Enabled Odiogo on my blog

I read about this cool new website Odiogo, which will enable the readers to listen to blog content as well by adding audio files for each blog entry. I am not sure how many people out there will be interested in listening to blog content as audio files, but neverthless i think the idea is pretty good and sounds interesting, they are offering this service free so I went ahead and signed up for my blog. So you should now see the icon "Listen Now" on top of all the blog post and by clicking that you could listen to the blog post in audio.

I am personally not happy with the quality of conversion to audio format, but i think they would improve on this aspect.

130 years to copy my data to external hard disk

I just started backing up my music to my new Seagate External hard disk and was amused to see that Windows explorer copy dialog box show that it needs 48822 days to complete the copy operation for around 9 GB of data, 48822 days equates to approximately 130 years.. I hope to be around to see that the data is copied successfully. I really don't know how they calculate the information about time needed to complete the copy operation, b'cos after a while the dialog box said that it needs only 2 hours to complete the operation.

Vista - One of the terrible technical products in history ???

I was very surprised/upset to see windows vista land up in the list of one of the terrible technical products in history. I have been using Vista for the last 6-8 months and dont have any bad experiences with it and I haven't had any issues with any hardware. But I do accept that there is nothing significant in it to migrate from Windows XP. I am not sure that one reason could make it qualify for one of the terrible tech products in history.

Got my Seagate FreeAgent External Hard disk in India

I have been looking to buy an external hard disk for some time to backup my ever growing collection of videos, photos (especially of my new born baby), I have realised that it's time to get an external drive to make sure I don't lose anything if my hard drive crashes some day. I have been lucky with my laptop (Dell Inspiron 700m) so far, it hasn't crashed on me, but I certainly know that I wont be lucky for long. As usual I went to Ritchie Street (Bargain Best Buy in Chennai) and got the seagate freeagent, I wanted to get Western Digital MyBook, but unfortunately I couldn't find it anywhere so I ended up buying Seagate, it costed me 4750 rupees(roughly 115 $). The reviews in the best buy/circuit city looks pretty good, so I think I bought a decent drive.

The power adapter that comes with it is for australia, so if anyone in India is buying it make sure you buy a adapter that fits Indian power outlet. But fortunately the power cord works well according to indian power output. The setup has been breeze, now I am off to transfer those songs and photos I have kept for a long time..

iPhone only working in speaker

Oops !!! I am relived.. for a minute I thought I have lost my valuable possession (bricked iPhone).. My iPhone started behaving strangely today, I could make phone calls, but could talk only in the speaker and I could not hear clearly what the other person was talking. I thought there should have been a technical problem with my iphone and started to look at possible solutions and came across an interesting post that solved my issue..

I am just copying the exact text from this URL.. It fixed my issue !! I just love the internet... I could just solve any problem if I just had a internet connection :)

"Everyday I listen to my iPod on the train and use the headphones as my conversation device too. For some reason, when my headphones were plugged in, it would play music, but when I took them out it wouldn't play through the iPhone. Therefore with this and the fact that the iPhone only worked on speaker (speaker works when headphones are plugged in normally) I determined that it had to have something to do with the iPod/earbuds/headphone jack.

To fix it, I opened the iPod application and plugged the buds in, started playing music, then paused it. I then removed the buds and pressed play and it played through the phone and also allowed me to hear a conversation the standard way (up to the ear). On the train today, I must have unplugged it while it was still playing and messed something up...not sure why that would mess things up, but it must be a small bug. I tried the same thing again that I did on the train and it is still working so I feel pretty safe..just a minor hiccup. I'm glad I got it working so quickly and didn't waste too much time!
:apple:*huge sigh of relief*:apple:"

Cool new interface idea - Bumptop

It's been sometime since I saw a cool new idea, the video of Bumptop showed me where the next gen Windows/Mac OS should be going. The UI is simple and resembles more of your real desktop rather than a desktop made up in current OS versions.

The bumptop project is at a very early stage but i wish it would soon be incorporated as a skin/widget for windows/mac.

Watch this video of bumptop to truly appreciate it

What type of developer are you?

I came across this interesting link in mads kristensen blog , it was about testing what type of developer you are. I took the test are here is the result..

Your programmer personality type is:

PHSB

You're a Planner.
You may be slow, but you'll usually find the best solution. If something's worth doing, it's worth doing right.


You like coding at a High level.
The world is made up of objects and components, you should create your programs in the same way.


You work best in a Solo situation.
The best way to program is by yourself. There's no communication problems, you know every part of the code allowing you to write the best programs possible.


You are a liBeral programmer.
Programming is a complex task and you should use white space and comments as freely as possible to help simplify the task. We're not writing on paper anymore so we can take up as much room as we need.

Take up the test here.

Low Volume problem in iPhone

I have having volume problem with my iPhone from the moment i bought it. I tried googling around for a firmware to fix it but couldn't find any answer even though many people have reported this problem. Atlast, I found the solution, don't laugh over this :)

I wanted to keep my iPhone clean so I haven't removed the sticker that comes on top of it and the sticker covers the receiver as well. So I made a small cut/hole on the sticker where the reciever is and boom I have the iPhone working in all its beauty and I can hear my friends on the other end clearly... I think there might be few folks out there who didn't realize so I am posting this so they could benefit from it ;)

iPhone SMS problems

I have been having problems with the SMS application in iPhone, it displayed 1 message but whenever i try to view my inbox it simply crashes and springboard gets displayed. After much googling, I found the answer here.

I found the problem is with ZYB... yup. the same cool service I blogged a while ago, which can get all the phone numbers from your cellphone stored in a central repository. Apparently a message they send has few alphanumeric characters which iphone can't open ;) cool hack.. So the simple solution is to use iBrickr to delete the /var/root/Library/SMS/sms.db file. Caution : This will delete all your messages that are stored in your inbox. You can also take the approach of installing SQLite and browsing thru the records and then deleting the malicious sms alone.

Battery that will last for 30 years

Next time when you buy your laptop make sure you ask for betavoltaic batteries ;) yeah... these batteries are currently under research and will soon be replacing the lithium-ion batteries. We have all been tired of having to charge our laptops every 2-3 hours, imagine if we could have a battery that could last for 30 years (that's the coolest thing I could imagine next only to iPhone)

Read here for more information.

Got my iPhone

Wow !!! I just got my iPhone (thanks to Arun who brought it for me from US). I have been waiting to get my hands on this cool device from the moment Steve Jobs unveiled it. Atlast I have it in my hands, it feels so good to touch and play with it. The screen is just awesome and I love the way the product has been designed..

The guys in nokia and motorola should feel really bad about themselves, having been in the market for such a long time none of them could make a phone as cool as iPhone. I would like to meet the team who designed the User Interface for iPhone, they have done a real awesome job. When was the last time you saw a device and it worked the way you wanted it to work.. it just feels like magic to work with this device.

It took some time to unlock the iPhone in India to work with Airtel network, since it's not officially available here yet. This article with clear step by step instructions helped me unlock the iPhone, except the final step using anySIM application to unlock didn't work for me. So I have to revert to the command line unlock for this. I should personally thank Mac Kalvin who helped me figure out the final step of unlocking my iPhone. Mac Kalvin has been doing a great job for the community in india, considering that there are folks in india who charge 5000 Rupees (100 $) to unlock an iPhone, I am totally surprised that he could offer his guidance over phone/email free of charge !! Good job mate !! Keep up the good work :)

Successfully softmodded my Xbox

It has been a really long week for me since I wanted to have my xbox softmodded after reading this excellent article in Lifehacker by Gina Tripani. I want to blog about my experiences from the past week trying to mod my xbox based on the post.

Note : Most of the steps mentioned in this post are already available in the web, I am trying to blog about my experience/problems faced during the softmod process.

The article mentioned that I needed the following :

1. XBox (obvious)
2. Splinter Cell (I was lucky to have the Platinum Hits version of this game in my collection)
3. Action Replay Kit
4. Home Network

Day 1:
I didn't have the Action Replay kit to start the work, so I set off to buy one from the famous Ritchie Street in Chennai (for those of you who don't know this place.. it's the combo of Circuit City/Best Buy/Gamestop for us). Unfortuntely none of them knew anything about Action replay kit, so I knew I couldn't get it from anywhere else in india ;). So I decided to look out for other options to softmod without using Action Replay.

Day 2:
I had 2 xbox controllers so I decided to use one to build my own Xbox to USB adapter it was very easy than I had expected. There are many articles in the web giving clear instructions on how to go about doing it. I didn't have soldering iron so I just taped the wires between my USB adapter and Xbox controller cable. I began testing my homemade action replay using my JOGR USB flash drive, it was nice to see that my Xbox recognized the Memory device. But my enthusiasm short lived as I was not able to copy any games from my Xbox to the flash drive. It kept saying "Copy failed". I tried to read the USB drive from my PC using Action replay software (refer to this article how to make Action Replay recognize your USB drive) but I was not able to copy any games using AR to the USB drive since it kept saying "Not enough disk space", I was confused since the 1 GB USB drive didn't have anything in it. I googled to see what could be the problem and stumbled across this page which lists out the USB drives that are compatible to use with AR software. Check out this link as well for the complete set of USB drives. I decided to get USB drive from my friends to see whether I would have any luck.

Day 3:
I got 512 MB Transcend USB drive and started testing to see whether it would work. I was happy to see the drive being recognized immediately by Xbox and was able to successfully copy my saved games from Xbox to the flash drive. Now it was time for the second test to see whether I could copy the necessary files from my PC to the flash drive using AR software. But AR showed the message "Unable to enumerate USB drive", I tried to google to see if there was any help, even though quite a lot of people have raised this question, there was no answer even from the AR software support... (pathetic). this article provided some hope but even after following the steps provided in the article I couldn't get past the error. I thought probably there was something wrong with Vista and I tried installing AR software in XP but that didn't help.

Day 4:
I got a 1 GB Transcend USB drive from one other friend and started to test my luck again. I connected it to my PC and started AR software and to my surprise it was recognized by AR software. So the reason behind "Unable to enumerate USB drive" was thrown by AR software was the usage of incompatiable USB drive, if you do get this message in your system please try with different USB drives. I copied the necessary files to the USB drive thru AR software and copied them onto my XBox hard drive.

I fired up my Xbox and loaded Splinter Cell game and loaded the "Linux" profile and clicked on "Checkpoints", I was expecting to see the X-evolution screen but my system was frozen.. I was totally baffled, i had followed all the instructions but I was not sure what went wrong now.. I googled to see if anyone has mentioned about this but noone has reported such error, so I thought I should have done something wrong.. so I started the copy process all over again and I immediately realised that by mistake I copied the NTSC version instead of PAL version.

After copying the correct version I loaded splinter cell over again and this time I was presented with the lovely x-evolution dashboard.. YUPPY !!! I was really happy to see this screen after having spent a long time working on this.. I followed the instructions mentioned in the article and successfully installed XBMC (Xbox Media Center). I was happy to rekindle my passion for hacking stuffs after a long time. Do drop me a comment if you found any part of my post useful for your xbox softmod process.

Addition to the family

I have really great news to share!! I was blessed with a baby girl on 27th August :) It was one of the precious moments in my life, seeing my daughter for the first time. The last 10 months seemed a really long time for me and my wife, waiting for the little one. My daughter weighed 3 kgs and many people said she looked like me. It was funny to hear that since I didn't see anything in my daughter's face that resembled me..

Which is more cool ? working for Google or Apple

Which is more cool ?? working as a software engineer in Google's reasearch team or working as a design engineer in Apple ? I thought of this question after seeing the way Google and Apple have been doing business. I initially thought of adding Microsoft into this question, but I think Microsoft lost the "cool" part few years ago (don't get me wrong.. I am still a Microsoft geek working on thier products .Net/SQL server for my bread & butter).

I am given such an opportunity I think I would take design engineer job in Apple. It would be so cool to design something which other competitors could be thinking 5 years down the lane. To add to that, I am just amazed by the way Steve has turned them around with his vision. I am pretty sure he is going to knock away the competition from giants including Motorola and Nokia by the way his company has designed iPhone.

Which one would you choose given an oppurtunity ?

Does iPhone work in India ?

Atlast the apple iPhone is available for general public at last (only in US of A)!! For the first time I feel really bad about moving back to India, had I been in the US, I would have grabbed an iPhone the first day of its release.

The internet has been loaded with information about how cool the phone is and the innovative touch screen. Check out these videos from cnet website about iPhone.

> First look at iPhone
> Out of the Box : iPhone

It will be so cool when the day comes when I will be the first one to carry it into my office (i sure hope this does happen soon). Now I have to start sending emails to figure out which of my friend in US will make a trip to india soon. I couldn't find any information about whether an iPhone bought from US will work in India ?? Can anyone post a comment if they know answer this question ?

My birthday

It's my b'day.. and after a span of 7 years I am spending it in India. Isn't that amazing !! I haven't been thinking about spending my b'day in India since I left to US 6 years ago.. but how quickly things change. I am back in india and spent the most part of the day with relatives. It's kinda different b'day celebration for me. I have been searching the net for interesting blogs, I saw this nice little writeup

To hate all Roses becoz you got scratched by one Thorn...
To give up on ur Dreams becoz one didn't come True...
To lose faith on Prayers becoz one wasn't answered...
To give up on your Efforts becoz one of them Failed...
To Condemn on your Friends becoz one Betrayed you...
Not to believe in Love, Becoz someone was unfaithful...

Remember that another chance will come up,
A New Friend, A New Love, A New Life...
Never Give Up !
Becoz Life is Indeed Beautiful !!!

Completed Halo2

Hurray !! atlast I have completed Halo2 in my Xbox !!! I know this sounds silly to many people out there, since this game was release more than 2 years ago.. But I just got my focus on this game to complete it.. However, sports games are more of my type and I love playing Winning Eleven & Topspin :)

I should appreciate myself for completing Halo2 before Halo3 comes in september

Good pdf on Enterprise Architect

My professional goal has always been to be an Enterprise Architect. I have been a mainly playing the roles of a developer, team leader across various domains but I had the privilege to be part of the Architecture team in my previous company (a fortune 500 company involved in healthcare). The organization was totally focussed on Zachman framework. But I would find it hard when there were frequent discussions between associates across organizations about the use of technology (Microsoft vs Sun vs Oracle), I think it's really bad when the CTO team gets in to details of implementation. This article in objectwatch provides a nice overview about enterprise architecture and points out of the failure of existing frameworks. I found most of them to be true. I hope you agree with my point :)

Zyb - save your phone contacts online

I stumbled across this cool service offered by Zyb, it offers to store contacts, events and messages from your phone for free. This is one of the service I have been waiting for some time since I lost my cellphone with contact information that I never had backed up anywhere. I wasted quite a lot of time trying to get all the contact information again. I tried to sync my Nokia N70m and it was done in a jiffy.

I hope i could have found this service before losing my cellphone.

Top 50 gadgets

PC world has compiled a list of top 50 gadgets in the last 50 years. I really had fun going through the list and looking at few things I haven't even heard about. Take a look at it and see for yourself.

Airtel 2 MBPS Plan - Stay away from it

I have been using Airtel 256 Kbps Unlimited plan for the last 6 months, the speed was okie and I should say I was happy with the service. Last week I decided to make a move to 2 MBPS connection plan (limited to 4 GB download). The change was done pretty soon but unfortunately I haven't noticed significant change in my download speed.

The customer personnel keeps asking me to check the speed in their website which keeps reporting download speeds around 1.5 MBPS - 1.7 MBPS. But if I try a different site like InternetFrog it keeps reporting a download speed of 400 - 500 kbps. They have sent a technician ?? to my house who looked and accepted that there was something wrong but went back and reported that everything was right???

I am not certainly not happy with the way Airtel is working to get this resolved.. but someday I hope to see Youtube videos without any pause :)

Update : It's been a month and my issue is still not resolved and I am frustrated after talking to Airtel Customer service for hours. So atlast I have decided to go back to my 256K unlimited plan. I am seriously looking elsewhere to change my ISP.

Keyboard shortcuts for Google search Results

As part of their experimentation effort Google has developed search page that can be navigated easily using keyboard shortcuts. I was expecting this from google for some time now since all the google applications like google reader, calendar and gmail have been heavily using keyboard shortcuts and they have been hugely popular among users.

Try it out and see for yourself.

Have invite for Joost

I managed to be a part of the hype going around the web atlast.. I got an invite to try Joost thru the weblog of Brajeshwar. I have been waiting for sometime to try this service. I should say I am very satisfied with the quality of videos that has been streamed using thier software.

I am sure you saw folks around the net talking about how slow thier service is and how much time it takes to download thier video. I think folks at joost have not done a good job in giving out so many invites at the same time and not considering the scalability of thier system. But I think they will scale up thier servers soon and we should be able to see the channels without waiting for a long time.

I have quite a lot of Joost invites to give away, so Please leave a comment with your email address in non-spam format(ie. hello at yahoo dot com) and i can send it across to you so you can enjoy the fun.

Invalid Product Key for MSDN download of OneNote 2007

I recently downloaded and installed OneNote 2007 from the MSDN subscriber downloads. To activate the product, I requested the product keys from the MSDN subscriber website but I was not able to activate the product using the product key. This is the first time I am having weird experience with a software that has been downloaded from the MSDN subscriber website.

I tried to call the MSDN support line, thier solution was to install the software from the MSDN CD that has been sent to the subscribers rather than downloading it from the MSDN subscribers online. It seems microsoft has uploaded an incorrect .iso image of OneNote 2007 and they are in the process of fixing it. Since we are using a volume user license and not everyone gets a copy of MSDN cd's I need to run around trying to hunt down the person having the OneNote 2007 Cd !!

If any one knows a solution for this problem, please leave a note :)

Update : This is a known Microsoft issue and you can activate your OneNote 2007 software by using the key you request for "Office 2007 Applications". Good for me now I don't have to run around to hunt the person having that CD ;)

How you shouldn't write a book

I wanted to read about Windows Workflow foundation since I have to prototype an upcoming project using it. Initially, I picked up this book "Foundations of WF: an Introduction to Windows Workflow Foundation (Expert's Voice in .Net)". I was shocked to see such a poorly written book from aPress. I could easily say it was one of the worst books I have read in terms of quality and presentation. To add to the misery the author keeps jumping between VB and copying the code to C#.. I have decided to drop the book and want to warn others who might want to pick a copy of this book..

I am going to pickup "Programming Windows Workflow Foundation Techniques" based on the reviews from Amazon it should certainly be a better book than "apress" book. Will keep you posted on my experience :)

Improving the performance of Windows Vista

I came across this nice post about improving the performance of Windows Vista system across various areas (Desktop, File System tweaks, Security Center). I could see a visible difference in the speed of my laptop after making these tweaks. I am sure whoever made this comprehensive guide has put in quite a lot of effort to come up the thorough explanation.

Free Online course offered by MIT

Wow !! this is the coolest thing I have heard for some time. Massachusetts Insitute of Technology (MIT) is offering FREE opencourseware is varied topics from Aeronautics all the way to Women's studies.. anyway I am interested only in "Electrical Engg & Computer Science". It has numerous topics ranging from Graphics to Compilers. They have good online course material, which is of great value. I am really enjoying reading the course on "Computer Graphics".

Choose a topic and get rocking !! My weekends are going to be busy for some time.. Don't we sometimes hope that we could have got access to such amazing sites a bit earlier in our career.
Better late than Never !!

I have an OpenID Account

I have been thinking about creating a OpenId account for myself and start using it for sometime now. Today I finally ended up creating a OpenId through MyOpenId.

BTW "What is OpenID anyway?", It is a new way to authenticate yourself in the web. You can use it in any of the website using OpenId as the login mechanism. The common problem users face is there are 100 different website they access and every website has some kind of username/password, after some time it becomes tedious to maintain this info. So OpenId is a protocol developed by diverse community to address this issue. Using OpenID you could go ahead and login to a OpenId enabled site as if you have already created a username/password. Hope everyone remember Microsoft's similar effort few years ago by trying use Hotmail passport as the centralized place for hosting user info. But users quickly rejected the idea of Microsoft having all the users data in a centralized place which could be a problem down the line. OpenID is trying to achieve the same but it's by a group of people from diversified community coming together to achieve this. At this point I am not sure how far it will be successful but I like the solution it offers to the end user.

There is a good screencast if you want to learn about OpenId.

Enforcing coding standard

As a team leader, I have always faced problems enforcing coding standard among my team members. You could always come up with a 20 page document which goes for a toss when the team codes crazy to meet the deadlines. To some extent you could use fxcop to enforce some rules that should be strictly followed before an assembly is deployed in the development server. But you cannot enforce some of the rules like, you want the variables in your project to follow a particular convention (camel casing/pascal casing). In this scenario a Dxcore plugin comes to the rescue, Code Style Enforcer is a tool created by Joel to enforce these constraints in the IDE itself when the developer is coding. It checks for the conditions on a line by line basis and underlines the appropriate lines that are not compliant with your coding standards.

This is the first time I am hearing about DxCore library for creating plugin(s) for Visual studio, but after googling I am finding quite a lot of good plugins that have been created using this.

I am going to install this plugin in all my team members system to enforce the standards rathar than throwing a document at them to enforce standards :)

You can create your own plugin by reading about it in this blogpost from Jason.

Down the memory lane - Trip to Maldives

I went down my memory lane for a while thinking about the list of events that happened in my life an year ago.. I had been to Maldives for my honeymoon in Sun Island(feb 14 - feb 17th, 2006). I could claim that I have travelled quite a bit across the globe, but the trip to maldives could certainly be rated as one of the best destinations I had been to.

We took the air-taxi from the airport to the resort and we were able to see the corels and the different colors of the water. We were put up in a water bungalow ( where you can walk down the steps and be in water..) Isn't it amazing ??? I certainly don't have words to explain the beauty of the resort we stayed in. Water in all imaginable Blue shades, crystal clear water for miles !!!

I hope to go back to Maldives again for a short vacation sometime soon.. I would suggest maldives as one of the best vacation spot for anyone in India. Let me know if anyone is looking for further information regarding Maldives.

SQL Server 2005 Installation problem in Vista

I have been trying to install SQL Server 2005 in my vista ultimate edition, but it fails with the following error. "This program has known compatibility issues" and it's failing to install core server components.

It's really wierd if I can't install sql server 2005 properly in my system how do they expect it to be fixed by Service Pack2 ?

.Net 3.0 WPF Crash Course

Folks looking to learn .net 3.0 (especially WPF) can use this link to get themselves updated pretty quickly. This blog has a series of good/short posts written about WPF. It's worth the time to get a quick start on WPF.

Role of Business Analyst, Developer and QA in a project

What is the role of the following resources for implementing a successful IT project? I know that thousand other roles like project manager, technical architect, development manager.. etc. exist in big companies but in a start-up company you will see that all these roles will be performed by the following key people.

• Business Analyst
  Typically the first person to get to know the change in business requirement, gather them and document it completely and they will be the point of contact of any questions/clarifications in the requirements document.
• Developer
  This person will take the business requirement and create a high level technical design document and will start coding using his favourite tool (.net) :). They should be responsible for ensuring that all the aspects of the service like scalability/reliability/extensibility of the code has been taken care of.
• QA
  QA is a person who should create the test cases based on "Requirements Document" and should never interact with the developer for any questions/clarifications. They are in charge of making sure the final code that gets released is error free (typically through black box testing).

Alrite... I hope all of us are in the same page with regards to the functionality of these resources. Now let's take the scenario after this code has been rolled into production. I am sure any code that gets released will have bugs in them who takes the responsibility for the bugs. This is my idea on who should be responsible for the bug.

• Functionality missing
  Has this been documented in Business Requirements ? If so, where there test cases created by QA to cover this ? In case the functionality has not been documented the blame should go to the business analyst and in case there were no test case the blame should go to the QA.
• Scalability/Reliability Issue
  The Developer should be solely responsible for such issues. These things are difficult to test by QA and the design should have addressed these issues.
• Functionality not working as per requirements document
  When a clearly documented functionality is not working, the blame should go entirely on the QA for not testing it appropriately.

But I don't see this process happening in many places, the developer is the first and only person to be caught for any bugs being reported and he is instructed to fix those issues within the next business day. Being a developer and hearing the same from friends working in startup companies, I am tired of working in such environment. I hope this trend will change in future and the appropriate resources will be pointed for their mistakes.

Time to reduce my weight - Part 1

I have been putting on some extra too much weight since I moved back to India from US, thanks to the food provided by the company and the frequent visits made by visitors with Sweets(pure ghee). My weight is around 83 Kgs now...I know that's a lot.. So I am going to make concrete efforts to bring it down below 80kg (that will be my first target, once I am able to achieve it I want to take it down further).

I came across a nice post on reducing your weight. It suggests good workable tips to reduce weight and to keep it away. Let's see if I can implement it and get some real results. Will keep you posted about my results in this blog.

E-Mail from Paramount airways going to Yahoo junk folder

I have been trying to book an e-ticket for my friend who is going to fly from Chennai to Coimbatore in Paramount airways. I used my yahoo account to get the confirmation email about the reservation process, but even after hours I didn't get any mail from the reservation process. First I thought that their mail server is playing catch-up with thousands of emails generated throughout the day. I checked again after few hours but still didn't see it my inbox.

Now I knew that there is something I might be missing, I started looking for culprit like "Did I enter my email address correctly"... yeah ..It's rite.. so now looking for the second option I started searching through my spam folder in yahoo.. and I was happy to see the mail from paramount sitting happy inside that.. I hope this post will be helpful for someone using yahoo and trying to book their tickets through paramount airways.

Getting started on WCF

If you are looking for article to get started on WCF on .Net 3.0, Microsoft has a decent e-learning course
Clinic 5137: Introduction to Developing with Windows® Communication Foundation and Visual Studio® 2005. I wouldn't say it's one of the best ways to get started on WCF, but if you have been looking for something on WCF to get started, this might be a good place to start with.

I tried to read blogs related to WCF, listen to podcasts, etc.. but personally I have been waiting for the book by Juwal Lowy on Programming WCF. He is the guy who can explain you WCF inside and out. Make sure you pre-order yours with Amazon.

Microsoft .net Interview Questions

Shivprasad Koirala has written/composed an excellent pdf file of interview questions on .Net, anyone attending interview on Microsoft technologies will benefit a lot from reading this. It's a pretty big .pdf file having around 528 pages. Even though I have not read through from end-to-end it covers many areas of Microsoft Technologies upto .Net 3.0.

But even others not looking from interview perspective has lots to learn from this .pdf file and brush up their knowledge on various subjects. It's a pretty nice gesture by the author to publish this well compiled .pdf file free for users.

Good wallpaper Collections

Check out this site for getting good wallpaper collections. They have collections in various areas like XP theme, sports, flowers etc.. But I really loved the collection of wallpapers they have on Apple. I have been looking to give my Vista an Apple laptop look and the wallpaper available in the site helped me achieve that.

IASA Launch of Chennai Chapter

10th January was an interesting day for IT Architects(includes both categories aspiring and folks who have already attained that designation) in Chennai. It was the launch of IASA - (Internation Association of Software Architects) chennai chapter. The event was sponsored by Microsoft and was held at Taj connemara. Around 400 associates attended the event and it had interesting sessions by Paul Priess (president of IASA) and Vivek Bhatnagar (Microsoft India). From what I can gather from the meeting was IASA is focussing on

• Developing more IT architects in India
• Providing guidance for existing architects to go to the next level
• Creating a good networking forum which will bring all IT architects working in different companies

To summarize, it was nice to meet fellow architects working in other companies and gather some good ideas. Looking forward to have more such sessions in future.

Cool feature in Google Reader

I simply love this new feature in google reader. The new feature provides "trends" which is very useful in visually analysing our reading trends and subscription trends.

Reading trends gives you data like how many posts you have read/starred/shared in the last 30 days. I currently have 18 subscriptions in my Google reader and I have read 840 posts in the last 30 days (I feel good about it).

Subscription trends gives you data about the feeds (how often they are updated). This is a nice way to identify whether you have some dead feeds that have not been updated which you are better off removing from your list.
It also provides interesting graphs about what time of the day do we ready our blogs and what day of the week we read them as well.. (pretty interesting to see my midnight bar soaring above the rest).

You can read more about it here.

Is google going downhill

I read a good article by Nathan Weinberg about how "Google ends year on sour note". It was an interesting article about how Google has lost credibility in some of its core areas including deleting all mails from 60 gmail accounts (even worse they don't have any backup).
Even though I have an email account, I primarily use my yahoo account but have been thinking for some time now to permanently to switch over to Google. But this will make me think a while before making the decision.

It's bad that even orkut was down for around 22 hours over friday and saturday. To add to the misery Blake Ross of firefox came out against google for promoting its own products for tips as part of search result.

I personally don't think that the quote by Nathan "By the end of next year, no one will like Google as much as they do today" is going to be a reality in a year from now. I believe google is a company with good vision and they will take a quick steps to regain the trust of end users.

2007 is going be an interesting year with some of new enterprenaurs like Powerset entering the search market. We have to wait and see who the next google is going to be...