let's look for life in the outer solar system :Freeman Dyson

Life & Computation

The Face of Leonardo Da Vinci

We all have seen the drawings made by Leonardo Da Vinci but most of us have not thought about his portrait or how he looked like. Most of his contemporaries had drawn their self portrait & Leonardo also must have drawn his portrait. In below video Illustrator Siegfried Woldhek tries to show us the true face of Leonardo, have a look & enjoy.

Signals Intelligence

Good article on Signals Intelligence, read about Signals Intelligence.

Business Models

If any of you are looking for various Business Models, take a look at this list of Business Models on Wikipedia.

Re-inventing

I was simply hopping from one site to another reading randomly today and came across this wonderful post. It's better if you read it from its original author Steve Blank. So here is the post Elephants can Dance- Re-inventing HP.

Update: Read this as well : Am I a Founder?The Adventure of a Life Time. I would suggest to add these to your favorite links/url's list.

B.NET TechED 2009

My last Saturday & Sunday was filled with full of excitement, as I spent my time at Tech.Ed, organised by BDotNet.in & BITPro Communities, listening to their wonderful sessions. It was sponsered by Infragistics, telerik,ineta & Microsoft UGSS. It was really a wonderful experience.The main reason for me to attend this event was to know about Virtualization, Cloud Computing but this event helped me to understand the technologies, which I could never have known.

I met some of the wonderful people, got to know lots of upcoming new technologies & had lots of dreams about the various skillsets that I can include in my resume :).

Day 1: (20 June 2009)

The session started with a Keynote by Mr.Ramkumar. His session was interesting start for the other sessions, as the keynote walked us through the various technologies like, Virtualization, Cloud Computing, SaaS, SOA,EAI & reducing the carbon foot print.

Next session was really interesting & inspiring, got to learn about latest features of Windows 7 by Vijay & Vic , Location & Sensor demo's were really interesting.This session was very informative and was excited to know a product from MS with such nice features.

Then we had a session on ASP.NET 4.0 by Chaitra, which was helpful (BTW,I am ASP.NET Web Apps Developer & It was something i was looking for) as it gave me an insight into the upcoming features. Waiting to use it for any of the projects.

Then the next session was on Solving Integration Challenges with BizTalk by Kashi, I knew the name "BizTalk" but didn't know how it will be used in Enterprises, & this session really gave me an insight into the world of BizTalk.

After Lunch, we had session on Biztalk & WCF by Meena,this session even further increased my curiosity, I worked on a project on WCF & this particular session made me to understand BizTalk better by means of WCF.

And after Biztalk & WCF session, the next one was by Vic on Silverlight 3. I liked this technology & have plans to work on a project which I was thinking for some time & was waiting for some Ideas, & this session provided me with many more options.

After all these technical sessions came the Management session by Sanath, initially I had plans to skip this session, but stayed there on my friends request, I am thankful to him. I liked the session & this was the inspiring session. After reaching home first thing I did was to find the videos shown in this session on youtube.

Day 2: (21 June 2009)

The day started with Keynote by Vic, he talked about Infragistics & showed demo of their wonderful Controls.

The Next session was on Micosoft Azure by Janakiram, I had very little idea about it, but this session clarified most of the things which I didn't know about.

After the Azure session came the Work Flow Foundation by Gayathri, which I missed to attend, so I can't give much details about it, but my friend said it was good.

Before lunch we had a session on SQL Server 2008 & Unstructured data by Praveen, this session helped me to know how microsoft is handling the unstructured data. It usually happens in real world that, most of the time we deal with unstructured data, & I was interested to know much about it & this session helped me to know the ways to deal with unstructured data.

After Lunch, the next session was on Microsoft Echange Server 2010, this session was good, but after some time I was feeling drowsy, as I had rice more during lunch, so lost most part of the session.

The next session was on Windows Server 2008 R2 by S.Kaliyan, which was interesting to know. I listned to this with much attention as it was the base for Microsoft Azrue Platform & at the end of the day we got Trial version of Windows Server 2008 R2 DVD.

The last session of the event was on Virtualization 360 by Praveen, this also was my favourite topic as I experimented with Virtualization my self without going through much details. I used Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 to run Knoppix Live Linux. I came to know the types of virtualizations & many interesting things.

Overall I liked the whole Tech.Ed, it really helped me to get started on many technologies.

BTW, I couldn't take much pictures at the event as I was busy taking notes, but here is the photo with all the people who conducted the wonderful 2 day event.

If any of you have attended it then let me know about your thoughts & views.

Using Fiddler with ASP.NET Applications

Most of the web developers will know about Fiddler.

Using Fiddler u can log the HTTP traffic between your application & Webservice, here Fiddler acts as a proxy in between your application & the Webservice.

To Use with ASP.NET set the following into your web.config, it will start logging all the HTTP Traffic.

<system.net>
<defaultProxy>
<proxy proxyaddress="http://localhost:8888" />
</defaultProxy>
</system.net>

Google Squared : Get your Results in Square

I couldn't stop searching on Google with this Google Squared .I feel this is really cool feature in Google. Hope most of you people like this. Check the screen shot below & you will know why its useful & interesting.

Startup City Event: Get Connected with 100 Startups

Hey All the readers,

Just wanted to let you know about an exciting event siliconindia is organizing on June 6th (Saturday in Bangalore). There will be 100 most promising technology startups showcasing their products.

Please be sure to visit the event website. http://www.siliconindia.com/startupcity_09/index.html



Roll up your Sleeves. Meet over 100 cool startups of your city. Learn new Technologies
Come. Meet the Startups that will become tomorrow's industry leaders.

Watch live product demonstrations
Get a peek into cutting edge technologies
Lay hands on the best-of-breed solutions
Meet young, energetic, passionate geeks
Experience the culture of innovation in small companies
Visionary Keynotes
In-depth Panel Discussions

This is undoubtedly the biggest event for startups.

There are limited seats. You can register yourself for FREE at: http://www.siliconindia.com/startupcity_09/index.html

Around the world in 80 Telescopes : Himalayan Chandra Telescope, Hanle, India

Tips & insights for programmers

Here is the list of tips & insights compiled from StackOverFlow.

1. Never be afraid to say I don't know.Manage expectations, learn to say "no".But always give it a try before you say that.

2. Never stop learning.Accept your mistakes and take that just as a new learning opportunity

3. Ask for help sooner rather than later,know that you can't do everything by yourself.Don't take all the responsibility for a problem. Sometimes you can be furiously trying to solve a problem alone and carrying the problem on your back. Get other people involved, escalate, get other folks involved.

4. Learn to take backup

5. Assumption is the mother of all screw-ups. So never assume something which you are not sure of.

6. Estimates are always off by at least 50% either way.

7. First make it work, then make it better.

8. Always negotiate deadlines/deliverables.

9. Don't hesitate to do overtime IF the situation requires it

10.Underpromise and over deliver

11.Find the balance between being realistic and being positive.

12.Be confident in your skills

13.Listern patiently to others opinion. Especially when you talk to a client.

14.Share your skills - Help others and the community with the knowledge you've got.

15.Make sure you get proper recognition and appraisal for your good work.

16.Manage your time effectively

17.Don't give people what they ask for, give them what they need.

18.No matter where you are on the pecking order of a team or project, you CAN make a difference.

19.It's more important to manage people's perception of the problem than it is to fix it.

20.Never trust the data. Validate your inputs.

21."It works on my machine" doesn't cut it. It HAS to work for them, too.

22.Show your code to other people - and listen to their comments.& Look at other peoples code and talk to them about it.

23.If you can't figure out a problem then take a break and come back to it in 10 or 20 minutes - makes finding a solution so much easier.

24.Realize that specifications are going to change.

25.Never implement new features unless you have a written request ( mail is just fine )

26.Be prepared to reinvent yourself every five years.

27.Before you roll anything out TEST TEST TEST

28.Use Source Control

29.Communicate, communicate, communicate

30.You can never have enough clarification and detail with project requirements

Web Transition Chart

Read about it at ReadWriteWeb

Microsoft’s Vine = Facebook + Twitter

Today I came across a post  by Brier Dudley, about latest social networking site called Vine  by Microsoft. Still its under beta & if you want to be part of it, then sign up.

As per the post, Microsoft planning to provide Vine to Emergency Management Officials, which helps them to broadcast & receive information during a disaster or other major event.

See some of the screen shots of the site below.

Validating HTML Text Area for HTML tags using Javascript RegEx

The below code might help you with validation of certain HTML tags entered in a TextArea. (Click image to enlarge).

Many-Core Shift & the Next Era of Computing

I have been observing the developments in Processor Technologies, and now I am really excited with the Future of Computing with the shift from single core to many core processor technologies.

As you all know, Moore’s Law tells us that, the number of transistors on an integrated circuits (IC) doubles every two years. Now the so-called “many core shift” is happening. It’s not a thing of the future, it is here already and it will change our developers’ life as we know it today.

What’s the many core shift?

This evolution of doubling the number of transistors on an IC has reached its physical limits (clock speed, power consumption, etc.). Instead of building faster and more complex CPUs, the manufacturers started placing more CPUs, read cores, on a chip.

It all started 2006 with Intel’s dual cores, today you won’t find a single core desktop machine anymore.

High end consumer machines come with quad cores, and servers with 16 cores (packed as 4 quad cores). Starting 2006 with 2 cores, five to six years from now we will have between 32 and 128 cores machines.

What does it mean?

Well, it probably means that today’s software runs a bit faster. Not much, certainly not the 32 times faster a 64 core machine is supposed to be compared to dual core. Have a look at the following task manager of a 16 core machine:

Now look at your own desktop and count the open applications. Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, Internet Explorer, Acrobat Reader, Firefox, Visual Studio etc. All the applications utilize 1 to two cores and Most of today’s applications simply are not capable of utilizing these cores appropriately. Consequence: In order to utilize these cores we have to change the way we write our software!

You may ask, do we actually need that kind of processing power? And if so, how do we use it?

For the first question the answer is yes, it is needed for Games, Video Conversion, File Compression, Graphics etc.

And for second question we need to know that there is a concept called Multithreading.

And “Most developers have avoided multithreading altogether. And those who did do work on multithreading probably did it just for optimizations.” So, now is the time we need to have multithreading in the mainstream of application development.

And with that in mind Microsoft is developing Visual Studio 2010. And I believe it will open up new possibilities.

I am really excited to work on Visual Studio 2010 and want to utilize the multi-core.

Let me know what you think about all this.

Reference:

1. http://www.intel.com/products/processor/index.htm
2. http://www.digital-daily.com/cpu/new_core_conroe/index1.htm
3. http://www.intel.com/products/desktop/processors/index.htm?iid=processors_body+dt_core

Want to know how to pronounce certain words?

I came across this wonderful site called Forvo where you can find the pronunciation of certain words and also you can add a word (your native language) and pronounce it.

Using Winnovative HTML to PDF Converter in C# to generate PDF File

Steps:
1. Add wnvhtmlconvert.dll to Project Reference under Visual Studio

2. Import it into your code behind file "using Winnovative.WnvHtmlConvert;"

3. Add your PdfConverterKey into Web.Config

<add key="PdfConverterKey" value="your key here"/>

4. Write Below Code (Click to Expand)


And you are done.
Let me know if you have any questions

Converting Enum to List

Method :



Usage :

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