என் சுவடுகள்

Steve Jobs

2011-10-08T22:20:00.002-04:00

I've never been part of fanboy crowd, but Jobs impressed me exactly twice, when i got hold of iPod classic and next time when i saw his keynote of introducing first iPhone. I did learn one thing on UI dev from Apple, user should never need an manual.

During my early days of development, i named a small utility app as iClick.net. I never heard of Apple or iPod or Jobs by then, luxury of coming from a non computer science background. Happenstance???

Revolutionary - hmm? may be...
Genius marketer- ohh yeah!!!

“You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.” – Steve Jobs, Inc. Magazine

Shoot-out in Tucson

2011-01-08T18:14:00.007-05:00

I watched all those tireless tv ads from Giffords and Kelly in last year election, and Giffords win which could have been so close to trigger re-counting. By look of it, i liked her more centrist approach unlike Grijalva from down-below, who i saw more of left-wing.

Interestingly, first thing i wanted to see what Sarah Palin tweeted, i don't think she had any influence in this, but it was fun to hear that her "cross-hair" map disappeared moments after shooting. For past one year, it was too much from right-wing and tea-party extreme nuts, with all those hatred on-air, i almost immediately scan away from 104.1 truth fm or else i'll end up hearing some right-wing nut screaming that Obama had to do something with rising onion prices in India.

On the same topic, Tucson was in every channel for last few hours, and i got calls from many, just checking if everyone is safe. I missed getting a single call from my company, checking if all employees are safe. I don't know, may be i'm being too left and socialistic, expecting that middle mgmt to give a call and check if their employees are safe, given our office/apts located just one intersection from Giffords office and almost someone drives on oracle rd (close to shooting spot) to get indian groceries on weekends. May be they expect to get the news on Monday morning if someone didn't turn up in office; how are we going to make-up one less in billing sheet, that might be big project concern :(

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ASP.NET "Base Pages" vs. PageAdapter

2011-01-07T16:53:00.003-05:00

Interesting option to avoid deriving from base page, which many times i forget

Replacing ASP.NET "Base Pages" with a PageAdapter

System.Web.UI.Adapters.PageAdapter

Learned a lot on ASP.net best practices from Robert by virtue of working in RSG and with his asp.net coding standards/guidelines. Good to see him as MVP and spreading his knowledge.

God and Science

2011-01-06T06:59:00.003-05:00

Pope Says God Behind Theories Like Big Bang

So where do we go from here, now Christianity is not anti-science anymore, vatican almost agrees with evolution. Pope is real clever to take it a level above todays science, which can not counter this for another couple of centuries (atleast he hopes so).

I do pray, but i'm still stuck with apatheism, thanks to god by keeping me fortunate enuf to be that way, i do not despise religion, only when it becomes nuisance to progress. Many times i question god, all times i try to refute ridiculous religious conventions & beliefs. Believe in god or not, but never the man in middle!

I kind of agree that Religion is a cult, it kills people from known history, science created computers, internet, and everything else that progresses human civilization, I don't ask people to question god, do whatever you want to make yourself happy, but god sake, don't kill people in his name or make money out of his name.

Click for Religulous and a interesting read “13 Things That Don't Make Sense: The Most Baffling Scientific Mysteries of Our Time”

About God, I cannot accept any concept based on the authority of the Church. As long as I can remember, I have resented mass indoctrination. I do not believe in the fear of life, in the fear of death, in blind faith. I cannot prove to you that there is no personal God, but if I were to speak of him, I would be a liar. I do not believe in the God of theology who rewards good and punishes evil. My God created laws that take care of that. His universe is not ruled by wishful thinking, but by immutable laws.
- Albert Einstein from an interview with William Hermanns in the summer of 1954

Happy New Year 2011!

2011-01-01T09:33:00.002-05:00

2011 is going to be big year with r2i and all the challenges ahead us.

“We choose to go...not because [it is] easy, but because [it is] hard, because that goal will serve to measure and organize the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.” - JFK

wallstreet is ready to bet if you will die next year!

2010-12-23T23:23:00.007-05:00

I happen to read article in WSJ about the concept of business of betting on a stranger's life. Mere concept makes me sick to my stomach.

Bets on Strangers' Lives

We all agree that your theory is crazy, but is it crazy enough? -Niels Bohr

Back from (almost) dead

2010-11-26T17:45:00.004-05:00

Loooooong time no post.

Finally decided to get myself a android phone, hopefully i should be able to post with the always connected device in hand :)

Advice is what others can give.... Answers only come from within! - Unknown

Free Market Economy 101

2009-06-13T21:15:00.009-04:00

A.I.G. Balks at Claims From Jet Ditching in Hudson

... “Insurance companies try to protect their assets, obviously,” ...

Welcome to world of free market economy, call me stupid socialist or evil communist, if i come out from a near death experience, i don't want to start making calls on my hospital bills, that start flooding my mailbox, with all due respect the bird hitting the engine is no fault of mine.

PS: Click here for Sicko. Though i don't agree with heavy socialist propaganda; Moore nails the issues in ~~health~~ sick care in america.

படித்ததில் ரசித்தது

2009-04-29T02:54:00.002-04:00

1 சாப்ட்வேர் மாப்பிள்ளை தேடும் பெண்களுக்கு
2 மணல் கயிறு ரீமேக்

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Common powerpoint mistakes :)

2009-03-29T18:12:00.003-04:00

Really funny presentation by Don McMillan

Chennai MTC Routes

2009-03-16T13:51:00.004-04:00

Happen to stumble upon the below site for Chennai MTC connections

http://rab.in/bus/chennai/

Yes Its Tucson!

2009-02-08T17:35:00.003-05:00

May be not exactly Tucson, its 25 miles from Tucson.

And yes the real Tucson is one in the backdrop of pic below

Moving on ...

2008-12-08T06:51:00.015-05:00

Bye bye Ny/Nj.

Hello Az!

175 random ilayaraja hitz (mostly melodies)

2008-11-10T21:52:00.030-05:00

Years of collecting songs, song db has bloated big enuf, that i play mostly the playlists in shuffle mode. Here is the dump of one of the IR playlist (mostly melodies), not by any means complete IR collection.

Track list >>>

IR_Hitz_1.rar
IR_Hitz_2.rar
IR_Hitz_3.rar
IR_Hitz_4.rar
IR_Hitz_5.rar
IR_Hitz_6.rar
IR_Hitz_7.rar
IR_Hitz_8.rar

---------------------------------------------------------------
PS: Here is link to album Vatsalyam by Bombay S. Jayashri. A Collection of Traditional Indian Lullaby.

Strange circle around moon

2008-10-14T20:43:00.007-04:00

Never seen anything like this before, yesterday (10/13) night around 10 pm, we saw this huge, perfect circle around the moon. Sky was void of any stars, just the moon and this spooky circle around the moon. Photo taken doesn't do any justice of the real effect, Wiki tells me its 22° halo.

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George W Bush: Go Fish!

2008-10-07T22:11:00.003-04:00

US Gross Federal Debt, unadjusted for inflation.

National debt when president George W Bush Jr. took office at the beginning of 2001 was about $5.6 trillion and it is close to 10.2 trillion as of today.

"Humble foreign policy" anyone?

Reminds me a line from Jurassic Park, "I don't blame people for their mistakes. But I do ask that they pay for them."

யார் யாருகோ டாக்டர் பட்டம் குடுகிறிங்கோ, இவருக்கு குடுங்கப்பா டபுல் டாக்டர் பட்டம்.

Authentication & Authorization

2008-08-20T21:30:00.005-04:00

Use AD for authentication and DB for authorization

I'm trying to reason out the above statement with best of my knowledge, this may be specific to windows environment. Do leave your thoughts if you know of better reasons.

A company intranet website application can be open to entire domain users and hence don't need any authentication at all. But we may need to restrict access to a phone list application to certain groups, this application may include additional authorization restrictions like certain group of users should not be able to view some section of data say for example "personal mobile numbers". Best approach is to authenticate all users with a AD group and use different authorization data store like a database.

Can we not use db for authentication, like use "authorization data store" and check if user is not authorized to do any steps in the application and redirect to access denied page? Though its a technically possible option, in this case, control on who gets access to phone list application is thro' db. Everyone will agree, access to that is weaker compared to a secure AD group membership which are restricted to AD administrators hands. Inherently. access to application db has wider spread, compared to AD. Also AD authentication blocks unauthorized users at the gate i.e stopped even before entering into application.

In other end of spectrum, why we should not use AD for authorization. For simplicity sake, if we have 3 authorization groups for each application and we have 10 applications and toss in 2 environments (dev/prod), we end up with 60 AD groups. Its work on AD admins that in course of time will become un-manageable, worst-case scenario, someone getting access which they shouldn't.

That said, there is room for all shades of grey, for example any enterprise has to maintain AD groups for something or other, like share folder access. Using the same phone list application, if there is a requirement to restrict users from viewing sr. mgmt contacts. I'd rather make that authorization against AD than have it inside my application db.

BBC - The Story of India

2008-08-02T21:06:00.003-04:00

Six part BBC series which attempts to cover the story of India from past to current. I felt they mostly covered Aryan part, shadowing Dravidian side of history.

leanerFox

2008-08-01T22:21:00.000-04:00

Off late i was frustrated with Firefox eating so much memory. Its far better from what used to be back.

Upgraded to latest and greatest version which has many memory leak fixes
Installed flashblock extension
Modded following config entries

browser.cache.disk.capacity 15000
browser.cache.memory.capacity -1
browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers 2 {seldom use back button}
config.trim_on_minimize true {would love if there is a similar thing for lost focus event}
nglayout.initialpaint.delay 0
network.http.pipelining true
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests 8 {for DSL speed}

I have the same problem with Yahoo messenger, felt it became more and more resource hog. I don't want a browser window to open all times for the web version (why can't they provide the msg archive on web to standalone version also}. After googling a bit, did the following, but i still see sometimes it gobbles 30k,

switched to classic skin
removed all plug-ins
remove annoying ad-banner {this patch worked for version 8.1.0.421}

Sanjana

2008-07-27T00:31:00.007-04:00

Updated Sanjana's photoset in flickr.

Microsoft surface

2008-07-23T13:52:00.000-04:00

Muti-touch, muti-user, device recognizing surface computing from Microsoft. Don't expect this coffee table to hit your home for next few years, hopefully demand should drive down the price to something affordable after 2010. This is just beginning of how things are going to change in computing world, from the not-so-fancy box in the desk or that oversize thing in lap. One of the future features is going to be connected devices with intelligent human interface, bye-bye keyboard/mouse.

2008-07-08T22:14:00.001-04:00

For while i'm not involved with significant development activities, hence replacing Building tomorrow's legacy system, Today! with something that aptly reflects the real significance of my babbles, err i mean the posts.

Armageddon

2008-07-07T18:22:00.000-04:00

82 mins to kindle the armageddon fantasy, ABC documentary "Last Days On Earth"

$150 by July 4th ?

2008-07-02T22:29:00.004-04:00

Last month Morgan Stanley projected oil will hit $150 by July 4th. Are we nudging close to peak or already on the summit of the peak.

Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash (Trailer)

full documentary

DVDRip here.

It may be end of oil, but one shouldn't under estimate man-kind's ultimate weapon, "innovation". What if we crack the cold fusion, there may not be high hopes now, but practically feasible solution like combination of alternate energy and energy efficiency, may give us the breather for next break-through.

Scraps for this week

2008-07-01T16:16:00.005-04:00

- The .NET Framework 3.5 Common Namespaces and Types Poster

- iTextSharp. Good/Free/Open-source pdf library. Collection of samples here. Original Java library's ebook.

- Today development site was pointing to prod db and client support team told me this even happens in reverse and they told me biz component uses db config from dll's app.config and hence they recompile the dll with different environment config. First reaction to what is happening stumped me, I was under assumption when web app used this component, component should be erroring out as these config entries are not available in web.config or in worst case retrieved empty string as values. Looks like .net embeds, compile time config entries as default values in the assembly. Some more light to what is happening under the hood here.

- Strange skies

Google Street View Maps

2008-06-24T14:34:00.001-04:00

Google Street View Maps for Knoxville. Looks like they have covered Knoxville left and right.

r2i quote

2008-06-14T10:29:00.004-04:00

Someone sent it to me way back, quote that describes all, happen to read it again today

Passion without action = LIA (x+1)
Action without passion = R2A
Passion with action = R2I

Nand Nandan ♪♫♪♫

2008-06-07T15:00:00.011-04:00

Been searching for this quite some time. Gg wanted this after listening (a bit of this) in Sindhu Bhairavi. Nand Nandan from album "Chala Vahi Des & Meera Bhajans by Lata Mangeshkar". If not any other song in the album, this one is sure to make anyone simmer down.

Listen to full album here. Download mp3 here.

Web 2.x ?

2008-02-22T22:21:00.005-05:00

Some useless thoughts of what could be next incremental feature addition in web 2.0 with current available technology.

Speech recognizing websites. How about getting into website and give a voice commands like pay bill, print statement. Web based voice chat apps show the capability to send voice data over the wire and automated telephonic response using speech recognition seems to be much more improved. Can these technologies mash?

Seamless web drives. Platform neutral i/o protocol that will enable users to add personal web space/folder like any connected external drive. People should be able to open and edit a document over web just like one in local drive; underlying protocol should manage connectivity/encryption/transmission with data store in the cloud. With high speed connectivity becoming ubiquitous, it will be a nice feature addition to OS.

Break 2 India :)

2008-01-11T07:04:00.003-05:00

After 4 yrs i'm finally taking a break from work for a month to India. I'd be happy to order "Veg Fried Rice" instead of Veg Fried Rice with No meat, No chicken broth, No sea food, ...

youtube to mp3

2007-12-30T22:17:00.000-05:00

A simple and zero installation way to convert youtube video to mp3.

Offshore night-out

2007-12-19T22:16:00.000-05:00

When i was in offshore, this was the slang word to work late and very late . One of my friend used to question shouldn't this be called "night-in"! Anyway, guy told me today, if someone is in offshore, they are expected to work after office hours most of the time. If you are one of those, i strongly suggest to stop reading further. I usually start my conversation when someone calling me late night from offshore, "why are you in office now?". I'm not going to say that offshore will never have to stay late, but certainly don't have to do it 4 out of 5 days. There were days we stayed back and worked late or come to office on Saturday; sometimes for issues, delivery deadline, help others and even to compensate for good time spent in office stairs vetti talk; but i don't think it was not lot of times.Ok based on my experience and lot of mistakes, following will help one to reduce late hours if not eliminate.

Estimate: Mostly a bad estimate will be the underlying issue. Whatever way you do it either scientific or absolute crap like scribbling in palm (yes i have done that) make sure it is something achievable. A feedback loop with actual will help refine future estimates, even with all tools and things there is always some personal judgment, so learning from mistake is a key.

Plan: Based on my limited experience at onsite "plan is god", everyone will agree to a plan and priorities. Plans can fail, but still there is some plan. In Lucas-TVS, there is 15 mins morning meeting before they start work, agenda is to review plan for the day. It is a stand up meeting and called sunrise meeting, those are days, where i had to start my commute during almost sunrise and glimpse early morning empty chennai.

Onsite call: Can't do much, but interacting through mails will eliminate lengthy calls. May be we can read thro' reqt document with some assumptions and clarify assumptions thro' mail. We can try looking into upcoming things and get clarified thro' mails instead of waiting for that day.

May be it is true that offshore has to work late many times, but what kind of life we are looking at, if we are still in office after office hours. I'd like to look at it from a humane point of view, every one in onsite moved from offshore only and didn't fall from heavens, though some would like to think that way. Drop me a note, if you have something to share.

outer join and group by clause

2007-12-02T21:24:00.000-05:00

Nowadays don't get a lot of chance to be hands-on. The following did not fetch the outer join rows

select ordr, grp, count(ser_id) as [Sev4 Created]
from #myHPSDGrps left outer join dbo.ServiceCallView
on AssignedToWorkgroup = grp
where
[Open Date&Time] >= @begin and
[Open Date&Time] < @end and
Severity = 'Severity 4'
group by ordr, grp
order by ordr

but one below does, moved all the where clause to outer join condition

select ordr, grp, count(ser_id) as [Sev4 Created]
from #myHPSDGrps left outer join dbo.ServiceCallView
on AssignedToWorkgroup = grp and
[Open Date&Time] >= @begin and
[Open Date&Time] < @end and
Severity = 'Severity 4'
group by ordr, grp
order by ordr

Didn't have much time to analyze :0

Imperialism or Free market economy. You decide!

2007-11-25T12:29:00.001-05:00

Is it fair when a company pays less than 1% of a product's retail price to a toiling worker located other side of the earth; yes everyone know there is raw material and other overheads; but what kind of future are we headed, if these company's only motive is shareholder profit and they don't mind exploiting resources (men AND material!). <todo> I'll scribble my useless thoughts here on capitalism, outsourcing, off-shoring, ... from a humane point of view. Till then here is a documentary. </todo>

Trailer:

Part I

Part II

Here is part1 and part2 in hi-def format for those who are on high-speed. Rest assured there is not a single quote from Karl Marx :) But here is one that i read recently "the capitalists will sell the very noose that will hang them.". I read some criticize the film that is doesn't provide a solution or alternative.

குறை சொல்ற நாய்ங்க, பொற கூட வாங்கி தராதுங்க (எங்கிருந்தோ சுட்டது)

Decade after college

2007-11-13T10:59:00.000-05:00

Whooph! its going to be a decade from completion of my bachelor. Gone are those days, one-and-half hour commute, missing morning classes promptly, never caring to listen to lecturer in the class, making sure to just clear attendance level needed, after announcement of exam schedule; running around to xerox class notes and previous question papers, so called group study(!), cramming thro' the exams, luckily (may be with little intelligence) cleared exams without arrears (never worried about occasional stamps).

I can happily recollect the morning of last exam of the course (i think automobile engg), didn't study major part of a chapter and told to a classmate "if i can clear so many papers in past, i should be able to clear this w/o studying this chapter", don't know if that was foolish optimism or damn crap. Other unforgettable paper is mechanics of machines, for some crap reasons didn't attend most part of the class and hence forced to learn from book all by myself. End of the college, did pass out with a decent above average score. Life after that was not so easy, had to toil a bit to get into masters degree and had to take that one little bit serious.

Innovation: Buzz (?)

2007-11-07T21:30:00.000-05:00

This should be most abused word, everyone is talking, from presidential candidate's to blue chip's and to your boss. By sheer happenstance i tuned to a presidential debate when american addiction to foreign oil was being discussed, two words i heard from many, one is innovation and other was hybrid. Personally i don't believe there is not going to be a ground breaking innovation (or invention?) in next decade and half, its going to be efficient engines, alternative fuels (not that ethanol crap) till a invention (fuel cell?) is mature for wide use. I did find a sore point in current hybrids "No cord to plug-in" is marketed as a feature; IMHO if its a electric it has to be plug-in.

Some of the big corporates expect innovation a big thing, which i totally agree, but they shouldn't expect few big innovations with million dollar savings but appreciate 1000+ small innovations. This reminds me Toyota production system and lean manufacturing, which aims at reducing waste's in the process using various concepts and continuous improvement. Concepts like Poka-Yoke, SPF, SMED and Kaizen wouldn't have come straight from drawing board, its all very simple innovations, improving efficiency and eliminating waste in the total value stream. பல துளி(யே) பெரு வெள்ளம்.

I strongly believe everyone has innovative ideas but most neglect it. I can fondly recollect old days, when i joined my first project it was 3 member team supporting an ERP application from offshore and client will log issues in a web based system and team used to hit IE refresh button every 5 mins to check if there is any issues logged. Innovations are born for need (and greed?), my unwillingness to do that mundane job, i used autorefresh meta tag and made the page self refreshing every 60 seconds. And there was a satirical comment, why do i even look at the screen; those were days i was just learning VB. Exactly 5 days later i was running a small VB program that will notify updates thro' mail, which was later coded to send SMS notification to support cellphone (though it was not implemented due to costs). Few days back i was able to share the same idea to team here and send SMS notification of prod issues and avoid staring at mailbox. Here is list of email-to-sms mail addresses for US carriers.

உலகத்துல உன்னை விட பெரியவன் யாரும் இல்லை அதனால யாருக்கும் பயப்படாதே அதே மாதிரி உன்னை விட சின்னவன் யாரும் இல்லை அதனால நீ யாரையும் தாழ்வா நினைக்காதே!!!
-அய்யம்பேட்டை அறிவுடை நம்பி கலியபெருமாள் சந்திரன்
(Ctrl-C/V from vettipayal)

Top 3 LIA luxuries!

2007-11-03T20:24:00.000-04:00

Today, one of my friend was telling me a list of things he loves in american life. It sparked my thoughts and i was wondering what would be things that i get here which i'll miss back home. Here is that short count down

3. Water
A sound proof what a person who lived 27+ yrs in Chennai dreams of. Back @ home, can i imagine a day taking 30 mins shower; hmmm after r2i, i should put it in a box and bury it 100 miles deep. I hope i can atleast get a couple of buckets of non-saline and some what clear water to take bath.

2. Interstate
As a guy who commuted entire part of his life in public transportation, this is something beyond luxury. Recollecting days in 18J and 47D, no question on India's population. But i see there is some hope on getting better road.

1. Long evenings & Nature
I don't know if this two should be split, but may be these two are some what related and hence shares number one position. I can easily count the number of times i reached home in day light; from there to a place with daylight till 9 PM, there is no words to express. Either it be a national park or city park next door, there is very little i happen to visit in chennai, probably there are places out there but either not easily accessible or known, but i highly doubt i'd have got a chance to walk in knee deep snow or drive on a frozen lake, hike a nature trail in deep woods, 1000 color fall season or tour an underground cave.

How much i'm going to miss these? quite a bit, but i lived in Chennai for most part of my life and i can go back taking these pleasant memories. There will be days where we have a kaakaa kuliyal and rush(!) to office in 1+ hr, get back home after sunset and switch on "Good nite" mat and wake up with 10 kosu kadi's; did i mention we also try to live a life in between.

"Veni, Vidi, Vici" -Julius Caesar

Fall colors @ Great Smoky Mountains

2007-10-27T22:12:00.000-04:00

2007 smoky mountains fall season ...

David Blaine Street Magic ;-)

2007-10-20T18:14:00.000-04:00

If you have seen Blaine's street magic earlier, here is a funny parody... PG13

here is the sequel ...

Chennai real-estate: Boom or Bubble ?

2007-10-14T20:48:00.000-04:00

I don't have any property as of now and i might be speculating on few things here. I keep hearing this "bubble" theory for quite a few years (little more than 4 yrs in my case) in potlucks, parties, media, ... i really like to know where this goes in chennai.

I was under assumption for a long time that this market is more end user driven with very little investor forces playing. But now a days i see lot of people esp NRI, IT folks looking it as a investment option. Is the surge mainly fueled by NRI, IT and investors or is there a genuine rise in demand for housing? I can't believe something getting appreciated by 300+% in matter of 4 or 5 years while there is no change in facilities; and one thing i hear in many instances is properties are shifting hands and nothing is built upon them, no idea how much of it is true.

If i R2I in couple of years, one thing that worries us is whether w'll be able to secure a piece of land close to my work, other will be the dollar dip (i'm sure you heard the scary story of 35 rupees exchange rate), which i leave it to Nilekani and Premji to worry for now.

Evolution or Intelligent design ?

2007-10-11T19:47:00.000-04:00

After reading a lot on both sides of the controversy for past few months, i question myself where i stand? And i realize that I'm still standing right on the line. Hmm, i ought to rest the question for a while.

Darwin's theory of natural selection is a scientific fact, but i do find pockets of grey areas (or i didn't get to know much) like, origin of an organic life form from a "primeval soup" and i'm truly not convinced of the counter argument against Irreducible complexity's flagellum example. On other hand in ID (just as a concept and not as a theory) i see a thread of theistic creationism running beneath, which is a dark area I'm not comfortable to enter.

I unequivocally agree that Evolution is a science and ID isn't, but i should say its far better than creationism. There is no way church and science going to get to a mutually agreeable point, so this one should linger around for quiiite a while. Till then i better worry about getting the bread to the table.

Wallpapers

2007-10-11T11:50:00.000-04:00

It was kind of boring for a while with my desktop wallpapers, one of my friend sent me a link to this site, i checked out some nature ones, really beautiful wallpapers, though not high res.

Real time flight data and tracker

2007-10-08T08:07:00.000-04:00

flightstats.com

real time flight details and tracking. requires free registration for email alerts and extended details.

YouTube >> iPod

2007-09-21T20:41:00.000-04:00

Unlike google video, youtube doesn't provide option to download video, one of my friend forwarded me link to Stephen Hawking's Origin of the Universe lecture at Berkley, i wasn't able to control my urge to download to my pod, after few mins of search ended up using this site to download youtube video in mp4 format. I'd highly recommend the site, just for its simplicity of doing all with no software to install in my machine.

Ahem... Dr. Ilayathalapthi

2007-09-12T12:34:00.000-04:00

What happen when politician run universities ...

Ooookkkkk... Who's next? ....
((god damnit doesn't shreya deserve one))

History of hAcKiNg

2007-08-19T09:35:00.000-04:00

After a longgg time had some time to vetti browsing :) Down below is quite a interesting documentary on the topic.

My take on this, black or white hat, he is just curious (hmm may be little bit too much). Whatever! Here is one of my recent discovery, hole in e.p.a.p.e.r edition of The H>i>n>d>u, deciphering the filenaming took less than 5 mins from start to finish, i think i talked about this hole in one of my prev post; servers change, hole remains.

Few months back, in a IIS7 feature demo there was one interesting item that i can recollect; a managed module for all IIS requests (even for static files); so theoretically i can write a HTTPModule to validate authentication and serve as gate keeper of any IIS requests.

url:
http://e^p^aper.theh^indu.com/pdf/YYYY/
MM/DD/YYYYMMDD?_###$$$.pdf
ex:
http://e^p^aper.theh^indu.com/pdf/2007/
08/19/20070819A_001101.pdf

take out ^ char in the url

? -> content
A --main paper
B --metropulse
C --opportunities or second supplement
T --may be special supplement

### -> running page number

$$$ -> edition
101 - chennai
102 - delhi
103 - hyd

batch download with flashget completes the square. Ok now goes the documentary,

Do i know you ???
I don't think so !!!

Sanjana some pix

2007-07-29T09:55:00.000-04:00

Few photos of our daughter Sanjana @ flickr :)

myTunes

2007-07-01T11:55:00.000-04:00

itunes sucks when you don't find option to take mp3/video/music out of ipod. Today i plan to dump iTunes and replace with idump and ml_ipod, let me see how far i can go with these. I'm copying winamp folder after ml_ipod plugin installation and idump executable in the ipod, with this i should be able to plug and manage ipod on any computer without itunes. But still i'd have to leave itunes in my machine for sole reason of firmware updates.

new desktop!

2007-06-09T20:25:00.000-04:00

Screenshot of my new XP desktop macified and vistafied, get it under 30 mins with ObjectDock and Google sidebar.

Whose Fish?

2007-05-19T10:26:00.000-04:00

I'm not big fan of puzzles, i did go thro' same old crap for infy, but i do recollect solving this puzzle *supposedly* created by Albert Einstein and said that 98% of the people in the world could not figure it out. Trick to solve is to *visualize*, for those like me, you can write and cut the paper. Save paper, save trees, save earth :)

There are five houses in a row in different colors. In each house lives a person with a different nationality. The five owners drink a different drink, smoke a different brand of cigar and keep a different pet, one of which is a fish.

Hints:

1. The Brit lives in the red house.
2. The Swede keeps dogs as pets.
3. The Dane drinks tea.
4. The green house is on the left of the white house.
5. The green house owner drinks coffee.
6. The person who smokes Pall Malls keeps birds.
7. The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhills.
8. The man living in the house right in the center drinks milk.
9. The man who smokes Blends lives next to the one who keeps cats.
10. The Norwegian lives in the first house.
11. The man who keeps horses lives next to the one who smokes Dunhills.
12. The owner who smokes Bluemasters drinks beer.
13. The German smokes Princes.
14. The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
15. The man who smokes Blends has a neighbor who drinks water.

Who owns the fish ???

A key logger

2007-05-13T10:48:00.000-04:00

Many came to me asking how a key logger will go undetected with all these security options. I think it may be due to the fact that AV scanners look for known keylogger signatures and if i happen to write and build one, it may not be able to find it. Here is source code of a simple key logger written in VB, tell me if it goes undetected in your AV scan. But this is just a payload, how you infect the client and transmit data out of the client is where the fun is.

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TinTin

2007-05-13T10:37:00.000-04:00

Long gone those days, life is fun and free of bs work. I had lot of fun time watching TinTin series those days and probably made me one of those ardent fans, last week i started googling for TinTin series and caught the link, it has dvd rip of "The Adventures of TinTin [complete season 1-3]" and get all srt subrips here.

Make sure all parts are available for each divx file before downloading thro' rapidshare link checker. You can opt to leech from many unsecured wifi next door or have patience in downloading from rapidshare with its time limitations.

Lean, Agile, and Extreme Programming

2007-05-12T10:27:00.000-04:00

Jokes apart, if you are interested in learning yet another process copied from manufacturing to software industry, here is a article on Lean, Agile, and Extreme Programming. Couple of years back i have seen advantages with couple of XP tools, peer programming and TDD which we used informally or to be precise w/o even knowing what is XP [Here is some literature on XP link1 link2]. Spending some time googling on lean s/w development brings back memories of how we used to appreciate tools from toyota prod system like poka-yoke, smed, u-cell,... I'd been more happy if i had sticked on to manufacturing domain, if not for C++ and mirage of fat paycheck.

... more free movies ...

2007-05-02T12:34:00.000-04:00

TamilTerminal.net

Here is link to another movie site to download latest tamil movies for free, some with divx quality. Many english movie links are dead i haven't checked out other lang sections

here is a link dump site, here is one for english.

Simple way to catch movie links out there, get into a share digger like shareminer.com or megadownload.net, type in the movie name, you should be all set to watch the movie in a day.

N'joy :)

Watermark photo date and time

2007-04-22T23:43:00.000-04:00

I wanted to superimpose the picture taken date in the photo's saved from my digital camera, i don't know if i really read thro' the digital camera manual, this doesn't seem to be possible, so after a while had some fun with coding (Ahem... Ctrl-C / Ctrl-V code stitching)

This utility reads the picture information available as EXIF attribute and stamps a watermark in the photo, now i can print those with the date and time on the photo.

Needs .net 2.0 framework, copy jpg's to folder where exe is located and run the binary or you can prefer to pass the folder path as cmd-line argument.
WARNING: Doesn't implement Lossless JPEG Transforms, so image resolution will degrade, shouldn't be a big problem if you are planning to print 5-by-7 and not a poster.

Pls feel free to extend the source to a full fledged app with decent user interface and implement lossless jpeg transformation.

Update 4/28: Some more code stitching and got the windows app interface for the same core logic, find the application and source.

Online Suryan FM, Sun Tv, K Tv, ...

2007-04-14T11:04:00.000-04:00

Long expected and finally now its here, listen to Suryan FM Chennai live in online. Hmm lets wait for Radio Mirchi's answer.

As a side note, watch free stream of Sun Tv, K Tv & Vijay TV online @ isaitamil.net . Also here is
link to Mahabharatham (தமிழ்) from rajshri.com

இனிய தமிழ் புத்தாண்டு வாழ்த்துக்கள

Sivaji mp3 with ID3 lyrics

2007-04-07T22:16:00.000-04:00

Sivaji mp3 with ID3 lyrics for iPod/WMP/...

Sanjana SasiKumar

2007-03-04T22:02:00.000-05:00

This is a good reason why i should stop net surfing; hold on i think she already accomplished it :-)

Sanjana SasiKumar born 2/16/2007 6:28PM EST

.NET and statistic calculations

2007-02-05T23:40:00.000-05:00

Today i had to calculate 99th percentile and slope and forecast. I was hoping .net may have something or i should be able to get some open source, but after couple of hours of search i was not able to find anything.

I decided to write my own component and got some java pseudo-code using koders.com and wrote one, here is VB.net code to compute nth percentile, i was too lazy to go back and study statistics literature and client gave me the logic for slope and forecast calculation. (Thanks Terry!)

PS: During this process, we figured out the percentile calculation in Excel is not statistically accurate.

Update 2/10/07: Let me share some of the common code i wrote in last few months. Unlike Microsoft enterprise library or application blocks these were written with some assumptions and simplicity in mind, so don't expect this to be feature rich. If you find any bug/issue with code leave a note. Compressed file has a data access layer component, common routines used for web and desktop, authorization component for web; all code written in .net 2.0

NTFS & Knoppix Live OS. A deadly combination.

2007-01-29T22:40:00.000-05:00

Last week my laptop crashed and after multiple tries i was not able to recover the OS and decided to reinstall OS, but i recovered data booting from Knoppix Live OS. Hell with NTFS protection, i figured out anyone with a live OS may be able to boot from it and mount the NTFS file system and copy any file from it, only consoling thing was Knoppix mounted drive as read-only system, so much for NTFS security :-(

How to be a programmer and also like being one?

2007-01-01T11:20:00.001-05:00

As I'm turning another page in my programmer's life, this is my answer from my experience, obviously there is very big crowd out there and do it in lot of different ways.

Code for personal use and fun. Helped me to learn things that i wouldn't have had a chance in my professional life.
Innovate. No, I'm not Edison, but i like to do simple things that makes my life easier, my first one, i was so lazy to hit F5 and created auto refreshing html to check for support issues, you have to believe me, till that team use to hit F5 every 5 mins manually, Duh!
Learn jargon and go beyond XYZ. Learning something new is always fun, 'coz I'll not be using it professionally and no one knows how bad I'm in it, but when someone needs to use it, they may think i know something on that, of course by that time, I'll have to atleast learn to use it properly;-)
Think Architect - Think Naïve. Sometimes i have to think from an architect angle and next minute I'll also have to think like an entry level programmer, kind of chinese Yin - Yang, if i haven't learn to try things differently, it 'd have been a boring work for sure.
To err is human. Slowly learning(!) from initial dog days, I can now appreciate this concept so much now. There is no such thing as Zero Defect, But why the heck TL's expect bug free code :)
Last but not the least, i think someone in future may look into my code. Yeah, i know what i'm writing is not a kalvettu, but atleast later i should not say "what the heck, is that?".

Reminds me incident in my first development project, where i decided to side track from normal VB program style, used encapsulation and coded a class to abstract the logic (some vetti work i should say). I had to take off on one day and there was a bug to be fixed, TL after looking in to the code, decided to wait for me to fix it next day though she had really good developer who knows better VB than me. You rarely get these days where you realize, you do justification when coding.

Happy New year 2007 !!!

FireFox extensions - my list

2006-12-05T20:18:00.001-05:00

I really hate to bloat my firefox with extensions, here is my list of extensions that accumulated overtime.

All-in-One Sidebar
Adblock Plus
Adblock Filterset.G Updater
Screen grab!
DownThemAll
FireFTP
FlashGot
Javascript debugger
Netcraft Anti-phishing toolbar
and of course Google toolbar

How much time should it take to watch a tamil movie?

2006-12-03T09:27:00.000-05:00

< 60 secs !

Yes that's all it took today for movie Rendu, what do they think when they make tamil movies, this will only stop if audience have a FF option in theater's. Whatever, here is a link to a site which holds few HQ movies, one of different ways to catch hold of divx in net.

BTW, If you have collection of divx movies, checkout Phillips DVP3040, i got one, this Thanksgiving day for $30 and it plays allmost all my formats i have, one thing to note though it doesn't have DTS decoder, but i think it is better that way and get a good HTS receiver.

Update 12/17 :- Looking for tamilgrounds coupon, one of my colleague shared the info about this v.good paysite YAMS, where you can download DVD rips of tamil / hindi / telugu movies @ $11/month, you will look no further.

Shopping for Holidays: Why not checkout google ?

2006-11-22T07:11:00.000-05:00

Shopping for this holiday season, do check if you can get something by using the google checkout. Technically it's like old wine in old bottle with new cork. I'm sure this is not going to wipe out Amazon, i go to Amazon 'coz of low price and high quality shipping service, many-a-times free.

Hype or Not, you get $10 to $20 Orders with Google Checkout now, in many participating merchants. If you buy something closely above the set limit, that's some discount, on top of your other discounts and coupons, why waste that, i did that few days ago.

Ok now the scary part, if you had clicked that "Remember me" checkbox when you login for convenience of using any other google feature, say gmail, i see many do that; your payment information is thrown open to anyone using that computer, 'coz you just clicked on that innocent looking checkbox. WTH! With that always signed-on feature, it simply takes me to screen where i just need to click one button to buy, what was google thinking ??? I expected them to authenticate me again before getting into this final order page.

Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new. – Albert Einstein

Happy Thanks giving.

ASP.NET 2.0 Caching - New features

2006-11-20T07:52:00.000-05:00

Here is a article that gives you fly-by of new caching features added in asp.net 2.0

J.P. Vaswani

2006-11-18T11:35:00.000-05:00

Like to hear some உபதேசம், here is one which has all J.P. Vaswani's speeches. I got to know about him from my wife, and i should say anyone may like his speeches, no matter whether they try to practice them or not. Ok lets take it like this, how often we get a chance to listen to some wise words / thoughts from an elderly person amidst this fast paced life-style and isolated nuclear family system. The talk is certainly won't be one of those boring seminars; with all those short funny stories sprinkled all along the speech, anyone should enjoy the talks.

Am I Secure - Really ?

2006-11-08T21:51:00.000-05:00

One of the colleague was talking to me on security of home computer he has, this becomes a more important topic with all those spy wares, trojans , bots and rootkits out there. Hmm, going back to the discussion with him, i found I'm bit more secure than his setup, but I'd be foolish to think i kept all doors locked, this brings up question, Am I Secure - Really ???

Here is my setup in what i have,

Firewall. No questions, everyone needs it, not that dumb WinXP firewall (looks like finally MSFT ships Vista with decent firewall features). I finally threw out the popular but most resource hogging security suite to a simple firewall, which provides blocking any incoming connection and outgoing connection (all except configured apps) . Firewall also includes Network and Host based Intrusion prevention system.

Anti-Virus/Anti-Spyware. In future should be a standard OS feature, still this is more of a after-the-fact solution with signature based detection. Check out a interesting rootkit demo at TechNet Webcast.

Anti-Phishing. This I'm dead serious about, if anti virus takes me down, i may have to
spend some hours cleaning up or re-installing, But i don't want to lose out my bank acct information and i know I'm really screwed by that time. On top of Firefox 2.0 and google toolbar anti-phishing features, i run Netcraft to make sure the bank site I'm accessing is not hosted from Russia or Taiwan. I use a PG open source app to store my sensitive and ultra complex online credentials, just to throw another layer on top.
based
Network Security. Home wireless network uses WPA encryption and locked by MAC address. If you like to learn some tips on this, here is a link.

Few years back learnt how easy to write a keylogger, which later transformed to trojan with payload from a file share, though strictly for fun and knowledge, that still keeps me little bit cynical and hence backup-ed data last week. :-)

Inayithil Tamizh

2006-11-06T22:36:00.001-05:00

"தமிழின் மேன்மை அதன் தொன்மையில் இல்லை - தொடர்ச்சியில் உள்ளது"
- long pending blog placeholder on THE oldest living language.

read books
to blog
to search 1 2 3
listen online radio's,
download tamil songs in mp3, more, more, more, more, ....
daily calendar
காற்றிநிலே வரும் கீதம்... <download>

ASP.NET Caching - Trick or Treat ?

2006-10-31T11:44:00.000-05:00

It's a corporate internet web site which pulls content from database, idea is dynamic content but of course this doesn't change often. I was called to help with designing(!) some page so i used opportunity to learn about web performance, let me blog on what i found some other time.

As usual next thing is to cache page output, but there is a glitch (it is!), the web application also includes content mgmt logic as part of it and hence pages will be called with different querystring param for page previews.



<%@OutputCache Duration="60" VaryByParam="*" %>

is ruled out for two reasons 1 it is going to cache preview page output and 2 cache duration is dynamic. So i had to cache the page output based on querystring and in the code behind

Protected Sub Page_Load(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Me.Load
If IsPostBack = False Then
If Request.QueryString("noCache") Is Nothing Then
lblTime1.Text = "page cached on " & DateTime.Now.ToString()
Response.Cache.SetExpires(DateTime.Now.AddMinutes(60)) 'The duration will be dynamic
Response.Cache.SetCacheability(HttpCacheability.Server)
Else
lblTime1.Text = "page NOT cached " & DateTime.Now.ToString()
End If
End If
End Sub

If page loads with no querystring (normal user), it will be cached for whatever duration of time it needs to. If page loads from content mgmt logic (which will now include querystring noCache) it won't be cached. When i tested with following querystring, looked like it is working as expected

http://localhost/cacheTest/tst.aspx --page was cached for 60 minutes
http://localhost/cacheTest/tst.aspx?noCache=1&param1=abc --page is NOT cached

Struck with a question what will happen in following case

http://localhost/cacheTest/tst.aspx?param1=abc

Expectation is, it will be cached for 60 mins, since it didn't have noCache query string param. May be it will maintain a cached version for this combination of querstrings. But actually what turned out is different, it was spitting out message "page cached on " as it should, but subsequent page loads fetched me current time instead of first cached time, no idea how this is happening. Need to find out a way to see if this is caching multiple versions every time i load this page.

Happy Halloween.

$0 PDA

2006-10-21T18:20:00.000-04:00

I was listening to Soma's (MSFT) interview in Merina today, he quoted "... thing that is common to any human is *Time* ... everyone has only 24 hrs a day ...", if you think about it a bit, we can appreciate importance of time management, so here is my blog on poor man's personal organizer, IMHO pen on paper is simple and best.

With so many hifi PDA devices in the market, here is one which costs you nothing. You don't have to carry a charger, it won't annoy you with reminder chimes and best of all you don't have to write a fat check to get one. Before you decide to click the link, sit back and question yourself why you need a PDA, if you think of just a personal organizer, check these out PocketMod & D.I.Y Planner.

Ajax WTH!

2006-10-14T22:18:00.000-04:00

For last couple of weeks i got quite a lot queries from team on Ajax. Its more of a standard response from me "use it, if it makes sense!".

IMHO one has to weigh the Ajax features against the coding complexity. Enter enterprise apps scenario, you got lot of additional things to consider, most importantly code maintainability and alternate technology options. Comparing enterprise apps against google map, google spreadsheet, flickr is like comparing apples and oranges. I'd seriously consider SmartClient if we really needed a windows feel in web.

Bottom line, page postback is not always evil !

search for code

2006-10-08T21:50:00.000-04:00

I had a chance to try google/codesearch and i did get what i was searching for in first few tries, though it's a long way to go.

Update 12/17 : Even better one.

System.Transactions TransactionScope issue

2006-10-06T01:21:00.000-04:00

I was having problem using this new model Transaction handling in .net 2.0, better than going to Enterprise services for just transaction handling, way it prmotes itself from Lightweight to full DTC XACT transparently helps a lot. Yeah i did bump into some posts pointing an bug that is currently open in this model, but that's not my issue today.

When i run the test app in Win XP SP2 connecting to 2 different SQL 2K server on Win 2K3, i got the following error "Network access for Distributed Transaction Manager (MSDTC) has been disabled." After some googling, enabled inbound/outbound transaction in DTC security settings and ended up with different error message, this happends when connection is opened
"The transaction has already been implicitly or explicitly committed or aborted", this one was tough, after lot of hit-n-miss i turned off firewall and it started working. Ahhhh.... WTH

hunt for bigfoot in code jungle

2006-10-04T01:09:00.000-04:00

Moved a web app to be used by all N.A. employees of the client, for unknown reason app was throwing error for 2 employees out of whole population, unfortunately 2 guys are top brace, so we had to figure out the problem asap and i wrote DbTrace component to trace SAP function module calls for specified users and it all seems to be ok and i was out of the scene. Looks like support team was searching for the bug for more than a month and they keep coming back and questioning web app. Today it was found that 2 employee's user defaults are using non US notation and hence SAP was rejecting a valid numeric value 'coz it was expecting in different format, gahhh......

Rounded corners

2006-10-02T00:12:00.000-04:00

Have you experienced editing the round corner image 'coz client decided to change the color of the rounded corner area, i happen to go thro one recently, considering my limited image editing knowledge somehow managed it.

Today happen to see this curvyCorners, js framework that provides this using few lines of javascript. As usual googling further found Atlas, ahem ASP.net Ajax sample. To make consistent coding practice and simpler server -side programming model, I'd prefer the later.

If think that is interesting, following should raise eye-brows, till now I'm also one of those millions who thought invisible table AKA table border="0" is only way to organize webpage layout, sit back and take a tour of CSS based design and why invisi table is bad. No idea if this is going to hit mainstream or not, but worth a try.

app offline page

2006-09-30T11:27:00.000-04:00

Thought of using app_offline feature and display the system down page for an webapp update happening today, if you haven't heard about this, here is a fly-by, if asp.net 2.0 engine sees this file in app root dir, it shuts app domain and serves this file to clients, brings back the app domain after this file is deleted.

Unfortunately clients needed to test the app during the down time and hence i need to allow list of users and server down message for rest, i started coding this logic in Application_AuthenticateRequest , ahhh what am i thinking coding this in app and i need to move the app again to remove this logic.

Finally wrote this in a HttpModule and wired it in the request pipeline, once testing is done its as simple as deleting off that 1 line in web.config. For more details on HttpModule, here is one i wrote for some other reason.

Ajax Ondemand Tooltip

2006-09-28T00:38:00.000-04:00

Client wanted to show a tooltip containing details for key column on mouseover. After talking to him 2 mins, it is clear that they really don't need this for every key showed in the screen, rather interested only a select few. Typical case for on-demand tooltip, i should be lucky today, i happen to cross the overlib tooltip js and ASP.net Ajax WS call to get the details and display a overlib tooltip on dblclick of text and it can be either closed manually or it'll autoclose in 5 secs.

Probably something likethis or intelliTxt might show up in the control toolkit. Here is the sample code.

web.config configuration node xmlnamespace issue

2006-09-26T16:59:00.000-04:00

I had developed and using a data access component which readds the db configuration from app.config. Today i was told it is not working and it indeed was not able to select the db config details node. After few mins of hit-n-miss, the issue is due to xmlnamespace attrib in configuration node. Once i remove the xmlns , i was able to select the specified node

<configuration xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/.NetConfiguration/v2.0">
<dataConfig ...

XmlNode enterpriseLibraryDataNode = appConfigDoc.SelectSingleNode(@"/configuration/dataConfig");

Not sure from where the dev team got this namespace from, googling a bit tells me its a VS 2005 beta release bug. Whatever the case, i hate to find a simple attribute crashing straight forward xml dom select node code.

downloading streaming media ...

2006-09-16T22:07:00.000-04:00

I get this request many times, how to download streaming media, like download song from raaga.com or download movie from tamilgrounds.com. I'm not going to give lot of details , to put it simply *anything* playable from internet should be downloadable, all we need to find underlying media url and save the file.

Many a times finding the playing media url is going to be bit tricky, we should be able to get it using any packet sniffer, I use very much tailored app for this URL Snooper and use Flashget as download manager, but any packet sniffer should do.

Signing off with link to tamil drama's (credits Gg)

Melissa Theuriau

2006-09-15T17:42:00.000-04:00

That's a gd reason to learn french ;-)

Ready Set Grow case study from Microsoft

2006-09-12T12:26:00.000-04:00

I was searching for some MSFT article for the F5 IIS session bump issue and sporadically searched for schwan and landed in the RSG case study. Not sure this is only version MSFT has.

Right bar lists, Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 & Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 in products and technologies. Hmm how come VS2005 & Biz2006 was used, when we started project in Jan '04

:-)

ASP.net session bump/hijack issue - F5 & IIS cluster

2006-09-07T23:50:00.000-04:00

I haven't seen this issue personally, but it is confirmed from multiple sources this happens. In short: user rarely bumps into another user's session, in verbose: user logs into web app and uses it for a while and all of a sudden gets data that is not in his session.

Current prod infrastructure is IIS cluster behind F5. Session affinity is set to 20 mins and IIS session time-out is set 20 mins. Session location is in-proc.

I have seen request getting postedback to different webserver and hence viewstate validation fail with exception CryptographicException: Bad Data. Authentication of viewstate failed. ...
i don't know how F5 works but i guess F5 lost identifier of the user and hence thinks it as new user and routes request to different web server. This is a normal issue and we can either turnoff viewstate encryption or explicitly specify viewstate encryption key in all servers in cluster.

But i have to totally rule out F5 from the session bump/hijack issue, 'coz F5 has no idea what asp.net session is, that is something internal to aspnet_wp.exe (IIS5) or w3wp.exe (IIS6).

Under the hood, aspnet maintains the session id using ASP.NET_SessionId cookie and IIS can guarantee its uniqueness across its requests. Here is an MSFT KB about reusing session id for apps in same DNS domain and this article explains behind the scene how asp.net serves request.

I'm guessing this could be the cause,
userA hits webserver1 in cluster in the initial request and F5 should take us to the same server for subsequent requests.
If F5 sends the userA's request to webserver2 in middle of the session, and by happenstance (theoretically this may be possible) userA's ASP.NET_SessionId is already assigned by webserver2 to some other user (say userB), then aspnet engine will think userA as userB and assign userB's sessionstate to this request.

Pls leave a note if you think this may be possible or how you think this could be happening.

I expect IIS team to provide option to make the sessionid unique in a cluster environment. For now what we planned is to generate a unique sessionid and store it in cookie as well as session, check if they match for every request, if not kill the session, this is going to kill both user's session, but i don't know if there is any way out.

I didn't want to include tis logic in existing app 'coz 1 i'll have to include this logic in every app i write and 2 i'm too lazy. I wrote following HTTPModule and hooked it to web app, ideally something like this should be configured in machine.config so that we don't need to do this every web.config, netiher i don't have authority nor i want to pursue this.

Right now code is written to send a mail when something like this happens (just dropping a line to see if something takes this bait) and it will redirect to itself, so page is written poperly to handle empty session which i expect to be a norm.

using System;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.SessionState;

namespace KCC
{
public class SessionCheck : IHttpModule
{
public SessionCheck() {}
public void Dispose() {}
public void Init(HttpApplication httpApp)
{
httpApp.PreRequestHandlerExecute += new EventHandler(this.PreRequestHandlerExecute);
if (httpApp.Modules["Session"] != null)
{
SessionStateModule session = (SessionStateModule) httpApp.Modules["Session"];
session.Start += new EventHandler(this.OnSessionStart);
}
}

public void OnSessionStart(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
HttpCookie sessionChk = new HttpCookie("KCC.SessionCheck");
sessionChk["iSAS.SessionID"] = Guid.NewGuid().ToString();
sessionChk["iSAS.MacName"] = System.Environment.MachineName;
sessionChk["iSAS.SesStrtTmstmp"] = System.DateTime.Now.ToString();
HttpContext.Current.Response.AppendCookie(sessionChk);
HttpContext.Current.Session["iSAS.SessionID"] = sessionChk["iSAS.SessionID"];
}

private void PreRequestHandlerExecute(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
HttpApplication httpApp = (HttpApplication) sender;
HttpSessionState session = httpApp.Context.Session;
if (session != null) //skip pages which don't use session
{
if(session["iSAS.SessionID"] != null) //skip if session value is empty
{
if (!httpApp.Context.Session.IsNewSession) //skip if new session
{
string szCookieHeader = System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Request.Headers["Cookie"];
if ((null != szCookieHeader) && (szCookieHeader.IndexOf("ASP.NET_SessionId") >= 0)) //skip if new session 2
{
if (httpApp.Request.Cookies["KCC.SessionCheck"] != null) //skip ifCookie not found
{
if (httpApp.Request.Cookies["KCC.SessionCheck"]["iSAS.SessionID"] != null) //skip if cookie data not found
{
if (session["iSAS.SessionID"].ToString().Trim() != httpApp.Request.Cookies["KCC.SessionCheck"]["iSAS.SessionID"].ToString().Trim())
{
System.Text.StringBuilder info = new System.Text.StringBuilder();
if (httpApp.Request.Cookies["KCC.SessionCheck"]["iSAS.SesStrtTmstmp"] != null)
info.Append("Session start time: " + httpApp.Request.Cookies["KCC.SessionCheck"]["iSAS.SesStrtTmstmp"].ToString());
info.Append(" ");
if (httpApp.Request.Cookies["KCC.SessionCheck"]["iSAS.MacName"] != null)
info.Append("Session start web server name: " + httpApp.Request.Cookies["KCC.SessionCheck"]["iSAS.MacName"].ToString());
info.Append(" ");
info.Append("Current time " + System.DateTime.Now.ToString());
info.Append(" ");
info.Append("Current web server " + System.Environment.MachineName);
info.Append(" ");
info.Append("Logged on NTID" + httpApp.Context.Request.ServerVariables.Get("LOGON_USER").ToString());
info.Append(" ");
if (session["NTID"] != null) info.Append("Current NTID in session" + session["NTID"].ToString());
info.Append(" ");
info.Append("URL " + httpApp.Request.Url.ToString());
info.Append(" ");
System.Web.Mail.MailMessage msg = new System.Web.Mail.MailMessage();
msg.To = "me@mail.com";
msg.Subject = "-- SESSION HIJACK ISSUE --";
msg.From = "me@mail.com";
msg.Body = info.ToString();
msg.BodyFormat = System.Web.Mail.MailFormat.Html;
try
{
System.Web.Mail.SmtpMail.SmtpServer = "mailhost.com";
System.Web.Mail.SmtpMail.Send(msg);
}
catch //do nothing
{}
httpApp.Context.Response.Cookies["KCC.SessionCheck"].Expires = DateTime.Now.AddYears(-1);
session.Abandon();
httpApp.Context.Response.Write(httpApp.Context.Request.Url.AbsoluteUri.ToString());
httpApp.Context.Response.Redirect(httpApp.Context.Request.Url.AbsoluteUri.ToString(),true);
httpApp.CompleteRequest();
}
}
}
}
}
}
}
}
}
}

For further reading, Foiling Session Hijacking Attempts and HTTP application executes events sequence.

Chennai satellite town

2006-09-07T15:44:00.000-04:00

Irrespective of what Ramadoss/JJ/KK thinks about the chennai satellite town, this is going to come up. Reason cited for objection "destroying fertile lands", CRAP! what if NY residents opposed to so called encroachment of urban buildings some 100 yrs back; ok tamil heroine's will have to look for different city to dance around, nothing much.

Current facilities is super sufficent for chennai city (if we can roll back 10 yrs). What leaders don't have is a vision (Dr. APJ strsses this in almost all his speeches), even the most hated Hitler had a vision to make Germany a modern nation, if not they will not have Autobahn now. Hmm, why should J needs to worry if she has to identify something everyday to spit out "arrikai".

Nothing is going to improve if TN politics is going to roll around J & K.

Vande Mataram!
:-s

asp:CustomValidator changing ErrorMessage displayed

2006-09-06T18:19:00.000-04:00

requirement: custom validate the amount value; is required only if ddlContributionType value is 2 or 3.

code:
<!-- aspx -- >
<asp:dropdownlist id="ddlContributionType" runat="server">
<asp:textbox id="txtAmount" runat="server">
<asp:customvalidator id="CustomValidateAmount" runat="server" controltovalidate="txtAmount" errormessage="Invalid" clientvalidationfunction="CustomValidateAmount_ClientValidate" onservervalidate="CustomValidateAmount_ServerValidate" />

function CustomValidateAmount_ClientValidate(oSource,oArguments)
{
var ddlContributionType;
if (oSource.getAttribute("ContributionType") != null)
{
ddlContributionType = document.getElementById(oSource.getAttribute("ContributionType"));
}
if (ddlContributionType != null)
{
if ( (ddlContributionType.value != "2") && (ddlContributionType.value != "3") )
{
oArguments.IsValid = true;
return;
}
}
else
{
oArguments.IsValid = true;
return;
}
var amount = oArguments.Value;
oArguments.IsValid = false;
if ( isNaN(amount) == true)
{
oSource.innerHTML = "Invalid amount";
return;
}
var re = new RegExp("^\\d+(\\.\\d{1,2})?$");
m = amount.match(re);
if (m == null)
{
oSource.innerHTML = "Invalid amount format";
return;
}
if ( amount < innerhtml = "Minimum donation of $1 required"> 9999.99 )
{
oSource.innerHTML = "Maximum donation is $9999.99";
return;
}
oArguments.IsValid = true;
}

' .aspx.vb Page_Load
CustomValidateAmount.Attributes("ContributionType") = ddlContributionType.ClientID.ToString()

I explicity not included the check if required for condition 2 or 3, as i re-use an existing validator (RequiredFieldValidatorWithAEnablingCondition) that i developed long back, will mail the code if requested

<KCC:RequiredFieldValidatorWithAEnablingCondition runat="server" ID="RequiredFieldValidatorWithAEnablingConditionAmount" ControlToValidate="txtAmount"
ControlToCompare="ddlContributionType" TriggerValue="2;3" ErrorMessage="Required." />

Is life hitch hiking ?

2006-09-04T23:25:00.000-04:00

Today saw Discovery documentry on panspermia, wonder what finally turned out in "kerala red rain". School taught the evolution theory, temple preached "intelligent design", after all who cares about these, idea is to stuff the answer paper and get results in mark sheet.
I think i really didn't take any side here, where do U stand ?

LDAP authentication in website

2006-09-02T17:55:00.000-04:00

Got a requet from a client to provide LDAP authentication in exisiting ASP website, in plain terms authenticate users using thier domain id and password. Initial thought of intergrated win auth was ruled out 'coz of Kiosk based computers used. Should make sure we SSL the page.

'ASP code
Const ADS_SECURE_AUTHENTICATION = &H1
On Error Resume Next
Err.Clear
Set dso = GetObject("LDAP:")
Set domain = dso.OpenDSObject("LDAP://server.com", strUserName, strUserPassword, ADS_SECURE_AUTHENTICATION)
If Err.number <> 0 then
Response.Write("Invalid login. Err.number=" & Err.number)
Else
Response.Write("Valid login. Err.number=" & Err.number)
End If
Set dso = Nothing
Set domain = Nothing

Also same functionality in ASP.net 1.0 http://support.microsoft.com/?id=326340.

dinamalar epaper

2006-09-02T17:49:00.000-04:00

Its becoming almost an habit to read dinamalar in original paper format. Today i thought of scrapping the content for offline viewing, it was rediculously simple, here goes the code.

using System;
using System.Drawing;
using System.Text;
using System.Net;
using System.IO;

namespace GetDinamalar
{
class Class1
{
[STAThread]
static void Main(string[] args)
{
DoWork();
}
static void DoWork()
{
// /Web/PagePrint/YYYY/MM/DD/DD_MM_YYYY_001.pdf
try
{
int pgCtr=1;
Console.WriteLine("Booting up ....");
string folderpath = Path.Combine(Path.GetDirectoryName(System.Reflection.Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().Location.ToString()),DateTime.Now.ToString("MM.dd.yyyy") );
Directory.CreateDirectory(folderpath) ;
WebProxy proxy = null;
Microsoft.Win32.RegistryKey reg1 = Microsoft.Win32.Registry.CurrentUser.OpenSubKey(@"Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings", true);
if (reg1.GetValue("ProxyEnable", "1").ToString() == "1")
{
proxy = new WebProxy("http://" + reg1.GetValue("ProxyServer", "proxy.isas.com:80").ToString(),true,null,CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials);
}
reg1.Close();
while(true)
{
Console.WriteLine("Sending request to web for page " + pgCtr.ToString());
string address = "http://epaper.dinamalar.com/Web/PagePrint/" + DateTime.Now.ToString("yyyy/MM/dd/dd_MM_yyyy_") + pgCtr.ToString().PadLeft(3,'0') + ".pdf";
WebRequest httpRequest = WebRequest.Create(address);
if(proxy != null) httpRequest.Proxy = proxy;

Stream ReceiveStream = null;
try
{
ReceiveStream = httpRequest.GetResponse().GetResponseStream();
}
catch
{
return;
}
string filePath = Path.Combine(folderpath ,DateTime.Now.ToString("yyyy_MM_dd_") + pgCtr.ToString().PadLeft(3,'0') + ".pdf");
FileStream fs = new FileStream(filePath, FileMode.Create,FileAccess.Write);
BinaryWriter binWrt = new BinaryWriter(fs);
binWrt.BaseStream.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.End);
int data=0;
byte [] buffer = new byte [1024];
while ((data=ReceiveStream.Read(buffer,0,1024))>0)
{
binWrt.Write(buffer,0,data);
}
binWrt.Flush() ;
binWrt.Close() ;
pgCtr++;
}
}
catch (Exception exception)
{
Console.WriteLine("Error:" + exception.ToString());
Console.Read();
}
finally
{
Console.WriteLine("Exiting process ...");
}
}
}
}

Back from Hibernation :-)

2006-09-02T17:32:00.000-04:00

It is almost 3 months i blogged, got myself tied up for happier personal reasons. To re-start with c# (.net 1.x) code to scrap daily dilbert comic and set it as desktop wallpaper.

Due to frequent demand for this, download the application here. Copy GetDilbert.exe to a folder and create a shortcut in windows startup.

using System;
using System.Drawing;
using System.Text;
using System.Net;
using System.IO;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;

namespace GetDilbert
{
class Class1
{
private const int SPI_SETDESKWALLPAPER = 0X14;
private const int SPIF_UPDATEINIFILE = 0X1;
private const int SPIF_SENDWININICHANGE = 0X2;

[DllImport("USER32.DLL", EntryPoint = "SystemParametersInfo", SetLastError = true)]
private static extern int SystemParametersInfo(int uAction, int uParam, string lpvParam, int fuWinIni);

[STAThread]
static void Main(string[] args)
{
DoWork();
}

static void DoWork()
{
try
{
Console.WriteLine("Booting up ....");
string address = "http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/";
WebProxy proxy = null;

WebRequest httpRequest = WebRequest.Create(address);
Microsoft.Win32.RegistryKey reg1 = Microsoft.Win32.Registry.CurrentUser.OpenSubKey(@"Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings", true);
if (reg1.GetValue("ProxyEnable", "1").ToString() == "1")
{
proxy = new WebProxy("http://" + reg1.GetValue("ProxyServer", "proxy.isas.com:80").ToString(),true,null,CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials);
}
reg1.Close();
string streamText = null;
Console.WriteLine("Sending request to web ...");
if(proxy != null) httpRequest.Proxy = proxy;
using (StreamReader rdr = new StreamReader(httpRequest.GetResponse().GetResponseStream(), System.Text.Encoding.ASCII))
{
streamText = rdr.ReadToEnd();
}
Console.WriteLine("Scrapping web response ...");
Match match = Regex.Match(streamText,@"/comics/dilbert/archive/images/(\w+).(gifjpg)",RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);

if (match != Match.Empty)
{
string imageLocation = Path.Combine(Path.GetDirectoryName(System.Reflection.Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().Location.ToString()),"Dilbert_" + DateTime.Now.ToString("MM.dd.yyyy") + ".bmp");
Console.WriteLine("Downloading todays comic ...");
httpRequest = WebRequest.Create("http://www.dilbert.com" + match.Value);
if(proxy != null) httpRequest.Proxy = proxy;
using (Bitmap bmp = new Bitmap(httpRequest.GetResponse().GetResponseStream()))
{
bmp.Save(imageLocation, System.Drawing.Imaging.ImageFormat.Bmp);
}
Console.WriteLine("Setting as desktop wallpaper...");
Microsoft.Win32.RegistryKey reg = Microsoft.Win32.Registry.CurrentUser.OpenSubKey("Control Panel\\Desktop", true);
reg.SetValue("TileWallpaper", "0");
reg.SetValue("WallpaperStyle", "0");
reg.Close();
SystemParametersInfo(SPI_SETDESKWALLPAPER, 0, imageLocation, SPIF_UPDATEINIFILE SPIF_SENDWININICHANGE);
Console.WriteLine("Shutting down app.");
}
}
catch (Exception exception)
{
Console.WriteLine("Error:" + exception.ToString());
Console.Read();
}
}
}
}

Microsoft.Web.AJAX

2006-05-01T23:06:00.000-04:00

In past i was intrigued by new mail notification feature in Outlook Web Access {tracking back OWA history} and kept wondering on technology behind that.
Enter Google Maps, everything changed after people coined term AJAX . Happen to learn concept of remote scripting in last project which used JSRS technique to get data for dropdowns and help text from server for controls. And i decided to look out for alternatives/options for this new wave (hype?) of web programming model. Ajax.NET Professional seems to be easier to use. But support to asp.net controls are limited, and when googling around that ended up in ASP.Net 2.0 Client Callback feature & Atlas April CTP, Expect Atlas to shadow the limited callback feature of asp.net 2.0

Here is a 18 mins video demo on Developing ASP.NET 2.0 Applications using "Atlas" by Scott G. Its kind-of Houdini show, when you see him write a Todolist web page and AJAX enabling the page, all under 18 mins and without writing a SINGLE line of javascript! I can understand why java community hates MS. Have time? See Atlas in action

From an architect point of view, Ajax usage may probably violate tiered approach and presentation tier code may end up spaghetti, isn't the idea of asp.net code behind model is to avoid this. Atlas overcomes this by providing a declarative programming model for Ajax and enabling use of asp.net server controls

I gotta give credits to MS for developing something like Atlas, even though its an alternative to Smart Client architecture that MS wants to use for rich web apps. But, I'd expect to use this in limited and for appropriate cases and i don't want follow Ajax bandwagon of creating single-page interface application in web, IMHO web apps are not supposed to work that way, rather leverage on Ajax features in cases where it demands like Google Suggest. To end with an interesting fact i happen to learn how Google prevents against excessive queries, mainLoop sets itself up to be called repeatedly using the javascript setTimeout function, instead of keydown events, handling fast typers on slow connections and also timeout interval between calls seems to be dynamic, adjusted according to how quickly the server responds.

iPod encounters

2006-04-25T01:07:00.000-04:00

I never thought of buying an iPod, and had been very much satisfied with Nomad Muvo 512, which i still believe gives good bang for buck. Until company gave all an iPod Video 30G. It was a more than a surprise when it got shipped in less than 48 hours from Shangai, CN to Knoxville, TN; hmm FedEx! Anyway here I’m trying to abuse this piece of electronic.

Anyone will fall for the slick user interface and cool click wheel, but when you start using it from a WinX OS, you are hit with a quite a bit of annoyances. iTunes interface for iPod is one crazy software, it doesn’t tell you if a selected/drag-n-dropped media file is not supported or anything, it just acts dumb. I can understand if Apple decided not to support many WinX media formats in iTunes, but I expect them to provide atleast an encoder in it to support those? I'v got ephPod downloaded; breathing fire over iTunes shoulder, waiting to make that kill.

Media are internally stored with cryptic file names, once I get them in, I don’t know how to backup them with original file names. A useless info I gained while googling for converters, AAC (internal media format) doesn’t (surprisingly) stand for Apple Audio Codec.

MediaCoder did most of the work converting all my audio collections in myriad formats to AAC (pointe de note: Only Nero AAC Encoder was able to convert my rm’s and gave better conversion quality over iTunesEncoder). Sadly I was not able to convert mpeg/dvd-rips using MediaCoder video conversion, even converting strictly to Apple iPOD supported video formats (tried both MPEG-4 & H.264 video in 768 Kbps); not able to get any support in web for this software, should be satified to have a free converter for most used feature of iPOD. Finally ended up using Xilisoft iPOD video converter, there is lot on the market.

And finally a note on v.rarely talked about feature, eBooks, check out yourself thousands of free ebooks for iPOD @ http://manybooks.net.

Keeping issues aside, iPod gets whatz supposed to: look&feel, good battery (audio only, video drains out battery v.v.quickly, drains 75% in 10-15 mins video playback), simple and easy interface and more than anything raising eyebrows in next seat ;-)

Bye and Happy iPoding.

Reverse Engineering Taboo

2006-04-06T09:44:00.000-04:00

Many (esp in IT world) think this a taboo, well here i'm trying to break. I don’t understand why such negativity associated with this; if this is not so in other industries. Take an automobile manufacturing industry, isn't a common practice to buy competitor product and disassemble it to examine and understand for the purpose of enhancing their vehicles/components. If you can consider that legal (of course if it doesn’t violate any patent/copy-right), then it should be okay to disassemble software for the purpose of understanding and enhancing existing system.

For people who confuse this with Security Hack, question yourself why you have that secured data/logic in the binaries which can be reversed in a matter of seconds (Lutz Roeder's .NET Reflector), esp with the these high-order languages. No, not even NGEN isn't protected from reversing, hmmm, are you still in Fool's Paradise!

Wake-up Buddy. The silent guy in that last desk could be a black hat! Hahahaha.

IM - Thin client

2006-03-29T10:18:00.000-05:00

I had not used Yahoo Messenger for a long time, and when i decided to change that and statr reaching ppl, my network group policy didn't allow me to run that in my office machine. I was wondering if there was a thin client yahoo client out there that i can use. And did found few e-Messenger & Meebo.

4/10 update: Today i was thinking what can be done if corporate proxy blocks this site, i renamed yPager.exe to iPager.exe and hmm it seems to work by-passing windows GPO !

Remembering Marshall, MN --continued--

2006-03-28T16:23:00.000-05:00

R4 Install day

Release 3 Install day

Diwali '04 @ YMCA

Snow @ Independance park

Goosberry Falls, Duluth

A Rest area @ South Dakota

Upper Sioux Agrncy SP, Granite Falls

Remembering Marshall, MN --continued--

2006-03-28T15:55:00.001-05:00

Palisade Head, Duluth

Valley Fair

Sunset @ Lake Sarah

Garvin Park

Split Rock Creek Lighthouse, Duluth

Glacial Lake ?

Home @ Winter

Ice scrapping !!!

Home just before Winter

Last flight from FSD to ORD

Leaving Marshall, MN (Last day to FSD)

Remembering Marshall, MN

2006-03-28T13:57:00.000-05:00

-- My first American soil --
-- Photo credits Gg --

Wind Mills before Pipestone

Two Harbors, Duluth

Glacial Lake SP

Rainy eve @ Camden SP

Sunset @ Independeance park

Mt. Rushmore

Sioux Falls

Frozen Lake Shetek

Sunset @ Camden SP

July 4th Independance park

Rainy Eve @ Lake Bendon

C# and VB.NET

2006-03-15T13:59:00.000-05:00

After developing .NET apps using C# for a long time, i'm now into VB.NET. I recollect old days where i was forced into C# from VB and my initial aversion over VB coming from C++. All along my .NET years i presumed VB.NET is C# w/o a ;.

Being developer for quite some time, i think language preference (especially .NET langs, JAVA) is mere personal adoration, i didn't had privilege to choose .NET over J2EE. Reason why Microsoft prefers to code in C# may be due to the fact, they have lot of C++ developers and hence transistion to C# should have been easy. And my first annoyance with VB.NET, feature go to matching ending brace with keyboard shortcut Ctrl + [ is not working or may be i don't know that. Speaking of VS.NET shortcuts, you may want to look at O'Reilly's Mastering Visual Studio .NET Shortcut Key Guide

My googling on Syntactical differences and comparison between VB.NET and C#.

Microsoft white paper on Differences Between Visual Basic .NET and Visual C# .NET

MSDN Language Equivalents comparing different .NET languages

Frank McCown's, C# and VB.NET Comparison quick reference guide
Steven Swafford's, C# and VB.NET Comparison Cheat Sheet a derivative of Frank’s comparison, option to download the material in PDF or Word doc.

There is hell a lot of code translators out there and I doubt full fledged use, but a good tool for developer who moves from one (.NET) language to another,
Alex Lowe's http://authors.aspalliance.com/aldotnet/examples/translate.aspx
Kamal Patel's http://www.kamalpatel.net/ConvertCSharp2VB.aspx
Carlos Aguilar Mares's Translation (VB.NET to C# and vice versa)
http://carlosag.net/Tools/CodeTranslator/Default.aspx
& a commercial tool http://www.remotesoft.com/octopus/try.html

Moving on

2006-03-01T13:28:00.001-05:00

I am moving on, from the RSG program to my next assignment in a paper tissue manufacturing company. Hope life takes me on a road to more better place, and quote in signature of sign-off email dedicated to Mr KD.

The wise man learns more from the fool than the fool learns from the wise man. - Marcus Aurelius

RSG! The End.

2006-01-15T13:08:00.000-05:00

Ahhhh....................

Alas RSG! Sees the final install (Slow-Roll) and looking back this 2.5 year long program all i can think of is HUGE from all aspects (complexity, code size, team size, ...) Anyone who worked on this will have a lot of things to take with.

Still few things are left like Prod. support and end state switch to all SQL. Talking of that i am more than happy to write that 2 lines of code to return SQL in switch component (XXXX0173, just in case i forget this abused component name)

Some facts on the program, i happen to gather after a while

5 Major releases
3500 Programs
1.8 Tb of disk space
350K batch jobs per month
490 - Peak team size
3837 Person Months
900 GB of data from DB2 to SQL Server (913 tables)
7 million lines of legacy code replaced with 1.5 million lines of code
70% reduction in code base

I'll take that for a huge project!

March to final install of RSG

2005-11-21T23:14:00.000-05:00

After a week’s relax, here I go again, march to the final install of this long, long project. Expecting R4 to be installed by Jan 15th . Should be offline for some more months…

Hurray! End of Prod Support.

2005-11-04T20:42:00.000-05:00

I have to agree, you can be a expert in architecting systems, but knack of fixing a production issue can't be compared to that. If you think zeroing in the problem code is tough, the tougher part is yet to come, no isn’t fixing the code, fixing the corrupted data, i was so lucky that i had to meet this scenario more than once.

Whatever today is end of 45 day support for R2/3, meaning no more calls from operators during nights and weekends! If we find bugs in production after so much testing, one should understand the fact, bug free system is more a difficult task as the size and complexity of the system increases. NUnit/TDD power is only as good as test fixture's strength.

But after initial hiccups, the system did come back and stabilize pretty well, may be it will become as good as mainframe as time goes, okay, at least before this becomes legacy hahaha...

என் சுவடுகள்

Steve Jobs

Shoot-out in Tucson

ASP.NET "Base Pages" vs. PageAdapter

God and Science

Happy New Year 2011!

wallstreet is ready to bet if you will die next year!

Back from (almost) dead

Free Market Economy 101

படித்ததில் ரசித்தது

Common powerpoint mistakes :)

Chennai MTC Routes

Yes Its Tucson!

Moving on ...

175 random ilayaraja hitz (mostly melodies)

Strange circle around moon

George W Bush: Go Fish!

Authentication & Authorization

BBC - The Story of India

leanerFox

Sanjana

Microsoft surface

Armageddon

$150 by July 4th ?

Scraps for this week

Google Street View Maps

r2i quote

Nand Nandan ♪♫♪♫

Web 2.x ?

Break 2 India :)

youtube to mp3

Offshore night-out

outer join and group by clause

Imperialism or Free market economy. You decide!

Decade after college

Innovation: Buzz (?)

Top 3 LIA luxuries!

Fall colors @ Great Smoky Mountains

David Blaine Street Magic ;-)

Chennai real-estate: Boom or Bubble ?

Evolution or Intelligent design ?

Wallpapers

Real time flight data and tracker

YouTube >> iPod

Ahem... Dr. Ilayathalapthi

History of hAcKiNg

Sanjana some pix

myTunes

new desktop!

Whose Fish?

A key logger

TinTin

Lean, Agile, and Extreme Programming

... more free movies ...

Watermark photo date and time

Online Suryan FM, Sun Tv, K Tv, ...

Sivaji mp3 with ID3 lyrics

Sanjana SasiKumar

.NET and statistic calculations

NTFS & Knoppix Live OS. A deadly combination.

How to be a programmer and also *like* being one?

FireFox extensions - my list

How much time should it take to watch a tamil movie?

Shopping for Holidays: Why not checkout google ?

ASP.NET 2.0 Caching - New features

J.P. Vaswani

Am I Secure - Really ?

Inayithil Tamizh

ASP.NET Caching - Trick or Treat ?

$0 PDA

Ajax WTH!

search for code

System.Transactions TransactionScope issue

hunt for bigfoot in code jungle

Rounded corners

app offline page

Ajax Ondemand Tooltip

web.config configuration node xmlnamespace issue

downloading streaming media ...

Melissa Theuriau

How to be a programmer and also like being one?