The Rise Of India

Kiruba points to this cover story on Business week on how Indian brainpower is reshaping the Corporate America. Definitely a good read and what looks like an unbiased view on Outsourcing. It's not just software now, but much more.

The gains in efficiency could be tremendous. Indeed, India is accelerating a sweeping reengineering of Corporate America. Companies are shifting bill payment, human resources, and other functions to new, paperless centers in India.

Another article talks about how India Is Raising Its Sights At Last. I really like the last paragraph of this article:

India's transformation is still a work in progress. The problems of illiteracy, poor infrastructure, and bad government persist. But something else is there, too: self-confidence. By 2015, 55% of Indians will be under the age of 20, and this generation will have grown up in an economy where roads like the Pune highway are the rule, not the exception. Unlike the generation before them, young Indians are no longer obsessed with India's poverty, but with its future. They give India a fighting chance.

Death of Pop-up Advertising

The article talks about how the nest version of Internet Explorer (actually it's Service Pack 2 for Windows XP) will bring an end to the era of Online Pop-up advertising. Well, for me, it happened couple of months back when I installed Google Toolbar.

Case Study: Amazon.com

Amazon is one of the very few companies I admire and Amazon.com is one of the very few websites I use to do my shopping and research.

In October, for the first time in its eight-year history, Amazon.com posted a profitable quarter that wasn't driven by holiday shopping—and its stock price continues to climb. But to keep growing, Amazon will need to wield more clout offline. A look at its untested new strategy to offer back-end online services to other retailers offers insights into how to profit from IT assets.

Something on SOA

Just as I thought that I have scoured everything on SearchWebServices, I land up on a blog pointing to this SOA Learning Guide. This has everything you want to know and understand about SOA.

Great Resource on Web Services

For some time, I've been reading SearchWebServices site articles and have been very happy with the quality of these. They have got really great authors there like Sean McGrath, Mark Baker, David Linthicum and host of others.

Want to know if a web service has changed and act accordingly, then read this article on SearchWebservices. Checking a Web service for version changes at runtime.

Alive and Kicking !

OK. It has been quite a while since we blogged. Just to let you guys know that we have been to India and back but this time to Harrisburg, PA. Right now we are neck deep in work(.Net/OLAP etc) but things should start getting normal in few weeks time. No promises this time but we have all intentions to keep on blogging. So stay tuned.

Developers sink 'waterfall' in favor of 'sync'

SearchWebServices.com writes:

What was clear from the research is that a majority of developers are undertaking projects that use the so-called "sync-and-stabilize" approach, in which members of a development project work on modular blocks and then synchronize their code with other members on a regular basis throughout the life of the project. It also requires that they stabilize, or debug, that work on a continual basis as well.

In a study of 150 software projects conducted jointly by MIT, Harvard Business School, the University of Pittsburgh and Hewlett-Packard Co., 64% of developers worldwide said they worked on projects in modules. A majority also produced "builds" -- or individually coded components -- on a daily basis in the early or middle stages of a project. The rates were 63% in the United States, 57% in Europe and 53% in Japan. The exception was India, where only 27% of developers were in the daily-build habit.

The interesting part is the last line above. In India, many of us are still developing using Waterfall model whereas others have moved to more evolutionary models.

XML in the Real Real World

Tim Gray writes in this article on XML-Journal:

There seem to be two kinds of XML-based initiatives out there. In the first, they don't bother too much with the niceties, they just focus on getting some things put together and happening, they make up and refine the messages as they go along, and they've been in production now for six months. The second kind takes a more carefully structured approach, builds things from the schemas out, worries a lot about choreography and data modeling and semantics, and is still in the planning stage, with the revised schedule calling for deployment two quarters from now if things go well.

That's lot of dejected talk from someone who co-authored XML recommendation. Anyways, Tim points to the continuous revolution(s) taking place in the RSS world which seems to be the greatest success story of XML so far. He writes:

Meanwhile, the biggest story in the XML world is happening just off the radar of the prognosticators and executives. It's called RSS, and it's a simple format for pumping the content of dynamic information sources around. It was invented for use by the legions of webloggers, but it's mainstream now; I no longer surf to the New York Times or the BBC or MSDN, I subscribe to them, and when something changes, I get a nice little summary and decide whether I want to check it out.

RSS has never actually been blessed as a standard, and its development has been fraught with nasty personalities and politics. There are competing versions, and the next-generation version probably won't be called RSS. But it's changing the world, and it's based on XML, and it's coming from a direction that nobody's looking in. Stand by.

Google News Alerts

Google launches Google News Alerts:

Google News Alerts are sent by email when news articles appear online that match the topics you specify.

Some handy uses of Google News Alerts include:

• monitoring a developing news story


• keeping current on a competitor or industry


• getting the latest on a celebrity or event


• keeping tabs on your favorite sports teams

Introducing BPEL4WS 1.0

Well, BPEL4WS was introduced last year and has already gone into version 1.1 draft release but this article on Web Services Journal provides a very good introduction of BPEL4WS and shows how it builds on the features offered by WS-Coordination and WS-Transaction.

BPEL4WS is at the top of the WS-Transaction stack and utilizes WS-Transaction to ensure reliable execution of business processes over multiple workflows, which BPEL4WS logically divides into two distinct aspects. The first is a process description language with support for performing computation, synchronous and asynchronous operation invocations, control-flow patterns, structured error handling, and saga-based long-running business transactions. The second is an infrastructure layer that builds on WSDL to capture the relationships between enterprises and processes within a Web services-based environment.

Taken together, these two aspects support the orchestration of Web services in a business process, where the infrastructure layer exposes Web services to the process layer, which then drives that Web services infrastructure as part of its workflow activities.

The ultimate goal of business process languages like BPEL4WS is to abstract underlying Web services so that the business process language effectively becomes the Web services API. While such an abstract language may not be suitable for every possible Web services-based scenario it will certainly be useful for many, and if tool support evolves it will be able to deliver on its ambition to provide a business analyst-friendly interface to choreographing enterprise systems.

Six Kinds of Jelly Beans

This article - "Six Kinds of Jelly Beans: How the Perception of Variety Influences Consumption" on Knowledge@Wharton (free registration reqd) discusses how visual perception of activity and an abundance of choices ultimately increase consumption.

The normal economic model would be that you eat when you are hungry or that you buy things that you need and that you don’t buy things that you don’t need. But we don’t think people really know how to eat today – they look for cues. And most people don’t realize that an assortment of a product encourages them to take more. We are all mindlessly making a lot of decisions.

A very interesting study.

The future of XML documents and relational databases

Jon Udell discusses the future of XML documents and relational databases. Good article on the changes happening in the RDBMS world where every Vendor is including more support for XML. The article also discusses the XML document Workflow and how in the process XML enhances the data by carrying contextual metadata.

Imagine a purchase order flowing through a business process some time in 2005. It's an XML document, created with a tool such as InfoPath, carrying a mixture of core data and contextual metadata. The core data, including the item number and department code, will wind up in the columns of a relational table. The contextual metadata, which might include a threaded discussion made from comments injected by the requester, the reviewer, and the approver, will remain in document form. "This human context is never stored in the RDBMS today," says Kingsley Idehen, CEO of Burlington, Mass.-based OpenLink. Yet it's the key to understanding how the data got there and what it means.

We are back

Notwithstanding, We've not blogged for quite some time now, almost two months. That's a long-long time in the Blog world. Well, the reasons are many. During this timeframe we moved back to India and now are concentrating on wrapping our current assignments. Not sure what we will do next but have all hopes that it will be something related to .Net. It was a welcome break nonetheless. The longer time we spend outside India, the more it seems, India changes. More on that later, Stay tuned.

Weekend Link-o-mania

For the last few weeks, things have been crazy at work. I have not been able to devote as much time to blogging as I would like. Although this will continue for some time, I thought of doing something different. So, taking a leaf out of Sam Gentile's "New and Notable" posts, here are few pointers that will keep you and myself even more busy. All of these are excellent reads. So here we go:

• Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates testimony before the Senate Commerce Committee against the evil of SPAM.


• Kevin Werbach is anticipating a post-Web, post-PC world,

  Technologists just can't stop thinking about tomorrow. The future always looks bright; the question is who and what will help get us there. Even the grinding downturn of the past three years has hardly dampened this belief among entrepreneurs, technology executives and investors. Will broadband be the hot new development that lifts us out of the doldrums? Will it be Wi-Fi? Online gaming? Web services? Homeland security? Those are the wrong questions.
  
  If you want to know where you are, you don't study a map to determine where you're going. You trace back the steps from where you've been. Over the past several years, "where we've been" in the technology world has changed. While we were all focused on the dot-com bubble and the subsequent bust, "yesterday" shifted. It used to be the PC revolution and client-server computing in the enterprise; now it's the Web.



• Rob High of IBM talks on Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). This is another acronym buzzing around the industry and this conversation highlights the basics of SOA. I missed attending a talk on the same topic last month by Drew Robbins in the Columbus .Net Developers Group meeting. He has posted the presentation on his blog.


• Kalsey provides a web interface to the Bill Zeller's button maker application. Cool. While at Kalsey's website, Check out the CSS tabs with Submenu's blog which is the best I have also seen.


• Wes Haggard shows how to determine the .Net Framework version by retrieving the current Framework Directory. Also check out the comments for even more straight forward way of doing the same.

Cavaliers win LeBron James sweepstakes

LeBron will be playing for Cleveland Cavaliers (which tied for the NBA League's worst record with Denver Nuggets). This is such good news for Cleveland Fans (count me in too). Cleveland is not that bad team as the numbers indicate and inclusion of LeBron can (and will) turn the tables for them. They have had some really great games last season (one that stands out is when they held LA Lakers to their lowest score this season).

For the uninitiated ones, LeBron is just 16 and is slated to be the top pick for this year's NBA Draft. He could very well be the next Michael Jordan. Have doubts, check this out and this.

Ruuuu-bennn is the Winner

Ruben Studdard is the "American Idol" but there were two winners today. The Velvet Teddy Bear, as he was dubbed by guest judge Gladys Knight beat out 24-year-old Clay Aiken for the crown and a recording contract with RCA. But both already have albums in the works. Clay Aiken was just as impressive as Ruben. American Idol was one of the most religiosuly watched programs by both of us.

Windows XP to see double

News.com reports:

Microsoft plans to retool its Windows XP operating system so that two people can run applications on the same machine concurrently, an important step toward the company's goal of transforming the PC into a home entertainment center.
Service Pack 2 of Windows XP will let one person manipulate applications via the keyboard while another person views pictures or surfs the Internet on the same computer via a smart display, according to a source.

Cool but not cool. Why? Check out the prices for SmartDisplays. With around $1000 dollars for a display they are too expensive for me. I would rather go for a Tablet PC which we are contemplating buying for some time.

Software Copyright Primer

A little offbeat post but nonetheless very interesting if you develop software. Here is a primer on Copyright protection for Software.

Copyright protection for software can be a valuable tool. But how do you get that protection, how long does it last, and do you need a registration? This article addresses those questions and more.

Site Hacked

Very early this morning WebJives.com was hacked. The home page was defaced and left with the following line:

hax0rs lab @ Brazil .. haxlab@mail.com - For more info about this: www.hl9517.kit.net/haxors.htm .. cya

Thankfully hackers just created a new index.html file and left other content untouched. Does this suggest We're famous...:).

Auditing Web Site Authentication

SecurityFocus has an article on auditing Web Site Authentication. The article (first part) discusses a standard audit procedure consisting of a list of questions to test Web site authentication schemes. Not all the questions may be relevant to a particular authentication scheme but still a very good read.

Hard Drive Noise on Sony Vaio

Atlast we fixed the hard drive noise on our Sony Vaio (PCG-GRX500P) notebook. After frantically searching for this information on net for few days, I found the answer at one of the forums hosted by HP. It seems this is a known problem with some Hard drives (In our case Toshiba) and Intel chipsets. Here are the steps you need to perform to get rid of the clicking noise. :

1. Determine the intel chipset that you have. To do this download the Intel® Chipset Identification Utility. To run the Intel Chipset Identification Utility, simply download the file and run it. Our Sony Vaio has Intel 845MP/MZ chipset on the motherboard.
   
2. Download and install the Intel® Application Accelerator . It supports almost all of the Intel chipsets in the 800 series. Note that Mobile chipset support was removed from Intel Application Accelerator version 2.3. Version 2.2.2 is the last version available that supports mobile chipsets. So we had to install Verison 2.2.2. Also note that IAA works on computer systems running Intel® Pentium® III or Pentium® 4 processor only.
   
3. Located within the Parameters window on the Device Information property page are certain parameters that are modifiable. To change a selected parameter, select the device you wish to modify in the Devices window. The corresponding available parameters will be displayed in the Parameters window, to the right.Left double-click on the gray wrench icon associated with the modifiable parameter. The “Edit Value” dialog box will appear. Click on the scroll down arrow and select the option desired.
   
4. To get rid of the noise, You have to select the "Maximum Performance" option under the "Advance Power Management" parameter.
   

In our particular case on a Toshiba drive, there is almost 90% reduction in noise. Cool.

Disclaimer: Try the above steps at your own risk. It worked for us and there is no guarantee it will work for you.

CSS Changes

We have made few changes to the stylesheet (CSS) of the website to allow for better user experience. Notable changes include:

• Bumped up the font size by 2 % and it makes a world of difference now.


• Styles for the blockquote element changed to appeal visually and provide focus on the quotes.

Windows Server 2003 Evaluation Kit

Microsoft is giving away Windows Server 2003 Evaluation Kit for free. The 180-day trial version will be available shortly after the product launches on April 24, 2003. If you are in US, Go grab your own FREE copy.

The following items are included in the Windows Server 2003 Evaluation Kit:

• Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition, RTM CD


• Windows Server 2003 Resource CD


• A unique Product Key (required for installation)


• Links to additional Web-based documentation

The Evaluation Kit is available only in English when you order it from this Web site. Localized versions may be available in other locales. We will add international Web site links as they become available. There is no fee for the Windows Server 2003 Evaluation Kit. As a special promotional offer, Windows Server 2003 Evaluation Kits will be shipped at no charge to customers in the United States, through July 31, 2003. (However, fees will apply if customers choose to receive their shipment via express methods.) Orders from outside the United States are subject to shipping charges and may be subject to import duties and taxes. When ordering from this site, you are considered the importer of record and must comply with all laws and regulations of the country/region in which you are receiving the shipment.

XML Enlightenment

Some days back Don Box pointed out to this excellent discussion by Aaron Skonnard. I bookmarked it then and got a chance only today to go through all the three articles. I must say all of these are a must-must read for all of us working with various XML API's presented by the .Net Framework. In the first part, he discusses the tradeoffs between XML API's for both reading and writing XML documents. The Second and third part describes choosing the right API's for reading and writing XML documents with the help of code examples.

[Also posted at My .Net Weblog]

The five biggest trends in tech

Fortune reports on the Five biggest trends in tech:

Standardization - An ever-widening array of technology tools are available in inexpensive, standardized form. The price of computers, storage, and bandwidth, among other things, continues to drop per unit of performance. Dell Computer is the ultimate apostle of this trend, but Dell only succeeds because of the work of Intel, Microsoft, the Linux community, and others.
Open source - Software that costs essentially nothing can do more and more tasks. I wrote the other day about the mySQL database. Meanwhile, Linux continues to astound. It makes available to anyone, inexpensively, the kind of robust software provided by the traditional proprietary Unix vendors. Linux also allows Wal-Mart to sell a $200 PC.
Wireless - The cost of deploying a broadband network is plunging because it can now be done wirelessly. This suits our public spaces, workplaces, schools, and homes. We can thank not the telecommunications industry but those in the computer industry who developed the standards-based unregulated Wi-Fi technology.
'Data Comes Alive' - This was the theme of Esther Dyson's recent industry conference, and aptly summarizes a panoply of emerging new technologies that hold the promise of dramatically increasing what software can do. Among them: web services, which allow applications to seamlessly communicate with each other; the so-called "semantic web," a richer version of the web we use today that allows software to communicate more efficiently without human intervention; and a variety of new enterprise applications that will bring the benefits of automation to many intractably uncomputerized business processes.
Selling software as a service - I've written in this column about the phenomenal growth of Salesforce.com's per-user-per-month sales automation software. Salesforce is just one of several new companies that allow anyone to automate parts of their operations without buying hardware, networks, and expensive enterprise software. All you need is a browser and you can get work done. If you apply this concept to your entire computing and software infrastructure, you have what IBM calls "on demand" computing, or Hewlett-Packard refers to as "adaptive infrastructure." It's all about getting more efficient use of technology resources, whether you own them or not.

Interesting phrase for web services, "Data comes Alive" although not sure if it was meant to be restricted to just web services. No major surprises in this list of trends. I don't think Standardization can be termed as a tech trend. Standardization in the way the article describes is bound to happen in any economy. After a point of time things will become inexpensive and this happens with all the fields, tech is no exception.

Drew Robbins has a blog

Never knew Drew Robbins has a blog (rather a complete website). Drew works for InDepth Technology and has presented a lot of time at the Columbus .Net Developers Group and generally acts as the MC for all the meetings. He is scheduled to present again real soon (April ?) on Business value of .Net. Cool !! RSS subscribed.

Fortune 500: Wal-Mart rules yet again

Fortune magazine released it's Fortune 500 list yesterday and no surprises there, Wal-Mart retained it's title as the # 1 company in the US. Another company I love, GE stood at #5. Not surprisingly, Enron and WorldCom are nowhere to be seen. According to Fortune's Editors if Wal-Mart continues bringing in profits like this, it could very well open up a gap between other top companies and maintain it's position for many years. Personally, I love Wal-Mart, Why? because of it's low prices and it's penetration in US cities. Wherever I have stayed in US, I could find my friendly neighbourhood Wal-Mart. Most of the times I've had choices of what Wal-Mart store to visit because of their proximity. Another reason for this love is one project I did for Wal-Mart while working for GE Appliances. Cool !!

JavaScript gets XML [ via Loosely Coupled weblog ]

JavaScript now known as ECMAScript is getting native XML support.

ECMA International (ECMA) is completing extensions to the widely used ECMAScript standard, currently being updated to its 4th Edition. The enhancements known as E4X (ECMAScript for XML) standardize the syntax and semantics of a general-purpose, cross-platform, vendor-neutral set of programming language extensions adding native XML support in ECMAScript.

This is a great step given the importance of XML in Web Services world. It would be interesting to see how client side functionalities get extended with the XML support.

The Myth of Loosely Coupled Web Services

In his Opinari Newsletter, David Chappell breaks some more myths about Loosely coupled web services. He compares loose coupling to asynchronous communication and then goes on to tell that WS-ReliableMessaging will allow Loose Coupling of web services. I haven't yet gone through this spec but looks like I may have to soon. For the uninitiated, here are some more links on this new spec.

Patching made painless

InfoWorld reports, Microsoft has released SUS (Software Update Services) 1.0 which allows companies to have their own update server within the intranet. Apart for being free, the software will reduce headaches for SysAdmins. In a big enterprise, updating servers and PC's is a big pain and I have been feeling this pain for quite some time now (not applying patches but validating those).

SUS uses the latest version of the Automatic Update client, installed as part of either Windows 2000 Service Pack 3 or Windows XP Service Pack 1, which allows redirection to the SUS server through use of an Active Directory group policy, or a modification of the desktop's or server's registry keys. SUS only accepts content that's signed by Microsoft, so security is much less of an issue than it might otherwise be.

But SUS just takes care of enterprises (big and SMB's), for individuals Windows Update is still the best bet.

Pop-up ads, spam and those old jokes

Writes Rob Pegoraro in his Fast Forward column:

The Internet comes with its share of annoyances, most of which -- spam, viruses and those old jokes your friends can't seem to stop forwarding to you -- have exhibited a cockroach-like tenacity despite our efforts to make them go away.

Well, the article focuses on blocking Pop-ups but the above statement is so true. Getting old joke(s), again and again from different set of friends is annoying but what can you do. You can't tell them, stop sending me this crap. Jokes are meant to make you laugh but these mails take every bit of smile away from your face while breaking your concentration and impairing productivity. But as I said, What can you do?

While I am on subjects of email, Read this very good article on when to email, what to email, who to email etc.

Martin Fowler on design of distributed objects

In the April issue of SDMagazine, Martin Fowler discusses how the design of distributed objects interfaces affects the performance of the system.

The overriding theme, in OO expert Colleen Roe’s memorable phrase, is to be “parsimonious with object distribution.” Sell your favorite grandma first if you possibly can.

Good Read. BTW, This article is adapted from his new but already famous book, Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture.

Good enough for today and at the right price

Read this Infoworld article by Chad Dickerson. He talks of integrating off-the-shelf software and outsourcing as the trends that will outlast the current economic downturn. At the end of the article, he twists a famous phrase by Steve Jobs of Apple as:

...enterprise IT has moved on from "insanely great" to "good enough for today and at the right price."

So true. I see this happening all the time and more so in the last few months. I have seen that the IT attitudes have changed but it is very difficult to change the habits of end users/clients. They have been accustomed to getting things done their way all the time. Guess these attitudes will have to change sooner than later.

The Deliberate Revolution: Transforming Integration With XML Web Services

Came across a great article on web services by Mike Burner, a software architect at Microsoft. Some very good information in there, especially the section on Service Patterns, where he describes the use of patterns for designing web services. The patterns he describes includes, Facade (to encapsulate complexity), Interception (Is this the same as Proxy pattern?) and few other non-standard ones (EAI Hubs, Information Portals, Catalog Publication, Business Process Management etc). To conclude the article he writes:

As the Internet becomes the backbone for data and application integration, common schema for describing our world and our interactions will unblock the flow of information between organizations, and allowing us to communicate with a precision we have never known before. But this shift requires organizations, from small businesses to world governments, to reconsider how data and processes are managed. The software industry, meanwhile, must deliver on technology that allows people to express and manipulate the information that drives our businesses, our societies, and our social interactions. Web services promise to be central to every facet of the transformation

I would rate the article as essential read for anyone interested in Web Services.

Red Herring Ceases Publication

One of my favorite magazines, Red Herring is shutting down. During the last three years of reading the magazine, I learnt a lot about different businesses, mostly upcoming ones as the magazine focussed most on the venture capital scene and technology companies during the dot-com boom. March will be the last issue of the magazine. I wonder what will happen of other new economy magazines.

Update: I received an email from Tony Perkins (co-founder of Red Herring and AlwaysOn) about his personal views on the closing of Red Herring and its potential revival that he has posted on AlwaysOn. I am sure Tony will keep alive the passion of Red Herring in the form of AlwaysOn.

Ten things to know about XDocs (Infopath)

Jon Udell writes about ten things you must know about Infopath (previously caled XDocs). From the Microsoft InfoPath preview site:

Microsoft InfoPath™ (previously code-named "XDocs"), is a new product in the Microsoft Office family and streamlines the process of gathering information by enabling teams and organizations to easily create and work with rich, dynamic forms. The information collected can be integrated with a broad range of business processes because InfoPath supports any customer-defined XML schema and integrates with XML Web services. As a result, InfoPath helps to connect information workers directly to organizational information and gives them the ability to act on it, which leads to greater business impact.

Jon further discusses InfoPath in his blog. Also check out this article on XML capabilities in Office 11.

Here's what I feel of Mike Tyson

Open this Photo Gallery and goto the last photograph (# 8). This is exactly what I feel about Iron Mike. Shut up now.

Perspective on Web Services

Another article on Web Services, this time by a credible source as Eric Newcomer (CTO at IONA). Eric discusses the evolution of Web Services and the roadblocks to a standardized world of Web Services. He writes:

..today we sit at a fork in the road of Web services evolution. There are two paths that the industry can take, with each path leading to a distinct and different future. One road leads to a truly standardized world where corporations fully reap the benefits of Web services by untangling the "spaghetti mess" of IT systems. The second road leads back to yesteryear, where proprietary systems ruled the day, maximizing vendor service and maintenance revenue, and killing end-user flexibility and return on investment.

Accepting that we have the core standards (SOAP, WSDL, UDDI) in place, standardized and accepted by almost everyone, he says that the fight has reached the next level and this is where Security, transactions, reliable messaging and orchestration comes.

True, This is what is hampering the adoption and deployment of web services. Security is the primary concern but we've got a good start with WS-Security specification (and other related specs) but Orchestration and Messaging involves lots of players (few unheard of before) and quite diverse ones two. It would be interesting to see the tug of war between the Vendors and the standards bodies and hopefully we will have universally accepted standards for these also.

Microsoft goes after Spammers, Finally

Some days back I reported the reduction in spam that I noticed on my hotmail account. Well, That didn't last very long. Spam is back again to its glory days but looks like not for long. Microsoft has finally decided to go after the Spammers and has filed a so-called John Doe suit in the federal court for the northern district of California in San Jose. The suit doesn’t name defendants, but allows the plaintiff the power to issue subpoenas as part of the investigative phase of the trial.

Consolidate Database Servers

Last week's InformationWeek had a story on how many companies have database software that uses only 10% to 15% of capacity and how a startup Savantis Systems comes to the rescue for such companies.

The Savantis solution, dbSwitch™, maximizes database availability while minimizing the costs of hardware and software. The patent-pending dbSwitch technology allows data centers to pool database servers in order to leverage resources across multiple applications. The result is a Database Area Network (DAN), a unique network-based approach to the provisioning and management of database services. Servers and databases may be added to the DAN without requiring any changes to the DBMS or to database applications.

Over the years I have seen so many database servers getting wasted with just 40-50 GB data and I have also seen the opposite, where database rationing was the utmost priority. This product when released can certainly reduce the hardware costs and what more would you want in today's world. Keep an eye.

Ink-based form designer [ via Shawn A. Van Ness's Blog]

This is so cool, a pen-based forms design tool for Visual Studio.Net. This was demo'ed in VSLive! and Shawn writes that they wowed a late-evening tired crowd. I say who won't get wowed by such a tool, the dead ones are already turning up in their graves....:)

[Also posted at My .Net Weblog]

Google buys Pyra Labs (the makers of Blogger)

This is huge news with even huge implications. Read all about it in Dan Gillmor's blog. More to follow.

HTML Tree Graph

Found an implementation of HTML tree graph on an unknown weblog to me. I really liked it. Basically it uses XSLT to convert a XML file to pure HTML. But then this guy had used Java to convert the XML to HTML. Well, apparently one line does this in ASP.Net. This line:

<asp:Xml id="myXml" DocumentSource="tree.xml" TransformSource="tree.xslt" runat="server" />

Here's the output:


[Also posted at My .Net Weblog]

The J2EE v .NET 'split' is nothing to do with Web services [via WebServices.org]

Tom Welsh tries to clear confusing and misunderstood view that industry is "split" because some organizations are basing their Web services on J2EE, while others prefer .Net. In an article on The Register he writes:

If everyone was ever going to settle for using nothing but Windows, they could all interoperate using COM+ or .Net Remoting. Or if we all agreed to standardise on J2EE, all we would need would be RMI and JMS. Actually, CORBA would have done the trick across all platforms, but it was "politically" unacceptable - meaning that Microsoft (among others) was so committed to talking it down that a U-turn would have involved too much loss of face. The Web services initiative could turn out to be IT's Project Apollo, in that it aims to open up a whole new application space that has hitherto been largely inaccessible. That space comprises fast, smooth, reliable automated interoperation between disparate computer systems, even those that belong to different corporate networks. Like Apollo, it will be a long job, because a set of wholly new technical problems needs to be solved - and before they can be solved, they have to be identified. But success is likely in the long term, simply because everyone has joined forces in the common cause.

Good read.

Microsoft muscles into business reporting

CNet News.com reports:

Microsoft plans to embed a business-reporting feature into its SQL Server database software, a move that will likely cause jitters among specialized business-reporting software companies.

I love companies throwing such surprises. This will be very interesting to see how Crystal Decisions and other vendors react to this development. Crystal Decisions already ships Crystal Reports with Visual Studio.Net.

[Also posted at My .Net Weblog]

Web Service-Oriented Architecture [Via CapeBlog]

Good article on Web services oriented architecture by the Cape Science CEO, Annraí O'Toole.

This article discusses some historic approaches to building service-oriented architectures and outlines the key failures of previous technologies. In particular, this article shows how Web Services technologies, through the provision of ubiquitous, Internet-based, and document-oriented technologies, provide the compelling foundation for implementing Web Service-oriented architectures, and consequently, that Web Services represent the best solution to business integration.

Stop the Press: Software Delivered to Schedule!

One of my favourite sites, Software Reality has an article comparing software development to publishing a newspaper.

Your average programmer has many fine qualities. Timeliness, however, is not normally considered one of them. If software were delivered along the same lines as your daily newspaper - with all the features you expect and according to a predictable schedule - our customers would be a lot happier.

Jakob Nielsen: Homepage Real Estate Allocation

Jakob Nilesen in his latest alertbox article:

On average, sample sites evenly distributed valuable screen space between content, navigation, fluff, blank areas, and system overhead. Areas of user interest should occupy more than the current 39%.

Creating a Culture of Ideas

Nicholas Negroponte says expertise is overrated. To build a nation of innovators, we should focus on youth, diversity, and collaboration.

India on the Security Council

Thomas Friedman writes in this article (registration required) on New York Times:

Sometimes I wish that the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council could be chosen like the starting five for the N.B.A. All-Star team — with a vote by the fans. If so, I would certainly vote France off the Council and replace it with India. Then the perm-five would be Russia, China, India, Britain and the United States. That's more like it.

Why replace France with India? Because India is the world's biggest democracy, the world's largest Hindu nation and the world's second-largest Muslim nation, and, quite frankly, India is just so much more serious than France these days. France is so caught up with its need to differentiate itself from America to feel important, it's become silly. India has grown out of that game. India may be ambivalent about war in Iraq, but it comes to its ambivalence honestly. Also, France can't see how the world has changed since the end of the cold war. India can.

Which Indian won't agree, I do. But then again, Is this sudden and unseen favoritism for India, just because of France's position on Iraq. On a related note, France backs India over Security Council seat. Interesting. I don't get politics and I never will.
Update: Times of India relates this story to the benefits India can reap because of US-Iraq conflict.

Checkout my .Net blog

Checkout my new .Net blog at http://dotnetweblogs.com/DSharma/ and the corresponding RSS feed. While there you can also check the other .Net Weblogs. If you are one of those who use News Aggregators, here is the OPML file and dotnetweblogs RSS feed.

Web services Adoption:Hype Ratio

We all know that there is too much hype surrounding Web Services. Personally I think hype for a new technology is good but this hype should be retained under the walls of reality. XML-Journal has an article discussing the Adoption:Hype Ratio of web services.

Even today, I'm frequently faced with those who are disappointed at the progress of XML and Web services. My stock answer to skeptical questions about XML adoption is to talk instead about the "Adoption:Hype" ratio and agree that its value is at or near zero. The many successful projects cannot possibly match the infinite hype associated with the technologies.

Loss of Comments

We had a disruption in the Commenting service provided by Haloscan this morning which lead to loss of few comments. It's happening for the first time with us so I won't say bad words yet but it's irritating. Sorry guys if you commented on something and don't find your comments now.

W3C publishes HTTP Implementation and User Agent Problems Notes

W3C has released Common HTTP Implementation Problems and Common User Agent Problems as a W3C Note. According to W3C, The guidelines will improve implementations of HTTP and related standards and also offer suggestions for good user agent behaviours. From the HTTP Implementation Problems note, here are few guidelines which I have seen being reiterated by many many people in the last few months.

1. Use short URIs as much as possible
2. Choose a case policy, Avoid URIs in Mixed case , As a case policy choose either "all lowercase" or "first letter uppercase".
3. Provide mechanisms for File System to URI mapping
4. Allow the use of standard redirects
5. When you change URIs, use standard redirects...

Security Fears for Web services

This news article on The Inquirer screams, Large firms hold off Web services because of security fears. This is exactly what will happen with the delay in Web Services security standards.

Web Services: Change Everything? Change Nothing?

The Rational Edge E-zine has a good article on Web Services titled Web Services: The Same, Only Different. Essentially what this article discusses is that whether Web Services change everything or that web services are just another piece of software and normal software development practices and tools apply to these. The article comes up with few notes at the end all of which I find very relevant.

• For the most part, developing Web services applications is the same as
  developing any other type of software application.
  
• There are, however, two important differences:
  
  
  
  • Service-oriented architectures are loosely coupled.
    
  • Web services development relies on HTTP and TCP/IP networking.
    
  
  
• These differences enhance the importance of:
  
  
  
  • Designing Web services that fit into an overall service architecture.
    
  • Optimizing component and application design specifically for Web
    services technologies -- especially to compensate for the slow and
    unreliable nature of HTTP and TCP/IP networks.
    
  • Utilizing lifecycle software management tools and best practices that
    enforce architectural control.
    
  • Continuous regression testing for service producers and consumers,
    both of whom risk serious consequences if a Web service fails.
    

ieHTTPHeaders [via Serdar Kilic]

This is a really really cool tool. Off late We've been doing stuff which always required looking at the HTTP headers and we employed a number of ways to do that. ieHTTPHeaders leave everybody behind.

ieHTTPHeaders is an explorer bar for Internet Explorer that will show you the HTTP Headers IE are sending and receiving.

Best part is that it is employed as an explorer bar in IE and second it color codes request and response headers. While there do check out the other tools. All very useful especially COMTrace.

NetRun no-touch deployment utility

Here's a great utility for no-touch deployment by Rocky Lhotka.

This program can be installed on a client workstation, along with the .NET runtime, and can then be used to launch .NET programs from a URL. The .NET program will be automatically downloaded into a cache on the client machine and will run from there. Any dependant DLLs will also be automatically downloaded to the client machine. The program and DLLs will also automatically update when new versions are placed on the server.

The source for this information, Rocky himself. He was the speaker yesterday for the monthly .Net Developers group meeting at Columbus. He spoke on architecture choices and best practices for putting the .Net Framework to work. It was a nice talk and we actually understood Remoting and Web Services concepts and when to use which. Cool.

Bill Gates on Security

In his latest executive e-mail, Bill Gates talks of the continuously evolving Security challenges and outlines the steps Microsoft has taken over the last year to address these challenges.

In the past year we have created new product-design methodologies, coding practices, test procedures, security-incident handling and product-support processes that meet the objectives of this security framework: Secure by Design...Secure by Default...Secure in Deployment...Communications

And he needs some help from the customers on three things,

1) stay up to date on patches, 2) use anti-virus software and keep it up to date with the latest signatures, and 3) use firewalls.

News That Comes to You

JD Lasica writes about RSS Feeds and News aggregators in this OJR column. Another cool thing he did is that he has published the complete transcripts of the interviews he had to collect views and opinions of people using RSS and aggregators. Your's truly was one of them. Read my interview on this page and others here. Writes Dave Winer about this:

JD does something extremely cool, on his weblog he provides full transcripts of the interviews he did for the piece. Much more interesting. Very nice. Someday all reporters will do this. Hey maybe they'll skip writing the polished piece, esp when the article isn't appearing in print.

I agree. This is the way online journalism will shape in the near feature.

Name Your Price for Airline Tickets, Hotel Rooms and ummm, well Software..:)

Informationweek has a story of a company called NetDive which allows you to download software a la Priceline.com and then allows you to determine the software's value before making an offer.

The Priceline.com approach has come to business software. NetDive Inc., which makes software for messaging, collaboration, and real-time customer service, has launched a name-the-price feature on its Web site. Customers can download test versions to determine the software's value before making an offer. A desperate move for hard times? The strategy acknowledges that a piece of software may provide different value at different companies, so pricing flexibility is key to attracting cost-conscious customers, CEO Dean Ansari says. Plus, it caters to human nature. Says Ansari, "If people could haggle about everything, they would."

Always On, The Insider's Network

A new website, Always On by Tony Perkins, editor-in-chief of Red Herring Magazine.

AlwaysOn (AO) is a media company dedicated to serving the global community of executives, entrepreneurs, investors, academics, and government officials who are helping to create and shape the Always On world. The AO founding premise is that most of the innovation associated with the global digital network developing on the Internet is still largely ahead of us.

Just checked the Founding Partners and saw a company by the name of Devi Yoga. What's that doing here?

Fly UI [via ChaosZone!]

Blue Fly in a urinal. A very clever UI design !!!

But this innocuous little fly just invites being peed upon, if such a thing makes any sense, but in a non-insistent, gentle, and entirely effective way. If you're the user interface specialist Donald Norman, I suppose you'd say the fly affords being peed on.

"The Glass Wall" : BBCi Design Process Document

Matt Jones has provided a PDF document titled The Glass Wall which details the design process and thoughts behind the BBC home page. It's a very interesting document. I encourage you to read it even if you are half a web designer/architect.

Mouth Wide Shut

New essay by Joel Spolsky:

When Apple releases a new product, they tend to surprise the heck out of people, even the devoted Apple-watchers who have spent the last few months riffling through garbage dumpsters at One Infinite Loop.

Microsoft, on the other hand, can't stop talking about products that are mere glimmers in someone's eye. Testers outside the company were using .NET for years before it finally shipped.

So, which is right? Should you talk endlessly about your products under development, in hopes of building buzz, or should you hold off until you've got something ready to go?

Some thoughts about SMBmeta Initiative

Some days back Dave Winer blogged about SMBBeta initiative. SMBmeta Initiative, which stands for small and medium-sized business metadata, is an open, distributed way for small and medium-sized businesses (with a web presence) to communicate information such as the physical location of the business and the area it serves, as well at the type of business, the working hours etc to search engines and other services. SMBmeta works using an XML file named smbmeta.xml:

The smbmeta.xml file is an XML file stored at the top level of a domain that contains machine readable information about the business the web site is connected to. It is an open, distributed way for small and medium businesses to communicate information such as the physical location of the business and the area it serves, as well at the type of business, to search engines and other services. Hopefully, it will open up innovation that will result in a wide variety of new services that will benefit the SMBs and their customers.

In my opinion, This is very much like meta tags that you place in the head section of your html file. So what's the big deal. Meta tags (for e.g. keywords meta tag) are used to make your site favourite of search engines and this lead to a widespread abuse of meta tags. As far as I know Google no longer gives importance to meta tags because of this abuse. So how will we make sure that people are not abusing this XML file by entering all kinds of keywords. Any thoughts? I had thought that it was limited to just US SMB's but apparently it's not.

Top Vulnerabilities in Web Applications

The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP), an Open Source community project has released the top ten vulnerabilities in web applications. The top ten vulnerabilities that makes the cut are:

Unvalidated Parameters
Broken Access Control
Broken Account and Session Management\
Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) Flaws
Buffer Overflows
Command Injection Flaws
Error Handling Problems
Insecure Use of Cryptography
Remote Administration Flaws
Web and Application Server Misconfiguration

You can read the complete report in this PDF document. I don't think this is the complete list but yes even if we follow this, we can make our applications much much secure.

Eric Weisstein's World of Science

I just stumbled upon this great site containing encyclopedias of astronomy, scientific biography, chemistry, and physics. Especially check the Mathworld. Cool.

SPOT ON or OFF

At 2003 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Microsoft released SPOT based wrist watches. From the Microsoft SPOT website:

Smart Personal Objects Technology devices are built on a brand new computing platform incubated in Microsoft Research (MSR). Microsoft worked with National Semiconductor to develop a chipset, which consists of an application chip and a tiny radio frequency receiver. The platform has been optimized for low power draw, miniaturization and low cost. To provide connectivity to SPOT devices, Microsoft created DirectBand, a set of radio technologies that enables the transmission of Web-based information to smart objects. DirectBand includes the custom radio receiver chip, a nationwide wide-area network based on FM subcarrier technology and new radio protocols created specifically to meet the unique communication requirements of smart objects.

Content such as news, weather and sports information is broadcast to smart devices as wireless "channels." Subscribers can customize the channels and the information within each channel so they see only the information that is important and relevant to them. They establish their preferences by interacting with a simple SPOT device Web site from their PC. A personalized Web site makes the care and nurturing of multiple smart devices easy and convenient.

But will these devices work outside of US. From what I've read so far, only Japan features as another country where these devices will work. I am really eager to know whether these will work in India, since the chips that goes in these devices were designed at the National's design centre in Bangalore.

Hotmail: A Spammer's Paradise?

Wired.com has a piece today on Hotmail being vulnerable to Spammers attacks and that they are not doing anything to avert this. I disagree. Over the last couple of months there has been a drastic reduction in the number of spam mails on Hotmail. Infact I get more spam in my yahoo email than hotmail today.

Clay Shirky on ZapMail and Telecommunications Industry

Clay Shirky compares the offering by Telephone companies to ZapMail, a fax service offered by FedEx in 1984(Two years and billion dollars later this service vanished). FedEx failed to understand that Fax was a product and not a service and that it's competition were it's own customers and not DHL/UPS.

FedEx misunderstood who its competition was. Seeing itself in the delivery business, it thought it had only UPS and DHL to worry about. What FedEx didn't see was that its customers were its competition. ZapMail offered two hour delivery for slightly reduced prices, charged each time a message was sent. A business with a fax machine, on the other hand, could send and receive an unlimited number of messages almost instantaneously and at little cost, for a one-time hardware fee of a few hundred dollars.

Telephone companies are making the same mistake with Wifi and VoIP. He writes:

If the economics of internet connectivity lets the user rather than the network operator capture the residual value of the network, the economics likewise suggest that the user should be the builder and owner of the network infrastructure.

Outlook News Aggregator

So many applications being built around RSS. Greg Reinacker has come up with Outlook News Aggregator. This requires Outlook 2002 (Outlook XP) and uses parts of Aggie (open source). This is cool. Eventually it will take away one more application from my desktop (Currently I have NewzCrawler running for most part of the day). Scripting News points to few more aggregators based on .Net.

The 100 Best companies to work for

Here's the Fortune Magazine's list of 100 best companies to work for(in US??). There are so many fairly unknown companies which make up this list. Edward Jones tops the list, one of the reasons being that 25% employees have stake in the company. Now I wonder How many non-stakeholder employees were sent the Questionairres...:)

ASP.NET Forms Authentication

This question comes up on almost every ASP.NET list every now and then. This article shows one of the several ways of authentication, Forms based Authentication. 15 Seconds has another good Forms based authentication article.

An evening of Comebacks

Pitsburgh Steelers spoiled what would have been a perfect weekend for us sitting in front of the TV. They rallied from a 17 point deficit to defeat Cleveland Browns 36-33. Three touchdown passes in the last 19 minutes, awesome. We kept believing final 54 secs of the game will bring some of the last minute Browns magic back again but no, not this time. In another game, San Fransisco 49ers came back from a 24 point deficit to beat NY Giants 39-38. What a game that was? One word, Intense. Weekend got a great start with Ohio State Buckeyes getting a win over Miami Hurricanes 31-34 to win the Fiesta Bowl. What a season for Buckeyes. The party that begun friday night in Tempe, Arizona will continue for a long time in Columbus. Cheers !!

Update: The NFL issued a press release on Monday stating that officials should have flagged a 49ers defender for pass interference on the final play of the game, allowing the Giants a second chance at a game-tying field goal. Does that take anything away from Garcia and his men, I don't think so.

Where the heck are we? [via Perceive Designs]

GeoURL may provide the answer.

GeoURL is a location-to-URL reverse directory. This will allow you to find URLs by their proximity to a given location. Find your neighbor's blog, perhaps, or the web page of the restaurants near you.

After adding some meta tags to your blog/website and then adding yourself in their database, You can find blogs/websites close to you.

Finding System Uptime of Windows XP Professional machine

Today I wanted to find out the total Uptime of my Windows XP Pro machine. Found out that there is a systeminfo command line tool that among other things give you the System Up Time info. Here's a batch file script that you can put down quickly to just extract the System Up Time using the systeminfo command line tool.

@systeminfo | @find "System Up Time:"

@pause

Better still, just download this Uptime.exe and run it on your XP Pro machine. Don't worry about what the System Requirements section says, it runs just fine on XP Pro. Here's the output:

D:\>uptime
\\DM has been up for: 0 day(s), 5 hour(s), 29 minute(s), 54 second(s)

Try the uptime /s switch for some really cool stats.

Generating revenues off Blogs

Paid Content has an article on business potential of weblogs and how some of the niche weblogs can be acquired by the more traditional media companies. The article has a list of some probable M&A marriages. For e.g. Corante Blog being taken over by Wall Street Journal Online, Gawker by New York Observer etc. It also talks of few blogs that were bought by semi-academic institutions in 2002.

...Romenesko's MediaNews and E-Media Tidbits, bought out by the Poynter Institute; Cyberjournalist.net, by the American Press Institute; and Arts and Letters Daily, bought out by The Chronicle of Higher Education (Wasn't TVSpy a weblog before it was bought by Vault.com?)

The article makes clear what they mean by being bought, which is quite important.

...And let me explain the term "bought" here: this may not necessarily mean exchange of money, but could be a package where the blogger gets a salaried position, or a certain cut out of the ad/subscription revenues and other such combinations. As Mark Glaser recently wrote on OJR: "Best-Case Scenario [in 2003]: Smart bloggers get their due, become famous, and can get paid for what they do. Media companies get it, and start assigning blogs as real jobs and not just extra-curricular activities." Amen!

Now, This is a stretch

According to this Reuters story, Web Monitoring Gives Clues to Broad Economic Trends. And I thought predicting Economy and Economic trends takes a lot of time (years) and statistical data (years) but apparently I am wrong.

So far, comScore has signed up 20 trading clients, including multibillion-dollar hedge fund investors and several of the major investment banks. Costs for macroeconomic and industry sector data start at $50,000 to $100,000 per year and go up from there. The biggest clients pay upward of a million dollars per year, but prefer to keep their uses secret, comScore officials say.

Happy Birthday, Dear Internet

20 years ago, ARPANET officially switched from the NCP protocol to TCP/IP. Thus was born, Internet in its present form.

Happy New Year

Wishing one and all a Very Happy, Fulfilling, Prosperous, Joyous and Fun-filled New Year 2003 !!

Monica and Deepak