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

When will Tech Spending Revive?

John Hagel in his latest blog writes:

...technology companies that move now to reposition their sales and marketing efforts will reap the near-term benefit of increasing sales. ...They will be far more credible when they present their vision for the future direction of technology because they will already have demonstrated their understanding and commitment to addressing the needs of their customers today. Most importantly, these few early moving technology vendors may in fact help to catalyze a broader revival of technology spending.

Adding Balloon Windows to a .NET Application

Introduction to the BalloonWindow class which allows .NET applications to implement balloon windows similar to what is available in Windows XP. Complete customization allows both the appearence and shape to be configured as well as projecting an alpha-blended shadow.

HumBlog

HumBlog, that's "We Blog" in Hindi language. That's the name of the Indian Blog Portal that Nilesh and gang are coming out with. Here's the cool layout that Nilesh created for this portal. Now Vikas does his turn and comes out with this beautiful collage. Vikas already has a blog portal which is quite underused at this point of time but of late he has done few improvements to the same, like XML-RPC server called Remocon, Ping feature to this server which in turns pings Weblogs.com and the latest one being Reverse ping from Weblogs.com. This is all good stuff.

First Blog Anniversary

It's one year since we started Blogging. In this one year we blogged about a lot of things with a concentration on .Net/Web Services/mostly techie stuff. It has been a great experience. Not only did we get to read and learn from other blogs, we also made some really great online friends. A year ago Kottke, Glish, Keep Trying, Scripting News were our favourite blogs. Of these Scripting News remains today with many other added (See the blogroll). Kiruba Shankar's blog was the first Indian blog we remember coming across. He is still churning great blogs.

Year 2002 was the year of weblogs, the year when blogging caught the eyes of mainstream press and we are happy that we became a part of this revolution. Although we would have liked to blog every single day of the year but somehow we don't have Wineristic skills. We will continue blogging next year. Here's looking forward to the next several years of blogging and having you all here with us. Cheers !!

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays !!

Monica and Deepak

Top Ten Trends in 2003

The Red Herring Magazine is out with the forecast of the top ten trends for the next year. The list includes Wireless, Hardware/Software, Venture Capital, Semiconductors, Nanotechnology, Financial Reporting, Telecommunications, Biotechnology, Broadcasting and Broadband. I think one of the trends missing from this list is Outsourcing. 2002 was a big year for Outsourcing and the need to cut operating costs and improve the bottom line will even be stronger in 2003. We should see a steady stream of big companies opting for Offshore Outsourcing.

On a lighter note, what Top ten list is complete without "Web Services"...:)

Time's Persons of the year 2002

Time's Persons of the year 2002 were announced today and they are the The Whistle-Blowers trio: Cynthia Cooper of WorldCom, Coleen Rowley of FBI and Sherron Watkins of Enron. Read the complete story. One question though, Is it not possible some year that Time does not declare Person(s) of the Year.

Dive into RSS

XML.com is rocking with good articles. Here's another one, What is RSS? by Mark Pilgrim.

XML.com: From XML-RPC to SOAP: A Migration Guide

Good article but am not sure about the following statement:

The time has come for the XML-RPC community to move forward; the time has come to migrate to SOAP, achieving interoperability across both systems.

VBTV, Episode 3—Building Web Applications with Visual Basic .NET

See how easy it is to develop Web applications in Visual Basic .NET as guests Susan Chory and Andres Sanabria, resident experts in Web application development, discuss key features in Web Forms targeted at VB developers.

User Agent Accessibility Guidelines

W3C released User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 as a W3C recommendation. The guidelines represent agreement among developers and the disability community on accessibility features needed in browsers and multimedia players used to access the Web.

At the Tomb of the IUnknown Interface [ via Sam Gentile's Weblog ]

Verity Stob says Bye-Bye to COM in this as usual great article. British Programing Humor at its best.

Sam is singing "Bye Bye Miss American Pie". Well, I am not sure if I can sing that song or not. I am still coding ASP based applications and most of the times COM/COM+ is what constitutes the middleware. There's some more time for me to evolve doing VB.Net/ASP.Net. But yes, I've started humming the chorus part:

So, bye-bye, Miss American Pie

     drove my chevy to the levee

but the levee was dry,

     and them good old boys were 

drinkin' whiskey and rye

     singin' this'll be the day that I die,

this'll be the day that I die.

High-Tech Hieroglyphics

Ever wondered what those icons and signs means at the back of your electronics gadgetry. To find out, read this Business 2.0 article.

Froogle Google [ via marketingfix]

Froogle, another cool service from Google.

Froogle is a new service from Google that makes it easy to find information about products for sale online. By focusing entirely on product search, Froogle applies the power of Google's search technology to a very specific task: locating stores that sell the item you want to find and pointing you directly to the place where you can make a purchase.

Features I liked: You can search by price, by price range and the results show images of the products along with the the $ values(most of the times). And if you wonder what kind of name Froogle is, here's the answer.

Google Labs has some more new experiments [ via Kiruba.com - Weblog of Kiruba Shankar]

The Google Labs has two new experiments, Google Viewer and Google WebQuotes. While I don't quite understand the relevance and usefulness of the WebQuotes, Google Viewer can be useful if you have lots of time to watch slideshow and don't want to use keyboard. Google Viewer does not use the stylesheets of the original site, so the results may not be exactly what you will see when you go to that site by clicking the link. Not quite for me, nice toys for some.

Lots of Good Stuff at MSDN

Web Services Enhancements 1.0 for Microsoft .NET (WSE) is released. This provides advanced Web services functionality for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET and Microsoft .NET Framework developers to support the latest Web services capabilities. Previously known as Web Services Development Kit Technology Preview (WSDK), this version allows Enterprise ready applications to be developed quickly with the support of security features such as digital signature and encryption, message routing capabilities, and the ability to include message attachments that are not serialized into XML. Functionality is based on the WS-Security, WS-Routing, WS-Attachments and DIME specifications.

Also a new article on What's New for "Office 11" Developers?, Some salient features: XML as Native File Format, Support for XML Schemas, and the biggest one, Visual Studios Tools. Visual Studio.Net 2003 will allow developers to write code for Office 11. See this animation preview to understand what I am writing.

Last, a guide on debugging .Net Applications in guess what, Production Environment. One good thing about these Patterns and Practices documents is that they are also available in PDF form to be downloaded.

Jakob Nielsen: In the Future, We'll All Be Harry Potter

In his latest Alertbox article, Jakob writes:

Much of the Harry Potter books' charm comes from the quirky magic objects that surround Harry and his friends. Rather than being solid and static, these objects embody initiative and activity. This is precisely the shift we'll experience as computational power moves beyond the desktop into everyday objects.

Then he is quick to point out the wicked wizards....:)

Every page that doesn't conform to expected behavior and design conventions undermines users' ability to build a conceptual model of the Web, and thus reduces their ability to use other sites with ease, confidence, and pleasure. Designers who inflict poor usability on the world and its Muggles are wicked wizards indeed.

COM Interop

Sam Gentile has a very good COM Interop presentation at his website. One thing I noticed, Sam mentions three ways to create the RCW, but I could not find any example of using the System.Runtime.InteropServices.TypeLibConverter class to do the same. I understand that the VS.NET and TlbImp.exe use this class internally but are there any examples. So, Sam this could be one area where we will like to see an article coming from you...:)

Evolving Languages

Really good stuff on the few choices for Language evolutions. The languages being discussed are VB.Net, MC++ and C#. Read the threads here, here and here.

IBM to buy Rational Software

Reuter reports:

International Business Machines Corp. on Friday said it would buy Rational Software Corp. for about $2.1 billion, expanding IBM's role in the market for tools companies use to make customized software.

Interesting.

Couldn't help Linking to it [ via Sam Gentile's Radio Weblog ]

Three Related Links...:)

News.com Vision Series

In this five-day report, 20 top entrepreneurs and researchers share their views on the future of some of the most rapidly evolving industries: security, Web services, open source, personal technology and wireless communications.

Interesting read if you have time.

Java Blogs

java.blogs - A blog community for blogs which discuss Java regularly. Anybody knows if we have anything similar for .Net blogs.

Little Nybbles of Development Wisdom [via vsbabu.org]

While building and running jGuru for the last three years, Terence Parr documented some thoughts about his experiences running the jGuru site.

In this document, I have tried to remember and distill my hard-fought 3-year experience as I evolved into a programmer capable of building a commercial product, http://www.jguru.com. Naturally this is a not complete list of programming advice, but rather what I learned on this project.

A very relevant document for anyone in the IT/Software business either coding or managing.

.Net Rocks [via Sells Brothers -- Chris's Home on the Web]

I didn't know this site existed. So cool !! This week's show features Chris Sells

Water: Simplified Web Services Programming Language

SD Magazines's DevTalk newsletter's november issue talks of a new Web Services programming language, Water.

Water™ is a new Web services and general-purpose programming language that allows you to program in ConciseXML syntax. It is an open, object-oriented language designed to simplify the creation of new Web services. Water is extremely flexible and adheres to a "Learn Once, Use Everywhere" philosophy where data, logic, and presentation have a uniform representation. Water leverages your existing investment in processes, tools and platforms, and lets you incrementally adopt a Web service architecture. A thin-client development environment is freely available and services are easily deployed on a standard industry platform.

You can try out the Steam IDE and the runtime engine from Clear Methods for non-commercial use. Water's available for most platforms including Windows, Linux and Mac. I tried it out and am really impressed by the simplicity it offers.

RSS as Web Service

After reading an article by Timothy Appnel, I am left wondering if RSS can be considered a kind of web service (or is it a web service and I quite didn't knew it). It does follow RESTian approach. If any of you know the answer to this or have some ideas, do let me know?

MSDE 2000

MSDN has a new article on how to get MSDE, install it, and use it as your application's database engine: integrate it with Access or SQL Server, manage it with OSQL, implement security and authentication, and do backups and replication. MSDE 2000 does not provide a human interface like SQL Server does with Enterprise Manager/Query analyzer. Users interact with MSDE 2000 through the application in which it is embedded. This article points to resources on how to interact with MSDE server and how to manage it with OSQL.


There is also a GUI tool at The Code Project website which you can download. The source code is also available. I have tried this tool and it's a pretty decent one and allows you to edit your tables, run queries, execute stored procs etc.

I am thrilled

Some months back, I volunteered to betatest (review) HTML for the World Wide Web with XHTML and CSS: Visual QuickStart Guide, Fifth Edition by Elizabeth Castro. Well, yesterday I received an autographed copy from Liz. And Guess what, my name is among those credited on the Special Thanks page. This is happening for the first time for me and as you can see I am thrilled. Thank you Liz, for this great oppurtunity.

Building Secure ASP.NET Applications: Authentication, Authorization, and Secure Communication

Microsoft have released reference guide that presents a practical, scenario-driven approach to designing and building secure ASP.NET applications for Windows 2000 and version 1.0 of the .NET Framework. Download this guide as a PDF, here. It's a must read for any web developer/web architect developing ASP.NET pages/web services with .Net Framework. So cool !!!

GoogleShare

Steve Johnson has come up with a cool idea, Googleshare.

Search Google for a specific word, and get back the total number of results. Then you search that set for someone's name. Divide the second number by the first, and you get a percentage that shows you how much the person "owns" the word. Call it semantic mindshare. Or lexical penetration. Or whatever.

And guess what, Rael has a Googleshare implementation using Google API to do just that. All you need is your Google API key.

W3C defines Web Services

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has published its first working draft of the Web Services Architecture document and the fourth of Web Services Architecture Requirements. W3C also published the first working draft of the Web Services Glossary. It would be very interesting to see how far the consortium goes with the glossary.

Web Services Architecture Requirements - W3C Working Draft
http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-wsa-reqs-20021114
Web Services Architecture - W3C Working Draft
http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-ws-arch-20021114/
Web Services Glossary - W3C Working Draft
http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-ws-gloss-20021114/

Unleashing the Ideavirus

Finally, I've been able to put up a small review of Seth Godin's book, Unleashing the Ideavirus in the book reviews section. Actually I finished reading this book sometime back and was trying to find time to write this small review, which I got today. This is the first marketing book that I've ever read and Guess what, I liked it. The book is also available online.

W3C recommends XForms

W3C has published the XForms specification as a candidate recommendation. From the W3C Recommendation:

XForms is an XML application that represents the next generation of forms for the Web. By splitting traditional XHTML forms into three parts—XForms model, instance data, and user interface—it separates presentation from content, allows reuse, gives strong typing—reducing the number of round-trips to the server, as well as offering device independence and a reduced need for scripting.
XForms is not a free-standing document type, but is intended to be integrated into other markup languages, such as XHTML or SVG.

Related Articles:
W3C Advances XForms 1.0
Captured in XML

Web Services: Freedom of choice

From the Don Box's interview in the MSDN magazine:

MSDN Magazine: If COM is Love, what are Web Services?
Don Box: XML and Web Services are about freedom—specifically, freedom of choice.

Bill Gates bullish on India

Bill gates seems to be very bullish on India. After pledging $100 million towards AIDS spread/prevention causes through his charity, he now says that Microsoft will invest $400 million in boosting education, business partnerships, localisation efforts and software development in India. This is the largest set of investments ever done by Microsoft outside US. Bill Gates and Microsoft see the oppurtunity that India provides with billions of home still unconnected (and without desktops) and the remaining connected ones with Microsoft OS's and softwares. Linux is still entering the Indian market and I guess some part of this $400 million will be used to compete against it.

Analysts say Microsoft needs India's vast army of software developers to make cheap and reliable software based on its Windows operating systems to meet competition from Linux which is a free, easily modifiable rival.

Microsoft will also be releasing the localized(Hindi) versions of Microsoft XP and Office XP softwares.

Read all about Gates India visit here: Gates in India.

Get content-to-code ratio of your blog [via Kiruba.com]

A cool application, GetContentSize, that calculates the ratio of text content to total page size for a given Web page. To do that it strips all HTML, JavaScript and CSS code and then determines how much of the document is actual text.

Atlast Commenting added

In the past, some of you had complained about lack of Commenting system on our blog. Guess, we were lazy to implement that. Well, here's it atlast. We are using commenting system by Haloscan. So Happy Commenting !!

Why is Pakistan still called a Democracy?

I don't understand, why Pakistan is still being called a Democracy. Economist writes after the Military Dictator, General Musharraf, postponed the opening of the country's new parliament.

IN MOST democratic countries, governments are made and unmade in parliament. Not so in Pakistan. A month after the general election of October 10th returned a hopelessly fractured parliament, there is still no knowing when parliament will actually meet to approve a prime minister.

After the most farcical elections in Pakistan, We are seeing a hung parliament. General Musharraf has distorted the entire constitutional and legal process in the country in such a manner that Pakistan can no longer be called a Democracy. And he is not done yet. With Benazir Bhutto's, Pakistan People's Party and Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal (MMA) party which is an alliance of six islamic parties striking a deal (that's a different story altogether) to keep General backed Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid away from the power, he has gone ahead and delayed the start of the parliament by atleast a week. And even if this state of hung parliament is resolved, one thing is clear, Pakistans new government cannot be formed without the help of MMA, and the real fun starts there. Pakistan needs US backing and financial support and I'm sure US won't like talking to an Islamic-Secular alliance(which talks of expelling US forces from Pakistan) in its fight against Al-Qaeda and terrorism. So what are General's choices? Promise for another Elections in three year's time period, til then enjoy being a dictator. Who cares, The World's still calling Pakistan a DEMOCRACY.

Holy Grail of .Net is out

Essential .NET, Volume I: The Common Language Runtime, authored by Don Box and Chris Sells is out. This is one book you can't miss having in your bookshelf if you are into .Net. Read a sample chapter here. Cool !!!

Calling Bangalore

Good article on R&D boom (and in general software) in Bangalore, India. Bangalore is the capital of Karnataka, a state in Southern India. Also known as the Garden city it boasts of itself as the Silicon Valley of the east and true so with almost all the big software/IT companies presence there.

Few good articles on Web Services

Understanding DIME and WS-Attachments, " This article explores the rationale behind attachments, including the key ideas around packaging and message delineation, and then looks at how DIME and WS-Attachments arose from these ideas"
Web Service Development Kit (Tech Preview), "Detailed walkthrough of the WSDK Tech Preview for WS-Security, WS-Routing, and DIME protocols. Provides sample code repackaged for VS .NET, some extensions of sample code for more realistic scenarios, and tips on how to avoid 'InvalidSecurityToken' faults when working with X.509 Certificates." [via Sam Gentile's Weblog]

Happy Diwali

A very Happy and Prosperous Diwali to all of you. May this festival bring happiness, joy and good health to everyone. Greetings from both of us.

Monica and Deepak

Web services: Look before you leap

A nice article with some good advice but I wonder how many will adhere to it.

Bill Gates India visit

Bill Gates shattered the urban myth that 32 % of Microsoft employees are of Indian-origin. Here's an excerpt of an interview with Bill Gates published in The Times of India:

"TOI: The urban myth is that 32 per cent of Microsoft employees are of Indian-origin, but that seems a stretch.
Bill Gates: Yes, that's too much. But if you took just our engineering departments then it's about 20 per cent.
TOI: That's still huge.
Bill Gates:Yes, that's huge and that's just the engineering department. It's a good-sized community. Hey, they even have a cricket community. But I will say the Indian restaurants in Seattle could be better. But we are working on that."

This is ridiculous

Check this, Company Sues Reuters, Aims To Block Site Visitors From Guessing At URLs. I have done this kind of thing in the past at various websites looking for a number of pages that I thought would have been there because of the way the URL was constructed. Where's hacking in there?

Dave Winer's SOAP definition

Dave wrote in his blog that Doc Searls liked his definition of SOAP, which goes something like:
"It's a simple way to call procedures running on other machines, on other OSes, written in other languages, using different economic systems, without being forced to pay a tax to Microsoft, IBM, Apple, Sun or the W3C."

Well, not everyone liked his definition.

Tutorial on DIME

PerfectXML has a new article on DIME. DIME is a specification which can be used to combine text, image, and video data in XML messages.