.NET From India

A couple of photos from the Dec 2011 Lunar Eclipse

Technorati Tags: Lunar Eclipse,Dec 9 2011,India,Photos

Just got around to moving some of the photos from the Dec 9th Lunar eclipse that was visible from India. Just a couple of photos from that here.

 

 

Enjoy…

 

Related articles

• Year's last total lunar eclipse left enthusiasts spellbound - NDTV (ndtv.com)

Global Internet Speed and Cost

I came across this picture and a related article on the average broadband speed and cost per mbps around the world.

Compared to Japan an Korea, rest of the world seems far behind. This does not mention India and China, two of the most populous nations. AFAIK, 20 Mbps is the max speed currently available for a home connection in India and the average speed would be around 256 Kbps?

And cost wise I am not sure where India fits in though….

(Soure: Compare Your Internet Cost and Speed to Global Averages [Infographic])

IE9 Tracking Protection and Tracking Lists

Obviously one of the most talked about option of the new IE9 RC is about the new feature called Tracking Protection. This allows you to control what kind of tracking options you will accept and also as a by product can help you stop all those distracting Ads from showing up. Do note, this is turned off by default and you need to turn it on and also subscribe to lists that contains sites to be blocked.

As soon as I installed the RC, I set this up and then went ahead and subscribed to all the recommended lists. I figured more the lists, better my chance of catching an Ad site.

But according to this article (Privacy protection and IE9: who can you trust?), the lists can contain both allow and disallow rules and allow rules win when there is a contention. So basically, it now becomes important that you choose the right lists or you are going to pretty much be without any tracking protection. Based on the article, the current list rate as follows (as of Feb 12th list):

Publisher	Block	Allow
EasyList	2,189	47
PrivacyChoice	463	1
Abine	94	0
TRUSTe	0	3,958

 

So going anywhere near TRUSTe, basically negates tracking protection as of now.

And PrivacyChoice does not actually allow any site, it just has a sample whitelist entry and that seems to have been counted as a false positive.

Certification – uCertify Preparation Kit Review

Certifications have been an area of interest for me for quite some time. I see certifications as showing a persons expertise in a certain area. There was a time a few years ago when Microsoft certifications were so easy that I almost stopped considering it. I have heard from people that it is better now and that newer certifications does focus on testing knowledge. (Given the prevalence of braindumps, I still am not 100% sure about that yet)

But given personal experience I would say if you take time out from a hectic life to go an take an certification, it at least shows some kind of initiative to learn from your side..

I was offered a license to review a certification product called uCertify recently. It is basically a preparation kit. It is not really a kit that will take you from no knowledge to certification. It is more of a tool that will help you get prepared for the exam if you already have knowledge of/experience in  the specified area.

So it basically provides you with study tips and simulated exams that will help your confidence and also refresh topics. Also if you find that you score poorly in certain topics, those may be areas you need to brush up on.

The kit also has a few articles, but I did not find then exhaustive of too helpful. So I would recommend, you study up for the exam and use the tool to check out your preparedness for the exam, before you actually get to the exam. (the kit I got for review had 4 prebuilt exams with around 230+ questions and study tips)

The UI is quite clean and usable, but I did get a few crashes when it automatically updates the engine or the exam kit. Also I have not seem updates for quite sometime now and so am not sure how regular these are.

 

Bottom Line: This is a good tool to test your preparedness for the exam and not something that will teach you for the exam.

Moving Applications to Azure

I was reading this post about how they are moving TFS to Azure to provide a cloud based version of TFS.

I find this very interesting as it provides you with a view of what kinds of problems you may face if you are moving an existing application on to the cloud (esp. Azure)

Some issues like security can have a major impact on your application design, while others like SELECT INTO support may also drain a lot of effort to fix.

And the final big thing that may weigh on your overall effort is testing. Because, now all your previous test results are out of the window and you will have to do a complete regression to make sure that everything works find.

Synchronizing IE Favorites

If you use multiple computers like me then one of the things you want to do is synchronize certain files and also IE Favorites. Previously I used to use the Live Mesh Beta software to share a directory under the IE’s Favorites directory that I synch with a similar directory on all of my computers.

Now the updated Live Mesh make it even simpler. You now get a option to turn on/off IE favorites synching.

This article has more details on all the other features in the new Live Mesh.

IE 9 – A few hidden UI features

If you are playing around with IE 9 Beta, you may have noticed the multiple UI changes that have been made. Most of these are good, but some may leave you unable to figure out something that you are used to.

A couple of features that I usually use that have changed..

1.Back and Forward History

This  is the history that you get for the back and forward buttons. You accessed this by clicking the small dropdown arrows available next to the buttons in IE8.

IE 8	IE 9

But there are no arrows next to the back and forward buttons in IE9. So how do you get to the navigation history. There are no visual indications available and since it is still in beta, documentation is sketchy. So with a little bit of clicking around, I found that you can get the history if you right click the navigation buttons instead of left click.

Now you get the familiar dropdown of the navigation history.

I use this feature a lot as I jump back and forth between pages when searching for stuff and so this becomes very important.

Not very easy to find, but the feature is still there..

 

2. Closing a non-current tab

You have multiple tabs open and you want to close a tab, but you don't want to switch focus to it.

In the above screenshot, I am currently in Tab 3 (in focus tab), but have my mouse hovering over Tab 2. In IE8 a small cross will appear at the corner of Tab 2 (like the closes button in the right of Tab 3), which you can click to close the tab. The advantage there is that you don't have to switch tabs to close them. In IE9, the close button appears only on the current tab (i.e. tab you are viewing) and to close the non-focus tab you will have to switch to it, for the close button to appear. I had written a feedback around this to MS and got a response saying that clicking the middle mouse button will close a non-focus tab (on my laptop touchpad, I can click left and right button together to do the same).

Again a feature that is not easy to find, but very useful if you know it. Here is a video of this feature at work

(Recommend watching in full screen at 1080p)

Run an App off the web

Came across this interesting site/technology called Spoon

 

It is something like Microsoft Softgrid, but out of the web. Basically you install the plugin and then you can go to the site and launch the app. They have a nice collection of free, open source apps there.

The apps basically run right out of the site, but are actually executing locally (I checked task manager and I can see the .exe showing there). But these are running in a sandbox, but can save to the local file system too.

Interesting, but the applications currently are still limited. Also as of now this seems to be free(though there is no info on that in the site anywhere), and they seem to be making money from businesses that want to have this technology run internally and from selling developer tools that allow you to package your application for this kind of virtualization.

Controlled update of MSE Virus Definitions

I have been using Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) from when it was in Beta. I really like it as it is very quite and most does catch any virus that try to creep in via USB sticks or from PDF files (which the ones I mostly come across)

The only sticky point is that the Virus Definition Updates happen automatically via Windows Updates. Since my laptop is online only at certain periods of the day, I saw that my virus updates were delayed for multiple days.

So I decided to schedule a manual update of the definition files during a specifc time of the day when I would most probably be online at home (I set it up to run at around 8am everyday, at which time my laptop is most probably on and online as I do my morning email checks)

The command to do the virus update is simple:

"%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Security Essentials\MpCmdRun.exe" -SignatureUpdate

The way to automate this is to use the Scheduled Tasks (at command) inbuilt into Windows.

1. Launch Schedule Tasks from the start menu

2. I recommend that you create a folder and put all of your tasks inside that so that it is easier to track

3. Create a new Task and in the Actions, Create an new Action to run a program

4. Now use the Commandline

 

"%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Security Essentials\MpCmdRun.exe"

 

5. Set the Arguments to

 

 -SignatureUpdate

 

6. Now setup a new trigger to run it whenever you want the updates to run

Thats it.

Sit Back and enjoy your virus definition Updates.. :)

Software Maintanence Cost - Is Oracle going to be hit the same way as SAP?

A couple of interesting articles in ZDNet on how the overall cost of maintanence for Oracle software and the bad economy may together force customers to bell the cat...

Software buyers must preserve 3PM rights

How Oracle gets customers to keep paying