What is wrong with Google?

The header certainly got your attention, didn't it? What can be wrong with Google? Almost for a decade now Google has been there for us, searching the internet and finding us what we want. Apart from search, Google has brought us services which are part of our daily lives now, services like Gmail, Orkut, YouTube, Blogger and Google News. I use most of these services and as I said earlier you would hardly ever get any disruptions in these services. So reliable is the Google brand that one of my friends said they dont need any error pages. Except Orkut of course, where we abuse the Orkut server for refusing us donuts!!

But in the past two weeks I feel things are starting to come apart. Firstly, with Google News there have been almost five instances when the service failed its service levels. These were disruptions that I myself experienced being an avid Google News visitor. Then the Gmail spam filter, has started detecting genuine mails as spam. The ironical thing was the mails sent to spam were from ZDnet and I have a filter in place to divert them from the inbox to archive folders under the label ZDnet. But i found my spam folder filled with six such messages today!!

Of course these are just minor errors, but given my nature to speculate and the fact that such disruptions and mistakes have happened in a very short span of time, I thought I write about it.

Just Like That - a PJ??

 An accomplished lawyer of the 60s era was visiting his grandson who was a developer. The lawyer was sitting on the sofa reading a newspaper while his grandson was on his laptop coding something.

Suddenly, the grandson sweared "*#@$&@#&$". Startled his grandfather said, "Son, whatever the matter, you shouldn't use words like those"

"Sorry about that grandpa! It's just that every time I run my program, OS shuts it down saying it has performed an illegal operation"

"Do you think it has performed any illegal operation?", asked the lawyer.

"I don't know. I don't think so!"

"Then ask that OS guy to prove that your program is illegal in court. I will take care of him."

Broken Laptop Screen

I saw from some distance a colleague in office using his laptop keyboard and desktop monitor. Intrigued, I went up to him to see what he was really trying to do. Actually, somehow his laptop screen had broken down, so he had plugged in a desktop monitor to a laptop and was working.

I had never seen a broken screen like that. So I asked him to take a picture of it and send me. Well here they are!! The Broken laptop and the desktop images. Fascinating, wat say you??

Free ASP.NET Hosting!!

I came across a site a month back or so which had free ASP.NET 2.0 hosting for 100 MB. WOW! I thought. I immediately registered to see what exactly were they offering. Upon my registration I was told that i could begin hosting only after 24 hours. I could not understand the reason they had given, something about many users registering and not using the service.

Well, I had completely forgotten about the whole thing. But today I was thinking of starting my own personal website. I knew that asp.net had a lot of sample starter kits with a personal site being one of them. I thought I might just download the starter kit and upload it to the free hosting service I had registered for. So I searched my mail as I had no clue where I had registered. Finally, I logged into the site and chose the appropriate things to get started. But nothing was appearing for the site manager, the place where the web-master can upload files etc. Stumped I noticed a few lines at the bottom which said that i had to contribute 5 answers or post a few genuine articles on asp.net to the community section of the site!!

Now, I appreciate the gesture that the people who have started the service are giving. But Please DO NOT call this FREE hosting. A day has just 24 hours. How a person utilizes his/her time decides how much he/she may earn. Wasting a valuable resource as your time and patience is a cost, though not in terms of dollars, but still it does get you peeved!

The UI for the forum and articles is so obsolete that you dont feel like staying on the site. And with all the Google ads over shadowing the main content of the site, I wonder what the real intentions of the service providers are. In my view, this could be a way to fool people to return to their site, increasing the number of hits and earning them revenue while the user is exasperated and exhausted by the harrowing experience.

I have surrendered and am not going to waste any more time trying for free hosting. This time around the w3schools punch line doesnt hold good - "The best things in life are free" If you have the patience you are free to try it out here.

All the best!!

Do you Flock?

Are you a Web 2.0 Freak? Do you visit Flickr quite often? Can't get enough of facebook? If the answer to the above is yes then you have to try out Flock. What is Flock? Well if you are asking me that then surely you are not aware of the new sleek Web Browser based on Mozilla engine that has caught on with people. It is said to be a social browser.

I do not use facebook that often but just a trial run of the browser and you see that surfing with flock is a totally new experience. But let me not waste your time anymore. Go ahead! Download and try it out yourself! You can find the link on the side.

Or you can download it from here. Enjoy!!

In Theory & In Practise

During my engineering studies, I had to undergo three weeks of Industrial Training. The purpose of this training was to gain insight on how the things that we were studying in college were actually being used in the Industry. The training had different meaning for different people. For some it was an opportunity to go to places they hadn't been to before, like my friends from Mechanical who spent their winter of 2004 in Haridwar visiting the BHEL facility, trying a hand at photography and God knows what. For some it meant to visit a friend's home, a friend who thanks to his/her contacts had arranged the Industrial Training for you. For some, it was a time to laze out at home as usual, getting the  "Successfully Completed Training" certificate from the company without really going even one single day and then overjoyed on getting an "A" for three weeks of partying with friends. For me, it was about getting up early in Winter, catching a bus to visit facilities 40-50 miles from my home; braving the cold, the dust of coal and then the response of the clerk at the facility to somehow learn how the electrical equipments I had studied about were being applied in the Coal Mining Industry. I managed a "B" for the 1 credit that the training carried even though the lecturer who took my viva was convinced that I had actually been to those facilities and seen things in the report that I had written . (FYI: Many reports submitted were merely ones that people got from the companies imparting the training)

Anyway, for me the training was a learning experience. I realized that theoretical knowledge has to be supplemented by practical knowledge and vice versa. While the foreman who was telling me knew a hell lot about the the faults that occur and what they do to repair, he was unable to answer some questions. Reading my book back home I found out the answer to some of the questions I had. I realized that being an engineer you need both practical as well as theoretical knowledge.

 I also learnt that getting things done is more about managing people than anything else.  But the reason why I have talked about the training is to emphasize on theoretical as well as practical learning.

Now as the first phase of the web app I was building is nearing to a close, I was reminiscing on what have I learnt so far. I have gained confidence in understanding requirements and some level of confidence on how to code to get those requirements done. But most of my coding has involved Googling a particular problem and finding out a solution or trying out a few things. But after building a complete Web App I am still not confident of how much I know about Web Development using ASP.NET. Just the other day I was going through a ASP.NET book and realized that I have managed to learn how to do things. But not what was going on behind the scenes. I was just like the foreman knowing what to do, not knowing why we are doing it.

This approach will never allow me grow and be competitive. So I decided to refresh the concepts from the books once again. If you are not reading to understand the underlying concepts, change your approach or stagnate!!

Working on a Sunday - Why??

Normally, I spend my Sundays reading The Sunday Times or sleeping or cooking ( that is a recent addition). But today I am in the office!! What the hell am I doing here? Well, I have been thinking for sometime to spend some extra time on the Web Application I am working on add some spice to it. Something which will earn me some bonus points. I have been thinking of this for the past 3-4 weeks now, but none of the weekends saw me coming to office. After a tiring 5 day week, there has to be some real motivation for you to get up and get going.
That motivation was not there the past few weeks.

So what has motivated  me this weekend to get me up and running? Many might say that with the end of the year performance review going on, I want to score some bonus points. After all, most of us have very short memory. I would not say that the review is not in my mind. It is, indeed. But had that been such a motivating factor, I would have done quite a lot by now to really make a hot delicious curry out of my Web App. Alas! That is not the case.

There is another motivating factor, a force so strong that has pulled me out of my sleep and brought me to my office driving 14 kms in the sun. What is this force? Well, it is ASP.NET AJAX!!

On Friday, I AJAX enabled my web app and went through the sample website that is present along with the AJAX Toolkit. WoW! The things that AJAX can do. You see them everyday in new Web 2.0 sites and wonder how was this achieved. With ASP.NET AJAX, I got a glimpse of how I can achieve such functionality. So, on Friday I decided that I would definitely be spending some time this weekend to see how I can apply the spices of ASP.NET AJAX and make my web app curry that extra spicy and delicious.

So here I am at the office. While the demo videos I downloaded and saw seem to be very simple, I have been unable to use any Controls from the toolkit till now. They just dont seem to be working. Only the Update panel and Script Manager have been functioning perfectly, but none of the controls from the toolkit.

Whatever the case may be, ASP.NET AJAX is definitely the way forward. So expect a few posts on that in the coming weeks.

And yeah, Blogger on the Move really Rocks!!

Cheers!!