Thursday, November 30, 2006

IIS Diagnostics Tools

IIS Diagnostics Tools

Preparing for a GoLive on a Windows Enviroment? It would be pretty sure that you would be encountering thousands of butterflies in preparing the webservers for robustness, scalability, security, resilence and fault-tolerance.

I have come across a suite of tools that aide a Microsoft Web Administrators to help diagnose and troubleshoot issues with IIS. I would like a share information about a few of them for readers quick reference:


Auth Diag

Troubleshoots IIS Authentication issues. Download it.

SSLDiag

Simulates and troubleshoots SSL configurations on the webserver. Download it.

SMTPDiag

Troubleshoots Microsoft Exchange related issues. Download it.

LogParser

A Versatile Log Parser for IIS Logfiles. Download it.


Web-Based Password Strength Test Meter

Web-Based Password Strength Test Meter

An online product or an application that is personalized for a particular user is secure as long as the user that is consuming its services take enough care to secure thier password. The password is currently the one and only key that acts as a safeguard for the account. For a website administrator, chosing a password that is weak might open up plethora of security holes for the website leading to vandalism and sabotage of its contents.

We now have a lot of web-based applications from our big brothers who use friendly AJAX to decide and tell you whether the password that you are using are relatively safe and secure are not. I would suggest a few of the webservices for your quick reference.

  1. Microsoft Password Checker
  2. SecurityStats Password Strength Test
  3. Google New Account Page
  4. Keepass Desktop Password Safe

Stamp out Spam on Blogs

Stamp out Spam on Blogs

Are you developing a weblog and tired of spam comments ravaging through your weblog posts all along? Just came across this Antispam Webservice from Automattic called Akismet. It is a very friendly webservice that can be implemented across our blog applications and stamps out every elusive SPAM in every form.

They have friendly free API for non-profile weblogs and also commercial license for enterprise weblog applications. Check it out today.

Neat Upload

Neat Upload

Looking out for an elegant upload solution like erstwhile ISAPI filter in C# and .NET .Look no further. Just found a very nice open source component called 'Neat Upload'. You can have the component downloaded along with a comprehensive documentation from http://www.brettle.com/neatupload

The website also enlists the bug reports and feature requests in a most lucid and elegant fashion.

A few more heavy weight upload solutions in ASP.NET:

  1. SoftArtisans FileUpload -- Commercial Component.

Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Focus Stealing in Desktop Applications

Focus Stealing in Desktop Applications

Windows is rich and cool in every new aspect. With every new version, it has a good new feature. My preferred version currently is Windows Server 2003, with rich IIS robustness and support. As far as the desktop nature is concerned, the only thing that I feel bad is that when you login to Windows, you are presented with a spurt of 'Startup Applications'. Typically every application that you install during the lifetime of Windows Installation on your hardware is actively vying for its share of startup. The same also applies to a Page_OnLoad in a WebPage.

Even as of typing this weblog, my other window running Dictionary.com keeps running different popups and popunders and they keep dancing across the browser, distracting you from the force of typing the weblog. I am trying to investigate the option of having an application that controls other applications from running amuck in thier behavior.

And interestingly, this post closely forwards its predecessor, "Scripting Hell in WebPages and Optimal solutions".

Focus Stealing in Desktop Applications

Focus Stealing in Desktop Applications

Windows is rich and cool in every new aspect. With every new version, it has a good new feature. My preferred version currently is Windows Server 2003, with rich IIS robustness and support. As far as the desktop nature is concerned, the only thing that I feel bad is that when you login to Windows, you are presented with a spurt of 'Startup Applications'. Typically every application that you install during the lifetime of Windows Installation on your hardware is actively vying for its share of startup. The same also applies to a Page_OnLoad in a WebPage.

Even as of typing this weblog, my other window running Dictionary.com keeps running different popups and popunders and they keep dancing across the browser, distracting you from the force of typing the weblog. I am trying to investigate the option of having an application that controls other applications from running amuck in thier behavior.

And interestingly, this post closely forwards its predecessor, "Scripting Hell in WebPages and Optimal solutions".

Quick ScratchPad

Quick ScratchPad

How many times while searching the Internet, you have found some information, noted down somewhere, somewhere and then searching it all along sometime later. It just indicates how we just carefully 'jot' down the points. There are some quick desktop solutions that come to our rescue including one from Google Labs. It is called Google Notebook.

But I personally feel that the following two are more easy for me.
  1. Yahoo Notepad
  2. Inbox Notes

So, no more searching of information. You can safely have them all in a single place and get your information whenever you want at the right time.

Monitoring Website for Uptime

Monitoring Website for Uptime

When we develop a website for our organization, we showcase it and present it to the audience as a 24x7 staff. It keeps telling about our organization across the world and continuously round the clock without any stop. Our routine offices have closures in our night time but websites do not unless there is a scheduled maintenance.
Even these downtimes are very significant in case where our website has real mission critical business to do. Under these circumstances, we can have mirroring of the website in geographically different locations and as well monitoring of the website from different places and alert us.
I came across a few monitoring websites and a couple of products that help us in our monitoring mission, which I would like to share with the readers. While I was in my previous organization, working as a module lead for a typical onsite-offshore project, I learnt about a few hosted web applications that help us in monitoring and alerting us.
  1. InternetSeer
  2. BigBrother (They also have an opensource version, which you can compile and install in your own system).
  3. Netcraft WebServer Survey.

Quick ScratchPad

Quick ScratchPad

How many times while searching the Internet, you have found some information, noted down somewhere, somewhere and then searching it all along sometime later. It just indicates how we just carefully 'jot' down the points. There are some quick desktop solutions that come to our rescue including one from Google Labs. It is called Google Notebook.

But I personally feel that the following two are more easy for me.

  1. Yahoo Notepad
  2. Inbox Notes

So, no more searching of information. You can safely have them all in a single place and get your information whenever you want at the right time.

 

PhotoSynth Technology Preview

PhotoSynth Technology Preview

Check out the latest from Microsoft Windows Live Labs -- Photosynth Technology Preview. The basic and the very interesting thing is that it just seems to use simple images and try to create a three dimensional model effect as the description goes.

It needs an ActiveX Control which gets installed the first time you visit the website to proceed. And hence the basic web browser that it can run is 'Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0' and/or higher on Windows.

Detecting Memory Leak in Internet Explorer

Detecting Memory Leak in Internet Explorer

While performance tuning and analyzing my JavaScript, I came across an elegant way in which Patrick shows how to diagnose memory effect problem in IE. Typically, he shows a Screencast on his website which indicates a StairCase Effect of a memory leak problem. Check out this StairCase Effect.


In the flash, you can see a program called "Process Explorer". You can download this from SysInternals website. There is also one more program called 'Task Manager Extension', which is available in CodeProject.

Monday, November 27, 2006

Hosted Wiki

Hosted Wiki

Wiki Pages are getting popular nowdays. A WIKI claims a unique place of pride and love among the web users in that they can share the ideas on the website by editing and/or adding a content to the website without even registering them. Wiki applications have a rudimentary source control that helps and good logging-cum-audit trails to preserve the data and content integrity and to safeguard itself from vandalism and sabotage.

I came across a website called PbWiki.com, which supports creating of FREE Wiki applications for ourselves. This weblog is now supported and complimented of its technology efforts by http://lavanyadeepak.pbwiki.com/

More to come... (Stay Tuned!)

Presentation Skills Improvement

Presentation Skills Improvement

Strong and elegant communication skills is very inevitable at least in IT field. SeminarsAcademy from Mumbai is organizing a two day communication skills seminar in  Mumbai towards this. Since I am subscribed to thier news bulletins and weekly newsletters, I have got the following information, which I would like to share with other interested readers.


Presentation Skills

Dates: 4th and 5th December, 2006
Time: 0930 hours to 1700 hours Indian Time.
Venue: Hotel Ramada Plaza Palm Grove, Juhu, Mumbai
Event Managers: Seminars Academy. (Can be contacted at seminarsacademy (at) vsnl.net)
Fee per participant: INR 8000 [Statutory Service Tax of 12.2% additional]. The total fee comes to INR 8980.

The fee covers course material, breakfast, lunch, snacks (tea/cofee) on both days. The programme is non-residential. Outstation candidates need to make arrangements for the accomodation themselves.

Course Content

Written

" Proposals
" Memos
" Minutes
" Reports
" Press Releases

Spoken

" Speeches
" Briefing

Audio Visual

" Power Point Presentations
" Film

Corporate

" Meetings
" Business Presentations
" Interviews 


Trainer's Profile

Mr Hansel D'Souza

Mr Hansel D'Souza has been involved in all aspects of business and communications since the last two decades. He has been a visiting professor at most of the leading management institutes in the Mumbai.

Hansel D'Souza holds a First Class Master's Degree in Management from the Bombay University through the Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies, besides being a Gold Medalist in Mass Communications. He conducts training programs and management development workshops internationally.

He is currently, also a Consultant to the USSEC (United States Soybean Export Council).


ENROLLMENT

Please send your nominations on your letter head along with the prescribed fee by cheque / DD (for companies outside Mumbai) payable to the Indian Academy of Management and mail it to :

Indian Academy of Management
331, Kaliandas Udyog Bhavan,
Century Bazar Lane,
Worli,
Mumbai - 400 025.
Maharastra. INDIA.

Phone No. +912265886060, +912230403400
Fax: +912224222162
to reach us at least seven days before the seminar.

WebScape -- BBC World's Choice of Best Websites Every Week

WebScape -- BBC World's Choice of Best Websites Every Week

Yesterday, I had an opportunity to watch BBC World and a nice programme called WebScape. This brings to the viewers' attention very informative websites that thier panel visits and shortlists.  This seems to be a weekly programme. BBC World also has a webpage associated with this program in thier website. Check out WebScape page. They also have dedicated a page where you get tips in surfing safely and securely.

Related Programmes:

The Tamil Channel (Sun News) also does telecasts every Sunday programme called IT.COM which showcases the best websites that the panelists select. They also interview experts in IT field and present the interview too.

Exto Solutions Looking out for Web Developers

Exto Solutions Looking out for Web Developers

I was reading through the weekly update email from TambaramOnline from the premiere directory operators, ExtoSolutions.com based from Tambaram, the gateway of Chennai. The weekly update carries top notch opportunities for web developers proficient in cutting edge .NET technologies.

They are looking out for Web Developers proficient in C#, ASP.NET, SQLServer with at least a minimum experience of 1 year. They have a rigourour background verifications and hence in case you are attempting to present fake experiences, please refrain from applying.

Though they are young startups with less than two year old, they have diversified in multiple directory services like TambaramOnline, Chronicle Chennai and similar websites.

Apply to support (at) tambaramonline.com

WinPatrol -- Effective Security Guard for your Windows

WinPatrol -- Effective Security Guard for your Windows

Are you tired of thousands of unknown viruses, trojans, spyware attacking your system. Recently one of a computer assembler in my region (Camp Road) showed me a freeware called WinPatrol. The icon is small 'WatchDog' that sits near the system tray. It effectively monitors whatever programs that adds itself to System Startup, modifies key registry entries etc.

A search revealed the website of WinPatrol to be http://www.winpatrol.com/

I think this should be a sure application these days when everyone has a broadband with dangers lurking around everywhere.

A Quick Tool To Peek at the View State

A Quick Tool To Peek at the View State

The most coveted and valuable feature in ASP.NET is the automatic page state persistence across roundtrips to the same page (what we call as postbacks). This is achieved by storing the required data as encoded base 64 string in the hidden field called __VIEWSTATE. ViewState, technically is a StateBag implementation.

At times we might need to inspect what is stored at that point of time in this Page StateBag (ViewState). The following tools come as quick and effective remedies for us.

  1. ViewState Decoder from PluralSight
  2. Check out the appropriate version since the website has separate decoders for 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0 frameworks.

Single Window MultiTab Browsing

Single Window MultiTab Browsing

I feel that it is really very much intimidating to see a clutter of Internet Explorer task bar icons in the TaskBar. Even if "Group Similar Icons" is selected, when we select the Icon Group, the really loooong list of URLs makes one feel very uncomfortable.  I feel comfortable in having a web browser that provides intuitive tabs within the application realm itself rather than depending upon external windows. In this way, I personally like Mozilla FireFox for its Tabbed Browsing. I think I missed out this feature in my earlier post. You can include this too.

Perhaps there are more tab-powered browsers coming along the way. Just wanted to share a simple list for web browser's convenience.

  1. Avant
  2. Maxthon (Loaded with a lot of goodies like RoboHelp plugin etc)
  3. Internet Explorer 7
So say 'Good Bye' to clutter in the desktop and get dipped in the voyage on the Internet Highway with an elegant superfast tabbed browsers.

Interesting and Useful Features in FireFox

Interesting and Useful Features in FireFox

I am starting to develop a crazy love for Mozilla Firefox. There are many reasons. First and foremost, it streamlines the HTML that we develop, thanks to its inheritance from Netscape. A few of the good things I would like to share are:


  1. I personally feel that FireFox brings the best speed of browsing from Internet Explorer along with the strict XHTML compliance of Netscape.

  2. Furthermore, its isolated mode of install of not getting mixed up with OS so that even non-administrators can install FireFox. The installer does warn that installation might not be complete if the logged on user does not have administrative rights. But a careful folder selection passes through.

  3. The very useful web development aide tools that I like in FireFox are:


    1. JavaScript Console

    2. DOM Inspector

    3. Page Info

    4. I have'nt tried the FireFox 2.0 yet and hence I am refraining from commenting on those features.

  4. And today while accidentally clicking a MMS link, it did give me an interesting warning, which elevated my love to FireFox. Had this been the other Internet Explorer, it would have launched Windows Media Player and my bandwidth constrained ADSL modem should be worrying unnecessarily downloading the scrap whose link I created by mistake in half-asleep mode.

  5. And adding feather to its crown is that 'Launch Application' button is disabled for a couple of seconds so that the user concenterates on what is displayed rather than just clicking the button.

Saturday, November 25, 2006

Web Page Optimization

Web Page Optimization

Even though broadband is getting a quick hype with marketing promos by every individual ISP in each and every country, nevertheless, having a webpage that provides instant response is always a welcome step. Previously, we had the eight second step. Now the users expect the pages to just land in thier desktop at the wink of thier eye.

To start with we would discuss about loading heavy images. A picture is worth thousand words but if we have a thousand MB picture which is going to take three hours to download, the web surfer is going to prefer File -> Close of the web browser and then launch a fresh browser session for your competitor website.

There are a few simple tricks that we can use to make images fast loading to provide a seamless user experience.

  1. Use Interlaced GIF compared to normal images. This way, the user gets a chance to preview the image as it downloads rather than waiting for the entire image to download.
  2. In case of heavy images, you can opt for having the images splitted and load the split images.
  3. For visual image toggling like 'ON' and 'OFF', you can have the alternative images cached on window.onLoad and hence the page delay at the time when the image is required would be avoided.
  4. Always specify WIDTH and HEIGHT for the images so that the web browser knows how much space has to be allocated on the webpage for the images. This avoids jump or flickers in the webpage.
  5. Always specify ALT tags. This way, in case the image is  broken, the user would know of the purpose of the image. Also image challenged text browsers like Lynx and users who have opted to disable images would get benefitted by knowing the purpose of the images.
  6. A Few Free Tools:
    1. It is not difficult to edit and fine tune the image. You can have simpler tools like Irfanview to edit the images and export them to a variety of formats and the publish them to your webpage.
    2. For splitting too, there is an online webservice from  Chami.com which you can make use of. Check out Online Image Splitter from Chami.com.

Friday, November 24, 2006

Elegant UML IDEs

Elegant UML IDEs

An elegant UML diagram presents a breeze of experience for developers in creating complex software design patterns, architectures in a more comprehendable way. There are a lot of tools that help us in this perspective. The best editor that strikes our mind in this is Microsoft Visio. But for casual developers who are pricked by the price of the same there are some free IDEs available to learn UML.

A few of them are:

  1. ProxyDesigner from ProxySource [This has been really valuable tool. Unfortunately, ProxySource website is no longer available and a website hijacker seemed to have taken the domain. I have a version of ProxyDesigner with me. A search revealed an older version hosted with WinSite. Thank you, Winsite. Here is the link of the same.]
  2. Dia Editor (hosted at SourceForge)
A few more like MetaMill are available in Shareware flavor. If we are intending to purchase it after the desired period, I think these can be used.  For those interested, I would also like to share the UML QuickReference Card over here.

Resilent websites with Resilent Logging Infrastructure

Resilent websites with Resilent Logging Infrastructure

Recently, I had an opportunity to review a small website operated by a reseller of his clients. He had some technical issues and wanted some assistance. He was also developing small-sized websites for regional clients like local chain of supermarkets, stores, pharmacies, mid-sized business houses in Chennai.

One of the most shocking thing that I learnt from them is that they just depend on IIS Logging and do not have a logging infrastructure. They just feel that it is a overkill and their application simply do not need the same. It is really a sad truth and I had to convince him the necessity of judicious logging for more than an hour and I could substantiate that the troubleshooting effort we had been taking along could have been expedited had they implemented logging from thier application. This would have also reduced the amount of downtime that we took the website too.

There are plenty of free logging frameworks available too. A few of them are log4j (for Java), log4net (for .NET) that has configurable channels to which information could be logged like Smtp, File, Database etc and also in different levels like DEBUG, INFO etc. And coming to the point of parsing a logfile, there are a lot of good powerful log parsers too. A few of them are:

  1. IIS Logs Lite Version 2.0
  2. Microsoft LogParser 2.0
Also ensure that I have used the term 'judicious logging'. Logging too much means the application is slowed down. There should be a balance in the information that is being logged, how long the logged information is maintained, how is the information parsed and when are the information expunged.

Empowering Community Contributions

Empowering Community Contributions

Community contributions has always been encouraged and supported throughout. It provides for healthy development of ideas and innovations. Diversified ideas and feedback from various parts of the world improve the architecture of the application and if applied after a careful feasibility study and analysis would make the application more resilent and robust.

Towards these, to support and aid for community contributions, I came across a website called Community Credit.com, which encourages community contributors by giving them lucrative prizes and displaying thier names on the website. The website also offers webservices for other forums and messageboards so that the contributors there are directly benefitted. It also acts as a great plus for the host website too.

Check out Community Credit website today.

Catching Musical Relaxation in Dos Prompt

Catching Musical Relaxation in Dos Prompt

A few days back we were discussing about download avaiability of valuable MSDOS Utilities. Not just for system administrators but even for casual users, I would say, they are inevitable tool in thier workman's chest. Today I was relatively free and just was surfing through the weblogs and websites. Just fondly recalled about QBasic and its ability to even play musical notes by simple strings. For anyone to start off in IT field, I think QBasic would provide a firm quickstart.

We would here discuss four important and interesting features of QBasic.exe (You can download QBasic from the URL above).

  1. Beep
  2. Sound
  3. Play
  4. Games
Beep: As the name indicates, BEEP just produces a simple beep sound from your computer's default speaker.

Sound:Sound is a more extensible and configurable BEEP. It instructs your computer's speaker on the intensity of the BEEP sound and its duration.

Play: Play command is very versatile. It allows you to configure and play complex musical notes from your MSDOS application. ABCDEFG stand for the SA RE GA MA PA DHA NEE and you can increase or decrease the OCTAVE by > and < than symbols. Also you can adjust the tempo too.

Games: You can check out some of the games with QBasic from the following URL. Though a very simple command prompt language, I would say QBasic is very rich and complex programming for standalone PCs could be created.


Peer Performance Appraisal

Peer Performance Appraisal

Periodic assessment one's own progress and introspection forms the most important phase in development of one's own self. Enterprises normally have something called 'Appraisals' in which individuals submit whatever they have accomplished for the quarter and managers review the same.

Even for normal individual use and milestones, appraisals (be it self or peer) forms a very significant part in self-development. I came across this 'Peer Performance Appraisal' from a website called Dotnetspider.com.

I am sure that this would be very useful for everyone and wanted to share the link with the readers.

Inbox.com Launches Antispyware

Inbox.com Launches Antispyware

Sometime back, I was lucky enough to write a small testimonial on (free) web-based organizer-suite of applications like Norada and Junglemate. For those interested, here is the permalink of the post.

It was about Monday night half past nine, when my friend in Camp Road called me. He was at another friends house and they were facing a piquant situation that a unique spyware was harassing his system. He had almost tried every antispyware and other kind of tool but to no avail. I did suggest him over the telephone a few registry tweaks. They did work to an extent but neither it was a complete cure.

Then I just thought of seeing the link of Inbox.com Spyware Terminator. As we have already discussed, Inbox.com is best known for rich UI and also quickest and reliable customer support. He immediately downloaded the same and it was the more fast remedy that our operator of detecting and eliminating all the spyware and trojan horses in the system succeeded in no time. He in fact thanked me for suggesting but I humbly told that the credit goes to Inbox.com and I have duly forwarded a thanks note to Inbox.com.

I wanted to share this URL with other readers too.

Building Lexical Resilence In the Web Applications

Building Lexical Resilence In the Web Applications

The power of a Word processor lies in the rich lexicographical companionship that it lends to the user. With a seamless experience of web platform complimenting desktop experience and sprawling Web 2.0 applications, the demand of a comprehensive desktop on the Web is ever increasing.

Sometime last week, I was looking out for a spell checking stuff. A search in Google revealed using Microsoft Word.  We would now analyse step-by-step in each of the possible solution and problems surrounding the same.

  1. Cross Browser Compatibility: Since Microsoft Word requires ActiveX Controls and browsers other than Microsoft Internet Explorer on Windows can not recognize them.
  2. Serverside Automation: The next solution we can try is to automate Microsoft Word on the serverside and use AJAX to communicate between the server and the web browser. Again there are the following issues surrounding the same.
    1. Office Web Components License
    2. Considerations for server-side Automation of Office
  3. Trying out StarOffice, we almost invite the same issues.
After a few search, I came across LiteSpellChecker, powered by AJAX and ASpell dictionary. If you have PHP as serverside language, you still have more rapid development with pspell API. Check out LiteSpellChecker examples. It has all cool features like:

  1. Open Source
  2. Comprehensive Examples in Perl, PHP and C++
  3. AJAX
  4. Suggestion Dictionary
  5. Richer DHTML Interface

A Gentle Touch ...

A Gentle Touch ...

Long time my (this) weblog on technical gossips was updated. Being relatively free today, I was trying to update it with a few more brighter and consistent template to my other weblog. The Rounders 3 blogger template seemed to be good. Blogrolling broke down and hence I had to repair the same. I have reimported all the earlier links from a backup text file. The blogroling restoration affects all the weblog since it is an external webservice.

I am trying to verify whether all links are intact. Should you find anything missing, let me know so that I can include the same. So what do you feel regarding the new template?  Let me know.

Friday, November 10, 2006

Quick Online Conversion Tools

Quick Online Conversion Tools

Are you stuck with a Microsoft Word document and need to convert immediately to StarOffice version but do not have the necessary software installed?

Are you stuck with a HTML file whose PDF version is immediately required?

Recently I came across two websites that cater to this quick conversions online without the need of downloading any software and hence thus incurring the risk of virus infections etc. Check these out at:

  1. Media Convert
  2. ZamZar

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Microsoft .NET 3.0

Microsoft .NET 3.0

Find the download of Microsoft .NET 3.0 from Microsoft Download Center over here. Also check out this page for the heirarchy chart and various associated downloads. Just last week, I got a copy of Windows Vista. I was terribly busy last week and hence had to figure out by installing this weekend.

I would keep posted over the discoveries, inventions, tips and snippets shortly. The quickest source of your essential information would be NetFx 3 website.

Monday, November 06, 2006

Scripting Hell in WebPages and Optimal Solution

Scripting Hell in WebPages and Optimal Solution

One pathetic thing I observed in most of the current webpages particularly login websites is the TextBox focus on pageLoad. But the most pathetic thing is an incomplete implementation of just focussing on the textbox regardless of wherever the user is and whatever the user is doing.

Drawback of the current solution: A regular user would be typing his username and started typing password even before the page completes loading. This 'Focus' script starts only on Body Load completes. Now when he is typing the password, the focus shifts and password appears along with the username.

Solution: Have a KeyUp handler and stop onFocus from bieng called if any username type has already begun.

[Imported from Blogdrive]Online Virus Scanners

Online Virus Scanners Virus Scanners are no longer difficult to install, tedious to configure. There are easy to use Online Virus Scanne...