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.

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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 

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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).

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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.
   
   

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Rich Internet Applications

Rich Internet Applications

Internet applications are getting richer by the day. Gone are the days of having simple HTML and Text markup. Now everything is dynamic and AJAX is the buzzword of the day. Getting along with AJAX is not at all difficult. Your favorite search engine should bring you tons of information on AJAX  and AJAX primers to help you along the learning path.

Also there are websites like Rich Net Apps which can you visit from http://www.richnetapps.com/,
which provide free tools along with source code to make your website feel richer. Check it out today.

Recovering Email Attachments from WinMail.Dat

Recovering Email Attachments from WinMail.Dat

Microsoft Outlook is by far the best and most rich email client on the planet. But there are other email clients also. The problem actually comes when you send an email with attachments to your friends and people and if the message is comprehendible by the email client used by them and if you have sent the email using Microsoft Outlook, they end up getting a simple attachment like winmail.dat.

What happens behind the scenes?

When you receive a message from a user with Microsoft Outlook who has sent you a message in Microsoft Outlook RTF format, you will receive the normal message text along with an attached file named 'winmail.dat'. Strictly speaking it's not a Word rich text file and you can't use Word to read it. The winmail.dat file contains a formatted version of the message (which this program ignores) and any attached files.

But there is some light at the end of tunnel. After searching a while, I came across a small tool called WMDecode, which recovers the email attachments from WinMail.dat and saves them for you individually. Check out WMDecode from this URL. However, the catch is that the software is released as a time-limited download and each time it expires it has to be redownloaded. However there is a non-expiring version which is also available on the website for $10.

An unique Career development post...

An unique Career development post...

Be it a fresher or an experienced professional looking out for a change, it is always the first and foremost to have a preliminary discussion (aka) interview with some of the representatives of the organization.

The success of the discussion remains in the fact how effectively we are able to convince our greatness. Check out this lucid post by Bhuvana Sundaramoorthy over here.

ASP.NET Learner Videos

ASP.NET Learner Videos

Of late I came across a nice Learner Video collections on ASP.NET and Atlas (AJAX for ASP.NET) framework. Check them out here.  This makes the learning of new technology a breeze since it is very much interactive.

PHP meets .NET

PHP meets .NET

The premeire Unix based Scripting language which also has Windows port (PHP -- Hypertext Preprocessor) meets .NET.  A new PHP Language compiler called Phalanger has been developed which converts PHP code into .NET MSIL, thus extending ASP.NET support for PHP

Check out for more details: http://www.php-compiler.net/

Windows Vista -- Test your Knowledge and get a CD

Windows Vista -- Test your Knowledge and get a CD

Test your knowledge in Windows Vista by answering simple questions and get a free Windows CD shipped to you. Check out this URL http://www.microsoft.com/india/offers/vista/quiz.aspx

An AJAX Framework by Matthias Hertel

An AJAX Framework by Matthias Hertel

One more cool AJAX Framework from Matthias Hertel. But this one is more powerpacked with cross browser compatibility, webservices interoperability and multilanguage support.

Also check out the documentation on http://www.mathertel.de/Ajax/AJAXeBook.aspx

Online Code Convertors from DotNetSpider

Online Code Convertors from DotNetSpider

How many times we have been frustrated by encountering a sample code or library but in a different language? I came across the following very useful tool that attempts to resolve the query and aspirations of millions of developer fraternity.

Check out online code convertor tools between C# and VB.NET from Dotnetspider here:

http://www.dotnetspider.com/convert/

Feel free to share any other code conversion tools as comments to this post or to Dotnetspider here.

Golden Jubilee Post

Golden Jubilee Post

It is a pleasurable moment to share with you that your favorite technology weblog, Daffodilnet, has humbly reached its Golden Jubilee Post. There are more milestones to conquer and laurels to win.

Keep visiting and extend your support and patronage. Thank you!

Microsoft Excel -- Quick Reckoner for Financial Calculations

Microsoft Excel -- Quick Reckoner for Financial Calculations

Most of us would have encountered piquant situations while planning to avail personal loans from financial institutions. While the bank gives a full details of the loan, the amortization schedules etc, it would be better that we also have hand-calculate and cross verify the details. The calculation process is not simple and particularly assumes mammoth complexities in the case of long term loans.

Fortunately, there is a simple but generic tool that lies very much within Microsoft Excel to help ease out this situation and greatly help us.

1. Amotization Schedule
1. Launch Microsoft Excel.
2. Right click on the bottom tab 'Sheet 1'.
3. Click on the tab 'Spreadsheet Solutions'.
4. You can now select 'Amortization Schedule'.
5. Fill out the steps and Microsoft Excel would calculate the rest.
2. Principal Component in EMI
1. Launch Microsoft Excel and from Insert -> Function, choose the category 'Financial'
2. Choose 'PPMT' as the function name.
3. Fill out the fields.
4. Instead of PPMT, if you can choose IPMT, you can get the Interest component of the loan.

I hope this would be of tremendous significance to any user before availing a loan from any financial institution.

JavaScript X Library

JavaScript X Library

While searching for some JavaScript functions and implementations, I came across a comprehensive website on JavaScript library, purportedly achieving cross browser compatibility and ease of diversified functions like utility functions, DHTML tips and tricks and more.

Check out X Library here: http://cross-browser.com/

Guidance Explorer

Guidance Explorer

Design of an enteprise application involves a lot of careful study and analysis which does not undermine the necessity of emphasing on the right type of design pattern that needs to be used. But startup developers often tend to curse of the plethora of design patterns, beguile and confusing terms used thereto, while program managers find pleasure in advocating and supporting the pros and cons of each design pattern.

Fortunately, there is a cool tool from GotDotNet Workspaces called GuidanceExplorer which attempts to ease this task for developers and realise the dream potentials of program managers.

Check out GuidanceExplorer from GotDotNet CodeGallery.

Microsoft Office 2007 Beta Delivery

Microsoft Office 2007 Beta Delivery

Check out the free downloads of Microsoft Office 2007 or free shipment of CD from this URL http://www.microsoft.com/india/office/beta/. It takes about two weeks of delivery time.  You may need to login with your Windows Live account to proceed with the order.

JavaScript X Library

JavaScript X Library

While searching for some JavaScript functions and implementations, I came across a comprehensive website on JavaScript library, purportedly achieving cross browser compatibility and ease of diversified functions like utility functions, DHTML tips and tricks and more.

Check out X Library here: http://cross-browser.com/

Online Tamil Keyboard (for Mozilla FireFox)

Online Tamil Keyboard (for Mozilla FireFox)

Check out TamilKey, an elegant solution in all Mozilla-based web browsers like FireFox to instantly toggle between Tamil and English. A JavaScript version of the browser for Internet Explorer is also available in Thamizha.com homepage over here.

Free ASP.NET 2.0 Hosting Accounts

Free ASP.NET 2.0 Hosting Accounts

Developers using .NET Framework 2.0 would be trying to find out some free hosting accounts where they can play around with .NET Framework 2.0 applications. During the initial stages of .NET Framework 1.1, we had the following websites that supported free .NET Framework hosts. Check out the following comprehensive lists:

1. Brinkster Inc.
2. DotNetPlayGround [currently free signups or hosting is unavailable]
3. ASPSpider
4. Maximum ASP Beta [ASP.NET 2.0 with IIS 7 Trial Account]

Comprehensive Guide to Visual Studio Debugger Problems

Comprehensive Guide to Visual Studio Debugger Problems

While searching for some solution regarding an 'Access denied' while attaching debugger to ASP.NET, I found out the following comprehensive document on Visual Studio Debugger issues. I would like to share it with our readers for reference.

This document seems to be maintained by the Visual C# Team in GotDotNet as the URL reads. Check out and download the document from here.

Visual Studio Project Convertor

Visual Studio Project Convertor

It would really be a daunting experience after downloading a Visual Studio .NET project file and your Visual Studio refusing it to open complaining that it has been designed for another version of the product. I came across a tool called VSConvert from CodeProject, which I would like to share the information with my readers and which I hope would greatly help in converting project files across .NET Framework (1.0 and 1.1). Check out this tool from CodeProject VSConvert page.

Currently, conversion of project files to 2.0 framework is possible using Visual Studio 2005 itself as the IDE pops up a wizard. However, the reverse might not be possible since there are a lot of changes from 1.1 to 2.0 version of the framework.

STS 121 Discovery -- Flash Demontration

STS 121 Discovery -- Flash Demontration

Check out the Flash Demonstration Application hosted on NASA website in its STS 121 Discovery Shuttle Mission Page. It is really exciting to even click and view the application and I am sure it is really a life's best experience travelling to outer space, doing research there.

Check it out for yourself.

No spams on Blogs

No spams on Blogs

One of the most dreaded threats that any blogger faces comes in the form of comment spamming.  A lot of people would have confronted with spurious comments posted by automatic bots on pills etc and also from persons sans ethics using others blogs to solicit visits to thier websites.

There have been a diversifed ways of combating this. Till now, the following have been used popularly.

1. Comment Moderation
2. CAPTCHA

Comment moderation enqueues all the comment till the blog owner/administration peruses through the comments that are pending approval and gives a nod. CAPTCHA filters all the comments that are posted by spam robots since it generates a dynamic image which is readable only by human eye and not by spam robots.

I came across this website similar to Email Relay Blacklist services which offers spam blacklisting webservice for blogosphere also. Check it out at Akismet. It is free for personal use too. So, I think, you can start using it as a valuable tool to combat spam and keep your weblogs healthy.

Develop without Borders

Develop without Borders

Check out a Microsoft Office 97 programming contest.  This seems to be a very innovative programming contest where the contest works are going to benefit a lot of charities worldwide. The contest is jointly managed by Microsoft and HP.

For further details, check out Develop without Borders website and/or the Source URL in Chennai .NET Usergroup Message.

Asia Pacific Telecommunity Elecution Competition

Asia Pacific Telecommunity Elecution Competition

The Asia Pacific Telecommunity and ICT development forum is organizing an International Conference in Chennai between 10th and 14th July, 2006. The event is hosted by the Department of Telecommunications and managed by BSNL, Chennai Telephones.

As part of the international conference, an elocution competition for college students is being planned out, in alliance with Anna University.  Students of Anna University and/or its affiliated colleges are eligible for participation in the same. Each college may nominate two UG/PG students for the same. The event is going to be one-of-its-kind in the international arena of telecommunity and would be a most right and an apt platform to showcase the potential and prowess of the students and the institutions.

All participants get a certificate of participation whilst winners stand to get attractive cash prizes besides an invitation to attend the main conference.

1. Enrolment Form: http://chennai.bsnl.co.in/apt/EnrolmentForm.htm
2. Venue and Prizes: http://chennai.bsnl.co.in/apt/VenuePrizes.htm

Source Courtesy: Chennai BSNL

JavaScript Framework Library

JavaScript Framework Library

JavaScript has been an inevitable scripting language that developers worldwide rely on ranging from the simplest forms of form validations through interactive animations on the web browsers. There have been JavaScript applications running from Windows Desktop as well.

Check out this elegant Javascript library called Prototype, which makes development of web applications easy, giving enormous flexibility to maintain as well.

[Imported from Blogdrive]Incessant Flow of Appreciation and Congratulations...

Incessant Flow of Appreciation and Congratulations...
An incessant flow of appreciations and congratulations for the recognition described in my other post ("Selected as Microsoft MVP again"), makes me more happier and merrier than ever. As my colleague, Prathiba, has described in her post, "Need for recognition", the words of appreciation really gave a great boost and energizes ourselves to conquer further peaks of victory.
This post is dedicated to one and all who supported, helped and encouraged me. To requote Prathiba,&nbsp; "It takes more than a good heart to let a person step forward when he took the only first step".
Thanks again...<!--
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//-->

 

        Posted at 02:26 pm by Deepak Kumar Vasudevan
 

 

Deepak Kumar Vasudevan July 5, 2006 &nbsp; 11:55 AM PDT&nbsp;Thank you, AravinthanAravinthan July 5, 2006 &nbsp; 10:04 AM PDT&nbsp;Congrats deepak.. :)

 

  Original BlogDrive Post on Tuesday, July 04, 2006

[Imported from Blogdrive]Selected as Microsoft MVP again...

Selected&nbsp;as Microsoft MVP again...A few moments back, my mailbox was glad to recieve the mail from Microsoft India Community Manager,&nbsp; Abhishek Kant &nbsp;that I have been selected as a MVP (Microsoft's Most Valuable Professional) in ASP.NET category.
A few things to recall -- I have been MVP for two years consecutively from 2003-04 and 2004-05 in .NET framework and then C# categories.&nbsp; I would like to express my sincere thanks to the Microsoft MVP selection team for considering my humble contributions towards this recognition. You can see the MVP logo in the left hand profile of this weblog.
I would like to extend my hearty congratulations to my collegue, Vadivel Mohanakrishnan, who also has been nominated back as MVP in his favorite SQL Server category. <!--
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        Posted at 06:55 pm by Deepak Kumar Vasudevan
 

 

Padmashree November 3, 2006 &nbsp; 12:57 AM PST&nbsp;Congrats for your achievement! I am a final year engineering student and am one of the managers of Maduraidotnet.The link is http://groups.msn.com/maduraidotnet.I would be glad if you could join our group and provide technical assistance.Deepak Kumar Vasudevan July 26, 2006 &nbsp; 01:56 PM PDT&nbsp;Thank you, Ankur!Ankur Raheja July 20, 2006 &nbsp; 12:30 AM PDT&nbsp;Just landed up here through some link... Congrats !

 

  Original BlogDrive Post on Monday, July 03, 2006

[Imported from Blogdrive]Quick Pointer to Archives

Quick Pointer to Archives
Blogdrive is no doubt an excellent weblogging tool. Of late, I needed to quick link an archive from my friends weblog, since I had been discussing on a topic, on which the other blog there was a discussion. But I could'nt directly found what is called a Permalink feature and hence I had to give the straight link to the archives page and then a manual instruction to use CTRL+F to find the text.
Thanks to Blogdrive extensive and comprehensive collection of database, I found the Permalink format. http://username.blogdrive.com/archive/blogid.html For example, the archive URL for this would be http://deepak.blogdrive.com/archive/169.html

fValidate -- A full-fledged form validation Library

fValidate -- A full-fledged form validation Library

JavaScript -- A Scripting Language of excellency. This saves up a lot of time, at least with respect to the client side form validations. Even then, web developers worldwide feel that it is nightmarish to write validation code in JavaScript.

Sometime back, there was a site called PeterBailey.net which gave a validation library in JavaScript called fValidate. The domain is currently unavailable. A Quick Search in Google revealed the new home of fValidate.

It is a good news for JavaScript lovers worldwide to see thier favorite fValidate back after a brief lull.

JavaScript and AJAX to rule the desktops

JavaScript and AJAX to rule the desktops

The power and prowess of JavaScript is invincible. With a humble start as a client side scripting language for webpages, with the mammoth and a large scale support and patronage of millions of developers worldwide, the potential of JavaScript now, as a Windows Scripting language, WebPage animations, Client Scripting Validations and the list goes on and on.

While casually surfing the web, I came across this URL called AJAX Remote Desktop Viewer.

I guess, as the description goes, some OS components or a listening daemon is required on the system serving for the desktop to serve it. Check out AJAX Remote Desktop Viewer here.

Click here to activate and use this Control

Click here to activate and use this Control

Oh My! Right during the website deployment, my team member screamed to me that the flash navigation does not work. It pops up a tooltip saying "Click here to activate and use this Control". Is'nt this your common complaint these days?

It seems to be a latest Windows update security patch that gets delivered from Windows Update website, that has caused this difference in behavior in IE forcing the users acknowledge and confirm that they really want to use the ActiveX Control. Going by the trend these days, Windows is getting stricter with the users in its sense of security making the shell secure for users. Additionally, the ActiveX Control (Flash Movie) appears with a kind of greyish border, indicating that the control is currently unavailable for any user input unless the user opts to activate it and use the same.

Check out this solution from Macromedia for the fix.

ASP.NET and other Web Development Tutorial

ASP.NET and other Web Development Tutorial

Are you looking for some easy web development tutorial in topics like ASP.NET 2.0 or 1.1 or in classic ASP. Check out this website of MaconState College Information Technology Department. I was aware of this website even sometime about 3 y ears ago. That time, if I remember only .NET Framework 1.0 was there.

After that I have changed two companies here in Chennai and this bookmark also I forgot. One of my friend was asking me regarding some online tutorial. I vaguely remembered some edu website and after some search in Google, I got this excellent tutorial, which I would like to share with other readers as well.

Free Online Study Material in .NET

Free Online Study Material in .NET

MSDN is the best and ultimate reference for .NET documentation. Nevertheless, we always have a hardcopy book that we refer at home. How about extending this hardcopy book into Internet realm.  I came across a few websites provided by prolific authors of repute, who have put as a companion website for thier books.

Check them out at:

1. Vijay Mukhi (covers C#, VB.NET, visual Studio Introduction, ASP.NET, MSIL)
2. Programming the .NET Compact Framework in C#

Your User's Geographic Map

Your User's Geographic Map

In a previous post, we were discussing about how to personalize the website and show content that is tailormade for each user that is visiting the website. The more essence of the website would be to make the website as close to his home as possible.

It would be a delightful visit for the user, if we could present a map of the region from where he is actually visiting the website from.

To plot a map of the region, is quite easy. Check out the following tools:

Remotely Hosted:

1. IP2Map. This website provides a map of the region from where the user is visiting.

Source Downloads:

1. IP Atlas: Check out this source download from X-Penguin.com and a demo is available from here.

Greet your visitors based on thier location easily...

Greet your visitors based on thier location easily...

Personalizing a website for the visitor who is at the moment surfing your website is really an excellent and increases more number of returning visitors. Personalizing can be to any extent. Sky is the limit of personalizing the website to users' preferences and tastes. For example, My Yahoo and Inbox.com have high levels of personalizing to the user's tastes in terms of News, Music etc.

To start with a minimum amount of personalization can be saying a 'Hi' to the user and show his country name. Sounds cool. Is'nt it? Read on...

This actually works, since the web browser that the user is connecting to your server, would be sending an IPAddress of it and based on that, you can do some more checks to get all details. This indeed, involves a bit of network lookups and nameserver operations.

A good news for free homepage webmasters too. Check out this website called IP2Phrase, which gives all these details by just placing a small script that the website gives. It is free too.

Windows Live OneCare -- OneStop Protection for your Windows Desktop

Windows Live OneCare -- OneStop Protection for your Windows Desktop

Tired of fighting with viruses and managing conflicting security software on your workstation like Windows Firewall, McAfee Antivirus, Spyware from another vendor and so on and so forth. Microsoft Windows Live is bringing in a suite of products called Windows Live OneCare, which offers complete protection to your Windows Desktop in the form of Antispyware, Firewall, Antivirus, OneCare Backup and Restore, Automated Tuneup, Automated updates.

Check out Windows Live OneCare from http://www.windowsonecare.com/Default.aspx and there are excellent discount offers for beta users too.

Creating dynamic Favorite ICONs for your webpage online...

Creating dynamic Favorite ICONs for your webpage online...

FAVICONs are very common and are excellent resources since they indicate a tangible symbol on the web browser's address bar as they visit your website and also when they bookmark your website.

For a complete explanation of FAVICON, check out this link from SiteWizard. For those people, creating personal webpages in GeoCities etc. creating FAVICONs dynamically is pretty simple. Check out this simple online applet tool from Favicon.co.uk But in case you have a more complex logo, then the best solution would be to use a full fledged image management software, resize it and then save it as an ICOn file. For freeware, check out Irfanview, which could help you out to quickly create a FAVICON for your images.

Personal Protection Software

Personal Protection Software

Sometime back, we were discussing about Naviscope, a personal desktop proxy server. Proxy Servers are not just enough. To take it further and give your system, a complete protection, we also need Personal Firewalls and Antivirus softwares that can give you complete protection against harmful content from external media like Internet or any removable storage that you would insert into your system.

I would like to list you a couple of freeware that would assist you in this regard:

1. Free Firewalls:
1. ZoneLabs Personal Firewall
2. Outpost Firewall
3. SunBelt Kerio Personal Firewall
2. Free Antivirus Software
1. Antivir
2. AVG Antivirus
3. Avast! Antivirus
3. Free Online Virus Scans
1. Trend HouseCall Antivirus
2. Panda ActiveScan
4. Security Test of your System
1. Symantec Security Test

Naviscope -- Good Personal Proxy Server for home desktops

Naviscope -- Good Personal Proxy Server for home desktops

With broadband and DSLs getting the common thing of the day, accessing the Internet is a breeze. However, with the ease of access to the Internet, it also brings in a lot of junk stuff into our systems. Here comes the resources like Personal Proxy Servers, Firewalls, Antivirus softwares to protect your desktops and workstations.

There has been a tool called Naviscope and its homepage http://www.naviscope.com/.  I don't think, this URL is available now but the download sites do offer Naviscope 8.71 as a free download. 

It is a free personal proxy server, that can be configured to run from the system tray and with a variety of features, a partial list of which, I would like to give here:

1. Prefetching the links as you search in Google or your favorite search engine.
2. DNS Caching to prevent superflous lookups to your nameserver.
3. Persistent HTTP Connections.
4. MTU/RWin (Windows Internet Capability) Optimizations.
5. Junk Content Blockers
1. Ad Blocker
2. Popup Blocker
3. Cookie Blocker
4. Embedded Sound/Video Blocker
5. Blinking Text Blocker

The interesting feature of Naviscope is that, it shows a floating toolbar with the progress of requests that are going through it. Say if a webpage is downloading a big EXE file in the background, Naviscope would show the download progress in the toolbar.

Towards the system perspective, Naviscope does also provide a system clock synchronization with NIST Atomic clock.  It also does not logging capabilities to log all Internet activities on the system.

Get your copy of Naviscope from PCWorld website.

Jana Server -- a small-scale server suite for small enterprises

Jana Server -- a small-scale server suite for small enterprises

Small enterprises can now also use full-fledged server applications from thier own infrastructure rather than depending on third parties and/or upstream providers. I came across a nice server suide tool called Jana Server, which is freely downloadable from its website.

It ships with an elegant set of features like the following:

1. Http (Web) Server. Capable of supporting even PHP and CGI applications
2. FTP Server
3. FTP Gateway
4. Email Server (SMTP, POP3 and IMAP)
5. News (NNTP) Server
6. Name Server (DNS)
7. Caching Proxy Server
1. Http Proxy
2. Socks 4/5 Proxy
8. Telnet Proxy
9. RTSP (Real Player) Proxy
10. Custom Gateway Configurations

Effective FTP Management of your website

Effective FTP Management of your website

FTP, which is an abbreviation of File Transfer Protocol is a very effective and inevitable tool for webmasters and even casual web surfers. Webmasters use this tool for day-to-day publishing and updates of their websites' content. Web Surfers find it a very useful tool to download software, where FTP is supported.

Compared to HTTP download/upload, since technically FTP supports dedicated connection, it is more effective in upload and download. Don't worry. I am not going to bore you with the technical internals of FTP. For those, interested thereto, check out the FTP RFC over here: http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc959.html

I thought of sharing some nice, useful client applications that would be useful for webmasters and websurfers using FTP.

FTP Clients

1. Leech FTP
2. FileZilla FTP Client

FTP Servers

1. FileZilla FTP Server

FileZilla FTP Client and Server are available even with source code from SourceForge webservers.  It also supports Secure FTP.

Leech FTP webserver says that the ftp application is no longer supported or is being upgraded. But it is really an excellent tool and some of the salient features that it supports are:

1. Multithreaded FTP downloads
2. Protected Bookmarks
3. Minimize the application (while it downloads) to a system tray and optional password protection.
4. Update check. But I think this feature does not work now, since updates are no longer supported.
5. Http URL Clipboard monitor.

Hexadecimal URLs

Hexadecimal URLs

Some strange phishing emails were there in my Rediff Webmail. Should I just delete it? No. I just thought I would do some sort of recycling and find if something useful was there.

And the email was faithful to give the following details. Of course, some of the links I had to ensure that should not be clicked by copy pasted to a Google Toolbar to get the actual victimized website which has been phished.

1. The site URL was Barclays Bank, based in UK. It seems to be a really an impressive and premiere banking website based in UK. There are useful tips and tricks besides interactive tools like Mortgage Calculator, Map and Area locator etc.
2. Obscured URLs. The URL was really strange it was like http://0xC18003C6.  For security reasons, I am not giving the phished URL rather tiving the URL of the bank itself in hexa decimal format.
3. A search in Google revealed a lot of things. Actually, hexadecimal URLs are supported by the web browser for security reasons since some confidential transactions can be safely sent using encoded and encrypted URLs. However, phishers seem to use this maliciously like this.
4. Technical Knowhow:
1. We can study the anatomy of the URL like this: http://0xC18003C6
2. http:// stands for the standard HTTP protocol.
3. 0x prefix indicates that the string literal, if convertible, is a valid hexadecimal number.
4. Every two digit then on would the IP address part. In this case, C1 80 03 C6 would resolve to 193 128 3 198. In the decimal notation, we need to use dot between the individual entities.
5. You can simple use the Windows Calculator in View -> Scientific mode to get conversions from Decimal to Hexadecimal and vice-versa.

Elegant Data Access Strategies in .NET

Elegant Data Access Strategies in .NET

Thanks to ADO.NET, database access and management has never been easy and a breeze. We have high speed managed providers without much of resource consumption. All resource management are being managed by CLR.

The default support of database access in .NET is like

1. SQLServer
2. Oracle
3. Generic OLEDB
4. Generic ODBC

But it would be a better strategy for us to have a Data Access Layer, which is shortly known as DAL in programming world, which would have the complete onus in talking to the database and returning the results, instead of having each of our modules talk to the database.  This way, in future,if wanted to make some performance improvements to the database access, the changes are restricted to one particular area instead of having this spill out through out the application.

Perhaps, I would like to recommend to the readers, the following URLs which we researched upon in Database Access Layers. We also have our own GDN (GotDotNet) Workspace. If you are interested to contribute some effort, please do drop in.

1. Full Database Abstraction Layer Generator by Jonathan De Halleux
2. DotNetEmpire -- GotDotNET (GDN) Community Workspace by Vasudevan Deepak Kumar

Managing ConnectionStrings (Securely)

Managing ConnectionStrings (Securely)

Database driven webapplications and windows applications normally store the connection related info (which is often called as ConnectionStrings), into some standard INI or registry entries. .NET applications have an edge since they have a predefined configuration file like web.config or app.config for web or windows application respectively.

But the following daunting questions appear to the user:

1. How to build a connectionstring easily?
2. How to securely store the connectionstring since it has username, password and other sensitive info?

Here is a humble attempt to answer the queries to the user.

How to build a connectionstring easily

1. If you know the provider or driver you are going to use, you can hand-prepare the connectionstring based on the manual and/or documentation or samples in hand.
2. Check out http://www.connectionstrings.com/. For any connectionstrings, this, I guess would be a very useful resource for developers worldwide.
3. You can easily build a simple connectionstring editor using a simple editor like using a tool like DanMeyar has given.

How to secure the connectionstrings

1. Securing a connectionstring is a debated question. Perhaps my other article in CodeProject also attempts to explain this. Check it out here.
2. Trusted Connections You can enable Trusted Connection for the account running your webapplication to the database of the application. Like ASPNET account in SQLServer for your database. Or you can use impersonation. Even Oracle now supports OS Integrated Authentication. This way, you can avoid storing passwords n web.config
3. ASPNET_SetReg.exe: You can use this Microsoft provided tool to encrypt and store credentials in the registry. Check out more details from Microsoft Support Article 329290.

I hope these would be very useful for developers of web applications and windows applications.

Website Precompiler for ASP.NET

Website Precompiler for ASP.NET

The most elegant feature of ASP.NET is the JIT compilation and caching of the pages once served, so that the second time, the users would get the most fastest response. However, the very first user to request the page has to wait a while, as the pages are JITted.

ASP.NET 2.0 has a compile website option, I guess. However, for websites running on .NET framework 1.1 this is still an issue. I have been looking out for some solutions and I came across the following article, which I think would be helpful to other users too and would like to share the same.

1. Precompile ASP.NET Pages by Narendra
2. Alberto's Precompiler for ASP.NET

I hope these would be very useful for ASP.NET development fraternity worldwide.

Guestbooks for the Website

Guestbooks for the Website

Websites which offer a dynamic interaction from the people have always been successful with more number of returning visitors. A very static webpage always invites only a few visitors who need the information for that point of time.

So what are the ways in which a webuser can register his opinion with the website? The sky is the limit for the channels that can be opened up for the same.

Traditionally, guestbooks have been the most preferred choice for webmasters, be it big websites or little personal hobby pages.

There is nothing in the world that claims a hundred percent perfection. There always remains a scope for further improvement and development. A good guestbook for a website can invite comments on a particular thought expressed in the website, get attention on a failing component of a website or a suggestion towards a better enhancement of the same.

Is it too difficult to configure a guestbook for a website. Not at all. Creating, Configuring and Maintaining a guestbook had and would never be a pain but rather a pleasure. When your kid gets comments from his teacher on getting first rank in his class subjects in the examinations, you would be happy right. It is quite similar to that, when your visitors leave suggestions for your website.

To start with, you can check out a lot of open source implementation of guestbooks, which you can download, configure and use them on your website. However, if you are afraid of technical configuration, there are a lot of remotely hosted guestbook solutions too.

We would like to summarize a few of them for your convenience.

Source Guestbooks

1. Guestbook Application from WebWizGuide
2. ASP Guestbook from Uwe Keim

Third-Party Solutions

1. Flash GuestBook from PepFx Design

RemotelyHosted Solutions

1. Bravenet Guestbook
2. SmartGuestbook

Tutorial of creating a Guestbook (in ASP)

1. Guestbook Tutorial from Joshua Bengal.

Tips on Maintaining Guestbooks

1. Check out administrative control panel of the guestbook once in a while to ensure that no unrelated or junk messages are posted to guestbooks.
2. To prevent spammers and spam robots from posting junk comments to your guestbooks, you can make use of CAPTCHA trick. Integrating a CAPTCHA trick is very easy in any of the solution. For more information on CAPTCHA, check out this post.
3. It would also be better to have a Private Message checkbox so that some users can send a message to you and then later you can edit and with the consent of the user make it appear in the Guestbook. The concept of Private Messages is in fact a debated issue. Some consider that these are like Contact Forms but their significance is always come to stay.

Web-based MineSweeper

Web-based MineSweeper

If you have observed Windows has a couple of nice elegant cames like Cards, MineSweeper etc in its default installation. These make Windows very interactive and lovely to work and even during a casual snacks or lunch hour or a weekend, we can keep playing in the laptop.

Just imagine, how cool it would be to play the game over the web browser too.

I came across this website called DestroyDrop, which offers this web-based MineSweeper in JavaScript. Check it out:

http://www.destroydrop.com/javascripts/mine/

ScreenRuler -- Measuring Screen Widths Effectively

ScreenRuler -- Measuring Screen Widths Effectively

Homepages and blogs are so common. Have you wondered and longed for a simple tool that can help you measure the screen widths quickly and effectively. I was having a similar requirement and a search revealed a simple freeware called ScreenRuler, which is downloadable from Spadix Software.

Now you can rule the screen with the ScreenRuler!

Free Indian Language Word Processing Application

Free Indian Language Word Processing Application

It is now history to have webpages in Indian Languages that need costly Java Applets, untrusted ActiveX Controls, heavy flash movies and slow images.  Perhaps if you check out Google Tamil or Google Hindi, the most elegant way could be to make use of Unicode UTF-8 standard to acheive this.

Towards this, I needed a software that could make up Hindi/Tamil versions of webpages for a friend of mine and came across this freeware editor called Baraha. Baraha in Kannada means writing.

It has a lot of features and supports a lot of Indian languages and export capability to Unicode. If you still need TTF type, Baraha has its own font for each of the Indian language to support that too.

Check out Baraha and/or Baraha SDK from http://www.baraha.com/index.htm

Free Online Network Utilities

Free Online Network Utilities

To diagnose and troubleshoot a network problem particularly in a production webserver is always a time-taking and strenous exercise. Particularly, if you do not have enough and a complete suite of tools that  you require to complete the process.

I came across this nice website which aids in giving a complete set of network utilities in Online for free. Check it out at CentralOps.net.

It does provide the following set of services:

1. Domain Tools
1. Domain Dossier -> Investigate details about a particular domain.
2. Domain Check -> Query availability of a particular domain.
2. Email Dossier
       Checks whether the email address actually exists or not.
3. Browser Mirror
        Investigates the information sent by the web browser.
4. Ping
        An Online ICMP Tool to ping the host.
5. Traceroute
         Traces the path a packet travels to the webserver.
6. NsLookup
         Lookup Utility for various DNS records for a particular domain.
7. AutoWhois
          A Whois Utility to query multiple domains across the world.
8. TcpQuery
          Analyse a particular webpage.
9. AnalysePath
           Visual Traceroute.

MyLittleAdmin -- Administering SQLServers on the Web

MyLittleAdmin -- Administering SQLServers on the Web

Administering a SQLServer typically after the website has been transferred to the production site is always night marish and particularly connecting through a desktop enterprise manager, and typically when you do not have the luxury of fast broadband.

I came across this little tool called MyLittleAdmin, whose lite edition seems to address this issue, satisfying the needs and requirements of many people.

Check it out at MyLittleAdmin homepage.

Online Virus/Trojan Scans

Online Virus/Trojan Scans

As you surf the vast diversified Internet, install and deinstall a wide variety of programs and applications, you also run risk of accepting viruses and trojans. Viruses are harmful to your system. Trojans play havoc on confidential data and send them back to some remote site to the Trojan writer.

Fortunately, there are two quick and easy Virus Scanners that you can make use of, to scan your system and clean it from Viruses and Trojans. This is for quick and easy check. It is any recommended to have a fullfledged and updated RealTime Antivirus software in your system running for constant protection against threats from the open Internet.

Here are the free online scanners:

1. Free Antivirus Check from Trend Micro website.
2. Free Trojan check from Windows Security website.

You need to be logged on as administrator since these websites require a small ActiveX Control to be downloaded and installed for the scanning to take place.

Web.Config Editors

Web.Config Editors

The most elegant feature of .NET application compared to classic ASP is that most of the things are now configurable in simple and standard XML Configuration files. The most significant among them is web.config files for a particular application and machine.config for a typical .NET Framework installation for the entire system.

Don't worry. I am not going to bore you into the internals of Web.config. For more information on the same, check out this MSDN link.

Here we would see, some of the free editors and or third party solutions that make editing and managing a web.config simple for system administrators and other personnel who maintain the website but not too tech-savvy to know the internals of the same.

Third Party Solutions

1. Hunterstone Web.Config Editor. I had seen that HunterStone WCE was giving promotional offers for free download sometime back but I think that offer is not available now. But it is a very simple tool to manage the web.config files.

Source Solutions

1. AppSettings Manager by Nigel Shaw

Tutorial cum Editor on XmlFiles.com

1. ASPxConfig Editor by Adam S CartWright

Windows Media Player Rudimentary PlayList

Windows Media Player Rudimentary PlayList

Normally, when I used to listen to Ayyappa Bhajan songs, basically MMS URLs I had to copy one by one into Windows Media Player to listen. I was thinking whether I can create a simple playlist that Windows Media Player can automatically recognize the sequence and play one after another.

There are Windows Media Player playlist XML files that you can create for them. But I found one more simple solution from a web discussion forum over here.

It is directly simple. Create a simple text file default.m3u and enlist the supported file type URLs and Windows Media Player would play for you.

A sample would be like this, as mentioned in the discussion forum (default.m3u)

http://www.yourserver.com/1.mp3
http://www.yourserver.com/2.mp3
http://www.yourserver.com/3.mp3 

Mobile VOIP -- Emerging Voice over Technology

Mobile VOIP -- Emerging Voice over Technology

With soaring high costs of long distance calls over circuit switched PSTN Networks, the industry and the world turned over to the following cheaper alternatives:

1. Computer to Computer
2. Voice over IP technology

Now, the industry also seems to be aggressive in research and development activity on extending Voice Over technology to handheld devices, as this Indiatimes article describes.

Linguistic Accessibility of Websites

Linguistic Accessibility of Websites

The power and prowess of websites is better known by the quantity of content, its reach, the impressions it had made on its' visitors mind, to name a few parameters.

With respect to the reach, the website can best reach by providing translation services to reach the audience in thier native language for best appeal.

Linguistic Translation does not need extensive groundwork to start with however, a minimal startup requires only associating the website with a few translation webservices and websites. I would like to share with the readers a few translation websites that aide in this perspective:

• Google Translate -> http://www.google.com/translate_t
• Free Translation -> http://www.freetranslation.com/
• Altavista Babelfish -> http://babelfish.altavista.com/

Quick and Easy Network Tools

Quick and Easy Network Tools

Managing and maintaining a significantly sized network does always carries with it significant responsibilities and that too in this world of Internet, which is filled with viruses, trojan horses and all sort of hackers. The responsibility and head-aches still increase when it comes to the point of production servers.

Fortunately, just like free email services, a lot of enterprises and open source developers have come together to remotely host services that aide in network management.

I would like to share some significant of them, which will be of real use.

• Reverse DNS Look: Check out this website hosted by 12Dt.com/ which offers efficient reverse DNS resolution of a given IP address. Free services are restricted to 100 requests per IP address and subject to cookie support in the web browser.
• Protected Whois Check: Whois databases too have been victims of spammers getting the email addresses by automated tools. Check out this protected whois database from Godaddy.

QBasic and Related Downloads

QBasic and Related Downloads

Following up my previous post, a few friends of mine were asking how to get QBasic and related help. As such and as far as I know, I don't think the current versions of Windows (Windows XP or Windows 2003) has Qbasic.exe shipping along with it.

A search in Google revealed the following MSDOS Utilities. Perhaps, I would like to share it among the readers. But the following things need to be clarified and I have posted in some community newsgroup. Once I get the response,  I would try updating them over here:

• Compatibility of these programs with the current Win32 model.
• Future compatibility of these programs as Win64 gains sway.
• License restrictions.

Perhaps if some reader of this blogpost has some answers, feel free to share with others as blog comments.

Power of QBasic

Power of QBasic

QBasic, the MSDOS version of QuickBasic and successor to BASICA, Turbo Basic and GWBasic. There are some cool features in this language, that I think even the current ones do not directly and so easily support.

For example, there are three simple commands like Play, Sound and Beep. While Beep is supported by an escape sequence and the ASCII character code, sound and Play do not find direct equivalents in Visual Basic or even in C#.

I am trying to understand this and perhaps if you visit Experts-Exchange and particularly this page, you would find an interesting discussion on this topic.

'This webpage could not be saved'

'This webpage  could not be saved'

How many times you have confronted this message when attempting to use File -> Save WebPage complete. I think in these cases, which also takes up more diskfiles and a folder is being created, you can use Web Archive (.MHT) file name extension.

Check out this article for the problem description and resolution: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q235589

CTRL+Enter in Internet Explorer

CTRL+Enter in Internet Explorer

CTRL+Enter is really a very useful feature in Internet Explorer.  We type google and CTRL+Enter automatically prefixes the TLD suffix and www and navigates to the URL. Myself and my friend faced a piquant situation yesterday. It was not working.

After a brief tweaks and fiddling with IE Options, we observed that this is dependent on Tools -> Internet Options -> Content -> Autocomplete checkbox to be enabled. Only then it works.

Also, it would be interesting to go a bit deep into the technical background of CTRL+Enter too and perhaps this technical background also helps us to customize it.  Check out Jeff's WebLog for details.

 

 

[Imported from Blogdrive]Nice TaxCalculator

Nice TaxCalculator

Check out this nice TaxCalculator from Nithyanand at http://www.ynithya.com/taxcalc/

Posted at 04:58 pm by Deepak Kumar Vasudevan

Original BlogDrive Post on Sunday, August 28, 2005

[Imported from Blogdrive]Plaxo (An AddressBook) -- Bringing together the Web and the desktop client

Plaxo AddressBook -- Bringing together the Web and the desktop client

Just wanted to share with all this nice contact management website called Plaxo.com (http://www.plaxo.com/) This also updates and manages friendly signature files and best works with Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express.

Posted at 03:45 pm by Deepak Kumar Vasudevan

Original BlogDrive Post on Sunday, August 28, 2005

[Imported from Blogdrive]Dynamic Scripting Tooltips Enabled in Website

Thank you, Nithya

Thanks to Nithya for pointing out that some of the pages in my WebKennel Personal website was showing JavaScript error since the Overlib JS, I forgot to upload. This has been uploaded now and it works.

Thank you, Nithya for pointing out the discrepancy to me.

Posted at 07:35 pm by Deepak Kumar Vasudevan

Original BlogDrive Post on Friday, July 01, 2005

Online Virus Scanners

Virus Scanners are no longer difficult to install, tedious to configure. There are easy to use Online Virus Scanners, which offer to scan your hard disks whilst you surf the Internet.

Check out the following:

1. FSecure Virus Scanner: http://support.f-secure.com/enu/home/ols.shtml
2. Trend Micro Housecall: http://housecall.antivirus.com/

Keep your system protected against spreading viruses...

"My World of .NET" -- WebLog

Feel free to check out my other weblog -- http://blogs.wwwcoder.com/deepak/

Whilst http://deepak.blogdrive.com/ shares anything and everything I would like to share, the abovesaid URL restricts information sharing on .NET alone.

An interesting date with Lotus Notes

The other day, I was staying through night in my office since the next day, I had some deliverable and left to home only at 4 AM. And I came back to my workplace back next day at 11 AM. I was still feeling sleepy and groping with sleepiness in the eyes, since I had been stretching out for almost three consecutive nights, I took the backups and latest versions from the SourceControl and preparing for the build.

Just noticed that my Lotus Notes ID file has mysteriously disappeared from my desktop. (!!) I had Domino Web Access to my mailbox though but my archives can not be browsed without the ID file. Is'nt it? Just searching experts-exchange and Google for some way of cracking into my mailbox, since I had a backup of my ID file there, but even entering it needed an ID. Deadlock, huh?

Luckily, one of my friend struck with an idea of using his ID file to enter the mailbox, open my NSF database, download the ID file and reopen the Notes with my ID file.The hilarious melodrama reached the climax after a bit of half-an-hour play.

[Imported from Blogdrive]An interesting date with Lotus Notes

An interesting date with Lotus NotesThe other day, I was staying through night in my office since the next day, I had some deliverable and left to home only at 4 AM. And I came back to my workplace back next day at 11 AM.
I was still feeling sleepy and groping with sleepiness in the eyes, since I had been stretching out for almost three consecutive nights, I took the backups and latest versions from the SourceControl and preparing for the build.
Just noticed that my Lotus Notes ID file has mysteriously disappeared from my desktop. (!!) I had Domino Web Access to my mailbox though but my archives can not be browsed without the ID file. Is'nt it?
Just searching experts-exchange and Google for some way of cracking into my mailbox, since I had a backup of my ID file there, but even entering it needed an ID. Deadlock, huh?
Luckily, one of my friend struck with an idea of using his ID file to enter the mailbox, open my NSF database, download the ID file and reopen the Notes with my ID file.
The hilarious melodrama reached the climax after a bit of half-an-hour play.
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        Posted at 03:22 pm by Deepak Kumar Vasudevan
 

 

 

 

  Original BlogDrive Post on Sunday, October 10, 2004

[Imported from Blogdrive]Page Moved

Page MovedThere seems to be some problem @provider end for europe.webmatrixhosting.net and hence my primary homepage has to shift its location again. Check out the new URL: http://vdeepakkumar.netfirms.com/ The migration is expected to be complete with a brand new set of features and look and feel, in&nbsp;the course of this week.&nbsp;As of now, I have just tried to make the website up, with minimal set of features.

Stay Tuned!!&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<!--
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        Posted at 06:26 pm by Deepak Kumar Vasudevan
 

 

 

 

  Original BlogDrive Post on Sunday, September 19, 2004

A Cool JavaScript Website

I was searching for some cool JavaScript Menu like Microsoft Outlook Bar and came across this website:  http://www.dynarch.com/mishoo/calendar.epl

This site is really cool. Check it out. It has a Cool JavaScript DHTML calendar widget with a real exhaustive list of datetime patterns, themes for the calendar, fast loading and appealing to the host application.The Navigation bar and Preference Setting for the website, is sure to enthrall the users and make them visit the website again and again. Add the website to your favorites and check it out...

[Imported from Blogdrive]"My World of .NET" WebLog"

"My World of .NET" -- WebLogFeel free to check out my other weblog -- http://blogs.wwwcoder.com/deepak/

Whilst http://deepak.blogdrive.com/ shares anything and everything I would like to share, the abovesaid URL restricts information sharing on .NET alone.

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        Posted at 02:56 pm by Deepak Kumar Vasudevan
 

 

 

 

  Original BlogDrive Post on Wednesday, September 15, 2004

[Imported from Blogdrive]A Cool JavaScript Website

A Cool JavaScript WebsiteI was searching for some cool JavaScript Menu like Microsoft Outlook Bar and came across this website:&nbsp; http://www.dynarch.com/mishoo/calendar.epl
This site is really cool. Check it out. It has a Cool JavaScript DHTML calendar widget with a real exhaustive list of datetime patterns, themes for the calendar, fast loading and appealing to the host application.
The Navigation bar and Preference Setting for the website, is sure to enthrall the users and make them visit the website again and again.

Add the website to your favorites and check it out...
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        Posted at 02:38 pm by Deepak Kumar Vasudevan
 

 

 

 

  Original BlogDrive Post on Wednesday, September 15, 2004

Launching Visual Studio .NET from within webbrowser

Having a quick reach link either as a favorite or LinksBar is the most simpler and user-friendly solution to any user connected to the  Internet nowadays. Searching has become a pleasure with Google Toolbar rather than typing http://www.google.com/ and searching. Is'nt it?

In the same way, just found out a small trick. You can have a shortcut to Visual Studio .NET from within your webbrowser. Type vs:/ and press Enter.

Your webbrowser will prompt you 'This requires launching of Microsoft Development Environment' and when you click OK to this prompt, Visual Studio .NET will openup. Just drag this link and drop on the LinksBar
and you can launch VS .NET from IE by clicking this link. 

Remote Scripting Support in JavaScript

There has been days while writing code in ASP and PHP when we wanted our dynamic JavaScript code to contact server and we used all tricks like hidden fields, hidden frames to contact server while maintaining 

interactivity of the page with the webuser. Just came across a nice component called Remote Scripting in
JavaScript, which helps us to meet this requirement. Check out some more about JSRS (JavaScript Remote Scripting) over here:

http://www.blueshoes.org/en/javascript/jsrs/

I am sure that this will be of immense use to the web development fraternity worldwide.

Nice Tree Navigation System

Of late, I had to develop a navigation system for a couple of applications and based on the analysis and study, we thought of going for a Tree-based navigation system, which would be quite user-friendly for the user. Whilst searching and analysing the various navigation systems, I found a couple of sites, which I would like to share the URLs with the web development fraternity, who may also be in search of site navigation systems:

http://www.treeview.net/
http://www.blueshoes.org/en/javascript/tree/ (A lot of trees with even checkboxes etc, besides the nodes)

Nice Tree Navigation System

Of late, I had to develop a navigation system for a couple of applications and based on the analysis and study, we thought of going for a Tree-based navigation system, which would be quite
user-friendly for the user. Whilst searching and analysing the various navigation systems, I found a couple of sites, which I would like to share the URLs with the web development fraternity, who may
also be in search of site navigation systems:


http://www.blueshoes.org/en/javascript/tree/ (A lot of trees with even checkboxes etc, besides the nodes)

[Imported from Blogdrive]Remote Scripting Support in JavaScript

Remote Scripting Support in JavaScript

There has been days while writing code in ASP and PHP when we wanted
our dynamic JavaScript code to contact server and we used all tricks
like hidden fields, hidden frames to contact server while maintaining
interactivity of the page with the webuser.

Just came across a nice component called Remote Scripting in
JavaScript, which helps us to meet this requirement. Check out some
more about JSRS (JavaScript Remote Scripting) over here:

http://www.blueshoes.org/en/javascript/jsrs/

I am sure that this will be of immense use to the web development
fraternity worldwide.

Deepak Kumar Vasudevan

-------------------------------------------------
This mail sent through Virus Free Email
http://www.vfemail.net
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        Posted at 08:19 pm by Deepak Kumar Vasudevan
 

 

web hosting February 24, 2012 &nbsp; 11:07 AM PST&nbsp;I get it clear idea about your topic.Each and every day i get it new information through this blog.

 

  Original BlogDrive Post on Friday, June 25, 2004

ADO.NET Database Access

Accessing the databases has not been that more easy than in a .NET framework environment. Perhaps to make this more elegant and maintainable to access any database, here is a nice DAL application, based on factory design patterns.

Check it out: http://www.gotdotnet.com/Community/Workspaces/viewUploads.aspx?id=c20d12b0-af52-402b-9b7c-aaeb21d1f431

[Imported from Blogdrive]Accessing databases in .NET -- A Generic DAL...

ADO.NET Database AccessAccessing the databases has not been that more easy than in a .NET framework environment. Perhaps to make this more elegant and maintainable to access any database, here is a nice DAL application, based on factory design patterns.

Check it out: http://www.gotdotnet.com/Community/Workspaces/viewUploads.aspx?id=c20d12b0-af52-402b-9b7c-aaeb21d1f431<!--
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        Posted at 07:06 pm by Deepak Kumar Vasudevan
 

 

 

 

  Original BlogDrive Post on Friday, April 30, 2004