Tools I recommend for your productivity

ToDoList A great To do List organizer..
SlickRun Good shortcut commands..
Freemind

Other Usefel Tools
CCleaner

Will update more soon in detail.....

Intuition is the best guide - C L Talmadge

A woman we will call Lynn was at her wit’s end. Her business was failing, she owed a huge sum of money that she did not have, and her long-term partner had just ended their relationship. In the small hours one morning she hit bottom, in a crisis of despair.
“There has to be something more,” she said out loud, even though no one was in the room with her.
“Are you asking?” a voice said clearly, outside of her head. She was too stunned to respond.
“Are you asking?” the voice repeated in an even more urgent tone.
“I guess I am,” she answered, and from that moment on Lynn knew she was not alone in this world. She had just met one of her angels, also known as guides.
Even though at times we may feel isolated and bereft, none of us comes into this world entirely on our own. We always have help and friendship right by our sides in the form of loving, invisible mentors who want nothing more than to play an active role in supporting us before, during, and even after our physical sojourns on earth.
All we need do is ask for their help — and then be ready and open to receive their guidance. In the days following that dramatic encounter, Lynn learned much about guides in general and her angels in particular. As vibrating eternal essences (also known as souls or spirits), we choose to experience each physical lifetime. We usually have a purpose for the life we have selected. Such purpose is general, such as teaching, healing, inspiring, creating, and so forth.
Our life purpose attracts to us other spirits who want to share that purpose but do not necessarily desire to do so in a physical body. We then select a group of souls to help us along the way. Often we make our choices based on the fact that we know these spirits already from other physical lifetimes on earth (or elsewhere). We trust these beings and they trust us. Sometimes we include souls who have a particular expertise that we believe will be especially helpful to us or because we just want to try something new while on earth.
Then we arrive in our physical bodies. As very young children, we interact with our spirit friends as the invisible companions we play with and who comfort us. Well-meaning adults, however, inform us that these friends are “not real”. We start to distrust our intuitive senses, the means by which we communicate with our angels, and eventually give up our angels so that we may “grow up” and become “well adjusted”.
Our angels remain with us anyway, sending us their love and guidance, hoping to reconnect in a more direct manner. In times of crisis, we call out for help, and they provide it to the extent we will allow ourselves to receive it. The voice Lynn heard was an angel.
Angels/guides have different functions on our behalf. Lynn’s angel will guide her spiritual growth, focused on her spiritual well-being. Another role for a guide is that of protector. In our world full of cars, buses, trains, planes, boats and other forms of mechanised travel, protectors put in plenty of overtime paying attention when we are distracted.
Many guides take on the function of jokester. Humour is the easiest and best way to tune into our own heart’s wisdom, so helping us find and appreciate the hilarity and absurdity in life also helps us keep our spiritual connection alive and healthy. Guides are also healers, teachers, legal experts, even business consultants. One of Lynn’s guides is a handyman who invariably astonishes his physical counterparts, who cannot understand why Lynn is able to tell them the actual mechanical problem even before they inspect the broken machine.
Angels or guides present themselves to us usually in a form we can relate to--human — but some guides have shown themselves as comic book figures, like Wonder Woman or Rocky and Bullwinkle, if that’s what helps us to connect with them. The forms and names they take on are simply a matter of making them, their love, and their guidance readily available to us by matching our needs and expectations.
Is it possible to for all of us to meet our guides, up close and personal? Yes, provided we are willing to relearn how to trust our intuition. Since guides/angels do not have physical bodies, we cannot sit down with them for a cup of coffee and a chat. We need our intuition — our hunches, gut feelings, visions, and inner hearing — to be able to receive their messages and send ours in return.
The next step is taking the time and space to get to know our angels via a meet-your-guides meditation, which we can do on our own or with help if needed. The energy and effort we put into getting reacquainted with our angels will come back to us many times over in the form of increased feelings of love, acceptance, safety, and well-being.
(Talmadge is the author of the Green Stone of Healing)

Ref: Sunday Times of India, Aug 24, 2008

New York City

Statue of Liberty, Broklyn, Times Square, New York always fascinated me...

Ref:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City

Power of subtitles

Girirajsingh Natubha studied up to Class 2 in Jamnagar. All his life he struggled to read simple words. A few years ago, however, he found to his surprise that he had begun to read. It happened quite amazingly after he began watching Chitrageet, a Gujarati television programme of film songs, which had subtitles at the bottom of the screen. Since he knew many of the songs, he could anticipate the next word. When it appeared he would read it unconsciously and sing along, karaoke style. Soon he found he was able to recognise words in the bazaar and before long he was reading headlines in the newspaper.
A brainchild of Dr Brij Kothari, a social entrepreneur and an IIM Ahmedabad professor, ‘Same Language Subtitling’ is a simple but powerful idea which is proven to improve literacy among adults and children. When lyrics are subtitled on film songs, and words appear in sync with the actor’s voice, the viewer makes a sub-conscious link of the spoken to the written word. Literacy, thus, takes a sudden leap for early and struggling readers. Based on his powerful academic findings, Kothari decided to become a social entrepreneur and help raise India’s literacy. Between 1997 and 2002, he made countless attempts to persuade Doordarshan to allow him to subtitle film songs on TV. Each time he was thrown out of their offices. In 1999, a new director at the Ahmedabad Kendra agreed to experiment with subtitles on four episodes of the Gujarati programme, Chitrageet. It created such a sensation that they had to continue it for a year.
The breakthrough, however, came in 2002 when a new director general of Doordarshan, S Y Quraishi, overrode the objections of his entire risk-averse staff and allowed Kothari to subtitle their hugely popular national programme, Chitrahaar. It happened soon after he won the $250,000 global innovation prize from the World Bank, which he used to pay for the cost of subtitling. For the past five years, every Sunday morning, 15 crore persons have watched Chitrahaar and Rangoli with subtitles. A Nielsen-ORG study, conducted in 2002 and 2007 to assess the impact of subtitling, showed that only 25% school children could read a simple paragraph in Hindi after five years of schooling. However, this jumped to 56% if they were also exposed to subtitling for 30 minutes a week on Rangoli. Equally dramatic results were found among adults.
Despite this success, however, a Damocles’ sword hangs over Kothari’s head. Unless Prasar Bharati takes a policy decision, subtitling will depend on the whims of each CEO, although the last two have been supportive. Moreover, the Department of School Education and Literacy ought to fund subtitling rather than Kothari having to go with a begging bowl each year to raise funds. It costs a pittance (one paise per person per week) compared to the rewards of giving lifelong reading practice to 15 crore early literate persons every week. Since subtitling also raises the ratings of the programme by 10-15%, i’m surprised private channels have not jumped into this game, including children’s cartoon channels.
You’d think that the best way to bring about change in a democracy is through politics. But when our political class is callous, unreliable and venal, you have to depend on individuals. India has always had our spiritual entrepreneurs, the most famous being the Buddha. In recent years we have seen the flowering of business entrepreneurs, making India one of the world’s most dynamic economies. Now, we have also begun to produce social entrepreneurs like Brij Kothari who are making a difference. Hence, India is rising not because of its political leaders but despite them.

Source : MEN AND IDEAS - GURCHARAN DAS - Sunday Times of Inda

Upgrading VB 6.0 applications to .NET

This post provides an overview for Upgrading VB 6.0 application to .NET

Visual Basic .NET represents a major shift from previous versions of Visual Basic. Because it was designed from the ground up to take advantage of the .NET Platform, there are many areas where compatibility with previous versions is broken.

Things to Consider Before Upgrading

Some of the factors in deciding to upgrade an application include features that aren't supported in Visual Basic 2005, and the amount of rework needed due to incompatibility and architectural considerations. more...

The following book is quite helpfull in
Upgrading Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 to Microsoft Visual Basic .NET


I will be updating this post with some more details over a period of time..

Ref:
Upgrading VB6 Projects to VB.NET

.NET Framework Library Source Code now available

.NET Framework Library Source Code is now available for everyone to use. Specifically, you can now browse and debug the source code for the following .NET Framework libraries:

.NET Base Class Libraries (including System, System.CodeDom, System.Collections, System.ComponentModel, System.Diagnostics, System.Drawing, System.Globalization, System.IO, System.Net, System.Reflection, System.Runtime, System.Security, System.Text, System.Threading, etc).

ASP.NET (System.Web, System.Web.Extensions)

Windows Forms (System.Windows.Forms)

Windows Presentation Foundation (System.Windows)

ADO.NET and XML (System.Data and System.Xml)

For more information please refer here

AxSys

This is about AxSys a Healthcare product development company. I was associated with it for a while and very much impressed with there innovative products.

AxSys Technology Ltd. was founded by its two directors Drs Pradeep and Anjali Ramayya in 1997 and is based at Glasgow, Scotland. The focus at AxSys Technology is to exploit Information and Communications Technology (ICT) to improve the delivery of healthcare. All AxSys solutions are patient-centric and are designed with a clinical perspective to directly benefit patients and healthcare providers.

AxSys has developed Excelicare, an application for collaborative care of patients. A friendly and functionally rich electronic patient record, forms the basic platform to which a variety of modules, including telemedicine technologies, can be added, allowing the system to grow with increasing user requirements.

Entirely standards based, Excelicare utilises industry-standards PC, networking and telecommunications technologies, runs exclusively on the universally accepted and user friendly Microsoft Windows operating systems, and is based on the scalable and industry standard Microsoft SQL Server database to facilitate uniform data storage and an easy upgrade path.

For more information check AxSys

I feared

I feared being alone Until I learned to likeMyself.
I feared failure Until I realized that I only Fail when I don't try.
I feared success Until I realizedThat I had to tryIn order to be happyWith myself.
I feared people's opinions Until I learned that People would have opinionsAbout me anyway.
I feared rejection Until I learned toHave faith in myself.
I feared pain Until I learned thatit's necessary For growth.
I feared the truth Until I saw theUgliness in lies.
I feared life Until I experiencedIts beauty .
I feared death Until I realized that it'sNot an end, but a beginning.
I feared my destiny,Until I realized that I had the power to changeMy life.
I feared hate Until I saw that itWas nothing more thanIgnorance.
I feared love,Until it touched my heart, Making the darkness fade Into endless sunny days.
I feared ridicule Until I learned how To laugh at myself.
I feared growing old Until I realized that I gained wisdom every day.
I feared the future Until I realized that Life just kept getting Better.
I feared the past Until I realized that It could no longer hurt me.
I feared the dark Until I saw the beauty Of the starlight.
I feared the light Until I learned that the Truth would give me Strength.
I feared change, Until I saw that Even the most beautiful butterfly Had to undergo a metamorphosis Before it could fly.

Pro ASP.NET 2.0 E-Commerce in C# 2005

Pro ASP.NET 2.0 E-Commerce in C# 2005 is great book with sample project I came across recently.

In this book, author uses a real-world example to demonstrate how to construct a multitiered ASP.NET application that allows a business to sell its merchandise online. Using this real-world,case-study approach, the discussion will start with gathering the requirements. Then the goes into designing and modeling the database, building the architecture, completing the code base, and finally compiling and deploying the production environment.

By following the case study in this book, you will be able to use the skills you’ve learned to expand a company’s customer base and sell products online, thus increasing the company’s profitability.

If you are developer who have experience building ASP.NET applicationsm, working with object-oriented principles and multitiered architectures this is book is for you.

This book is structured in a unique way compared to many of the other books you’ll find on the shelves. Specifically, it covers the business-related issues of e-commerce in addition to covering the technological aspects.

The discussion will begin with an introduction of the fictitious company used for the casestudy; then the author will cover gathering the requirements, modeling the application, designing the database,establishing the architecture, coding the functionality, and finally deploying to the productionenvironment.

Ref: http://www.apress.com/book/view/1590597249