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

SharpReader

SharpReader is an RSS/Atom Aggregator for Windows, created by Luke Hutteman. It has great features ..check it out..

Main features
Handles all RSS versions, ATOM 0.3 and 1.0, modules like dublin core, content:encoding, xhtml:body, etc.
Advanced threading support allowing you to view connected items together in a threaded fashion. SharpReader detects and shows connections between items if they have same link, if one item links to another, if two items both link to the same external webpage, or if an item has comments (for feeds supporting the standard).
Group subscribed feeds into custom categories.
Feed settings like refresh-rate and purge timeout can be set per feed or per category. Category-wide settings apply to all feeds in that category that are still set to "Default" for the setting in question.
Dialog-less way of subscribing to new feeds - just drag a link from your browser into SharpReader, or enter the url into the address-bar at the top.
Feedster integration to easily search weblogs and newssites for specific terms, and even subscribe to such a search to be notified of new results.
Support for proxy-servers and proxy authentication.
Reduces bandwidth by using HTTP Conditional GETs and gzip/deflate encoding.
Minimizes to the system-tray.
Systray popup when new items arrive (can be disabled on a per-feed or per-category basis through the properties pane).
Easy keyboard navigation to go the next or previous unread item.
Import and export your subscriptions using OPML.
Filter items.
International Character-set support.
HTTP Authentication support.

http://www.sharpreader.net/

VS 2008 Multi-Targeting Support

Earlier this month at TechEd we announced the official name of Visual Studio "Orcas" - which will be called Visual Studio 2008. We also said that the official name for the .NET Framework "Orcas" release will be called .NET Framework 3.5 (it includes the new LINQ support, integrated ASP.NET AJAX support, new ASP.NET data controls, and more).
VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 Beta 2 will ship later this summer, and the Beta 2 release will support a go-live license for those who want to put applications into production using the new features immediately.
What is Multi-Targeting?
With the past few releases of Visual Studio, each Visual Studio release only supported a specific version of the .NET Framework. For example, VS 2002 only worked with .NET 1.0, VS 2003 only worked with .NET 1.1, and VS 2005 only worked with .NET 2.0.
One of the big changes we are making starting with the VS 2008 release is to support what we call "Multi-Targeting" - which means that Visual Studio will now support targeting multiple versions of the .NET Framework, and developers will be able to start taking advantage of the new features Visual Studio provides without having to always upgrade their existing projects and deployed applications to use a new version of the .NET Framework library.
Now when you open an existing project or create a new one with VS 2008, you can pick which version of the .NET Framework to work with - and the IDE will update its compilers and feature-set to match this. Among other things, this means that features, controls, projects, item-templates, and assembly references that don't work with that version of the framework will be hidden, and when you build your application you'll be able to take the compiled output and copy it onto a machine that only has an older version of the .NET Framework installed, and you'll know that the application will work.

Ref: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/06/20/vs-2008-multi-targeting-support.aspx

Performance Rules from Microsoft FxCop 1.35

Performance Rules from Microsoft FxCop 1.35

Following are some of the rules from fxcop to identify performance related issues in your modules.

1. Avoid costly calls where possible
2. Avoid calls that require unboxing
3. Avoid excessive locals
4. Avoid uncalled private code
5. Avoid uninstantiated internal classes
6. Avoid unnecessary string creation
7. Avoid unsealed attributes
8. Avoid unused parameters
9. Dispose methods should call SuppressFinalize
10. Do not call properties that clone values in loops
11. Do not cast unnecessarily
12. Do not concatenate strings inside loops
13. Do not ignore method results
14. Do not initialize unnecessarily
15. Initialize reference type static fields inline
16. Override equals and operator equals on value types
17. Prefer jagged arrays over multidimensional
18. Properties should not return arrays
19. Remove empty finalizers
20. Remove unused locals
21. Test for empty strings using string length
22. Use literals where appropriate

MS FxCop can be used to identify your application performance related problems with the above rules from its rule engine.

The description and sample code of each rule is available in FxCop documentation.

Performance Optimization - Explicitly Dispose or Close all the resources

Explicitly Dispose or Close all the resources: To guarantee resources are cleaned up when an exception occurs, use a try/finally block. Close the resources in the finally clause. Using a try/finally block ensures that resources are disposed even if an exception occurs. Open your connection just before needing it, and close it as soon as you're done with it. Your motto should always be "get in, get/save data, get out." If you use different objects, make sure you call the Dispose method of the object or the Close method if one is provided. Failing to call Close or Dispose prolongs the life of the object in memory long after the client stops using it. This defers the cleanup and can contribute to memory pressure. Database connection and files are examples of shared resources that should be explicitly closed.

Ref : http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/ASPNET_Best_Practices.asp