Google the Skynet in making

Alright, skynet is a wee bit old. Lets say Matrix in making.I started thinking about it (finally) when I heard that Google was doing away with local storage and promoting cloud only storage for their new OS Chrome OS!Now, for those who woke up after a late night slosh fest, Google has announced a spanking new OS (well its actually a smartly repackaged Ubuntu) that has only the browser for an interface. Blazing fast, highly interactive and the other usual Googly stuff.Now, coming back to the case in point. Cloud storage. I just...

ChromeFrame Offline Install

I had a tough time installing Chromeframe behind my proxy as downloading exes were banned. Even if you managed to get the 500kb setup, it again tries to download another installer. So, i pulled some favours and managed to work through the firewall restrictions and fiddle the URL.Here is a link that allows you to get the offline installerhttp://tiny.cc/chromefrm_offl...

Trapped with Internet Explorer 6.

Working on a product for three long years building a web2.0 software with all the bells and whistles that an any sane human would care for is taking its toll on me.With so many browsers IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera its quite an ask to just ensure everything works the way it should on all platforms!Now, after all the efforts we connect to our customers to roll the new platform out. We demo the product and they like it all and looks like the only thing to do was sign the contract and cash the cheque.When things could not...

Multicasting in c#

This has been one topic that had me going around in circles for quite some time. Not that it was difficult to find sources that helped me. But it was the sheer difference in approaches that really frustrated me.I'm writing this hoping that it saves someone a lot of head ache when they try multicasting. I'm going to refrain from explaining what is multicasting et al. There are excellent resources available on the internet...

Designs for making your searches faster - Part 5

In the previous parts we looked at different ways of speeding up application based transaction searches. In this part we will look at pushing the boundaries to an extreme limit without compromising on application data integrity through use of search engines.Search EnginesSearch engines are different types. The ones we all are familiar with, the internet search engines scour the web for data and catalog them to help us...

Designs for making your searches faster - Part 4

Let us quickly recap the earlier part.We looked at improving the performance throughput through use of an efficient caching solution. Then we further helped efficient cache management through indexed and segmented caching to strike a good balance between page size selection and cache access.this part we will look at pushing the performance envelope further. When users run searches their focus is on fast and accurate...

Designs for making your searches faster - Part 3

In this part, we will look for an improvised solution for the problem we have been discussing. That is making enterprise transaction searches faster.Caching Search ResultsOne of the weakest links in the earlier solution was that we had to query the database each time the user hits 'next' or 'previous' in the search results. This cost performance dearly and also system resources.Now, if we could cache the search results...

Designs for making your searches faster - Part 2

In this part we will look at a few basic solutions that can be considered. Before we dive into the solution, let us quickly put together a design considerations chart that we can use for compliance verificationConsiderationComplianceSearch must be fastSearch must be accurateSearch must use minimal system resourcesSearch must avoid redundant queriesSearch must provide current dataPagination must be fastMust facilitate...

Designs for making your searches faster - Covering the basics - Part 1

Search is a universal requirement for any web application. Be it a simple collaboration portal or a complex trading system, searches are the most frequently used feature of any application.Searches can generally be categorized into types at a high level,Simple one box search that searches everything for the content you are looking forFocused searches that help you seek a single entry from a large data repository.There...

Iterative development

A team in my workplace been working on a, sorry, struggling with a product development initiative for the last three years now.They have been doing iterative development on a fixed bid assignment for a product development initiative with no well defined scope. I know you must be thinking this is the perfect recipe for disaster.Well, here is what i found out that is wrong with the way they were doing this.Iterative development has been taken way too seriously. Everything from requirements is being iterated. Before you start thinking...