நேற்று இரவு ஒரு டின்னரை முடித்துவிட்டு, நானும் எனது விருந்தாளியும் காரில் ராதாகிருஷ்ணன் சாலையில் வந்துக் கொண்டிருந்தோம். மணி  சுமார், 11:30pm இருக்கும், நான் தான் ஒட்டுனர். சாலை குறுக்கே பல காவல்துறையினர், வரும் ஒவ்வொரு காரையும் நிறுத்தி சோதனை செய்துக்கொண்டிருந்தனர். எனது காரை நிறுத்திய ஒரு காவலர், மிகப் பவ்வியமாக "சார், கோவிச்சுக்காதிங்க வாய கொஞ்சம் ஊதரிங்களா?". அவர் கேட்டவிதம் எனக்கு அச்சரியம், சென்னை காவலர இவர்!.

கதையை தொடர, ஊதினேன், "ஒன்றுமில்லை, போலாம் சார்" என்று என் காரை அனுப்பிவைத்தார். 

Recently I came across The World Fact Book, this is a US Government's CIA website that provides comprehensive information of all countries - their geography, history, economy, people, culture, concerns and more.  Unlike the popular belief, seeing this site you will get convinced that US Government is well informed about rest of the world!.

Two sites I normally turn to for Encyclopedic content - the first is MSN's Encarta and the other is free Wikipedia. Wikipedia even has a Tamil Encyclopedia (if you notice even this URL has a Tamil folder name!)

In my last post, I mentioned that I am using Sauce Reader to do my postings. Though I managed to do text only posts, I am having problems with posts that include images. Sauce Reader supports two image upload options - MetaWebLog API and FTP. MetaWebLog is not supported in dasBlog 1.7.x and for some reasons (which I am yet to figure out), my FTP server refuses to get connected from Sauce Reader or even from IE. My FTP server gets connected only from GlobalScape CuteFTP, even though the FTP server is Windows Server 2003/IIS.

While using Sauce Reader I noticed that its UI looks sharp and clean; curious on the 3rd Party controls they could be using I went into the "C:\Program Files\Synop\Sauce Reader" folder and I noticed they used a handful of third-party components (a combination of free/commercial). I found the list of components impressive, so giving them below:

1.  .NETXP  - This is a set of free packages that include lots of Windows XP like controls, Alerts, Reusable forms, Wizards, FTP Client, MSN Messenger/Outlook style alerts and more. Check it out. [Free & Commercial]
2. .NET Components from Chilkat - Seeing their website this company seems to make lot of email, HTML related components for .NET & ActiveX. [Commercial]
3. XML-RPC.NET from Cook Computing. [Free]
4. esellerate - A Software commerce Provider. [Commercial]
5. NET Html Agility Pack from Simon Mourier - An agile HTML parser that builds a read/write DOM and supports plain XPATH or XSLT [Free]
6. SharpZipLib - A Zip, GZip, Tar and BZip2 library written in .NET. [Free]
7. Infragistics Windows UI Development Tools [Commercial]
8. Apache log4net - A tool to help the programmer output log statements to a variety of output targets. [Free]
9. Lucene.net  - Lucene.Net is a byte-to-byte port to .NET of Jakarta Lucene a high-performance, full-featured text search engine library written entirely in Java. Now it is commercially available as Search Black Box.  [Free & Commercial]
10. NetSpell SpellChecker  - A free .net Spell Checker. [Free]
11. Microsoft Application Block [Free]

Since I do little printing on paper and I have a variety of printers available in my office, I have so far resisted the idea (mine and my wife's) of buying a printer for my Home PC. Though my Home PC is fully loaded (P4 HT, 1GB RAM, 180GB x 2, DVD-RW, CD-RW, TV Tuner, 17" LCD, DSL, FireWire, USB) , till now I only had a scanner for emergency scan and email.

This week, when I wanted to scan and email an important document, the scanner decided to die. Frustrated, the next day as soon as I went into to office, I ordered for a top of the art, HP All-in-One Home device. Yesterday, the vendor delivered HP PhotoSmart 2608, which is a Colour Photo Printer (meaning it can print photos on special paper), Scanner, Fax & Copier. It includes a LCD Display for settings and Photo viewing, USB & Ethernet Interface & multiple memory card slot readers. In Chennai it costs Rs.14,600/-. I installed it today morning and so far happy with the print and scan quality.

Previously whenever I got to install any new device on my home PC (my Systems guys don't let me do it in the office ), I go straight ripping the package, connecting the power, installing the software and after few hours, turn to the manual. Today, I decided to act wise, I first read everything in the box, including the instructions on how to open the box and remove the printer. Then once I found the setup instructions, I went through it religiously one-by-one, all the way through the 20 odd steps and got the printer installed. It turned out to be good idea, as without the proper steps, this could have taken me hours to figure out. 

The first time the software installation failed with some crazy MSI error. It offered to uninstall and reboot. I did that and reinstalled the software, everything went fine this time. During the software installation I noticed two things, that it required Microsoft .NET Framework (and installs it, if it doesn't find one) and it took more than 30 minutes to complete it (probably on my machine, Windows XP itself doesn't take this long). When I say 30 minutes on installation, I meant purely the file copy/settings time it took and it doesn't include the waiting for user-response time or detecting the printer, etc. Definitely a long time...

I have been using Sharp Reader for reading all my subscriptions and  using the Web UI of dasBlog to do my postings. Though I love Sharp Reader for its simplicity, lately I was feeling down because an update for it is long overdue.

Anyways, after trying out Newsgator, FeedDaemon and others now I am using Sauce Reader. I like the neat Interface, especially the clear, legible fonts (I guess enhanced by Clear Type). I will likely stick with this, will keep posted on how my trial goes.

This posting is posted from the WebLog feature of Sauce Reader - hope it comes out clean.

I don't believe this - that I am writing a blog entry about working in vanilla "ASP" (Active Server Pages).

Anyways, last week on an existing website, we had to do a new ASP page that reads an XML from a URL, and display it. While doing it, should cache the XML file, so that for every incoming web request, the page doesn't do an outbound XML file web request. Basic idea was to act as a kind of a reverse proxy (or caching web server) to prevent the full load from reaching the other webserver which had the XML file.

Doing this in ASP.NET is a simple matter of enabling page caching, but doing it in ASP required pulling off few tricks from my old ASP hat. The code I wrote to do is a generic implementation that used ASP Application Object and VBScript DateDiff time comparison method. You can download the full code from here.

A situation we had in a recent project (Windows Application) was to take some actions based on whether we had an Internet Connection or not. Though it sounds very simple, there is no straight forward way to determine this. This because you can be connected by numerous methods - Internet via LAN/Wireless or Modem/Dialup or thru' IR/Bluetooth, etc.

Couple of years back, when we were building a Cricket Score Alert Application in VB 6.0, we used to download a very small file via HTTP, and if succeeded we concluded that the Internet Connection was present. This time, I wanted the solution in VB.NET and expected to find a better solution. After several Internet searches, I came across this article (KB Article: 821770), which talks about WinInet DLL. Though this WinInet function gives you good information on the type of Network Connection (LAN or Dialup, etc.), it doesn't still say for sure you have an active Internet connection.

Instead of calling WinInet through Interop from VB.NET, I would have loved to see a native function in .NET Framework BCL - Framework folks, are you listening?.

You can download the code snippet here, for using the "InternetGetConnectedState" WinInet Function.