tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-59881802009-07-02T13:20:03.710-07:00Random thoughts and notes for myself. Mainly on Windows, .NET & Java.Vishnu Varadarajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03021388439150345778noreply@blogger.comBlogger49125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5988180.post-40375597489940026702008-10-28T18:01:00.000-07:002008-10-29T09:48:43.886-07:00

Windows Azure - Microsoft's cloud platformMicrosoft doesn't seem to have changed it's strategy a little bit even though many have hailed this as a 180 degree turnaround. It is again copying what other startups and market creators have done (cloud computing, internet as a platform etc) and then executing on the plan so well that it is cheap(?), superior and accessible to everyone. At the same time

Vishnu Varadarajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03021388439150345778noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5988180.post-17698447635666692302008-09-18T12:12:00.000-07:002008-09-19T19:35:23.052-07:00

Thought Networking (from Primal Fusion)This may be unknown to anyone outside Waterloo, but yesterday a local startup (Primal Fusion) which was in stealth mode for over 3 years talked about what they are doing for the first time. It was interesting to watch the understated local hype since it was run by Yvan Couture, who had succesfully sold his startup to Agfa for a good profit and is also quite

Vishnu Varadarajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03021388439150345778noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5988180.post-78821574223469061652008-07-18T07:32:00.000-07:002008-07-18T07:36:59.399-07:00

Product quality - Dev & QA synergy.Quality is a problem which every software development team has to deal with.We have the usual bell curves etc which we use to gain confidence regarding overall stability before we ship.But, here are some observations based on the timelines of the curve & potential dev/qa synergy.There are some projects where many bugs are found after the 'code freeze'. This is a

Vishnu Varadarajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03021388439150345778noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5988180.post-91071830350383153622008-06-10T20:09:00.000-07:002008-06-10T20:20:04.273-07:00

mobileMe - Wow!The sleeper announcement at the Apple WWDC was probably mobileMe. It is what MSFT, GOOGL etc. would have loved to build. I had earlier blog entries indicating that I liked .mac & how synchronization is the key to merge the web & devices (eg. SharpCast). Microsoft tried it with LiveMesh but failed before it even took off.(To be fair, I never tried the service) The seamless

Vishnu Varadarajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03021388439150345778noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5988180.post-85474532454589712782008-04-14T20:06:00.000-07:002008-04-14T20:29:41.763-07:00

Google App Engine - First impressions* It is free, but with quotas. The business model is probably to get others to build apps so that Google can get users, searchable data & then eventually offer a business edition.* You don't have to worry about hosting, load balancing & scaling which is indeed huge since writing the web application is the easiest among all of the above.* The initial release is

Vishnu Varadarajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03021388439150345778noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5988180.post-54694289463665893272008-03-13T11:52:00.000-07:002008-03-13T11:55:24.139-07:00

iPhone SDK - First impressions.This is probably the most comprehensive SDK released for a mobile OS, even though Windows Mobile probably is similar. It must have been easy for Apple since most of the functionality was already in in Mac OS, throw in a different UI framework & a bunch of innovations on touch, acclerometer and location sensing you have the mobile SDK. RIM's blackberry SDK is many

Vishnu Varadarajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03021388439150345778noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5988180.post-60151450458789338952007-12-16T17:27:00.000-08:002007-12-16T17:34:53.260-08:00

Parallels vs VMWareJust a mental note to myself to keep off Parallels on Mac if I have a choice, it wasted almost my entire weekend since it had trouble after I upgraded the OS to Leopard & installed new parallels trial. XP image kept on crashing after a Windows update. Finally, I switched to VMWare and had to reinstall all OSes. Hopefully, it is just a problem with the trial copy, but I found

Vishnu Varadarajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03021388439150345778noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5988180.post-75217311714228076722007-10-09T15:58:00.000-07:002007-12-16T17:33:53.614-08:00

Ruby on RailsIt is hard to be excited over a new language nowadays, but recently I came across one which seemed to make web & database development fun again.I am referring to the combination of Ruby & Rails (RoR). This was a framework built for real world development problems rather than for 'building a framework' as per it's founder.It has several interesting features: 1. Lack of strong typing &

Vishnu Varadarajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03021388439150345778noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5988180.post-742526524900120332007-08-19T10:36:00.001-07:002007-08-19T11:11:48.148-07:00

The end of SOAP webservices.It is probably a bit early to say this, but SOAP webservices doesn't have a future.I had been a myopic fan of SOAP webservices and one of the early adopters of the technology in various implementations - .NET 1.0, axis, xfire, JAX-WS, BPEL, JSR 180 etc. It is a great example of how excitement about a new technology can blind your judgment.It failed the single most

Vishnu Varadarajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03021388439150345778noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5988180.post-57381781790566101362007-07-25T05:18:00.000-07:002007-07-25T05:34:56.191-07:00

Future of the web.The answer is right in front of you even if you don't see it already:The web started with simple HTML.Then came the dynamic web where content is dynamically generated for the users.Then came the wikis which enabled editable webs.Then web applications got more interactive with AJAX.The next level of interactivity is where applications execute and behave like Desktop

Vishnu Varadarajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03021388439150345778noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5988180.post-70033574881493800832007-04-28T07:58:00.003-07:002007-04-28T07:58:51.212-07:00

Sometimes you have to keep repeating a message so that everyone gets it, at the risk of sounding like a broken record. There was a quote in this month's Popular science which applies to  software world as I had been trying to say in earlier posts- "good engineers find solutions to hard problems that are complex and hard to understand, but great engineers find solutions to hard problems that are

Vishnu Varadarajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03021388439150345778noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5988180.post-3560812458967434212007-04-10T19:07:00.000-07:002007-04-10T19:09:56.322-07:00

ABCs of good designGood design and architecture has always been identified as a key requirement for a product to succeed in the long term.But how how can you measure the quality of a design or identify the recipe to come up with the best design always?These are not questions with easy answers, but help to illustrate the challenges in the area.There have been many approaches to improve the quality

Vishnu Varadarajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03021388439150345778noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5988180.post-28188947611369769902007-04-04T13:52:00.001-07:002007-04-04T14:06:36.635-07:00

I have always been a Windows admirer, but a newly converted Mac fan, so it is probably time to see the OS world in a more 'objective' way! Today Linux It is great as a server - controlled environment and free software without support works just fine. It is not a good home machine OS - at least not yet for the typical person who need driver support for his peripherals and who needs to run PC

Vishnu Varadarajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03021388439150345778noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5988180.post-82226189911963938592007-03-11T17:59:00.001-07:002007-03-21T17:27:22.117-07:00

These should be obvious to anyone who has developed a real software product before. But, recently I had talked to a few people who were working on their first large scale projects on their own but were making some basic mistakes without realizing it. 1. If you are developing a new product or technology, prototyping and research is a must. Agile development methodologies are good, but for a large

Vishnu Varadarajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03021388439150345778noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5988180.post-48666156257933430942007-02-10T06:34:00.000-08:002007-02-10T06:58:03.907-08:00

Story of a website being hackedHosting a website at home is one thing, but hosting one on the live internet is a whole different ballgame. Yesterday, I decided to expose one of my Xen virtual machines at home to the internet just to see if it works. I wasn't expecting to be hacked in less than an hour though with just 2 ports open. It brought down my jboss server(did a security no-no by running

Vishnu Varadarajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03021388439150345778noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5988180.post-43189376950475587992007-01-07T09:58:00.000-08:002007-01-07T10:10:55.462-08:00

Customers & managing complexityThe only reason you should ever be solving a complex problem is if it makes your customer's life so much more simpler. But again, all complexity can be put into this category, so think twice before you do that!

Vishnu Varadarajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03021388439150345778noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5988180.post-69809838290487111672006-12-06T12:47:00.000-08:002006-12-06T12:48:11.608-08:00

Finding the simpler problems to solve and focusing on the right things.This is one of those common sense things where most big corporations and even many smart people go wrong. It is not good enough if you found a tough problem and then solved it. Many smart people often fall in this trap because they love solving tough problems.It is more important to find the simpler problem and then solve it.

Vishnu Varadarajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03021388439150345778noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5988180.post-77656100635568801432006-11-19T13:31:00.000-08:002006-11-19T14:13:44.416-08:00

Web 2.0 companiesSigned for accounts at some of the promising Web 2.0 startups, Omnidrive looked useful and had rave reviews. Unfortunately, it seems to have starting troubles. This weekend I tried to drag and drop my photos over and it failed without copying even one file after some kind of wierd xml error message. Moreover, it always keep complaining about not being able to contact the server.

Vishnu Varadarajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03021388439150345778noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5988180.post-1158633281680454472006-09-18T19:30:00.000-07:002006-09-19T17:03:08.696-07:00

Ruby on RailsThe good - quick and easy way to develop a basic db application, esp with InstantRails.The bad - No i10n, no EJB, UI code looks a bit like ASP 1.0 after a while.Grails - has EJB support using Groovy, screenshots looked good. But, the .x download didn't match tutorial onsite and hence probably won't be ready for a while.

Vishnu Varadarajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03021388439150345778noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5988180.post-1158343107668319252006-09-15T10:56:00.000-07:002006-09-19T17:05:02.266-07:00

These links matter if you are serious about Java/J2EE.Jvmstat is pretty cool, but similar to some of the excellent tools which was already available in .NET world.http://wiki.jboss.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=JBossASTuningSliminghttp://java.sun.com/performance/jvmstat/

Vishnu Varadarajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03021388439150345778noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5988180.post-1158073540279128262006-09-12T08:04:00.000-07:002006-09-12T11:04:29.593-07:00

Predicting the future...Writing some personal thoughts on what happens after 5 years, so that I can check back later! - .NET has more penetration, still everyone hasn't switched to Vista/.NET 3.0. But WPF/E is getting popular, even though Flash is still strong due to better cross platform support.- Java/J2EE is for server side development, as a way to reduce costs in distributed server farms

Vishnu Varadarajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03021388439150345778noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5988180.post-1152557209832241112006-07-10T11:46:00.000-07:002006-07-21T03:43:21.666-07:00

Troubleshooting memory issues.If private bytes continue to grow without leveling off, then you probably have a private bytes leak.If private bytes levels off while while virtual bytes continue to grow then you probably have a virtual memory leak or fragmentation.If the committed bytes counter follows the virtual bytes counter, then you probably have a virtual bytes leak.If the virtual bytes grow

Vishnu Varadarajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03021388439150345778noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5988180.post-1150987568102201782006-06-22T07:43:00.000-07:002006-06-22T07:46:08.120-07:00

Creating a symbol server1. Share out a folder eg. \\mymachine\symbols2. symstore add /r /f [path-to-symbols] /s \\mymachine\symbols /t "[app-name]" /v "[version]"Replace [path-to-symbols], [app-name] & [version] as appropriate.

Vishnu Varadarajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03021388439150345778noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5988180.post-1150853280942808692006-06-20T18:22:00.000-07:002006-06-20T18:28:54.346-07:00

Linux or WindowsJust reminding myself again that I should not install Linux in my home machines. HP PSC 1510 - linux drivers are present but I was forced to do a source compile.Macromedia or Adobe design tools doesn't work.Cannot download pictures from my Canon powershot. Again, these may be present somewhere in some form. I am just not a Linux fanatic to work harder to use things I paid for.But,

Vishnu Varadarajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03021388439150345778noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5988180.post-1150851369301832582006-06-20T17:51:00.000-07:002006-06-20T18:00:22.046-07:00

More RPC debugging tips without special configuration.!rpcexts.thread & !rpcexts.obj - debug stuck rpc calls.!rpcexts.stubmsg & !rpcexts.rpcmsg - stack based debugging.I believe this is the only way to debug in Win2k since built-in rpc debug support is present only in XP or above. No time to blog all the details of using them, maybe later when I have more time.

Vishnu Varadarajhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03021388439150345778noreply@blogger.com0