Pavan Gayakwad

At-least for me, configuring MySQL zip archive on server by reading MySQL team's unfriendly, multi-navigational  document  has been quite a challenging task. Here is my simplified version: Download mysql noninstall zip from here:  http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/ Extract do C:\mysql folder Under c:\mysql folder you will find my-default.ini file, make a copy of it and rename it to my.ini Open my.ini in notepad, You will find basedir and datadir as commented statements, just uncomment them (by removing # from the starting position of each line) and do the changes shown below basedir = c:\\mysql #installatin directory datadir = c:\\data   #data directory, it can be in some other drive too! Open cmd.exe as administrator and type below commands one after the other Go to bin folder where mysqld.exe file is present cd c:\mysql\bin Below command will initialize the data directory, by reading my.ini file (in our case its in c:\mysql folder) ...

Please note, Below mentioned hosting providers are reputed organizations with well established infrastructure. This post is for your information and only intended to keep you informed about their 'policies' that turn evil when you have cut throat challenges. Hostgator We heard a lot about Hostgator and we registered one of our customers website with them without giving a second thought. Few months later, during our support phase on our customer's website, we encountered Hostgator feature and support challenges which I think not many experience unless they do some hardcore technical activities with their website. Many said hostgator has good support track. For us it was always waiting for 20 or more minutes to connect Hostgator support executive for online chat. This can be excused if it is ones in a while, but that was not the case for us. If you are running an e-commerce kind of website or offering online services every minute, then 20 minutes wait time feels ...

When an educator start searching for question paper generation software, he/she will find plenty products claiming they are the best in automating paper setting and generation process. As the number of similar type of software is more, complexity to settle down to one product increases. Let me put some helping points to simplify software selection process.  Software price tag is bit more expensive than your planned budget   -   but wait!   Many of us feel that software price is fixed and not negotiable, In-fact, some companies do offer discounts if they are selling product under promotion period . so make sure you check with them regarding the discount. It's a customer right to negotiate, nothing bad about it! You checked features list, all competing software has all-most all features! Which one to pick for analysis?   - Really, this is a puzzled situation. In that case, Look for the product screen shots or ask for a demo. Take a scenario, such as, how...

When it comes to programming, I noticed most of the super programmers share similar attitude and thought process. I started identifying similarities whenever I took interviews. After meeting 3000+  potential candidates (thanks to all my previous companies choosing me as interviewer), I dared to have a quick points to spot a 'Super Programmer' from the pool of programmers. When I shared these points with my colleagues, they found it useful during their interviews. Please note These points are strictly valid for 'Rock Star Programmers' only. If you apply these observations to a good programmer, you may loose him.  I always don't follow these points very strictly in interviews as there will be many other aspects to consider, However these can just be used as indicative pointers if you feel good.  So here it goes, They may be little nervous in the beginning. When you ask them about their interesting project, their eyes glow and for a moment they...

If you want to design a webpage with stylish font. There are few important things to consider before using graphical text images. If you prefer search engines bring traffic to your web page, it has to be  Search engine friendly , as of  now crawling engine ignore text written in images. (BTW, can search engines improve to extract text from image and index? like  Quick Quest  does ;) The font should be rendered and displayed consistent across multiple browsers . When viewed through mobile browser, it should wrap (as normal text do) to fit the small screen. Its now old fashion to choose the most common font (either Times New Roman or Arial, that are for sure exist in users computer) and design the page accordingly to stay safe. Things have changed, so the approaches. To respect above points, HTML font embedding became essential need to design impressive web page ( SrushtiSoft.com  home page is using font embedding. Its live now!). Bac...

Are you planning to create long running background process (in C#) and thinking to build a Windows service? Then wait for a moment! Windows Task scheduler (Start->Programs->Accessories-> System Tools-> Task Scheduler) can also be a decent choice! "Windows Vista and higher windows (server) operating systems are offering matured Task scheduler with many advancements like Triggers, Actions, Conditions, failure recovery, email notifications, security and much more." Its obvious that many programmers think Windows Service is easy to maintain and what it can do, task scheduler can’t . But now, it’s time to look at Windows Task Scheduler [also at Microsoft white paper ] and see what great features it is offering. When to go for Windows Service? Okay, let me try to answer this popular question in one line.  Windows Service is suitable for receiving service request ' anytime ' and process ' instantly '. Just think of anti-virus scanner, netwo...

I wanted to track download count of Quick Quest demo version hosted on SrushtiSoft through Google analytics. I faced obstacle during the implementation process and wanted to share here, hoping to save your sometime if you are also trying to do the same for your website or blog. Google neatly guide you how to do it, http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55529 with a slashing message "This article is for the latest version of the tracking code". But it just doesn't work at one-shot!  I had to spend sometime to find a way to troubleshoot "pageTracker is not defined" javascript error . Finally, the post on StackOverflow puts you on right path: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3503511/google-analytics-pagetracker-is-not-defined Though google talks about the approach in detail here: http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/asyncUsageGuide.html chances of it going unnoticed is more.

When Microsoft, Mozilla and Google are competing hard to increase browser share by tweaking their products, opera silently concentrated on innovation and sprung with neat free stuffs. Opera’s new suite ‘Unite’ lead the way in defining how we can maximize our internet experience through its impressive capabilities. This amazing software is not just a ‘browser’ loading web pages lightning fast with Turbo technology; it’s a web server in the browser, messenger, media/file/photo sharing host, a fridge (people can leave a message for you) and can be more in future!!! If you are using FireFox, Chrome or Safari and you have set of strong technical reasons for why you are using it over Internet Explorer, then it’s time for you to checkout Opera Unite 10. From the technology point of view, your satisfaction is guaranteed.

1. Why Microsoft is still using Flash when its own baby- Silverlight light is out there? 2. As shown above, having popup menu open on IE8, why Windows Start menu does not appear when windows key (on keyboard) is pressed? (Windows Vista with SP2 Operating system ) Grr...

Recently, I was searching for a generic sorting approach on dotnet List. Many articles (Like one , two ..etc) were suggesting standard way of creating IComparer implementer class and using that with generic list (List <T>) in our application. Writing IComparer class for every business object not only take huge time also create challenges in code management when it grow considerably. So, here is simple and effective generic sorting class which can be used with any custom business object and can be sorted on any one of its properties. All you have to do is, copy paste the complete code in to a new .cs file. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Text; using System.Reflection; namespace Srushti.Business { public class GenericComparer<T> : IComparer<T> { string _propName = string.Empty; bool _sortDirection = true; public GenericComparer(string propertyName, bool SortAscending) { _propName = propertyName; _sortDirection = S...

If you are a new bee to LINQ (Language Integrated Query), stunned by looking at big books and longer web pages on it, here is the relaxing news. Read “ LINQ: The Future of Data Access in C# 3.0 ” by Joe Hummel. He presented LINQ in a simple and effective manner. This book with 60 pages quickly give you pragmatic understanding of LINQ and push you to start using it in next hour. This i s a good quick starter book in spades . I personally prefer reading such quick start books to get glimpse of technology and later pick thicker book or detailed tech web links to dig deeper.

Windows Vista never ‘wow’ed me. Office 2003 installation did, when I was fiddling around MS office 2003 advanced installation options. I got to see 'Works for Windows 7.0'!!! Did Microsoft have intuition about Windows 7 operating system in the year 2003? Before I think too wild, the description helped me to understand that 7.0 is the version of ‘Microsoft Works’ ;)

DotNet Windows service is a long running executable, registered with windows operating system and do its work behind the scene. It gets activated when system boots, acquire its own windows session and start working without giving any clue to the user. Since windows start and manage these services, we have to register windows services in operating system. I noticed it many times, the windows services which does simple operations, some of us having habit of writing code in the service onStart() event or write a private method in the same file/project and call it in the onStart() event. The problem with this approach is whenever we modify logic or functionality of existing windows service, we have to re-register executable with updated one. Doing this kind of geeky stuff on production server does not seem reliable. The best thing to avoid this situation is, write all code in a separate class library project. Generate a DLL out of it, refer it in windows service and call the DLL public ...

I was keep checking chrome website to download Google’s new browser. It was night 12:19AM when chrome was available for download. I installed it and used for half an hour. My first impression was - “Neat”. I pretty much liked the way tabs are placed by pushing URL bar inside each tab, wider space for HTML page display making status bars small and toggling, download utility with resume, unified search and URL bar, all menu are grouped under two buttons sitting next to the URL bar, good speed, I didn’t find any web site ‘breaking’…I just felt it was worth waiting till mid night. Chrome handles tabs different than FireFox. Each tab in chrome is hosted on separate process; this makes browser stand stable even one of its tabs crash. New Internet Explorer 8 is also handling tabs this way under the hood. My next observation was on memory consumption comparison between Chrome, IE8, FF3.1 for given same set of web sites. Chrome used Approx. 62 MB, IE8 Approx. 89 MB, FF31 Approx. 56 MB. Differ...

After 2 years, Microsoft's great effort of making Internext Explorer better than ever is resulted in second installment of IE8.0 Beta relese. Beta 2 IE8 looks promising with speed, security and usability. You can check IE8 top features here . After instaling IE8 on my laptop, very soon I noticed it breaking on Microsoft web sites! Windows Update Hotmail Linked Accounts drop down on mouse hover Let me stop hoping on other sites like blogger.com posts editor. All these may be absolutely okay because IE8 is in 'Beta', what's wondering me was these can be very easily caught during unit testing. In general, what I do not like about browsers (IE, FF, Opera, Safari....etc) is all are having differently acting HTML render engine. I certainly do not enjoy writing code to check the browser type and take relevant actions. I sometimes expect browser makers to give a thought on streamlining these differences and reduce web developer's pain. New version of their browser shoul...

Now a day, if your installed programs are running slower, if your Windows XP taking more time to boot, if your windows explorer is making you to wait longer before it shows up, then its time for you to wear a spy hat and do some serious investigation to catch out why Windows is shambling. 1. Check in memory processes. Hold CTRL+SHIFT and press ESC key, The Windows Task Manager will appear. Click on “Processes” tab. Sort entries on “Mem Usage” by pressing it. Find out which one is taking more memory. Usually ignore all ‘svchost.exe’ process because they are good candidates working solely for windows. Other process names should give clear hint about the application they belong to. Sometimes when you don’t get a clue, open Windows File or Folder Search, enter the same process name and find out its location. The folder structure will certainly help you know about its parent application. Depending on the importance of the application you can take appropriate action. You can turn off proces...

Quick Quest - software created for college universities to generate ‘equally distributed complexity’ question papers. My college university attempted to utilize it and found it useful. This is an old story. The latest happening on this is, I am re-creating it with latest technology (.Net) putting the software architectural knowledge I have gained in several years being in this industry. If you are a person who is having more than 10 years of experience in software design, my step of software re-creation might not sound big for you. It turned out huge for me due to several reasons. When I had a plan to re-start on old successful software, I took opportunity to reach as many technical gurus as I can and asked them a most controversial question - “How good is to re-create good old software? Or should I extend the same old software with new features?”. Many had different thoughts but the common opinion was, extend the existing one instead going for whole new re-creation. When I sat and lo...

I built a small utility using C# Dot Net version 2.0 in which I took help of Open File Dialog box windows control to know user selected file path and name. I used “SafeFileName”(Gets a string that only contains the filename for the selected file.) property of OpenFileDialog box to display selected filename on the windows form. I did a fine testing on my development machine and deployed it on production computer. The production computer was up by freshly installed Windows Vista operating system (without SP1 update). since Vista ships with DotNet runtime, my job was as easy as copying my dot net executable assembly and double clicking it. When the OpenFileDialog box tried supplying user selected file name through “SafeFileName” property, it crashed! Damn...!! The error message was clearly telling me that “method not found: OpenFileDailog.get_SafeFileName()”!! I was darn surprised. Though I did a quick fix for this problem by making use of FileName property (Gets or sets a string containi...

First time when I tried installing Linux on my box, I was failed to appraise it. I concluded that “I am typical ‘Windows’ user and might be not-understanding the Linux way”. I took break; I read some good articles on Linux. Few articles mentioned like “This Linux distribution is so easy that my grandma can use it…” I downloaded few Linux distributions (I would prefer not to mention their names here.) and tried installing one by one on my laptop. In almost all distributions, my first impression of Linux being faster operating system was gone. When I wanted to install new utility software (.rpm package) I had to learn command prompt options and finally ended up with error messages which tells one or the other supporting library is missing. Badly organized start menu always took more than required time to find out what I wanted. Too many small utilities fail to achieve user needs as a whole. Few distributions were good in few things. My overall intention was to get faster Linux on my ...

Few software which periodically needs to be updated, usually comes with an in-built 'Automatic Update' feature. Windows Automatic Updates is one known example for an instance. For a person who is not a software techi, this is indeed a great facility, which does its work silently in the background with no manual intervention. Person like me do not like (sometimes hate) this feature and there is a strong reason behind it. Automatic updates do not retain downloaded update files after applying it. Few months down the line when I format my machine and reinstall the software, Automatic update once again downloads all older update files along with new ones if there any. Time and resource consumption for older updates download is simply repetitive. Automatic update facility in many software wont disclose download location and delete files after applying it. It could be great if we see an advanced option to specify download folder location or get to know where these files are downloaded...