Passion for the craft…

I was just going through the website of Chetan Bhagat the “Oh so great Indian Author” while browsing around. He has given a couple of best sellers in India, but I feel it is not even worth spending time on light reading. I would rather read the entire C# Language Specification, (which happens to be exceptionally boring), than read one of his. Anyways I read this part where he quotes, Read More…

Security Essenitials and Defender

Note: I am slowly moving my blog to http://www.dasboard.in/nilotpal/blogs/347. Please check my blogs there and update your RSS feeds. Thanks.

I bought a computer recently and I didn’t have an antivirus software. I was wondering what I would do about that. Microsoft already had a fantastic utility called Defender, to detect and remove spyware and potentially unwanted software (which ships with Windows 7). Well now they have come up with is a new antivirus software. It is called the Microsoft Security Essentials, previously known as Microsoft One live care.

It is freely downloadable. There is a 32 bit and a 64 bit versions available and they are compatible with the new and shining Windows 7.

The 32 bit is downloadable here and the 64 bit here.

So no need to worry about spending extra just to keep your machine safe. I say it should come free with the OS, coz the OS, after all, is a software and what’s a software if its not safe…

Joomla… or should it be Zoomla…

I have been thinking of owning a website of my own for a long time. First web space was expensive. Not universally, but at least for me. Always thought, is it worth it? How am I justify the annual cost no matter how little. And then of course my salary wasn’t that big then.

Well by God’s grace I am doing pretty ok now. But since the last couple of years, I just didn’t have the time to do it.

I bought web space some 1 and a half year back. wrote a whiz bang application that would host a video invitation to my marriage. Yeah we wanted it to be different, so we made a video wedding invitation.

Anyways. I own a web space since then and I never had the time to create a portal out of it. Just the default page. And then one day I decided to go to godaddy.com and check out what my money buys me. And it turns out that it is more than just the space. I get a host of other products free with it. like Blogs, Emails, CMS, etc.

Honestly, I felt a little shy using the CMS initially. I being a developer should be able to write my own asp.Net application. I bought the damn windows hosting with .Net and everything. I should use it. But then I figured that having a CMS made website is better than not having one. Joomla is what I ended up using.

Usually I ramble about Microsoft Technologies here. But I have to tell you guys. joomla really is zoomla. Initially it might look confusing. But once you get a hang of it, you will have your website ready pronto.

I have mine ready in 1 day. It is called http://www.dasboard.in. It is not much. Not that I have built the next google or anything. But its something, and its there. All that waiting and all it takes is a day.

What’s it about a phone that pulls you so hard…??

So I have a Sony Ericsson P990i. So what…? So what if I had a P910i before this and a P900 before that…? So what…? Why did i feel so much attracted to the Experia X1 and why do I feel an even harder pull towards the Experia X2.




I guess men are going to be men… And they will get attracted to unachievably expensive gadgets no matter what…

An interesting Mathematics

A very interesting mathematics

Visual Studio 2008 Unit tests… Error loading *.vsmdi: *.vsmdi

I got this error. I got no information on the internet as to how to get around it…

3 hours earlier:

I wanted to create a sequence diagram from the code I have already written. Visual Studio 2010 comes with the sequence diagram feature. I decided heck why not use it. It creates some really cool sequence diagrams. I opened the same project in Visual Studio 2010, created the sequence diagram, closed the project. Went for a smoke.

30 minutes earlier:

My test cases won’t run. the error I get is  “Error loading xxx.vsmdi: D:\Projects\xxx\xxx.vsmdi” looked here, looked there looked everywhere. But didn’t look in the place I should have been looking.

10 minutes earlier:

I built the test project. I got an error. “Project file contains ToolsVersion="4.0", which is not supported by this version of MSBuild. Treating the project as if it had ToolsVersion="3.5".”

Well I should have been looking at this 30 minutes ago. I went to the test projects Properties, went to TargetFramework and checked. it was not selected at all. I selected Framework 3.5.

After this all I had to do was close the project and open it and then run all my tests in the solution.

They were all still green. Love it when that happens…!!

UML 101

So you need to read the entire UML book in 20 minutes. What do you do? These are the excerpts from the Unified Modeling Language Reference Manual I was reading and thought I could summarize for a quick refresh.

 

Aggregation and composition:

Generalization:

Kinds of dependencies:

Use case diagram:

Kinds of Use Case relationships:

Activity Diagram:

Sequence diagrams and Activation:

Component Diagram:

Deployment Diagram:

Packages and relationships: