Sudev Gandhi

It is rare for a technology product to attract as much attention as SharePoint has in recent years. The industry has historically paid little attention to new product suites, particularly those related to web design. SharePoint products and technologies, however, have managed to excite and rejuvenate industry followers, causing them to take notice of the ease of use, scalability, flexibility, and powerful document management capabilities within the product. A number of organizational needs have spurred the adoption of SharePoint technologies. Some of the most commonly mentioned requirements include the following: A need for better document management than the file system can offer —This includes document versioning, check-out and check-in features, adding metadata to documents, and better control of document access (by using groups and granular security). The high-level need is simply to make it easier for users to find the latest version of the document or documents they need to do th...

I’d like to share a typical problem recently I faced with WSS 3.0 configuration on a Windows 2003 Server. I created a virtual machine with Windows 2003 OS and named it “ myvpc ” in a hypothetical workgroup viz. “ WKGP ” (I initially planned to use it in stand-alone mode). Then I installed all available updates to the Windows Server and .Net framework 3.5 with IIS followed by Stand-alone installation of Latest WSS 3.0. The default team site and central administration site were working smooth. I even created another application using central administration. Later I changed my mind and thought that it would be better if I include this virtual machine into our company’s local intranet Domain. At this point of time I had to change the PC name from “ myvpc ” to “ SUDEV-VPC ” due to some or other reasons. Now, suddenly none of the SharePoint sites were accessible even from the “ localhost “! I opened IIS console and noticed that “SharePoint Admin” site was stopped!!! I checked the systems log...

Microsoft is offering a first look at the next version of its Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE) and platform, which will be named Visual Studio 2010 and the .Net Framework 4.0. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/products/cc948977.aspx There’s a lot promised in the new release (expected to ship, duh, in 2010), from improved software testing tools to software engineering modeling capabilities to integrated development and database functions for the application lifecycle management (ALM). Microsoft is putting its attention on improving Visual Studio for the benefit of every one of its users—from the CIO to the software architect to the enterprise developer to the software testing team. A key goal in VSTS 2010, says Microsoft, is to help democratize ALM by bringing all members of a development organization into the application development lifecycle, and remove many of the existing barriers to integration. One way that Visual Studio 2010 will do this is to break do...

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 can, working with other components of the Microsoft Office 2007 suite of applications, provide the functionality and benefits described previously. However, the amount of functionality derived from an MOSS installation depends on the features implemented and activated, as well as whether or not the MOSS environment is used to extend other building blocks, such as WSS and SQL Server. Figure 1 illustrates the structure of a complete MOSS environment. MOSS provides much of the functionality, but that functionality can be enhanced by the inclusion of other extended capability systems. The MOSS Common Framework MOSS 2007 supports other server-based applications and services with a set of common administrative services, as shown in Figure 2. The primary elements in the common group of services are (as shown in Figure 2, left to right): Collaboration This service supports discussions and shared task lists on server-based portals and determines the statu...

SQL Server Reporting Services, due to its robust but user friendly architecture, is an obvious choice for Enterprise or in-house reporting, for product management, sales, and human resource and finance departments. Its flexibility makes it an ideal for usage in applications as well (Deliver User-Friendly Reports from Your Application with SQL Server Reporting Services - MSDN Magazine August 2004). Reporting Services offer various delivery methods, from ftp to email and it provides various rendering formats therefore it makes adds easiness to business to business reporting. Similarly because of its flexibility and industry standard security model, it makes extranet and secure internet reporting easily achievable. The reporting system comprises for following main components. Report Server & Report Server Database Report Server is an integrated web service which controls report generation and management. Report Server database is a SQL server database which is used as data dictionary ...

This beautiful cosmic cloud is a popular stop on telescopic tours of the constellation Sagittarius. Afer all I'm also Saggy only and equally handsome ;). Eighteenth century cosmic toyurist Charles Messier cataloged the bright nebula as M8, while modern day astronomers recognize the Lagoon Nebula as an active stellar nursery about 5,000 light-years distant, in direction of the center of our Milky Way. Courtesy : http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/

You may have noticed that Google has a new favicon, the small icon you see in your browser next to the URL or in your bookmarks list. Few days ago Google changed their favicon, from “Big G” to “small g“. It was a surprise! Why would google change the “Big G” which is recognised all over the world! Lots of questions filled my head… • Why would google change the “Big G” which is recognised all over the world and create a dip in its brand recognition. • Is this one of the google’s marketing trick to create buzz(as if they need one!) • Is it trying to re-brand? (why would they do! everything is working more than fine for them) No need to ponder more... I just "googled" it and found the answer on their own blog .

Inside This Article you'll find 1. Introduction to How Cloud Computing Works 2. Cloud Computing Architecture 3. Cloud Computing Applications and 4. Cloud Computing Concerns read more | digg story

Although most people today will never set foot on the moon, everyone likely comes in contact with a NASA by-product every day. Partnering with various research teams and companies, NASA continues to spawn a vast array of new technologies and products that have improved our daily lives. read more | digg story

Stacks of chips, one on top of the other, will power the next generation of superfast PCs, IBM has announced. Laying chips vertically, instead of side by side, reduces the distance data has to travel by 1,000 times, making the chips faster and more efficient. Big blue has said that it will start producing the compact silicon sandwiches in 2008. Chip manufacturer Intel has previously announced that it is also developing similar vertical chip technology. Last year, the firm unveiled a chip with 80 processing cores and capable of more than a trillion calculations per second (teraflops) that used vertical stacking technology. Other firms, such as Tru-Si, have also developed techniques for creating 3D stacked chips. High rise Today most chips are laid out side-by-side, connected by wires. The new technique involves placing chips directly on top of each other, connected by tungsten filled pipes, etched through the silicon. These "through-silicon vias" (TSV), as they are...

SQLinForm is an automatic SQL code formatter for all major databases ( ORACLE, SQL Server, DB2 / UDB, Sybase, Informix, PostgreSQL, MySQL etc) with many formatting options . No installation needed. No database driver necessary. Even incomplete SQL statements or SQL statements with syntax errors are formatted Run it out of your browser It is secure. No SQL statement is transferred from the applet over the internet Written for Java and .NET environment

One more stuff thing for Google Lovers. It's Google shell (goosh, it's unofficial though). It's again a cool and simple thing developed for Google Lovers like me. Though you can wonder what is the need of such a thing, but hey, you never know where it can be used. I like the web, images and video searching options. And surprisingly, it's pretty damn fast, as if we are really using a shell. Check out this link. http://www.goosh.org/

Microsoft has released details on a flaw in the Safari browser that, coupled with the correct Windows or Internet Explorer vulnerabilities, could be used to execute malware. Changing the default download location on Safari is enough for a workaround. read more digg story

In previous versions of SharePoint (or other platforms), if you had some task you wanted to perform on a scheduled basis, you'd have to either create a console EXE and schedule it to run via Windows Task Scheduler (ala AT.EXE) or create a Windows Service that went to sleep for a period of time. In order to install (and maintain) these tasks, you had to have console access to your production SharePoint (or other app) servers... something IT or admins wouldn't easily hand out. Addressing this issue, Microsoft has added something called timer jobs to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007. Microsoft uses timer jobs to do things like dead web cleanup (purging unused sites from site collections) among others. To see what other timer jobs are out there, from Central Administration , click Operations and then Timer Job Definitions . Not only does Microsoft use timer jobs in MOSS, but you can create your own custom timer jobs to do your own scheduled tasks. What's nice a...

They are members of one of Earth's last uncontacted tribes, who live along the Brazilian-Peruvian frontier, and are thought never to have had any contact with the outside world. read more | digg story

Hitachi Maxell and a number of universities and firms in Japan have created a design for a Li-Ion battery that will last 20x longer than current unitsElectric cars with 2000miles range on single charge, cell phones requiring outlet once in a month, laptops with batteries for 1 week. Lets hope technology finds its way to life sooner than later. read more | digg story

The first public demonstration of Windows 7 was made at the D6 conference, showing off Windows 7's multitouch features. Notably absent from the demo was anything new. read more | digg story

Many times you need to create a comma seperated list of values in a table. Here is a line of T-SQL solution to get comma separated list of values of single field of a database table. DECLARE @commaSeparatedVal AS VARCHAR(MAX); SELECT @commaSeparatedVal = ISNULL(@commaSeparatedVal +',','') + CONVERT(VARCHAR,[SKU]) FROM PRODUCT PRINT @commaSeparatedVal

Google Talk, Labs Edition is an experimental release of the Google  Talk client. It has many of the same great features as the Google Talk  Gadget, including instant messaging, emoticons, and group chat. Google  Talk, Labs Edition also comes with new desktop notifications from  Calendar, Orkut, and Gmail. You can download it from http://www.google.com/talk/labsedition/ . browse discussion on http://groups.google.com/group/google-talk-labs-edition-discussion-group/

Do you know What does !important mean in CSS?, an "!important" declaration (the keywords "!" and "important" follow the declaration) this takes high precedence over a normal declaration. And can be framed in this way, this means that the styles are applied in order as they are read by the browser. CSS it tries to create a balance of power between author and user style sheets. By default, rules in an author's style sheet override those in a user's style sheet. But in CSS1, this is in other way round - Author "!important" rules took precedence over User "!important" rules. For Example: User's Style Sheet: 1: < style > 2: p { font-size : 2em !important; } 3: p { font-style : italic; } 4: < / style > Author's Style Sheet: 1: < style > 2: p { font-size : 3em; } 3: p { font-style : normal; } 4: < / style > If you see in the above i...

The award-winning open source Web browser Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 is available in more than 45 languages (including Gujarati and Punjabi) as a public preview release intended for developer testing and community feedback. It includes new features as well as dramatic improvements to performance, memory usage and speed. Check out http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-rc.html for more information and download Firefox 3 RC1. Regards, Sudev Gandhi

Disney is bridging the gap between gaming and virtual worlds. Disney Interactive Studios on Thursday formally launched DGamer, a free avatar-based community for U.S. buyers of games the company... read more | digg story

"Hello World" is the traditional first program you write when learning a new language, first appearing in K&R's "The C Programming Language" book in 1978. Since then it has been implemented in almost every programming language on the planet. This collection has it in 366 coding languages and 58 human ones! Is your favourite here? read more | digg story

Hi All, I'm just exploring this exciting feature from Google Docs. You can directly publish your online documents as blogs in simple steps. One more reason to love Google. Regards, Sudev Gandhi

Office 2007 Service Pack 2 will bring improved XML support to the office suite -- but it will be to ODF and not Microsoft's own format. read more | digg story

More than 30 sources of radiation were buried by debris from the massive earthquake in central China last week and all have either been recovered or safely cordoned off, state media reported Tuesday. A French nuclear expert said the radioactive sources likely came from materials used in hospitals, factories or in research, not for weapons. read more | digg story

Google File System - large distributed log structured file system in which they throw in a lot of data. Reliable scalable storage is a core need of any application. GFS is Google's core storage platform.Google File System (GFS) is a proprietary distributed file system developed by Google for its own use. Its point is both to assure reliablity by using redundant copies and to allow individual most used data to selectively receive more resources (more dedicated hardware or/and redundant copies).GFS is optimized for Google's core data storage needs, web searching, which can generate enormous amounts of data that needs to be retained; Google File System grew out of an earlier Google effort, "BigFiles", developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in the early days of Google, while it was still located in Stanford. The data is stored persistently, in very large, multiple gigabyte-sized files (around 100GB) which are only extremely rarely deleted, overwritten, or shrunk; files a...

Bigtable is a distributed storage system for managing structured data that is designed to scale to a very large size: petabytes of data across thousands of commodity servers. Many projects at Google store data in Bigtable, including web indexing, Google Earth, and Google Finance. read more digg story

Grid computing India is the fastest adopter of grid computing in the world, according to Oracle’s Grid Index IV. Oracle should know, since it has 70 customers in India using its grid solutions. Grid computing is applying the resources of many computers in a network to a single problem at the same time. It is not a new phenomenon. Research organisations, government agencies and universities have been using this concept for years. What’s new is that Indian corporates are now latching on to the concept. Some of the enterprises using grid computing in India include the Gujarat Electricity Board, Saraswat Bank, National Stock Exchange, Indian Railway Catering & Tourism Corporation, General Insurance Company, Syndicate Bank, Ashok Leyland, Maruti Suzuki India Ltd and Municipal Corporation of Hyderabad. Last year saw two major developments that will prove important for the adoption and acceptance of grid computing in India. First was the Computational Research Laboratories (CRL) — a subsi...