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Securing your business’ website
The other day a friend of mine called and asked for guidance. He is owning a small business and had registered his domain name for the business, got a web app developed by a software services firm in Mumbai, all developed, deployed and working. For this post let us call the website Example.COM. The business is not big, he employs less than 10 staffs all on offline activities. Their clients log in and check their transactions done with the company using the website example.com. In that sense the website is important to their business & over a period as revenues kick in he is aware that he has to have…
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Project Spiftcar
Project Spiftcar was one of the challenging projects that I am proud to have directly worked on, which set the stage for my next 15 years (ongoing) partnership with MSN India & other media clients in India. The engagement was with Microsoft India to develop and deliver the NDTV.COM Election Website for the Parliament elections in 1999. This was challenging for many reasons including having Streaming Video (which was bleeding edge in those days), live integration with real-time election results from backend systems and the duration which was in total just 10 days from groundbreaking (blank Visual Studio Project/Zero Infra) to go live! Incredible and probably a world record of…
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R.I.P – Microsoft Mix
World over Microsoft conducts lots and lots of events every year. Their flagship events are two – Professional Developer Conference a.k.a. PDC (this is where they announce the next big thing like .NET, Windows 2000, Longhorn, Windows Azure and so on) and Tech Ed (this is more hands-on current technologies for IT Professionals with some Developer content) happening almost every year in USA and then replicated across the world. About five years back in 2006, they announced a new event by name “Mix” which for the first time tried to bring 3 stakeholders into one event – Business Managers, Designers & Developers. It was started to promote Web development and…
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WWW: Technology, Standards and I18N Conference in New Delhi
Today there was a conference in Hotel Lalit, New Delhi on “WWW: Technology, Standards and Internationalization Conference” and the inauguration of W3C India office in TDIL, Government of India. Ms.Swaran Latha of TDIL & Director of W3C India Office Character sets and codes for all 22 official Indian Languages and 11 Scripts are now in UNICODE Efforts happening on PLS 1.0 (Pronunciation of Language Specifications) starting with Hindi. TDIL will soon start work on other Indian languages Issues specific to Indic languages on CSS3 style sheets like line breaks, drop case and others need to be handled & discussed In terms of CSS3 Japanese have done some excellent work on…
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Nice user interface – Undo!
Alan Cooper (the father of Visual Basic) in his famous book – About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design, talked about how we have to build software that matches the user’s goals. Much of software even today (after nearly two decades of this book) is built by developers to meet their development goals. If I remember correct, in one of the chapters Cooper talks about how almost all the word processing software including MS Word asks “Do you want to save this document” when you are closing a window with an open document. What a stupid question. “Yes” I want to save it, that’s why I spent last 1…
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How to report SPAMs?
All of us get SPAMs all the time and most of us feel frustrated as there is little, we can do to stop it other than marking the email as Junk/SPAM in your email reader (Outlook/Thunderbird/GMail/Hotmail). However, this doesn’t stop the source of SPAM but just moves the message to a Junk folder in your storage – basically you still get the SPAM message. If you are running your own mail server, you pay for the traffic consumed by SPAM which can as high as 70-80% in some cases. Adding to this, some SPAM sources manage to keep sending your Junk mails even if you block it, as they keep…
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Donate to Wikipedia
Next to Google search or sometimes more often than that, a website I turn to most often is Wikipedia. It has helped in resolving many arguments that I have had with my wife on who a signer for a song was, which movie Rajini acted in the 1980s and in which state is Darjeeling and so on. A good example was after we watched Mani Ratnam’s “Guru” we were curious to find out how closely the movie portrayed the original story of Sri Dhirubhai Ambani, turning to Wikipedia told us more on Sri Ambani and his life than what we could have got even from Reliance website. Especially after I…
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Firefox Geode and W3C Geolocation
Mozilla in their upcoming Firefox 3.1 release is introducing an experimental feature “Geode”. Geode is about the browser (and server) automatically deducing your location and provide appropriate location-based information. Though Location-aware applications are present in Mobile Phones using Cell-Tower Triangulation or GPS, this is the first major effort to do something similar on the PCs. Geode provides an early implementation of the W3C Geolocation specification and location information will be provided by one or more user-selectable service providers and methods – GPS-based, WiFi-based, manual entry, etc. What I was curious is how they deduct location information using Wi-Fi. It seems they use a technology from a company called SkyHook, whose…
