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Sunday, December 11, 2011

Human Computation - Outsourcing complex problems to Human


Computer technology has become more and more powerful over the last few decades. Yet still there’s a clear margin - actually a gap - between Computers’ (artificial) decision making ability when compared with human intellect. 

Filling out this gap is one of the most important problems that needs to be addressed, because this digitalizing world requires devices and applications that human can use more comfortably and effectively. Truth is, to make the human feels comfortable, the ‘dumb’ devices or applications should anticipate what he requires and consider his preferences. Therefore, artificial decision making algorithms should at least resemble (if not match up with) human intelligence.

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Microsoft Virtual Academy - Free Learning Resources for Cloud


If you are an IT professional who daily interact with the technology, no need to tell how hard it is to keep up with the continually evolving technologies and practices. Often that is the toughest part in leading a career in IT.

There are always new emerging concepts and technological breakthroughs, so in order to keep yourself up in the top; you always have to engage in learning.

If you haven’t known yet – Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA) is one of the best and freely available learning experience focused on cloud based Microsoft Technologies. It allows you to learn several cloud related technologies including Windows Azure, BI, Public/Private Cloud… and more.

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

SQL Query Result into Comma Separated List


During my work I had encountered a situation where I need to get a comma separated list as an output from the values in a SQL query result. To elaborate it more, my query returns set of records (multiple records which match a certain criteria) as its result. Then there’s a column which I need to take as a comma separated value set.

Monday, August 29, 2011

Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 : Introduction

Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 is a flexible business application development tool that can be used with Visual Studio 2010 IDE. It gives you a simplified development environment which give the capability to create CRUD based business applications within few minutes.


Typical business application manage data through user interfaces, provide search facilities and provide data validations. Usually, if you want to create a business applications you have to develop the user interfaces, write codes for interactions with data sources, along with the most critical business logic. But with Visual Studio LightSwitch, you can omit the first two and concentrate only about the business logic.

Saturday, August 27, 2011

The Story Never Ends ! [UCSC Batch 6]

End of a journey. But still couldn’t believe it! Though this wasn't un-expected, I never anticipated that reaching the end of my undergraduate life would make me this much emotional. Even though we (me and my batch mates - UCSC 6th batch, 2007/2008 intake) are not graduated yet, yesterday was the final remarkable day at university for most of us except our friends who’ll be continuing with their specialization on the fourth year.


Saturday, August 13, 2011

Logins, Users and Guest users in MSSQL

Recently I was working with some database restoring and configuring stuff. And I was getting errors due to the conflicts on database users, server logins and their permissions.

In the ideal scenario, there should be a 'login' in the database server, and a corresponding 'user' for the database. Sometimes people get confused with the difference of these two. But they are for two entirely different purposes.

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

What are MDF, NDF and LDF ?

If you have experience with SQL Server, you may have heard the terms MDF, NDF and LDF already. Those are the commonly used file name extensions in SQL Server for specify the Primary Data files, Secondary data files and Log files respectively.

In SQL Server, data and log information are never stored in the same file. Furthermore, those individual files (primary data, secondary data and log) are used by only one server. However, below is a brief description about the three file types in SQL Server.

Sunday, July 17, 2011

Touring Google Earth

It has been a long time since my last post. I was busy with exams, projects and of-course with my first job! Few months back, me and few of my colleagues were working on a project. This was an essential part of our academic curriculum, and luckily, the selection of the topic and the scope was in our purview. So, we decided that we'll jump into virtual tour using currently available web resources and try out ways to provide better user experience in GIS.


Saturday, March 19, 2011

Scheduling tasks in Windows 7

While working with your computer, no doubt that you wish you could schedule running some application or make the computer do a specific job without you have to stay at computer for hours. For me, I want to shut down the computer automatically at a scheduled time, so that I can sleep without waiting till the computer finish the job. Or if I want computer to remind me something, I wish if there's a way to  schedule a notification.

in Windows 7 you can do those tasks by “Scheduled Tasks”. To locate the scheduled tasks; click ‘Start’ –> Control Panel –> Administrative Tools –> Task Scheduler. You’ll get a similar screen like the below image.

Saturday, February 26, 2011

Hawk-Eye : How does it work?

It’s the cricket world cup season! So, all the fans are getting excited, and the game is getting competitive.

Cricket is a game where win or loss is defined by a thin margin. Currently, a lot of money is involved in the game and a huge number of spectators are waiting to see a favorable result for their team. Therefore, not only the responsibility of players to win and play without mistakes, but accuracy of decisions made by umpires have became critically important factors.



However, umpires are also human. Naturally, there may be errors when they take decisions. To support umpires to take the correct decision (and minimize the margin of error), lot of new technical utilities have been used recently. This is going to be about one of those technical advancements of the sport; Hawk-eye.

Friday, February 25, 2011

Where's your data? – Google and Microsoft Data centers

Are you worried about where you keep your money? – Answer is obviously “Yes”. In the modern information society, data is equally or more important when compared with money. Not to mention that data is referred here to the information gathered at the computers. But how many of you know about where your data is stored. We know about data stored in our computer, or in our backup device. But what about the data stored in internet.



Today most people use internet based email services, picture albums, video hosting facilities, document management systems…. and lot more. Technically, considerable amount of our digital information is out there on the internet. We use Gmail, yahoo mail, live mail for our email purposes. And flicker, Picasa for sharing our pictures. YouTube for videos and Google Docs, Office online for various documents. But the locations of the storage and what happen behind is a complete mystery for lot of us.

All those data used and gathered by internet services and applications are stored at huge data centers of those service providers (if not, at third-party datacenters). Following is a quick look at the datacenters used by two information giants; Google and Microsoft.

Monday, January 31, 2011

Debugging in Visual Studio 2010

Debugging is the process of finding and fixing the bugs/defects of a software program. And it’s a essential and a critical part of the software development life cycle. Sometime it may take more time than writing the code. So how to debug? Well, literally you have to go through the code and find where, and what went wrong. Then you have to come up with a fix.


Luckily most IDEs have some integrated  facilities that make the debugging process much easier. And Visual studio also come up with some nice and effective debugging tool set. Visual Studio built in debugger come with facilities to add breakpoints, error listing, tools for visualizing program flow, control the flow of execution, view variable values and lot more. This article is an introduction to the debugging tools of Visual Studio 2010. Since this span a little long, I broke it into two parts, so here’s the first one.

Saturday, January 29, 2011

Main entry point of a C# program

Like any other computer program, a program written in C# should have a default entry point. his entry point is where your code start executing.  Similar to many high level programming languages C# entry point is the “Main” method. (Libraries and services do not require a Main method as an entry point.) Main is also a member of a C# class or struct. This post is going to explain about few tricky points about usual C# main method and program execution.

Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Virus Identification Techniques

Since ‘Elk Cloner’, the first computer virus was written in 1981; Computers are always been subject to various threats. Not necessarily the viruses, but malware, trojans, worms, rootkits, spyware and hacking attacks always threatening the computer users. That’s where antivirus programs come to the help. Antivirus software is used to prevent, detect, and remove computer viruses, worms, and trojan horses. Furthermore, it may also prevent adware, spyware, and some other forms of malware.

Currently there are hundreds of antivirus software available. Each of them are implemented with different strategies and they may behave and perform in different levels. In this post I’m going to explain about some generic methods used in antivirus software to detect and remove the malicious software.

Sunday, January 2, 2011

Connecting MySQL to Visual Studio 2010

Your database servers are MySQL and yet you need to build an application in .Net; is that possible? Yes. MySQL Connector/NET enables developers to easily create .NET applications using C#/Visual Basic with connecting to MySQL databases. MySQL connector is responsible for creating necessary ADO.NET interfaces and integrations to ADO.NET tools. Therefore developers can build applications using MySQL just as they usually build database applications.

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