Waves

LINQ or Language INtegrated Query is a set of classes in .NET that allows you to query arrays just as would query a database, using keywords such as ‘select’, ‘where’ etc.

Sounds interesting?? I’m just exploring it. Have a look at these sites in that order.
1. http://blogs.msdn.com/danielfe/archive/2005/09/13/464904.aspx
2. http://blogs.msdn.com/sriram/archive/2005/09/16/468927.aspx

There is also a video at channel9…Do check it out…http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=114680 and here is the related MSDN link that offers a lot of code samples and downloads.

By the way, it is supposed to be shipped with the next version of Visual Studio (Orcas).

I was taking notes very sincerely (occasional hobby he he)…every 20 or 30 seconds looking up to get what he was telling. The lecture was on how to speak well in group discussions during campus interviews. Some guys at the last were giggling at every word he spoke…it made me to smile ofcourse….classroom fun is too good…He completed what he was saying and then clapped his hands twice to the get attention of the class.

The giggling stopped…everyone looked up. He said, “Put the pens down. I’m going to tell you something important”. That said, even the last benchers looked up. The sound of all the books closing filled the room for sometime and then there was pin-drop silence. He cleared his throat….

“Do you know???” he began, “Do you know, im HIV positive”….What??? What the hell?? I was shell shocked. My eyes popped out. He continued, “im having leukemia too”. What the hell of a class was this…I was bombed. This was worse than the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima. A HIV+ guy doing a class for us?? Not even in the wildest dreams i was imagining so…almost paralysed with that information. sniff…sniff…some girls on the far right had started weeping and they began to wipe their noses…the news too big for them to bear.

Seeing them, he began to laugh. I couldn’t just understand what he was doing. He tells he is HIV+ and starts laughing. Congrats!! for his positive approach but it was still beyond comprehension. He started again, “Didn’t I get you all by surprise?”. “Yes” was the unanymous reply. He said, “Words whether they are empty or full, they leave a huge impact. I know you wont forget this in your lifetime. So choose your words carefully in your Group Disscussion. If you dont then your job is out of your hands”.

How true that is with our life also. With hasty decisions and words thrown out carelessly, we not only create a crack between our friendship, we also leave a scar in our friend’s heart. So, let us choose words carefully before we speak. This brings back to my mind the famous Thirukkural “Theeyinal sutta pun ullaarum aaraathe naavinaal sutta vadu“. It means, “Even the deepest burns caused by fire will heal one day, but the burns caused by words wont heal”.

Brr…I’m shivering now!! The exam fever caught up sometime back…Its showing the symptoms of leaving now because of the rains…and the exams got postponed again.

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hi!! just remembered these very famous Kaviarasu Kannadasan’s poems….enjoy them….

1
kalangalil aval vasantham
kalaigalile aval oviyam
mathangalil aval margazhi
malargalile aval malligai

2
veedu varai uravu
veedhi varai manaivi
kaadu varai pillai
kadaisi varai yaro

These poems are really superb!!!

hi!! I went to Bangalore for the past 2 days…1st day to attend the launch event…2nd day to roam around the place.

Day 1
Reached bangalore at 6AM and had a lunch-like-breakfast with 4 aloo parathas, 2 club sandwiches and a pineapple juice. Phew!! getting quite heavy with that, went to the nearest lodge & flopped for the next 4 hrs, almost shivering due to the cold weather.

Finding it was already 10:30AM, had a good bath & after another small breakfast 😉 headed to Palace Grounds, where the launch event was about to take place. Btw, if you are wondering what the launch event was, Bill Gates was visiting Bangalore to launch the latest version of the platform for developing and deploying software….Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006.

Event started at about 2:30PM; Bill Gates giving his keynote address for about an hour and after other blah blah blah, the event was over at 6PM. Parikrama was good with their Super Hero song, but other than that i could find they were only screaming with their voices and guitars :)) .

The event as a whole was great. The audience, around 6000 IT pros in and around B’lore and we Microsoft Student Champs from chennai, coimbatore, b’lore and mumbai. It was great learning experience, in that we got to know how Bill thinks. He is thinking at about 20 to 30 years ahead of today (duh! ofcourse he does) & with his proper timing of events, no doubt he is the richest man personally and built a company that is building 300 odd products. He was sharing his vision of the tablet pc as the next revolution, his next investment of $1.7 billion in India over the next 4 years etc. He also mentioned that India is 1 of the primary development centers outside USA. Getting a seat barely 100 metres away from the man, i was no doubt very attentive to his keynote. Thanks a lot to the ADEs for arranging that. Moreover, we had a great time meeting the other champs.

As with any big event, there are some negatives too. The food was as bad as it could be. They served 2 very small bananas (each 1 about an inch in size), 1 cake, 1 veg puff, frooti cool drink, 1 small sandwich, 2 cookies. Anyone with the right brains couldn’t have thought of such a wonderfully stupid lunch. That apart, the event was a success.

Day 2
Night dawns early at B’lore and it gets dark very soon. So, waking up at 10AM the next day, i got ready in half hour and went to Lalbagh Gardens. It was a half hour journey from the place called J.P.Nagar. The garden is so huge and its right there in the center of the city. It also has a mini lake inside and the whole atmosphere was cool and great. If you would want some peace amidst the noice of bangalore, then this is the place to go (i would recommend Thekkady lake in Kerala as the first destination).

Now for some positives about Bangalore…
1. Its a good place with a cool-cooler type of weather in contrast to Chennai’s hot-hotter weather.
2. A city with lots of opportunites for IT pros because this is the home for some of the biggest software companies.
3. Helpful people and uncheating autorickshaws.
4. Its the place for bird hunting 😉

As for some negatives,
1. Very crowded. If there is anything else that would determine the time required to reach a place its the worst traffic.
2. Cost of living is high. You need to earn a decent amount to sustain yourself in bangalore.

Personally, i love Bangalore and i would love to work/live there, but it would only come next to Chennai bcos its my darling hometown. How much i had missed this place for the past 2 days??? Phew!!!

hey! did you ever wonder why Bill had to visit this time for the launch???

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hi!! read these 2 poems….

Poem1:
saptiya bun
beachla mun
shoot panrathuku gun
kalayla udhikum sun
unga appavuku nee oru son

Poem2:
pepsi romba gup
nee kooda romba gabbu
vekka poraen appu
sariya mappu
beer kudicha erum mabbu
velaiku pona kidaikum dabbu
un mela enakku veruppu
en endral nee romba sharpu
nan than idhai writingu adhai nee nambu!!

Ha ha ha….these 2 are really comic…no meaning in them though. Ofcourse, they weren’t written by me.

hi!!

You may be knowing about SMTP. Its called Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. SMTP is responsible for transfering mails from 1 server to another server. Suppose you want to send a mail from yahoo mail to gmail, the yahoo server sends the mail to the google server through SMTP. To know in detail about the SMTP sepcification, refer RFC 2821 at ietf.org.

Coming back, when a mail is about to be sent, a domain called the “Mail Exchanger (MX)” is contacted, which relays the mail to the destination. The mail exchanger works on default smtp port (25). This MX can be contacted directly by bypassing the usual web interface (that we are used to) and thus anonymous mails can be sent!!! Sounds dangerous?? Read on….

For example, lets take a fictitious website called http://www.abcdefghij.com/ and lets assume its having a MX. In linux OS, we use the dig (i don’t know the windows equivalent) command to retrieve the MX record of a website. On issuing the command at the terminal,

dig abcdefghij.com mx

a list of url’s popup as the result. Look for “;; ANSWER SECTION“. At the end of the line, there will be a url which is the mail exchanger. Ofcourse, a website may have many MX records.

Now, we have to connect using telnet to port 25, the standard SMTP port at any of the MXs.

telnet mx1.abcdefghij.com 25

Your output should look similar to
Connected to mx1.abcdefghij.com
Escape character is ‘^]’.
220

For each line of command you type, you will get a response. Normally, an email will have a from address, to address, subject, content. Issue the next command as follows.

MAIL FROM:<xyz@abcdefghij.com>
503 // Server output
RCPT TO:<abc@abcdefghij.com>// The angular brackets are mandatory
503
DATA
503
Subject: this is subject // A blank line is a must after this line

this is the content
. // ‘.’ (dot) signifies content end
QUIT
221 mx1.abcdefghij.com
Connection closed by foreign host

Your mail will be sent now. Almost no servers will support foreign relaying. That is, if u want to use the MX of yahoo the ‘MAIL FROM’ should have its email address ending in yahoo.com or something that the yahoo servers support. The ‘RCPT TO’ can be any valid email address. Have a look at this url http://www.yuki-onna.co.uk/email/smtp.html for having a detailed explanation on sending mails using SMTP & terminal

Why this is insecure??
It allows emails to be sent without logging in. Only the domain of FROM address is checked to see whether its legal for relaying. That too, the email address is not verified. Therefore, unscrupulous spamming is a possibility. Connecting on normal SMTP offers a bit of security because, the email address is verified for its existence.

Hope this helped a bit…..bye!!~~

hi!!

AJAX or Asynchronous Javascript & XML seems to be the coolest or hottest (in whichever way u want) technology around. It deals with sending asynchronous requests to the server behind the scenes, and its a very good way of showing interactive content.

It comes with lot of advantages. One of them being; large data driven websites need not refresh whole pages of data always to display new content. Gmail is 1 of the many sites that uses AJAX heavily.

In .net, AJAX is implemented as “Atlas” and in J2EE, any app server that supports servlets will support AJAX.

To know more about it, follow the wikipedia link. Check out the Atlas link to know more about it in .net. As for J2EE, read this excellent article on implementing AJAX. As usual, there are some FAQs as well and some common pitfalls that you should avoid.

Happy coding bye!!~~

hi!!

Forbes.com has an innovative idea called the Time Capsule. Its aim is to collect emails now and then send it to you in the next 1/3/5/10/20 years which ever you prefer. Fancy reading a message 20 years later when many things around us will change drastically. It will be great to remember our friends again that we tend to forget over time.

It surely is exciting. So, check out the Email Capsule. Yahoo! is one of the companies handling this project along with an entrepreneur. Read more about the project at this url.

Be sure to do it….Last day is 30th November 2005. Off to send myself an email 🙂 …..bye!!~~

PS: Here is another interesting url http://futureme.org/.

hi!! this is the part 2 of “Start Downloading 2 to 8”. Before you continue, you may want to read the first part of the post. It deals with scheduling downloads.

Coming back, this method was tested on Huawei SmartAX 880 modem and this solution works for those who have that “Always On“. A similar kind of interface was found with Huawei SmartAX 800 modem.

Warning: Before you try this, make sure you save your existing connection settings.

1. Start–>Run. Type “cmd” or “command” and press Enter.
2. Type “ipconfig” in the DOS prompt and press Enter. Note down the IP address. Most of the time it will be 192.168.1.1
3. Open Internet Explorer and type http://192.168.1.1
4. Expand the “Home” node and click on “WAN Setting”.
5. Change the “WAN Type” to “RFC2684Bridged”.
6. Click Apply, restart the modem and enjoy!!!

Now, you have to create a dialer to connect to the server. Follow these steps to create the dialer.

1. Start–>Control Panel (or) Start–>Settings–>Control Panel. Go to Network Connections.
2. Create a new connection. From now on, follow the wizard to create your broadband dialup account. You need to have your username and password for creating the same.

The reason why you may want to change to dial-up broadband connection is to schedule downloads. It is said that the modem must be restarted at 2AM to start a new session. Creating a new session by restarting the modem automatically is not possible. After you followed the above 6 steps, you have to follow another set of 6 steps found at http://broadbandforum.in/index.php?showtopic=2431&hl=tutorial , so that you can actually use that full 2 to 8 for downloads without overdoing your 1GB limit.

Most of the time, the Dataone Account Administration link at www.dataone.in redirects to the wrong site. Use this instead http://10.240.43.216/, to monitor you broadband usage.

To restore back to “Always On”, follow the first 4 steps and then change the “WAN Type” to “PPP”. Give your username, password and select enabled for Use eDNS field. Click apply and restart the modem……

hi!!

This is an account of a small incident of my friend……read on..

This is such an unfair question by itself (Is India a secular country?). The festival of lights, festival of joy invites shops, services, stores to increase sales during this period of diwali. But is diwali meant only for those who celebrate it? Isn’t a festival common to all? Common to mankind in general whether you reside in Europe or USA? Leave alone Europe ; it happened in Chennai.

Listening to grandma’s rants about diwali discounts, I entered a well reputed beauty parlour in the city which offered good discounts for all kinds of stuff done till Diwali in their parlour. The lady who was being attended to just before my turn was told that her payment would be Rs.6 for threading. But she was charged Rs.8-the real cost of threading without taking into account the diwali offer. When she inquired into the issue she was told that it was a diwali discount and since she was a Christian she couldn’t avail it!!!horror of horrors! In a secular, democratic, socialistic, republic (whatever they taught us in civics!)Country like India and among the well educated ladies of Chennai this discrimination based on religion still exists! What if she had worn a “bindhi” and walked into the parlour? She becomes a Hindu and gets the discount? The issue here was a matter of trivial two rupees which she could have easily parted with; but can India part with its secular policies because of shameful incidents like this?

In this age even when lowly thieving does not discriminate religions and caste, people earning a decent living do fail to notice this. Is this what our 57 years of independence as a free body taught us?Obviously enraged by this, the lady voiced out “What? You discriminate based on religion in a secular country like India? Be ashamed of yourselves to have spoken those words” and so on and also added ” I’m going to write about this to the newspapers and to the police. You will be in jail; remember that”. Although I’m not aware if one could be jailed for this because it was forgotten by the lady herself when she added, “I’m silenced now; be sure it does not happen to anyone else”. This incident is giving me nightmares because being new to this kind of aghast experience I never believed that religious discrimination ever existed in the world, should I remain oblivious to the incident and walk away like that lady?

Well, the least i can say is, this is really sad……