Was trying to pay my Electricity bill online via a site called Bangalore One , which is the Governments, premier one-stop shop for Electronic Delivery of Citizen Services. I could not pay because it seems like some backend services they need for credit card payment is down. How do I know this? Because the site is revealing too much detail! See the exception details pasted below. ...

I came across this very interesting article in the guardian called “ Google logic: why Google does the things it does the way it does ”. This is a fascinating insight and a lot of it makes sense to me. What was also interesting to understand a little more on how the mindset is very different from the other corporates and technology leaders out there. Especially interesting the self-righteous view one perceives that Google has of themselves. It is a little long, but worth a read.

I am probably the only guy on the planet who broke his Surface Pro device! :oops: So much so that the screen shattered - so much for Gorilla glass and all that! I was starting out on a 4 week long trip and the Surface slipped and fell at the airport when taking it out for the X-Ray machine. It fell on one corner and the screen shattered. With small pieces of glass everywhere on it, it was not usable. However it did work when I switched it on a week later. Here are a few photos that show the extend of the damage and the fact that it was still working post that! ...

Enough said! Dilbert and Leadership

TechEd a couple of months ago was really fun and I am grateful to Microsoft folks for giving me an opportunity to be both part of the Keynote and also have a slot in the Architecture track. Sorry it has taken me a very long time to upload my TechEd talk “Building cross-platform Modern Apps: the Design perspective”. But as they say better late than never. 😏 You can download a copy of my presentation - Xamarin - Building cross-platform (pdf) . ...

I would prefer a Windows 8 Metro app, and not a ’traditional’ app for WordPress. I host my own blog ( http://desigeek.com ) and need to update that. View Question on Quora

We will be travelling with a Toddler (2.5 yrs) to Amsterdam and wanted to know what suggestions one has to keep her engaged, excited, and busy? View Question on Quora

Yes, I am still alive. Between a baby and work, don’t have time for much else. I did want to say Hello World. Will try and be more regular here.

I was cleaning out my old papers (finally!) and came across an old paper I had titled “ Compiler Writing Tools using C# ” which essentially shows how you can write a number of tools like lex and yacc but instead of C/C++ on Unix, you use C# and .NET. ...

After seeing this, I think I also want the “Apple 5”; supposedly this lady is true and has been waiting in line for 2 days. {Credit: wmpoweruser.com }

Microsoft folks have released a large collection of free eBooks including Visual Studio, WP, Win 8, Office 365, SQL, Azure, CRM, etc. You can get more details from the following two posts where not only you can browse the catalogue but also download them. First post with free books Second post with free books Happy Leeching!

I did a quick internal brown bag on Cloud computing yesterday. It is interesting to still get to meet folks who don’t have much ideas on Cloud and what the various types are, what they mean and their value. In any case, cloud is just full of hot air. ! 😄 I always found, most people can get it when they can relate to cloud usage as a consumer. And of course the CoIT and BYOD will just help accelerate that and bring the usage out in the front. I personally am a heavy cloud user and use it all the time. I also have a local copy of almost everything, I still don’t trust the broadband providers – lots of things that can go wrong. ...

I am trying to see if I can get Redis working on Windows 8 using Visual Studio 2012 RC bits – I have not had much success, but then I have not had much time to invest to try this out. I am wanting to give a demo tomorrow and would be good to see if I can get this working. Curious to know if anyone else has got this? ...

I am giving a presentation next week on NoSQL and as part of that I wanted to create a Word Map, similar to the ones I have seen in the Guardian over the years. After searching a little, I came across the following two sites which do an excellent job of this. Both of them allow a number of options to customise the output and I think are very cool! ...

I was reading something and came across these fallacies of Distributed Computing which all beginners (to distributed computing) have. Oh how we all learn. The network is reliable Latency is zero Bandwidth is infinite The network is secure Topology doesn’t change There is only one administrator Transport cost is zero The network is homogeneous

My WHS was dead for close to a year now with no automatic backups happening! I knew the issue was one of the HDD’s had failed, but I did not have time to take them out and plug them somewhere else to figure out the exact issue. I finally bought a couple of new disks and restored the WHS over the weekend and everything is running fine now. Also got about 101 GB backed up on S3, which is good. ...

In Visual Studio “11” when I try and create a new C++ Metro app using the built-in template, I get the following error: “Can’t find localized resources”. I wonder if anyone else has managed to get around this? I am running the Consumer Preview Build of Win 8 (Build 8250).

I am running Windows 8 on my primary work machine now, which is domain joined. When I try and use the SkyDrive metro app (which ships with Windows 8), it does not like that fact I am domain joined and wants me to switch accounts, which is something I don’t want to do. This of course works great for those who are not domain joined and essentially are personal machines. For many of us who will be using this on ‘work’ machines, this seems like we will be ignored. ...

The sooner we all understand the Concurrency ≠ CEP (Complex Event Processing), the better the world will be! CEP is generally used when we implement real-time systems (of course that is not the only area where CEP is used). Real-time does not mean concurrent or for that matter high-performing system. Of course there are correlations, but at the same time they are fundamentally different paradigms.

I had forgotten that I had the AWS Extension for Visual Studio installed until recently I noticed AWS Explorer item in the View menu option. This add-in allows you to explore the various features that Amazon exposes right from within Visual Studio. The toolkit makes it easier for developers to debug and deploy a .NET solutions that uses AWS. ...

Got this in one of the chain emails, and thought it was too funny to pass up. Thought of the day

Whilst the following was said in the context of mobile ad-hoc network ( MANETs ) I believe it can hold of many situations that life throws at us. Efficiency and quality are of equal importance!! Both come from experience, not from study. Study as you go, don’t assume that you’re ready for the real world because you studied first. ...

Our current camera ( Canon IXUS 860 IS ) is on the last dying leg – the camera itself works OK, but the screen is going to give up any day now – there are big holes where the pixels are dead (looks like a black hole). We love this model and want something along the same form factor and not interesting in anything fancy. One of the options was the new Canon IXUS 240 HS which has a built-in Wifi connection and has just been released, though is not available in all the markets. ...