My First ASP.Net MVC Appliacation

While developing my first ASP.Net MVC application, I faced many problems which has no solution on the web. There were problems with ViewData, Primary Key etc. and the solutions  I finally found were very simple...
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Scott Guthrie's ASP.net MVC Tutorial Links

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ASP.NET MVC Framework
One of the things that many people have asked for over the years with ASP.NET is built-in support for developing web applications using a model-view-controller (MVC) based architecture. Last weekend at the Alt.NET conference in Austin I gave the first...

ASP.NET MVC Framework (Part 1)
Two weeks ago I blogged about a new MVC (Model View Controller) framework for ASP.NET that we are going to be supporting as an optional feature soon. It provides a structured model that enforces a clear separation of concerns within applications, and...

ASP.NET MVC Framework (Part 2): URL Routing
Last month I blogged the first in a series of posts I'm going to write that cover the new ASP.NET MVC Framework we are working on.  The first post in this series built a simple e-commerce product listing/browsing scenario.  It covered the high...

ASP.NET MVC Framework (Part 3): Passing ViewData from Controllers to Views
The last few weeks I have been working on a series of blog posts that cover the new ASP.NET MVC Framework we are working on.  The ASP.NET MVC Framework is an optional approach you can use to structure your ASP.NET web applications to have a clear...

ASP.NET MVC Framework (Part 4): Handling Form Edit and Post Scenarios
The last few weeks I have been working on a series of blog posts that cover the new ASP.NET MVC Framework we are working on.  The ASP.NET MVC Framework is an optional approach you can use to structure your ASP.NET web applications to have a clear...

ASP.NET MVC Preview 5 and Form Posting Scenarios
This past Thursday the ASP.NET MVC feature team published a new "Preview 5" release of the ASP.NET MVC framework.  You can download the new release here .  This "Preview 5" release works with both .NET 3.5 and the recently...

Microsoft’s New Operating System - Midori

Microsoft’s New Operating System
"Microsoft is incubating a componentized non-Windows operating system known as Midori, which is being architected from the ground up to tackle challenges that Redmond has determined cannot be met by simply evolving its existing technology.

Midori is an offshoot of Microsoft Research’s Singularity operating system, the tools and libraries of which are completely managed code. Midori is designed to run directly on native hardware (x86, x64 and ARM), be hosted on the Windows Hyper-V hypervisor, or even be hosted by a Windows process.
According to published reports, Eric Rudder, senior vice president for technical strategy at Microsoft and an alumnus of Bill Gates’ technical staff, is heading up the effort. Rudder served as senior vice president of Microsoft’s Servers and Tools group until 2005."

My Rajasthan Visit

My Rajasthan Visit

In last winter I visited Rajasthan with my family. It was a unofficial official vacation tour. I planned the trip with my team mates and their family. It was a five day trip in desert. We rented an luxury Tempo Traveler which had a bed at the back side.

Predicting Market Direction Using Put Call Ratio (PCR) « Yanesh Tyagi writes …

Predicting Market Direction Using Put Call Ratio (PCR)

"Not sure where the market will head tomorrow? Tired of all those technical analysts? Do your technical analysis in seconds. Predict market sentiments yourself using PCR.

Put Call Ratio commonly called PCR is a simple ratio. This is calculated by dividing total number of put traded by the total number of calls traded on a particular day."

Share, Explore and Learn: Future hybrid System

Share, Explore and Learn: Future hybrid System

The new concept car coming from the automobile giant Peugeot Design Competition is surely a sophisticated design

Programmer Cost Calculator (for Programmers)

Programmer Cost Calculator (for Programmers): "How much do senior-level software developers really cost? When you consider the hidden costs associated with hiring employees, outsourcing to a services firm becomes an attractive alternative — especially for projects that are outside your company's core competence."

How To Create A Podcast

Podcasting is a method of giving out media files over the Internet. But how exactly is a podcast created? Read on and this article will tell you all you need to know.

First of all you will need a domain name. This will give your subscribers the location of where they can obtain your media files. If you can, choose a name which is easy to remember and describes the type of podcast you are publishing. Use a domain register such as eNom or GoDaddy to register your domain name.

The next thing you will need is a web host. There are many companies you can use, for example, Host Gator or StartLogic. As you will be storing a large amount of media files it is best to think about getting a big disk space when you are looking for a web host. For instance, a 2-minute mp3 file may be 2 MB in size. Quite a few web hosting companies offer several GB in disk space at an extremely low monthly cost. Apart from the disk space, you should also consider the amount of bandwidth the company is providing. This is the quantity of data that can be moved to and from your host each month. As your data files will be large, even a few subscribers can easily use up all of your bandwidth in a short space of time. Somewhere between ten and one hundred GB of bandwidth may be sufficient, but keep an eye on this and make sure you increase your bandwidth as your subscribers swell in number.

Upon selection of your web hosting company you will be provided with name servers which you will apply to your domain name later on. To finish setting up your site, you will need to input the name servers into the site where your domain name is registered and then your site will be visible on the Internet.

When your site is set up you should search the Internet and download dircaster.php. Arrange this program to show the particulars of your domain and then upload to your site accordingly.

The next step is to record the media file, which is known as an episode, that you are going to podcast. Audacity, from audacity.sourceforge.net is handy software to use and it is a free and open source to record and edit sounds. You can then record your episode from a CD, the computer's sound card, a microphone or even a VOIP conversation and then edit the file by mixing tracks and cutting or adding segments. You also need to be adding tags and descriptions on your episode too.

Upload this media file in the same directory as the dircaster.php. The dircaster will then generate a RSS feed informing your subscribers all about the new file that is available for them to download.

Setting up a podcast is not difficult and the good news is that it does not cost much either. The required software is free and downloadable from the Internet. If you feel you have something to share with others of like minds, then podcasting is a super way to supply your information to the Internet.

VB.net to c# converter

Many times we need to convert VB.net code to c#. There are many utilities to do this. but none of these is perfect as these have one or other shortcomings. Most of these utilities are the windows apps written in c# language. The draw back of windows app is that you need to upgrade the app at times.

I was looking for an online app for the conversion. And after some googling I found a cool online tool from the Developer Fusion Lab. This conversion tool is quite accurate in conversion and if it could not convert any code then it inserts the error message into the code. So one can easily identify the error message and do the manual conversion.

Link:
Convert VB.NET to C# - A free code conversion tool from Developer Fusion

Microsoft's New Operating System - Midori

Microsoft is incubating a componentized non-Windows operating system known as Midori, which is being architected from the ground up to tackle challenges that Redmond has determined cannot be met by simply evolving its existing technology.

Midori is an offshoot of Microsoft Research’s Singularity operating system, the tools and libraries of which are completely managed code. Midori is designed to run directly on native hardware (x86, x64 and ARM), be hosted on the Windows Hyper-V hypervisor, or even be hosted by a Windows process.
According to published reports, Eric Rudder, senior vice president for technical strategy at Microsoft and an alumnus of Bill Gates' technical staff, is heading up the effort. Rudder served as senior vice president of Microsoft’s Servers and Tools group until 2005.

“That sounds possible—I’ve heard rumors to the effect that he [Rudder] had an OS project in place,” said Rob Helm, director of research at Directions on Microsoft. He noted that it is quite possible that the project is just exploratory, but conceivably a step above what Microsoft Research does.
One of Microsoft’s goals is to provide options for Midori applications to co-exist with and interoperate with existing Windows applications, as well as to provide a migration path.
Building Midori from the ground up to be connected underscores how much computing has changed since Microsoft’s engineers first designed Windows; there was no Internet as we understand it today, the PC was the user’s sole device and concurrency was a research topic.
Today, users move across multiple devices, consume and share resources remotely, and the applications that they use are a composite of local and remote components and services. To that end, Midori will focus on concurrency, both for distributed applications and local ones.
According to the documentation, Midori will be built with an asynchronous-only architecture that is built for task concurrency and parallel use of local and distributed resources, with a distributed component-based and data-driven application model, and dynamic management of power and other resources.
Midori’s design treats concurrency as a core principle, beyond what even the Microsoft Robotics Group is trying to accomplish, said Tandy Trower, general manager of the Microsoft Robotics Group.
The Midori documents foresee applications running across a multitude of topologies, ranging from client-server and multi-tier deployments to peer-to-peer at the edge, and in the cloud data center. Those topologies form a heterogeneous mesh where capabilities can exist at separate places.
In order to efficiently distribute applications across nodes, Midori will introduce a higher-level application model that abstracts the details of physical machines and processors. The model will be consistent for both the distributed and local concurrency layers, and it is internally known as Asynchronous Promise Architecture.

Links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midori_(operating_system)

43 Things Tags: cloud computing,mobile development,.NET,SOA & SaaS,software development,Windows,Microsoft

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Money Manager Ex - SQL Query

Money Manager Ex is a personal finance management software. It lets you manage your personal faineance. You can manage  your expenses, investments and stocks using Money Manager Ex. The most appealing feature of this software is custom reports. It lets you run custom queries against its Sqlite database.

In my previous post on Money Manager, I explained its different features. In this post, I will explain how you can get category wise report of your expenses. Money manager manages your accounts in categories and sub-categories. It has many pre-defined categories. Each category is further classified into subcategories. Usually these are sufficient for the general use.

However you can create new category or subcategory easily. One lacking feature of this software is that it does not provide category-wise report of your transactions. You can see transactions summed up by sub-categories however.

To overcome this shortcoming, I wrote a simple SQL statement that allowed me to see the amount I spent on different categories.

SQL to view category-wise report:
The SQL statement to see categori-wise report is written below.

select a.categid, categname, round(sum(transamount),0) amount from checkingaccount_v1 a inner join category_v1 b on a.categid = b.categid group by a.categid having transdate >= '2008-06-01' and transdate < '2008-07-01'

The above statement displays amount spent on different categories for the month of June 2008 i.e. between 1st June and 30th June (both inclusive).  You may need to replace the dates i.e. '2008-06-01' and '2008-07-01' as per your requirement.

To execute this statement, select 'Custom SQL Report' from the 'Reports' menu on the Money Manager. If you cannot see 'Custom SQL Report' option, you may need to expend the Reports section by clicking on the '+' sign.

 

Selecting the 'Custom SQL Report' will open a 'Custom SQL Dialog' box that will ask you to type the query. Copy and paste above statement into the white box and click on the Run Query. It will show your desired report.

If you have any problem running the query, please let me know through comments of this post.

If you need any specific query for your requirement, please put your requirement in the comments and I will be happy to help you out.

Note: In future, I will be writing more SQL queries for MME. If you are interested in these queries, please subscribe the RSS.

Related Post:
Money Manager Ex - Described

43 Things Tags: Money Manage Ex,Personal Finance,Personal Fianance Software,Yanesh Tyagi

Phillips Go Gear SA-31 Media Player - Repairing Firmware

I purchased Phillips Go Gear SX 31 Device on 14th Feb 2008 from the Next's store. This is a beautiful black device with easy interface. This was working fine up to Tuesday last week when it started to misbehave. Any song I tried to play was being played in the fast forward mode. It was producing strange sound in the earphones.
Thinking that any key might not have released, I pressed all the keys. But that doesn't work. I switched the device off and then switched it on again. Hopefully, I tried to play the song. But again it was running like a jet plain - skipping 4 seconds at a time. The seconds count was 1...5...9...13..so on. Being a software professional (Microsoft technology), I thought of giving the device a hard boot. But the device has in-built battery and there is no way to remove its battery.

Today while I was enjoying my Sunday morning (at 11:30 am!), suddenly I remembered that the software that came with the device has an option to repair its firmware. I switched on my PC and tried the option of repairing the device. The device was repaired successfully. Thinking positively, I removed the device from USB connection and tried to play the song. But there was no song. The music folder was empty. With blowing heart, I checked my videos and pictures. All was gone. Even I lost my recorded sounds. The device came loaded with a video, that I like most. And not all was gone.

One thing that irritated me most, in the whole scenario, was that the repair software did not prompt me that my data may be lost. Although, I have the backups of my music, videos and pictures, I can't get back my sound recordings. The lose is non-recoverable.

Steps to Repair:

1. Open the Phillips SA-31xx device manager.
2. Connect the player to the computer while pressing and holding the on/off button of the device (the inner round button.). Windows will tell you that a USB device is connected in the repair mode.
3. The device's screen will look like:

1. On the device manager, click on the Repair tab.
2. On Repair tab, click the Repair button. It will show the message that the device is repaired. The device will also show that it's being repaired.

3. After the device has been repaired, below message will be shown.

 

4. BEWARE ALL DATA WILL BE LOST from the Phillips Go Gear SA-31xx Media Player without any warning.

Related Posts:

• PhillipsGoGear SA3115/97 Portable Media Player

 

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True / False in classic VB

In classic VB (and classic ASP as well), zero is considered as false and any other non-zero integer is considered as true.

While debugging an asp page, I come across following line:

If Not Request.Form.Count Then
...

Now form count was 2 (true) so the condition should evaluate as false (Not true). But this was always evaluating as true. It took me half an hour to find the catch.

What actually happening here was that Not is a bit-wise operator in VB. It flips the bits. So,

2 is 0000 0010 in binary.
NOT 2 is 1111 1101 in binary.

Considering that the last bit is sign bit, this becomes -3.

Now our condition If NOT (2) becomes If (-3), which always evaluates to true (non-zero integers are always true in VB).

 

Technorati Tags: ASP,VB,Programming,Classic+ASP

Automatic Formatting of Markup (HTML) in ASP.NET

Daniel at dimebrain did a really fantastic work writing a plug-in for VS that can format the markup in asp.net. When you build a web page using the VS designer, it auto generates the markup. But the auto generated code so clustered and impossibly hard to read.  You have to manually format the markup (HTML) code by hand. This is always very tiresome and boring job. Also this is wastage of time.

Daniel also felt the same. After being inspired by the Joe Stagner, he developed this plug-in. It provides an additional Edit menu item and hotkey (Ctrl+K, Ctrl+Z) to automatically line up attributes in a selection of text, or format the entire document if no text is selected. The meat of the add-in is a handful of regular expressions that parse tags (XAML, HTML, and ASP.NET directives) and a few IDE tools to line them up according to their indent level.

Download Links:

• Download the code (rar file)
• Download VS2005 Setup (msi file )
• Download VS2008 Setup (msi file)

Screen Shots:

Technorati Tags: ASP.NET,WPF,Silverlight,markup,indenting,guidelines

InstallShield Error: 5004 : 0x80070005

 

While Installing driver for my Sonix PC camera, I was welcomed with the followng error. I was trying to run setup.exe. It was a setup program created with the InstallShield setup creator.

Error Details

The details of the error were as below:

Error Code:    -5004 : 0x80070005
Error Information:
>SetupDLL\SetupDLL.cpp (1924)
pAPP:USB2.0 PC Camera-268
PVENDOR:Sonix
PGUID:75438C0E-9925-412E-AD85-D0E71C6CE2ED
$7.1.100.1248PAK
@Windows XP Service Pack 2 (2600) IE

7.0.6000.16574

 

Solution

After some Googling, I got a very unusual tip from Gonarth. I have tried other tips but they simply didn't work. I as little bit tired, but finally I decided to check this out. The tip was very simple but strange. I tried it and wow! it worked. Beloow is the step by step description of what I did:

1. Opem command window. Start -> Run -> Type cmd and press enter.

2. At Command window, type following command

at time /interactive cmd.exe

Replace time with the actual time. For example, its 00:38 AM at my computer. So I should type time as 00:40.  Press enter.

3. Close the command window.

4. Wait upto the time you entered in step 2. At this time, copmmand window will automatically appear on your screen.

5. Run the setup program from command window. For example, I was running setup from CD ROM so I typed "G:\setup.exe".

6. The installshield will load and run the setup without giving the 5004: 0x80070005 error.

7. Complete the installation as usual or as instructed in your installation guide.

What Happened

The problem with the installshield program seems to be with the permissions. When you opened the command window using the at command, it is opened with some extra permissions. You run setup program with these extra permissions, and it works fine.

Top 20 Programming Books

1. Code Complete  by Steve McConnell - Darn near a bible of software development goodness, Code Complete reminds us of our priorities. It's essential and everyone who writes code should read this book.

2. The Pragmatic Programmer by  Andrew Hunt and Dave Thomas - I like to read this book at least every six months or so. It's clean, clever, clear and full of concrete tips you can use to be a better, simpler, pragmatic programmer. A new classic.

3. Programming Pearls by Jon Bentley - This may feel initially like a C book, but it's really an algorithms book at its heart. It's old school with techniques and thought problems that can be applied today, even in language like Ruby and C#.

4. Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code -by Fowler, Beck, Brant, Opdyke, Roberts  Although the language used is Java, the concepts are universal. This is a very linear, easy to read, learn by example book. If you think you know how to refactor, but you haven't read this book, pick it up and refresh yourself. You'll find names for Refactorings you've used for years and you'll definitely not only pick up new ones, but be better able to spot opportunities to use them.

5. Design of the UNIX Operating System by Maurice J. Bach So few programmers today can answer questions like "explain how virtual memory is managed" or "how are Unix processes different from Windows." How did we get here. Know your history.

6. Design Patterns by Gamma, Helm, Johnson, Vlissides - One of the comments on Amazon says it best, "It is expected that any professional developer has read this book front-to-back. Buy it, read it, then put it in your bathroom and read it when convenient. Also, when you're done, spend some time at the Portland Pattern Repository.

7. Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers - The book is highly entertaining and comes across as a conversation with a really sharp, really patient guru developer. Often, it's a chore to slog through code-heavy books. But Feathers manages to keep my attention with interesting stories, loads of examples, and well-written text.

8 .The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff stoll - A sentimental favorite, The Cuckoo's Egg seems to have inspired a whole category of books exploring the quest to capture computer criminals. Still, even several years after its initial publication and after much imitation, the book remains a good read with an engaging story line and a critical outlook, as Clifford Stoll becomes, almost unwillingly, a one-man security force trying to track down faceless criminals who've invaded the university computer lab he stewards. What first appears as a 75-cent accounting error in a computer log is eventually revealed to be a ring of industrial espionage, primarily thanks to Stoll's persistence and intellectual tenacity. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

9. Head First Design Patterns by Elisabeth Freeman, Eric Freeman, Bert Bates, Kathy Sierra - I just started reading it yesterday and it is a really well written (lots of pictures and examples) and is put in terms even I understand. Even so early on I would recommend it to anyone wanting an introduction into design patterns.You may not want to include it is all the examples are in Java although if you know c# you should understand it and even the VB / C++ shouldn't have to jump to far.

10. From Coder to Developer: Tools and Strategies for Delivering Your Software by Gunderloy and Sybex - started very interesting. For someone new to the business it gives a nice overview of what the whole software development process entails and made things a lot clearly for a new graduate like me.

11. Code Reading by Spinellis - is a good read for learning how to quickly and efficiently get to grips with an existing codebase. I'm fortunate enough to have worked on greenfield stuff my last couple of projects, but this is gold when starting at a new company and needing to get up to speed. Also great if you're looking to join an open source project. (http://www.spinellis.gr/codereading/).

12. Writing Secure Code 2 by Michael Howard - This book provides a great overview of what techniques are important when writing secure applications, and what pitfalls to avoid. The book does a good job at making a point through examples and by explaining possible exploits.

13. The Mythical Man Month by  Brooks - This is a touchstone book, where by merely mentioning the name, you instantly communicate a body of knowledge on software engineering insight. It's full of truths about Software Engineering that are still relevant. 30 years later.

14. Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler - Noted software engineering expert, Martin Fowler, turns his attention to enterprise application development. He helps professionals understand the complex--yet critical--aspects of architecture. Enables the reader to make proper choices when faced with a difficult design decision.

15. TCP/IP Illustrated Volume 1 by  W. Tichard Stevens - Even though this book was published in 1994, it still serves as a useful reference and learning tool for the TCP/IP protocol. There are of course changes and additions that have been made to TCP/IP over the last 7 years such as IPv6, but one can still refer to this book as a good source of information about the dynamics of TCP/IP. There are exercises at the end of each chapter, so it can, and has been used as an effective textbook.

16. Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition by Steve Krug - A practical Web design usability guide, "Don't Make Me Think!" is based on empirical observation not exhaustive statistics. Steve Krug's five years of usability consulting and testing are distilled down to this thin yet gem-filled how-to. Krug observed how people actually use the Web rather than how we *think* they use it, gleaning key usability guidelines.

17. The Inmates are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity by Alan Cooper - It's worth reading this book -- even despite the painful tone he often takes -- just to pick up on the ideas of creating concrete personas and how you use them to develop your product. We do that today at Microsoft (at least in Developer Tools), and it's a highly successful way of not only building a good product, but also in helping hundreds of developers understand why a feature is 'in' or 'out', no matter how much they might like it personally.

18. Mastering Reguler Expressions by Jeffrey E. F. Friedl - Regular expressions, a powerful tool for manipulating text and data, are found in scripting languages, editors, programming environments, and specialized tools. In this book, author Jeffrey Friedl leads you through the steps of crafting a regular expression that gets the job done. He examines a variety of tools and uses them in an extensive array of examples, with a major focus on Perl.

19. Test Driven Development by Kent Beck - The book teaches the concepts of TDD by working through two complete sample projects. Along the way, Beck gives the reader valuable insight into the thought process and techniques behind successful test-driven development. When the reader has finished working through these sample projects, he should know enough about TDD to get started working on a TDD project.

20. Head Rush Ajax by Brett McLaughlin - The Head First Labs crew has done it again in this excellent into to Ajax. The book really gives a great overview of Ajax for both programmers and non-programmers alike. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to pick this up. Although the book covers more PHP than I care for, and not enough of XML as I would like to see, it does an excellent job of covering their bases in a way that's easy to understand. I highly recommend this book to anyone with little to no understanding of Ajax. Let's pretty up the web, people!

Technorati Tags: Programming,Books,Programming Books,Code Complete,The Progmatic Programmer,Programming Perls,Refactoring,Design of Unix Operating System,Yanesh Tyagi

Birthday ... or April Fool

What is the relation between birthday and april fool?

Well, you may call people at a food junction telling them that today (1st of Aptil) is your birthday. Most will believe you and wait for you at the food junctions. but some will be smart enough to figure out that it's the Fool's Day.

But what if somebody actually born on Fool's Day? My boss, Kiran, is one of those rare persons. He was born on the first day of April. There was a great party at our office cafetria (to make us believe!). We brought a very beautiful chocolaty cake for him.

Kiran told us the same story. He used to call people for his b'day and people thought that he would be fooling them. He used to keep waiting at the cake table and nobody turns up. He then had to call them many times and turn all the stones to make them believe that it was a real party.

Kiran will give us an unoffical party on Friday .............................................not to be disclosed.

I have one more friend who has a very unique thing about his b'day. This year he celebrated his 11th birthday. And his daughter is doing Post Graduation at the university (believe me!). I will discuss that later on.

Technorati Tags: Birthday,Cake,Kiran,Yanesh Tyagi,Tecnovate,Party,Fool's Day,April Fool,Unique Birthday

Money Manager EX - The Personal Money Manager

Since long time, I was wondering where my money goes. I always run out of budget at the end of every month. And I could not track where all my money goes. So I decided to use a personal money manager. After some Googling, I found a wonderful software called Money Manager Ex. This is a lightweight personal money manager software which is available free of cost.

Features

Money Manager provides some nice features. Below is the summary of the features, I like.

Multiple Bank Account: You can manage multiple bank accounts. It supports two type of accounts - saving/checking and investment. Your investment accounts automatically becomes stock accounts. But it would be nice if I could get third account type - credit account, for my credit cards. However, you can manage credit cards by pretending them to be saving account and entering the opening balance (i.e. outstanding amount) in negative.

Transactions: With Monery Manager Ex, you can enter tentative transactions. I enterd tentative transactions for the month in advance. Then you can categorize the transactions as reconciled, void or follow up.

Repeated Transactions: You can enter repeated transactions and set the frequency, date etc. This saves lots of data entry time.

Transaction Splitting: This is a very useful feature of Money Manager. You can split a transaction in multiple transactions. I enter a lum sump amount at the beginning of the month for home needs. Later on I can split this transaction into different categories. This helps me to manage my budget and always provides me a birds eye view of my finance.

Budgeting: This software allows you to enter budget for a year. Later on you can compare budget with the actual expenses.

Reports: Money Manager Ex provides a handful of useful reports. Some of the reports, I use are:

Where The Money Goes
To Whom The Money Goes
Where The Money Comes From
Budget Performance
Income vs Expenses

Custom Reports: If you are not satisfied with the reports provided with the software, you can use custome SQL reports. This allows you to write SQL statement to generate the report. This is a very noice feature for a developer like me.

Database: Money Manager uses SQLlite database. You can do anything with the database using any SQlite tool like SQLite2008 Pro Enterprise Manager or SQLite 3 Explorer.

Carry Your Money Manager With You

The best feature of the Money Manager is that you can carry it with you. The software is very carefully designed not to use any windows dependency like windows registry or any thing else. You don't need to install the software on your machine. Keep the software in a pen drive and use it any where, at home or on your office laptop or in a cyber cafe etc.

Related Posts:
Money Manager Ex - SQL Query: to create category-wise expense report.

Need any help on using money manager? Put a comment and I will be happy to help you out.

Philips GoGear SA3115/97 Portable Media Player

I planned to gift a portable media player to my wife on this valentine day. After little market search and product analysis, I decided to buy PhillipsGoGear SA3115/97. It has a great look. It has appealing black color with 1.8" color screen.

It has simple interface with keylock feature. keylock feature is very useful when you intend to keep your player into pocket. It locks all the keys except volume keys.
This Philips player has five keys on the front - 4 cursor keys and 1 multifunction key. These keys are placed in a circular keypad with soft touch. The multifuction key at the center of keypad is a dual key for playpause and onoff functionality. Press it once for playpause and press and hold for few seconds for onoff functionality.
There is one key on the lefyhand side with an icon on lock. This is the keylock key. One pair of keys are at right side. These are volume keys - for V+ and V-.
Below is a chart of common features of this media player:
MemoryType : Flash
Capacity: 1GB
Expended Memory: not supported
Display
Coloured display with 1.8 inches screen.
Resolution: 160 x 128
Audio
Supports MP3 and WMA format.
Equalizer: 7 mode (Off Rock Funk Jaaz classic hip-hopp Dance.
Sound Quality: Above average however there is no question of comparing it with Apple iPod. iPod is much better than this. (well, one of the factor in my decision of buying this was money also.)
Video
Supports only WMA format. Additional support for 3gp format would be great.
Radio
Has FM receiver in built. You can set and save 10 channels.
Pictures:
Supports JPEG and BMP format. It comes with an media convertor utility which resizes and convert JPEG images to BMP images. Although the player can display JPEG images, very large images gets distorted. I copied my Siny Digital Camera (12 megapixels) images to the player without convertor utility. It took too longer to display and the displayed image was havily distorted. Then I used convertor utility which reduce the size of images to nearly 57 KB but the display was better.
Battery and ChargingPhillips GoGear has inbuilt lithium ion battery. This can only be charged through USB port of myour laptop or desktop. Or you can use an stand-alone USB charger, if you don't have PC.
Lacking Features:

1. Support for 3gp video format.
2. Browse music by location. Currently you can browse music artist album Genere only. You can choose all songs as well but in that case songs are played in alphabatical order.
3. Support for multiple playlist.
4. Functionality to play all songs of an artist. Currently you have to choose artist and then its album. Once it has played all songs of that album and artist combination, you can set to repeat or repeat and shuffle within that album. It would be better if the player software automatically jump to next album of the same singer or to next singer.
5. You can not listen music or viw video or photo while it is connected to computer. This is irritating as it needs to kep connecting for hours for charging.
6. USB changer should be bundeld with the packet.

Great Features:
You can upgrade the firmware. It comes with a device manager that you install on your computer. Device manager check for the update avaible on Philips website and automatically updates the firmaware.
However, I could not use these feature. My players firmware version is 2.56 and the latest version available on the website is 3.7. When I used device manager to upgrade, it told me that my player has most updated version. I tried several times, but it keeps on giving the same message. finally I got frustrated and gave up.
Any suggestion, how can I upgrade the firmware to latest version?
Related Links:Phillips Go Gear SA-31 Media Player - Repairing Firmware

43 Things Tags: Philips,GoGear,SA3115/97,Portable Media Player,Philips GoGear SA3115/97 Portable Media Player,Yanesh Tyagi,Music Player,MP3 Player,MP4 Player,Photo Viewer

Google Reader - Keyboard Shortcuts

Google Reader is a great application from Google Labs. This allows you to organize your blogs, manage your subscriptions and share interested posts with your blogs. All this is available online. This means you can access all your settings and blogs from anywhere. You can also access Google reader through mobile device.

Keyboard Shortcuts:

Google reader is popular for its keyboard shortcuts. According to The Official Google Blog "j" key is the most popular key. This is used to move to the next item. You can find a list of popular Google Reader keyboard Shortcut keys here. A complete list of keyboard shortcut is available here. However, the best keystroke is "?". This is "/" key with shift key pressed. This provides help on all other keyboard shortcuts.

Google reader have a very large list of features. I will discuss these features in the next post.
Technorati Tags: Google+Reader,Keyboard+Shortcuts,Google+Reader+Keyboard+Shortcuts,Blog+Management+Tool,Yanesh+Tyagi

Comparison Of Intel Desktop And laptop processors

 

Comparison of Intel Processors for Desktop
	Intel® Core™2 Extreme Processor	Intel® Core™2 Quad Processor Q9550	Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor E8500	Pentium® Dual-Core Processor	Pentium® 4 Processor
Processor Number	QX9775	Q9550	E8500	E2200	N/A
Architecture	45 nm technology	45 nm technology	45 nm technology	65 nm technology	90 nm technology
L2 Cache	12 MB	12M	6M	1 MB	1M
L3 Cache	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
Clock Speed	3.20 GHz	2.83 GHz	3.16 GHz	2.2 GHz	2.80A GHz
Front Side Bus Speed	1600 MHz	1333 MHz	1333 MHz	800 MHz	533 MHz
Chipset	E5400	G33 Express Chipset	G31 Express Chipset	N/A	865GV / 910GL

 

Comparison of Intel Processors for Laptop
	------------------------------------ Intel Centrino ----------------------------------------------					Centrino vPro
CPU number sequence	L7000/T7000/U7000	T5000; L7000/T7000/U7000	T2000/U2000	T1000/U1000	U2000	L7000/T7000/U7000
Processor	Intel® Core™2 Duo	Intel® Core™2 Duo	Intel® Core™2 Duo	Intel® Core™ Solo	Intel® Core™ Solo	Intel® Core™2 Duo
Number of cores	2	2	2	1	1	2
Clock speed	up to 2.4 GHz	up to 2.33 GHz	up to 2.33 GHz	up to 1.83 GHz	up to 1.2 GHz	up to 2.6 GHz
L2 cache	up to 4 MB	2/4 MB	2 MB	2 MB	1 MB	up to 4 MB
Front side bus	Up to 800 MHz	533/667 MHz	533/667 MHz	533/667 MHz	533 MHz	800 MHz
Memory support (DDR2)	up to 667 MHz	up to 667 MHz	up to 667 MHz	up to 667 MHz	up to 533 MHz	up to 667 MHz
Chipset	Intel® 965 or 945 Express Chipset	Intel® 945 Express Chipset	Intel® 945 Express Chipset	Intel® 945 Express Chipset	Intel® 945 Express Chipset	Intel® 965 Express Chipset
Wireless communications	Intel® Next-Gen Wireless-N or Intel® PRO/Wireless	Intel® Next-Gen Wireless-N or Intel® PRO/Wireless	Intel® Next-Gen Wireless-N or Intel® PRO/Wireless	Intel® Next-Gen Wireless-N or Intel® PRO/Wireless	Intel® Next-Gen Wireless-N or Intel® PRO/Wireless	Intel® Next-Gen Wireless-N or AG
Wired communications	Intel® 82566MM GB	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	Intel® 82566MM GB

Unicode Tool tip

While using windows XP, I was facing a problem. I was working on a multilingual web site. we were showing tool tips to help user to understand what a particular button will do or where a link points. The tool tips were working fine for language which uses English language characters. But in case of other characters (read unicode) such as Chinese or Arabic, it showed small boxes instead of letters.

I had to do lot of research on the internet (googling is my first habit) and here is what I found:

To set your tooltip font to be able to display Unicode characters:
Right click on the desktop, pick Properties -> Appearance -> Advanced ->Item: ToolTip, then set the font to Arial Unicode MS or other large font.

This will show unicode characters in the tool tip.