Bytes and Bites of Internet
Archive for August, 2010
Newsgroups … playing with ancient form of Forums …
Aug 31st
If you are like me, then probably you already familiar with Forums and their uses (other than searching Pornos ofcourse 
) … if you look at the history you will find that forums came to existence not too early … but their another form was here since early ages of Internet … it was is called NewsGroups …
Newsgroups are basically collection of messages posted by many users. They use NNTP (Network News Transfer Protocol) at application layer. So, in a way they are discussion groups or if I dare to say Forums … and believe me despite of present Twittered and Facebooked culture, there is a lot big user group still use these ancient technology of communication … when I first time used it, it felt more geeky to me … (I mean it was geeky to even a geek 
) … we can do almost anything that we are doing with all these Web 2.0 tools. and torrents (again other than searching Porn )… And what I liked about them is access to almost all posts / reposts of day and you don’t need to search for answers like you do in forums. Or the greatest benefit (atleast for me) is, if you are just browsing all questions to gain more understanding of practical problems and their solutions from all across the user base then its more easy to do in Newsgroup then Forums…
I have used couple of different newsgroup readers (all are free), and the two I liked the most are Windows Live Mail and Grabit … both has really good features to customize feel and look … with ability to control.
I will show few shots of How to Setup Newsgroup in Grabit .. actually, its pretty straight forward. Simply grab Grabit … and install it. Now, when you will run it at first screen it will ask to add News Server, but don’t do that instead click cancel and delete that default news server (because it won’t let you rename it !!)… then create new server, add profile name and Host name of your server … also feed ID and PWD if your server need them.
IIS 7.5 + Multiple websites = troubles
Aug 29th
Today when I was trying to work on an ASP.NET application which I was saving on my “Default Web Site” in IIS, I was getting “unable to start debugging on the web server. the iis worker process for the launched url isnot working” error whenever I try to run & debug any application in my Visual Studio 2010. Even my old application which were stored in IIS very long time ago were throwing me same error!!! …. But if I try to access that application directly by typing its path in browser, I was able to run them properly !!! .. So I figured out that something must be wrong with my IIS (or its Settings ) but not with my application itself …
Introduction to Indexing …. and SQL Server
Aug 28th
Indexing in simple term can be explained as a pointer to some specific information. It works nearly same as indexes at end of book, just fine the keyword you are looking for at index and get the page number where it is located (when I was studying, mostly sometimes I thought that best way to read a book is to begin from index 
, because it gives you precise location of information).
If you ask any developer or DBA about importance of indexes in database then at first they will look at you like 
or 
… and then probably they will lecture you for next 1 hour about how it is really important to have good indexes (are there bad ones too ? … of course yes) for database. I will talk about bad indexes at end, but first why we really need them ??
Well, basic use of any DBMS is to store data, right ?? And as I said, index is basically pointed to some information or in our case some record. So basically when we execute any query, Query Optimizer of Database Engine first looks for existence of any Index for the column on which we are performing operation (NOTE: before running ANY query, Query Optimizer generates a plan to execute query called EXECUTION PLAN, which is used to analyze/troubleshoot performance of query)!!! And if index exists on column in question then it becomes really easy (generally this is process, but things can get complicated at complex queries) to get results … by easy means execution time of that query reduces significantly. Of course if you have used SQL Server or even any DBMS then you know that there is no general answer for any question and you will hear “it depends” a lot from senior guys 
… which sometimes makes you doubtful about their qualification understanding … but they are correct, I mean even though I am writing it now there are many “it depends” scenario we can talk about but then this post will be more like epic then simple introduction 
… but I will try to mention some points in the end of post.
Eureka moment with Firefox 4 beta 4 !!!
Aug 27th
Archimedes would have said same thing today if he was sitting next to me 
… Finally I got Firefox 4 beta working !!!
As I had posted few days earlier, I had been trying to make Firefox 4 beta working and every time I tried to install it, I always ended up with some really weird looking screen then regular one. I tried many different approaches, like clearing temp … cleaning registry … removing old folder … but none worked. But today, I was in mood to fight till end. So, I uninstalled all plugins from my old Firefox 3.6 and then tried to install Firefox 4 beta … and with a little surprise the final result was something I was not expecting at all !!! I had all normal Firefox 4 screen as it was shown in screenshots at Mozilla 
…
Freeze the time … and protect your system !!!
Aug 25th
Well, it’s not title of new sci-fi movie where hero freezes time in order to save his computer from vicious villain 
… it’s about a software called Time Freeze by Wondershare. If you have known already, there is a really good site called Giveaway Of the Day, which gives away a licensed software everyday for free !!! In past this site has given many free but really good software including Anti-viruses, Firewalls, Utility Software, designing software etc. And today they are giving away this really cool app. by Wondershare.
I am already using a sandboxing software called SandBoxie (free)… and Time Freeze is doing same. If you are like me and do lots of web surfing to unknown new site or say you love to “experiment” with your OS by installing new software / games etc. then this is the right thing for you. By creating virtualized system, it prevents any kind of harm that can be done because of viruses, software or even by yourself 
…
SQL Server and The Models …
Aug 25th
Atomicity Consistency Isolation and Durability these are key features of any Database Management System weather its SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL or any … and so it is essential for any DBMS to be able to recover / restore data to its original state or a state in any given period of time defined by it’s user. Now, I am using SQL Server mainly so I am gonna talk about it …
In SQL Server, when ever a transaction (a set of instructions) is done it gets registered or say logged into log file of that database where transaction is being performed. Now, at event of disaster it is really important for database to recover from it with minimal without loss of data, because enterprise itself depends only on data !! And at that event this log file (or say Logs) plays really important part. Let me explain it in more detail …. when ever we do any transaction it gets logged in Log file, but it doesn’t gets written to data file immediately. So, it is possible that if we made changes to 100 records it won’t exist in real data file (but if we query those records we still can see new data because SQL Server has marked those data pages as dirty so any query referencing it will show new records not the real data that is stored in data file 
) … now I know it sounds a bit of confusing but in one line just understand that, if we make change to database it doesn’t gets written to data file immediately, instead database engine marks those records (or a data page where those records are stored ) as dirty and it only gets written after some given time or after those record size reaches upto some value (btw, the process responsible to write these dirty pages to data file is called “Lazy Writer” ). So, like I was talking, if you have changed 100 records of some table say Credit Card details and still that data is not changed in real data pages … meanwhile something goes wrong and server gets crashed … or in another case say someone deleted whole table of Customer Information, what you think will happen ?? Well, the answer lies in something called “Recovery Model” of SQL Server.
And now we have official WP 3.0.1 …
Aug 23rd
Well, I have been using WordPress 2.8.6 since I started blogging … and WP 3 got released some where during June 2010…since then it was telling me to upgrade to 3.0.1 but I was feeling lazy to do so because at first I thought its kind of ultra complicated process (and it is because I have not given access to WP to write, so no automatic upgrade) …
So yesterday night I was in mood to do something and I just thought that why not try to upgrade. So did some googling about the whole process and end up with WP help guide which gives step by step detail instructions to whole upgrade process …