Manish Agrawal

GPS - Tracking of BIAL (Bangalore International Airport) Buses

Manish Agrawal — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 18:45:10 GMT

Shiffin.Com has come-up with an exciting tool for GPS tracking of BIAL Buses over Google Maps.

This tool is very good and provides not just the location of the bus, but also keeps the pin moving in real-time as per speed of the bus. You can highlight the route (path) of individual bus and even Zoom-in to check the Satllite Image (static) of the location where the bus currently is. More-over it shows the Bus No. and even speed of the bus also.

Bravo, Great Work guys!!!

Some screenshots:

Google Chrome - New Browser & Googles simplistic approach

Manish Agrawal — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 04:07:51 GMT

It is a very nice browser.. is the feeling, I got after using it for an hour or so. So the first impression is good.

But I can't write this blog post using it. So there is lot to be still done. For example it doesn't shows the RichEditBox toolbar as shown below over the Post Body entry box.

Similarly it is unable to show XML content as XML and renders it as html (without tags). These just some examples, I am sure Google will incorporate all such features in coming releases.

The things which I liked about Chrome are:

Smart use of Screen space (as default feature), providing maximum area for viewing
Smart use of Status bar, by only showing when it is required
Google Search directly from Address bar
Drag tab out to create new window or gather multiple tabs into one window
FAQ for web developers
Comics interpretation of key engineering decisions
Hold Back/Forward button to see history
Web Inspector: to see the elements and resources associated with the component by right clicking on it, including a hierarchy view of the DOM and a JavaScript console.
Treating Tabs as independent process (great lesson for Microsoft to improve IE's never ending Crashing problem)
Open Source
Text Area Resizing option. Click & drag the bottom right corner of text area to resize.

As this is from Google the company which believes in releasing of rock solid products. And Chrome is still in Beta, so I will not mind the shortcomings and would wait for more features to be added.

Great work guys keep it up...

links:

Download link

Features page

Can techies be good/ successful Product Managers?

Manish Agrawal — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 18:05:55 GMT

Till now, I use to create Posts marked, Post I liked. But for this one I would like to say, Question I liked:

Anant Mishra has asked a very interesting question on LinkedIN. And so are the answers. (I mean interesting).

Being a Technical Product Manager myself, I couldn't stop myself from blogging about it.

Click here to see the Answers.

SCRUM -- as Explained by Ken Schwaber

Manish Agrawal — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 18:47:05 GMT

This is a really nice video... worth watching... if you want to learn Scrum, in just 1 hr.

Thankyou Sharad, for sharing this video 2 years back and now again, in an answer to one of the questions on LinkedIN..

Future Web Trends...

Manish Agrawal — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 18:04:54 GMT

| View | Upload your own

Shift Happens -- (A very good presentation) -- remember Matrix...

Manish Agrawal — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 21:18:22 GMT

| View | Upload your own

One Machine multiple Operating Systems - Virtualization / Fusion / Multi boot

Manish Agrawal — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 18:22:00 GMT

Going thru the various articles on Virtualization / Multi boot machines to support multiple OS. I have started feeling the need to go for a machine + software configuration which can give me best of all the worlds.

Following are some of the great articles, which I found & might be using some day to configure my dream machine.

So an ideal laptop for this would be a MacBook Pro 2.6Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo with 200GB+ HDD (7200 RPM), 4GB+ RAM.

huh!!! it goes upto $2999 + $240 for Windows Vista Home Premium.

In Rupees (my currency) it comes to Rs. 140000.00 (approx.). i.e. big money

Next I am thinking, How to arrange the money for this dream machine!!

For this, I am even open for accepting donations if u r willing to donate u r most welcome and believe me it would be a gr8 help to the computing community , just add a comment to this post and I will provide you the details about how u can send in ur donations.

May 31st: Posts I liked

Manish Agrawal — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 04:58:43 GMT

Mobile VAS related:

Ivan Komarov as an editor of Eyeline Communication, has written many excellent blog-posts on Mobile technology. Link to few of them which I liked are as under:
- What is WAP- 2 ?
- USSD related posts

Trends of Mobile Internet - (on Opera Mini)

Manish Agrawal — Wed, 28 May 2008 09:57:12 GMT

Lately Opera Software has released a report on Opera Mini usage and Trends of Mobile Internet.

You can access the report here.

As per the Report:

Social Networking is the most popular service on Mobile devices among other Mobile Internet Sites.
One Web will triumph over WAP content

I am just pasting the report in my post as well, I hope Opera will not mind this and anyways it will be free promotion of Opera Mini Mobile Browser.

Top Trends

Social networking stands supreme
Almost 40% of traffic worldwide is to social networks. In some countries, such as the United States, South Africa and Indonesia, the social Web accounts for more than 60% of the traffic.

One Web will triumph over WAP content
Full Web surfing comprises more than 77% of all traffic. Content on WAP and .mobi sites accounted for 23% of mobile Web traffic. This share continues to decline as more consumers both use Opera Mini to access rich Web content and become more comfortable browsing the Web on their phones.

Part 1: Growth

Opera Mini cumulative users per month

Cumulative Users

Opera Mini has become the world's most popular mobile browser. Since its worldwide launch in 2006, more than 44 million people have downloaded and used Opera Mini. More than 11.9 million people used Opera Mini in March 2008. In the last quarter, the number of people who downloaded and used Opera Mini grew 26% over the prior quarter in 2007.

Pages transcoded by Opera Mini per month

Pages Transcoded

Opera Mini users viewed more than 2.4 billion pages in March. In the first three months of 2008, the number of pages viewed through Opera Mini grew almost 57% over the last quarter of 2007. In March, each person using Opera Mini viewed 202 pages on average.

Total data consumed per month (in MB)

Data Consumed

As the content available to mobile phones improves, data consumption increases. Last month, those 11.9 million Opera Mini users generated more than 33 million MB of data for operators worldwide. This represents an almost 88% growth over the previous quarter.

Part 2: Content Preferences

By examining aggregate numbers, we are able to paint a picture of the types of sites and services that win on the mobile Web. Tracking the type of content across the top 100 sites visited by all Opera Mini users, we find:

Social networking is popular worldwide and is the leading source of Web traffic for mobile devices.
Successful sites on the Web find users on mobile phones, further underscoring the emergence of One Web.
Consumers desire a rich Web experience regardless of the device they use to access the Web. WAP continues to diminish as more-capable Web browsers are able to display full Web content on mobile phones.
Nearly a quarter of all traffic is headed to content portals or search engines.

Snapshot of the top 10 countries for Opera Mini (ranked by usage):

Snapshot: Russia

Russian Opera Mini users consume more entertainment content than users in all countries except for Ukraine. Traffic to entertainment, leisure and sports sites comprise almost 40% of Web traffic to mobile phones.

Snapshot: Indonesia

With 63% of traffic going to social networks, Indonesia is tied with the United States as the number one country for social networking on the mobile Web.

Snapshot: China

Web portal content and search engine access is extremely popular in China, accounting for nearly 55% of the traffic.
E-commerce and e-mail are not yet as popular in China as in other parts of the world. Together, these two categories combine to create less than 2% of overall Opera Mini traffic in China.

Snapshot: United States

More than 63% of U.S. Web traffic on mobile phones is to social networks, tying it with Indonesia for the number one spot.

Snapshot: India

India favors social networking, with nearly half (48.9%) of all traffic going to social networks.

Snapshot: South Africa

A very high 61% of traffic in South Africa is to social networks.
South Africa has the second-highest penetration of e-mail access on mobile devices (more than 4% of the traffic).

Snapshot: Ukraine

Opera Mini users in the Ukraine enjoy their entertainment and sports. More than 61% of traffic is in this category.
Mobile-optimized content remains popular in the Ukraine--more than 43% of Opera Mini traffic in the Ukraine is directed towards WAP sites.

Snapshot: United Kingdom

The United Kingdom is the world leader in mobile e-mail, although that number remains small. More than 11% of traffic in Q1 was to Web-based e-mail services.

Snapshot: Germany

Compared to users in other countries, German users shop the most on Opera Mini. E-commerce accounts for more than 7% of German Opera Mini traffic.
German users of Opera Mini enjoy entertainment and sports content on their mobile phones. More than 28% of traffic heads to entertainment and other leisure sites.

Snapshot: Poland

In Poland, people using Opera Mini prefer to access the full Web from their mobile phones--only 4% of the traffic is to WAP or .mobi sites.

--Manish Agrawal

May 21st: Posts I liked

Manish Agrawal — Wed, 21 May 2008 03:30:16 GMT

Mobile Application related:

May 15th: Posts I liked

Manish Agrawal — Thu, 15 May 2008 09:36:06 GMT

ASP.NET related

Mobile Application related

alcheMo - Technology (J2ME to BREW and iPhone porting solution)
Mojax (Mobile Ajax application framework) - it provides access to device capabilities like Camera API, Location Services, Contacts and more.
Android Weather Forecast - Google Weather API - Description
Android Poor mans GPS - Cell (Tower) ID / Location Area Code - Lookup
Writting your own GPS application - Part 2
Mobile GMAPS
C# Remote Control using the Audio Port

May 1st: Posts I liked

Manish Agrawal — Thu, 01 May 2008 14:45:38 GMT

ASP.NET Page Life Cycle : Pradeep KV has written an excellent article describing the life cycle of ASP.Net Page.
Multiple File Upload With Progress Bar Using Flash and ASP.NET
Providing Web Applications with Context Sensitive Help Using RoboHelp WebHelp : by Robert Pittenger
CAPTCHA Image : Brain Jar has written an excellent article to demonstrates how to create such an image and employ it within an ASP.NET web form.
Tetris for Pocket PC : by Marcelo Ricardo de Oliveira
Pocket 1945 - A C# .NET CF Shooter : by Jonas Follesø
Writing Your Own GPS Applications: Part 2 : by Jon Person

April 23rd: Posts I liked

Manish Agrawal — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 12:19:26 GMT

Performance - Scaling Strategies for ASP.NET Applications: This is a nice article on how you can improve the performance and how to scale your application. There are three strategies available that you can employ in order to improve scaling: specialization, optimization, and distribution. How you apply them will vary, but the actual strategies are straightforward and consistent.

Unit Testing: Apply Test-Driven development to your Database projects

Google Website Optimizer Opens Up

Windows Live 4 developers

Free Performance Tool - Analyze IIS Logs Like A Pro With Funnel Web Analyzer

Chart / Graph Tools
Open Flash Chart - Can be used in many languages for creation of Flash based Chart. It is free too.

Java Script based Charts from Emprise

Feature Driven Development (FDD)

Manish Agrawal — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 14:40:29 GMT

Few days back, I had a great discussion over Agile & FDD with my CTO Mr. Naim Kazi.

He told me about thebenefits of FDD & about how it takes Agile to next step.

Impressesed by FDD, I googled for it and found a great site (FeatureDrivenDevelopment.com) and a great PPT on FDD.

So thought of sharing it with my blog readers also. Click here to get the PPT. for other articles / downloads Click here

If you find any such good link on FDD, please do share the same by adding your comments.

March 19th: Posts I liked

Manish Agrawal — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 03:16:39 GMT

Inspired by Scott Gu, I also felt the need of blogging the Links/BlogPosts I liked:

** March 19th is the date in "my" context and not that of posts I refer.

Build & Release Automation (it is on top priorities in my list of personal project development)

CI Server: Redefine Your Build Process with Continous Integration: Jay Flowers has written an excellent article on CI and about his tool CI Factory. I think Jay Flower has some similar thinking process I do, CI Factory has almost the same features and has been built upon using CruiseControl.Net as base reference, which even I was doing. The way he has written the title of the article with use of many Upper Case words, also seems to be a matching pattern.

SharePoint (MOSS)

Selling MOSS (The moral of the story): Paul has written an excellent post, he has covered many aspects of proposing a technology and its implementation...

Silverlight

Microsoft Silverlight Streaming Service
IIS 7.0 Bit Rate Throttling Module Released: by Scott Guthrie

.Net

Mono project releases first IDE, Mono 2.0 into beta: by Dana Blankenhorn & Paula Rooney
MonoDevelop Documentation

--Manish

JSON: The Fat-Free Alternative to XML

Manish Agrawal — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 16:33:55 GMT

For quiet some time, I wanted to understand JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) and its advantages.

Always after hearing about it, I thought, it is some advance form of JavaScript, but after studying it today, I was surprised to know the advantages of JSON.

In the present world, where companies are providing SAAS (Software Applications As Services) over the Web, and applications are mashing-up with other applications... in such scenarios everyone wants to make applications, to be able to exchange data with other applications seamlessly and as fast as it can.

Seamless integration of data was made possible by XML, but it seriously lacked the speed. Over and above it, XML required specific Serialization and De-Serialization of content. This is were JSON has the real advantage over XML and it doesn't compromise on the other advantages of XML.

More information on JSON can be found at the following links:

JSON vs XML: http://www.json.org/xml.html

Practically learn JSON: http://braincast.nl/samples/jsoneditor/#

Web 2.0 is hot!!! Think Again... Bubble 2.0 is waiting its turn!!

Manish Agrawal — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 20:59:54 GMT

Crazy Video... very coool and nicely done...

Capacity Planning for .NET Applications

Manish Agrawal — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 03:43:54 GMT

On MSDN an excellent article on How To: Perform Capacity Planning for .Net Applications is available.

Although it applies to ASP.Net version 1.0 and 1.1, but in principle it can be used for version 2.0 and above also.

Swadesh -- My Country

Manish Agrawal — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 19:41:00 GMT

What a Great Song!!! And What a Great Movie!!!

Every Indian should watch...

Database TCO Calculator

Manish Agrawal — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 12:40:41 GMT

On MySQL website I found a very good tool to do MySQL TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) Savings Calculator.

My intention here is not to advertise MySQL or how much savings one can do using it (as different databases gets used according to the specific requirements), but I just want to share the information about the tool (Calculator) for calculation of TCO for Databases like MS SQL Server, IBM DB2, Sybase, Oracle and MySQL.

Not just that it also provides information in tabular format, which is also helpful to make comparisons.

Great work MySQL team...

Reporting Options

Manish Agrawal — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 11:09:28 GMT

Athena Pawlowski of Canberra .Net User Group has made an excellent PPT on Reporting Options from .Net Applications.

He has compared Crystal Reports, SQL Reporting Services, Active Report and HTML reports on various parameters.

Good work!!

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) Licensing and Configuration Scenarios

Manish Agrawal — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 12:18:47 GMT

John Stover has written an excellent post on MOSS 2007 Licensing and Configuration Scenarios.

Some other important links related to this are as under:

Windows Server 2003 R2 Pricing

MSSQL Server 2005 Editions & Pricing

Cornelius also has posted an excellent post on Complete MOSS Licensing info

Microsoft Press Free E-Books Offer!

Manish Agrawal — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 21:11:56 GMT

Great Stuff by Microsoft!!! You can download the books from here: http://csna01.libredigital.com/

Developer Map for SharePoint Products and Technologies

Manish Agrawal — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 18:02:04 GMT

Use Yahoo Pipes to aggregate and display multiple rss feeds

Manish Agrawal — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 12:00:01 GMT

Yahoo Pipes is a great tool, it allows you to aggregate feeds from different sources and present the same in a single view. This saves surfing thru various sites to see latest information, you can just create pipes to suck latest information from various sources organize / sort it on date time and display.

Using Yahoo Pipes you can do the following:

Define different sources
Define Search terms
Fetch the feed
Make Union of feeds from different sources
Sort by date
Filter / remove non unique items / feeds
Set the count of feeds to be displayed

I have created Telecom Pipe to aggregate feeds from few of the Telecom site. Link for which is: