Another example of M$ most foolish mistakes.

Their latest MP3 player / Ipod rival is not compatible with their latest OS Vista

Read

I was trying to figure out whether ASP.Net is better than PHP. I have been in PHP for some 2 years now and also tried my hands on ASP. Now trying my hands on Asp.Net

PHP’s OO is not the best even if PHP5 has pretty good OO support.
Found these interesting reads in this regard.
Sitepoint Debate

Sitepoint Top 10 Myths

PHP vs Asp.net Redux

Microsoft Whitepaper

Microsoft has announced a Beta version of its blogging client for the PC.

Do you know how these companies got their names… I bet you must have known most of them. Here is a revision for you.

Compaq
This name was formed by using COMp, for computer, and PAQ to denote a small integral object.

Mercedes
This was actually the Diamler/Benz’s French financier’s daughter’s name.

Adobe
This came from the name of the river Adobe Creek that ran behind the house of founder John Warnock.

Apple Computers
It was the favorite fruit of founder Steve Jobs. He was three months late in filing a name for the business and he threatened to call his company Apple Computers if the other colleagues didn’t suggest a better name by 5 O’clock. They couldn’t, he did!

CISCO
It is not an acronym as popularly believed. It is short for San Francisco.

Corel
The name was derived from the founder’s name Dr. Michael Cowpland. It stands for COwpland REsearch Laboratory.

Google
The name started as a joke boasting about the amount of information the search-engine would be able to search. It was originally named ‘Googol’, a word for the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros. After founders – Stanford graduate students Sergey Brin and Larry Page presented their project to an angel investor, they received their first funding cheque made out to ‘Google’. Since they didn’t want to risk going back to the investor to correct the error, they retained the name ‘Google’!!

Hotmail
Founder Jack Smith got the idea of accessing e-mail via the web from a computer anywhere in the world. When Sabeer Bhatia came up with the business plan for the mail service, he tried all kinds of names ending in ‘mail’ and finally settled for hotmail as it included the letters “HTML” – the programming language used to write web pages. It was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective uppercasing.

Hewlett Packard
Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide whether the company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett.

Intel
Bob, Noyce and Gordon Moore wanted to name their new company ‘Moore Noyce’ but that was already trademarked by a hotel chain . So they had to settle for an acronym of INTegrated ELectronics.

Lotus (Notes)
Mitch Kapor got the name for his company from ‘The Lotus Position’ or ‘Padmasana’. Kapor used to be a teacher of Transcendental Meditation of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

Microsoft
Coined by Bill Gates to represent the company that was devoted to MICROcomputer SOFTware. Originally christened Micro-Soft, the ‘-’ was removed later on.

Motorola
Founder Paul Galvin came up with this name when his company started manufacturing radios for cars. The popular radio company at the time was called Victrola.

ORACLE
Larry Ellison and Bob Oats were working on a consulting project for the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). The code name for the project was called Oracle (the CIA saw this as the system to give answers to all questions or some such thing). The project was designed to help use the newly written SQL code by IBM. The project eventually was terminated but Larry and Bob decided to finish what they started and bring it to the world. They kept the name Oracle and created the RDBMS engine. Later, they decided on the same name for the company.

SUN
Founded by 4 Stanford University buddies, SUN is the acronym for Sanford University Network. Andreas Bechtolsheim built a microcomputer; Vinod Khosla recruited him and Scott McNealy to manufacture computers based on it, and Bill Joy to develop a UNIX-based OS for the computer.

Yahoo!
The word was invented by Jonathan Swift and used in his book ‘Gulliver’s Travels’. It represents a person who is repulsive in appearance and action and is barely human. Yahoo! founders Jerry Yang and David Filo selected the name because they considered themselves yahoos.

Just thought of sharing these facts..

via [expressions in solitude]

Open-source vendor SugarCRM has unveiled a new technical-collaboration partnership with Microsoft that will boost interoperability between SugarCRM products and Windows Server.

Announced at the Open Source Business Conference, the collaboration project is designed to help customers of both vendors take advantage of Windows administration for running SugarCRM.

read more

The preview of Microsoft’s Windows AntiSpyware wrongly fingered two Symantec enterprise anti-virus products as password-stealing programs last week. If users followed Microsoft’s recommendation and removed the offending Registry key, the Symantec software turned into so much digital junk. Read more

Microsoft is considering the opportunity to create its own portable player, which could compete with the popular Apple iPod player. Iâ??????d remind you that iPod occupies the lionâ??????s share of the market, to which the players with Microsoft software are aimed.

According to the spokesman of Microsoft there is no official solution on this matter so far. However he confirmed that the company is considering the idea to produce the player along with many other projects as the part of reorganizing program for 2006.

Last time round we stopped with just on printing output with asp.It means that you can print HTML tags and HTML content using ASP the same way PHP or JSP does.

Now we will see some commonly used variable declarations and loop constructs in ASP.

Variables

People who have worked in Visual Basic will have come accross the Dim keyword. Its the same way variables are declared in ASP.

[code lang="asp"]
<%
dim variablename
variablename="value"
response.write("value is: " & variablename)
%>
[/code]

As you can see, the Ampersand operator is used for appending.

Arrays

You can declare and use arrays in the following manner. We will see how to use loops so that you can access the array elements

[code lang="asp"]
<%
Dim array_name(array_size)
array_name(1) = "value 1"
array_name(2) = "value 2"
array_name(3) = "value 3"
array_name(4) = "value 4"
array_name(5) = "value 5"
array_name(6) = "value 6"
%>
[/code]
For Next Loop

This is the general for loop you might have used in some application.

[code lang="asp"]
Dim variable
for variable=start to end [optional step argument]
statements
next
[/code]

The step argument is used to increment the variable in steps less than or more than 1

Do Loops

[code lang="asp"]
<%
Dim variable
variable=5
Do
response.write("The variable is: "&variable&"
")
variable=variable-1
loop until variable=0
%>
[/code]

IF statements

[code lang="asp"]

<%
if condition is true then
true statement
else
false statement
end if
%>
[/code]
Select Case

[code lang="asp"]

Select Case variable
case 1
response.write("case 1")
case 2
response.write("case 2")
case 3
response.write("case 3")

end select

[/code]

We will see about Functions and Procedures in the next part.

I would like to share with you people a simple XML to HTML parser i found when working on a related project.

It contains two files. The xmlParser.asp and xmlStyle.xslt
The xmlParser.asp
[code lang="asp"]
<%
response.ContentType="text/html"
dim objXML, objXSL
set objXML=server.CreateObject("MSXML2.DOMDocument")
set objXSL=server.CreateObject("MSXML2.DOMDocument")
objXML.async=False
objXSL.async=False
objXML.setProperty "ServerHTTPRequest",true
objXML.load "http://domain.com/rss_url"
objXSL.load Server.MapPath("xmlStyle.xslt")
response.write ""
response.write objXML.transformNode(objXSL)
response.write ""
set objXML=nothing
set objXSL=nothing
%>

[/code]

xmlStyle.xslt

[code lang="CSS"]

[/code]

Hereâ??????s an interesting read. Looks like Microsoftâ??????s Sleeping with the Enemy !

â?????An investigative report into the Linux lab at Microsoft has revealed some interesting twists to Microsoftâ??????s often stormy relation ship with the world of Open Source Software (OSS).

The lab, which opened last September, is run by Bill Hilf, a former programmer for IBM. Originally, it was set up to â?????help Microsoft understand the phenomenon of open source software and improve our products because of that.â???? But over time, the role of the lab has changed, from merely wanting to understand the â?????enemyâ???? towards a tentative effort to working with them.â????
Link: Microsoftâ??????s Linux lab works on Open-Source interoperability