McLaren gets screwed by FIA for spying on Ferrari

McLaren have been excluded from the 2007 constructors’ championship and fined US$100 million following Thursday’s FIA World Motor Sport Council (WMSC) hearing in Paris. Drivers Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton have not been penalized and are free to continue their fight for the drivers’ title.

More on this news here 

This  means Ferrari are going to win this years Constructor’s title.

I almost forgot about F1 about Schumi retired.

This one is super

No McLaren representative will be allowed on the podium should a McLaren driver win any of the remaining races of the 2007 season.

AJAX.Asp.Net Update Panel does not reduce bandwidth usage

One of the main reasons for using Ajax in any web application is

1.Rich User Experience

2.Reduce bandwidth

But a MSDN article I came across tells us that Update panel control does not reduce bandwidth usage in any manner (contradicting the general opinion about AJAXified web apps)

rendering shockingly easy and “for worse” because its simplicity and ease-of-use come at the cost of efficiency and, ironically, bandwidth.

While UpdatePanel brings AJAX magic to ordinary Web pages, it doesn’t bring the efficiency we normally associate with AJAX. Did you know, for example, that when an UpdatePanel control performs an asynchronous AJAX callback to the server to update its content, the request contains everything a conventional ASP.NET postback contains, including view state? Most developers assume that AJAX eliminates view state. That’s not the case, though, with UpdatePanel’s brand of AJAX.

Feedburner Email Subscriptions Gone since Sunday

Hey Folks,

I have lost all Email subscribers for my mobile blog
2007-08-21_204649.jpg

Damn it was showing 153 till yesterday.

2007-08-21_204827.jpg

Can you see the sudden dip in the graph.

2007-08-21_204931.jpg

The Feedburner Email Subscription Service is missing from this section today.

It was present yesterday as you can see below

2007-08-21_205050.jpg

Don’t know wtf is wrong.

No info on the Feedburner blog

Page Prediction is Dead

I always have a passion for monitoring pageranks of my websites and other websites.

I use the Google toolbar and   Live PR (currently down) for monitoring current page rank.

For Page Rank Prediction / Future Rank I have used a lot of websites like

http://www.iwebtool.com/pagerank_prediction and http://www.rustybrick.com/pagerank-prediction.php

iwebtool and rusty used to work like a charm, but not anymore.

Has Google banned users from finding out future page rank ? or is the algorithm these tools are based on a failure for a change in Google’s Algo?

Only one tool at PageRankPrediction seems to be working now.

Web Project Management

Managing a Web Project is a challenging task. I’m not talking about the Project Manager’s role alone. Consider every Individual in the process, right from the client to the developer.

The hierarchy below is pretty common for any web based project.

  • Customer
  • Project Manager
  • Technical Lead
  • Senior and Junior Developers

Each person has some amount of responsibility on his shoulders. And it’s not the managers and leads alone who are responsible for running the show on the whole. Even a developer must be capable of doing some Project Management from the developer’s angle like tracking open issues, working based on priority and deadlines.

While the project manager’s role is to track what each team member does, It’s up to each member to be at least aware of what is his current responsibility. It’s better that the technical status of issues is managed by Tech Lead and developers as most often Managers are meant to be tackling issues like scheduling , planning, billing etc.

I will post a few more posts on Web Project Management – a Developer’s View and a Manager’s View and a Customer’s View

DataPager in .Net 3.5

Pagination is something we face eachtime when we build a web application. My project needed some kind of paging functionality last week and we were evaluating various options. I hate SQL Server for one reason and embrace MySQL for the ANSI defying LIMIT clause.

Pagination in MySQL is simply fun. Just say LIMIT starting record number,items per page and Voila you get the wanted result set.

Pagination in SQLServer is not that easy.You can however achieve paging using some work arounds like ROWORDER and ROWCOUNT in SQL Server

You need to be passing around the PrimaryKey and must sort the data based on the key for the pagination.You need to add a Numeric Primary Ke if your schema does not have one.

DataPager is a brilliant new Pagination Control available since .Net 3.5.

You can use it with the Repeater Control or the new ListView Control.

Its not like the DataGrid which uses tables for the markup. You can use  it with Divs.

I was playing with Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2008 Beta 2 when i found this control.

Head over here for a nice example 

Akamai CDN Prices – the Battle Continues

The Content Delivery Network Market is hotter than ever now. The number of websites delivering content to a Global Audience is on the rise.

I came across an interesting post my Om Malik in this context.

Akamai Technologies (AKAM) has lost over $3 billion in market cap in the last one month due to increased costs and reduced prices due to heavy competition. Akamai has a presence in India as well with a lot of Indian websites thronging them for collocation. A long time customer of Akamai in India is rediff.

Just see the ping time for rediff india’s homepage

Reply from 220.227.238.168: bytes=32 time=29ms TTL=62

VSNL ,Bharti, Reliance, Sify have their data-centre businesses but the costs are to high. VSNL has been there for a long time .

I would debate later on the difference between partnering with a CDN vs getting up a dedicated server cluster.

Will be interesting to watch how CDN players / prices perform in the current web2.0 scenario.

Online Video is currently booming and broadband penetration is also rising.