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Well, I am blogging after a long period of time. In between we were off to a very refreshing weekend at Smoky Mountains, Gatlinburg and Cherokee. Whitewater rafting was fun.

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Check the June 2002 issue of Business 2.0 magazine. The feature article is on How to beat Bill Gates and Microsoft. Makes me wonder how many journalists make their living off Microsoft. If this article catches on, the next thing we know is that the same journalists are featured on some tv/radio show where they again bash microsoft and in the process generate some cool pocket money, not to mention the fame and the name they will get by featuring in such shows.

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Some cool .Net Resources

Are you building web services using VB.Net. Well then you must read this online book, Real World Web Services for VB Developers by Yasser Shohoud. Yasser has also written quite some cool articles on web services fundamentals.

Well, now that I am pointing to .Net resources, here are some more:

DotNetExtreme

.NET Remoting

DotNetBips

and last but not the least Sam Gentile's website. Sam also maintains a radio weblog where he blogs about everything related to .Net. Here you can find links to other gurus in the .Net space. Enjoy !!

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Congratulations

Our Heartiest Congrats to Pawan and Amita on becoming proud parents of a baby girl. Welcome Shruti !!

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Going Offshore

Global Services Jobs Migrate to India Via Internet. We will be seeing more articles/news item similar to this one since the telecom deregulation has happened in India. For effective coordination of offshore projects, communication was one hindrance(not that till now companies could not communicate, only that it will be cheaper now). This takes care of this issue. Now once VoIP services are in place and functioning, more and more companies will try to reap benefits of offshore development/support/maintenance. Way to go.

Watch out this space for an article on Offshore Development and its challenges.

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Say no to “printer-friendly” versions and yes to printer-specific style sheets. Eric Meyer, CSS expert, has come up with an article on designing print style sheets using CSS. Time to make WebJives use print specific styles.

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What not is SOAP?

Dave Winer: "Back to scripting. I've heard a lot of people say that SOAP was designed to circumvent firewalls. In fact, that wasn't one of the goals for SOAP. We chose HTTP because it was broadly supported in scripting environments, and we wanted the lowest possible barrier to adoption. It was also done with respect, don't reinvent something that already works...."

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Usability for Senior Citizens

Jakob Nielsen's latest alertbox is on usability for Senior Citizens. And if you want to continue on the theme of usability, check out this months feature article of Digital Web magazine titled Accessible By Design by Anitra Pavka.

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Identifying Fonts

We can easily identify the difference between serif, sans serif and script fonts. But how many fonts can we identify, 10, 20 maybe even 100. Well that should be enough, for we don't use more than 10 fonts in our day to day working. For example in this site we have used verdana font at all the places barring the Logo image which we made using "Trajan Bold" font from Adobe.


But, at times we need to find that particular font we saw someplace. At such times, services like Identifont and WhatTheFont comes into play. Identifont allows you to identify a font by asking you a series of simple questions whereas at WhatTheFont, you can upload the image or specify the URL to the image and it will give you a list of matching fonts. We now have our many questions answered except for just one. What's that font Andrew Sullivan is using on his site?

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New Site Layout

We have a new layout. This layout adheres to W3C HTML and CSS Standards quite comfortably. This would be a lot more easier to maintain also. We have tested this layout on IE 5.5 and Netscape 6. We don't see any reason why it should not scale well for other newer browsers. Let us know what you think of this.

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Thank You, David

David Watson blogged about our Google API implementation today. So, Are we famous now?? :)

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Google API implementation

Here is an implementation of Google API in VBScript. I have modified the original source by David Watson. This code should run on any windows machine which has the Windows Scripting Host and Microsoft SOAP 2.0 Toolkit installed. You can run this script by saving it as a .vbs file and double clicking it or by issuing "csript <filename>" command at the command prompt. 


REM Declare the variables
Dim soapClient, ResultCount, Results, i, key, query
Dim ResultElements, ResultCount
REM Create the object 
set soapClient = createobject("MSSOAP.SoapClient")
on error resume next
REM Extract the WSDL file from the googleapi.zip in the same directory as this script file
soapClient.mssoapinit("GoogleSearch.wsdl")
key = "Your key here"
query="Your query here"
if err then
     wscript.echo err.description
     wscript.echo "Faultstring =" + SOAPClient.faultString
     wscript.echo "Faultactor =" + SOAPClient.faultactor
     wscript.echo "Faultcode =" + SOAPClient.faultcode
     wscript.echo "Detail =" + SOAPClient.detail
end if
REM If you are connecting through a proxy server, Keep the following three lines
 soapClient.ClientProperty("ServerHTTPRequest") = True 
 soapClient.ConnectorProperty("ProxyServer") = "Proxy"
 soapClient.ConnectorProperty("ProxyPort") = 8080
set Results = soapClient.doGoogleSearch (key, query, 0, 3, False, "", False, "", "", "")
For i = 0 To Results.length - 1
  If Results.Item(i).nodeName = "resultElements" Then
       ResultElements = Results.Item(i).nodeTypedValue
       Exit For
  End If
Next
if err then
     wscript.echo err.description
     wscript.echo "Faultstring =" + SOAPClient.faultString
     wscript.echo "Faultactor =" + SOAPClient.faultactor
     wscript.echo "Faultcode =" + SOAPClient.faultcode
     wscript.echo "Detail =" + SOAPClient.detail
else
     wscript.echo ResultElements 
end if


This should return you three(3) results of your query. This example can be extended to take care of other search responses. For example the following will return you the estimated total number of results that exist for the query. 


For i = 0 To Results.length - 1
 If Results.Item(i).nodeName = 
              "estimatedTotalResultsCount" Then
       ResultCount = Results.Item(i).nodeTypedValue
       Exit For
 End If
Next
wscript.echo ResultCount