Create Sequence diagrams with just description - online

Here’s a site i came across for creating UML Sequence diagrams online by just describing the actions (actors, messages, etc) in text.

http://www.websequencediagrams.com/

This currently seems to have only limited functionality, but should be enough for starter. The ‘planned features’ list in the site seems to promise more in the future.

Update: meanwhile, one of my friend sent another interesting tool which reverse engineers the .NET assembly (yes, it’s a .NET specific tool at the moment) and generates sequence diagrams. It is available in codeplex here.

(Again) it seems to be in its early stages of development, but quite promising.

I still feel the need for such tools to be integrated to VS as does the class diagrams (you know the changes made to class in code are synced back in the class diagram, I like that behavior).

World eBook Fair - over 1 Million eBooks to download

This years world ebook fair has started recently at www.WorldeBookFair.org.

This time there are even more collections - over 1 million! and it’s available only during the period July 4th to August 4th.

From the website itself, here’s the contribution list with number of eBooks.

“As of midnight Central Daylight Time July 4, 2008 these are the approximate numbers:

100,000+ 500,000+ 450,000+ 160,000+ ..17,000+	from Project Gutenberg from The World Public Library from The Internet Archive from eBooks About Everything from IMSLP
1,227,000+	Grand Total

Happy downloading… !

Once you’ve downloaded, if interested, list down your favourites and ‘must-haves’ in comments…

iPhone 3G Booking open in India now

I’m not sure, if I’m the one among few to see this first, but here it is.
Today when I logged on to Vodafone.in site to pay my mobile bills, the home page greeted me with huge banner saying “Pre register here for your iPhone 3G”.

I couldn’t wait to check out the Airtel.in site as well to check if Airtel has some booking open, it turned it has.

This confirms few things

1. iPhone comes to India as “iPhone 3G” - this is obvious, but the sites confirm now
2. Both Airtel and Vodafone will be offering iPhone to Indian mobile subscribers - the question for which I was looking for a clear answer somewhere.

So, why wait, people who have been looking to pounce on this artistic beauty can go ahead and pre-register in the following links

link > Vodafone - iPhone 3G - Pre registration
http://vodafone.in/existingusers/iphone/pages/preregister-iPhone.aspx
link > Airtel - iPhone 3G - Booking
http://www.airtel.in/iphone3g
[Disclaimer: These links are just provided for convenience]

Here’s a screen shot of the home pages of both the sites, just in case they remove it in the future.

Vodafone.in	Airtel.in

Whatever may be the buzz, I’ve my own list of ‘Why I should NOT buy iPhone 3G now?’ as below

1. What is good is 3G with out the 3G infrastructure (in India 3G network is to be deployed only late 2009)
2. A 3G has to have a front facing camera. I still wonder why iPhone didn’t have one. Here’s a fun reply to Apple on this issue.
3. Then the usual stuff, battery life. I really hate recharging my phone everyday.

Update: The AirTel booking page is not working now.

Update: Seems the AirTel iPhone booking site is just being setup. It’s up again now, but still actual registration page not opening yet! Hope this will be restored soon.

Update: This site states the additional facts about iPhone 3G in India http://www.imacusers.com/iphone-3g-in-india/

Update: Rumours!?!?  Economic times says AirTel will open sale on Aug 22 here and Tech2 post mentions Vodafone will make iPhone available in it’s store by Aug 18 here. Anybody got any more information???

How to find if all the values in the selected query is same?

Well, today I had to run my brain-machine to sort out couple of problems in our project. The generic version of the problem is what you read as this post’s title and here are the problems…

1. How to find if the values of the field in the selected query are all same?
2. How to find if the list of values of particular field is exactly same among all the specified class or group of values?

The complete solution is in my dev blog over here…

Too many microblogging already…?

Well actually,  I’ve been trying to ‘adapt’ to the micro-blogging culture lately and found quite a lot (?!) of sites. I tried to use few among them from the most popular micro-blogging site to the newly arrived ones like twitxr.com.

Well all in the whole seem to give just one thing - the ability to publish your information in small quantities to the world + allow everyone else to ‘follow’ oneself. Of course, that’s what it’s supposed to do right? well then why so many? the answer is nothing but the usual one, while twitter.com offers just 140 chars max texting with support for SMS, sites like tumblr.com is notable for it’s blog like structure with beautiful theme support (though I wouldn’t classify it under micro blogging, I just mentioned because it one of the sites I’ve started using recently).

Tumblr.com is also noticable for it’s direct and simple integration with lots of things: From text, photo to chat scripts, embedded contents, etc. Even twitter is using tumblr for it’s site updates.

I got an invite from my friend to twitxr.com which I started exploring. It has got geo-location integration, integration with share photo in other sites (like flickr, facebook, picasaweb). I didn’t try the mobile integration. It reportedly has support for high-end mobile phones, which I suppose will be fully utilizing the GPS if available in the phone.

One another set of sites which is not so surprising after seeing all these massive number micro-blogging site going online - is those which ‘integrate’ all such services in one place like friendfeed.com

Some sites go beyond just their online presence and provide APIs with enable some quite wonderful applications like twhirl (for twitter.com, friendfeed.com). These applications keep everyone in the micro-blog world hooked with others. Sometimes I get this strange feeling that such apps are just more advanced form the instant messengers. Have to mention the recent integration of such micro-blogging service into the multi-protocol instant messengers like Digsby, Pidgin.

Well all said, lets see how many such sites are going online further…

PS: I might have done justice to all the micro-blogging sites & utilities but I think this will just serve as an overview of this massive micro-blogging world!

Xobni – the social extension of Outlook™

While reading my usual feeds, I came across this wonderful add-in for Outlook introduced in NY Times article.- “Xobni” (it’s funny that it is the word  “Inbox” spelled backwards )

Xobni basically claims itself as a Email Search tool, much like Windows Search and GDS. But it is very much more than what it says it can do. People call it “Next generation of social networking”, etc.

When I installed it the immediate change I appreciated was it worked on ‘cached exchange mode‘. Then quite intelligently even while indexing it showed lot of interesting facts like my frequently mailing friend, my fastest replier and gathered everyone in my network into a list and started ranking them based on recent conversations. yet, it didn’t stop there, since I was working it was good enough to tell me that it would index the rest of my mail (those present in the local archive folders) in later time.

One of cool thing to note is the interface it has. The Xobni itself installs as a side bar in the outlook mail box, with various sections which includes Email analytics (frequency of mails received), Phone numbers (yes, it actually extracts phone numbers from the email), network contacts, past conversations and files exchanged in the mails. Apart from extracting individual statistics, Xobni can also give a complete analytics for the mail communication like average response (reply) time, mail traffic graph, etc…

Well so much for it’s additional features, but the search itself is quite impresive, enabling me to just view the message within the sidebar and do all my work within that space on the search lists.

You should take a look at the product video for a tour of all it’s features. They have launched a public beta just now. An old news but need a mention here: even BillG demoed Xobni in last Office Dev Conf during February, 2008.

I think this is worth a try! Hope the guys at xobni will keep on innovating!!

Summer Shopping spree - New Trinitron and Phillips

Oh boy!, It’s practically been a busy shopping time in my home past 2 weeks. But I should admit it was not just like any other times.

We have been holding on to a standard Onida 21″ TV which is quite out of date now. We have been longing since several months to ‘upgrade’ it but was just looking for some excuse (since the Onida was in excellently good form even after about 18 years of operation God, I love the quality of the products of those times :|).

Well at last the wait was over, one fine day, my mom and dad decided to make the move. They call me up on that day (it turned out to be a Friday) evening and asked if I was fine with a ‘29″ Sony flat TV’. and, they continued if I was okay with a ‘Phillips DVD player’. I thought “well fine, since the names are well known and I know there would have been a research went on behind the scenes, it should be okay”. and I wouldn’t do less than agreeing to that, but I was too curious to play with that in detail. I traveled to home immediately without any hesitation.

When I reached home I could see a majestic ‘Sony Wega 29″ (Trinitron)”‘ sitting on the table. The reason i’m excited about this is because of the legendary Trinitron technology which you would appreciate if you have come across this brief history.

Next comes the ‘Phillips DVP5150 with Progressive scan‘ which is quite state of the art with excellent support that extends till DivX, Xvid, etc… Now I don’t have to worry about converting my DVD rips to again DVDs, but just could play it with this beauty!

All this happened two weeks back (during my last visit to my hometown) From then on, it’s quite different experience I get when I watch shows/ movie in our new TV. Yes, I know these are the ‘top class’ available in the market but who cares, as long as you fulfill your delights and you are happy - it should be fine! Though there are aspirations for a LCD + Home Theatre setup , I would have to resist that decision myself till sometime in the future.

Rest assured, seems this summer will be ‘well spent’ at home!

Refreshing my memories - the Flickr way!

Today I wasn’t much working since in the morning I was hit with a serious problem. Yes, I know my flickr account had reached its’ 200 photos limit, but I keep postponing it since I thought there were already too much of photos that I won’t need are clogging my storage space in Flickr.

Sooner I thought why not just do it now, why not geo tag my photos completely, why not give a meaningful names and descriptions to the many photos that I always wanted to describe! Well, it just happened. You can look at my Flickr Photo stream with descriptions and geo tagged location for almost a photos!

I did delete some and move some photos just to make I could share more thrilling and exciting pics in the future! ;)  Nevertheless, it was really wonderful walking along the lane of past memories!

Socrates’ Triple Filter Test - Do you really want to hear that?

Got this as a forward from my friend and thought it will be worth to write here!

The Socrates Triple Filter Test

In ancient Greece , Socrates was reputed to hold knowledge in high esteem.
One day an acquaintance met the great philosopher and said, “Do you know what I just heard about your friend?“
“Hold on a minute,” Socrates replied. “Before telling me anything, I’d like you to pass a little test. It’s called
the Triple Filter Test.“

“Triple filter?“

“That’s right,” Socrates continued. “Before you talk to me about my friend, it might be a good idea to take a
moment and filter what you’re going to say. That’s why I call it the triple filter test.“

“The first filter is TRUTH. Have you made absolutely sure that what you are about to tell me is true?“
“No,” the man said, “actually I just heard about it and…“

‘All right,” said Socrates. “So you don’t really know if it’s true or not. Now let’s try the second filter, the filter
of GOODNESS. Is what you are about to tell me about my friend something good?“

“No, on the contrary…“

“So,” Socrates continued, “you want to tell me something bad about him, but you’re not certain it’s true. You
may still pass the test though, because there’s one filter left: the filter of USEFULNESS. Is what you want to
tell me about my friend going to be useful to me?“

“No, not really.“

“Well,” concluded Socrates, “if what you want to tell me is neither true nor good nor even useful, why tell it to
me at all?“

————-

TN State board books are online in PDF and downloadable

Got this as a forward from one of my friend

Ever remembered the books you read in school??

Now the TN State board books are online in PDF and downloadable.
From Std 1 to Std 12. All subjects…

http://www.textbooksonline.tn.nic.in/

Available Languages : Tamil, English, Kannada, Malayalam, Telugu, Urdu (?!)

Should be a one of nice thing from TN Government to academic community!