Compare 2 Word Documents

Microsoft Word came with a handy feature to compare 2 Word documents. But I’ve got to know this very recently.

Background

When I’m getting multiple revisions of the same MS-Word document, how can I make sure that I have seen the changes effectively?

Solution

1. In MS Word, go to “Review” and select “Compare”
   
2. Select files to compare
   
3. Output looks like this
   
4. Double click on red colored line, then you can see the changes. (deletion, insertion etc.)
   

Microsoft Band- My Health Companion

I was looking for a kind of monitor or tool to track my varies health related things. Doctor recommended me to walk at least 3 km &  workout 15mins daily.  I want to track my sleeping patterns as well.  ( Note: This is not to diagnose something, but to stay healthier)

I found Microsoft Band is satisfying my needs. Also it provides additional cool features. (As always Microsoft gives us something more additionally) It stands among similar products. So, three weeks ago, I bought a Microsoft Band.

Now I can

1. keep an eye on my sleeping pattern.
   
2. see the distance I made so far
   
3. see details about my workout session
   

Microsoft Band require Microsoft Health App which sync through Bluetooth 4.0 and App will sync to Microsoft Health web dashboard where you see drilled-down data.

Why don’t you try it?

WSO2 Con 2014

Picture Courtesy: http://asia14.wso2con.com/ 

I’ve participated to WSO2 CON 2014 conference, 2nd time, held in Colombo. The theme for the conference is “Connected Business”. This is the current trend in the industry.

Interesting 5 keynotes by 5 experts, took my attention.

Everybody will be there in the Cloud after next 5 years. During this cloud transition period, businesses will evaluates the technologies. Being a open source company WSO2 provides complete middleware product stack to achieve “Connected Business”.

WS02 Con 2011- Colombo

During last week, I have attended to WS02 conference. The company, WS02, known as SOA company but I would like to call them Platform Enabler. They have done really good work in open source. I’m quite interesting in their ESB product which using by EBay.  

They have implemented open source version of Cloud platform called WSO2 StratosLive is really simple and easy to use.  As a Sri Lankan I’m truly proud of this company. If I’m not wrong, WSO2 started somewhere around 2005-2006, but they made a good journey so far.

Best of luck for your future.

Creating MS SharePoint meeting workspace from MS Outlook 2010

Microsoft SharePoint is tremendous collaboration tool for an organization.  As a software engineer I’m using SharePoint to manage my team, their activities, event customers requirements.

In SharePoint, we can manage meeting workspace where we can store relevant documents, agenda, decisions etc. All attendees can share them, hence it is easy to use for later references.

Here is the simple steps to create meeting workspace from Outlook 2010.

1. Adding “Meeting Workspace” icon to the Quick Access tool bar of Meeting window.
   • Go to “Calendar”
   • File-> Option & follow the numbered
     
2. Setup the meeting request as usually.
   • Click on “Meeting Workspace” icon
   • Now you can see a panel named “Meeting Workspace” on the right hand side of Meeting request window.
   • There,
     Select a Location.
     Select a type of Meeting workspace. Eg. Basic Meeting Workspace, Blank Meeting Workspace etc.
   • Click on “Link” button and it will embed to meeting workspace link to the email body.
     

Security

By Default, all invited associates will be granted to read, write and delete information in the workspace.

Social Networks: The Other Aspect

As we know, social networks increasingly becoming new communication tool among us. Surprisingly the Public adopt such tools more quickly even without training. According to the Forrester Research two third of internet users (total internet users 625 million¹ ) have joined a social network.

Why this becomes so popular? We can find very old friends, probably haven’t been meet them after high school, which is very good thing . Also social networking can use as mechanism of promoting your business. We have to pay less than TV or printed media advertisements.

Well, did you think about its other side?

1. This will be affected to the country's productivity.
   Most of the companies in the world now blocking them in working hours. Some countries completely blocked such tools.
2. People losing their privacy.
   It is found that more than 85% of users has crossed their line and suffering or will suffer consequence. This is a great place for being Identity theft. Also, I read some news someone had been robbed, because he or she put everything in the network including days he/she out of the town.
   Had several cases ended up with death.
3. Law Enforcement
   Who will be the responsible for cases such as defamatory, obscene work? We can clearly see rules and regulations completely differ from country to country. Hence no guarantee for protecting such cases.
4. Protection of Data
   The most important thing is, do these social networks can protect or have compliances on their users’ data. Very recently, one social network had information flaw and it’s been there since first release.

Ok. What we can do then? Should be completely dined?

1. Don’t expose your too much information.
2. Don not trusts anybody in the cyberspace.
3. Avoid giving personal data.
4. Limit the use of them and don’t be addicted.

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^{1. It is expected that internet users will increase by 45% by 2013. (IT NOW Jan 2010)}

Skinput - Turns your body into an interface

Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University, doing research for Skinput and showing how it can turn your body into an interface.   This product is still only POC. Check this video.

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Sources:
http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=conWebDoc.34927
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35708587

Inside Microsoft Chicago data center

Microsoft opened its Chicago Data Center late last year. In its first phase, the ground floor of the facility is designed to hold up to 56 containers, each filled with anywhere from 1,800 to 2,500 servers.

Further said , building the data center required 2,400 tons of copper, 3,400 tons of steel, 26,000 cubic yards of concrete, and 190 miles of conduit.

More...

Challenge your world: Day Final

The sessions that I attended today, I can categorized into three.

1. Technical (Most of the time)
ASP.net 4.0 by Seok Chern.
• He has showed us new features of ASP.net. Like background task, async file uploading, email verification etc.
• AppFabric- without setting up webfarms we can distribute load across multiple servers. 
• CSS Sprites- If you have 4 images to show in the page, typically asp.net will call 4 server request to get those image files from the folder. But using Sprites technique asp.net runtime will get those 4 images as 1 image from the folder and show it in the page.  
• SmartyRoute – eg: we can omit file extension in the browser address bar but still load the resource. You can type http://www.foo.com/category instead of http://www.foo.com/category.aspx .
  SmatyRoute enables load dynamic pages based on the parameters given in the URL.
2. Promotional
• Microsoft Dynamics introduction were held by Krishnan Muralidharan.
• Lisa Tay showed us xRM as a rapid application development freamwork with some case studies.
3. Tactical
• Madhusudan Kohil & Rahul Pahwa delivered a practical topic these days Green IT. We also learnt that we still have opportunities to save Green in terms of IT. They showed us how Microsoft has adopt this strategy and how far success them.
• Freddy Tan, security advisor for Microsoft Asia, has delivered yet another good session to the gathering about IT security risks.

Today is the final day of Tech Ed 2010 Sri Lanka. I am truly thanks full to all the speakers and Microsoft with other sponsors to make this happen in Sri Lanka.

Challenge your world: Day Two

Bruce Schneier, The security guru – The Economist , delivered a speech under topic Re conceptualizing Security. In that one hour session, he convince us that he is a real security guru. And he discussed what security models passed down with our generations and how it think in that way to apply security concepts in IT. Though it is not technical session but quite interesting one which change the way thinking of security.


Its took my attention what he explained about Feelings, Model and Reality in terms of security.

In the next session, Prasanna Amirthalingam has presented Tips & Tricks with WCF 4.0. Some of the interesting things are,

• Missing address discovery using UDPDiscoveryService
• Service request routing
• Validating inputs (Parameter Inspectors) in WCF pipeline which will enable to plug or unplug without modifying the current WCF service.
• Caching
• Implementing REST principle

Pinal Dave showed us the other side of SQL Server index which we already know but use it wrong way. It is also interesting session that attracted everyone’s’ attention. He proved us worst cases when using index without knowing it. The conclusion of this session is,

1. Drop unused indexes
2. Always have clustered index
3. Use filtered index( new to Ms-SQL 2008)
4. Use User Defined Functions(UDF) wisely.

I have learnt lot of things today and as a totally I’m happy for the day with tech ed.

Challenge your world: Day One

Microsoft Tec Ed 2010 Sri Lanka is now happening in Colombo. This time its theme becames

Challenge your world.

 It is quit thrilling experience to Sri Lankan IT professionals. It will be last 3 days, today is the day first. I am one of attendee on behalf of my company(Brandix Lanka).

Here is the summary of sessions which I attended to,

Sliverlight 4.0 (Beta) (Speaker : Risman Adnan) ,Some of the new cool features were introduced, among them ,

• Drag’N Drop- you can drag files from your local hard drive into the Silverlight application.
• Printing Capabilities.
• Right Click facility which enables to add context menu to the application.
• Integrating web cam with Silverlight applications.
• Feature that I’ve thrilled is Out of Browser enhancement.

Darren Sim has explained to us about VS2010 and its new features and ASP.net 4 .0 and AJAX CDN(Content Delivery Network).
ASP.net 4.0 comes with,

• Lots of Charts including financial and statistics. Now creating a chart as easy as binding data to a Gird control.
• AJAX Toolkit – now totally supported by Microsoft.
• MVC 2.0
• URL rewriting
• SEO optimization
• And we can create packages to deploy ASP.net applications with VS2010.

In addition to that there were following sessions too,

1. What's new in Exchange 2010 by Madhusudan Kohli & Aviraj Ajgekar
2. Optimize your Windows 7 Deployments with System Center by Charlie Tan
3. New Features in SQL Server 2008 R2 by Rushab Metha
4. Managing Exchange Server with System Center by Charlie Tan
5. Data Protection Manager 2010 by David Foo
6. The history of the Log: Change Data Capture (CDC) by Pinal Dave
7. Active Directory Federation Services v2 by Brian Puhl
8. SharePoint Server 2010 by Joy Rathnayake
9. Introducing the Microsoft Web Platform by EdQuek

Future IT Practitioner : Ethics

Ethics in a profession will describe professional behavior among professionals. Further it will describes an individual’s behavior towards to his or her profession. Because misbehaving of few professional will disrupt the profession as whole. Hence professional bodies like BCS, IEEE defines “Code of Ethics” for their members.

In both “Code of Ethics” we can see common areas they tried to address.

1. Public Safety
   We have responsibilities to protect the public in many ways. Special due care should be paid for designing, developing and maintaining critical systems.
   Therac -25  and London ambulance service failure  are two incidents that come into play.
2. Avoid Discriminations
   This is a wide area to talk about but, basically we should not less favorable because of race, skin colour, religion etc.
3. Professional Obligations
   Here it addresses, our competency level, integrity with other professionals ,avoiding conflict of interest etc.
4. Legal Obligations
   This has wide scope that will differ from country to country. But we should know legal legislations for the country that we are going work with. Examples for common legislations of misusing computers, regarding confidential information, discriminations , consumer protection etc.

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Code of ethics of
+ BCS http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=nav.6030
+ IEEE http://www.ieee.org/portal/pages/iportals/aboutus/ethics/code.html

Copyrights © Kelum Ganegoda 2009

Related Posts: Future IT Practitioner

Future IT Practitioner

It is crystal clear that our current society became information society. Throughout the world organizations and individuals are now starving for information. This happens purely because of following factors,

• Expansion of IT
  IT is no longer an isolated unit in an organization. It is link into other units with helping out for their work.
• Evaluation of technologies
  Inevitably Internet, ERPs, SOA, SAAS (Software as a service) etc.

By considering all the facts, IT became truly global profession. All IT practitioners across the world have contributed and contributing to this global profession.

Even though, IT is global profession it has no limitations as a profession like other prominent professions, Medical practicing, Lawyers, Accountants etc. What I’m trying to say is, for an example, no control of entry for IT, like, doctors or engineers. Although this type of control of entry is necessary but it’s too late to implement at the moment. We know, UK and USA had put enormous efforts for this, unfortunately those were not work out.

On the other side, if we put such control of entry, sometime it wouldn’t get as much expansion as the present.

Since you and me contributing to this global profession, as professionals, we have sort of responsibilities. May be, those responsibilities will become practices throughout the professionalism. Mainly we can categorize them into 2.

1. Ethical practices
2. Competency

Generally ethical practices are enforced by a professional body, like BCS, IEEE etc, to its members. For this global profession, I think, all practitioners should adhere to general ethical practices. Professional ethics, sometimes, will help to sharpen up our competency level.

Copyrights © Kelum Ganeogda 2009

Related Posts: Future IT Practitioner : Ethics

For Career

Read this before you make a decision
(Courtesy: Yahoo! Inc.)