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)}

New Look

It took me only 5 minutes to make complete change of my blog's look and feel. Blogger has cool feature "Pick Template" which makes our life easier.

Thanks for the blogger and guys who creating templates.

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...

Calculating Elapsed Time Accurately (C#)

To calculate elapsed time in our code, we normally do ,

DateTime stTime = DateTime.Now;
.....
// Do some work here
....
DateTime etTime = DateTime.Now;
TimeSpan ts = etTime – stTime;

But, this method won’t always give accurate value. I found Stopwatch class in System.Diagnostics namespace to calculate accurate elapsed time. Should look into it.

using System;
using System.Diagnostics;
using System.Threading;
class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        Stopwatch stopWatch = new Stopwatch();
        stopWatch.Start();
        Thread.Sleep(10000);
        stopWatch.Stop();
        // Get the elapsed time as a TimeSpan value.
        TimeSpan ts = stopWatch.Elapsed;

        // Format and display the TimeSpan value.
        string elapsedTime = String.Format("{0:00}:{1:00}:{2:00}.{3:00}",
            ts.Hours, ts.Minutes, ts.Seconds,
            ts.Milliseconds / 10);
        Console.WriteLine(elapsedTime, "RunTime");
    }
}

Above example directly taken from MSDN. For more information check this link, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.diagnostics.stopwatch.aspx

Did you Know?

A fantastic video found in YouTube, should check this out.

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.