Cyber Blood Banks

Last week, one of my friend’s friend met an accident and doctors told that he is in great need of AB- blood. Being one of the rare blood groups, hospital did not have this group to be able to exchange it with another group. My friend visited local college at the place but could not locate anyone with this blood group.

We knew quite a few sites which have contact details for a host of volunteer donors. We searched and found contact details for 2 people with same blood group. Very important and amazing was the response we got from each of them. It was really great and I still feel great when I think of it.

My friend tried calling first person. This guy was in Bangalore at that time so was not able to help us immediately but he was ready to fly to our place and donate blood as soon as he could. We told him to hold for some time just to try other person’s contact. Then we called second person, he was about 150 kms away from our place and told us like “I will be there as soon as I can”. After 5-10 minutes, we thought to give him a call just to reconfirm the time when he will reach us. Till the time we called him again, he was already on his way. He reached in approx 2.5 hours and donated blood

It was really good to know that even in today’s busy world there are at least some people who are eager to help just for the sake of humanity without any personal benefit.

Here is the list of some of the sites..

http://www.bharatbloodbank.com/

http://explore.oneindia.in/health/donors/blood/

http://www.indianblooddonors.com

http://www.lionsbloodline.com/

Tool to generate script with SQL 2005

Just wanted to share this tool to create script files for any DB changes for SQL 2005 as this feature no longer exist with new version. http://www.sqlteam.com/publish/scriptio/

Here is comprehesive description regarding the same from one of my friends.

From: Ravindra Bisht
Sent: Monday, February 19, 2007 3:38 PM
Subject: Tool to generate script withSQL 2005

Microsoft Sql Server management studio does provide a elaborate Script wizard for generating script but it has only following options

- Script to file (which is one huge file with everything)
- Script to Clipboard
- Script to New Query Window

However two important features from SQL 2000 are missing:

1) One object per file.
2) A script that performs both DROP and CREATE.

Though MSDN documents indicates that this is possible here http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms191299.aspx

However, it doesn't give any clue on how to accomplish it. Quote from that page:
"The schema for generated objects can be saved in a single SQL Script file , or in several files with each file containing
the schema of just one object."

And these above two features can be accomplish by tool that can be installed from http://www.sqlteam.com/publish/scriptio/

However the extension for all those files is .sql which can easily be modified.

Regards
Ravindra Bisht

Yahoooo vs Gmail

Yahoo has finally done some really cool things with its email interface. Its all now using AJAX giving a very fast and rich interface. Sometimes, when my system is running under load, I feel yahoo working much faster than even MS Outlook which is a desktop application. Over that keyboard shortcuts have made life really easy. Gmail had done some marvelous things when it was launched. But now I can see Gmail way behind Yahoo Interface. And funny thing is …Gmail has also come up with keyboard shortcuts but their shortcuts are like

To Send Email –> Tab + Enter

This only works if your focus on the text area containing body of the composed email.

Because Tab shifts your focus to the next control (which is Send Button) and Enter clicks the button. So if someone types “To” address after keying in whole body then he will have to click on the text area to use shortcut for sending email.

Can someone call this a shortcut J

When to use asp 3.0

.Net guys must have read a lot of articles explaining what all benefits you get using asp.net over asp 3.0. but today I seem to realize that there are some instances when you may feel good to use asp instead of asp.net. Some of my friend, asked me to build a very very simple web application and he wanted to invest least possible amount of money. I thought, probably using asp would be a good choice to go as:

1. asp web hosting space is much cheaply available. In fact, you can get some free space to host, if you are not really concerned about domain name.

2. making changes to the application is very straight forward, just change the file and redeploy. (This point is partially correct, as you can get same thing with asp.net if you write complete code in aspx file itself without using code behind feature)

...and yes, these points only have some relevance when you have a very simple application for some kind of personal use. From organization point of view, small saving(with cheap hosting space) using asp does not really makes much sense as features obviously outweigh cost.

MS SQL Server 2K Editions

I was googling to know difference between three flavors of MS SQL server i.e. Enterprise, Standard, Developer. I was amazed to know that SQL servers comes with eight editions actually !!!!
Wanna explore difference between each of them…check it out here

Right to Information Act, 2005

I was surfing net searching for something, the other day and by chance I came across document related to Right to Information Act (RTI) and when I read it, I found it quite interesting. I mean interesting in actually two senses.

One, to know how whole RTI system works. I mean knowing duties for public information officer, information commissioner and how we can exercise our rights for the information.

Secondly, as this was probably first of this kind of document, I was going through; I noticed how these kind of documents need to cover guidelines for each related aspect with deadlines:
a. Guidelines to govt. organization about how to organize things to provide information.
b. Necessary staff (officers, commissioners etc.) required
c. Situations in which request can be denied.
d. Public appeals against officers and penalty, in case officer are found to be guilty etc.
e. Different costs involved.
f. Guidelines about how Govt. should make people aware about this act and encourage them to exercise their rights.

If you would like to go through it, here is where I found it. This really sounds great!!! (I mean, at least on papers :))

Interesting interviews abt SQL Server

Someone, forwarded me this link today telling about some interesting interviews about SQL Server.
Really good one :)
How do you spell S-Q-L?