Dev’s Blog

Google has blacklisted the German website of BMW (bmw.de) on accounts of using doorway pages to increase traffic for the keyword gebrauchtwagen or “used cars”. The site used text-heavy pages liberally sprinkled with key words to attract the attention of Google’s indexing system. However, once a user clicked on the link displayed in Google’s results window, they were redirected to a regular BMW Germany page, which contained far fewer of the key words. The website’s page rank is reset to zero.

On Jan 15 2006, the boomerang that NASA hurled into outer space seven years ago landed safely on Utah after collecting thousands of interstellar dust particles. Scientists believe that these particles are the pristine remains of the material that formed the planets and other bodies some 4.6 billion years ago. The unseen, unimaginable arenas of life such as the outer space sometimes humbles us isn’t it? Wonder how God developed all this without any bugs. 4.6 billion years and still a lot more functionality is to-be-tested !!

Now finding the nemo is easy. He’s heading towards disney along with Steve and they both carry a cool $7bn. After a week long speculations on whether or not the king of animated movies is buying the new prince, the news is finally out. Disney is buying Steve’s pixar and thus making Steve the largest individual shareholder in Disney. UPDATE 2-Disney board okays takeover offer to Pixar

Apple’s steve jobs started Pixar in 1986 and the animation company made Toy Story, Finding the nemo and the likes. Disney was obviously hurt by pixar’s success and they decide to take on the enemy in the best possible way - embrace.

Was reading a post on Steve’s Keynote and saw a link to download Steve’s presentation in filmloop format. Curious to see the presentation i visited filmloop website, took the pain of downloading (another) player, and installed it successfully. But when i tried to run the player it said Failed to initialize. Exiting the application.. I tried again. Uninstalled it and installed again. Googled for “filmloop failed to initialize” and saw one more poor soul with that problem. Visited filmloop faq page. But returned empty handed.

May be its a small connectivity problem wherein my player couldnot connect to its server over the internet. But thats not my problem. Am just damn lazy to get across my cubicle and check with my sysadmin to see why my player cannot access its server. Wait a minute. May be am not lazy…may be i have started thinking that its the duty of filmloop guys to identify such painpoints and eliminate them. Well what ever it is. I dont bother anymore. Even after Guy’s repeated attempts to get people in the loop ( i bet someone is counting the download numbers…9 out of 10 blogs from Guy now carry a link to some .fl file) i am still a stranger to filmloop.

Hmmm…may be we all should agree the fact that people who use software are humans and they are as lazy as me. Unless the software is going to save their job / company any simple hiccup would turn them away. So if you are building a software better think that everybody is lazy and keep your developers busy asking them to find out the hurdles.

Reminds me of this saying “If something can be read easily, then lot of effort has gone into writing it”

I picked my favorite seven points about elegant software from this long list of Steve Summit. Though it is written 7 years ago, lot of Steve’s points are valid even today. Amazing work.

Elegant software does one job and does it well.

Elegant software lets you do things its designers never imagined.

Elegant software lets you explore its features with confidence, and protects you from mistakes.

Elegant software is relatively free of bugs, and those that it has are minor and are usually easy enough to work around.

Elegant software takes care to save your data incase it crashes.

Elegant software is written by developers who have their users in mind.

Elegant software is a joy to use.

Google has agreed to acquire dMarc Broadcasting, Inc., a Newport Beach, Calif.-based digital solutions provider for the radio broadcast industry. Already there are predictions and rumours on how google might use the other ad medium such as Print, and TV to give adwords more mileage. With that i guess the only medium left out is outdoor advertising. Don’t curse me if you get to see something like this in future.

Image courtesy of Apple Computer, Inc.

Was preparing a comparison document between WiFi Manager and other offerings in the maket when this caption struck me. Jumped into writing this post immediately.

One of the pricing models adopted in WLAN mgmt software space is price-per-managed-access-point where the software vendor charges a fixed amount; say $90, for every Access Point that the software manages. As a seller, this model makes huge sense as the revenue scales with the customer deployment (think of the cost of management if the user has 100 access points - works out to $9000, right?). But as a buyer, it is a pain for two reasons 1)you pay 1/4th of your AP cost on managing it 2)you have to contact the vendor for an upgrade every time you install a new AP beyond the licensed number. For WiFi Manager we purposefully cut off this relationship between software price and the devices it manages. Using WiFi Manager one can manage 1 or thousands of access points for the same $995 (roughly the cost of 2 enterprise grade access points). Sounds good, right?

well am going back to my document now..

Last year, concerns over WLAN security and management tried to slow down the proliferation of WiFi into enterprises. But today the scenario is different. We see more and more enterprises embracing WLAN technology confidently, thanks to solid security standards and management software offerings. ManageEngine WiFi Manager is one among these offerings but with a difference - it offers a lot more than others. To be precise it offers the following 3 benefits:

WLAN security: WiFi Manager detects all types of intrusions, attacks, vulnerabilities in your WLAN using hardware RF sensors and ensure tight WLAN security in your airspace.

Centralized AP Management: You can configure and manage access points from all leading vendors using WiFi Manager. With the ability to discover/monitor/configure/upgrade firmware/ access points it addresses centralized management of WLANs.

Wired Network Monitoring: You can also monitor your wired devicessuch as Routers/Switches/Servers/Desktops/Printers etc., using WiFi Manager.

And all the above at the rate of couple of access points! Now wasn’t that really an affordable 3-in-1 package?

For more information on WiFi please visit our website - http://www.wifimanager.com