Online database of medicines used in India - MedGuideIndia.com

No matter how big or small your ailment, you should never try to play doctor. However, there may be times when you want to verify details of medicines you are consuming. Typically, Indian doctors scribble names of medicines that are almost illegible but surprisingly understandable by the pharmacist.

MedGuideIndia lets you check details of commonly used drugs in India by their brand name. Their search feature also shows brand names for a specified generic drug and you can find out which manufacturers sell that drug and at what cost. Composition of brands and comparative prices of various brands of same composition are shown as well.

This website, aimed mainly at medical professionals, is not an alternative for an actual doctor but it helps consumers to be well-informed.

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HOW TO see how your web pages are ranking in realtime

Google tells us not to focus on PageRank or “PR”, the famous part of their ranking algorithm, as a metric for success. It acknowledges that PageRank being a number is easier to measure than relevance which is what actually counts. Google removed PageRank distribution data from Webmaster Tools but if you still want to see in real-time how your web pages are faring, use StatCounter analytics.

Note that the Search Rankings vary when searches are conducted from different parts of the world and at different times. The ranking you see displayed in your StatCounter account is the actual rank position that your visitor saw (for your web page) from the location they are in, at the time they did the search.


Currently, this information is only available for some Google searches so you will not see a ranking beside every Google query or beside non-Google queries.


In Google AJAX SERPs (Search Engine Results Page), when you click on a link Google redirects you to the search page and also passes some referrer information that analytics providers can use to track rank. For example, the cd= parameter contains the exact ranking position of the search listing within the SERP -
http://www.google.co.uk/search?sa=t&source=web&cd=4&ved=0CEk.... [trimmed]

This is possibly the method that StatCounter uses to identify the rank of a page.

Related:
Comparison of free Web Analytics tools

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Learn IIS7 with Scott Forsyth's 52-week video lesson series

IIS expert Scott Forsyth has been running a video lesson series where he shares best practices, technical processes, tools of the trade, and occasional stories from working in the trenches. 25 of the planned 52 weekly, roughly 10 minute sessions are hosted on YouTube and currently available for free viewing. I checked out the "AppDomain - What it is and Why it's Important" & "IIS Virtual Directory vs. Application" sessions & found them very informative. I've jotted down some material from there & I'll add more as I finish watching the rest -

* When to use Virtual Directory vs Application -
- Use Virtual Directory when you want to point to a different physical path, when you want to share a physical folder across sites.
+ Use Application when you want:
- New application root or
- AppDomain isolation or
- Subfolder to be in new application pool (2 folders of same site targetting different .NET Framework versions can be set to different app pools)

- A vDir pointing to a single physical path can be shared by 2 sites. While accessing files under that shared folder, it appears as if this vDir appears physically under it.

+ 4 types of IIS Folders (note the icons in the image)
- Normal Folder
- Application Folder - use "Convert to Application" in the context menu. Lets you change Application pool but not physical path
- vDir only Folder - shares same app domain & app pool as root site
- vDir with Application - vDir with seperate application boundary

- On removing an Application, physical path remains but references are lost.

- AppDomains are a boundary set up by ASP.NET; they are controlled by IIS

- Usually there is a 1:1 mapping between app & app pool

+ AppDomain recycle consequences -
- First hit perf penalty when
- Any info in that appdomain (like inproc sessions) is lost

+ AppDomain Recycle causes -
- App Pool Recycle/server reset/reboot
- Touching or modifying web.config
- Touching anything in an application folder (bin folder or any of the 7 ASP.NET special folders - App_Code etc)
- Adding/deleting folders
- IIS settings that affect app pool
- IIS settings that affect web.config (change to Default Document in IIS causes app recycle as this file is referenced in web.config)
- Root machine.config & web.config changes (but modifying applicationHost.config will have no impact)
- Some failures at AppPool or AppDomain level

Related:
Notes from Tech-Ed session "Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.5 for Developers"

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India IT - facts, numbers & trivia

Numbers tell a story. Interesting tidbits about India IT from the newspapers (work in progress) -

• Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), largest Indian software services provider, is closing in on Accenture to become the world's second-largest IT company in terms of headcount by the end of this financial year... TCS had 2.27 lakh employees on its rolls as of last December. Accenture, on the other hand, had a headcount of 2.46 lakh as of February this year. IBM is the biggest of the lot with a global headcount of 4.5 lakh.As on date, Infosys and Wipro have 149,994 and 136,734 employees respectively 23-Apr-2012
• Hyderabad, which currently has a headcount of around 18,000 associates spread across the Gachibowli and Pocharam campuses, ranks third in terms of headcount after Bangalore that has 25,000 employees and Pune with 21,000 people. Chennai with a headcount of 17,000 is the fourth largest centre for Infosys. ToI 21-Jan-2012
• Tata Consultancy Services has emerged as the largest recruiter over the last year, followed by Infosys and Wipro Technologies. Cognizant Technology Solutions India Pvt. Ltd. is ranked four in the list, while HCL Technologies Ltd came fifth. The other players who found place in the top 10 list are: Mphasis Ltd, Genpact Ltd, Capgemini India Pvt Ltd, Tech Mahindra Ltd, Aegis Ltd. .....women as a percentage of total new hires have reached more than 40 per cent over the last 3 years - NASSCOM rankings of top 20 IT-BPO employers. CIOL, 28-Jul-2011
• Onshore software services (often derogatorily called 'body shopping') account for close to 45% of TCS' $8-billion revenues - ET, 1-Jul-2011
• Telecom Regulatory Authority of India reported that at the end of March (2011) the country had just 8.8m broadband connections. By contrast, it boasts some 812m mobile subscribers. - Economist, 28-Jun-2011
• "..cloud-services form 3 per cent of Infosys' income, and over 10 per cent if cloud- products are included."  - 25-Jun-2011
• TCS's headcount stood at 1,60,429 as on April 1, 2010, which increased to 1,98,614 as on March 31 this year. - ET, 21-Jun-2011
• Infosys had 130,820 employees during 2010-2011, from 88 nationalities. Of this, the number of software professionals stood at 123,811, while the rest were sales and support staff....the average age of its employees in 2011 stood at 27 years. The trend is similar with other IT service providers, including Wipro and TCS. - BS, 4-Jun-2011
• Tata Consultancy Services is the largest private sector employer in the country. It had 1,63,700 employees as on June 30. But guess who's number 2? ....The fact that IBM has over one lakh people on its rolls (global workforce is about 400,000) in this country is one of India Inc's best-kept secrets.  ToI, 18-Aug-2010
• Wipro .. "the first company in the world to achieve a level 5 CMM certification" ET, 8-May-2010

Also see: Indian software product start-ups that are making news

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Notes from Tech-Ed session "Team Foundation Server for Everyone"

The video recording of Martin Woodward's two sessions at Tech-Ed, NA 2011, Team Foundation Server for Everyone & The Accidental Team Foundation Server Admin provide an overview of TFS 2010 in about 2 hours. Some notes -

• TFS installation choices - Basic, Advanced
• TFS Basic Wizard - most compact TFS installation possible, provides only Source Control, WorkItem Tracking & Build services; can even work with SQL Server Express
• No requirement for Windows SharePoint Services, SQL Server Reporting Services
• Supports client installations - Windows 7, Windows Vista
• Grows when you grow - Client OS, Single server, Multi-server farms
• x64 Support
• Supports Java development
• Team Foundation VSSConverter command-line tool can migrate projects, files, version history, labels, and user information from your Visual SourceSafe database to your server for Team Foundation version control. This tool is included with TFS.
• Helps with Build Automation & Continuous Integration
• Work Item Tracking enables you track everything you need to manage: Tasks, Bugs, User Feedback, Feature requests
• Rich integration in Visual Studio / Eclipse
• Full featured synchronization lets you work in Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Project
• Web Access lets you get to your work items
• CodePlex uses TFS 2010 to manage 2.5 million users & 15000 Team Projects. Involves 4 Virtual Machine Application-Tier Farm with 10 Team Foundation Server Instances on 2 physical servers
• Developer Division at Microsoft uses TFS - 42 instances, 19,700 unique users, 6,154 team projects, 7.9 million work items

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IBM turns 100

To highlight its achievements in the 100 years of its existence, IBM has released a full-page ad in some Indian newspapers & a dedicated site for IBM's 100 Icons of Progress. A few interesting facts & trivia from that list of accomplishments -

• IBM programmer John Backus and his team produced the first high-level language, FORTRAN (for FORmula TRANslating System) in 1957.
• Contributed to the rise of the Internet by designing with its partners a new high-speed National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET) to connect US universities and 6 US-based supercomputer centers.
• Developed storage devices like Magnetic tape & Floppy disk
• Invented the UPC barcode system in 1973
• The first IBM Personal Computer (IBM 5150) had a price tag of $1,565 & earned Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” award. The brand name PC has got so popular that it is now used as a synonym for a micro-computer.
• IBM engineer Forrest Parry's wife contributed to the development of Magnetic Stripe Technology by suggesting to her husband that he use the iron to melt the magnetized tape strip onto a piece of plastic when he was struggling to combine the two components.  Now you know who is behind the magnetic stripe on credit cards. 

Also see:
100 Years of IBM in Pictures

History of Apple

The History of Microsoft

15 years of Internet Explorer

Windows 7 is 1 year old, Windows platform soon to be 25

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Notes from Tech-Ed session "Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.5 for Developers"

Steve Evans' presentation "Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.5 for Developers" at Tech-Ed, NA 2011, had some interesting IIS tips & tricks. I transcribed some of them from the more than hour-long video recording on Channel9 -

- Developers have Swiss cheese knowledge – they know a lot but there are holes in what they are familiar with.

Certificates
- Certificate Authority (CA) creates a cert for a specific site & date range, the OS trusts it.
- Client connects to server, pulls down cert & check for 3 things -
* Certificate creator trusted?
* Host header matches?
* Date is in range?
- Configuring SSL certificates - A wildcard certificate can be used for multiple sites related to each other
- You can drop a non-CA issued cert into the Trusted Root Certification Authority to simulate a real scenario while experimenting with a feature

PowerShell
- strong support in IIS 7.5
- PowerShell treats IIS as a drive

DefaultDocument setting
- DefaultDocument setting within IIS Manager lets you specify the default file to return when a client does not request a specific file.
- Interesting IIS notification when I tried the DefaultDocument setting on an Application - "The file ‘default.aspx’ exists in the current directory. It is recommended that you move this file to the top of the list to improve performance"

Feature Delegation
- Feature Delegation module is used to configure the default delegation state for features at lower levels in IIS Manager
- web.config is created automatically when certain settings are added in IIS.
- we have the option in IIS to change which settings are stored in the web.config versus the IIS metabase. Its through Feature Delegation.
- if Feature Delegation is set to Read Only, the setting is stored in the IIS metabase

Application Pool- is where the code runs
- Managed pipeline mode setting for Application Pool has 2 options –
* Integrated – ASP.NET is part of the pipeline
* Classic
- Be in Integrated mode whenever you can
- 10 year old codebase in ASP migrated to IIS 7.5 ran fine in Integrated mode
- Application Pool > Advanced Settings | General > “Enable 32-bit application”-false will address more than 4 gigs of memory
- Application Pool > Advanced Settings > Process Model | Idle timeout – set to 0 on Production server, default is 20 minutes
- Every 29 hours (Recycling | Regular time interval - 1740 minutes), the app pool will recycle (inproc sessions will be lost) no matter what
-Worker Processes module in IIS Manager lists all App pools
- Host rogue or crash-prone apps in a separate app pool so that it’s in a sandbox

Failed Request Tracing Rules
- configure tracing for failed requests. A request trace is logged either when an error status code is generated or when the time taken for the request exceeds a specified duration. If both conditions have been fulfilled, the first condition that is met willl generate the request trace.

Log Parser Lizard
- free GUI tool for MS Log Parser

MS Web Deploy /One Click deploy - available through command-line (MSDeploy.exe) & GUI
- Example: msdeploy -verb:sync -source:webServer -dest:webServer,computerName=demoiis -whatif - informs what would change on a sync but not actually change it.

Security
- After the Code Red security issue in IIS5, from IIS6 onwards components of IIS are disabled by default.
- URL Scan is built into IIS 7.

Web Platform Installer - app store for IIS

URL Rewrite - popular extension for IIS
- allows us to write rules to change the request coming in & going out on they fly
- comes with a bunch of pre-canned rules
- The sample rule UserFriendlyURL makes URLs SEO-friendly
- provides rewriting capabilities based on rules for the requested URL address & the content of an HTTP response. So if user types http://site2.com/ IIS can make it look as http://www.site2.com/
- You can rename URL Rewrite configured rules in web.config to have memorable names rather than using the automated default names.

IIS Express
- true IIS except it does not run as a service, it runs as a app under your user context.
- "Use IIS Express" appears in context menu for project in VS & you can switch from using Cassini to IIS Express. URL Rewrite, FRT, Log files (for use with Log Parser) available with IIS Express

Also see: Free videos from major Microsoft Developer events are archived on Channel9

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