Articles from November 2010

Little saving cash – interesting

9 months ago, i decided to put some money for saving. At that time i just wanted to do something different as usual i did. So i put aside 4 millions VND in a bank account – a nice started. The account should have been updated for every month. However, that was the only and last time i put money in 🙁 . In programming, we call it: Fire and Forget.

9 months later; which is now; i have a small problem with money. I need money for a trip with my girlfriend’s company. I could borrow from friends or got it from my credit card as i did before. When considering the solutions, that bank saving came back to my mind. I decided to go to the bank and asked for my money. Surprisingly, i have 4 millions 3 thousands and 24 VND. Yeah i am happy. And the most important thing is that i feel the power of those small saving.

A bit of fact is that many people do the same thing for long long time ago, except me 🙁 . That idea is now coming in my mind. Obviously i know how to use it and make it better.

Parallel Programming – get started

I have been coding for 5 years; mostly in web-based applications. And i work on serial programming; sometimes with a bit parallel: asynchronous model. Honestly speaking, my experience with multithreaded, parallel is zero. Which is bad 🙁 I know for sure what the multi threading programming is; in a basic level of awareness. That is quite a poor story of 5 year-experienced  developer.

For the past couple of days; maybe a week; i decided to take a deeper look at the topic: Multi threading, parallel programming. Having googling “Multi threading, parallel programming Google gave me thousands of links. Picked up some, read some on MSDN. And i got loss 🙁 I found some links about parallel programming in new .NET 4.0. There are books about it. Reading one of them, and again i got loss twice 🙁

OK then i realized that i had no basic knowledge about it. So how can i read  the API in .NET 4.0? Impossible! Even though i can use them, i cannot get them in mind. I decided: back to the basic. I got this book: Art of Concurrency. I scheduled for a future post about the review of the book. At first impression, it is really useful.

Here is my approach for overcoming Parallel Programming:

  1. Acknowledge the basic: by finishing the Art of Concurrency book.
  2. How it is implemented before the .NET 4.0: ask Google again.
  3. .NET 4.0: Patterns of Parallel Programming book.
  4. Write some code along the way of course.

As many other programming tools, techniques, what i really care about are:

  1. What is it?
  2. When to apply it?
  3. How to do it?
  4. How to test it? Usually unit test at first step
  5. How to debug it? Of course in case of bug.
  6. How to measure its performance comparing to the serial one?

Updated:

A sort comment about the Art of Concurrency. Honestly i cannot finish the book all 🙁 There are so many useful theories and examples. However my purpose is to get the idea of the Concurrency, Parallel. The first 4 chapters satisfy my needs. For me it is enough to move on with specific code in .NET framework.

Xobni – a must-have for outlook

Yesterday, my colleague introduced my this tool: Xobni. It is a tool to manage your inbox. For each contact, when you click on an email sent to you, it will show detail of:

  1. All emails sent by that user; in term of summary. That way you can have an overview of email-conversation between you and the sender.
  2. How many attachments sent by that user; with a list of attachments. Now getting an attachment from that user is a piece of cake.
  3. You also can have an overview of his network; how many links; how many appointment you have so far with him/her.

For all its functionalities, please go to the website:Xobni. You can get a free version for the basic functionalities.

After installed, it takes a few minutes to index all your inbox; including all folder in your mail box. The indexing also tells you who is the most active contact with your; ranking you contact based on the number of mails you got from that contact. The indexing service is running all the background; therefore it does not block your outlook while indexing next time.

Check it out yourself if you are using outlook for everyday email-conversation.

Coolite premium support

With the coming out of Coolite v 1.0, download here , my company purchased 5 pro + premium support licenses, i decided to use its help for the first time. Really cool and fast! i posted question and immediately got reply.

I have been working with Coolite for nearly a year. Honestly, it is super cool component to build desktop-like web application. If you are tired of HTML  + JavaScript to build a website then it is there for your side.