http://www.diovo.com Mon, 05 Jan 2009 06:16:05 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Opera is once again set to screw up its UI in the upcoming version 10 of the web browser. Granted, that the new iteration of Opera is faster and bloasts loads of new features, but the UI is still such a mess to look at. See for yourself: This is the default theme named ... http://www.diovo.com/2009/01/opera-please-hire-a-designer/ You guys wont believe this: I have a hard time convincing some of my friends that facebook is having more users than orkut !!! Why is there a confusion? It is because in India orkut is more popular than facebook. So they think that facebook is just a clone of orkut ... http://www.diovo.com/2009/01/orkut-vs-facebook/ For a national paper presentation contest in a reputed engineering college, they developed a website for participant registration. Before opening the website, they changed the database table name to a better one. (You know, these developers have got a habit of naming tables and variables after their pets). After one month of operation, they ... http://www.diovo.com/2009/01/why-you-may-consider-testing-your-application/ If you are on twitter, you can find me at twitter.com/diovo Follow me if you want updates from my side. As is the case with this blog, I won't say anything if I don't have anything to say. I promise you that I will be sending tweets worth your time your way!!! http://www.diovo.com/2008/12/find-me-on-twitter/ The last day I saw an interesting abuse of hash functions. In an application that processed strings, there was a part where it compared medium sized strings. Instead of using the in-built string comparison routine, they calculated the hash values of the strings and compared the hashes. Clever? Wrong! Finding the hash value ... http://www.diovo.com/2008/12/hashing-is-not-a-substitute-for-string-comparison/ I am not talking about the bells and whistles. I have been using Windows 7 for the past few days and it looks like this is going to be a great Operating System from Microsoft. The UI looks similar to that of Vista, but with a lot of tweaks. The new taskbar ... http://www.diovo.com/2008/11/windows-7-is-awesome/ It is a bad idea to have an application with exception handling like this: catch(SQLException sqlexception) {         //This is not supposed happen } This is not supposed happen?!! Seriously? We all know that exceptions are not supposed to happen. Still we catch them so that if they do happen, we can take some steps to prevent ... http://www.diovo.com/2008/11/dont-catch-exceptions-if-you-are-not-going-to-handle-them/ ... people miss you. Good to know that there are people who care. A big thanks to Silky and all others who expressed concern over the blog. http://www.diovo.com/2008/10/you-feel-humbled-when/ I saw the following comparison chart in a web hosting site: This is just nonsense. Scalability and Reliability are two things which you cannot enable on the flick of a switch. Scaling web applications is a very difficult job. For instance, twitter is still fighting scaling issues. Reliability is hard, very ... http://www.diovo.com/2008/10/on-scalability-and-reliability/ Since you are smart, you know these things anyway. Just tell your friends too. Avoid using select * from in your queries. Why? Selecting every column in the table reduces the performance of the database, the network and the application in general. Alternative: Use something like select required_column1, required_column2,… from table_name instead. Avoid using ... http://www.diovo.com/2008/10/quick-tips-for-database-programmers/