JQuery.NET ...

Of late, I have been reading through JQuery and I find it very interesting.A fantastic javascript library that helps web developers traverse the HTML DOM fairly easily.

I found an interesting example that uses JQuery here.

I built a .NET custom control using the example above.

Some of the features are:

• Ability to bind the control to a list of name value pairs


• Allow the control to be initialized with a list of tokens


• Property to determine if the list has to allow adding items not in the search results

Feel free to write to me incase you are in need of such a control and I shall be glad to email you the sources.

Note: Please do not forget to quote your email address while requesting for the sources :-)

Cheers !!

Cancer - Can Sir ...

Continuing with my last post where I ended with a wish/pray that ARR wins an OSCAR for India - On the day when OSCARs were announced, I was up early in the morning not just to see the event but attending a CT Scan for my dad !! I was going through a mixed feeling - on one hand, my wish for my icon got fulfilled while on the other hand, my dad was diagnosed to be suffering from Cancer!

Cancer - the term is scary, for sure. It is often said that "Cancer can be cured when diagnosed early" and having observed the diagnosis and the treatment for my dad, I intend to put my experiences with an aim to spread the awareness on Cancer.

What is Cancer - putting it simply it is a disease where some cells in our body start multiplying exponentially resulting in bulges/tumors on the body.

How do you diagnose it ? - This is infact a tough question.How many times did you feel your whole body to observe any lump/bulge that is not painful ? I am sure the answer is "zero". Generally, we tend to ignore a swelling/lump/bulge in our body that is not causing pain and there's the culprit.

A swelling that is painful is less dangerous than the one that is not painful.

In my dad's case, we observed a swelling near the left jaw and we ignored it ('coz we were busy with my engagement and marriage events and on the other hand, the swelling is not causing any pain !). We went to a local doctor who concluded that it is a general infection, while it is not.My dad started experiencing pinching pain near the abdomen and that's when we consulted a specialist who diagnosed the disease to be Cancer. (thanks to the doctor - Dr.G.V.Prakash).

Dr.Prakash helped us by explaining the purpose of each test, the results and the next steps. After having gone through a set of tests that ensured that all the vital organs in the body are in tact, he referred us to a Radiation Oncologist (Dr.Nalini) who took up the case and started the treatment.

The treatment comprises two major procedures - Radio therapy and Chemo therapy.
Radio therapy - the patient is subjected to controlled radio active rays at the area where Cancer is identified.
Chemo therapy - a particular combination of injections/chemicals are injected into the body which identifies the culprit cells and kills them. The chemicals are so powerful that they affect the normal cells too and as a result the patient suffers from various side-effects like loss of hair, sore throat, mouth ulcers, vomiting sensation, dehydration, fever, etc..


Believe me, Cancer is a disease where the disease doesn't cause the pain but the treatment is painful. I thank God for my dad is able to bear the pain and I pray Him to give my dad all the strength to tolerate the side-effects and come out of it healthy.

During the course of the treatment, I had collected some material guiding the patients as to how they have to maitain diet during the treatment and here is the link to that document.

For Cancer, more than the medicine, it's the diet/food and a positive attitude that helps one fight it.

I hope I have contributed a bit towards fighting Cancer by spreading awareness and I will be more than happy if the information here helps you in some way.

Maestro strikes again ...

Music Maestro,Mozart of Madras - A.R.Rahman strikes again and this time the aim is to bag an Oscar. He is the first Indian music director to win the prestigious "Golden Globe" award, besides a big list of awards that he has got for the movie "Slumdog millionaire".

I am just waiting for the Oscars to be announced and praying God (seriously and sincerely) that my icon wins an Oscar for Indian music.

I wish ARR all success :-)

Creating multiple websites on a single IP ...

Suppose, I have a couple of websites hosted on a dedicated server (Windows 2003 with IIs 6.0) and the issue is that with one IP address (in other words - Static/Dedicated IP address), I was able to reach only one of the websites.

There are three options to host multiple websites in IIS :

1. Create websites, each assigned an IP - The downside of this option is that you will have limited IPs with you !!
2. Create websites, each listening on different port numbers.For example, http://mysite1.com and http://mysite2.com:8888 - The downside of this approach is that users have to remember the port number of the site that they are interested in!!
3. Using Host-Headers - This option is the "best" that solves the problem at hand.

Let me elaborate a bit on option #3 here:

1. Create multiple websites in IIS
2. Right click on a website, choose "Properties".
3. On the tab page named "Website" click "Advanced ..." and here you can add a host header (say, mysite2.com) and let all the websites have the IP as "All Unassigned" and the port 80.

Having done this, update the DNS records for mysite1.com and mysite2.com to point to the IP running your webserver and try accessing mysite1.com and mysite2.com, it works :-)

For more details, please visit http://www.iisanswers.com/Top10FAQ/t10-hostheaders.htm

Cool Javascript for implementing a photo gallery ...

The other day, Sudeep gave me a url to a javascript library that can be used to implement a photo gallery on web pages. The script is - LightBox2. I liked the script and wanted to give a try, so I thought why not a photo gallery with the pictures of Bara Imambara ;-)

Here it is ... Click on an image to see the script in action. After you click on an image, roll over the mouse on the image (popup) to see next and previous buttons or use left/right arrow keys to navigate through the gallery.

Images courtesy: wikipedia.org :-)

POP3 client in C# ...

The other day, I was trying to develop a C# application that can retrieve emails from Gmail via POP3. I searched through various sites for a library that I could use to fetch POP3 emails. I came across a bunch of libraries (along with source code) but unfortunately, none of them worked, 'coz they all don't seem to support SSL, while Gmail POP server requires communication over a secure connection (SSL) !!

After a lot of search in Google, I came across a post in which it is explained that there is an open source project named OpenPOP.Net and that there is a class named PopClient.cs that needs to be modified as explained (the code was put on the site there). I had downloaded the sources, tried compiling OpenPOP.Net with the new class, spent some time fixing the compile time issues since the modified PopClient.cs in turn relies on a third-party library !!

Atlast I have got the sample in OpenPOP.Net working with the modified PopClient.cs and now I am able to fetch messages from Gmail :-)

For the benefit of all those developers, breaking their head trying to read emails from Gmail in C# apps (or any other POP server that requires SSL), here is the library along with one sample Windows application that you can use to test the library.

I request you to please post a comment, if you find the sources helpful and thanks to all the posts on the web that helped me compile the zip that is ready for download

Incredible India ...Understand, to appreciate ....

Last week, I had been to Lucknow (the capital city of Uttar Pradesh) to attend one of my close pal's marriage.It is interesting to explore places, traditions and customs in general, and in India, you find a variety of it. Each state,pretty much, has got it's own language (almost), culture, customs and traditions.

We got some time to explore the places in Lucknow and we were taken to a place named "Bara Imambara" - a shrine built by Shia Muslims (I didn't know what it means when I visited the place but got to know of it from wikipedia !).My first impression at the shrine (it looks more like a fort than a shrine, though) was that it's a big construction, just another archealogical piece left to us by Nawabs !! I realized that my knowledge is meagre, so is the information that is available over there about the monument !

Some of the highlights of "Bara Imambara" are :-

• The Great Imambara or the Bada Imambara has a central hall, one of the largest vaulted galleries in the world, beneath which many underground passages are present. Any pillars or any other supports do not support the main hall, which is over 50 feet in height. The roof has been put together with interlocking bricks without using a beam or a girder.
• The upper floor, Bhulbhulaiya, is also famous as a fantastic labyrinth. It is believed that a stranger cannot come out of this maze without any assistance from some expert guide. It is possibly the only existing maze in India and came about unintenionally to support the weight of the building, constructed on marshy land.
  
• The design of the Imambara was obtained through a competitive process. The winner was an architect Kifayatullah, who also lies buried in the main hall of the Imambara. It is another unique aspect of the building where the sponsor and the architect lie buried besides each other.

Incredible India - It has got so many archealogical master-pieces but pity that there is not much information available to the visitors to appreciate the beauty of these monuments.

I wish the Archealogical Survey of India wakes up atleast now to get some literature available to the visitors of these historical pieces and let them appreciate their greatness !