I learnt today…
2008-11-21
As an IT professional, I go through many problems, challenges and new stuff everyday.
Every challenge I face teaches me a new lesson. Every problem shows me a new path.
Also I come across new stuff daily through various methods.
The interesting thing is that someday somehow we meet the same problem again and I have experienced it. In many times, I have remembered that I have faced a similar situation in the past.
The problem is that I don’t remember how I faced it!
So I thought to start a blog and write down everything I learn in a day.
I expect several things from this:
- To keep a reference to things that I learn on a daily basis
- To help the world; If anyone faces the same problem after I did and searches the Internet for a solution, I would be pleased if my past experience could help that person.
- Someday, use this as a way to turn back and see the challenges I have faced in the past.
God, help me to keep the enthusiasm and continue this endeavor !
Cassian Menol Razeek
Six Advices to Succeed in Online Paid Surveys
2009-03-14
I have been working with many survey sites in the Internet and I have learnt a lot of lessons. I learnt some of these when I was researching about online survey sites and most of these lessons are learnt by experience. So I thought to share my knowledge with the rest of the world hoping it would help someone out there.
What are surveys anyway?
Several years ago the word “surveying” mainly referred to land surveying. For most of us the only thing hit our minds when we hear this word is a surveyor looking though a leveling instrument to take measurements.
Even though marketing surveys have being used by large organizations for a very long time, these surveys hit the middle and small sized organizations very recently and now even some of the smallest shops in the town have survey forms to get feed back from their clients.
Online Surveys
Internet is an amazing thing. Anyone has access to it from almost anywhere on the earth so what ever the trends that hit the world get reflected in the Internet right away and then millions of people start following it. The same thing has happened to surveys and as a result, a huge community has been made up around the world from people who are interested on surveys. As I write this, thousands of sites publish new surveys and millions of people are taking those surveys.
So in this article, I will give a set of advices that I have learnt in the hard way…
Rule 1 – Don’t Select Survey Sites From Lists Rated By Other People
Many people in the Internet are involved in affiliate marketing. Many surveying sites pay bloggers when they refer a new person to their site. So don’t believe in those lists such as “Top 10 Most Paid Survey Sites”, “Top 5 Survey Companies”, etc. because the TOP site of those lists is the site that pays the blogger most! So my advice is not to believe in those ranked lists.
Rule 2 – Ask the site this question: ” What Do I Get For Responding To Surveys? “
The answer depends on the site you are going to work with. Some sites pay money and some sites pay by other means such as coupon codes and sweepstakes entries while some sites are charity sites where you get non-paid public service surveys.
Rule 3 – Work Only For Cash
As I mentioned there are many sites which pays you in indirect methods such as coupon codes. My advice is never work on surveys unless they pay you by money because there is no way to measure the value of your work. They will give you a coupon code or sweepstakes entry at the end of your days work and you still have to go around the corner to get your own earnings. Since most of the times these are given as discounts, you have to spend more money and buy something to apply those discounts. In simple words, you only feel you earn but you never get your earnings into your hands.
The worst problem is some coupon codes may not be useful for you at the moment and some discounts may not be available in your region. You have to take this very seriously if you are not living in the same country or region as the origin of the site where it is operational.
Rule 4 – Check Available Payment Methods
Your computer may simply get surveys through the site without any problems or delays but it doesn’t mean your payment gets to your bank account in the same speed. Go and check the payment options supported by the site. Some sites support various payment methods while some sites only have one or two methods.
For most payment methods there are limitations across countries. This isn’t a problem if you are located in the same country where the site is operational but if you are living in a different region or a country you have to be more concerned about this matter.
For an example, you may be able to create a Paypal account from your country but you may not be able to accept payments to that account because Paypal doesn’t support that service in your country. In such situations if your site does not have suitable options you may lose your money.
Rule 5 – Don’t Go After Fortunes
There’s no such thing as easy money! Remember this as you go on finding for survey sites because you will face sites that say they would pay bulks of money for each survey. My advice according to what I have learnt so far is don’t go for those sites because the more money they promise, the more chances for that site to be a scam. Unfortunately, many people around the world get into these scams everyday. The best thing is to find a site that pays a reasonable and especially practical price for your work.
Rule 6 – Work Hard! There’s No Boss To Push You Forward!
If you are working in a company then you have a boss looking at you to make sure you meet company expectations and to kick you off if you lose performance. In this case, you are your own boss. The good news is there’s no one to kick you off and you own everything you earn. The bad news is you have to take care of everything. Especially you have to keep your motivation up. It’s not easy to do something of your own without postponing. You must dedicate yourself to the work at least till you reach a solid level of ground to stand on.
In this new office you don’t have office times. You have your freedom and at the same time you have all responsibilities on your shoulders. In simple words, It’s your baby go ahead and grow it!
Don’t look for fortunes, Work hard and make your own fortune!
Was this post helpful to you? How can I improve? – Your comment is highly appreciated!
Cassian Menol Razeek
An Answer to All Atheists Around the World Who Criticize Religions…
2009-01-19
I am not in the idea that atheists should not exist because as humans we all have our rights to express what each of us think and what our opinion is on anything.
What really matters is the accuracy of our conclusions which depends on the breadth of our mind and depth of our thoughts and it’s very important to be open-minded.
Recently I got into a blog of an atheist. In his blog he has hand-picked some examples like casualties of wars, starvation due to food waste which are results of activities of mankind and he simply claims that there’s no God just because he cannot see God coming down to fix those things…
Even though I tried my best to explain him and his colleagues from around the world who really God is, I found that it’s not possible because they have already come to a conclusion depending on several hand-picked examples like what I listed above.
I believe at least they should understand that it needs lots of studies than extracting examples from news sites when trying to come to a conclusion on a very complex topic. So I thought to give an answer to all atheists around the world for what they are trying to prove.
To My Dear Atheist Friends from Around the World…
My dear friends, the effort you are taking to define whether the God exists or not is like a physician doing a heart surgery.
Some people will trust him because anyway he’s a doctor and has some knowledge about heart.
And the physician of course can proceed with the surgery and will get into heart but he doesn’t know whether he cuts the right veins or whether he goes on the right path to make the surgery.
However, the physician will finish the surgery and come to a conclusion as he’s correct but the patient will never live.
The physician will have enough people around the world to support him and tell him he did the right thing even though the patient is dead.
Only heart surgeons who have experience will try to say that the physician is wrong.
But still the physician will continue his work until a court decides he’s wrong.
My dear friends, I’m just a guy who have some experience in my life. I’m not the judge.
So you can continue these arguments with your hand picked examples as long as you want because…
The court that’s judging you does not come to conclusions as simply as you do.
Cassian Menol Razeek
The Blood Brain Barrier
2009-01-08
I wouldn’t be wrong if I say the Brain is the most vital organ in the human body. As we all know brain handles most of critical operations inside our body such as keeping and managing memories, organizing our activities, keep other organs perform, and so much more.
The Brain, as most of us already know, works by sending electric signals through complex meshes of neurons so the brain has to maintain a good environment around to keep the accuracy of this electrical signal flow.
The environment inside the brain is the brain fluid so the ingredients or components of the brain fluids are very critical to the functionalities of brain.
Any organ of the body gets the supplies it needs through blood and so does the brain. Ingredients of human blood vary depending on the situation, food, problems of other organs, etc. so it is obvious that the blood is not the same all the time.
Not like other organs, the brain has to think a lot before extracting anything from blood because if the chemical levels of brain fluid vary it directly affects the signals passed through neurons. If the brain fluid is not maintained in an optimum level, the environment will become too noisy for neurons and sending signals would become like talking in the middle of a party.
So there is this Blood-Brain Barrier (which is also referred to as BBB) which extracts the necessary ingredients such as Oxygen and Glucose and make sure nothing else is taken in.
Blood-Brain Barrier Diagram
Photo courtesy: Malcolm Segal
Where is Blood-Brain Barrier Located?
BBB is located at the brain blood capillaries. These capillaries are unusual in several aspects from capillaries in other organs. Those aspects are briefly described below:
- The end-points of cells which make up the walls of these capillaries are sealed together at their edges by tight junctions which are a key component in the barrier. These junctions make sure that water soluble substances in the blood don’t pass between the edges of cells.
- These capillaries are enclosed by flattened cells which altogether called the ‘end-feet’ which also work as a (partial and active) barrier.
- The only way for water soluble substances in the blood is through the walls of capillaries. These walls plays the other role in the barrier because their cell membranes are made up of a lipid/protein belayed only allowing flat-soluble molecules including those of oxygen and carbon dioxide, anesthetics and alcohol to pass through the walls of capillaries.
- In the capillary wall there are three classes of ‘efflux pumps’ which pumps various lipid-soluble molecules back in to the blood out of the brain.
However, the brain needs water soluble compounds such as Glucose for energy production and amino acids for protein synthesis so there are these Carriers in the walls of capillaries which allow those compounds to go through the wall and move waste products and unwanted molecules in the opposite direction.
The blood-brain barrier plays another key role in keeping the volume of the brain at a constant level. Since the brain is contained inside a rigid skull it is important to keep the fluid from free movement thus keeping volume of the brain static.
Problems Related to BBB
Even though BBB is made in the sole purpose of protecting the brain, it has become a barrier to medicine to access the brain. Since many medicines are water soluble, they are barricaded at the BBB. This process has made it very hard to treat brain tumors and infections such as AIDS virus.
In fact, AIDS virus uses BBB as a shield by hiding behind the BBB from body defense mechanisms.
Due to such reasons medicine has to be made as fat-soluble but then a new problem arises because then the medicine will be absorbed by most cells of the body which may be toxic.
The alternatives are making drug molecules that can ride on natural transporter proteins or use drugs that can open the Blood-Brain-Barrier.
Was this post helpful to you? How can I improve? – Your comment is highly appreciated!
Cassian Menol Razeek
Recommended Books:
What is a Permalink
2009-01-07
If you maintain or work around blogs then the word “Permalink” should be familiar to you.
In early stages of the Internet all web addresses or URLs were static or permanent but as the web became more complex where large volumes of content is added daily, it became hard to handle in the usual way.
The involvement of database driven systems was necessary to manage large volumes of web content.
The URLs used with these systems were not human readable and each URL is only brings a main or central page and loads the requested page from their.
Ex/ Non-Permanent (Old) link for the Wikipedia page for Albert Einstein
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Albert_Einstein
As you can see, these dynamic URLs do not provide a permanent link to the relevant page. The part “Albert_Einstein” is only a parameter sent to the internal CGI of Wikipedia.
A Permalink is a permanent link for each item in the web site or domain. With this concept each page of a domain gets a unique permanent URL.
Ex/ Permalink for the Wikipedia page for Albert Einstein
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein
Why Permalinks are Helpful for Bloggers…?
In blogs, post goes down the stack as new posts arrive. So when permalink is enabled, each of your post gets an individual URL so that anyone on the Internet can link to your post from their site or blog without depending on what happens at your blog.
Was this post helpful to you? How can I improve? – Your comment is highly appreciated!
Cassian Menol Razeek
Recommended Books:
C# ASP.NET – GridView : How to Use Checkbox in Gridview to Select Multiple Rows
This post is moved. Please use following link:
How Fibonacci Sequence Relates to Nature
2009-01-05
Italian mathematician Leonardo Pisano had a problem worked on to find a mathematical pattern to answer the question: how many pairs of rabbits can be produced from a single pair of rabbits in one year?
He carried out his work on following assumptions:
- Rabbits are kept under optimal conditions
- Female rabbits always give birth to pairs
- Each pair consists of one male and one female
If we start with a pair of new born rabbits and monitor the population monthly…
Rabbits cannot reproduce until they are at least one month old. So in the first month there will only be one pair and at the end of the second month the pair is able to reproduce so the female rabbit will give birth to a new pair.
In month three the original pair gives birth to yet another pair while their first pair of baby rabbits grows to the adulthood.
In the beginning of month four there are two pairs of adult rabbits and one pair growing so both of these adult pairs give birth to two new pairs. So the total number of pairs in the end of the fourth month:
Adult pairs : 2
Growing pairs : 3
Total : 5
Like wise the pattern goes on as follows:
1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, … on to the infinity. Each number is the sum of the previous two.
Leonardo Pisano found this interesting pattern on 1202. How come the pattern is named Fibonacci Sequence?
Leonardo Pisano was also knows as Fibonacci, meaning “son of Bonacci” giving this name to his finding.
Are rabbits the only species having relevance to Fibonacci Sequence?
Many natural entities such as Fruits, Vegetables and Seed Heads show spiral patterns which follows Fibonacci Sequence.
Some examples:
If you look at the array of seeds in a center of a sunflower you should notice that those seeds are arranged in spiral patterns curving left and right. And the amazing thing is if you count the number of these spirals you will get a Fibonacci number. The most amazing thing is if you divide the spirals pointed to left and right and count those separately you will get two consecutive Fibonacci numbers!
If you look at a pineapple you can notice that its scales make a spiral pattern and if you look closer and count those scales in each spiral you will notice that those numbers reflect Fibonacci Sequence.
Same thing can be noticed in pinecones, cauliflower and many more natural things we live with.
This sequence has an amazing link with the nature and that’s may be why the ratio between two of these numbers is called The Golden Ratio.
The Golden Ratio:
Two numbers are considered as in The Golden Ratio if the ratio between the sum of two numbers and the larger one is equal to the ratio between the larger one and the smaller.
In mathematics the golden ratio is often denoted by the Greek letter ϕ (phi).
The value of the golden ratio: ϕ = 1.6180339887…
Was this post helpful to you? How can I improve? – Your comment is highly appreciated!
Cassian Menol Razeek
Recommended Books:
My Goals for the New Year 2009!
2009-01-01
It’s a New Year…!
I want to be much more improved in both my personal and professional lives when I look back at the end of this New Year!
So I decided to make a list of goals I want to achieve in this year. And I will make sure that I achieve my goals as I go on living this New Year.
Goals for My Professional Life:
I have a set of goals which will improve the quality of my professional life and will increase the value of me in the profession. If I directly go to the list…
- Obtain MCTS Certification
- Obtain SCJP Certification
- Be More Competent on My Work at My Office
- Make My Clients Happy
- Find More Freelance Work
- Create Several Methods to Earn Some Money Online
Goals for My Personal Life:
- Keep My Family Happy
- Focus More on Health of My and My Girl Friend’s Parents
- Cut Extra Fat I Have Gained and Get the Body I Used to Have
- Learn to Play Guitar – ANYHOW!!!
- Go to Swim
My Financial Goals:
- Open a Fixed Deposit Before the End of June
Other Goals:
- Obtain Work Permit
- Give Clothes Regularly to Children of a Poor Family
These are the Goals I have in my mind at the moment and I will update the list as I go on…!
Yes, I know, I will have to work so hard if I want to have all of these achieved at the end of this year. I will definitely make this dream come true with the great help from my parents, my girl friend and all my friends around me and always the best helper, The God!
I wish the whole world, a Happy and Successful New Year!
Cassian Menol Razeek
Looking Back at 2008!
2008-12-31
I am not happy about my last year because I did not make much significant achievements on my carrier in the year! At the beginning of the year I had a goal to obtain MCTS certification but I could not achieve that.
However there were some small achievements as well:
What I feel as the best achievement of the last year is this blog itself. I made this on November and I am very happy about this because it feels so great to see someone out there is reading my posts.
A software solution provider company chose me as a technical consultant to solve their problems and I am so happy that I could solve many problems that many of their staff could not solve. I consider this as one of my major achievements of the last year.
I have survived in my work place and after taking the recent lay-offs into my consideration, I would take this as an achievement!
I could take my family on a trip and they were so happy about it and we all enjoyed it. It was the best personal achievement for me!
Also me and my girl friend could go several short picnics to beautiful places like beaches. Those were romantic achievements to me because those moments brought us even closer to each other!
I don’t remember everything I achieved or missed through out the last year at this moment so I will publish this post at this point and will update as I remember…!
Cassian Menol Razeek
ASP.NET – AutoPostBack : What is AutoPostBack and How AutoPostBack Works
2008-12-26
Today I was experimenting on a grid view where I was trying to select multiple rows of the grid view using a check box column.
I wrote some code in the CheckedChanged of checkbox but then I found that the code was not executed when the state of the checkbox is changed.
So I did a little googling and found out about this AutoPostBack property. This property defines whether the control should post back to the server each time when the user interacts with the control. Or, according to this scenario, a post back will fire when the user clicks on the check box or when the Checked property is changed.
AutoPostBack :
This value holds a boolean value (true/false)
If the property is set to true, a post back is sent immediately to the server and no post back is occurred when set to false.
The Use of AutoPostBack:
According to MSDN, for most WebControls, when AutoPostBack is false, only the events from actions that cause a net change in the state of the control are submitted to the server.
In other words some events are not queued to the server. For example no event is fired when a user selects a value from a drop down list or when user presses Enter or Tab key after entering a value to a textbox.
If you want such events to be fired then you have to enable autopostback by setting autopostback property to true.
How AutoPostBack Works :
When AutoPostBack is enabled, the .Net framework automatically injects following additional items into the generated HTML code.
- Two Hidden variables with name __EVENTTARGET and __EVENTARGUMENT
- A Java script method with name __doPostBack (eventtarget, eventargument)
- OnChange JavaScript event to the control
What is __EVENTTARGET :
__EVENTTARGET tells the server which control wants to fire the event so that the framework can fire the event on that control.
What is __EVENTARGUMENT :
__EVENTARGUMENT can be used to provide additional information to the server about the event.
What is __doPostBack (eventtarget, eventargument) :
Parameters sent to this method holds relevant target and event argument values and this method sets those values into __EVENTTARGET and __EVENTARGUMENT hidden variables so that the server can read those.
Then this method submits the form to the server where the appropriate event will be fired.
What is OnChange JavaScript event to the control :
Every control has a client side event called OnChange. When AutoPostBack is enabled for a control the framework sets the handler for this client side event as the __doPostBack method and will pass the name of the control as the first parameter, eventtarget.
Ex/
Following shows how the framework binds the __doPostBack method to the OnChange event.
<input type=”checkbox” onclick=“javascript:setTimeout(’__doPostBack(\’CheckBox1\’,\’\')‘, 0)” />
Was this post helpful to you? How can I improve? – Your comment is highly appreciated!
Cassian Menol Razeek
Recommended Books:
How to Save a Copy of a Visual Studio 2005 Solution
2008-12-22
Sometimes things we consider as simple take much time to be accomplished than we expect just because we forget!
Today I wanted to save a copy of a web based visual studio 2005 solution but it took life 10 minutes for me to accomplish that because I had completely forgotten the method to do it. Since keeping track of what I learn is one objective of this blog I decided to include this small detail today.
How to save a copy a solution in visual studio 2005 (Save As)
Select the solution (click on it) in the solution explorer
Now go to File menu and there will be a command to Save the solution to any place you want.
Ex/
If your solution name is “My Solution.sln”
When you select your solution in the solution explorer and go to the file menu, you will see command like:
Save My Solution.sln As
Simply click on that and you will get the usual Save As dialog box.
Some Details
Even though you can select the place to save project files in web based solutions such as web sites, the solution is saved in a different location which is located in your My Documents folder.
The solution file contains information about your projects and files including paths so if you want to move the entire solution to a different computer to continue work on a different workstation then this tip will become handy unless you don’t forget things as I do 
Was this post helpful to you? How can I improve? – Your comment is highly appreciated!
Cassian Menol Razeek
Recommended Books:
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