Over 250,000  students take the prestigious CAT exam every year in India . The test was conducted using pencil and paper.  Indian Institutes of Management, a network of India’s top business schools in India which conducts CAT had a  $40 million deal to computerize IIM’s Common Admission Test. This deal was bagged by none other than Prometric.

For $40 million , Prometric has done a very lousy job.  When students went in to take the exam on 28 Nov, the servers crashed. And not all of the 250,000 students were taking the test. It was only 20% of them.

The students who took the online Common Admission Test, some of them were not quite convinced about the new format of the examination. And their fears had come true.

Well 50,000 stduents concurrently taking test should not be a rocket science . Compare to ebay , Amazon and twitter which handle multiples of traffic every minute. Looks like prometric did not even bothered to conduct a pilot run.

No update on when the service will be restored and if IIM can afford to have this kind of glitch again.

In US, State of New Jersey has a different format for written driving test. For those who want to clear the driving knowledge test , please note that the DMV written test consists of 80 percent, or 40 of the 50 questions, must have correct answers.  For practice , we have a New Jersey DMV Driving test .

Looking for your comments and feedback.

This is the second part of .Net chart control and this is going to cover some advanced topic. Please go thorugh Microsoft Chart Control Tutorial before you continue this.

Introduction

In this tutorial we will discuss some advanced features on .Net chart control. As our previous tutorial covers the basics of chart control, we will not discuss those same things over here. Here we focus on the advanced features primarily based on two examples:
1. Creating .Net chart from the data of an XML file
2. Creating .Net chart only by configuring ‘ChartArea’ sectionof the control from the source page
Both of these two examples also show you different features of .Net chart .

Displaying XML data using .Net chart

We are going to mention the steps one by one to create the same things in your machine for practice: Read more…

For those who are appearing for the road test  in US , here are some tips . Me and my wife both had been driving cars in India and had been also driving in South Africa. So were not new to cars. What we were’nt accustomed to was the left hand driving but we picked it in couple of weeks.

My state was Massachusetts(MA) and I first gave the written test. You can practice for written test Free RMV driving test. Luckily I cleared it in first go. Next was driving test.I was lucky enough to clear it first time but for my wife it took 3 attempts !!(Yes 3 attempts). Let me help you out what she missed and how you can learn from our experience Read more…

Google Analytic is the default freeware tool for monitoring the website traffic . It has also been used effectively to measure the traffic of blog. I have been wondering if there are any tools to monitor the twitter statistics. With twitter comes a typical problem that those users may or may not come to your site. So how do you monitor the effectiveness of twitter. Some tools for twitter are

• Twitter Analyzer – Did not find much usage except that it gives a graph of how much tweets you have done
• twitalyzer – Provides Influence,  Signal , Generosity, Trend , Velocity of your twitter account
• Klout -  I am not going to write much about clout because Avinash Kauushik has given a very detailed explanation on Klout in this post twitter quantitative qualitative analysis.

if you are looking for some free wordpress themes , here are some options

Free wordpress themes

Netflix . the online leader in movie rentals had a typical problem at its hand. It wanted a recommendation engine to recommend movies to its users. The problem statement was “To improve the accuracy of predictions about how much someone is going to enjoy a movie based on their movie preferences.”

They had tried to find a solution to this in house and had spend some time and resources but without much luck. So they they threw this challenge for people  to come together and solve this problem. The grand prize of US$1,000,000 was reserved for the entry which would best Netflix’s own algorithm for predicting ratings by 10% Read more…

Virtualization has been a buzzword for me, until recently I stumbled across it and gave it a serious thought. I thought about sharing my experiences in this blog.

To start with we had some issues on our linux hosted webserver and had to do some sanity checks by duping it, on somewhat a similar kernel. The usual system resource crunch and the nagging system admins put me on a no mans land.

Left with no options, I decided to do some checks using ubuntu kernel. Remember I still have my notebook (windows XP) to try stuff on, I could have easily partitioned and installed ubuntu with windows and done my job. But probably I was more inclined to virtualization and thought of trying it out. I did some groundwork and came up with options like Sun Microsystems Virtual Box, VMware, virtual pc etc to name a few. Read more…