Dear users, we have been down several times in last 1 week and are still experiencing downtime. Our service provider has changed the configurations at their end and ever since we are experiencing consistent outage.

We apologize for the inconvenience caused especially those users who bought the test and would like to practice .

While we are working to resolve the issue, we appreciate your patience.

Design by Contract essentially mean that a class has to fulfill certain responsibilities and are inside a boundary. This is done by use of interface. If you have a class which implements an interface (as is done in Java) , it has been designed by contract. The contract here is the methods which this class has to implement.

Going further down , if a class method getMyDetails(long ssnId)
we can put a assert statement like
assert ssnId != null;

Y’day I was going through glass door and I saw some job openings posted on site.

To my amazement the salary of a Project Manager (PM) for a reputed company was $81ooo and below that was the salary of a truck driver which was $73000

I do not say that the tuck driver should not earn high salaries but the PM should also not get paid so low.

If you look at the one below, the business analyst gets paid less than a truck driver .  The salary of business analyst is $53000.

Makes me wonder what the future of software is …

You want to check the physical location of the server on which any domain is hosted

Go to http://www.81solutions.com/

Enter your domain name and it will tell you the physical location of the server on which site is hosted.

I have found it to be very accurate.

Want to see the hosting provider

http://www.whoishostingthis.com/

http://www.whois.net

Find IP address of website

on Windows do ping www.sitename.com  on command prompt and it will show you the IP address of the site.

If any time you had faced an attack on your site My site has been attacked , make sure you check out your website with google safe browsing tool and also verify with Norton.

Google Safe Browsing tool

http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=www.skill-guru.com. You would see something like this

For verifying with Norton you will have register and place a html document in root folder.

http://safeweb.norton.com/report/show?url=http://www.skill-guru.com/

A very nice comparison of several VPS performance including Amazon EC2.

The user has compared the costs and performance of Linode, Slicehost, Prgmr, Rackspace and Amazon.

You can find the results here

If you are getting the email from facebook with subject

Facebook Password Reset Confirmation

Be very careful. Do the contents look like below ?

From: Facebook, Idella Brighter <eidfj@facebook.com>
Date: Mon, Sep 20, 2010 at 10:32 AM
Subject: Facebook Password Reset Confirmation
To: Mrabc@gmail.com

Hey,

You have requested a new password.

You can see your new password in attached document.

Please note that this email has been sent to all contact emails connected to your profile. If you did not request a new password, it’s likely that another person has mistakenly attempted to log in with the help of your login.

For more information, check our Help Center at http://www.facebook.com/help/?topic=login

Thanks,

This is a scam. McAffee  had warned users about facebook password reset scam.

No password reset are done through attachments.

Last week we rolled out new features in Skill-Guru.  These features have been requested by some of our power users or power gurus who wanted to get more out of Skill-Guru platform.

These new features are  :

1. Rich Editor for tests : The simple editor has been replaced by a rich editor . That means gurus can create questions with images, underlines , bold , italics and colors. In short , black and white screen has been replaced by colored screen.

2.  Shopping cart button added : Earlier our users could only buy one test at a time. If some one was interested in buying more than one tests , they would have to repeat the process of going through paypal, which was cumbersome. It means loss of revenue for Guru as well as us.  This would also lead to better conversion.

3. Coupons :Who does not love a deal ? Every one! Now Gurus will have a chance to use coupon codes to promote their test.  These coupons can be circulated in your network who can then avail discounts on your test. At this stage they can not create their own coupon code. It has to be done through our administrators.

4. Transaction fees : Not one of the features we love but we were getting  hit by paypal’s $0.30 transaction fees for each sale. Now if cost of test is $0.99 and paypal deducts transaction fees + commissions, there is hardly anything left for the guru who had created the test.

What we decided is that we will absorb the transaction fees if total sale amount in more than $2.99.

Hope you liked these new features. Do give us your feedback and let us know if you want to see anything more.