Some VS Bugs

Error

"the page has one or more <asp:content> that do not correspond with <asp:ContentPlaceHolder> controls in masterpage"

Apparently I’m using a wrong contentPlaceHolderId which doesn’t exist in my master page but that’s not true. Here is my Page

<asp:Content ContentPlaceHolderID="Head" runat="server">
</asp:Content>
<asp:Content ContentPlaceHolderID="Content" runat="server">
</asp:Content>

 

And my Master page looks like this

<head id="h" runat="server">    
    <title id="t" runat="server" title='<%$ CurrentPage: Title %>' />
    <asp:ContentPlaceHolder ID="Head" runat="server">
        <link rel="canonical" href="<%= CurrentPage != null ? CurrentPage.Url : Request.RawUrl %>" />
    </asp:ContentPlaceHolder>  
</head>

 

It all looks good to me so where is the problem? Error message is not very friendly in this case and error and solution both seems pretty weird.
Solution: The title tag should not be used as a single closed tag e.g. <title /> instead it should be written as <title></title> and the problem will go away. Look out for other tags as well such as <script />. It doesn’t work very well in the single close tag. Use explicit close tag wherever possible. Browsers are forgiving in nature but not the VS

Solution: Facebook Social Plugins not working in IE

What to do when you’ve worked hard to integrate Facebook plugins with your website and they look cool on Firefox/Chrome but all of a sudden you feel disappointed when it doesn’t work at all in IE, or may be works sometime but not always (as in my case).

Being an avid IE fan and user, I can’t just sit back and relax when it’s not working on IE. So here is a small modification you need to make to your page when you feel you’ve done everything correct but your fb:like or fb:login-button are still not working.
Add the xmlns:fb namespace to your page and you are done. I just forgot to add this to my page and was living in frustration for one whole day until I came across this post. Then I realized it was a silly mistake and I should’ve added this before when my Visual Studio was complaining about the unrecognized fb tag

<html xmlns:fb="http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml">

I hope it helps some people implementing Facebook connect on their pages.

Bowling at its worst :)

This is us playing bowling at Extreme Sports Bar Hyderabad.

Let’s see how we play :)

This is Suneet playing his second best lol..

Now you know how was his first best :) People moved their children away after his ball hit the pins Why?? ‘coz it hit the pins in the another lane… Lol

I was not behind though.. this is how I like to play

Dynamically adding Facebook XFBML plug-in to your page using jQuery

I was trying to add some of the facebook social plug-ins to my home page at www.sandeeprawat.com which display a kind of splash screen at first (not a splash actually but a simple visible <div> and hidden content on the page) and then on clicking on the page, it renders the hidden content of the same page and adds some XFBML plug-ins and a twitter gadget. I didn’t want to download everything on the page load since it will never be shown to a user if she never click on the splash screen and it would  mean unnecessary load time. So I what i tried to was to add the content dynamically on the onClick handler. Now here is the problem.

facebook SDK parses the DOM only on the doc load, so when I dynamically add <fb:like /> button after that, it is inserted successfully but doesn’t do anything and no iframe is generated which is obvious. I’ve scratched my head for long, tried various options suggested over internet but none of them worked for me, so I went back and added them statically to the page and make those controls hidden which wasn’t a good solution but at least it worked.

Now here is what I was doing wrong, I was using FB.XFBML.host.ParseDomTree and I also used FB.XFBML.Parse() as suggested by Facebook but I still couldn’t get that to work. Now the error was very simple, my syntax was wrong I should have used parse in small case instead of Pascal casing which caused me a fair amount of time to discover but at least it was a good learning. Mind you I’m new to the jScript world :)

Here is the code snippet I’m using to insert the tags dynamically.

$(document).ready(function () {

    $("#divStarter").click(function () {
        oTweet.render().setUser('talksandy').start();
        $("#divStarter").hide();
        $(".container").css("visibility", "visible");
        var poetry = $("#autoFetch").html();
        $("#poetry").html(poetry);        
        $("#fbReco").html("<fb:recommendations />");
        $("#fbFriendPile").html("<fb:friendpile />");
        $("#fbLike").html("<fb:like />");
        FB.XFBML.parse();
    });
});

Dandeli – Goa trip

Note: Cross posted from Smoke 'n Ashes.

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Some pics from our trip to Dandeli and Goa. Trip was kool but nothing that we expected. We had more fun the last time we went to Hampi.


It’s a nice place to visit. You can do Jungle Safari, rafting, kayaking and all short of other cool stuff. Place is a bit expensive though.

It’s me. Who else did you expect? :)
Visit my Picasa or Facebook Album for more pics…
Note: Cross posted from Smoke 'n Ashes.

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Trip to Hampi

Note: Cross posted from Smoke 'n Ashes.

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Hampi is famous for its temples. Some cool images from Hampi. Trip was fun, we spent two days in Hampi

Note: Cross posted from Smoke 'n Ashes.

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Bindaas TV - Dadagiri Host gets slapped

Embedded Video

Been a long time since I posted a blog, but this one is a world famous video of a relatively unknown Indian reality show Dadagiri where tv hostess gets slapped by a contestant which is deserved very well. Another Coward co-host whoever he is should be punished as well. Bunch of A***holes

This show should be closed for the good of society.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

ACDC vs M&M – Online Dance Battle

Gone are the days of Street Dancing battle on streets. Everything going hi-tech these days And so did the Street Dancing.

ACDC (Adam/Chu Dance Crew) and M&M (Miley and Mandy) Cru  are on the street (Online street Youtube.com) fighting for the title of largest online dance battle in the world history. So far it’s going good.

Check’em out on 10th June – They are ready to kill each other

Here is the First challenge from ACDC

M&M’s Response to the above

Some history (Copied from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UA7dEWKAT7Y )

HISTORY:
April 10, 2008
Jon M. Chu and Adam Sevani challenge Miley and Mandy to "The Biggest Online Dance Battle in YouTube history". The rules are...there are NO rules. both crews are allowed to do whatever they want, however they want. Jon and Adam name their crew the ACDC (Adam/Chu Dance Crew). They release their first battle video.
April 15 2008
Miley and Mandy respond with a giant video to Madonna and Justin Timberlake's song, "4 Minutes". In 24 hours their video gets OVER A MILLION hits and become an instant YouTube classic. It gets posted on Perez, Access Hollywood, Yahoo News, Ellen etc. They even recruit one of Step Up's own to be in their video (Channing Tatum and Jenna Dewan).
April 28, 2008
Adam and Chu release a teaser for their response to the Miley and Mandy video. It sets a date and time for the release of their next installment, "April 30th 9pm PST." Buzz grows.
April 30, 2008
There is an ONLINE frenzy on the ChuPictures youtube page where the fans have gathered for the live release of the battle video. Chu's youtube triples it's views in twenty minutes before the video has even been uploaded. Technical difficulties lead to the delay of the video release for 1 hour. Frenzy only gets bigger.

Icahn Moves to Oust Yahoo Board

Following Microsoft withdrawal of Y! acquisition plan and signs of not reversing the decision, Billionaire investor Carl Icahn launched a proxy contest to Oust Yahoo!'s board, stating that Y! Directors acted irrationally and lost the faith of Investors and Microsoft.

Below is the Letter sent by Mr. Icahn to Y! Chairman Roy Bostock

May 15, 2008

Dear Mr. Bostock:

It is clear to me that the board of directors of Yahoo has acted irrationally and lost the faith of shareholders and Microsoft. It is quite obvious that Microsoft's bid of $33 per share is a superior alternative to Yahoo's prospects on a standalone basis. I am perplexed by the board's actions. It is irresponsible to hide behind management's more than overly optimistic financial forecasts. It is unconscionable that you have not allowed your shareholders to choose to accept an offer that represented a 72% premium over Yahoo's closing price of $19.18 on the day before the initial Microsoft offer. I and many of your shareholders strongly believe that a combination between Yahoo and Microsoft would form a dynamic company and more importantly would be a force strong enough to compete with Google on the Internet.

During the past week, a number of shareholders have asked me to lead a proxy fight to attempt to remove the current board and to establish a new board which would attempt to negotiate a successful merger with Microsoft, something that in my opinion the current board has completely botched. I believe that a combination between Microsoft and Yahoo is by far the most sensible path for both companies. I have therefore taken the following actions: (1) during the last 10 days, I have purchased approximately 59 million shares and share-equivalents of Yahoo; (2) I have formed a 10-person slate which will stand for election against the current board; and (3) I have sought antitrust clearance from the Federal Trade Commission to acquire up to approximately $2.5 billion worth of Yahoo stock. The biographies of the members of our slate are attached to this letter. A more formal notification is being delivered today to Yahoo under separate cover.

While it is my understanding that you do not intend to enter into any transaction that would impede a Microsoft-Yahoo merger, I am concerned that in several recent press releases you stated that you intend to pursue certain "strategic alternatives." I therefore hope and trust that if there is any question that these "strategic alternatives" might in any way impede a future Microsoft merger you will at the very least allow shareholders to opine on them before embarking on such a transaction.

I sincerely hope you heed the wishes of your shareholders and move expeditiously to negotiate a merger with Microsoft, thereby making a proxy fight unnecessary.

Sincerely yours,

CARL C. ICAHN

 

Reference:
Icahn Moves to Oust Yahoo Board (Wall street Journal)
Icahn Letter to Yahoo Board

Microsoft withdraws its offer to acquire Yahoo!

Here is the Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s letter sent to the Y! exec

Mr. Jerry Yang
CEO and Chief Yahoo
Yahoo! Inc.
701 First Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94089

Dear Jerry:

After over three months, we have reached the conclusion of the process regarding a possible combination of Microsoft and Yahoo!.

I first want to convey my personal thanks to you, your management team, and Yahoo!’s Board of Directors for your consideration of our proposal. I appreciate the time and attention all of you have given to this matter, and I especially appreciate the time that you have invested personally. I feel that our discussions this week have been particularly useful, providing me for the first time with real clarity on what is and is not possible.

I am disappointed that Yahoo! has not moved towards accepting our offer. I first called you with our offer on January 31 because I believed that a combination of our two companies would have created real value for our respective shareholders and would have provided consumers, publishers, and advertisers with greater innovation and choice in the marketplace. Our decision to offer a 62 percent premium at that time reflected the strength of these convictions.

In our conversations this week, we conveyed our willingness to raise our offer to $33.00 per share, reflecting again our belief in this collective opportunity. This increase would have added approximately another $5 billion of value to your shareholders, compared to the current value of our initial offer. It also would have reflected a premium of over 70 percent compared to the price at which your stock closed on January 31. Yet it has proven insufficient, as your final position insisted on Microsoft paying yet another $5 billion or more, or at least another $4 per share above our $33.00 offer.

Also, after giving this week’s conversations further thought, it is clear to me that it is not sensible for Microsoft to take our offer directly to your shareholders. This approach would necessarily involve a protracted proxy contest and eventually an exchange offer. Our discussions with you have led us to conclude that, in the interim, you would take steps that would make Yahoo! undesirable as an acquisition for Microsoft.

We regard with particular concern your apparent planning to respond to a “hostile” bid by pursuing a new arrangement that would involve or lead to the outsourcing to Google of key paid Internet search terms offered by Yahoo! today. In our view, such an arrangement with the dominant search provider would make an acquisition of Yahoo! undesirable to us for a number of reasons:

· First, it would fundamentally undermine Yahoo!’s own strategy and long-term viability by encouraging advertisers to use Google as opposed to your Panama paid search system. This would also fragment your search advertising and display advertising strategies and the ecosystem surrounding them. This would undermine the reliance on your display advertising business to fuel future growth.

· Given this, it would impair Yahoo’s ability to retain the talented engineers working on advertising systems that are important to our interest in a combination of our companies.

· In addition, it would raise a host of regulatory and legal problems that no acquirer, including Microsoft, would want to inherit. Among other things, this would consolidate market share with the already-dominant paid search provider in a manner that would reduce competition and choice in the marketplace.

· This would also effectively enable Google to set the prices for key search terms on both their and your search platforms and, in the process, raise prices charged to advertisers on Yahoo. In addition to whatever resulting legal problems, this seems unwise from a business perspective unless in fact one simply wishes to use this as a vehicle to exit the paid search business in favor of Google.

· It could foreclose any chance of a combination with any other search provider that is not already relying on Google’s search services.

Accordingly, your apparent plan to pursue such an arrangement in the event of a proxy contest or exchange offer leads me to the firm decision not to pursue such a path. Instead, I hereby formally withdraw Microsoft’s proposal to acquire Yahoo!.

We will move forward and will continue to innovate and grow our business at Microsoft with the talented team we have in place and potentially through strategic transactions with other business partners.

I still believe even today that our offer remains the only alternative put forward that provides your stockholders full and fair value for their shares. By failing to reach an agreement with us, you and your stockholders have left significant value on the table.

But clearly a deal is not to be.

Thank you again for the time we have spent together discussing this.

Sincerely yours,
/s/ Steven A. Ballmer

Steven A. Ballmer
Chief Executive Officer
Microsoft Corporation

Reference: http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20080503/ballmer-to-yang-dear-jerry-drop-dead/
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/may08/05-03letter.mspx

An American Crime (2007)

Couldn't resist myself from writing this post after watching this movie, based on one of the most terrible and heinous crime ever committed.

A young girl Sylvia Marie Likens tortured and murdered by Gertrude Baniszewski, her children and young people from their neighborhood in 1966.

Articles:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,835635,00.html
http://www2.indystar.com/library/factfiles/crime/history/likens_sylvia/sylvia.html
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0802948/

The Girl Next Door (2007) is another movie based on the same plot.

Honey Singh - Badshah (Adults Only)

After the great success of hugely popular Zeast - Sutta song, here is one more explicit song, which is becoming extremely popular in the underground crowd. And the song is Honey Singh - Badshah.
Some of you might have already heard it but for others here it is

Sorry guys. Had to remove this video due to adsense restriction.
Got a chance to listen this few months back but after listening the same in a Pub in Chandigarh, I thought it's time to post it Live.
PS: I haven't contributed to this song :) This is one of my most popular post. Thanks guys and Baadshah!
(Posted From - Windows Live Writer)

IPL Cricket - Hyderabad - RC vs HD (Photos)

I'm not a big fan of Cricket but cheerleaders in IPL 20-20 certainly attracted me to the Cricket Ground.
Here are some pics from the cricket match Hyderabad Deccan Charger vs Rajsthan Royals which RR won after a great fight [Thanks abhishek for correcting me].
Sania Mirza the famous tennis player also came to support team from her home city.

Direct Link to photographs


I've also added some Cheerleaders video on youtube which you can watch at
http://www.youtube.com/user/flyingdeath

Internet Explore and ACID2

Finally IE 8 renders the above image correctly. On my browser IE 7 it still sucks.

So what the fuss is all about? Acid2 is a web test (though not a standard) which tells how browsers renders some specific features of web standard. Web Standards Project, publisher of the test, is an Web Standard Advocacy group. For a web developer, supporting ACID 2 means a better cross browser compatibility. They don't have to write different set of style and HTML code for different browser. It certainly make their life happier.

IE was one of the worst performing browser as per the ACID test but not any more.

As per the Blog post from IE Blog 

"With respect to standards and interoperability, our goal in developing Internet Explorer 8 is to support the right set of standards with excellent implementations and do so without breaking the existing web. This second goal refers to the lessons we learned during IE 7. IE7’s CSS improvements made IE more compliant with some standards and less compatible with some sites on the web as they were coded."

With earlier releases of IE, it used to break some of the the existing web sites. For example my blogger theme just didn't work with IE7. It was pretty much fucked up and I had to revert to some other theme. Hopefully I will not have to suffer any more.

Well DONE MSFT and IE team.

Brick Walls are There for a Reason

Couldn't resist myself from writing this blog after watching this great video.

It's Awesome! simply awesome lecture.

Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch, who is dying from pancreatic cancer, gave his last lecture at the university Sept. 18, 2007.

See his inspiring, emotional, funny lecture. This is a must watch.

Link
http://blip.tv/file/461472

Media Player Performance

I've been looking all over the internet to find out which media player can play my media files without hurting my system performance which is very important when you are doing some CPU/Memory intensive work and needs to listen music as well.

I dint get a very good search result which compare them based on their performance. So I'm writing my own results may be it will help someone choose their media player.

Right now I have two P4 3.4, 512 MB RAM, 120 GB HDD. Lots of msngr running. 2 IE 7 Window opened (12 tabs) and this Word 2007 window.

Media Player	Memory consumption on start	Avg. Memory consumption
Windows Media Player 11	30 MB	22 MB
FooBar2000 0.9.4.3	9 MB	11 MB
GMplayer (MPlayer with GUI)	19 MB	26 MB
MPlayer console	5 MB	5 MB

 

Please post your statistics so that I can update the list and perhaps someone else could seek help from it.

I'll be updating the list as soon as I get my hands on other media players. But I guess FooBar2000 is pretty light-weight and get my preference over other when I'm low on system resources.

• Yahoo! Juke box sucks Last time I used it, it used to crash very frequently and very high boot time.
  
• Real sucks I don't like those freaking ads and RealSched process that gets added in the startup no matter how many time I remove it.
  
• Used to use Jet Audio but dint use it from a long time
  
• Was a great fan of WinAMP 2 series but after WinAMP 5 it is of no good use.
  

BTW: Streaming music from internet is better in terms of performance but quality is not that great.

Tips: WMP eats up loads of memory if you open it in library mode. Keep it in No Visualization mode with Now playing window opened and it will perform better.

My personal favorite is WMP11 when I work on my 2GB - x64 Dual Core.

Thanks go to:

http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=74636


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_media_players

मेरी प्रथम हिन्दी कथा

मैं काफ़ी दिनो से प्रयासरत था कि मैं हिन्दी मैं अपना ब्लाग लिखना शुरु करुं । आज अंततः इस बात की शुरुआत हो ही गयी.

प्रारंभ मे यह थोडा मुश्किल अव्श्य है पर समय के साथ मैं तेजी के साथ लिख्नना प्रारंभ कर दूंगा.

 

इस रचना के निर्माण मे मेरी सहायता की है Barkha नामक software ने. and I'm very greatful to this software for helping me out.

 

This is extremely helpful package for writing hindi and it is quite easy to use much easier than in build hindi IME from Microsoft.

IPod virus

So finally here we are,

After the long list windows viruses and some mac exploits, we finally got something for the portable music players.

As you all might be aware of no software is bug free and you are portable music players are no exception they run some small media player software on top of a tiny os so no wonder we've got this nasty things for your cool IPods.

Its called Podloso and found by the KasperSky labs.

Not that harmful though but this is just the beginning of the world.

Full report on wired.com: http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2007/04/vonage_death_wa.html

Sanjaya in final 9

Despite his cocky voice without any melody in it Sanjaya shows no hurry to get out of the most valued TV show of the America. His style (read hair style) keeping him in the finalist. After winning the support from Howard Stern and the votefortheworst contest he is receiving more attention than any other competitor…

Let's see how far can you go.. Once you get in the Top 5 you will have to unveil the real singer or you are screwed up.

PS. Hey Dude come back… You don't deserve to be there….

Yahoo launched a new search engine in its alpha

Yahoo launched a new search engine in its alpha stage. It's more like a Meta search engine just as google mashup.

Find it at http://au.alpha.yahoo.com