Things I did not know about India

Visiting Bengaluru in India I found there were things I did not know about India. I found India is tougher (more frequent) on emission standards than USA. Here are some I did not know about. I may add to this list......

• I did not know that they do emission testing for cars every six months
• I did not know that they do emission testing every 3 months for two wheelers and three wheelers
• I did not know by constitution you have a choice of not casting your vote to any candidate if you so wish as, "I do not want to vote for anyone on this poll as no one in my opinion is good" is one of the choices.
• I did not now that gas prices can be set as odd as Rs 15.32 per liter. [While Rs 0.3 is worthless what good is there in going to the next decimal place].
• I did not know that selection of students to top technical / medical colleges has become very transparent (no influence peddling)
• I did not know that there is a constitution backed PCPNDT act in India which makes it illegal to determine the sex in prenatal diagnostics.
• I did not know that most traffic signals derive their power from Solar panels.
• I did not know...

Bringing to you a new video tutorial on Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services

I confess this is my first video tutorial and it is made possible by an evaluation
copy of Adobe's Captivate. Adobe Captivate is an easy to use program.

The video describes fully, in a matter of 10 minutes the SSIS 2005 IDE. SSIS 2008
is almost similar to SSIS 2005 in most respects. The IDE is described in even fuller detail
in my book on integration services, 'Beginners guide to Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services 2005'
published by Packt Publishers in UK.

Video: Visual Studio 2005 IDE for SQL Server Integration Services


Watch this video on the SSWUG.org site and update your knowledge about this important product from Microsoft. You may watch this video for free by regstering as a guest.

Extremely promising High performance 'Lithium Air Battery' Development in Japan

A February 2009 report by the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) describes a new type of Lithium Air battery, the salient features of which are as follows:

• The lithium air battery uses a combination of aqueous and organic based electrolytes

•  Has achieved a capacity of 50000mAh/g based on an air electrode

• The lithium fuel battery is comprised of using lithium metal in the form of cassettes or other forms

Here is a schematic of the battery from their publication and a chart showing its performance.

Figure 1: Schematic of the battery

Figure 2: Performance of the battery being developed

The author of this blog is responsible for the translation of figure details and is grateful to the public relations department of The Naional Institute of Advnaced Industrial Science and Technology for the use of the notes and figures (Figures 1 and 2).

My problem with VS2010 Beta was due to a bug

Microsoft recently provided a link to fix the problem in response to my Connect feedback:

https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=481884&wa=wsignin1.0

This appears to be a bug which will be corrected in Visual Studio Beta2 (date tbd).

The following preventative measure is provided in this KB article from Microsoft. Thank you Microsoft for following up the connect feedback.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2001109

The problem is summarized here:

http://hodentek.blogspot.com/2009/08/problems-installing-microsoft-visual.html

You should give credit to the web site or the article author

This post has been removed.