But first What is CDN?

From WikiPedia

A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a system of computers containing copies of data placed at various nodes of a network. When properly designed and implemented, a CDN can improve access to the data it caches by increasing access bandwidth and redundancy and reducing access latency. Data content types often cached in CDNs include web objects, downloadable objects (media files, software, documents), applications, live streaming media, and database queries.

When is best time to start using CDN?

It depends on what kind of content you are trying to serve in which part of world. If you have a website which serve rich multi-media contents for global audience, you should consider starting on CDN from day one. On the other hand, if you have website which serves a local community with some static pages, serving files via CDN might not be that beneficial(from ROI perspective)

Most of us would find us in the middle of the two extreme scenarios I have mentioned above, and there is no better way for you to find if you need a CDN or not than running some tests. Below are steps:

1. Run your website on http://www.webpagetest.org
2. Keep note of results.
3. Move files to CDN (you only pay for use, so couple of tests wont cost much)
4. Re-run tests and see if it made difference for you.
5. If you see good difference in the page load time, and believe that would benefit your customers (and you at the end), go for it!

BTW, there are other great recommendations you will get on http://www.webpagetest.org when you run test on it, like zipping content n stuff, which would help you reduce latency.

Know any better way to improve latency? Share with readers as comment below

You can read and download IE 9 here http://www.beautyoftheweb.com/. I love it!

But if you are one of the guys like me who like building and playing web and have been dog fooding Release candidate, you might have noticed that there are some cases where IE9 does not renders your website as good as IE8 was.

I don’t want to get into the discussion of why it doesn’t? (fairly long discussion).

So just in case, your website is not getting rendered as expected on IE9, and before you figure out how to optimize your website for IE9, below is a small trick.

Use below string in your meta data of your website template. Whenever a user hits your website using IE9, IE9 will smartly figure out that it needs to behave like IE8 and would render your website

<meta http-equiv=”x-ua-compatible” content=”IE=8″>

You can read more on document compatibility http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288325(v=vs.85).aspx

Natal, as you might be aware is a new xbox project announced by Microsoft, which would change the way players interact with their gaming system (xbox console). You dont need any controller to do whatever you have been using it to play on xbox.

This is a dawn of a Natural User Interaction (NUI).

All of this and other observation leads me to this conclusion:

As we become computers, computer becomes us (human).

We first trained ourself to to be able to interact with computer the way it understand, and now we are making computer to understand human. I believe this is a law of human machine interaction. I would call it Garg’s law of human machine interaction.

While Natal is a big step towards the realization of NUI, I believe its just a scratch on the surface of the possibilities.  There are machines/equipments/tools all around us which decides its behaviour (or perform it function) taking external factors into consideration (say thermometer, barometer), but now machines would be capable of considering one more a very important factor i.e. human body.

Be  it getting trained on salsa in front of your TV screen, lessons on table etiquette, or practicing or even conducting interviews via Natal enabled system, possibilities are endless.

Just try to imagine a human in a machine when you go near a machine next time and tell me what you thought it could do.

Till than game On!!

You must watch this video interview for two reasons:

1. They way video has been hyperlinked within itself to browse through the talk.
2. Actual talk from Eric, who speaks in general about innovation, management, future challenges and more.

What I dont like…or rather I would say I wish I had a feature in TataSky which allowed me to set reminders not only via the indexed program list, but also when there is some commercial going on for a movie or a soap I wish to watch.

To explain it a bit further, say I am watching a channel on which they are broadcasting an advertisement about a forthcoming movie next week at 8pm. So if I wish to watch this movie, either I should rely on very limited and short memory OR I should go to program list, browse through it so that i can reach that particular timeslot and set reminder (which is just soooo many clicks/presses if this movie is scheduled after a week).

There should be single button click option right there which should allow me to set reminder than and there for this telecast. Right there!

Technically, I think this should be quite possible. What TataSky needs to do probably is to get broadcasters like Sony or Star to tag there advertisement pertaining to forthcoming telecast. Just catch these tags and display an option for user to click ‘red’ button to set reminder.

Simple isnt?

Microsoft tops the list of the Best companies to work for in India Study, 2007 jointly conducted by Business Today, Mercer and TNS India.

Complete Story here.

I am just trying to bring some attention to other contextual news, happened in and around same time Steve announced its launch

Cisco is suing Apple for Trademark infringment for using iPhone as a trademark which is obtained by Cisco in 2000 by aquiring Infogear.

LG Electronics, recently unveiled the KE850 that looks uncannily like the just-released Apple iPhone, down to the full touch-screen interface and beyond.

Will LG be suing Apple soon according to the marketplace?

Whatever, these phones are looking really cool.

What do you say guys?

1- Yahoo Messenger for Vista:

A really good UI and much improved User Experience in the new Yahoo messenger made for Windows Vista Machine using WPF technology. I really liked the features explained in this video and waiting to use it as soon as its available. Read More

2- CPUID.com : Lately I am thinking to upgrade my old & slow Compaq Presario 2109 laptop’s RAM to 1 Gig so that Vibha can work effectively on her memory intensive graphic design work. I had no idea how much RAM i can upgrade that into and what all frequency my machine can support.

I found one program cpu-z on www.cpuid.com which allowed me to peek into too many intricacies about various hardware installed on my machine. It told be about type of ram, slot available, frequency and what not.

Interestingly both of these links I got from my friend Vinil.

I have been waiting for a while so that YouTube allows me to post videos to my wordpress self hosted blog, and here it is.

Lets see how it comes to the blog

Update: this doesnt seems to be working well with wordpress self hosted blog. Does anyone was able to do it successfully??