How readable is your blog?

We all want to write an easy-to-comprehend blog post. Something, everyone could read and understand easily. I have always thought, it would be nice to have an automated tool to review/rate the readability of my post, before it's posted online. And, i found this website online, which rates the readability of the given text and rates the easiness-to-read based on algorithms such as Flesch readability test.

Go the url, paste your post and test the readability. The paragraph above has 58.90 on readability test, which means, it can be read easily by anyone aged 16 years and above.

http://www.addedbytes.com/code/readability-score/

QA on online businesses.

Stackoverflow site redefined the concept of community discussion web sites, with it's intuitive yet really simple discussion board. The user interface makes the conversations highly productive. Now, another site focussing on Q&A about online businesses is using the same discussion board software (never new it can reused). There are already of ton of interesting discussions. Check it out here http://www.gatejumper.net/.

Passion and focus will rock your career.

Read this awesome post on being "jack-of-all-king-of-none". Makes lot of sense. An excerpt from the post below:

"In work, jumping from one thing to the next doesn’t necessarily pay off. You will undoubtedly end up competing with people who have focused on one thing for much longer than you have. Those people will eventually become really great at that one thing. If you’re only good at that one thing, you’ll lose in a competitive marketplace. The other things you’re also good-but-not-great at probably won’t help you land jobs or customers."

Read the full post here.

How to evaluate competence of PM candidates?

This is a tricky one for most of us. Interestingly, ASAPM has something called National Competence Baseline, a defined set of parameters for evaluating PM candidates. Eventhough the objective of these parameters were for the certification offered by the body, it also helps evaluate potential PM candidates during the recruitment process. The document outlining the parameters can be found here.

How do you quality check a Project Mangement Candidate?

Most of us have played both the roles of interviewer and interviewee. Interviewers at times(or most of the times) tend to interpret the situation from their own context, without following any objective goals. The discussion thread in linkedin here has some interesting thoughts and captures a realistic picture of interview process.

How to reduce XAP size

Image via CrunchBase

Large XAP size will result in longer downloading and loading time, thereby requiring large bandwidth and better PC configuration for snappy user experience.

If your Silverlight XAP size is large (>1 MB), better be thinking about reducing the size to improve performance and ultimately, the user experience. Here are few tried and tested ways to do it.

1) Split the XAP into two or more till an optimal size is reached. For an app that has login followed by viewing the actual app, you could split the login and user profile into two xaps. This way the login process seems pretty fast. Only disadvantage of this approach is your XAP files containing duplicate copies of assemblies such as the ones from the SDK. But, there is a solution to this problem. The next optimization technique explains it.

2) Application library caching. All XAP files refer to one or more assemblies from SDK and are mostly packaged with your XAP file. If you had two XAP files containing the same assemblies, the duplicate assemblies will get downloaded with the XAP. Why not just cache the duplicate assemblies in browser and avoid downloading them again? That's what app library caching does. It allows you to separate out the common assemblies from the XAP and allow them to be cached in the browser. Read this blog post on configuring app library caching. In addition to the article, you can use the emm utility from here to generate the extmap files.

3) Compress the XAP better. XAP is basically an archive of files. It seems the XAP files are not compressed for download optimization, but for browser rendering optimization. You could compress them better by doing the following.
 - Rename the xap extension to zip.
 - Extract the zip to a folder.
 - Archive it again with zip or rar formats with best possible compression ratio.
 - Rename the archive back to xap
Most people have reported a much reduced XAP size, but again it depends on the content type such as image, text etc.

Good luck!

Blogger spam robots s***.

Well, can you imagine Blogger taking down a genuine blog account with 88000 visitors/day without notice?

It happened to a site two days back. Couple of jottings from the site owner.

"Blogger's spam-prevention robots detected that my blog had characteristics of a spam blog. However, Automated spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and so there are lots of false positives--with this being one of them!"

"Blogger has no phone support and its online forum about this issue indicates that a Blogger representative needs to review the situation and this may take some time."

It's ridiculous that Google can do such silly things. It's basic common sense that, someone "human" MUST evaluate a suspicious blog account that's been in existence for couple of years with such a high volume of visitors. This is the irony of highly automated systems. But, this is also the sheer mistake of Google policies and support for blogspot!

Be warned that, this could happen to you and me ;)

EHR adoption in United States today.

Image via Wikipedia

Only 10% of hospitals and 17% of doctors currently have at least a basic electronic health record system in place, and fewer than 2% of hospitals use electronic records in all departments, according to the New England Journal of Medicine. The government's goal is to change the digital landscape over the next 5 years, ensuring security to electronic health records for all Americans by 2014. Fail to go digital by 2015, and your organization will face graduated financial penalties.

There is a webinar on the topic here. BTW, i am not affiliated to this company in any way.