I am beginning the series of articles about various SaaS solutions offered by various companies – some known and some that you probably haven’t heard about, and since all of them share that characteristic of being the SaaS solution, it is important to describe first what SaaS is.

In the upcoming series I am going to describe multiple SaaS services and focus on the alternative ways to have the same functionality. My goal is to describe each of them so you could understand them without digging into the documentation or waste time trying. More...

All of a sudden I decided to spend one hour of this evening to make the second part of PowerShell introduction for Windows system administrators. I just noticed, that the previous part was made in… November, and having quite a few requests to continue I just couldn’t resist! So, this is pure improvisation, although I tried to make it as smooth as possible.

This time we’ll dig further into what system administrators do most – working with large arrays of data, such as files, ACL lists and finding objects by special parameters. You will learn about variables in PowerShell and how you can effectively use them. More...

There are many reasons why people decide to host their web projects on notebooks. Either way, the question is not why, but how. Like everywhere else, there are pros and cons in hosting of your web application on notebook hardware, so we are going to discuss here how to do it properly and get most out of it.

Possible reasons to host your web server on a notebook

Usually people think about hosting on notebook, for one or many of these reasons:

• The price of hosting is higher than expected revenue, or no profit is expected.
• There are less than 1000 users expected to use this web project.
• The web application is not consuming much of resources.
• Notebook is powerful enough.
• You can’t sell this old notebook, but also don’t want to refurbish it, as it is still working as designed. And now you have this web project of yours that needs cheap hosting.
• Your internet connection is fast and reliable and you see no reason or have no resources to acquire new hardware and data center (DC) allocation.
• You want to host the web application on-site but want to keep your electricity bill at minimum.
• You have to make your server mobile.

More...

This article explores the controversial product placement of Apple in the recent adaptation of Stieg Larsson's "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo".

Prior to my recent movie experience, I was blissfully ignorant of the purported deficiencies of Apple notebooks. To be exact, the film appears to suggest that they could be among the most poorly engineered notebooks in existence. These were my thoughts as I walked out of the theatre, the echoes of the movie still lingering.

The financial cost to Apple for this product placement in "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" remains unknown. The film is a fresh offering from David Fincher, graced with performances from Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara, and set to the haunting tunes composed by Trent Reznor. However, the product representation in this film may be one of the most egregious I've ever witnessed.

To begin, believe it or not, the movie seems to imply that Apple MacBook Pros have a near-monopoly on the Swedish market. Indeed, it may remind you of the widespread use of Sony Ericsson mobile phones in Daniel Craig's other famous movie, "Casino Royale," even boasting capabilities that the real-world devices can only dream of.

Midway through the film, the protagonist's computer abruptly fails, the repairman declaring data recovery impossible. Is this what users should expect from their Apple MacBook? To replace her MacBook Pro, she embarks on a perilous adventure, rather than conveniently utilizing the warranty. Does the movie accurately portray the struggles of dealing with Apple's warranty system? 

As an aside, the film does accurately represent the irretrievability of data from a MacBook Air. However, it's worth noting the faulty device in the film wasn't an Air model.

The third “fact” gleaned from "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" is that MacBooks are easy to hack. In the original book, Lisbeth Salander (the titular 'Girl') is portrayed as Sweden's preeminent hacker, with detailed accounts of her exploits. However, the film fails to highlight this crucial aspect of her character. Instead, we observe a punk girl seemingly breezing through MacBook security systems.

"But the files are encrypted!" one character protests, only to be dismissed with a casual, "Please…" Is the movie implying that the encryption within MacOS is deficient or even nonexistent?

Shifting gears, Stieg Larsson himself was an avid Apple fan, and his trilogy is peppered with Apple devices. However, the books manage to integrate these elements seamlessly into the narrative without the overt product placement that plagues the movie. 

This adaptation, coming only three years after the original Swedish film, seems to have a single-minded goal: to serve as a drawn-out, insipid advertisement for Apple and Volvo.

I won't delve into the critique of the movie itself, as my experience was undoubtedly colored by my prior reading of the book. Suffice to say, the performances and music were noteworthy, yet the film might leave you underwhelmed if you've read the book. Or, perhaps, if you happen to be a MacBook owner.

I thought about what some of my readers and other people said about the new feature of Google, called “Your World”, and all the concerns they had about it. The move was so smart, that it looks like Google outsmarted themselves. If to rephrase the saying “kill two hares with one shot”, the Google managed to kill the whole population of them.

And you know, I hate myself for what I am about to write, because for some reason I think it will be the first shot at the Black SEO frontier of the Battle for Relevance, but hopefully I am exaggerating the problem and it’s only in my mind. I was thinking so when I was writing the first post, too. More...

This is part 4 of Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 for Developers walkthrough. Last time we were speaking about the unit tests, and that was useful, but very basic foundation of what you can do in terms of Test Driven Development. However, we can conventionally separate testing in Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server to 3 levels. So today we are going to talk about the second level – Advanced Testing techniques, such as Test Impact Analysis, Coded UI Tests and Load Tests.

If that’s only the middle layer of complex testing in Visual Studio 2010, what’s in the last one, you might ask? There will be test automation using Hyper-V virtualization with Virtual Machine Manager and yes, we will discuss it later as well.

But today we’ll begin with Test Impact Analysis. More...

2011 was a year of great changes. For example, the SEO changed so much, that applying principles which were effective long time ago, would bring your website down. But surprisingly, the same we can say about the social networking. This post is about the dramatic changes I foresee in social networking in the year 2012.

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