Prashant Danda - Technical Database on the Web

Free PMP PDU - Category B - SWAT: A Tactical Approach to Designing Project Accomplishments

2011-03-26T20:03:00.003-04:00

Note: Beginning March 1 2011, PMI has changed the categories & consolidated and eliminated redundant categories.The new system now has Category A, B, C, D, E & F (Much simpler, no more sub categories) like 2 SDL etc..So you can claim this PDU under Category B - Continuing Education.How to get 1 Free PMP PDU?See this Free Webinar and you can report 1 PDU against Category B.At the end of this

PMP New PDU Categories

2011-03-02T21:42:00.003-05:00

Beginning March 1 2011, PMI has changed the categories under which we report PDUs.The new one is good because under Category B we get 30 PDUs for Self Directed Learning, in the old system under 2 SDL only 15 PDUs was granted.And we still have no maximum for Category B, which is always good.Keep learning folks & keep reporting all your PDUs...Note: If you follow my blog, I will keep posting

Free PMP PDU - Category B - Soft Skills for Project Managers: The Human Part of the Gantt Chart

2011-03-02T21:37:00.002-05:00

Free PMP PDU - Category 4 - Stop Playing Games...

2011-02-26T22:44:00.001-05:00

How to get 1 Free PMP PDU?See this Free Webinar and you can report 1 PDU against Category 4.At the end of this webinar are the details on what to report for the provider.LinkNo need to create a login, you can see the recorded webinar by clicking on the "View the webinar now" button and enter your email. Then the webinar should start automatically, it runs for 1 hour.About the WebinarIn this

Free PMP PDU - Category 4 - The life long project

2011-02-26T19:53:00.003-05:00

EVM - Earned Value Management

2011-02-22T21:50:00.001-05:00

EVM - Earned Value ManagementEarned Value Management (EVM) also referred to as earned value, is a technique for the management of cost and schedule.Planned Value => is the amount of resources, usually stated in terms of dollars, that are expected to be consumed to accomplish a specific piece of work scope.Actual Cost => is the amount of resources, usually stated in terms of dollars, that were

Realistic project estimates using PERT Program Evaluation and Review Technique

2011-02-22T20:39:00.003-05:00

I have had several experiences with different managers with respect to estimates.Some have said this is too high, some have said this is too low, please add lots of buffer. Some took my estimates and doubled it and gave it to their management. :)So looking at PMBOK is there a good way to arrive at an estimate, yes one of the ways is to use the PERT estimation.Break down you entire task in to

Excel Sheet IMEX=1 and how text gets treated as numbers

2007-05-16T16:54:00.000-04:00

I was surprised today to see how microsoft excel finds out the datatype of rows in a excel sheet.Let us say you have an Excel sheet with 60 rows and the first column has first 20 rows as numbers and the next 40 rows as alphabets, some thing like,UserIdentifier First name last name10 John Smith20 Steve Martin............ALAN Alan SmithUser identifier in this case is alphanumeric (can

ERROR [IM003] Specified driver could not be loaded due to system error 5 (IBM DB2 ODBC DRIVER)

2007-04-26T12:09:00.000-04:00

Today was one of those "dog days", where you go to solve a problem and you get lead in to another, and if you google for a solution, you get 10 different answers none of which work and it drives you nuts.But this was very tricky problem.Here is the issue,1) I use DB2, ASP.Net with vb.net code behind,2) DSN is created in ODBC and sits on windows dsn,3) Run regedit and go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE >>

Google signup restriction and email alias

2007-02-07T23:16:00.000-05:00

I wanted to create another email to synchronize my website, my blog and my email id, so tried to create an id without a dot, and i learnt something new today,1) If you already have a friend, he can send you an invite, but if you dont have an invite, if you try to login via signup, it is not that easy, i saw a unique feature, when you try to login to google they ask you to give your cell phone

Assembly Info usefulness

2007-01-23T15:36:00.000-05:00

Most of our project we leave the assemblyinfo file empty, this is a very bad practice, if someone is going to use our assembly as a COM object they need to understand who is the provider.So look at this artcile,http://www.artima.com/intv/principles4.htmlhttp://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000141.htmlI understood the real use of it only today.

Problems with chm files

2007-01-09T01:24:00.000-05:00

This is so pathetic, i got lot of chm files on my hard drive (useful stuff) but all these days, when i click them i used to get this 404 page, at that time i used to click other chm files and they worked fine.Recently i felt like banging myself on the wall when i came to notice this in the properties.When you download a chm from the web, XP automatically blocks it (isnt this ridiculous).So you

Internet Explorer 7.0 Vs Fire Fox 2.0

2006-10-30T23:44:00.000-05:00

Browser Battles still continue, now it is whether the 800 pound gorilla IE 7.0 or the zilla from Mozilla :)This months Information Week carried an excellent article comparing both the browsers.Here is the gist of the same,Eight major browser features which are important to businesses,1) Remote managementIE allows remote management of browser where as Fire fox needs explicit plug-ins2) Tabbed

CAPTCHA project

2006-10-25T00:41:00.000-04:00

CAPTCHA is an acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart".We all would have seen lot of sites which show an image which is disturbed and has some text in it and we need to read and enter that text in to a textbox so that we can avoid automatic spam bots or automated testing tools entering the page.This is a project of Carnegie Mellon university and

Virtualization is going to hit you soon

2006-10-03T01:12:00.000-04:00

Well Apple is talking about it, microsoft is talking abt it, all Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies are using it.Soon virtualization is going to hit every developer,We all have heard about VMWare, Microsoft Virtual PC (we are talking about giants), but this small company is rocking too, they have a 50$ product for virtualization and it rocks.http://www.parallels.com/en/products/workstation/I

hey scripting guy

2006-10-03T01:08:00.000-04:00

I had a need today to play with some VB Script, i was amazed to see the number of samples provided by microsoft,http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/resources/qanda/default.mspxThis book has a lot of samples, what surprises me is, one team example scripting team @ MS is doing this but why not teams like Message Queue team or other teams !!!!!!!!May be Institutionalization is tough there

GC Memory leask

2006-07-03T11:12:00.000-04:00

http://blogs.msdn.com/ricom/archive/2004/12/10/279612.aspx

Exterminate Agents

2006-06-16T20:35:00.000-04:00

An interesting site which explains what db2 agents are and how to kill themhttp://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/db2/library/techarticle/dm-0504poon2/

Command Prompt CSharp Compilation

2006-06-10T17:28:00.000-04:00

Here is the string for compiling the .cs files c:\bin>csc /t:library fileName.cs.

Sql Server number of tables, procedures etc

2006-06-10T16:33:00.000-04:00

Use db1select count(*) from sysobjects where xtype = 'U' and status > 0select count(*) from sysobjects where xtype = 'P' and status > 0Use db2select count(*) from sysobjects where xtype = 'U' and status > 0select count(*) from sysobjects where xtype = 'P' and status > 0Here xtype can also beObject type. Can be one of these object types:C = CHECK constraintD = Default or DEFAULT constraintF =

Sql Server Table Column counts

2006-06-10T16:32:00.000-04:00

It has been a long time since i added anything to the tech blog.Got one very nice UDF here for finding the number of columns in each table.Was very useful as i had to upgrade a clients db after a long time.SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ONGOSET ANSI_NULLS ONGOCREATE FUNCTION dbo.udf_Tbl_ColCountTAB ( @Table_Name_Pattern sysname = NULL -- Pattern for matching -- to the

பிரசாந்த்

2006-06-07T00:37:00.000-04:00

பிரசாந்த்Wow that is actually my name in Tamil. It is cool that it is being shown since it is in Unicodehttp://home.att.net/~jameskass/keybtaml.htmUsed this link to paste it

Tracking who read your mail

2006-04-01T22:13:00.000-05:00

Well i had a very interesting code which i had to look on friday. So what is so interesting about this code, the answer is it magically tracks who read your mail.No i am not talking about the outlook read receipt, that shows an annoying alert to the receiver saying "the person who sent it wants a receipt do you want to send yes/no" - who on earth would like to send this receipt, I always click no

No more installation issues

2006-03-26T14:06:00.000-05:00

With VmWare providing application appliance model, moving forward there will be no more installation issues, no need to worry about dot net framework Vs IIS installation which comes first, no more issues about vb run time or java runtime.all we need to do is ship the vmplayer to the client with all the items installed and they will import it.Wow !!! what a great idea.We have read about hardware

VMWare player

2006-01-03T00:59:00.000-05:00

Spoke to kicha (who works for vmware) on new year eve and came to know about the new vmware player.http://www.vmware.com/news/releases/player.htmlFree New Product Enables Users to Securely Browse the Internet with New Browser Appliance Powered by Mozilla Firefox, to Quickly Run Pre-configured Software Environments and to Access Their Personal Computing Environments on Any PCWhat is more