I am a very heavy user of Skype. All my communication with my team members and clients happens through. Yesterday when i logged into Skype, within 5 seconds the application crashed. My first impression was that I probably forgot to restart my machine after installing Windows updates. So I restarted my laptop, same deal. The application crashed right after I logged in. This happened few times. So l looked at the event logs and found the following details.

Faulting application name: Skype.exe, version: 5.5.59.124, time stamp: 0x4e96c098
Faulting module name: KERNELBASE.dll, version: 6.1.7601.17651, time stamp: 0x4e211319
Exception code: 0x0eedfade
Fault offset: 0x0000b9bc
Faulting process id: 0x1310
Faulting application start time: 0x01cccedd641f3439
Faulting application path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Skype\Phone\Skype.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Windows\syswow64\KERNELBASE.dll
Report Id: b189e264-3ad0-11e1-b713-415645000030

That is not a very good sign that the application is crashing inside a system DLL Kernelbase.dll. This was obvious sign of some corruption in installation or something changed in OS that is causing the errors. So I decided to re-install Skype client. After cleaning up old install and re-install, the problem did not go away. Skype kept crashing right after login. Then I went onto Skype's support site and forums and found out that there is some known issue in Version 5.5 client. Some of the advertisers are pushing in some code that is causing this unstable behavior in Skype itself. Skype is asking people to download Beta version 5.7 of Skype to try. After i installed version 5.7 (Beta), the problem disappeared and no more crashes. I have provided link to Skype's page from where you can download the beta client.

Click here to download Skype Beta version

I have been a Quicken for lot of years. It has helped me a lot in financial planning budgeting and the whole nine yards that goes with money. It is a very powerful financial management tool. For some time I have been looking for a secure, reliable online tool that I could use to manage all finances and get some quick overview and reports on varioud aspects of the finances. In Quicken it was not easy for me to look at important metrics about finances. It required me to customize all the home view etc. I just needed something that would know out of the box about things that matter the most and need immediate action from me.

This year while doing my taxes on TurnboTax, at the end of the filing I was offered to goto Mint.com. So I decided to give it a spin and see what this tool has to offer. Well, I was quite impressed with it. Here are some of the highlights of this tool that you will find very helpful.

• Security is prime concern when you are putting your personal financial information on the internet. I have using TurboTax for lot of years now. So far I have no complaints about security of my data. So I did not see any reason why I could not trust Mint.com when it is from the same company.
• Configuration is very simple with Mint. You get started in matter of minutes. Only thing you need is an email address.
• Adding your bank accounts, investment accounts, mortagage accounts etc. is very easy. Mint has ability to pull data from most of the instituotions automatically. Only thing it needs it your login information for all the institutions. Other than one account, Mint was able to pull data for all my accounts. I did not have to manually add a single entry into the system.
• You can configue email alerts about each aspect of your finances. For example when you spend over limit for certain items or if there is large transaction on your account etc.
• It is easy to create budgets and then it provides you a quick view of how you re doing with your budget.
• Suggestions, this is part i really like about Mint. It provides you very helpful hints on what you can do to reduce debt, mortgage etc. This thing saved me quite some money per month based on their suggestions.
• In this world of phones and devices, this tool shines. It provides you native applications for Andorid and iPhone that you can download and then you have access to all the information on your device.

There is a lot that Mint.com has to offer. Give it a try.

This morning I decided to log into into my Windows Live/Hotmail account and was just surprised to see over 100K emails sitting in my Inbox. Well, I could not just do a blanket delete on all emails in Inbox because that would mean loosing my old emails as well. I looked at some of the emails and figured that 90% of the emails were from same sender. So if I could just find a way to clean up emails from a particular sender, 90% of clean up is all done for me. So here is snapshot of how my situation looked like at a given time.

In this post I will discuss how to clean up your hotmail mail box by deleting all emails from a particular sender.

• Login into your hotmail account.
• Double click on email from sender that you want to clean up.

• In the right hand pane, you will see Reply link with a small arrow next to it. Click on the arrow and you will be presented with a context menu with few options. You will notice an option Delete all from sender as shown in the image below.

  

• Select Delete all from sender option. Hotmail will bring up a pop up window showing you progress of deletion of messages. At this point you can not perform any action on the email window itself. But you have option in the progress pop up window to stop the deletion process. Following image shows the progress window while deletion is going on.

  
• After all emails from that particular sender have been deleted, you will be able to interact with main page again.

Hope this information helps you in cleaning up that cluttered inbox that you have been wanting to clean up for quite some time.

Yes, this blog is little out of the characteristic of this site. But I thought I will share my personal activities as well when I can. I had a fish tank for quite some time now. And my 5 Koi living a happy life in there. Last week, I had 2 of my older fishes bite the dust. It just happened in matter of minutes. In the morning they were swimming around and after 30 minutes I see them up side down. Oh well, I should have seen it conning. Actually I did sense that something needs to change in the fish tank quickly before something happens. Here are some signs that you may want to look for when your fish tank needs some love.

• Water filter pump stopped working every other day. That is a sign of:
  • Fish are generating more waste than than filter can handle.
  • Fish are being over fed so that there is lot of food left in tank that is making its way to filter and then clogging it.
  • The pump itself is giving in and probably time for clean up or replace some part or the other.

Surely keeping 5 Koi was not an ideal situation in a small tank considering that Koi are usually kept in ponds. And with 2 of the fishes growing rapidly, it was eventually going to happen. What happens is that when you have more fishes in the tank, Ammonia level starts climbing rapidly if the filter is not strong enough to recycle and clean the water. Again there is an optimal level of fish to tank size ratio.

So I went ahead and got a bigger fish tank now. And also reduced the number of fishes as well. Here are some of the lessons I learnt along the way.

• If you are not fish expert, ask the person at store about how many fishes can live X number of gallons. And only keep that number and probably less to start with to figure out if your tank can have another fish or two without disturbing the eco-system in there.
• Always install a water pump that can handle more than capacity of your tank. Yes, that extra capacity for the times when conditions become less than favorable and your fish may die because your pump could not handle that extra waste because it was just at it limits.
• Do not over feed the fish
• If water in the tank starts getting dirty too fast, its time to check your pump and filter.

Hope you can find some useful tips from my experience to keep your fish healthy and enjoy they beauty.

Recently I was putting together an ecommerce and marketting site for a car dealer. And one of my developer asked me if I have to buy a new car today, what will I make. After taking a pause for couple of minutes I answered that I will pick a Toyota make vehicle. The developer seemed little surprised. He said that given the recent safety issues and massive recall of Toyota cars and other vehicles why would I go with those vehicles. And I just answered, that is exactly the reason that I will pick a Toyota car. I also added that I do not know if my answer will be same 10 years from now, but today I definitely consider new Toyota vehicles to be safer than others. Here is my reasoning behind this choice and decide.

Traditionally Toyota has been a company that is known for its quality and dependable cars. They are one of the champions of Six Sigma methodology. Those were the days when they were not number one car sellers around the world, but they were inching towards that goal. And suddenly they found themseleves inches to that goal. And just that little lapse of judgement happened and they tried to take a short cut to get to that goal quickly. They probably ignored some of the strict quality goals they had in place and cranked up the output of manufacturing plants. And thats when mistakes happen and now they see it.

Now they had a slap on their wrist. The company's philosphy is still the same to be proud of their quality and dependability. They will and are working to amend their mistakes. So all the new models that are coming out of the plants are being monitored closely and following stricter quality assurance processes. Toyota has to get the confidence of their customers back and only way to do it is by shipping vehicles that are safe and dependable.

It's just not the quality, Toyota is offering more discounts and deals to the customers to bring them back to car dealerships and showroom. So at present it makes sense to take a look at Toyota cars from quality as well as cost point of view as well. My hope is that Toyota has learned that short cut to top place can slide them down the hill quickly as well. And they will go back to their basics that put them in top of the pack.

After a long time I went to my FaceBook account to see what all my friends are doing and saying. I was not too surprised that there was lot of chatter about BP Oil Spill. It is the HOT topic these days. And everybody wants to take a stab at it and be part of some discussion about oil spill.

Yes, it is a disaster that happened. And probably there could have been done early or there could have been some plan B put in place by BP to reduce the damage. But that is history now. And we have to face this oil spill and its long lasting effect on environment and human lives.

Thing that kind of struck by surprise was some of the comments people are making now. These are the people who work in technology and software sector. And they all are very well aware of that crap happens some time. We all take all precautions to avoid disaster in our products. But there is always that one edge condition or one use case that we do not think about and when it strikes, it hits hard. And we all mobilize all available resources to plug the spill and get applications or products back on track. All these people are spitting blood on BP and not a single person was coming forward with a solution. Oil spill is not something would want to have. Every barrel of oil spilled in gulf is the barrel that they are not selling and making money off of it. So it is in interest of BP to stop this spill as quickly as they can. BP will be more than happy to shell out money if somebody will come with some brilliant idea. But only thing that these so called tech savvy people can come up with it how to prosecute or how to boycott BP products and things like that. What good is that going to do? Well at least BP is paying to fix the mess and pay claims of people who are out of work. If BP stops their effort then Administration is going to have to put the burden on common people by raising taxes to pay for clean up etc.

It's administration that relaxed the rules that made it possible for oil companies to not have relief wells in case of disaster like this. Well, the same administration is asking whose butt should they kick.

Oh well, i think this is enough of my rant. Time to go back to my blog entries on technology and software development.

For a long time I have been thinking of creating some instruction videos on some software development exercises. And also when I received bug reports from my users and clients, I used to ask them to send screen captures and things like that to show the behavior of the bug. And lot of time I wished if they could send me some video clip to demonstrate the bug. Few days ago I reported a bug to Microsoft about some refresh issues in Visual Studio 2010. It was very hard to explain what I was seeing. Microsoft responded to my bug report and one items in the email caught my attention.

2.A video file about the issue ((Community clips is an easy way to record and share: http://www.officelabs.com/projects/communityclips/Pages/Default.aspx )

Yes, this is a tool that Microsoft created to record video clips, Community Clips. And this is absolutely free and is still available at their site. I installed it and it worked like a charm. There is no need to pay $300 to some commercial software when the only thing you are looking to do is create some simple video. You can always use other video editing tools to edit the video clips.

Click here Download Microsoft Community Clips

If for some reason the link is down or tool has been removed from Microsoft site, let me know. I will try to make it available to you.

Usually I do not write about these kind of topics. But today of my co-workers asked me about opinion on an advertisement she saw that advetised that you could make $300+/week by working for google from home. In tough economic times a lot of people tend to fall for these kind of statements. This person is well educated and works for an internet company. I asked her to forward me the link she saw. For a change I read throught the whole page. I will have to say that it was very eye catching and written to attract right kind of people.

At this point we all very well know about this infamous Google Money Making Kit which is being adevertised to be sold for $1.97. Here are some of the facts that I will list about this whole scam. Thanks to one of these sites, I found all the information in fine print.

• $1.97is one time shipping fee or subscription fee you are paying to get started.
• You have 7 days to cancel the subscription or you will be charged close to $300/month in subscriptions. I bet you did not know that part.
• To cancel your subscription there is a phone number of mailing address. You can forget about getting to that number
• Here is worst news. If you accidently do give your credit card number to these sites, your credit card company is not going to be of any help. They will ask you to cancel your credit card account to stop any further payments to them.

Following is fine print that I found hidden in source of the page. I will make it bigger so you could read at leas this part.

Here is some more information from another site. Read the costs very carefully

Yesterday I started new job with a big company. I went through full day of orientation and training. After it was all said and done, I was in my new office. Oh yeah, for a change I actually got an office of my own now. Anyways, I wanted to grab a cup of tea. So I am looking around for kitchen or something. Finally I find it. There it was a coffee machine. Well, this coffee machine was a make and model that I had not used in my previous jobs. Its late in the day and almost everybody has left. There I am standing in front of this coffee machine trying to figure out how to make me a cup of tea or coffee. After playing with gazillion buttons on it, I could not make me a cup of coffee. I was like, I spent whole day in orientation and nobody showed me how to use this machine. Since coffee or tea is something that most of us start our day with, I think all employers should include part of the orientation program "How to use coffee machine in the kitchen?". What do you think?

These are tough and rough times. Everybody who has a job should consider themselves lucky. But who have lost their jobs to recession should not be completely dejected. If you have the skill and will, then you can easily survive through this downturn. For a software professional, there are lot of avenues open and available to earn decent money to make ends meet. I am not going to write some philosophical notes here about survival. So lets get down to business.

Where is the work?

Everyday we hear the terms that jobs are being shipped overseas or you have to compete in global economy. Well that is very true. The big companies usually outsource their work to well known and established consulting companies. If you look at the statistics, there are more small to medium size businesses who also outsource their software development work. These small companies definitely benefit from outsourcing because it helps them to keep their costs down while they are in growing stage. Especially in tough times, they really need to keep a check on their expenses. That means that there is more and more work that is being done by outsourcing it than hiring somebody full time in the company.

There are few good sites out there that facilitate outsourcing of work for individuals, small or medium sized companies. You just need to be aware of these sources and get registered with them to get started.

What kind of work I can find?

Here is list of some commonly posted projects on these sites

• Web Development
  • Creating clones of existing web sites
  • Creating HTML/CSS layout for new web sites
  • Creating icons, images or graphics for web sites
  • Fixing bugs in existing web sites
• Software Development
  • Design and architecture of new desktop, mobile device applications
  • Bug fixing of existing applications
  • Prototype development
  • Complete development of applications
  • Adding functionality to existing applications using open source apis
  • Customizing open source APIs for particular need
• Data
  • Scrapping of data from existing web sites
  • Data entry
  • Design of database for new applications
• Writing
  • Writing articles for content sites
  • Proof reading content of documents for mistakes
  • Translating documents from one language to another
• SEO
  • Optimizing new or existing web sites to improve their position in search engines
  • Promoting web sites to increase their site visitors
  • Link sharing

This is just a high level list of type of work you can find. The work is not just limited to this list. There is lot of work out there that falls into this high level list in some form or the other.

What kind of skill is hot?

There is no definitive answer to this question. You will find work posted in all categories. But you will find that there is lot more work posted in area of web application development. And that work can fall under any of the sub categories that I mentioned above. So there is work for everybody.

Acquire new skills

The whole idea of outsourcing is to find skilled resource at reasonable cost to do good work. And part of cost cutting is use of open source technologies. There are a whole lot of technologies out there that get used these days. And it is not possible for an individual to be proficient in each and every technology or language out there. So you are thinking what kind of new skills you should get. What you need to figure out is that given your current skill set, what new open source technologies come close to them or what you feel comfortable learning in small span of time. I am not saying that you can't learn all of them. But you definitely do not want to spend all your time in learning. You have to get going soon because it is tough competition out there and time matters. Here is a list of open source technologies that you may want to get proficient. I have compiled this list based on my experience and doing some research on data obtained from various sites.

• Wordpress
• Joomla
• Drupal
• DotnetNuke
• All Google APIs
• Paypal
• Ebay
• Amazon
• JQuery
• YUI
• Dojo
• Ajax.Net
• FaceBook
• Twitter
• Ning
• Open Social

• PHP
• ASP.Net
• MySQL

• Apache

Along with these open source APIs and technologies, make sure that you keep your skill with programming languages upto date as well. Knowledge of following languages give you a better chance of landing projects

• C#
• VB.Net
• C/C++
• PHP
• Java

This is not end of the list for open source apis, languages, technologies etc. Everyday we see new software emerging in open source community. You should not panic or go after every single technology out there. Do what is comfortable for you. Trust me, there is room for all kind of skill set.

What sites are available?

There are lot of sites out there that have lot of projects posted for which people are looking for help. I will mention couple of them here because I had some decent experience with them.

• Rent A Coder(RAC)
• oDesk
• Elance
• LivePerson

I personally had a great success with RAC. They seem to have lot more projects posted on their site than other sites I have come across. And I have met some good developers on that site as well. Their process from project bidding to completion is simple and payments are prompt. With Elance, you are limited to bidding on only 3 projects in a month. If you want to bid on more, you have to subscribe to their site. If you look at rate of success of winning a bid, then 3 bids per month is not something you can work with. I found that business model not very effective for small freelance professionals. LivePerson is mostly used for very small scale projects or homework help etc.

Size of projects

You will find there are projects posted ranging from $5-$15000 and some time projects are posted with Open to suggestion note. What that means is that buyer is not sure of amount of work involved and what costs are involved. Fixed cost projects are based on type of work and amount of time it may take for a person to do it. One thing you need to keep in mind is that a buyer estimates these costs or time based on his or her perception of work. If you think that the buyer's estimates are way too low, do not hesitate to communicate it to him or her. A lot of time you will find that these buyers take a second look at their proposal. They will go over your comment and suggestions and ask you to submit your bid of amount what you think is reasonable. I have been very successful in negotiating projects with buyers and got them to raise their budget for the work. But you have to do your diligence to present a proposal that highlights the reasons why you think that initial estimates are low. Also make sure that your proposal is stated in very clear and easy to understand terms. You need to keep in mind that lot of buyers are not very tech savvy or they do not have time to research on your proposal. They want all the information upfront in front of them to make their decision.

Project too small for me to consider?

I have come across lot of professional who will not entertain a bid if they see that maximum it is going to pay is $20 or some very low amount. They think that is below their level to even look at it. Well, I don't think that way. I remember 2 weeks ago I did a project on RAC for $5. Well, only $2 came to my pocket. But project was as simple as to refer the buyer to a link for certain type of source code. Well, it took me one click in google to find the site. And give that link to buyer. Well, I may have only made $5 from that project but see what extra that I gained from that deal.

• A 10 rating in my record
• A count increase on number of projects I have done
• A nice rating note left by buyer
• A contact with a new buyer who may give me some preference over others when he posts some bigger project

Even in money terms, I made $5/min. Well that's not bad at all. It took me a min to search the site and send that message to buyer. So when you are looking at small projects, there are couple of things that you may want to consider before turning it down.

• Amount of work involved and time it will take.
• Does the project involve new API or technology that you want to learn? I would not mind somebody paying for me to learn new technology. But you have to also consider that do you have time for it? If you are already involved in some bigger project, you don't want to jeopardize that one for this small one. After all, your future project winning depends on your history. You can't afford to get bad rating from past work.

Communication is the key

At the end it all comes down to communication. From entering a bid to winning a bid, communicating with buyer is very important. You want to be as descriptive as possible in your bid as possible. There are some important things that you should mention in your bid message.

• Your understanding of problem
• What approach you will take
• How much time it will take
• If there are some potential roadblocks, highlight those. A buyer really appreciates it if he or she knows impediments ahead of time.
• If you have done some past work in same or related problem domain, add reference to that
• Link to articles or demos that you have posted on some sites. This shows quality of work to the buyer

Make sure that you reply to buyer's messages in timely fashion. This is very important because this shows the buyer how quickly you can respond to his requests when you are engaged in doing the project. If you are running into some technical issues or some personal issues that can delay delivery of the project, let the buyer know ahead of time. Telling buyer at the last moment does not leave a good impression with buyer and can be cause of friction.

Get frequent updates

Most of these sites have some kind of mechanism to send you latest open projects. Make sure that you take advantage of it. Mos of the sites provide RSS feeds. Subscribe to them. This way you will have latest list of open projects. Lot of time just by looking at small description in feed you can decide if you are interested in this project or not.

Join hands

A lot of time you will find projects that are little larger in scope and it is not possible for you to execute it alone. Join hands with your friends or co-workers who may be in same boat as you. They may also be looking for some extra work to survie through hard times. Most importantly since they are your friends or co-workers, you know their work style and their capabilities to deliver projects. So make some useful alliances and take on some bigger projects with help of those friends.

These are not the only avenues there to help you make some extra money or surviving recession. Look around and you may find some more sites that offer similar kind of services. You can always send me comment and I will be more than happy to append those to this articles. If you have some thoughts about this topic, feel free to send me comments.

Join Our Team?

A lot of time we get lot of projects for which we do not have time. Please read the following link if you are interested in helping out and in process making some extra cash for your self.