Getting Started With Windows Azure

Feb 8, 10 – 10 am

I wanted to start learning about Windows Azure in December last year, but I got bogged down by other work. And while it was unfortunate that I missed the free trial period, thankfully, we have some MSDN premium licenses at work, which gets us some free hours on Azure, and these free hours can be used for testing the applications on the cloud.

With plans to master application development on the Azure platform as soon as possible, this weekend I started looking for and gathering resources – books and tutorials – which can help me get started. The Windows Azure ‘Getting Started’ page lists some resources, but they only offer a very high level view of things. Not very useful in my opinion, but you should still go through these if you don’t have a clue about what is Windows Azure.

There are also many videos available on channel9, but these offer highly segmented information on the technology, and are difficult to stitch together into a wholesome tutorial. Moreover, many of these videos are of the social marketing type, and many of the old ones are unlikely to be very useful because of recent changes in the Azure technology.

There are a couple of Apress books available on Azure, which you can buy from Amazon. However, these books are also largely outdated from a technological point of view. Both the books are also badly written. They were probably written in a hurry without going through a proper editing process. I was somewhat surprised because I have read some great Apress books.

I was getting disappointed by the lack of proper information on Azure, when I stumbled upon a recent post on the blog of Hanu Kommalapati. The post has links to some very useful PDC’09 videos on Windows Azure, which will get you up and started quickly. Additionally, the videos are ordered with respect to depth and complexity of the topics covered in them, so you can download and follow them in the order in which they are listed. They are also technologically up-to-date.

Don’t forget to download the high quality versions (Windows Media Video (High)) of the videos so you can read the code in the screencasts. Also make it a point to follow the blogs of the speakers in these videos, in case you want to master the technology.

By Tathagata | Posted in code, programming, software | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Typekit Looks Better When It’s Dark

Feb 3, 10 – 7 pm

Update: Okay, so I was wrong. Typekit fonts on a darker background on Firefox, on Windows, look pretty bad. Given that Firefox has a large market share (hell, I use it most of the time!), I can’t really afford to piss off Firefox users. So reverted back to a light background and scaled up the fonts instead. You still might find it interesting to read the post below.

Ever since I bought a Typekit subscription, I have been trying hard to get the Typekit fonts to render decently on Windows. After all sorts of permutations and combinations, I think, I have figured out some important things.

To get the fonts looking good on Windows you can either crank the font-size way up, or you can choose to render the fonts in a lighter color and use a dark background. Large fonts make sense if you have less text to render. However, for a blog like this one, the darker background is probably the only option.

With a dark background the rendering in Firefox looks much better. Additionally, in IE, which renders the fonts without anti-aliasing, the fonts looks less broken. These reasons were enough to convince me that I should switch to a darker background.

However, switching to a dark background has its own problems. Firstly, and most importantly, readability decreases for large paragraphs of text (which is currently bothering me a lot). Secondly, I have many sketches (with many more planned) which have white backgrounds, and these create too much contrast with the dark background (leading to some eye strain and an ugly looking website). I partially solved this problem by having an intermediately colored border on the right of the images.

Dark backgrounds have other problems too. They look much darker on Windows than on a Mac because of different color profiles.

Having spent a lot of time on the site design, I will probably take a break now. Let me know if you are also using Typekit and have any other suggestions.

Update: I thought I would put up another set of images illustrating how Typekit fonts looks on different browsers on Windows (and on Firefox in Ubuntu). On IE and Chrome it looks the same, and, as you can see, it looks cool enough on most browsers except Firefox on Windows (looks pretty hairy, pun intended :)).

Typekit Windows Browsers

By Tathagata | Posted in art & design | Tagged , | Comments (1)

An Encounter With Death

Feb 2, 10 – 7 pm

Rob was driving back home from a meeting. He had been driving for around 45 minutes in his brand new Porsche, when he suddenly had an uncanny feeling that he was being followed. He slowed down a little and looked closely in the rear view display. A rusty old car, a hundred or so feet back, looked conspicuous. He somehow felt certain that this car had been following him for a while.

Rob couldn’t figure out why anybody would be after him. He led a quaint life and had never made any enemies, at least none that he could recall offhand. Maybe they want to steal the Porsche, he thought. He had read a few suspense novels and watched some thriller movies in his time, so he knew how to determine if someone was really following him. He took a few random turns in the next block. Yeah, I am definitely being followed, he thought, and felt an amount of fear creeping in.

His adrenalin level raised, his mind started racing to figure out all possible routes of escape. His best chance, he figured, would be to outrun his followers. After all, speed was on his side. He felt a little reluctant at the thought of possible damage to his new Porsche.

Before he could decide what to do, he felt shots ringing out from all directions. Almost immediately a bullet hit his neck, almost dead center. He could see the blood pouring out like water, and felt his vision getting cloudy before it went completely blank. He was dead for sure.

Game end, the machine beeped a couple of times and popped up a scrolling list of options. Rob got out of the contraption he had been in for several hours now, and stretched himself out on the bed. Who could have done that, he thought. He had joined this virtual world a month back, and hadn’t taken out an insurance policy yet. Respawning can cost a lot, though in this case his company would probably be ready to bear it. He must respawn soon to check out the situation, and have a talk with the virtual world’s admin police. No harm in doing a little sleuthing of his own too, he thought, after all, the game had just begun.

By Tathagata | Posted in short stories | Tagged , | Comments (0)