What's New?

Updates

• This Quarter: Added more book reviews - The Mythical Man-Month, What Were They Thinking?, How You Can Be More Interesting, The 7 Habits for Managers, The Black Swan, The Art of Being Kind, The Build Master, Crucial Conversations, America (The Book), Crossing the Chasm, and Refactoring. Made minor changes to the fonts and content in various pages.
  
  
• Year 2007: Converted the website to a fully ASP.NET 2.0 driven website. Created a wider layout and changed the fonts and styles. Moved blog to new domain name thoughtclusters.com. Links moved to del.icio.us. Added a new OPML file for my favorite blogs and RSS feed for website updates. Added new content to different pages and removed outdated articles and content. Added a new partial Sudoku Solver in the Puzzles section. Wrote a new formatter for displaying the source code of the C++ and Java programs in color. Added a disclaimer. Introduced the top 10 most read blog postings in the Writing section.
  
  Added over 65 book reviews such as Lean Thinking, Peopleware, Getting Things Done, About Face 3, Conceptual Blockbusting, Freedom at Midnight, The Goal, What Got You Here Won't Get You There, The Halo Effect, Programming Pearls, Don't Make Me Think, Software Estimation, The No Asshole Rule, The Essential Druker, Six Thinking Hats, A Random Walk Down Wall Street, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Made to Stick, Prioritizing Web Usability, Dreams From My Father, The Age of Spiritual Machines, Getting Things Done, The Prince, Managing in the Next Society, Code Complete 2.
  
  
• Previous updates available in Past History below...

Features of Version 9.0

• Created in Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition
• ASP.NET 2.0 application using C#
• Image editor: GIMP
• Java IDE: Eclipse
• C++ IDE: Bloodshed Dev-C++
• Website Analytics: Google Analytics
• FTP: Filezilla

Past History

My M.Sc. final semester project was building a corporate website. During this time, I became interested in developing my own website. I registered a site with XOOM, to build a site that would contain information on computer terms. When I found that lots of sites already contained this information, I lost interest and stopped further development on the site. After my project, when I went into freelance web-developing, I decided to start again. I registered another site with XOOM and uploaded 5-6 pages.

Version 1 of the site was a simple site with a lot of text spread over the page and links to other pages down at the bottom. Initially I put my resume and added my essays and technical articles. I had a section on how to conduct quiz. Links to other sites including those of my friends were provided. Later, I brought all the links together into a table and kept this table at the bottom (Version 2). I added C++ and JavaScript programs. A directory structure slowly evolved. The quiz section was removed as it was incomplete.

XOOM was a good hosting place initially as it had no ad banners. But later a XOOMBar was added and my pages were served up in a frame. This caused issues with my JavaScript programs. Also, files could only be uploaded using FTP. So I switched my site to Geocities. It was a good thing because XOOM closed its web hosting services soon after that. In Geocities, files can be uploaded through the browser and the popup doesn't get much in the way. I also moved the table of links to the left (Version 3). After this, I changed the background GIF and changed the front design. New sections for jokes, Java, quiz, Prolog, etc. were added (Version 4).

In version 5.0 and 5.1, all unnecessary images were removed. Pages were optimized for speed. Navigation was made easier by providing links to other pages from each page. The front page design was changed. Some new files were added in the articles section.

In version 6, I moved the website from Geocities to a shared hosting site, which had support for ASP.NET. So I began the process of converting the HTML code to ASP.NET using C# and leveraging XML/XSLT to drive some of the content. The quiz pages were changed from client driven JavaScript to server-side C# pages. Additional quizzes were added.

In version 7 (c. 2004), I changed the layout to a blue background. The links went to the top of the page. I removed the jokes section as I was not sure about the source of some of the jokes and what copyright they may fall under. The JavaScript programs were also discarded along with some essays. Folder structure was redesigned for simplicity and maintainability. Style-sheets were used extensively to provide uniform look and simplify HTML coding. Added "What's New", and "Book Reviews" sections. Added image scorecard in Quiz section, and new crossword puzzle.

In version 8 (c. 2006), there was a major re-arrangement of the content in several pages. The blue background was changed to white. The Prolog and Links section were removed. I added a new Java program for Kruskal's algorithm. Many book reviews were added. Some items were moved to my blog. A blogroll was added. Changed the front page layout with links to book review sections and outward links.