Berkshire Hathaway To Sell Auto Insurance In India

1-800-1800-800 is the number to call if you want to buy Auto Insurance in India. Have you seen any easier toll-free number? 

That’s the number of Berkshire Insurance. That’s right. It’s the same Berkshire you are thinking of. Berkshire as in Berkshire Hathaway.

Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway is all set to start selling Auto Insurance in India as a corporate agent for Bajaj Allianz. Warren Buffet is going to Delhi, India for a special event on 25th of March, 2011.

One unique aspect of Berkshire Insurance is that it will sell auto policies Online and over phone only. And their toll-free number is the most easiest to remember : 1-800-1800-800.

Anybody is already reading between the lines of Warren Buffet’s entry into India?

Pluralsight On-Demand Training : Now Starts at $29/m

Pluralsight has slashed its prices and now a monthly subscription to their FULL library costs just $29 per month.  Compare it to earlier pricing of $99/month, it’s a drastic reduction.

More over if you are in India, the monthly subscription costs even lower, $14.99 per month.

If you are a .NET developer or aspiring to become one, this is really a great news. I personally loved their videos and definitely recommend to anybody.

Link : Pluralsight On-Demand Access Pricing Plans

Restoring the trust between agile and software craftsmanship

Andy Hunt (@PragmaticAndy) 2/7/11 4:36 PM Uncle Bob talks about the agile manifesto and craftsmanship movementshttp://bit.ly/g9jdHH

Microsoft MIX : Why can’t they offer RSS Feed instead?

I don’t know why? Majority of conferences organized by and around Microsoft Technologies, DO NOT offer RSS Feeds of their sessions and videos. For some mysterious reasons. Instead the sites offer a ridiculously tedious and stupid interface to subscribe/download session videos.

It is supposedly a conference of UX Experts.

“MIX is a gathering of developers, designers, UX experts and business professionals creating the most innovative and profitable consumer sites on the web.” - http://live.visitmix.com/

But when you want to watch or download session videos, there is NO RSS FEED. Instead here is what they want you to do:

If you’d like to download all of the keynote and session content, download a recent build of cURL (~250K), and extract it to your folder-of-choice. Then, download MIX10Downloader.zip (1.39KB) and extract the MIX10Downloader.bat file to the same folder. From a command prompt, start MIX10Downloader by passing it one of the following parameters: WMVHIGH, WMV, MP4, PPTX. Then wait. For files that aren’t available, cURL will download a file that is around 1,245 bytes in size (if you change the extension to .htm and open it, you’ll see that the file is simply an HTML "not found" error page).

To rename the files, first, download MIX10Renamer.zip (4.09KB). Then, extract the MIX10Renamer.bat file to the folder that contains your downloaded files, and from a command prompt, type MIX10Renamer WMV to rename all of the .WMV files to the full session title. By changing the parameter, you can also rename your PPTX and MP4 files.

Majority of people that are interested in these sessions, I believe, would have one or other RSS Feed Reader applications. If they provide an RSS FEED, everybody can easily and readily view all sessions and download if they want to.

What kind of an UX is this?

Two Microsoft .NET Developer Events in DFW, You Must Attend

If you are a budding .NET developer looking to kick start your career in 2011 or advance your career on Microsoft .NET technologies, here are two great events right here in DFW that you must attend.

Windows Azure 2 Day BootCamp : 16th and 17th February 2011

This is a 2-day deep dive program to prepare you to deliver solutions on the Windows Azure Platform. We have worked to bring the region’s best Azure experts together to teach you how to work in the cloud. Each day will be filled with training, discussion, reviewing real scenarios, and hands on labs.

More Details and Registration here.

Dallas Day of Dot Net : 4th and 5th of March 2011

With Phil Haack kicking off the 2 day event with ASP.NET MVC 3, it got 2 days of immersive .NET programs including but not limited to “Windows phone, Azure, C# 4.0, HTML 5, Asp.Net MVC 3, WPF, Silverlight”. The event is priced at $200, but all proceeds go towards helping a cancer patient.

More Details and Registration here.

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. -Gandhi

MS Event : Windows Azure 2-Day Boot Camp

New Releases From Microsoft For Web Development

Microsoft released an array of new Products and releases mostly targeted for .NET Web developers. Read the full Announcement at Scott Gu's Blog.

Here is a summary of  release contents :

• ASP.NET MVC3 - The latest version of the MVC for ASP.NET, featuring a new view-engine "Razor".
• IIS Express 7.5 – A simplified developer focused version of IIS that does not require admin rights to run and debug code from Visual Studio.
• NuGet - An open source package manager designed to make it easier for .NET developers to find, install, and use open source libraries for projects. One of the best and is our favorite.
• Orchard 1.0 - The Orchard Project is Microsoft-sponsored project dedicated to creating open source applications and reusable components in .NET. Orchard 1.0, a .NET based CMS, is its first project.
• SQL Server Compact Edition 4 – SQL Compact edition gets much simpler to use and deploy. Best deal is that Zero installations required and can be used now in multi-threaded environments.
• WebMatrix – This is definitely a major product,  aiming to make developing .NET web applications fun and simple.  It comes packaged with IIS Express, ASP.NET and SQL Server Compact.  Develop your own or download and install a variety of community applications

That’s a really a huge basket of goodies.