TechFront

Being a Graduate student, I had
keen interest in development work. I always wanted to get involved in various
types of projects. And it is always nice if you can make some money out of the
projects you do.

Then I came across two such
websites through which I could get what I was looking for.

• RentACoder
• Scriptlance

 
These websites provides
opportunities to developers worldwide to get their hands on various types of
projects that are of interest to them. Well that?s not as easy as it seems. To
get a project you need to make a bid (Yes, make a Bid). The buyer reviews the
bid by various people, sees their portfolios before accepting the bid. Now how
to get a good rating at such a site? Well, you can get a rating directly from
the buyer only after completing a project. A buyer may rate you from 1-10 (10
being best) after he accepts the complete project.

 

But about payment, which is an
important factor that drives people there. These sites provides us with various
option such as a Wire Transfer, Direct cheque, Paypal Transfer, etc. (Check the
respective sites for details). Personally I prefer Paypal, since it is fast and
easy. After receiving the payment using Paypal, I can do online shopping also.
(Now that?s cool). Most of the sites accept payment through Paypal.

 
What is the guaranty that I will
receive the payment from my Buyer? Well sometimes a dispute may occur, whether
a buyer may refuse to accept the deliverables or the coder may be unable to
complete the work on time. In such cases, RentACoder has an arbitration
mechanism in which the arbitrator looks into the details of the project and the
deliverables and makes a decision. And the person who looses the arbitration
gets a bad rating. So, it is generally advisable that people use Escrow as
payment option so that money is safe for both ? the buyer and developer.

 

All this seems easy, but now I?ll
say about the most difficult part. How to get your bid accepted? Plenty of
people bidding for a project with different amount and time duration. Well, it
depends on your current rating, your existing work, bidding amount and of
course LUCK.

 
What does these websites get by
providing this facility? Registration is generally free for the developers (I
don?t have any buyer account).  Well they
deduct a percent of the bidding amount to keep themselves going on.

These days there are many
different sites coming up with similar idea. A simple search leads to ? www.elance.com, www.getafreelancer.com, www.getacoder.com, www.indianlance.com, etc

Happy Bidding !!!

(P.S. - I might be wrong, but thats just my opinion. This is my first blog post, will post soon more on current research areas - Grid Computing)

I ran into a petty trouble with SQL today which took me almost 3 hours to solve.


I was working on a Web Application for a client. Everything was going fine, except for two pages that were misbehaving in the SQL Query. (I am using MS Access 2003 as a test database)


Query was pretty straighforward:

• select * from language
• select * from tutor where language like 'English'

The ASP page gave me the message "Undefined error.". I kept scraching my head for nothing. At last I solved the issue by renaming the table name to "laguagetbl" and field name to "languagefld". That was the trick which solved the "Undefined error". I wish if there was some user friendly error message.

It took me so much time find out that "language" was a reserved keyword.

My Advise is be careful while keeping the table names and field names in your database. You never know when trouble is waiting.

During the development of ApplyTeacher.com, I had a requirement to change the webpage in a different Frame. (After successful Login, the menu in top frame needs to be refreshed so as to change Login to Logoff). Also the login page needs to be redirected to the user page.

The following code did the trick

response.write(vbCrLf & "<script>" & vbCrLf)
response.write("parent.frames['<frame-name>'].location.href='<page-url>';" & vbCrLf)
response.write("</script>" & vbCrLf)

Replace the <frame-name> with actual frame name and <page-url> with actual page url.

This helped me to change the webpage in another frame and for the current frame (through which the user logged in), I simple used used response.redirect to send the user to his account page.

This script works fine in Internet Explorer 6 and Firefox 1.5 but it should work on all browsers.

One of my client had a requirement of displaying a list of Products in a Random Order. He had around 50 products which he wanted to display on the same page but the products should appear in random order each time the page is refreshed.


Here is the code which I used, to do the work

<%
Dim rs
Dim ctr
Dim cnnstr
Dim cnn
cnnstr="Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;Data Source=" & Server.MapPath("products.mdb") & ";"
set cnn = Server.CreateObject ("ADODB.Connection")
cnn.Open cnnstr

set rs=Server.Createobject("Adodb.Recordset")
rs.open "SELECT * FROM Products",cnn,1,1
ctr=rs.RecordCount


Dim a1
ReDim a1(ctr)

Do Until ctr = 0
    Randomize
    rnd_no = Int(Rnd*rs.RecordCount) +1
    ctr=ctr-1
    if rnd_no>rs.RecordCount then rnd_no=1
    rs.MoveFirst
    rs.move rnd_no
    if a1(rnd_no)=1 then
            while a1(rnd_no)=1
            rnd_no=rnd_no+1
            if not rs.eof then rs.MoveNext
            if rnd_no>rs.RecordCount then
                rnd_no=1
                rs.MoveFirst
            end if
            wend
    end if
    if not rs.eof and not rs.bof then
        a1(rnd_no)=1
    
%>
 
// Display the recordset Here.


<%
end if
loop
rs.Close()
Set rs = Nothing
cnn.close
%>

This code works like a charm for around 50 records. Didnt tested it for more.

Now in this code I am using a array 'a1' to mark the recordset which has been displayed. This is required since sometimes the Random funtion calculation gives the same number back, so the same record may get printed more than once. This was undesirable. So by using this array and marking each record after printing ensures that each record is printed once only.

Do tell me your reviews on this code.