MTS MBlaze – Worst Internet Service Provider

This is my story of sufferings that I faced with MTS MBlaze. It was a red-letter day when thought of buying MTS MBlaze entered my mind and that was the day when I had given open invitation to trouble, frustration, and tension.

I bought MTS Mblaze in first week of Feb 2010. However, after 1 week it stopped working. I contacted their Customer Care and they informed that the device was not registered in your name and so they cannot help with any issue. I was shocked and surprised. I contacted the persons from MTS Pune and they told me that by mistake they have mixed the documents of two customers that is why there was all the confusion. They gave me their demo device, which used to stop working at 10PM. After a months time (March 2010 last), they returned my device with changed number.

However, the connectivity was still very bad. There were hardly any signals and whenever there were any the websites used to open very late. This was very frustrating. Later on 30 August 2010, I got it recharged and within few days, I was unable to connect to internet. I again called their customer care and was informed that my number does not exist. I told them I got it recharged few days back but of no use. The person was not even ready to listen anything and disconnected. I again contacted local MTS personals and they told me that my number has again changed. They provided me with the new number in mid-September, but the recharge that I got on 30 August was never returned to me nor credited to my device.

Two days ago (Nov 2010), after returning from Diwali holidays, I got it recharged again. It got connected but no website could be opened including MTS Blaze’s homepage. I am still trying!

MTS is worst service provider. I have used Reliance Netconnect (USB) and Airtel broadband in Pune and BSNL Broadband in Agra. They are far ahead of MTS. I will recommend everyone to refrain from buying MTS because the Reebok shoes they provide free with their connection will only be used running after MTS personnel to get your work done. At least till they get their service competitive enough.

Government of India and Its Websites

I am just fed-up with how government functions. All the Pub Ad stuff is weird specially when it comes to implementation in India and by the Government. The efficiency of Government organisations are always questioned and the quality of the product they deliver is unacceptable. Even their websites are not untouched. For instance see the websites designed and hosted by National Informatics Centre (NIC). Every site it has hosted or designed has a disclaimer that the content is maintained by the respective department or organisation of the government. But the question is not about content. The design of the websites is not up to the standards accepted by the industry. 

There is another division known as Information Systems Wing which host the website of Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) that conducts examinations and makes appointments to various Civil Services in India. The notifications on the home page in the main frame are not at all readable on the website. Do these people never visit the website is maintained by them. Leave people from that department;  do the Chairman and members of UPSC never visit this site? 

Whenever I raise this point with my friends, they say that India is a socialist country and cannot spend money on good design and maintenance of the site.  This reasoning is flawed from the very assumption. The government websites are designed and maintained to share information with public so that it is easier to communicate with them. This helps in easy and quick dissemination of the information to the target audience. The websites should be simple but the design must follow basic UI principles and the industry-established standards. 

NIC and Department of Administrative reforms and Public Grievances (DARPG) have developed the guidelines to address the entire lifecycle of a website, web portal/application right from its conceptualisation to design, development, maintenance and management. Why the websites cannot follow these basic guidelines? 

But everything is not gloomy. There are websites that have changed for better. In January this year, Rohit Chauriha (a friend of mine) and I visited MP Police's website to gather some Cadre related information. The websites was badly designed. Even the content of the website was very stupid. See, the screen shot that I took in January 2011. But the website now has changed and is in better shape.

MP Police's Website as in Jan 2011

MP Police's Website After Changes

Similarly website of Agra was in pathetic state of affairs. But it has also improved. You can visit its website here.

Among Indian government websites best design is of National Portal of India. It is greatly designed and maintained effectively. 

But most of the websites are worst. Even the internal pages of Agra's site doesn't follow the guidelines.  Check this link:- http://agra.nic.in/lokvani/default.htm  or http://tehsildivas.up.nic.in which are linked from the Agra's website. The former is of the same genre that of UPSC and it is one of the worst sites. The latter is not compatible with any browser other than Microsoft Internet Explorer. I really feel sorry for the developer(s) who is not able to think beyond MS IE. 

I did the review of Agra's website as per the guidelines given at http://www.web.guidelines.gov.in/ and sent it to upagr@nic.in as per the Contact Us page of the website. But didn't receive any response from them. 

To improve the websites there is a need to implement some process. We can have a common template for all the websites and ask the developers to build the websites using them rather than asking them to use their brains. The website design should be thoroughly reviewed and also at each stage of development. Only when the reviews and testing are completely successful the sign-off should be given for releasing the website to production and hosted. 

I wish that people working in IT department in various government organisation get some senses and work towards implementing what NIC  and DARPG have developed. 

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Oracle Service Bus Interview Questions

Q1. How can you generate File Based Events using Oracle Service Bus? 
Service Bus allows you to create Proxy Services that can poll to ftp and sftp servers . Create a Messaging Type Proxy Service and choose , ftp or sft as the protocol on transport configuration. You can also use File protocol for the same.

Q2. How can you invoke an EJB method from Oracle Service Bus? EJBs can be invoked as Web Services by first registering a Business Service with ejb transport and then getting the WSDL from the Business Service.

Q3. How can you achieve parallel processing in Oracle Service Bus? Oracle Service bus has the Split Join capability. A request can be broken to multiple childs each of which can be processed parallel and the results can be joined and then sent to requester.

Q4. What is difference between a WSDL Proxy Service and Any SOAP Proxy service? Any SOAP proxy service can accept any payload that conforms to SOAP schema.

Q5. Can you interact directly with Database from Service Bus? Yes by using the BEA XQuery method execute-sql

Q6. How can you interact transaction ally with multiple EIS such as JMS EJB and DB in Service Bus? Invoke the Business Services and xqueries(for DB) representing the different EIS in the request pipeline

Q7. For a Proxy Service listening to a JMS Queue how can you ensure that the JMS Message is retried if an error occurs during processing? Use an XA JMS Connection factory in the jms url.

Q8. What purpose do the Stage components serve in Service Bus? They are the containers for actions. A stage is the smallest group to have its error handling

Q9. How can you jump control from one stage to next stage without using if then else logic? Use the Skip action

Q10. How can you end a Proxy flow without using if then else logic ? By using the Reply action

Q11. What dows FLOWR in XQuery terminology stand for ? For,Let,Order By,Where and Return are key words for writing XQuery Expressions. FLOWR stands for these key words .

Q12. How can you find out the tag name of an XML Element excluding the namespace? By using the local-name() Xpath function e.g.

For the Xml node Request xmlns:ns0=”blah blah”>abc local-name function will return ‘Request’

Q13. How do you specify namespace definitions in XQuery File? By using the ‘declare namespace ‘ statement.

Q14. How can you read external xml document in XQuery ? By Using the document() function

Q15. What does the Xquery expression ‘element xyz{“abc”}’ result into? It will result into xml element abc.

Q16. How can you avoid getting xquery transformation errors? By doing data validation before invoking the core xquery functions/constructs.

Q17. How can you concatenate Strings in Xquery ? By using the concat xquery function

Q18. How can you remove multiple newline ,space and tab characters from a string ? By using the normalize-space xquery function

Q19. How will you iterate over the child nodes of an xml node in XQuery? By using the for… expression.

Q20. How will you return a Boolean true value from xquery ? By using the true() function.