Famous Failures: Never Give Up!

Success comes in all shapes and colors. You can be successful in your job and career but you can equally be successful in your marriage, at sports or a hobby. Whatever success you are after there is one thing all radically successful people have in common: Their ferocious drive and hunger for success makes them never give up.

Successful people (or the people talking or writing about them) often paint a picture of the perfect ascent to success. In fact, some of the most successful people in business, entertainment and sport have failed. Many have failed numerous times but they have never given up. Successful people are able to pick themselves up, dust themselves off and carry on trying.

I have collected some examples that should be an inspiration to anyone who aspires to be successful. They show that if you want to succeed you should expect failure along the way. I actually believe that failure can spur you on and make you try even harder. You could argue that every experience of failure increases the hunger for success. The truly successful won't be beaten, they take responsibility for failure, learn from it and start all over from a stronger position.

Let's look at some examples:

Henry Ford - the pioneer of modern business entrepreneurs and the founder of the Ford Motor Company failed a number of times on his route to success. His first venture to build a motor car got dissolved a year and a half after it was started because the stockholders lost confidence in Henry Ford. Ford was able to gather enough capital to start again but a year later pressure from the financiers forced him out of the company again. Despite the fact that the entire motor industry had lost faith in him he managed to find another investor to start the Ford Motor Company - and the rest is history.

Walt Disney - one of the greatest business leaders who created the global Disney empire of film studios, theme parks and consumer products didn't start off successful. Before the great success came a number of failures. Believe it or not, Walt was fired from an early job at the Kansas City Star Newspaper because he was not creative enough! In 1922 he started his first company called Laugh-O-Gram. The Kansas based business would produce cartoons and short advertising films. In 1923, the business went bankrupt. Walt didn't give up, he packed up, went to Hollywood and started The Walt Disney Company.

Richard Branson - He is undoubtedly a successful entrepreneur with many successful ventures to his name including Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Music and Virgin Active. However, when he was 16 he dropped out of school to start a student magazine that didn't do as well as he hoped. He then set up a mail-order record business which did so well that he opened his own record shop called Virgin. Along the way to success came many other failed ventures including Virgin Cola, Virgin Vodka, Virgin Clothes, Virgin Vie, Virgin cards, etc.

Oprah Winfrey - who ranks No 1 in the Forbes celebrity list and is recognized as the queen of entertainment based on an amazing career as iconic talk show host, media proprietor, actress and producer. In her earlier career she had numerous set-backs, which included getting fired from her job as a reporter because she was 'unfit for television', getting fired as co-anchor for the 6 O'clock weekday news on WJZ-TV and being demoted to morning TV.

J.K. Rowling - who wrote the Harry Potter books selling over 400 million copies and making it one of the most successful and lucrative book and film series ever. However, like so many writers she received endless rejections from publishers. Many rejected her manuscript outright for reasons like 'it was far too long for a children's book' or because 'children books never make any money'. J.K. Rowling's story is even more inspiring because when she started she was a divorced single mum on welfare.

Bill Gates -co-founder and chairman of Microsoft set up a business called Traf-O-Data. The partnership between him, Paul Allen and Paul Gilbert was based on a good idea (to read data from roadway traffic counters and create automated reports on traffic flows) but a flawed business model that left the company with few customers. The company ran up losses between 1974 and 1980 before it was closed. However, Bill Gates and Paul Allen took what they learned and avoided those mistakes when they created the Microsoft empire.

There are lots of more example.

ASP.Net MVC Training Table Of Contents

Please get the installation completed of the following tools on your machine

• Visual Studio 2012 or 2013
• SQL Server 2012 (for developing database driven applications)

Following are the contents of training we will cover

• 1       .NET Framework Overview

       We will read a book and will have a training session over Microsoft .NET Framework Application Development Foundation which covered most of the .Net Framework concepts as follow

o   .NET, CLR, MSIL/JIT, Assemblies, CTS, .NET languages            

o   Data Types, Operators, Expressions, Statements, Console I/O, if / switch / case, Loops, Arrays, Methods

o   Creating and Using Objects, Exceptions, Strings, Generics, Collections, Attributes

o   OOP Concepts such as Defining Classes, Constructors, Properties, Events, Interfaces, Inheritance, Polymorphism

• 2      Introduction to ASP.Net MVC

The MVC Pattern

o   Model, View, Controller

o   The MVC Pattern for Web and Examples

ASP.NET MVC

o   Comparison with ASP.NET Form

o   ASP.NET MVC Advantages

Creating ASP.NET MVC Project

• 3       Introduction to ASP.Net MVC Advance Topics

ASP.NET MVC Bundling

o   JQuery and JavaScript

ASP.NET MVC Routing

o   Route constraints

Controllers and Actions

o   Action results and filters

Razor Views

o   Layout and sections

o   Helpers

o   Partial views

Areas

Firstly, we are going to start .Net Framework Fundamentals which will cover most of the basic concepts of .Net framework and then we will start over ASP.Net MVC (Pro ASP.NET MVC 4).

Building Applications with ASP.Net MVC 4:

http://pluralsight.com/training/Player?author=scott-allen&name=mvc4-building-m1-intro&mode=live&clip=0&course=mvc4-building

Prevent SQL Server Reporting Services Slow Startup

Problem: 

I've installed a SQL Reporting server 2012, with some reports. But I've some performances issues. 

The first call of the day to the server(report is access in MVC application), is VERY slow(something like 20-35 seconds at best), The report generation is then fast(1-2 seconds). I've the impression that it loads alll supporting dlls in the memory on first call the use cached dlls for rest of calls. But what can takes 20-35 seconds to be loaded in memory? And how to load it only once? 

These reports will be launched along with web application and will be accessed frequently, so they will always be slow on first load if I can't change this. And since it's available for customer, I just can't make them understand this(and the report is called through a website, so I risk to have timeout).

Solution:

I have solved the problem by Using the following articles as guidance:

• Technet – “RSReportServer Configuration File” – http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms157273.aspx
• MSSQL Tips – “Prevent SQL Server Reporting Services Slow Startup” –http://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/2735/prevent-sql-server-reporting-services-slow-startup/

I Scheduled a SQL Server job that will handle a report call periodically (for example every morning before everyone rushes to the office like I schedule it for 6:00 AM), for this I have written a powershell script which will warm up MS reporting server.

# URL to your SSRS. As example localhost is used.

[string] $url = "http://localhost/ReportServer";

$httpRequest = [System.Net.HttpWebRequest]::Create($url) ;

$httpRequest.Credentials =[System.Net.CredentialCache]::DefaultCredentials;

$httpRequest.Method = "GET";

# Time out has been set to 5 minutes to make sure the call is properly completed

$httpRequest.Timeout = 300000;

$objResponseReader = [System.IO.StreamReader]($httpRequest.GetResponse().GetResponseStream());

$objResponseReader.Dispose();

I Scheduled this job for daily at 6:00 in the morning.