Fast Loading Thesis Blogger Template

HOW TO delete an email address from GMail auto-complete list without deleting Contact

2011-10-16T01:10:00.000-07:00

Supposedly friendly features like spell-check & auto-completion can be a bane sometimes. Imagine if your boss & best friend share the same name & you excitedly send a very private message to the boss instead of the friend because GMail cleverly fills the email address while you type a few characters of the name. If such a scenario rings a bell, here is one option to prevent GMail from supplying names you don't want to see in the email auto-complete list that appears while composing a mail.

The easy way is to delete the contact. But if you want to prevent an email address from showing up in GMail auto-complete list when you try names in the To:, CC: or BCC: fields, then you can consider moving the email address from the Email field in the form for that Contact to the Notes field.

click on image to enlarge

HOW TO compare HTML5 features supported by versions 8, 9 & 10 of IE

2011-10-07T11:24:00.000-07:00

This page on the Browserscope website lets you choose versions of the same or different browsers & see how they stack up in supporting HTML5 features. Click on the "Compare UAs" link on that page, select User Agents you want to compare & then hit the Compare button.

I chose versions 8, 9 & 10 of Internet Explorer to see what's new with respect to HTML5 in IE9 & IE 10

click to enlarge image

You can copy the table data to Excel & transpose the columns to rows to view the tabular data vertically as a list (in Excel2010, click on Paste dropdown in Ribbon & select Transpose).

So here is the list of HTML5 supported features in IE9 as detected by Browserscope by utilizing Modernizer 2.0.4 -

audio:m4a
audio:mp3
backgroundsize
borderradius
boxshadow
canvas
canvastext
csstransforms
draganddrop
fontface
generatedcontent
geolocation
hashchange
hsla
inlinesvg
localstorage
multiplebgs
opacity
postmessage
rgba
sessionstorage
smil
svg
svgclippaths
video:h264

IE10 additionally supports the following HTML5 features -

applicationcache
cssanimations
csscolumns
cssgradients
csstransforms3d
csstransitions
history
indexeddb
input:autofocus
input:list
input:max
input:min
input:multiple
input:pattern
input:placeholder
input:required
input:step
inputtypes:email
inputtypes:number
inputtypes:range
inputtypes:search
inputtypes:tel
inputtypes:url
textshadow
websockets
webworkers

Also see:
Comparison of layout engines (HTML5)
HTML5 compatibility across major mobile and tablet browsers

Scott Allen's 10 favorite C# rules for developing software

2011-10-06T06:38:00.000-07:00

From Scott Allen's C# Fundamentals Part 2 course on Pluralsight -

Rule #10: Avoid Regions - as they are typically used to hide ugly code or classes that've exploded in size or responsibility. Think if you should break the regions into seperate classes
Rule #9: Use exceptions for errors..instead of status code or booleans...but not for control flow
Rule #8: Avoid boolean parameters
Rule #7: Avoid too many parameters - beyond 4, consider grouping
Rule #6: Warnings are errors - Go to a Project's Properties and in the Build tab of the dialog box that opens up, change "Treat warnings as errors" to All from the default None
Rule #5: Encapsulate complex expressions - Instant recognition is good
Rule #4: Try to avoid multiple exits - have just one
Rule #3: Try to avoid comments - A meaningful method name is more effective than comments. Triple slash comments in VS are ok as they help in documentation of an API. Other developers can see your comments through Intellisense when they reference your assembly.
Rule #2: Keep methods short - general rule of thumb: 1 to 10 lines
Rule #1: Keep classes small

+ The foundation for most C# coding standards is Microsoft's "Design Guidelines for Developing Class Libraries"
+ ReSharper VS Plugin & StyleCop can help you enforce naming conventions
+ Names contain meaning & adding meaning to code is what readability is all about - use meanigful names
+ Embedding type in the name of a variable is not a good idea especially for primitive types. Name should indicate what an variable or object can do & what it represents.
+ How to improve readability of your code - read other people's code to figure what is good & what is bad. Be introspective.

Thrilled to be among top Pro Webmasters Stack Exchange users to receive swag

2011-10-04T21:30:00.000-07:00

I'm a fan of several sites of the Stack Exchange family. I was thrilled to know that I'm among the top Pro Webmasters Stack Exchange users with over 950 reputation to receive cool swag. Thank you, Stack Exchange!

The Stack Exchange family currently consists of 65 question and answer sites & has over 1.2 million users.

Looking for internship or job? Check Microsoft's Students to Business program

2011-10-01T20:41:00.000-07:00

Microsoft's Students to Business website connects graduating students with Microsoft, Microsoft Partners and its customers. This program is open to graduating students in India. The enrollment process is simple and does not require any fees.

Microsoft's DreamSpark program gives students Microsoft professional tools at no charge.

For students passionate about software development, there are also other avenues where they can publish their original projects or contribute to ongoing open-source projects and get noticed. Here is a list of popular project hosting sites -

Trivia: Smiley & "Frowny" Emoticons

2011-09-19T20:12:00.000-07:00

In its Events That Shaped The Wired World section, Wired magazine credits Scott Fahlman with first using the Smiley :-) & "Frowny" :-( emoticons in electronic messages.

On Sept. 19th, 1982, he had proposed on the computer-science department bulletin board at Carnegie Mellon University that the smiley be used as a joke marker & "frowny" to mark things that are NOT jokes.

Scott came up with the idea after reading “lengthy diatribes” from people on the message board who failed to get the joke or the sarcasm in a particular post.

HOW TO block images/image ads originating from a specific domain in Firefox 4 & above

2011-09-17T23:39:00.000-07:00

Firefox 3.x used to have an option to block pesky images that were not part of the context of page that you were viewing - like image ads. You just had to right click on the image, & select "Block images from {domain serving the image}" to never see any images from that domain again. That context menu option is missing from Firefox 4 & above.

It turns out that it is still there but there are some additional steps to reach it. Right click on the image on the page you are viewing in Firefox & from the context menu, you have to select View Image Info & click on the checkbox "Block images from {site name}".
Thanks RalphB

Also see:
HOW TO block IFRAME based ads

Trends & Reference Tables that every Web Developer should track

2011-09-14T10:55:00.000-07:00

A web developer's education is never finished. Here is a list of trends & reference tables that, in my opinion, every web developer should track -

HTTP Archive - Trends in web technology, interesting stats, repository of web performance information
Browser Security Handbook - Key security properties of contemporary web browsers
HTML 5 Reference Table
HTML 4/ XHTML Reference Table
CSS 3 Reference Table
CSS 2 Reference Table
PPK's Browser Event Compatibility Tables - Desktop, Mobile
HTML5 compatibility on mobile and tablet browsers

work in progress...

Find Windows System info with Windows key + Pause/Break shortcut

2011-09-10T21:28:00.000-07:00

If you need to find hardware details of your Windows PC, like any of the following -

Version including Service Pack used
Window Experience Index
Processor
RAM
System type (32-bit or 64-bit OS)
Computer name, domain & workgroup settings
Windows Product Id & whether Windows is activated

... there is a easy keyboard shortcut to reach for this info rather than going for it through Control Panel - Windows key + Pause/Break

I discovered this shortcut in this Scott Hanselman article that has other great tips for maintaining your PC

Interesting USB accessories

2011-09-10T03:45:00.000-07:00

I follow the Personal Technology page of "Economic Times" with interest for their India-centric coverage of gadgets & IT topics.

This week ET listed 10 useful USB accessories. Among them, although a USB-based Hub & Mug Warmer, Cooler, paper shredder, Vaccum Cleaner have some novelty, they didn't appeal to me as much as these -

Jabra Speak 410 - USB powered speakerphone ... with integrated cable managment system. Weighing a mere 250g, this speakerphone also has a headset port where you can plug-in any 3.5mm headphones in case you want the call to be private. (Rs 8,000 from www.jabra.com)

USB Display - This little monitor is completely powered off USB – just one cable is needed for both the video signal and power. The 7-inch 800 x 480 pixel panel is touchscreen enabled too – you can move certain items onto it to clear space from your primary display.
The best part is that since the display connects via USB, your regular VGA/HDMI out is unused and can be used to output to another device simultaneously. ($229.99 from www.thinkgeek.com)

ASUS CrossLink Cable - Thanks to Asus' Crosslink USB cable and adapter, you can quickly connect and transfer data at high-speeds between two computers.The adapter is shaped like a USB drive, has 2GB storage and a miniUSB port on the other side to connect using the Crosslink cable. You can even share an internet connection and optical drive between two PCs. (Rs 4,000 from eBay Global EasyBuy)

USB Foldable keyboard - If your netbook's keyboard proves too small for you or you just prefer to carry your own keyboard around, this flexible USB keyboard is ideal. Since the keys and base material are made of silicon, it is completely silent.
Even though it has the full 104 keys, you can roll it up into a small package. The added advantage is that the keys are completely waterproof and dustproof. ($23.99 from www.thinkgeek.com)

USB Phone2PC - This handly little device is great if you want to keep a record of all your voice calls. It can be connected to most phones using an analog or digital connection and then it connects to the PC using USB.
A software is required to be installed which provides an easy-to-use interface to record incoming/outgoing calls. It includes an external microphone for recording meetings and interviews directly to the PC as well. (Rs 10,000 from www.ebay.in)

I'm surprised that such phone recording/tapping tools are easily available despite recording/tapping being illegal in several countries including India.

In the same technology section, ET gives Reliance 3G Tab a favorable review & 4 stars (out of 5). Reliance 3G Tab (Specs: 7-inch touchsceen,800 x 480 pixels,1.2Ghz processor,512MB RAM,4GB+microSD slot, 2MP rear camera, 2MP front camera, 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, FM, accelerometer, Android 2.3, 380 g) sells for 12,990 INR.

The review points out three areas where the Reliance 3G Tab doesn't match up to something like the original 7-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab (P1000).

Firstly,the screen has a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels the same as what a high-end smartphone offers and lower than the Galaxy's 1024 x 768.This means that the number of pixels per square inch (pixel density) is low.Secondly,the 800Mhz processor is a bit of a step down and it is noticeable at times with certain apps or when you scroll between screens too fast.Finally,the device is locked to the Reliance network,so you can't just use any SIM card you want.

In the end, they offer a nice suggestion -
If you'd rather not spend the extra,you can choose to buy the 3G Tab without a plan and pay just 12,999 upfront.You'll be using it just like a Wi-Fi tablet and later,you can opt for one of the discounted 3G advance rental or monthly plans.

Website to track weather in Indian cities - imd.gov.in

2011-09-02T21:05:00.000-07:00

Weather isn't a hot topic in India (as it is in the US) & forecasts aren't taken seriously.

Possibly to promote awareness, the Indian Meteorological Department has put out an ad in today's Times of India (with a glaring typo -Meteorological is misspelt as Meteorogical right at the beginning) to publicize the features if its site - IMD.GOV.IN

click image to enlarge

Besides a host of services & forecasts, the site publishes 3-day city forecast for 100 cities. Unfortunately, neither this nor the information from other weather forecasts are accessible as RSS feeds or through widgets as on the US National Weather Service website. As such, there is no easy means by which other websites or individuals can consume useful weather information.

There is a toll free number (1800 180 1717) to get city weather forecasts & observations but the site lacks services that have a "push" mechanism

A better designed site with interactive features (better maps, email alerts, easier accessibility on mobile phones) can boost the utility of India's official Weather tracking service by sharing its wealth of information among the general public.

Also see:
India - Know your elected government representatives
State of Internet in India
Browser Usage Stats for India
Jago Grahak Jago
E-Commerce in India
India IT - facts, numbers & trivia
Discover public transport in India with Google Transit

Compare ASP.NET Hosting Providers

2011-09-01T19:52:00.000-07:00

Microsoft's Web Hosting Gallery has a neat tool to let you search for hosting providers based on parameters like type of server (shared, dedicated, virtual server) cost, technologies supported (Frameworks, Databases, Publishing protocols), storage, number of SQL Databases, number of e-mail accounts, bandwidth per month, support, uptime.

Also see:
Tips on ASP.NET Hosting & Deployment

Types of ASP.NET MVC View Engines

2011-08-31T05:31:00.000-07:00

A view engine provides Controllers with the ability to translate views into HTML. There are multiple reasons why you may choose one view engine over another. Here is a list of different types of ASP.NET MVC View Engines, the first two are available with ASP.NET MVC 3 -

WebForms /ASPX – classic ASP.NET MVC views

Razor (CSHTML)

Spark

NHAML - (pronounced enamel) is a pure .NET implementation of the popular Rails Haml view engine.

NVelocity

Brail

It is possible to use multiple view engines in the same project

Related reading:
ASP.NET MVC View Engine Comparison
Spark and NHaml - Crazy ASP.NET MVC ViewEngines

Search Engine for Comics

2011-08-28T11:29:00.000-07:00

A relevant comic strip introduced into an article or presentation can make a topic more appealing & livelier (assuming you have permission to use if it's not your own). Finding the image of a strip on the web that you remember reading in a Sunday newspaper may not be easy. Don't you wish there was a comics search engine that could get you cartoons for a keyword you submit?

Here are a few that I found -

Calvin and Hobbes Search Engine by Michael "Bing" Yingling

Dilbert Strip Finder by BF Martin

XKCD - use this search filter on Google: [keyword -site:*.xkcd.com site:xkcd.com]. The first filter is to exclude searches within subdomains of xkcd.com. The content is indexed by Google because each strip has hidden text.

Software industry related comics

DuckDuckGo shows why Google may not be good for you

2011-08-22T20:11:00.000-07:00

To show that DuckDuckGo, a search engine site winning rave reviews, doesn't "filter bubble" or track you, they have illustrated guides to demonstrate how Google may not be as saintly or good as it may appear. The facts they present are something to ponder on.

On a different note, DuckDuckGo provides a great API alongwith other goodies like the easily configurable Karma Widget that displays your online karma (e.g. twitter follower count, facebook fans, etc.), for your blog, profiles or other Web sites.

Here's how a sample Karma Widget looks -

Related:
Say Goodbye to Privacy

Print stylesheet - Best Practices

2011-08-20T22:05:00.000-07:00

Using a Print stylesheet is a more convenient way to generate a printer-friendly page than creating such a page through server-side coding. Tim Connell has a nice CSS tip in his article on things to note while coding a stylesheet meant for printer output.

At some point, you have probably found yourself reading a printed article when you get to an engrossing section that includes a link for more information. A link that sits there teasing you with its blue underline. Without a mouse or Apple’s latest interfacing doo-hicky you have no chance of finding out where that link goes unless you return to the original article on screen.
The solution to unclickable links is an easy one to deploy. Use some CSS to print out the location of the link that would otherwise be hidden:
#content a:link:after,
content a:visited:after {
content: ” (“ attr(href) ”) “;
font-size: 80%;
text-decoration: none;
}

As a result of using the above CSS content property setting in the stylesheet meant for the printer, the actual link will appear next to a hyperlink in a printed page.

So content like this -

will show up like this in a printed page -

Mobile Web Trends - 2011

2011-08-20T10:45:00.000-07:00

Interesting points from BuiltWith.com's Mobile Web Technology Report 2011 -

The growth of the mobile web is staggering, with approximately 726 million people having access to a 3G mobile subscription

The viewport meta tag was originally designed by Apple to resize the layout viewport of a website, a requirement for the mobile device to understand how the website designer has defined how the content should be displayed to the end user. Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry and iPhone all support the viewport meta tag

Close to 3% of the top 10,000 sites use the viewport meta tag

Of the top 100 sites most visited on the internet, 71 of them have content specifically designed for mobile devices. The remaining 29 either do not support mobile devices or, depending on the device, prompt the user about a device specific application.

jQTouch is currently the most used mobile JavaScript library (38%) in the top million sites, shortly followed by JQuery Mobile (32%), both of which are extensions of JQuery, the most popular JavaScript library used on the web.

Summaries of Google Webmaster Central YouTube videos

2011-08-17T02:04:00.000-07:00

There are currently close to 400 videos on Google Webmaster Central YouTube channel featuring Matt Cutts who answers questions posted to the Webmaster Help Forum or to the Twitter handle @googlewmc. Occasionally, some Google secrets slip out in these videos. You can also pick up some tips & tricks on SEO by watching these typically 2-minute videos.

If you are SEO inclined, the videos have some interesting titles that draw you to find out the answers. I track updates through their YouTube channel RSS feed. I sometimes wish the answer was part of the intro that comes with the feed so that I can find the answer immediately. For future reference, I plan to jot down summaries of these videos while I watch a few of them every week. Here goes the list -

* Do spelling and grammar matter when evaluating content and site quality? (Aug 17, 2011)
No.
Reputable sites tend to spell better and the sites that are lower page rank tend not to spell as well, so "that's the sort of content analysis that would be pretty interesting to explore as a potential quality signal"

* Why do Amazon.com pages tend to rank well for product queries? (May 25, 2011)
If there's an official homepage for a product, it will rank very well & sometimes number one. Not every book or product has an home page. Amazon has a relatively good user experience in general and lots of links to it due to which it tops the result list.

* How does Google handle pages with content that changes on each page load? (asked on Apr 22, 2011)
If you really want Googlebot to see & follow, make sure that the important links are always on your root page.

* Can I tell Google about links to my site? (Apr 19, 2011)
Better let Google find the links. You can upload a sitemap which is a list of all URLs on your site but Google doesn't guarantee that uploading a sitemap will get all of your pages indexed.

* Can coding errors affect how a page is indexed? (asked on Apr 19, 2011)
Check the web page in a text browser or the popular browsers, if you can see the text. "If all that text is visible, then it should, for the most part, be able to be indexed by Google."

* How can I make sure that Google knows my content is original? Apr 4, 2011
Google tries hard but is not perfect at identifying who is the original author of an article. To let Google index your original article faster before a deceptive site like a scraper, claims it is its own (by showing a manipulated timestamp), let the world know about it by, for example, tweeting about it or hook up thinks like Pub Subhubhub which will ping various places to asynchronously say that there's a new article or blog post.
Alternatively, you can do a DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) notice or a spam report

* Is serving Googlebot a transcript in place of a video considered to be cloaking? (asked on May 5, 2011)
Yes, that would be considered cloaking and is not recommended. Show the video & transcript as well.

* How do you rate links from sites like Twitter and Facebook? (asked on Jan 14, 2010)
Google treats links the same. It looks at how reputable the links are. It doesn't matter whether they come from a .gov or .edu or Twitter or Facebook...they don't automatically carry weight.

* How much weight does the number of years a domain is registered for have on your ranking? (asked on May 7, 2009)
Don't "worry about that very much"

* How can new pages get indexed quickly (besides using Google Webmaster Tools)? (May 27, 2009)
Get more links. Google can index a page within seconds.

* Does the position of keywords in the URL affect ranking? (Mar 5, 2009) Is example.com/keyword/London is better than example.com/London/keyword?
Not a lot. Having four or five keywords maybe good

All videos have a transcript (hidden by default) but they may not work every time (the trouble could be with the JavaScript to show-hide the panel). To view transcript, click on the button to the right of the flag below the video (if you hover over it it, it will say "Interactive Transcript") and it will open up the transcript.

Cross-Browser Testing Tools

2011-08-15T10:16:00.000-07:00

I've used cross-browser testing tools like Adobe BrowserLab, Browsershots & Expression Web SuperPreview but didn't know there were a dozen more.

Smashing Magazine has done an exhaustive review of all available cross-browser testing tools with a nice tabular summary at the end for easy comparison. It covers the following list of tools -

Free:

Adobe BrowserLab

Browsershots

Expression Web SuperPreview (free and commercial)

Lunascape 6

IETester

IE NetRenderer

Spoon

Sauce Labs (free and commercial) - 200 free minutes/month

Browsera (free and commercial)

Browserling (free and commercial)

Commercial:

Mogotest

Cloud Testing

BrowserCam

Multi-Browser Viewer

CrossBrowserTesting

Learning with Pluralsight videos gets even better with course assesments

2011-07-27T20:51:00.000-07:00

If you are Pluralsight subscriber, you can try out the course assesment beta feature to test yourself on what you've learnt. Pluralsight is currently seeking feedback on the Q & A and intends to make this feature available in the future along with the course with score tracking after community vetting.

For those fond of quizzies, the current limitation of allowing only 10 beta test assessments every 30-days may be a little stifling.

I hope Pluralsight also start a Forums section soon to let its users discuss topics covered in the courses.

Free JavaScript & jQuery learning resources

2011-07-27T10:23:00.000-07:00

There is a nice compilation of JavaScript & jQuery learning resources in this community wiki on StackOverflow.com. I picked those which are publicly available online along with my own favorites. Here's the list -

Videos:

eBooks, Articles, Tutorials -

(work in progress...)

Also see:
Popular JavaScript apps dissected
Free Online University Courseware & Video Lectures
JavaScript: The Good Parts - photo gag
Stanford's CS101 course now taught with Javascript (thanks @tkadlec)

Learn IIS 7 - IIS 7.x's Configuration System

2011-07-24T06:40:00.000-07:00

Notes from Scott Forsyth's session "IIS 7.x's Configuration System" in his 52-week video lesson series -

- IIS 7.x drastically different from IIS 6

- IIS 6 - IIS path (Metabase.xml) & .NET path (machine.config, web.config (root, site, app))

- Metabase.xml - app pools, site config, mime types, compression, various settings like default document

- 2 paths have merged & .NET becomes a first class citizen in IIS 7.x

- IIS 7.x - Distributed & Delegated Config system

- applicationHost.config (kind of replaces metabase.xml, guts of IIS) & administration.config (IIS Manager related settings) host most of the settings of IIS. Both files are in the %windir%\System32\inetsrv\config\ folder

- lot of settings related to not just .NET but also IIS config settings can live in the web.config or app web.config files

- Settings managed by IIS admin can also be managed by the development team as well.

- Feature Delegation - what settings are allowed to be applied in the config files vs. what has to be set at the global level. Every setting or config section has a decision on whether it is Read/Write- can't be delegated or whether it's read-only.

+ Benefits of Distributed Config
- Developers have more control of IIS settings - delegated management
- IIS configuration saved in source control
- Easier to maintain when migrating
- Websites packaged for consistent deployments - some settings may not work as they are not delegated

+ Gotcha's of Distributed Config
- Easy to overwrite existing settings
- AppDomain recycle
- Configuration is "all over the place" (aplicationHost.config, web.config files of site)
- Not replicated with shared config

- Lines are blurred between IIS & ASP.NET

Related: Getting Started with IIS Manager

Older ASP.NET Starter Kits

2011-07-23T10:41:00.000-07:00

The current ASP.NET Starter Kits page does not show older Starter Kits built on ASP.NET 2.0 & links to them that you may find in old articles may be broken. When I have to refer these useful oldies to folks in need, I keep going back to the search engine. Rather than waste time searching, I thought I'll place them all at one place. So here goes -

Why formatting of a ASP.NET page looks different when rendered through VWD & IIS

2011-07-20T12:51:00.000-07:00

A puzzled ASP.NET developer asked on the ASP.NET Forums why the formatting of the same ASP.NET page looked different in Internet Explorer when rendered by Visual Web Developer & IIS seperately. When the entire source code is the same, why should they look different?

Dave Sussman has this insightful answer -
It's possible the application is running on IIS under a v4 application pool, meaning it will be run as though it were a v4 application, so the control rendering might be different. Two things to do:

1. On IIS machine, select the application and from the Actions tab on the right, select "Basic Settings ...". From the dialog that pops up, select the appropriate application pool (Classic .NET AppPool for an ASP.NET 2.0 application).

or

2. In Web.Config, in the <system.web> section add:

<pages controlRenderingCompatibilityVersion="3.5" />

That will ensure the controls are rendered as though the application was ASP.NET 3.5, so should be consistent on both machines.

A standard ASP.NET control may render a different kind of source depending on which Framework it targets. For instance, ASP.NET 4 brings the following major rendering changes:

The Image and ImageButton controls no longer render a border="0" attribute.
The BaseValidator class and validation controls that derive from it no longer render red text by default.
The HtmlForm control does not render a name attribute.
The Table control no longer renders a border="0" attribute.
Controls that are not designed for user input (for example, the Label control) no longer render the disabled="disabled" attribute if their Enabled property is set to false (or if they inherit this setting from a container control).

Legacy rendering can be preserved using the ControlRenderingCompatibilityVersion setting in the web.config file.

Also see:

HOW TO control ASP.NET's Adaptive Rendering behavior

HOW TO manage a ASP.NET site during maintenance

HTML5 at work

2011-07-18T20:18:00.000-07:00

I plan to look out for & compile interesting, practical, real-world examples of HTML5 features that popular websites have started implementing. I hope all the browser manufacturers quickly agree on a common minimum set of HTML5 features & get HTML5 rolling.

* Google Docs now supports uploading an entire folder.

There is a nice explanation on StackOverflow about how this is achieved by setting up an attribute "webkitdirectory" on a file input element.

Unfortunately as this attribute is proprietary, this feature doesn't work on all browsers.

* The Windows Live team recently released a faster new version of SkyDrive that incorporates HTML5 features.

"We’re using HTML5 for CSS animations, reflow animations and other features. We’re using local storage for various parts of our caching support. We’ve also worked on making our HTML more standards compliant, so that everything you see works in as many modern browsers as possible."

HTML5 versions of Hotmail & Bing are believed to be on the cards

* 6 of the world's top 10 websites currently use LocalStorage on the mobile while Bing & Google use it on the desktop browser as well. Twitter uses App cache.

(to be continued....)

Discover public transport in India with Google Transit

2011-07-17T04:11:00.000-07:00

I first tried Google Transit in Seattle in 2008 for help with bus routes and wished it came to India as well. I was happy when it started covering local trains of the Hyderabad Multi Modal Transit System (MMTS) in 2010(it seems to discontinued now) and then wished it worked with bus routes as well. Being a believer in public transport as a way to protect the environment, I was glad to find out that Google Transit provides help with bus routes in Hyderabad, Bangalore, Chennai, Mumbai, Delhi.

It'll be great if they also show the cost & distance involved in different bus routes and bus types (buses in Bangalore & Hyderabad have multiple types of services with varying ticket costs)

Adobe BrowserLab vs Browsershots.org: online services for cross browser testing

2011-07-16T11:28:00.000-07:00

Adobe BrowserLab is an online cross browser testing service (free till April 12, 2012) that has more features than Browsershots.org, the other free online cross browser testing service. However, BrowserLab currently covers a smaller set of browsers & platforms than Browsershots -

Chrome 10 - Windows
Chrome 11 - Windows
Firefox 3.0 - OS X
Firefox 3.0 - Windows
Firefox 3.6 - OS X
Firefox 3.6 - Windows
Firefox 4.0 - Windows
Internet Explorer - Windows
Internet Explorer - Windows
Internet Explorer - Windows
Internet Explorer - Windows
Safari 4.0 - OS X
Safari 5.0 - OS X

Unlike Browsershots, BrowserLab requires registration. The screenshots are shown using Flash so Flash Player plugin 10.0.0 or higher is required and Javascript needs to be enabled in the browser.

Opening screen showing BrowserLab generate screenshots for a chosen Browser Set

Some unique features of BrowserLab:
- Preview full screenshots with multiple view options and customizable test settings.
- Rulers & Guides - pinpoint the exact location of any area within a screenshot.
- Adjust screen shot alignment - to compare specific page elements to each other, you can adjust the alignment of screen shots individually. This helps you account for shifts caused by different browsers, which align page content differently
- Screenshot delay - you can preview content that needs time to generate by pausing the rendering of a screenshot by up to 10 seconds. This lets you capture Ajax data, interface animations that occur after the page loads, and Flash movies after their initial loading process.
- BrowserLab for Firebug add-on - lets you preview temporary changes you've made to a page with Firebug. BrowserLab can be launched directly from Firefox to show how the page looks in Firefox & other browsers.
- Active Links in screenshots - Links in screenshots can be activated by holding down the Control or Command keys & clicking. BrowserLab will open the link & generate a screenshot, replacing the current screenshot.

Related:
HOW TO make web pages "cross browser"

Overview of Pluralsight course "A Beginner's Guide to the Microsoft Web Platform"

2011-07-14T14:23:00.000-07:00

This video course by Michael Palermo is useful for beginners to ASP.NET and ASP.NET developers who are yet to try MVC & WebPages. The seasoned presenter explains the difference between Web Forms, MVC and WebPages. He demonstrates how to create a new site, a new page, a simple input form, a data-driven list with each of the models.

Some notes from the video -
- A modern definition of ASP.NET – "Microsoft’s family of technologies to enable web development"; includes Web Forms, MVC, Web Page models
- The Web Page model is a page-centric execution model, similar to PHP. Markup and code are both contained in the page itself, with helpers being leveraged to keep the code succinct.
- If you have VS 2010 SP1, you should be able to see MVC3 options
- A WebPage can be built with Web Matrix or VS 2010
- Site built with WebMatrix can be opened through VS
- WebPage has the extension .cshtml. Works even without extension in the URL.
- CASE methodology – Copy Always Steal Everything. Bazinga!

I found that the presenter speaks slower than most other Pluralsight instructors and this is actually good as non-native English speakers can follow it more easily.

Trivia: For fun, I increased the Playback speed in the Windows Media Player (this option is available when you open the site in Internet Explorer) and was able to complete watching the video in slightly lesser time than the actual duration of 1 hour 47 minutes.

I like the fact the Pluralsight specifies the overall duration as well as duration of individual sections of a course as it helps in planning how you would want to watch a long course.

You can now use an actual image as Google Image search argument

2011-07-11T20:39:00.000-07:00

There are times when you just have a picture (of a monument, person etc) but can't frame a keyword for Google to search on.

The search box on Google Images now sports a camera icon on the text box as an indicator that you can use to either upload an image from your computer (by just dragging & dropping with browsers supporting HTML5) or specify an url of an image that you want more info on. This image is then used as an search argument and the web is searched.

This kind of visual search is already available with the Google Goggles mobile app. Although the results are not perfect in all cases, this is a remarkable development in terms of bringing complex computer science topics to practical use.

HOW TO check what HTML5 features a browser supports

2011-07-09T11:54:00.000-07:00

Now that I'm getting my feet wet in HTML5, I thought I should spend more time with features that are supported by all popular browsers rather than digging into HTML5 features that are implemented by only one or two browsers.

Table showing browser support for HTML5 Input types from W3Schools.com

I noticed a nice demo by Craig Shoemaker in the Pluralsight HTML5 Fundamentals course on feature detection with Modernizr that lists all supported features. Not finding any readymade sample similar to his script after some googling and lazy to write it on my own, I tweeted him to ask if could share his code.

I appreciate that he did and I got it working locally after tweaking the CSS a bit to ignore a few images that he had used in his slightly old (it uses Modernizr 1.6) original code. I hope to work on it further while I learn more about HTML5 & Modernizr.

Meanwhile, here is the HTML5 Feature detection script using Modernizr 1.6 (red indicates a feature is 'not supported' while green means 'supported')

Update: haz.io & the Modernizr Test Suite show a much larger list of HTML5 features supported by a browser opening their test page.

Browserscope compares all browsers on supported HTML5 features in a single page. I wish the first row & column of the table there were frozen for better readability.

Online database of medicines used in India - MedGuideIndia.com

2011-07-08T02:20:00.000-07:00

No matter how big or small your ailment, you should never try to play doctor. However, there may be times when you want to verify details of medicines you are consuming. Typically, Indian doctors scribble names of medicines that are almost illegible but surprisingly understandable by the pharmacist.

MedGuideIndia lets you check details of commonly used drugs in India by their brand name. Their search feature also shows brand names for a specified generic drug and you can find out which manufacturers sell that drug and at what cost. Composition of brands and comparative prices of various brands of same composition are shown as well.

This website, aimed mainly at medical professionals, is not an alternative for an actual doctor but it helps consumers to be well-informed.

HOW TO see how your web pages are ranking in realtime

2011-07-06T23:19:00.000-07:00

Google tells us not to focus on PageRank or “PR”, the famous part of their ranking algorithm, as a metric for success. It acknowledges that PageRank being a number is easier to measure than relevance which is what actually counts. Google removed PageRank distribution data from Webmaster Tools but if you still want to see in real-time how your web pages are faring, use StatCounter analytics.

Note that the Search Rankings vary when searches are conducted from different parts of the world and at different times. The ranking you see displayed in your StatCounter account is the actual rank position that your visitor saw (for your web page) from the location they are in, at the time they did the search.

Currently, this information is only available for some Google searches so you will not see a ranking beside every Google query or beside non-Google queries.

In Google AJAX SERPs (Search Engine Results Page), when you click on a link Google redirects you to the search page and also passes some referrer information that analytics providers can use to track rank. For example, the cd= parameter contains the exact ranking position of the search listing within the SERP -
http://www.google.co.uk/search?sa=t&source=web&cd=4&ved=0CEk.... [trimmed]

This is possibly the method that StatCounter uses to identify the rank of a page.

Related:
Comparison of free Web Analytics tools

Learn IIS7 with Scott Forsyth's 52-week video lesson series

2011-07-04T21:40:00.000-07:00

IIS expert Scott Forsyth has been running a video lesson series where he shares best practices, technical processes, tools of the trade, and occasional stories from working in the trenches. 25 of the planned 52 weekly, roughly 10 minute sessions are hosted on YouTube and currently available for free viewing. I checked out the "AppDomain - What it is and Why it's Important" & "IIS Virtual Directory vs. Application" sessions & found them very informative. I've jotted down some material from there & I'll add more as I finish watching the rest -

* When to use Virtual Directory vs Application -
- Use Virtual Directory when you want to point to a different physical path, when you want to share a physical folder across sites.
+ Use Application when you want:
- New application root or
- AppDomain isolation or
- Subfolder to be in new application pool (2 folders of same site targetting different .NET Framework versions can be set to different app pools)

- A vDir pointing to a single physical path can be shared by 2 sites. While accessing files under that shared folder, it appears as if this vDir appears physically under it.

+ 4 types of IIS Folders (note the icons in the image)
- Normal Folder
- Application Folder - use "Convert to Application" in the context menu. Lets you change Application pool but not physical path
- vDir only Folder - shares same app domain & app pool as root site
- vDir with Application - vDir with seperate application boundary

- On removing an Application, physical path remains but references are lost.

- AppDomains are a boundary set up by ASP.NET; they are controlled by IIS

- Usually there is a 1:1 mapping between app & app pool

+ AppDomain recycle consequences -
- First hit perf penalty when
- Any info in that appdomain (like inproc sessions) is lost

+ AppDomain Recycle causes -
- App Pool Recycle/server reset/reboot
- Touching or modifying web.config
- Touching anything in an application folder (bin folder or any of the 7 ASP.NET special folders - App_Code etc)
- Adding/deleting folders
- IIS settings that affect app pool
- IIS settings that affect web.config (change to Default Document in IIS causes app recycle as this file is referenced in web.config)
- Root machine.config & web.config changes (but modifying applicationHost.config will have no impact)
- Some failures at AppPool or AppDomain level

India IT - facts, numbers & trivia

2011-07-02T19:49:00.000-07:00

Numbers tell a story. Interesting tidbits about India IT from the newspapers (work in progress) -

Tata Consultancy Services has emerged as the largest recruiter over the last year, followed by Infosys and Wipro Technologies. Cognizant Technology Solutions India Pvt. Ltd. is ranked four in the list, while HCL Technologies Ltd came fifth. The other players who found place in the top 10 list are: Mphasis Ltd, Genpact Ltd, Capgemini India Pvt Ltd, Tech Mahindra Ltd, Aegis Ltd. .....women as a percentage of total new hires have reached more than 40 per cent over the last 3 years - NASSCOM rankings of top 20 IT-BPO employers. CIOL, 28-Jul-2011
Onshore software services (often derogatorily called 'body shopping') account for close to 45% of TCS' $8-billion revenues - ET, 1-Jul-2011
Telecom Regulatory Authority of India reported that at the end of March (2011) the country had just 8.8m broadband connections. By contrast, it boasts some 812m mobile subscribers. - Economist, 28-Jun-2011
"..cloud-services form 3 per cent of Infosys' income, and over 10 per cent if cloud- products are included." - 25-Jun-2011
TCS's headcount stood at 1,60,429 as on April 1, 2010, which increased to 1,98,614 as on March 31 this year. - ET, 21-Jun-2011
Infosys had 130,820 employees during 2010-2011, from 88 nationalities. Of this, the number of software professionals stood at 123,811, while the rest were sales and support staff....the average age of its employees in 2011 stood at 27 years. The trend is similar with other IT service providers, including Wipro and TCS. - BS, 4-Jun-2011
Tata Consultancy Services is the largest private sector employer in the country. It had 1,63,700 employees as on June 30. But guess who's number 2? ....The fact that IBM has over one lakh people on its rolls (global workforce is about 400,000) in this country is one of India Inc's best-kept secrets. ToI, 18-Aug-2010
Wipro .. "the first company in the world to achieve a level 5 CMM certification" ET, 8-May-2010

Also see: Indian software product start-ups that are making news

Florida Primary : The billionaire businessman Jeff Greene,

2011-06-27T10:50:00.000-07:00

Florida Primary : The billionaire businessman Jeff Greene, who ran as a Democrat for the U.S. Senate, and multi-millionaire health care executive Rick Scott, who ran the Republican nomination for governor, have positioned as newcomers fresh ready to take on the establishment candidate, Democrat Kendrick Meek and Republican Bill McCollum, respectively.

Ordered List

Polls predict "no", but the last word belongs to voters.

Polls predict "no", but the last word belongs to voters.

Unord--

Polls predict "no", but the last word belongs to voters.

Polls predict "no", but the last word belongs to voters.

Quotes

Polls predict "no", but the last word belongs to voters. Polls predict "no", but the last word belongs to voters. Polls predict "no", but the last word belongs to voters. Polls predict "no", but the last word belongs to voters.

Polls predict "no", but the last word belongs to voters.

Polls predict "no", but the last word belongs to voters. Polls predict "no", but the last word belongs to voters.

Notes from Tech-Ed session "Team Foundation Server for Everyone"

2011-06-25T08:34:00.000-07:00

The video recording of Martin Woodward's two sessions at Tech-Ed, NA 2011, Team Foundation Server for Everyone & The Accidental Team Foundation Server Admin provide an overview of TFS 2010 in about 2 hours. Some notes -

TFS installation choices - Basic, Advanced
TFS Basic Wizard - most compact TFS installation possible, provides only Source Control, WorkItem Tracking & Build services; can even work with SQL Server Express
No requirement for Windows SharePoint Services, SQL Server Reporting Services
Supports client installations - Windows 7, Windows Vista
Grows when you grow - Client OS, Single server, Multi-server farms
x64 Support
Supports Java development
Team Foundation VSSConverter command-line tool can migrate projects, files, version history, labels, and user information from your Visual SourceSafe database to your server for Team Foundation version control. This tool is included with TFS.
Helps with Build Automation & Continuous Integration
Work Item Tracking enables you track everything you need to manage: Tasks, Bugs, User Feedback, Feature requests
Rich integration in Visual Studio / Eclipse
Full featured synchronization lets you work in Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Project
Web Access lets you get to your work items
CodePlex uses TFS 2010 to manage 2.5 million users & 15000 Team Projects. Involves 4 Virtual Machine Application-Tier Farm with 10 Team Foundation Server Instances on 2 physical servers
Developer Division at Microsoft uses TFS - 42 instances, 19,700 unique users, 6,154 team projects, 7.9 million work items

IBM turns 100

2011-06-18T21:49:00.000-07:00

To highlight its achievements in the 100 years of its existence, IBM has released a full-page ad in some Indian newspapers & a dedicated site for IBM's 100 Icons of Progress. A few interesting facts & trivia from that list of accomplishments -

IBM programmer John Backus and his team produced the first high-level language, FORTRAN (for FORmula TRANslating System) in 1957.
Contributed to the rise of the Internet by designing with its partners a new high-speed National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET) to connect US universities and 6 US-based supercomputer centers.
Developed storage devices like Magnetic tape & Floppy disk
Invented the UPC barcode system in 1973
The first IBM Personal Computer (IBM 5150) had a price tag of $1,565 & earned Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” award. The brand name PC has got so popular that it is now used as a synonym for a micro-computer.
IBM engineer Forrest Parry's wife contributed to the development of Magnetic Stripe Technology by suggesting to her husband that he use the iron to melt the magnetized tape strip onto a piece of plastic when he was struggling to combine the two components. Now you know who is behind the magnetic stripe on credit cards.

Also see:
100 Years of IBM in Pictures

History of Apple

The History of Microsoft

15 years of Internet Explorer

Windows 7 is 1 year old, Windows platform soon to be 25

Notes from Tech-Ed session "Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.5 for Developers"

2011-06-18T02:33:00.000-07:00

Steve Evans' presentation "Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.5 for Developers" at Tech-Ed, NA 2011, had some interesting IIS tips & tricks. I transcribed some of them from the more than hour-long video recording on Channel9 -

- Developers have Swiss cheese knowledge – they know a lot but there are holes in what they are familiar with.

Certificates
- Certificate Authority (CA) creates a cert for a specific site & date range, the OS trusts it.
- Client connects to server, pulls down cert & check for 3 things -
* Certificate creator trusted?
* Host header matches?
* Date is in range?
- Configuring SSL certificates - A wildcard certificate can be used for multiple sites related to each other
- You can drop a non-CA issued cert into the Trusted Root Certification Authority to simulate a real scenario while experimenting with a feature

PowerShell
- strong support in IIS 7.5
- PowerShell treats IIS as a drive

DefaultDocument setting
- DefaultDocument setting within IIS Manager lets you specify the default file to return when a client does not request a specific file.
- Interesting IIS notification when I tried the DefaultDocument setting on an Application - "The file ‘default.aspx’ exists in the current directory. It is recommended that you move this file to the top of the list to improve performance"

Feature Delegation
- Feature Delegation module is used to configure the default delegation state for features at lower levels in IIS Manager
- web.config is created automatically when certain settings are added in IIS.
- we have the option in IIS to change which settings are stored in the web.config versus the IIS metabase. Its through Feature Delegation.
- if Feature Delegation is set to Read Only, the setting is stored in the IIS metabase

Application Pool- is where the code runs
- Managed pipeline mode setting for Application Pool has 2 options –
* Integrated – ASP.NET is part of the pipeline
* Classic
- Be in Integrated mode whenever you can
- 10 year old codebase in ASP migrated to IIS 7.5 ran fine in Integrated mode
- Application Pool > Advanced Settings | General > “Enable 32-bit application”-false will address more than 4 gigs of memory
- Application Pool > Advanced Settings > Process Model | Idle timeout – set to 0 on Production server, default is 20 minutes
- Every 29 hours (Recycling | Regular time interval - 1740 minutes), the app pool will recycle (inproc sessions will be lost) no matter what
-Worker Processes module in IIS Manager lists all App pools
- Host rogue or crash-prone apps in a separate app pool so that it’s in a sandbox

Failed Request Tracing Rules
- configure tracing for failed requests. A request trace is logged either when an error status code is generated or when the time taken for the request exceeds a specified duration. If both conditions have been fulfilled, the first condition that is met willl generate the request trace.

Log Parser Lizard
- free GUI tool for MS Log Parser

MS Web Deploy /One Click deploy - available through command-line (MSDeploy.exe) & GUI
- Example: msdeploy -verb:sync -source:webServer -dest:webServer,computerName=demoiis -whatif - informs what would change on a sync but not actually change it.

Security
- After the Code Red security issue in IIS5, from IIS6 onwards components of IIS are disabled by default.
- URL Scan is built into IIS 7.

Web Platform Installer - app store for IIS

URL Rewrite - popular extension for IIS
- allows us to write rules to change the request coming in & going out on they fly
- comes with a bunch of pre-canned rules
- The sample rule UserFriendlyURL makes URLs SEO-friendly
- provides rewriting capabilities based on rules for the requested URL address & the content of an HTTP response. So if user types http://site2.com/ IIS can make it look as http://www.site2.com/
- You can rename URL Rewrite configured rules in web.config to have memorable names rather than using the automated default names.

IIS Express
- true IIS except it does not run as a service, it runs as a app under your user context.
- "Use IIS Express" appears in context menu for project in VS & you can switch from using Cassini to IIS Express. URL Rewrite, FRT, Log files (for use with Log Parser) available with IIS Express

Also see: Free videos from major Microsoft Developer events are archived on Channel9

JavaScript: The Good Parts - photo gag

2011-06-15T18:51:00.000-07:00

Photo gag by an observant Niyaz PK (click on image to enlarge)

Try these VHDs instead of using any pirated Microsoft software

2011-06-15T10:41:00.000-07:00

Programming with new Microsoft products & technologies does not have to cost anything. Besides offering time-limited (trial editions) or feature-limited (Express editions) versions of its products, MS also makes available VHDs of some of its popular products. Here is a list of such VHDs that I've come across (work in progress) -

The downside is that most of these VHDs are time-bombed and are VERY bulky.

If after evaluating a product, you wish to seed these trial editions of the OS, SQL, VS, etc. with MSDN keys so the VPC doesn't expire, you can (as acknowledged by an MS evangelist in the comments section of this link).

Also see: HOW TO try Windows Azure for free (without any credit card)

Google Maps Driving Directions gadget - useful for a "Contact Us" page

2011-06-13T20:17:00.000-07:00

Google organizes "the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful" but info about some of its own products may be a little difficult to find. If there was a reference to Driving Directions gadget & the Static Maps wizard on the Google Maps API Family page, they could be easily discovered. As these useful utilities exist on orphaned pages and are hard to find, many developers may go on to create their own components.

The Google Driving Directions gadget is a nifty utility that organizations can configure for their websites to show on a map where they are located. More importantly, it optionally lets users type their location & then shows the travel route visually & through textual instructions.

Free, online, open-source book on web performance - Book of Speed

2011-06-12T20:58:00.000-07:00

Stoyan Stefanov, a web performance expert, Facebook engineer, ex-Yahoo, smush.it creator & YSlow 2.0 architect, has released the draft of Book of Speed for free & public access. Currently 5 of the planned 9 chapters are online.

In his blog post announcing the release, he also mentions another free, online JavaScript resource by Marijn Haverbeke - Eloquent JavaScript.

Chrome Offline Installer

2011-06-12T04:16:00.000-07:00

Chrome uses a installer that you have to first get which then downloads the latest stable version of the browser. If you have to install Chrome on several machines, you can grab the offline installer. That way, you don't even need internet connectivity for each install.

I found this helpful tip on the official Chrome Forum.

HOW TO export Contacts from a LG CDMA Mobile to newer phones

2011-06-04T10:39:00.000-07:00

I recently needed to copy Contacts from a LG-Reliance CDMA Mobile handset to a GSM smartphone. After a bit of monkeying around with the available options, I found that you can copy Contacts to the CDMA SIM.

I inserted the CDMA SIM into the GSM smartphone and could successfully copy the Contact details to the smartphone.

Popular sites which use Lucene

2011-06-03T10:35:00.000-07:00

List compiled from Lucene wiki's link database & references in various online articles -

Apple
Disney
IBM
LinkedIn
Wolfram Research, Inc. - Wolfram Research uses Lucene for internal tools, the Demonstrations project, the Mathematica documentation search and site searching.
Pluralsight
StackOverflow

(work in progress)

Also see: Large sites that run on ASP.NET

Say goodbye to Google Translate, Transliterate & ten other APIs

2011-05-29T03:04:00.000-07:00

About a fortnight ago, Google highlighted on its official blog how "two clever Translate trends caught our eye—perhaps one of them will inspire you to come up with a fun Translate trick of your own.". Folks around the world were making fun remixes

First, some creative folks translated strings of consonants into German to create a new beatboxing tool. The phrase “pv zk bschk” didn’t initially make much sense to us, but a quick listen got us nodding our heads along to the beat.
Now it seems there’s a similar trend in Taiwan: using the spoken output of Google Translate as the vocals for self-composed songs or video spoofs.

A few days ago there was an announcement on the Google Code blog that the Google Translate, Transliterate & ten other APIs will be deprecated. The Google Translate API will be shut off completely on December 1, 2011 and the reason is "substantial economic burden caused by extensive abuse". So what constitutes "fun Translate tricks" and abuse? Why not just debar developers abusing the API?

An aggrieved developer ranted thus in the comments section of that announcement -

you are supposed to be the smartest guys on the planet and the only solution you can come up is to shut it down? thats a joke, but the joke is on us, the developers.
with this move you just showed us what you really: a company that does not care about developers, you just want to become more like facebook and apple. oh what a great world we live in. more walled gardens.

Also see - HOW TO monitor performance and availability status of public APIs & websites

Tatkal Train Ticket Reservation Tips

2011-05-28T10:23:00.000-07:00

Tatkal train ticket reservation is a ray of hope for millions of Indians who prefer to commute by trains over other forms of travel even if they have to pay extra because the original reserved ticket quota has run out. The IRCTC website is possibly the best known site in India as it helps travellers avoid the long queues at the train reservation centers. It is also probably the most hated site as getting the more premium Tatkal ticket is a harrowing experience.

Some of these tips to book a Tatkal train ticket online maybe too obvious for experienced folks so don't write to tell me. If you like them, tell your friends. None of these tips guarantee confirmed availability as they are numerous factors involved that matter (like season, day of the week, route etc), these may just improve your chances. Here are the tips that I usually offer to my relatives who are not Internet power-users -

Many cities have multiple stations and IRCTC will get you results for all stations for that city. If the original station codes don't match, you will have to subsequently fill another form to specify the exact FROM & TO stations which is a waste of precious seconds during the first half-hour of Tatkal booking.
Keep alternative station codes ready. Don't wait for the autocompletion feature to fill-in the FROM & TO fields.
There MAY be a greater probability of getting Tatkal tickets on long distance trains as they will cost more than those which run between major cities and they are less known as they don't run on all days of the week.
Keep long words like your name and bank details saved in Notepad/text editor so that you can quickly copy-paste. Youngsters are generally quick with the keyboard (due to the long hours they spend on the computer) so you could get a power user to assist you in case typing isn't your strongest skill. It may help to have multiple people around while booking in order to take quick decisions & also to sanity check the data that is being entered. For instance, mis-typing the gender in the hurry could lead you to do some explaining to the TTE or a visit to the reservation office to get it corrected.
Use a modern browser (not IE6 or older versions of other popular browsers) as they load pages relatively faster.
Your IRCTC "session" may time out if you leave the site unused for a long time. If you anticipate the reservation exercise to take a lot of time, use Opera browser's native auto-refresh feature or use this bookmarklet in IE, Firefox, Safari & Chrome to automatically refresh a webpage at specified intervals.
Get the fastest Internet service possible (3G USB) & browse from a decent laptop. That way you can avoid any disruption due to an unfortunate powercut or a landline Internet service issue. If you perform a dry-run before the actual exercise, some elements of the IRCTC site like images maybe cached and may improve speed slightly.
Rather than take a single direct train, you can use 90di.com to look for multiple trains in the same route. You have to compromise on comfort & cost but at least you may be able to get confirmed tickets.
Every second counts, so keep yourself distraction free & busy till you have finished all options.
Each user is currently permitted to book only 10 tickets in a month. So if you book a lot of tickets, make sure you are not crossing the monthly limit before you start the Tatkal ticket booking adventure. In such a case, you can be prepared with credentials of another userid.

A scenario that I foresee for the future in case IRCTC doesn't tackle the "Service Unavailable" issue (which typically comes up between 8-8:20 AM) is that desperate train ticket seekers will stand in queues with their smartphones at ticket reservation counters to try their luck both online & offline.

If you end up without confirmed Tatkal tickets at the end of the fateful first hour of booking, take consolation in the fact that you are one among thousands that had the same luck. Instead of despairing, consider this as a learning experience & a practice session for a future encounter with IRCTC.

If you have any practical tips, feel free to share them through the comments section below.

Also see:
IRCTC Alternatives
Make the most of IRCTC
Travel Planning & Reservation Tips using Online Tools
Indian Railways RAC and Waitlists concepts explained

Notes from Pluralsight course "Introduction to Visual Studio 2010 - Part 2"

2011-05-27T10:21:00.000-07:00

Introduction to Visual Studio 2010 - Part 2 importantly covers IntelliTrace & Extensions. Some interesting facts about VS from the video course -

You can debug a release build. Release folder can contain .pdb. PDB – Program Debug Database
Deploy Release version of build. Depending on the third party libraries you are using, their licensing terms may not allow you to deploy the Debug version.
Build > Clean Solution throws away all the products of a prior Build. This will mean that the next build will be full build.
Rather than doing a Clean Solution & then Build Solution, you can directly do a Rebuild Solution
Look at Locals window after a breakpoint is hit for variable values. Use Watch window for specific variables
DataTip dimensions can be modified

Ctrl + Datatip – for a transparent background, useful when you want to see code behind a datatip
Pin a DataTip to see variable value change dynamically inside it.It can be dragged, unpinned or closed.
Trivia: Codename of IntelliTrace was Historical Debugging
IntelliTrace is available in VS Ultimate only
Saves a trace file of execution path & values of member variables
By default has very little performance impact
IntelliTrace can provide time travel & space travel (you can test a iTrace file on computers other than originating one to analyze "works on my machine" scenarios)
When you close VS, itrace files are gone so save it elsewhere. You can get the iTrace file's location from Tools > Options | IntelliTrace > Advanced
You can open a itrace file within VS. Double click main thread in thread window to replicate scenario & start debugging on a different computer.
Using traces from other machines lets you share bugs with other developers or avoid "works on my machine"
Visual Studio Extensions can boost productivity. There are over 2400 extensions for different versions of VS on VisualStudioGallery.com
Use Tools > Extension Manager to enable/disable/uninstall update
Productivity Power Tools by Microsoft is a bundle of popular extensions that includes features that go on to become standard features in future VS versions. Some features in Pro Power Tools include -

- Highlight current line
- Auto brace completion
- Ctrl-Click Go To Definition
- Column guides (to check length of each code statement does not go beyond a specific column number)
- Quick Access (Windows Vista/7 like universal Find)

Productivity Power Tools (1.37MB) are distributed as a file with an extension vsix, a new format in VS2010
Microsoft All-In-Code Framework is a free, centralized code sample library
Microsoft All-In-Code Framework Sample Browser is available from VisualStudioGallery
You can select a keyword within your code & select Search Code Sample in context menu to view matching samples from All-In-Code Framework.

Also see - Things I learnt from the Pluralsight course "Introduction to Visual Studio 2010"

Free videos from major Microsoft Developer events are archived on Channel9

2011-05-26T01:39:00.000-07:00

Recordings from TechEd, PDC, MIX events are all now archived on Channel9. These are great learning resources to keep abreast of all that's happening in the Microsoft Development world. Here are videos I have identified from Tech-Ed North America 2011 for weekend viewing over the coming weeks:

MVP Open Day 2011 was an insightful experience #opendayin

2011-05-21T22:08:00.000-07:00

Like last year, MVPs from all over India & a few from Sri Lanka & Australia converged in Hyderabad for the MVP Open Day event. I had a great time meeting & talking with some extremely smart & passionate MVPs & listening to presentations from visionaries & Product Team leaders at MS IDC.

(click to view enlarged image)

Free SQL Server Goodies

2011-05-05T18:51:00.000-07:00

Michael K. Campbell has shared some useful SQL Server goodies that are available online, in his article in DevProConnections. I picked the ones I liked -

* Scripts - TechNet's Script Repository has a vast repository of scripts provided by Microsoft and by its users/customers that you can adapt for your own requirements.

* Books - Red Gate Software which sells some great developer tools also publishes books. Some of them are available for free download in PDF format -

SQL Server Stumpers Vol.5

Inside the SQL Server Query Optimizer

SQL Server Execution Plans

Mastering SQL Server Profiler

SQL Server Statistics

The Red Gate Guide to SQL Server Team-based Development

Defensive Database Programming

Confessions of an IT Manager

SQL Server Tacklebox

How to Become an Exceptional DBA

The Art of XSD

SQL Server Hardware

The SysAdmin Handbook - The Best of Simple Talk

Brad's Sure Guide to SQL Server Maintenance Plans

Exchange 2010 - A Practical Approach

Don't Just Roll the Dice

Protecting SQL Server Data

Book of Red Gate (about Red Gate, not SQL Server)

* Videos

The Basics of SQL Server Profiler

How to Interpret Profiler Results

Notes from Pluralsight SQL Azure course

2011-05-02T20:56:00.000-07:00

Here is a summary of the 2h 38min duration Pluralsight SQL Azure course -

* Advantages of SQL Azure -

Highly available
Manageable
Scalable
Familiar – similar to SQL Server 2005 & 2008, but differences/limitations exist
Maintained by MS IT

* Some differences from standard SQL Server -

Data migration – SSIS, BCP, Scripts, SQL Azure Migration Wizard, System.Data.SqlClient.SqlBulkCopy; Restore not supported
Transactions – possible in same DB instance only
Collation applies only to Column & Expression level; Server, Database excluded
Tables must have clustered index
Supports most but not all of TSQL

* Candidate apps that can leverage SQL Azure -

Require relational data model. Consider Windows Azure Table for other needs
Easily partitioned data sets, 5 – 50 GB database
All queries use one database. (Most Enterprise apps may need to access multiple DBs)
Require high availability

* Besides Memory, Time, Disk costs, Devs must also understand SQL Azure pricing
* SQL Azure pricing based on usage units: Web (upto 149 databases of 1—5GB each possible) or Business (upto 15 databases of 10—50GB each possible)
* No cost for data transfer if SQL & Azure are on the same availability zone
* Bill accessible through Windows Azure Portal
* SQL Azure usage scenarios -

Cloud Hub Data Collaboration
Scale-out Enterprise Applications
Departmental Applications
SaaS
BI

* MS Tools to access SQL Azure – SSMS, Visual Studio, SQL Azure Portal
* Understand Connection termination failure codes to manage recovery -

System is busy, reconnect after 10s: 40501
Database hit maximum size: 40544
Transaction Termination: 40549
Lock Consumption: 40550
TempDB uses 5GB: 40551
Log File issues: 40552
Excessive Memory Usage: 40553

* Ideal candidates for migration to SQL Azure –

Tables with indices
Transations stay in a single db
DB under 50GB

* Tasks in migration -

Migrate users & login IDs
Map data types
Map db objects: tables, triggers, views, SPs
Update incompatible objects to work with SQL Azure
Update apps to work with SQL Azure
Migrate data to SQL Azure

* It is possible to expose SQL Azure database over OData especially to non-SQL consumers
* OData makes your data consumable everywhere
* OData is a web protocol for querying & updating data
* OData builds on HTTP, Atom Publishing Protocol, JSON
* Feeds may supply more than one collection
* SQL Azure can feed needs of data analysis (through Excel, SSRS etc)

Also see:

Things I learnt from the Pluralsight course "Introduction to Visual Studio 2010"

2011-04-25T11:31:00.000-07:00

Visual Studio is a complex IDE that mostly looks simple on the surface but has a number of invisible features. In the Pluralsight video training course Introduction to Visual Studio 2010 (duration: 4h 37m), Kate Gregory does a walk-through of the useful features of Visual Studio 2010. Many of the tips also apply to VS 2008. My notes -

You can export & import Visual Studio settings. A whole team can identify best practices & share the same settings.
.NET tab in Add Reference lists assemblies stored in the Global Assembly Cache.
There are 50 VS toolbars! They show up in context.
To learn the names of toolbars, right click on a toolbar & the currently opened toolbars are shown in the context menu with a checkbox next to it. Check additional ones that you require to make them show up. The last option of this context menu is Customize. This can be used to add new commands to a specific toolbar. This is one way to control what commands are on each toolbar.
The keyboard shortcut Shift+Alt+Enter lets you go Full Screen so that you can focus on just your code.
VS 2010 is multi-monitor aware. Panes can be on a second or third(!) monitor.
A code window can be made to float outside of VS 2010!
Class View is a great way to study other's code. Familiarity with the Class View and Object Browser Icons can help you grasp code faster.
Besides using Go To Definition (or F12 keyboard shortcut) to jump to the dependent member, you can use the Code Definition Window (View > Code Definition Window) to view dependent code in a docked window without having to navigate back & forth.
The Call Hierarchy option under the View menu lists dependencies of a member. It shows who calls a specified function & what this function calls.
Dock the Quick find dialog box to prevent the dialog box from jumping around while you continue searching for keywords. Use the Bookmark All next to the Find Next button to conveniently move between references to the search keyword.
Use Ctrl+Scroll wheel (on a mouse that has it) to zoom the text in & out. This zoom trick works in browsers too.
Use the Zoom level dropdown in the status bar of VS 2010 to get a bird's eye view of the "shape" of the code. Once you recognize the blocks of code by their shape, you can jump to the required one with a decreased zoom level.
Visual Studio can not only resolve namespaces for classes that don't originally have a reference but also intelligently build method stubs (Generate > Method Stub, from the context menu) on request for a custom method that you may have declared but not defined. Like a chess player, VS is busy figuring out your moves while you are typing out your code.
Using the Help Library Manager (Help > Manage Help Settings), you can choose whether to invoke online help or local help. You can switch between the two whenever you like.

Simplify your Visual Studio 2010 Toolbar and Free Your Mind

What's new in Visual Studio 2010

Free MSPress eBook on VS 2010

Why are these Visual Studio Settings not enabled by default?

HOW TO build your own Project Template in Visual Studio 2008

What is the difference between "Start" & "Start without Debugging"?

HOW TO achieve XHTML compliance by changing existing HTML code in upper case to lower

Are you building a WikiLeaks of your own life?

2011-04-20T10:34:00.000-07:00

New York Times reports that there are now several people database websites that can aggregate personal information & present a dossier with your age, home value, marital status, phone number and your home address, even a photo of your front door.

Snoops who take the time to troll further online may also find in blog posts or Facebook comments evidence of your political views, health challenges, office tribulations and party indiscretions, any of which could hurt your chances of admission to school, getting or keeping a job or landing a date. Many privacy experts worry that companies will use this data against users, perhaps to deny insurance coverage or assign a higher interest rate on a loan.

Like the way some weight loss clinics charge for each pound lost, there are sites that charge a price ($75-$99) for removing personal information from the top online databases!

Also see:
Say Goodbye to Privacy
Impact of online reputation on job recruitments

My 30-day personal project - watch 100 hours of Pluralsight videos

2011-04-18T20:02:00.000-07:00

Inspired by Matt Cutts' 30-day challenges, I plan to watch 100 hours of Pluralsight online videos to get up-to-date with current & emerging Microsoft technologies. I find its faster to learn with videos than books. Moreover, videos are quicker to get detailed & structured info on emerging topics. Books are great as a reference but may not be suitable for emerging technologies. I hope to post my notes & reviews of the courses I finish.

Here's a tip about Pluralsight videos to jump back to the last topic that you were viewing. I've been watching the videos on & off since several weeks now & the path that I've had to take after logging in, is to go the Course Library & scroll down to the course and then drill down to the specific topic to continue that series. I recently discovered that you can save a few seconds by clicking on your name in the header (highlighted in the image below) & it'll show you the link to the topic you were viewing last.

To make this more obvious, Pluralsight could show this link directly on the home page after a user logs in.

HOW TO detect unused CSS style definitions

2011-04-17T02:47:00.000-07:00

As your web app project & the team size get larger, there is a chance that the CSS style definitions within the stylesheets grow uncontrollably due to lack of coordination among the developers. This could lead to duplicate style definitions & gradually this could impact web page performance.

Luckily, there are tools to detect unused CSS selectors per page & weed them out manually -

Dust-Me Selectors is a Firefox Extension (Firefox version 4 is not currently supported) that scans all the definitions inline & within external stylesheets and reports the unused ones.

Audit tab within Google Chrome Developer Tools (Ctrl+Shift+I) lists unused selectors as part of its performance recommendations

Also see:
HOW TO cut & paste just the text in a browser, not the formatting

Things I learnt at the Windows Azure Camp in Hyderabad

2011-04-10T20:04:00.000-07:00

Here are some of the new things I learnt at the Windows Azure Camp that was held yesterday at the Microsoft campus in Hyderabad -

* Windows Azure Service Management API is a REST API for managing your services and deployments programmatically to do many of the things that you can do through the Azure portal. Usage of the API is free

* Can the Service Management API be used to replicate a new portal that's like the Silverlight-based Azure portal?
- Not exactly, some info like Billing cannot be fetched through API

* csmanage.exe is a tool to manage your deployments and services, using the Windows Azure Service Management API

* What you can do with Windows Azure Service Management API -
- Integrate with Tools/Dashboards
- Integrate with Build & Deployment - Nightly builds
- Monitoring systems
- Specialized scenarios - Auto scaling

* Azure cannot (currently) auto scale dynamically. Options to implement auto scaling -
- use publically available command-line tools or cmdlets
- third party commercial tools like AzureWatch
- do it yourself using APIs - related link

* Why do Azure APIs use REST?
- REST APIs make Azure access language independent

* The Windows Azure SDK 1.3 adds the ability to use Remote Desktop Services to access Windows Azure roles and supports Full IIS, allowing your web roles to access the full range of web server features available in an on-premise IIS installation.

* Domino’s Pizza is a public site that uses Azure

HOW TO try Windows Azure for free (without any credit card)

2011-04-06T10:27:00.000-07:00

Windows Azure, Microsoft's cloud platform offers .NET developers a great opportunity to extend their skills to this new platform. You don't have to spend a bomb to get started. While there is a free trial offer that doesn't have any upfront costs, you may have to submit your credit card.

The free Windows Azure Platform 30 Day Pass doesn't need a credit card to register. I've seen promo codes that are needed to get a Pass in various MSDN blog posts & Codeplex. The promo codes don't last forever so you may have to grab them when you see it or keeping looking at those places for new promo codes if you want it gratis.

Here are some free Azure learning resources I've found (work in progress):

Pluralsight currently has 5 Beginner & Intermediate level online training courses of totally 15 hours duration. Having received an annual subscription as a Pluralsight offer for MVPs, I've watched some of them & found them to be very helpful (will post a review shortly). Their monthly subscription price of $14.50 or roughly Rs. 700 in India for their entire course collection looks like a great deal to me.

HOW TO show/hide items in the Windows 7 Start menu

2011-04-04T19:36:00.000-07:00

Recent Items is a Start menu option that I frequently use to pick files I last worked on. I was surprised to find that option as well as the Run command that developers infrequently need, missing from the Windows 7 Start menu. It turns out that these items are just hidden. You can control showing or hiding any items in the Start menu. To enable Recent Items or customize how links, icons & menus look & behave in the Start menu, follow these steps:

Right click on the Windows 7 Taskbar & select "Properties" from the context menu
In the Taskbar & Start Menu Properties dialog box that opens, select the "Start Menu" tab.
From the Start Menu tab select the Customize button.
Select or de-select the customization options that you require

Dashboard-like info with Browser tabs, Windows 7 Taskbar tabs

2011-04-01T08:16:00.000-07:00

Browser tabs & Windows 7 Taskbar tabs are turning self-aware.

This is how my browser looked the other day:

I had the summary of all that was happening within those browser tabs because of the ubiquitous AJAX code running inside all those webpages which was dynamically updating the page title.

In Windows 7, a Taskbar tab representing a browser can show the download progress of a file being fetched within that browser visually as a green flowing gel.

Hotmail has added email notifications to its pinned site that displays the number of new messages directly in the taskbar.

Thanks Scott Mitchell, 4GuysFromRolla!

2011-03-30T09:10:00.000-07:00

13 years after founding the website 4GuysFromRolla & writing for it for all these years on Classic ASP & ASP.NET, Scott Mitchell is calling it quits. And oh! I got to know just today that the site I've been following since 2000 is pronounced 4GuysFromRawl-ah, not 4GuysFromRoll-ah. He has made a candid assessment of why the site started failing after he sold it to Internet.com during the dotcom heydays.

Scott Mitchell belongs to that rare breed of developers who can also explain things well as they can identify with the audience. Like scores of other web developers, I relied heavily on his tutorial site when I started my career with Classic ASP. He has consistently maintained the quality of articles & they are always educative. His "An Extensive Examination of" series of articles covering important .NET topics is excellent material for self-learners.

As I mentioned earlier, I find it is an interesting coincidence that besides sharing the same first name, Scott Mitchell, Scott Guthrie, Scott Hanselman & Scott Allen - all big names in the ASP.NET community, have an entertaining & simple style of writing.

I hope Scott Mitchell continues to write a lot more great books & articles.

HOW TO study (or copy) code related to JavaScript effects from websites you envy

2011-03-29T11:25:00.000-07:00

"The problem with quotes from the internet is you can never quite be sure they are genuine" - Abraham Lincoln

To build web apps with a great UI, its ok to draw inspiration from the best sites on the web. Sometimes the good-looking websites with great JavaScript effects may obfuscate their code knowingly or unknowingly or the code may be difficult to understand by just viewing the HTML source.

Visual Events is a nifty bookmarklet that shows the events attached to each of the elements in a webpage. The keyboard & mouse events are represented as icons & when you mouse over any icon the source code related to it is shown. This is helpful because on JavaScript intensive sites you don't have to rummage through the entire source to find a small code block that you need.

For instance, when you mouse over a Tag button on the StackOverflow site, it shows a tooltip

If you call the Visual Event bookmarklet while this page is loaded, you will see this icon over the javascript Tag button indicating that there is a mouseover event attached to it. The complete mapping of icons & their corresponding events is listed on the Visual Event bookmarklet's homepage. When you hover your mouse pointer over the icon, the Visual Event bookmarklet scans through the source code & fetches just the code corresponding to the javascript Tag button's mouseover. The code window also informs that this particular StackOverflow webpage uses jQuery version 1.5.1

Click image to enlarge

This bookmarklet can detect event handler code that is written using one of these libraries -

DOM 0 events
jQuery 1.2.x +
YUI 2.6.x (2.x might work!)
MooTools 1.2.x
Prototype 1.6.x
JAK (Events 2.2)
Glow

Visual Event is beta grade software. It doesn't currently work in IE

Also see:

The Joy of Bookmarklets

View Selection Source in IE

Add DOM Monster to your collection of Web Perf Analysis & Optimization tools

Free: Developer Support Handbook

2011-03-23T18:49:00.000-07:00

Pamela Fox's Developer Support Handbook is based on her experiences at Google Developer Relations. Aimed at API providers, it discusses the following topics -
    * Documentation
    * Forum Support
    * Issue Tracking
    * Communication
    * Top Developers

Also see:
The Developer Evangelist Handbook

ASP.NET MVC Usage Trends

2011-03-20T11:12:00.000-07:00

As per the BuiltWith website, there are 34,183 websites using ASP.NET MVC and among them, 1,840 websites are within the top million most visited sites on the internet.

Also see:
Large sites that run on ASP.NET

HOW TO track time for multiple time zones in Windows 7 & Vista

2011-03-15T09:43:00.000-07:00

In our highly globalized world, we may sometimes have to keep track of not just our time but also the time in other countries due to business reasons or to follow a live sports or event broadcast on TV that is happening in another part of the world.

Did you know, you can track the time in up to two countries/time zones besides your own, right from the system tray in Windows 7 & Vista?

To configure the extra clocks, click on the time in the system tray & within the dialog box that opens, click on the "Change date & time settings..." link. In the new dialog box that opens, select the Additional Clocks tab & configure them to show upto 2 new clocks.

If just two are not enough for you, pick a gadget from the Windows Live Gallery, that can handle even more.

While the additional clocks cannot handle Daylight Saving Time(DST), the primary clock is intelligent enough to do the conversion for you.

HOW TO display Word, Excel, PowerPoint documents within the browser

2011-03-11T06:28:00.000-08:00

If a Word, Excel or PowerPoint document (.doc, .docx, .xls, .xlsx, .ppt, .pptx formats) hosted on the web is accessed through a browser, it typically asks if you want to open or save the file. You can then view it if you have MS Office or the corresponding Word/Excel/PowerPoint Viewer (freely downloadable) installed.

To increase the reach of the content in those Office documents among non-PC/Mac users, you can use Google Docs Viewer to embed them within a web page. Google Docs Viewer now supports 12 new file formats including Excel & Powerpoint.

You can generate the HTML tag for the embedded viewer that you can paste into your own web page from the home page of Google Docs Viewer. You can alternatively use the example below to append the URL of the Office document to the url querystring of the service -

<iframe src="http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocs.google.com%2Fviewer%3Furl%3
Dhttp%253A%252F%252Flabs.google.com%252Fpapers%252F
bigtable-osdi06.pdf&embedded=true" style="border: none;"
height="780" width="600">
</iframe>

You can also tweak the dimensions of the embedded Viewer within the browser.

Embedded Viewer displaying an online PowerPoint file within a webpage

Head First Design Patterns - C# & VB.NET Code Examples

2011-03-09T18:00:00.000-08:00

Books in O'Reilly's Head First series are like "For Dummies" books, covering technical topics in an unconventional way. They contain goofy pictures and their content generates extreme reactions - readers love it or hate it. Going by the reviews on Amazon, Head First Design Patterns, a majority of the readers like it. The code samples in the book are in Java. So if you pick the book, be aware that the same samples have been ported to C# & VB.NET by volunteers -

Also see:
Learning resources on Design Patterns for .NET Developers
Opening Questions For A Design Patterns Study Group

Facebook embarrassment

2011-03-08T08:23:00.000-08:00

A Facebook update of an acquaintance who expressed solidarity with the cause of Children dying from Cancer, showed up thus -

Also see:
See what Google is suggesting
See what Google is suggesting - II

The Glorious History of Internet Explorer

2011-03-06T19:15:00.000-08:00

Love it or hate it, you will have to appreciate IE’s staying power. Having been around for 16 years, it is still the browser market leader. Here are some interesting facts about Internet Explorer:

IE 1.0

IE 1.0, based on Mosaic, was released together with the Windows 95 Plus! Pack in 1995
Used on Windows 95, IE 1.0 was only slightly more than 1 MB in size.
IE 2.0 was the very first cross-platform browser that supported both Windows and Mac.
Released in 1995, IE 2.0 had support for JavaScript, frames & cookies
At the end of the first week of IE 3’s release in 1996, more than 1 million copies of the browser were downloaded.
IE4 which came in 1997 introduced Microsoft's Trident layout engine, which is still in use today in Internet Explorer.
Released in 1999, IE 5 was the first browser to support bi-directional text.
IE 5 introduced XMLHttpRequest which enables building AJAX applications.
The XMLHttpRequest object was not completely functional until as late as version 1.0 of Gecko released on June 5, 2002.The XMLHttpRequest object became a de facto standard amongst other major user agents after it was implemented in Safari 1.2 in February 2004 & Opera 8.0 in April 2005 (Source: Wikipedia). Chrome wasn't even around at that time.
IE6, released in 2001, was the most widely used web browser during its tenure. At its peak in 2002 and 2003, it attained a total market share of nearly 90%. IE 6 sounded the death knell for Netscape Navigator.
Coming in 2006, IE 7 delivered the Web 2.0 experience.
IE 8.0, which came in 2009, focused on secure browsing. It introduced a bunch of new features like web slices, accelerators, automatic Tab crash recovery and inline search within pages.
After 2 beta releases which had millions of downloads, IE9, the oldest among popular browsers, promises to give the rest a run for their money.

Related:
Timeline of web browsers

HOW TO cut & paste just the text in a browser, not the formatting

2011-03-03T19:02:00.000-08:00

Typically when I have to paste formatted text within a rich text box of a web app, I paste it into the search box of the browser first to remove the formatting & then paste the un-formatted text in a rich text editor. What a pain!

I learnt from the WebApps StackExchange forum that in Chrome, you can use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Shift + V to paste the unformatted version of the copied text.

While monkeying around to see if there is any trick to make this work in browsers other than Chrome, I serendipitously discovered that Ctrl + Shift +C opens Developer Tools in Chrome & triggers the Inspect element hotkey that shows a tooltip for a webpage element that you hover upon.

Also see:
Keyboard shortcuts common to Firefox & IE

Windows Azure CDN locations

2011-02-27T18:47:00.000-08:00

I asked on the WebApps StackExchange forum a few months ago out of curiosity, if it is possible to know where a Content Delivery Network's servers are located?

The unanimous answer was that it is not possible to know unless the CDN vendor gives it out. Both the respondents to the question also mentioned that big CDNs don't reveal exact details.

I was therefore pleasantly surprised when I recently came across a Windows Azure Team blog post that lists all of Windows Azure CDN's (currently) 24 physical nodes.

Book Review - Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art

2011-02-24T10:04:00.000-08:00

Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art by Steve McConnell is a book that meets my definition of a good technical book.

In my opinion, Estimation is an underrated subject. A lack of understanding of this topic among team members (not just the PM) can negatively impact the success of the project. This is because the Project Manager has to draw on the judgement & experience of the software development team as well. This book is written for developers, leads, testers, and managers who need to create estimates occasionally as one of their many job responsibilities. It gently guides the reader through the esoteric art of software estimation with lots of practical real-world advice.

Within the 300+ pages of the book spread across 23 chapters, the author explains 32 Estimation techniques graded according by these factors of applicability:

What's estimated (Size, Effort, Schedule, Cost, Features)
Size of project (Small, Medium, Large)
Development stage (Early, Middle, Late),
Whether the development style is iterative, sequential, or both
Accuracy possible (Low, Medium, High)

The well-researched content is interspersed with 118 tips, numerous facts drawn from other authoritative books on software estimation and interesting statistics. Tip #30 contains the mantra of estimation: Count if at all possible. Compute when you can't count. Use judgment alone only as a last resort.

Tip #17 advices: Include time in your estimates for stated requirements, implied requirements, and nonfunctional requirements—that is, all requirements. Nothing can be built for free, and your estimates shouldn't imply that it can. He lists the nonfunctional requirements that also need to be taken care of -

Accuracy
Interoperability
Modifiability
Performance
Portability
Reliability
Responsiveness
Reusability
Scalability
Security
Survivability
Usability

As with his other books, the author sets clear expectations. He explicitly states where the estimation techniques mentioned in the book will not be useful -

This book is not about how to estimate the very largest projects—more than 1 million lines of code, or more than 100 staff years.

These techniques will not produce estimates that are accurate to within ±5%, but they will reduce estimation error to about 25% or less, which turns out to be about as useful as most projects need, anyway.

He informs in the beginning that this book draws from both the art and science of software estimation, but its focus is on software estimation as an art. This book avoids deep math and emphasizes relatively simple practices. Steve McConnell plans to publish a companion volume in the future that will deal with the Science of Estimation and cover more mathematically intensive estimation approaches.

I feel this book is essential reading for anyone who is into software development & highly recommend it.

Related:

HOW TO open your favorite set of websites in new browser tabs at once

2011-02-21T06:56:00.000-08:00

Ignore this post if you live on the web & rarely turn off your computer.

On the other hand, if you have a favorite set of websites that you open everyday, you can automate the process of starting these sites in multiple tabs within a single Firefox window by using a Windows Batch file. To create such a Windows Batch file, open Notepad or any text editor & paste these lines -
@echo off
start firefox.exe "stackoverflow.com" "twitter.com"

Change the URLs in the example to your own favorites & save the file with a valid name and a .bat extension.

Related: Setting Browser Tabs to Open at Start-Up

What makes a good technical book 'good'?

2011-02-16T19:19:00.000-08:00

This question came up StackOverflow.

I have an unenviable target of reading at least one technical book a month. I have enjoyed reading dozens of them. Here's what I think are the ingredients of the secret sauce that makes technical books great -

They are written in plain-English
They have a no-fluff, straight-forward tone & a conversational style
They identify the audience in the beginning & meet the expectations they set
They have some kind of takeaways you can benefit from - practical examples, re-usable code samples.
Their content is well-organized & structured.
Attention is paid to technical accuracy, grammar, layout & fonts used
Illustrations, backgrounders & infoboxes are provided where required & important information is highlighted.

Search for keywords in videos with Microsoft Research Audio Video Indexing System (MAVIS)

2011-02-15T08:33:00.000-08:00

If you were searching for videos that reference the Razor (view engine) from among Microsoft videos from events like PDC, MIX 2010, Channel 9, MAVIS can get you results with direct links to the precise moment that word was uttered in a video.

This feature has also been implemented on the U.S. Department of Energy's videos at ScienceCinema.

MAVIS uses the Windows Azure cloud which affords massive scale & on demand computing capability to crunch through the videos.

The Microsoft Research Audio Video Indexing System (MAVIS) is a set of software components that use speech recognition technology to enable searching of digitized spoken content, whether they are from meetings, conference calls, voice mails, presentations, online lectures, or even Internet video.

Did you know, speech-recognition technology is already integrated in a number of Microsoft products, such as Windows 7, TellMe.com, Exchange 2010, and Office OneNote?

Using integrated speech-recognition technology in the Windows 7 operating system, users can dictate into applications like Microsoft Word, or use speech to interact with their Windows system. The TellMe.com service allows mobile users to get directory services using speech while on the go. Exchange 2010 now provides a rough transcript of incoming voicemails and in Office OneNote, users can search their speech recordings using keywords.

Also see:
Sound Search Results

How AI touches our everyday lives

2011-02-13T18:26:00.000-08:00

In the NewYork Post article "The machine age", Peter Norvig traces the progress of Artificial Intelligence over the years. He cites interesting examples of how we are already using applications that utilize AI -

* Spam filtering programs using A.I. learning and classification techniques correctly identify over 99.9% of the 200 billion spam e-mails sent each day.

* Your Android smartphone can recognize your speech and transcribe it into words quite accurately, despite your “New Yawk” accent and the honking cabby passing by on the street behind you.

* A.I. chess programs play at the level of top human champions (defeating the world champion 40 years after Simon’s prediction, not 10). IBM’s Watson computer will eagerly take on “Jeopardy!” champs starting tomorrow. In checkers, an A.I. program has achieved perfection — it can play flawlessly and it proved for the first time that checkers always results in a draw if both sides play correctly.

* With Google’s machine translation system, you type (or speak) a sentence in any of 58 languages and see (or hear) a translation into your desired language. The automated learning techniques in this project allow a new language to be added in two weeks of work rather than the two decades it previously took.

* Your Microsoft Kinect can recognize human motion and gestures well enough that you don’t need a video game controller anymore.

* Google’s prototype self-driving cars cruised a continuous 1,000 miles of winding highways and city streets without a single intervention from their human drivers. But autonomous vehicles are nothing new — unmanned drone aircraft have been used throughout the last decade in war zones, and modern airline autopilots are perfectly capable of flying a plane from liftoff to landing (but the human pilots usually prefer to do some work themselves).

* A.I. systems approve credit card transactions, insurance applications and claims and loan applications, while detecting fraud and calculating risk; they route billions of phone calls and Internet connections while relieving traffic jams and detecting suspicious behavior; they make stock trades better than humans (unfortunately we learned in 2008 that that wasn’t a high enough standard).

Does office space affect software development efficiency?

2011-02-13T09:13:00.000-08:00

Steve McConnell identified "Noisy, crowded offices" as a "classic mistake" in software development, in his book Rapid Development. This finding has been substantiated by the results of multiple surveys. However, nothing much seems to be done about it.

A recent CNN report reveals that the average (American) office space has been shrinking over the past 20 years.

In 1994, the average office worker had 90 square feet of office space, but the area had been whittled down to 75 square feet in 2010, according to the International Facility Management Association, a professional network for the facility management industry.

Chart from the article in CNN. Click to enlarge

An interesting tidbit from that article -

For two years in a row, Fortune magazine has named SAS, a business intelligence software company in North Carolina, the No. 1 place to work. Company officials say they give almost all their employees private offices, which they say contributes to their success.

India - Know your elected government representatives

2011-02-09T09:54:00.000-08:00

Who says India is a poor country? Did you know 315 of the 545 MPs (Members of Parliament) in the current Lok Sabha or Lower House of Parliament are crorepatis (have assets greater than 10 million Indian rupees)? Out of 543 MPs (Lok Sabha), 153 are facing criminal charges. Fifty-four are facing charges of very serious nature, including murder. Who says having 35 criminal cases filed against an individual can stop that person from becoming a law-maker?

The Association for Democratic Reforms' National Election Watch is a web-based application that has collated details about India's elected government representatives, both at the state & national level, from their own sworn affidavits. It lists details like their constituency, Party, involvement (if any) in criminal cases, education, assets and liabilities. Find out how the representative for your region stacks up against the rest and be better informed while voting at the next election.

This website is the winner of the 2011 NASSCOM Social Innovation Honours in the ICT led Innovation by Multi-stakeholder Partnerships category.

Also see:
BigTech/NASSCOM Foundation offers NGOs software titles at huge discounts
Indian software product start-ups that are making news
Judicial Orders that changed the nation
When grassroots innovation goes global

Video Overview of Visual Studio 2010 suite

2011-02-08T08:28:00.000-08:00

David Chappell has posted a video series on Visual Studio 2010 on YouTube. In all, the seven sessions are of roughly 45 minutes duration & cover the following topics -

Here are a few screenshots related to VS 2010 from his talk -

VS 2010 components

TFS 2010 Uses

VS 2010 Pro/Premium/Ultimate - Comparison
Click on images to enlarge

China Bing Dictionary makes learning English fun

2011-02-03T19:03:00.000-08:00

There are some odd words in English, especially those originating from other languages, that are not pronounced the way they are written (wonder if there is a word for these kind of words). Mispronouncing such words could make you a laughing stock.

Unlike some other online dictionaries that just read out the pronunciation, Bing Dictionary for China also has karaoke-style videos for some 10 million sample sentences.

According to PCWorld, Matt Scott, the project lead for Bing Dictionary is the model for the videos currently online. And no, he has not actually spoken all those 10 million sample sentences

"Rather than repeatedly tape a person speaking the different sample sentences over and over again, Microsoft has found a way to synthesize the sounds and artificially mouth the facial movements of the model speaking in the videos.

It works by capturing shots of all the different pronunciations the model can express in a five-hour process that maps the person's lips, Scott said. The technology then finds the best match between the lips and what word the programmers want the model to say, creating an accurate lip synch. The end result is a video of the model mouthing the words of the sample sentence while a computerized voice reads it out loud."

I hope Bing brings this feature to other countries as well.

Also see:
HOW TO pronounce foreign names
WordWeb - the desktop English teacher

Can’t proceed beyond Database Configuration step in PrestaShop Installation Wizard?

2011-02-02T07:35:00.000-08:00

PrestaShop is an open-source e-commerce solution that is built with PHP. It is reportedly used by more than 50,000 webshops throughout the world. Like any PHP app, it runs under both Apache & IIS.

While trying PrestaShop version 1.3.6 out, I ran into a few issues. After spending some time googling for an answer, I decided to do some experiments of my own and lo and behold, they worked! Let me tell you how it went -

A simple way to install it on a Windows PC with IIS is to extract the contents of the PrestaShop app that's packaged as a compressed file into the wwwroot folder of Inetpub. Now type this URL in your browser address bar to start the Installer Wizard - http://localhost/prestashop/install/index.php

The first hurdle came at the second step of the wizard, which is System Compatibility. The Wizard complained that my configuration was invalid as GD Library wasn't installed.

Click to enlarge all images

To correct this, I went to the Add or Remove Programs option in Control Panel (in Windows XP) & ...

..choose the Change option for the PHP program to install the GD Library Extension that I had not selected while installing PHP originally.

After the GD Library was installed, I could proceed to step three.

The second hurdle appeared at the next step, "System configuration". The installation guide tells you to create a database for your store before you start the Wizard. During this step, the Wizard populates the blank database with data. So, prior to reaching this step I created a blank database & named it prestashop using this query - CREATE DATABASE `prestashop`

My database configuration was ok but the wizard would not proceed to the next step on clicking the Next button.

I got a hint from a thread on the Prestashop forums that this could be because of the database not supporting utf-8 charset.

I dropped the prestashop database I created earlier & re-created it with this query -
CREATE DATABASE `prestashop` DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8;

When I went through the database configuration step again in the Wizard, everything went fine subsequently & the installation succeeded.

Soft skills & career advice on MS "My Career Roadmap" site

2011-01-31T20:51:00.000-08:00

My Career Roadmap is a Microsoft India site that has resources on career advancement.

One of the learning resource there is a 32-part screencast series called “Driving Your Career” by Brian Prince. Each screencast is typically less than 10 minutes in duration and available for download as a WMV & MP3 file. There is no way to directly view it on the site.

I found some of the tips like "Use metaphors to communicate with humans" to be interesting. However, there were some that had profound titles but not equivalent content. Your mileage may vary.

Also see:

Bill Gates video on vaccines

2011-01-29T20:35:00.000-08:00

Bill Gates has posted an interesting video on his site about his thoughts on vaccines

The video presents facts through entertaining comic art with voice-over by Bill

Also see:
Software industry related comics

7 HTTPS myths debunked

2011-01-28T20:52:00.000-08:00

HTTPWatch Blog has a nice article debunking these HTTPS myths -

Myth #1 – My Site Only Needs HTTPS for the Login Page
Myth #2 – Anything can go in Cookies and Query Strings with HTTPS
Myth #3 – HTTPS is Too Slow
Myth #4 – New SSL Certificates Have to be Purchased When Moving Servers or Running Multiple Servers
Myth #5 – Each HTTPS Site Needs its Own Public IP Address
Myth #6 – SSL Certificates are Expensive
Myth #7 – HTTPS Never Caches

Also see:
A Web App Is As Secure As You Make It & the Browser It Runs On
Prevent identity theft with HTTPS browsing

Software industry related comics

2011-01-25T10:25:00.000-08:00

The software industry inspires cartoonists & vice versa.

From The Oatmeal: Why some emails go unanswered

Here is a list of software industry related comics from a question on the Pro Webmasters StackExchange forum -

Dilbert - Keyword search is now available on the site. There is also an unofficial Dilbert Strip Finder which explains its popularity. This strip where Asok, the IIT-ian intern takes a jibe at a senior colleague over how experience doesn't matter in the software industry, garnered 50+ comments.
Smashing Magazine cartoons - cartoons on web development & design, published every Friday
xkcd - comic titles & transcripts are searchable
The Oatmeal
Abstruse Goose
Mashable Comics

I'll add more as I find them

History of Apple

2011-01-24T06:06:00.000-08:00

Did you know, Apple was founded on April Fool's day in 1976 by Jobs, 21, & Wozniak, 25.

This is how their first product Apple I looked like -

Check out NY Times' History of Apple in pictures.

Also see:
Google Timeline
History of Microsoft
The Apple Museum - 30 years in 2 minutes

WebPageTest Tips & Tricks

2011-01-21T21:02:00.000-08:00

WebPageTest is a powerful online web performance testing & analysis tool that has been adding a lot of interesting new features. Their list of test locations to check a page from is growing (currently 17) & now includes Delhi, India. It makes it easy to do "what-if" testing on production pages by showing what performance gains can be achieved by removing ads, widgets, JavaScript. It looks simple on the surface but once you start poking around Advanced Settings & see its analytical review of web pages you test, you'll wonder how it's even free.

I highly recommend this tool to web developers who want to improve performance of the web pages they build.

If you never tried this tool or gone through it superficially, check Patrick Meenan's video to get started and learn directly from the creator of the tool.

Web Performance Testing - Interpreting a Waterfall Chart

2011-01-19T19:01:00.000-08:00

Some native browser Developer tools & external web performance analysis tools visualize data that is generated by the series of actions that occur between a user and the server from the time a request is made till it is completely delivered, through HTTP Waterfall charts

Joshua Bixby's Waterfalls 101 article explains in plain-English the parts of the Waterfall chart & how to analyze it.

Free WebApp Security Testing tools

2011-01-18T08:56:00.000-08:00

Performance & Security are non-functional requirements which cannot be taken for granted.

Here's a compilation of Security testing tools for Web apps, drawn from an answer on the Pro WebMasters StackExchange forum & other sources -

Netsparker Community Edition - detects SQL Injection, XSS & other vulnerabilities
Watcher - Fiddler plugin that works as a passive-analysis tool
Microsoft Web Protection Library (WPL)
Web Application Configuration Analyzer (WACA) - analyzes server configuration for security best practices related to General Windows, IIS , ASP.NET and SQL Server settings.
AntiXSS 4.0 - protects ASP.NET web-based applications from XSS attacks
CAT.NET
HP Scrawlr - scans for SQL injection vulnerabilities
Exploit-Me - suite of Firefox add-ons
Websecurify - also available as a Google Chrome Extension
Acunetix Free Edition
N-Stalker Free Edition
Google's Skipfish
RatProxy - passive web application security assessment tool
Nikto2 - open source web server scanner
w3af or Web Application Attack and Audit Framework
Arachni
Wapiti
WebScarab

Also see:
Web Performance Analysis & Optimization tools

Comparison of URL Shortener services

2011-01-15T12:21:00.000-08:00

SearchEngineLand & NotLong have compared popular URL Shortener services.

Google offers its own URL Shortener service called goo.gl (gl is the country-code top-level domain designated for Gibraltar). It now also has an API.

Pingdom, the uptime & performance monitoring service, has found goo.gl to be one of the fastest and with 100% uptime.

For spam, security or legal reasons, the goo.gl service can disable some short URLs

A new JavaScript Reference to bookmark

2011-01-12T09:16:00.000-08:00

For years, the JavaScript section at W3Schools.com has been a indispensable source of reference for me. It will now not be my only source. After going through Stephen Walther's JavaScript Reference built with HTML5 & jQuery, I'm impressed with all the useful & up-to-date information that it contains.

Unlike W3Schools which shows what browsers support (or don't support) a particular method or property, without explicitly specifying the version...

...this new Reference shows which browsers support each of the Objects, Functions, Properties, Statements, Operators, Comments, Directives. Only the latest versions of popular browsers are taken into account & surprisingly Opera is excluded.

The complete source (15.2MB) of this HTML5 JavaScript Reference application is available for download & review.

Update(14/Jan/11): If you work with JavaScript, also get this bookmarklet - Steve Souders has created a meta-bookmarklet that includes DOM Monster & a few other performance analysis tools available as bookmarklets. His meta-bookmarklet works with mobile & desktop browsers.

Add DOM Monster to your collection of Web Perf Analysis & Optimization tools

2011-01-10T10:49:00.000-08:00

If you like web page performance analysis & optimization tools like YSlow, you will love DOM Monster (thanks @souders)

"DOM Monster is a cross-platform, cross-browser bookmarklet that will analyze the DOM & other features of the page you're on, and give you its bill of health."

The good thing about this tool is that you wouldn't have to update it when a new version comes out as it is in the form of a bookmarklet.

DOM Monster suggestions for a ASP.NET Forums page (click to enlarge)

Book Review: Al Jaffee's Mad Life: A Biography

2010-12-31T21:51:00.000-08:00

Al Jaffee is a tireless satirist, inventor of the MAD magazine “fold-in” & my all-time favorite cartoonist. At 89, he is MAD magazine’s oldest & most prolific artist, having actively contributed to it for over five decades. His biography titled Al Jaffee's Mad Life tells the tragic story of this creator of incredibly funny cartoons and how this “master adapter” has surmounted overwhelming odds.

His childhood was short-lived as he had a neglectant mother (an ultra-orthodox Jew) & a caring but absent father. His mother uprooted him & his three brothers from the US & the twentieth century and moved them to their native country of Lithuania which was still in the nineteenth century in terms of development. His father’s career as a manager at a department store took a hit and progressively went from bad to worse after he had to transport his family back to the US not once but twice. Despite flitting between countries & cultures, Al adapted well to difficult & changing circumstances. The turning point in his life came in 1935 when his drawing talent secured him a place in a prestigious art school in New York. Due to family pressures, he had to turn paterfamilias but all did not go well for him, his father & three brothers.

Al is a survivor who has braved huge odds. Inspite of his personal challenges, he has been regaling comic lovers worldwide with his unique brand of satire.

To me, Jaffee’s style of biting satire & mostly “anti-adult” themes is the cartooning equivalent of British writer Saki’s short stories. The blurb on the book’s cover flap neatly summarizes Al’s achievement -

To date he has pickled three generations of American kids in the brine of satire, and continues to bring millions of childhoods to untimely ends with the knowledge that parents are hypocrites, teachers are dummies, politicians are liars, and life isn’t fair.

This biography is sensitively written by Mary-lou Weisman, a friend of Al Jaffee for thirty years. She touchingly covers the highs & lows of Al’s roller-coaster life. The book of 200+ pages has over 70 original illustrations by Al.

I highly recommend this book to those who love Al Jaffee’s phenomenal work in MAD magazine or have a professional interest in cartooning.

A relatively cheap way of checking Al Jaffee’s work over five decades is to get yourself (like I did) a DVD compilation of over 600 issues of MAD Magazines in digital format from 1952 to 2006. It is titled Absolutely MAD Magazine - 50+ Years & costs less than 30 bucks.

HOW TO sarcastically tell someone to google for their answer

2010-12-29T19:14:00.000-08:00

Before Google became popular, it was common to see the expression RTFM (or in polite terms, Read The Fine Manual) used in internet forums if a poster asked a question without doing any homework. These days it is more common to see messages directing such users to Google or Bing instead of the manual.

LMGTFY.com (the word LMGTFY represents the initial letters of "let me google that for you") is one among a bunch of sites that sarcastically explains how to use Google. It lets a responder create a shortened URL for a saved search query for a question that a poster may have posed without putting any effort to solve it by himself.

The popular Q&A site, StackOverflow discourages impatient responders from posting LMGTFY-like links.

How Tynt Insight works

2010-12-25T19:46:00.000-08:00

If you are looking for tips on a range of useful topics, head to Dummies.com (never mind the name). It is the website for the For Dummies series of plain English reference books. The site features interesting topics from it's books on varied & complex subjects.

If you copy & paste any content from there, it will add a link of the URL from where it was copied, at the end of the pasted content. This is achieved by a 12KB JavaScript utility library called Tynt Insight.

There is a nice explanation on StackOverflow about how Tynt Insight works -

the code activates on events like mouseup, mousedown, and copy (in the startListeningForTraces function)
if the user selected a range of text, then it:
- creates the HTML for an attribution link, plus optional CC license URL
- appends this HTML to the selection, placing it inside a zero-size <div> (to keep it invisible on-screen)
- reports what was copied back to Tynt's servers

HOW TO make Gmail Labels act like Hotmail Folders

2010-12-23T08:41:00.000-08:00

If you apply a Label to an email in Gmail, it will appear under both the Inbox & the Label category chosen. This is unlike in Hotmail where an email can appear only under one Folder category.

To address this issue, Gmail introduced a "Move to" option that will place an email under a single Label or category. This option can help in maintaining a clutter-free, cleaner Gmail Inbox but requires manual intervention. A poster on the StackExchange Web Apps forum wanted to know how he can automatically filter emails on arrival so that they are placed under a single category as in Hotmail.

Here are the steps -
1. Click on the "Create a Filter" link that's next to search box in Gmail

2. As we want the filter to act upon ALL emails that are recieved, set the To: textbox to your own email address & click on the "Next Step" button

3. Choose the first option to Skip the Inbox alongwith "Apply the label:" option to move an incoming email to a specific label/category. This way every mail that you get will be automatically categorized, thereby simulating Hotmail Folders.

If you want to view all your emails uncategorized at any point of time, click on the "All Mail" option in the left menu

Hotmail tip - Move, Delete, Find emails originating from a specific sender with a single click

2010-12-21T08:36:00.000-08:00

Did you know, a context menu will pop-up after two seconds if you place your mouse on any email within Hotmail

With just one click on the context menu, you can then ...

reply to that email without explicitly opening it
find all emails which have originated from the same email address as that of the selected email
move all emails from the same sender to a specified folder
delete all emails which have originated from the same email address at once

This a pretty neat & thoughtful shortcut!

If you right click on that email, it opens up a context menu that will let you perform operations on that email alone

Also see:
Hotmail lets you download attachments as a zip file
The One Click GMail Help Layer UI Pattern

Free eBook: The Insider's Guide to Mobile

2010-12-19T19:23:00.000-08:00

If you are involved or interested in Mobile development, check out Tomi T Ahonen's free eBook - The Insider's Guide to Mobile. It has 11 case studies, 7 essays & exposes 8 myths.

Also read Peter-Paul Koch's assessment of the Smartphone Browser Landscape.

Track the most visited websites worldwide & by country

2010-12-18T21:10:00.000-08:00

Google's DoubleClick Ad Planner maintains a list of the 1000 most visited websites worldwide & the top 100 websites in 20+ countries. This list is based on estimates & updated monthly.

It combines information from a variety of sources including anonymized, aggregated Google Toolbar data from users who have opted in to enhanced features, publisher opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in external consumer panel data, and other third-party market research.

For each site on the list, you'll be able to see:

The site category
Unique Visitors (users)
Page Views
Whether the site has ads

Find meanings of a bunch of words at once with Google Spreadsheet

2010-12-17T07:40:00.000-08:00

A relative recently asked me if there was a quick way to find the meanings of a list of words all at once. I use & recommend WordWeb to look up difficult words but it takes one word/phrase a time.

I knew about the nifty GoogleLookup function in Google Spreadsheet that fetches "straightforward facts about specific things", but it does not fetch definitions from Google Dictionary as I had imagined. So, I turned to the ImportXML function to scrape the meaning of each word from Google Dictionary.

ImportXML() takes two input parameters URL & query. URL is the URL of the XML or HTML file from which information will be fetched while query represents the XPath query to run on the data given at the URL.

If you were manually looking for the meaning of pipsqueak on Google Dictionary, this is how the URL in your browser address-bar would look when you submit the request -
http://www.google.com/dictionary?q=pipsqueak&hl=en&langpair=en|en&spell=1&oi=spell

You'll notice that the word we submitted goes into a querystring value (q=pipsqueak). To automatically fetch definitions of multiple words at once, I placed the list of words in column A with the first one going into cell A2. In cell B2, I typed this formula -

=ImportXML("http://www.google.com/dictionary?aq=f&langpair=en|en&q="&A2&"&hl=en","//ul[@id='pr-root']")

If you look closely at that formula, you'll see that I inserted the cell number (A2) into the first argument of the function. Now, as we are interested in only the portion of the Google Dictionary page that shows the meaning of the word, we will grab only that content using a XPath query. The definition of the word is rendered in the HTML source code of the Google Dictionary page within an ordered list which has the value 'pr-root' for its ID attribute.

(click on image to enlarge)

After you finish typing the formula, press the Enter key & within a few seconds, the meaning of the word will get populated in the cell B2.

While the focus is on the cell B2, you can copy the formula to the rest of cells for which you want the definitions in column B by dragging at the edge of tiny blue box that appears at the bottom right corner of cell B2. This process will dynamically change the column A cell numbers in the formula & bingo......the meanings of the remaining words in column A will get populated in the column B.

(click on image to enlarge)