Book Review: Foods That Harm, Foods That Heal

It's comforting to know that food can also be preventive medicine. Foods That Harm, Foods That Heal - An A-Z Guide to Safe and Healthy Eating beautifully explains the benefits & drawbacks of various vegetables, fruits & food sources. Written by experts and full of relevant images, this colorful...

Read More

HOW TO access web pages faster on a slow Internet connection

Disable IFRAME based adsDisable Flash based ads. These ads suck up a lot of bandwidth. It's easy to enable/disable add-ons like the Flash plugin on newer versions of IE & Firefox. Note however that you will need Flash to be enabled to watch videos on YouTube or MyPopKorn.com (the site that gives...

Read More

Pros & Cons of various C# Collection classes

The System.Collections and System.Collections.Specialized namespaces contain about a dozen Collection classes. How do you decide which one is optimal?This compilation of pros & cons of various C# Collection classes can help you decide.Also see:MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-536): Microsoft...

Read More

State of Internet in India

As per stats released by The Internet Governance Forum, India has 81 million Internet users. These figures however don't tally with other estimates.According to Akamai's quarterly State of the Internet report for Quarter 3 of 2008, India has 26% on narrowband (<256kbps), 5% on broadband (>2 Mbps)...

Read More

HOW TO avoid the IE Information Bar during development

If you have ever tried opening a web page that contains JavaScript directly instead of from your web server in newer versions of IE, you may have noticed the message "To help protect your security, Internet Explorer has restricted this file from showing active content that could access your computer"...

Read More

Plain English Explanation for Non-Geeks

Explaining Internet terms like Podcasting, Phishing Scams, Social Media, Twitter, Blogs, Social Bookmarking, Social Networking, Wikis, RSS to non-geeks is not a easy job. Typically if people find something intimidating they may form a bad opinion about it & keep away. That's what happened to me...

Read More

Learning Resources for Building High Performance Websites

I have high regard for Steve Souders & Peter-Paul Koch. Their knowledge and contributions to the Web Development community are exemplary. Steve is the man behind YSlow, a nifty tool that analyzes web pages and tells you why they're slow based on the rules for high performance web sites.Steve recently...

Read More

What is Stemming?

Stemming means matching on the "stem" (or root) of the word rather than the exact word.Many of the popular search engines support Stemming. For instance if you search for pet lemur dietary needs, search engines like Google & Live Search will also search for pet lemur diet needs, and other related...

Read More

HOW TO find if your site is indexed by search engines

For most websites, much of their traffic is driven by search engines. To see if your site is listed on popular search engines like Google, Live Search and Yahoo Search, type site: followed by (without space) your website domain URL. Ofcourse, this technique can also be useful to search within a specific...

Read More

Large ASP.NET websites - 1

Anything that represents customer hand-holding represents a failure of site design - Jim Buckmaster, CraigslistWhat does it take to run a large ASP.NET website that can have 30+ million hits a day (500 - 600 pages per second)? You would have to ask Markus Frind who single handedly runs PlentyOfFish,...

Read More

HOW TO implement AutoComplete with jQuery & ASP.NET

Auto-completion of search terms is an AJAX feature popularized by Google that reduces typing by listing possible keywords as the user types. ASP.NET developers typically use the AutoComplete Extender that is the part of the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit to plug it to a text box to implement auto-completion....

Read More

HOW TO avoid Spam Filters while emailing programmatically

Spam filters are generally built into email clients, can be installed seperately or implemented on the server. Many popular spam filters utilize Bayesian spam filtering besides other techniques to distinguish illegitimate spam email from legitimate email. The process involves training the...

Read More

HOW TO conditionally format entire row/s based on a cell's text value in Excel 2007

I found that Conditionally Formatting an entire row/s rather than a single cell and that too  based on a text value in a cell rather than a numeric value in Excel 2007 is not straight forward. After a bit of monkeying around I learnt you can also actually have multiple Formulas while specifying...

Read More

SEO simplified

Undermining the exagerrated fears of some SEO consultants about all the changes happening at Google Search in recent times, randfish over at SEOmoz Blog says -SEO remains, at its core, remarkably similar to what it was in 2002:Make pages accessibleTarget with keywords that searchers employBuild content...

Read More

How To Copy Files between Virtual PC and Host PC

With Virtual PC 2007, you can run multiple operating systems (Guest OS - Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/Vista/2008, OS/2) on the same physical computer (Host OS - Windows Vista Business/Enterprise/Ultimate, Windows XP Pro/Tablet PC). The biggest advantage of using Virtual PC 2007 is that you can test an...

Read More

India Stats

India Today published a special issue titled "Transforming India Great Ideas.Great Minds" in October. It has thought provoking articles by India's best minds on ideas than can transform India and how they can be implemented.The articles contained some statistics about India - some interesting, some...

Read More

Book Review: JavaScript Step by Step

JavaScript Step by Step by Steve Suehring is a good "plain-English" book for beginners. Although it lacks both breadth & depth, it covers topics that are relevant to current client side Web development. Out of the 19 chapters, 3 are dedicated to AJAX. The author's explanation of HTTP headers &...

Read More

IE8 News

The IE Team has been conducting live chats every month since the first IE 8 Beta was released. As per news on the IE Blog, there will be one more public update of IE8 in the first quarter of 2009 and then a final release. Here is a compilation of some of the answers from the transcripts of the...

Read More

Get Google Search results by SMS, talking to iPhone

Google has a cool new feature for India - Google SMS. You can send a search query by SMS & get back results by SMS without paying any premium charges. Considering that a majority of Indian mobile users don't have handsets that support Internet browsing, this should go well with tech savvy folks...

Read More

Tweaking Firefox configuration settings

In the past I've come across two great links on tweaking Firefox configuration settings, that I had to refer to yesterday again. The first one is about how to do automatic Windows Authentication with Firefox. If you have been trying out some local website that requires Windows Authentication in...

Read More

Book Review - I. M. Wright's Hard Code

"I'm not opinionated, I'm always right" - spotted on a T-ShirtThe book "I. M. Wright's Hard Code" is a collection of 49 opinion columns from among the many originally written "for Microsoft software developers and their managers, though they were drawn from my (Eric's) 28 years of experience in the...

Read More

Google SEO resources

If you are keen about optimizing your website for search engines, Google has several resources - Webmaster Tools, Webmaster Help group, Webmaster Central Blog.Ocassionally they also conduct free Chat sessions where Googlers share tips & tricks and also answer questions. Here is a sampler -Suppose...

Read More

Silverlight 2 FAQ

Some answers from the Silverlight 2 FAQ that I found insightful -What is in Silverlight 1 that is not in Silverlight 2?Nothing. Silverlight 2 is a full superset of Silverlight 1.0. It is 100% compatible with Silverlight 1.0 applications and provides more powerful features and functionality. Silverlight...

Read More

My favorite Foxit Reader keyboard shortcuts

Foxit Reader is a free, lean (just 2.55 MB) PDF reader that I have been using for more than a couple of years. Although Adobe started it all, I find it's Adobe Reader unwieldy. Being lazy I generally prefer keyboard shortcuts instead of accessing things with the mouse although it takes a little effort...

Read More

Dreamspark in India

For students aspiring for a career in the software industry or those who are passionate about building software, this should be great news. Microsoft is giving away the latest developer and designer tools that normally cost hundreds of dollars at no charge to verified students through its DreamSpark...

Read More

IE Special issue of Code Magazine

IE 8 is the most standards compliant and feature-packed version of IE that is currently in Beta. If you are a web developer, you owe it to yourself to know how the changes will impact what you are currently building. Getting conversant with the new version can also help you plan for your future releases.To...

Read More

Free tools to generate screenshots

If you are not satisfied with the kind of screenshots you can generate with the PrintScreen button & MS Paint, you should evaluate these free tools that offer you a lot more options -Cropper is a lightweight screen capture utility written in C# with a lot of nifty features. It is available from...

Read More

IE Developer Tools Tips & Tricks - #2: Script Console

One of my favorite features in Firefox is the Error Console in the Tools menu. It's a Developer feature inherited from Netscape that has been enhanced over the years. Whenever a page has a Javascript error, the precise error message with line number in the source code shows up in the Error Console....

Read More

SSMS Tips & Tricks

There are innumerable features in SQL Server Management Studio. In my years of working with SQL Server 2005, I've discovered some that I feel are underused. Here are a few that have helped me -Tip #1: Open Object Explorer and new query on start up - If you have used SQL Server 2000 Query Analyzer a...

Read More

Application Architecture Guide 2.0 BETA 1

When setting out on a new project, you risk painting yourself into a corner if you take ill-conceived decisions without knowing the choices you have. The book Application Architecture Guide 2.0 provides design-level guidance for the architecture and design of applications built on the .NET Framework....

Read More

Software industry inspires cartoonists & vice versa

Nikhil recently posted a Dilbert comic strip on 'featuritis'. He wished the comic strips were available with full text search, something I would love as well. It would be cool if search engines had a feature to return cartoon strip images matching keywords in them.It is interesting how the software...

Read More

Book Review: Agile Project Management with Scrum

Many large companies have taken advantage of Scrum to undertake complex projects in an incremental fashion. Without doubt it is a promising methodology if understood & implemented properly.If you haven't heard of Scrum or know little about it, Ken Schwaber's nearly 200 paged book 'Agile Project...

Read More

Thrilled to be a MVP

I'm thrilled to receive the MVP award from Microsoft for a fourth time.Wish to know what the award is about and how to become a MVP? Check out this video in which MVP Lead Abhishek Kant talks to MTV VJ Nikhil Chinnapa at the recently concluded Virtual TechDa...

Read More

HOW TO view YouTube videos offline

Sarah on Channel 10 has this tip -The Zamzar web browser button is a bookmarklet you can add to your bookmarks toolbar folder in your web browser. With the bookmarklet installed, you’re then able to convert any files you find on the web and download them to your computer. To use the web browser button,...

Read More

Tools to monitor your website

Monitoring & maintaining your website is as important as building it.Try out these nifty tools that make the job easy -POPURI.US is an online tool to check the ranking (Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Technorati etc.) and popularity of your website (based on social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us,...

Read More

IE Developer Tools Tips & Tricks - #1

IE Developer Tools formerly called Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar and available as a separately installable browser add on is now integrated in IE 8 (Beta 2). It is accessible from the Tools option in the IE menu or by using the F12 shortcut. Although there are differences between Firebug and IE...

Read More

HOW TO speed up your Windows Vista PC

I have found these tips from the Windows Vista online documentation practical & useful -Disable services you don’t need - see possible list of Services to disableTurn off visual effects - over 20 of them; if you want speed over looksDelete programs you never useLimit how many programs load at startup...

Read More

Free SQL Server 2008 Learning Resources

Microsoft Press is offering a free 258 paged e-book - Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2008Microsoft Learning has a free e-Learning course - Collection 6187: What’s New in Microsoft SQL Server 2008Red Gate has two free offerings - Dissecting SQL Server Execution Plans and How to Become an Exceptional...

Read More

HOW TO find distance between 2 places using Virtual Earth Map Control

In the time that you search online to find a source to find the distance between two places, you can adapt one of the example scripts from Virtual Earth Map Control SDK 6.2 online documentation.All you need to play with the Virtual Earth Map Control (version 6.2 has recently been released) is a fair...

Read More

Book Review: Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 Plain & Simple

The book is what it claims to be - a simple, pictorial, plain English guide to Outlook 2007. It is suitable for folks who are completely new to Outlook 2007 or have some exposure to previous versions but find the new UI a little daunting.I have used different email client tools at different times. I...

Read More

The One Click GMail Help Layer UI Pattern

I know GMail & Google Reader have some cool keyboard shortcuts like "c" to start composing a mail etc but never realized, there was a "?" shortcut. It displays the list of all important shortcuts instantaneously on a transparent layer over the web pages.I feel this is an interesting UI pattern as...

Read More

HOW TO create an Excel 2007 Macro

I have recorded an Excel Macro in the past but never coded one until recently. I was prompted by a question in an online forum posting to learn, implement and respond to the query with a working code sample.The requirement was to automatically copy the previous day's worksheet to a new worksheet and...

Read More

HOW TO implement a Store Locator for a website?

The folks at Wotton.org have put up a simple online app that makes it easy to put up a Store Locator for your website in no time with Google Maps. The advantage of showing it in an online map is that it can utilize the Driving directions feature that can be useful to visitors of that website.The app...

Read More

Road maps of Indian cities on the Web

Creating road maps for India is a tough job. It's a bustling country full of idiosyncrasies. Not just street names even city names can change overnight based on popular or political sentiments. In the past decade, names of four major cities Bombay, Calcutta, Madras and Bangalore have been changed to...

Read More