Free ebook - Firefox 3 REVEALED

Firefox 3 REVEALED - What's New, What's Hot & What's Not by Fabio Cevasco is a free ebook from SitePoint. You need to provide them your email-id & they send you the link to the 1.2MB zip file.

It covers the new features of Firefox 3 from the regular user's & Developer's perspective. At just 30 pages it is a quick read. The author thankfully does not eulogise Firefox. Read along with the tips & tricks on the Firefox website, it's a good introduction to Firefox 3.

There are many new changes that make for a good reason to upgrade to Firefox 3. I liked the fact that the IE 7 feature of enabling / disabling Flash on the fly is possible now from the menu option Tools > Add-ons | Plugins. This is good if you are visiting websites that have pesky Flash based ads. Used along with the "Block images from .." option, we can get rid of irritating image ads originating from parasitic websites as well.

There is a noticeable performance improvement over Firefox 2. There are other interesting bells & whistles like tab cloning (drag a tab holding Ctrl to copy it instead of moving it), resizable search bar (drag the separator between the address and search bars), One-Click Bookmarking

Firefox 3 supports CSS 2.1 & Animated PNGs (APNG) natively. I liked the author's explanation of APNG

If you were browsing the web in the nineties, you certainly remember those cute but very annoying, poor quality GIF animations that plagued the Web. They only had 256 colors, and they didn’t really support transparency. More recently, they have been rediscovered as throbbers for almost any Ajax web application: whenever you have to wait for the end of an XMLHttpRequest call, chances are that you’ll see a throbber spinning to indicate that you have to wait a little longer.

Although GIF animations look ugly for anything more complex than a throbber, APNG images do not. APNG images are definitely smoother, and they support transparency and 24-bit colors.

.. APNG is fully backwards compatible with PNG, so any browser that's able to display PNG correctly (or incorrectly, like IE6 does), will render an APNG animation as a static PNG.

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Geek Talk

If you love geek talk, check out Scott Hanselman's podcasts. The PDF transcripts for it are also available. He picks an unusual but interesting technical topic each time & discusses them with experts. The conversations are engaging and generate a lot of insightful thoughts to ponder about.

I liked a recent episode where Richard Campbell and Scott shared war stories about scaling large websites.

Excerpts:

I'm consistently surprised at how many sites don't have a geographic failover.

So, what is the difference between a performance problem and a scale problem?
Well, I think most people see scaling problems manifest as perceived performance problems.

When someone tries to start aggressively caching, whether that be output cache or formally caching from a business perspective, there's this Cartesian product that happens.

I like the idea of being able to attribute something or mark something and have it handled because this is a common pattern and anytime something is a common pattern, I expect the best practice to be embodied within the library.

..if you start thinking about performance early on, you always get accused of being a premature optimizer.

dasBlog is an interesting application because we don't have a database.....Everything in dasBlog is stored in XML.

You know, what I like to do is I turn it (ViewState) off completely and then turn it on.

While, Microsoft, now that I'm starting to understand what they think about, they have to make that distinction between speed of development versus the expectation of the developer. They wanted ASP.NET to just be one of those things where I can drag a button onto a page and it works.

One of my favorite defaults and I've talked about this in sessions all the time that people a) don't know about, but b) when you really think about it realize it's a good default, but seems totally non-sensical is ASP.NET's default worker process restart is 23 hours. That's the default setting for a cold install of IIS. Every 23 hours, restart the worker process.

The MSDN "Geek Speak" Webcast series is another good resource.

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20 SQL Server 2005 Keyboard Shortcuts

What is the bored mother of a geek called?
Motherboard

There are a bunch of SQL Server 2005 Keyboard Shortcuts on MSDN, but I find these 20 super convenient & use it very often.

Description	Shortcut
Create a New File	CTRL+N
Toggle full screen mode	SHIFT+ALT+ENTER
Set or remove a bookmark at the current line	CTRL+K, CTRL+K
Next bookmark	CTRL+K, CTRL+N
Previous bookmark	CTRL+K, CTRL+P
Clear bookmarks	CTRL+K, CTRL+L
Make the selected text a comment	CTRL+K, CTRL+C
Uncomment the selected text	CTRL+K, CTRL + U
Make the selected text upper case	CTRL+SHIFT+U
Make the selected text lower case	CTRL+SHIFT+L
Toggle between query and results pane	F6
Display Object Explorer	F8
Output results in text format	CTRL+D
Output results in a grid	CTRL+T
Cancel the executing query	ALT+BREAK
Display the estimated execution plan	CTRL+L
Display the Replace dialog box	CTRL+F
Display the Find dialog box	CTRL+H
Start incremental search	CTRL+I
Find the next occurrence of the previous search text	F3

Related links:
My Favorite Visual Studio 2005 Keyboard Shortcuts

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E-Commerce in India

As per this Excel report "An Analysis on the behaviour of Payment Gateways during the month May-08" on IRCTC (Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation Limited), the Indian Railway's internet ticket booking website logged over 3 million (3,403,495) transactions amounting to Rs. 233 crores (INR 233,80,39,488) or roughly $58 million ($58,450,987) in a single month of the holiday season. I guess this should make IRCTC the most popular E-Commerce website in India.

The average time taken for refund against cancellation of tickets is roughly 3 days. Among all the Indian Payment Gateways, the ICICI Payment Gateway recorded the highest number of transactions.

The application has been built using BroadVision.

I feel IRCTC is the best and the only way online for most people to buy railway tickets in India and avoid the perennially long queues at the reservation centers. Online users are however milked Rs.15 extra as service charges by IRCTC and a similar additional amount by the bank.

Although there is still plenty of scope for improvement, the site is speedier than last year & sports a better UI. The new option of being able to buy Tatkal & waitlisted tickets online is a boon for the last minute trip planner.

Update (9-April-09): With estimated gross sales for 2008-09 at Rs 3,400 crore (Rs 34 billion), IRCTC is the largest contributor to e-commerce in India, accounting for over a third of the total e-commerce of Rs 9,000 crore (Rs 90 billion).

Cleartrip and Yatra which now offer train reservations through IRCTC's API platform have an AC to Non-AC bookings ratio of 70 to 30, while for the IRCTC website, the ratio is the opposite.

Update(26-Aug-09): Did you know, out of the 880,000-odd train tickets sold everyday, around 300,000, or 34 per cent, were online? IRCTC has more than 10 million registered users.

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CAPS LOCK may lock your account

You know your day is not going well when you are prevented from logging into a website that you visit everyday because you typed the wrong password. Panic can strike when you realize that you have just one more chance before you Internet banking account or some equally important website account that holds your critical personal details can get locked. You re-check your password by looking up whatever secret place where you write down your passwords as you curse the world of identity theft we live in. And then you retry again.....

Even if you are not faint-of-heart, it can be disturbing to be told by a stupid web page that your account has been disabled. As you ponder on various conspiracy theories, it will hardly be obvious that your account has got locked because the caps lock key was on. This chain of events is possible when your login id is a number or pre-filled and you get no clue that the caps lock key is switched on.

However this scenario is often overlooked by developers & can cause much aggravation for end-users. Providing hints through tool-tips or warning labels in the login screen (like Windows XP & Vista do) may mean a little more code for the developer to write but a lot less hassle for the user. I understood this after I fell victim to the CAPS LOCK mayhem.

There is ready-made code for web developers to fix this scenario.

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Which is better - EXISTS check or SELECT COUNT(*) ?

A nice explanation from a detailed article in SQLMag -

Using the T-SQL EXISTS keyword to perform an existence check is almost always faster than using COUNT(*). EXISTS can stop as soon as the logical test proves true, but COUNT(*) must count every row, even after it knows one row has passed the test.

I like collecting tips like these to supplement the numerous tips, tricks & checklists in the (freely downloadable) Patterns & Practices guide "Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability". I wish they upgraded this .NET bible to include the advances that have happened since the guide was published in 2004.

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HOW TO convert authenticated / protected pages to PDF

There are free HTML to PDF online/desktop converters that can convert web pages to PDF. Web2PDF Online is a free service that accepts a URL & generates a PDF file for it. But what if you wanted to convert web pages that are authenticated / protected to PDF for convenient offline access?

CutePDF Writer is a free (for commercial and non-commercial use) tool that lets you 'print your document as PDF'. It works in the same way as you get a printed hard copy of a web page by specifying File > Print (the browser normally picks the default printer automatically). To print as PDF, you need to specify CutePDF Writer as the printer type.


You can virtually generate PDFs with any tool that supports Print functionality by downloading and installing Ghostscript (Post Script to PDF converter, GPLGS8.15; 5.01 MB) & CutePDF Writer (Ver. 2.7; 1.54 MB)

Related links:
HOW TO mimic Google Search/GMail's “View as HTML” feature to browse PDFs/Word docs online

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