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

If you use Public APIs (like Bing Search, Google Maps APIs) in your applications, it helps to be aware of performance and availability issues that those services may face. Thankfully, there are some free tools that monitor popular APIs & websites -Api-status.com tracks 40+ Public...

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India ranks fourth in Internet usage

Deepak Shenoy informs that as per Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) data, India has nearly 10 million Broadband connections in India (not just users). As per current TRAI norms, a broadband connection should have a speed of 256 kbps.According to World Bank data, only 4.5%...

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Discover patterns with Wordle

Wordle is a fun web application for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. It can also be considered a “information visualization” or a text-analytics tool. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different...

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jQuery on CDN - Usage Stats

Dave Ward has done an informal study on the top 200,000 sites identified by Alexa to find which of those sites use a public jQuery CDN. His findings:47 of the Alexa top 1,000 include a Google CDN reference. 99 of the Alexa top 2,000 reference jQuery on the Google CDN. 6,953 of the top 200,000 sites...

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Your digital camera can land you in trouble

Some "smart" digicams can store location data in the photos you shoot. When you publish these photographs on public websites, this information can get into wrong hands.Computer World explains how -..the Exchangeable Image File format (EXIF) specification adds metadata to common JPG and TIFF image files....

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Using ASP.NET? You MUST read this

A security vulnerability (dubbed as 'Padding Oracle' Crypto Attack) has been identified in ASP.NET.Scott Guthrie has a detailed blog post that you must read & implement the advice in it to keep your ASP.NET applications safe. Excerpts -This vulnerability exists in all versions of ASP.NET...all versions...

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Job ad in HTML source code

While looking at the HTML source code of a page on The Register, I noticed a link to a job opening -Talk about targeted advertisi...

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AJAX is like steriods for web apps

An ever increasing number of web apps are utilizing AJAX to deliver an addictive user experience. Here's a list of apps/mash-ups I like that leverage AJAX -* YouTube Instant Messaging - developed by Stanford University student, Feross Aboukhadijeh, this is a predictive search results feature for YouTube...

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Think Mobile First

Summary of the advice from the "Rethinking the Mobile Web" presentation on developing for the mobile web -1. mobile first 2. use well structured, meaningful markup 3. the absence of support for @media queries is in fact the first @media query... 4. progressively enhance using JavaScript and @media queries...

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See what Google is suggesting - II

I don't how Google's auto suggest algorithm works exactly but if it shows the most queried results matching the initial keywords without filtering those with negative connotations, its a time to worry, especially for parents & teachers. What impact can it have on teenagers & younger kids? SafeSearch...

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HOW TO prevent 3rd-party browser extensions from being installed in IE

There can be some sneaky programs that install not just what they explicitly claim to do but also things like toolbars & add-ons within IE. As most people agree to a software publisher's Terms & Conditions without reading them, they may have deviously add a line...

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15 years of Internet Explorer

Last month, Internet Explorer turned 15. Here's a timeline of IE releases based on excerpts from seattlepi's article on the history of IE -IE1 was born when Microsoft got a license from Spyglass Inc. for the source code of Mosaic -- the first graphical Web browser technology. Microsoft launched IE1...

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Microsoft SharedView - free document & screen sharing software

SharedView lets you connect, share, review, and update documents with up to 15 people in a session in real time. Anyone can share, and the person sharing can give control to anyone else as long as they have  downloaded the current release of this program.Audio support is not currently available,...

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HOW TO perform mouse actions with the keyboard

Computer hardware can go wrong anytime. If your mouse ever conks out, your keyboard can turn a saviour. Mouse Keys is an accessibility feature present in a various Windows versions that can let you control the mouse pointer with the keyboard.You can press left ALT + left SHIFT + NUMLOCK keyboard...

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HOW TO dynamically generate a Word document with custom header & footer

Way back in 2004, a project I was working on required a web page to be exported as a Word document (.DOC). Without relying on any components, I utilized the Office XML & HTML technique to implement this feature. I posted my sample on CodeProject to seek feedback. Over the years, I've received some...

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