Home » Archive for January 2011
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Soft skills & career advice on MS "My Career Roadmap" site

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:
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Bill Gates video on vaccines

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
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7 HTTPS myths debunked
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7 HTTPS myths debunked

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

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Software industry related comics

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 -
I'll add more as I find them
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History of Apple

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
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WebPageTest Tips & Tricks

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.
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Web Performance Testing - Interpreting a Waterfall Chart

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.
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Free WebApp Security Testing tools
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Free WebApp Security Testing tools

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 -
Also see:
Web Performance Analysis & Optimization tools
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Comparison of URL Shortener services

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

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A new JavaScript Reference to bookmark

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

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)
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