Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

- As of 2009, the latest version of the language is JavaScript 1.8.1. However, not all browsers support the latest version (as there is no specific need). IE 8 supports JScript 6 (which is equivalent to ECMAScript 3, JavaScript 1.5 - more bug fixes over JScript 5) while Firefox 3.0 supports JavaScript 1.8 (1.7 + Generator Expressions + Expression Closures + misc.) Check this test page & it's source to know which browser supports which version. - JavaScript was originally developed by Brendan Eich of Netscape under the name Mocha, which was later renamed to LiveScript, and finally to JavaScript - JavaScript, despite the name, is essentially unrelated to the Java programming language even though the two do have superficial similarities. The language's name is the result of a co-marketing deal between Netscape and Sun, in exchange for Netscape bundling Sun's Java runtime with their then-dominant browser. "JavaScript" is a trademark of Sun Microsystems

Heard this interesting news from Vinod Unny - Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs) in India can get loads of software (& hardware) from Microsoft and other vendors at very low prices. All they need to do is sign up with BiG Tech , the philanthropy program of NASCOMM Foundation and provide details of their NGO status. Once they are approved, they can choose from a huge list of software and obtain them by simply paying an admin fee. For instance, Windows 7 Professional Upgrade is available under this scheme for Rs.325 while Windows Server 2008 Standard costs Rs.1024. There are only a few restrictions on the number of times that an order can be placed and number of titles. Facts about BiG Tech - * Over 300 registered NGO's * Number of products donated – 3188 * Value of software donated - over 4.2 crores * Big Tech covers 138 districts in over 26 states across India Also see: Pay It Forward with Wikipedia

There is news that Visual Studio 2010 may be launched in the first quarter of 2010. (Trivia: Typically VS products release in the year in their product names but VS 2008 released Nov 2007 ) There are already a number of useful learning resources on the upcoming technologies - Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Course ASP.NET MVC Tutorials Also see: Free SQL Server 2008 Learning Resources Learning resources on Design Patterns for .NET Developers

In the whitepaper " How Secure is PDF? ", Adobe Certified Expert (ACE) Bryan Guignard's conclusion on PDF security is - The only way your property can be safe is if you keep it to yourself. The site Giveaway Of The Day (GAOTD) is even giving away a commercial tool called Recover PDF Password for free. This tool unlocks restricted PDF documents & recovers passwords of protected PDF files. As per comments at GAOTD, this isn't also the only tool. This comes as a rude surprise to me. Sometimes, ignorance is not bliss. Also see: PDFZilla overrides PDF's copy protection PDF Anatomy 101 A Web App Is As Secure As You Make It & the Browser It Runs On

Got to know from Vinod Unny's tweet that you can select some pics in Explorer and click the "Email" button to auto-resize to emailable format in Windows7. This feature works in Windows XP & Vista too! Right click a large image that you want to email. Choose Send To > Mail Recipient - As soon as you do that, Windows XP provides an option to let you resize it - The dialog box is a little different in Vista - That's it! Also see: Crop Images online Free tools to generate screenshots

Don't take yourself so seriously. No one else does. Regina Brett Danny Dover makes an interesting point on privacy - The privacy conflicts .. encountered in the offline world are nothing compared to those .. in the online world. With a story & hard facts he illustrates how our private details are tracked by popular websites - Google is storing hundreds of .. metrics about it's users . Apple is rumored to be building a $1 billion data center .. In total, 25 Terabytes of user activity data is stored daily by Facebook. AT&T reportedly has 20,268 servers . This is infantile compared to Google's estimated 1,000,000 servers. Twitter recently peaked at 5,000 messages a second following Michael Jackson's death. Odds are one of them was yours. Digg says that only about half of its server load is from visitors to its website . The other half is a mix of Digg buttons and API calls. This means a non-trivial amount of information that Digg collects is from