Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Before Google became popular, it was common to see the expression RTFM  (or in polite terms, Read The Fine Manual) used in internet forums if a poster asked a question without doing any homework. These days it is more common to see messages directing such users to Google or Bing instead of the manual. LMGTFY.com (the word LMGTFY represents the initial letters of "let me google that for you") is one among a bunch of sites that sarcastically explains how to use Google. It lets a responder create a shortened URL for a saved search query for a question that a poster may have posed without putting any effort to solve it by himself. The popular Q&A site, StackOverflow discourages impatient responders from posting LMGTFY-like links.

If you are looking for tips on a range of useful topics, head to Dummies.com (never mind the name). It is the website for the For Dummies series of plain English reference books. The site features interesting topics from it's books on varied & complex subjects. If you copy & paste any content from there, it will add a link of the URL from where it was copied, at the end of the pasted content. This is achieved by a 12KB JavaScript utility library called Tynt Insight . There is a nice explanation on StackOverflow about how Tynt Insight works - the code activates on events like mouseup, mousedown, and copy (in the startListeningForTraces function) if the user selected a range of text, then it: creates the HTML for an attribution link, plus optional CC license URL appends this HTML to the selection, placing it inside a zero-size <div> (to keep it invisible on-screen) reports what was copied back to Tynt's servers

If you apply a Label to an email in Gmail, it will appear under both the Inbox & the Label category chosen. This is unlike in Hotmail where an email can appear only under one Folder category. To address this issue, Gmail introduced a "Move to" option that will place an email under a single Label or category. This option can help in maintaining a clutter-free, cleaner Gmail Inbox but requires manual intervention. A poster on the StackExchange Web Apps forum wanted to know how he can automatically filter emails on arrival so that they are placed under a single category as in Hotmail. Here are the steps - 1. Click on the "Create a Filter" link that's next to search box in Gmail 2. As we want the filter to act upon ALL emails that are recieved, set the To: textbox to your own email address & click on the "Next Step" button 3. Choose the first option to Skip the Inbox alongwith "Apply the label:" option to move an incoming ema

Did you know, a context menu will pop-up after two seconds if you place your mouse on any email within Hotmail With just one click on the context menu, you can then ... reply to that email without explicitly opening it find all emails which have originated from the same email address as that of the selected email move  all emails from the same sender to a specified folder delete  all emails which have originated from the same email address at once This a pretty neat & thoughtful shortcut! If you right click on that email, it opens up a context menu that will let you perform operations on that email alone Also see: Hotmail lets you download attachments as a zip file The One Click GMail Help Layer UI Pattern

If you are involved or interested in Mobile development, check out Tomi T Ahonen's free eBook - The Insider's Guide to Mobile . It has  11 case studies, 7 essays & exposes 8 myths . Also read Peter-Paul Koch's assessment of the Smartphone Browser Landscape .

Google's DoubleClick Ad Planner maintains a list of the 1000 most visited websites worldwide & the top 100 websites in 20+ countries . This list is based on estimates & updated monthly. It combines information from a variety of sources including anonymized, aggregated Google Toolbar data from users who have opted in to enhanced features,  publisher opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in external consumer panel data, and other third-party market research. For each site on the list, you'll be able to see: The site category Unique Visitors (users) Page Views Whether the site has ads

A relative recently asked me if there was a quick way to find the meanings of a list of words all at once.  I use & recommend WordWeb to look up difficult words but it takes one word/phrase a time. I knew about the nifty GoogleLookup function in Google Spreadsheet that fetches "straightforward facts about specific things", but it does not fetch definitions from Google Dictionary as I had imagined. So, I turned to the  ImportXML function to scrape the meaning of each word from Google Dictionary. ImportXML() takes two input parameters  URL & query .  URL is the URL of the XML or HTML file from which information will be fetched while query represents the XPath query to run on the data given at the URL. If you were manually looking for the meaning of pipsqueak on Google Dictionary, this is how the URL in your browser address-bar would look when you submit the request - http://www.google.com/dictionary?q=pipsqueak&hl=en&langpair=en|en&spell=1&o

Google's “ Instant Preview ” lets you visually preview a search result page before you actually visit a page. A new advanced search filter called Readability level now lets you predetermine whether the result pages you want to see Basic, Intermediate or Advanced. I could not find details on what methodology Google uses to judge the readability level. Amazon.com has been carrying a Text Stats feature in the "Inside This Book" section of most book-detail pages since a long time that can help you gauge the readability level of books. They are calculated based on the following rating techniques  - The Fog Index was developed by Robert Gunning. It indicates the number of years of formal education required to read and understand a passage of text. The Flesch Index, developed in 1940 by Dr. Rudolph Flesch, is another indicator of reading ease. The score returned is based on a 100 point scale, with 100 being easiest to read. Scores between 90 and 100 are appropriate fo

PDFRider (currently in version 0.5) is an open source project on Codeplex. This utility provides a GUI for the command-line program  Pdftk . It can perform the following operations on PDF files - Merge PDF documents  Insert pages from PDF file to another  Extract pages from a PDF document to a new document  Delete pages  Rotate pages  Crypt and Decrypt a PDF file  Burst or split a single, input PDF document into individual pages I used it to extract summaries of chapters from a PDF eBook & then merge them all together into a mini PDF ebook. The UI of PDFRider looks amateurish & needs a lot of improvement. I badly missed the keyboard shortcut to save the manipulated files. Considering it's free, open-source & it did the job quickly without errors, I can't really complain though. It felt faster than PDFSAM which I tried a few years ago.   Also see: HOW TO mimic Google Search/GMail's “View as HTML” feature to browse PDFs/Word docs online HOW TO convert

The free download IIS Express brings the IIS 7.x feature-set to Windows XP SP2+ (which comes with IIS 5) & Windows Vista (which hosts IIS 7). With the upcoming Visual Studio 2010 SP1 (a beta is now available), enabling integration with IIS Express will be easy . IIS Express will bring the best of both existing web server options in Visual Studio - ASP.NET Development Server & the native IIS. The advantages of IIS Express paraphrased from Scott Guthrie's post - IIS Express will work with VS 2010 and Visual Web Developer 2010 Express, will run on Windows XP and higher systems, does not require an administrator account, and does not require any code changes to use.  It’s lightweight and easy to install (less than 10Mb download and a super quick install) It does not require an administrator account to run/debug applications from Visual Studio It enables a full web-server feature set – including SSL, URL Rewrite, Media Support, and all other IIS 7.x modules It suppo

We lived in farms, then we lived in cities, and now we're gonna live on the internet! - Sean Parker/The Social Network Google has announced that the Chrome operating system which was supposed to come out in the fourth quarter of 2010 will now be available through netbooks in the first half of next year . On the elegant but minimalist Chrome OS website, it says Chrome OS is for people who live on the web. To check if you are a native of the web, take their fun quiz  which is more of an ad for their products. One of the Chrome OSs touted benefits is that all your apps, documents, and settings are stored safely in the cloud. The downside I see to this centralized approach is the criticality of protecting your account credentials so that you are not lost in the cloud.

You can use the site: operator to make Google restrict the search results to only websites originating from a specified domain. However, there may be times when you want Google to prioritize results so that those from your favorite websites will automatically appear before results from other sites (which then appear below). Google's personalized search feature of star-ring results requires manual intervention but Custom Search can automate the process of always moving results from your favorite sites to the top . Also see: Google Guide

The Internet is a great place to find answers provided you know where to ask. Search engines can only go so far. The Stack Exchange network of Q&A sites is unique because the user community votes up or down answers & therefore the best answers float to the top of the list. People who provide good answers get “reputation points”, which gives an additional indication of the value of an answer. It all started with the site Stack Overflow over 2 years ago. 82% of 1.1 million questions there have been answered so far on the forum that has 415,000 users. Anyone can propose a new Q&A site but there is a process it has to go through to show a lot of people support that topic. If a Q&A site for a proposed topic goes successfully from the Define & Commit phases & if there is sustained interested in the Beta phase, that site stays. I currently follow these Stack Exchange forums during the weekends - Stack Overflow Web Applications Webmasters Super User English

There were quite a few games built with HTML5 in the 10K Apart contest . The grand prize winner's submission was a game built using just canvas and JavaScript, measuring only 6.9KB. HTML5 is indeed making it easy to develop games for standard web browsers while also providing a way for developers to reach mobiles and tablets with a single code base. The Google sponsored HTML5 Game Jam has also produced some nifty games. Check the winning entries and also look out for Mozilla's Game On competition