Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Indian Railway Catering and Tourism corporation (IRCTC) is a PSU of Indian Railways. Its website irctc.co.in is used for purchasing Railway E-Tickets. From a Ministry of Railways press note - irctc.co.in is managed in-house by Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS), the IT arm of Indian Railways.   The data-center is in the premises of CRIS.   About 5.48 lakh tickets were booked in a single day in April 2016 with 2.66 lakh peak concurrent users.  About 13,600 tickets per minute were booked. The E-ticketing system has several components viz., internet gateway, network security devices such as gateway router and Firewall, Application Delivery Controller, Security Information Event Management System (SIEM) web server and database server access logs.   The IT security of E-ticketing system is ensured through regular security audits by Standardization Testing Quality Certification (STQC) directorate of Department of Electronics and IT, Government of India.  The entire traf

This trick works only if the HTML container of the portion of the web page that you wish to link to has an ID attribute. Generally, " named anchors " can be coded to allow jumping to links within the same page when you own those pages. Named anchors are often used to create "table of contents" at the beginning of a large document. Each chapter within the document is given a named anchor, and links to each of these anchors are put at the top of the document. The upcoming HTML5 standard suggests using the id attribute instead of the name attribute for specifying the name of an anchor. Using the id attribute actually works also for HTML4 in all modern browsers. Now what if you were reading an long article on a site you don't own & wanted your friend to read only a specific portion that's interesting. As I discovered from this answer on the WebApps StackExchange forum , you can append the "id" of the HTML element that contains the interesti

Netcraft is one of the oldest sites devoted to tracking technology on the Internet. Their service provides a site report that can tell you what web-server a site is running on, host info, uptime etc and also identify related subdomains . BuiltWith lists technologies used by a specified site. As they profile thousands of sites, BuiltWith Trends  provides consolidated information about the most popular technologies used on the web. Snoopy is a bookmarklet for snooping on web pages . Snoopy can 'sniff' out of the page, such as the   doctype, what JS libraries are used in the page, what analytics, what font embedding technique is used, etc. I found it interesting that it also shows the generated source which can be useful to web developers for debugging.  

Got a quick C# snippet to try out but don't want to use Visual Studio or don't have the resources on your computer right-away? There are some great desktop alternatives to VS to run snippets but did you know, there are also online IDEs for running .NET code : ideone  (supports more than 60 programming languages including C, C++, PHP, Python, Ruby, R) LearnCS.org  (has separate domains for  C ,  Python ,  PHP ) Compilr  (needs signup, supports mulitple programming languages including C, C++, PHP, Python, Ruby, R) MSDN Virtual Labs CodeRun This type of web applications that allow their users to upload snippets of text, usually samples of source code, for public viewing , are called Pastebins . There are plenty of Pastebins now, but the above list lets you run C# programs. Also see: Collaborative JavaScript debugging tools - jsFiddle & JS Bin Free C++ Learning Resources

I often  re-use old code because it's mostly bug free and has withstood the test of time. I recently copied a jQuery snippet from a perfectly working old project and was shocked to find that a particular piece of AJAX functionality wasn't working anymore. It turned out that there was a breaking change in the jQuery.ajax() method  in jQuery library version 1.5 and the code was failing because the original sample ran an older version of jQuery (1.4.2)! The jQuery Blog appears to be the official place where breaking changes are announced along with the news of new releases. Some jQuery plugins too will only work with a specific version of the jQuery library. Related: jQuery videos for ASP.NET developers Free JavaScript & jQuery learning resources

This answer in dba.stackexchange.com puts in nicely - Whether you use SQL statements or stored procedure doesn't matter. What matters is whether your SQL uses parameters or concatenated strings. Parameters prevent SQL injection; concatenated strings allow SQL injection. The OWASP wiki has a more detailed explanation The Stack Exchange family of websites lets you sort & view top voted questions in a specific area of interest identified through tags . They provide a RSS feed that you can keep following through a RSS Feed Reader like Google Reader, to stay abreast of hot questions in your favorite programming area. The RSS feed for the top voted questions with the sql-injection tag on dba.stackexchange.com looks like this - http://dba.stackexchange.com/feeds/tag?tagnames=sql-injection&sort=votes

From my old notes - a list of sample database scripts (.SQL files) that you can use for your SQL Server  experiments: Pubs Northwind  (download link:   archive.msdn.microsoft.com )    BBC Countries Dataset CIA World Factbook Nobel Prize Winners Music Movie Database ACME products Top of the Pops Musician Southwind (download link: SQLzoo.net ) WordNet lexical database from Princeton University (download link:  packaged as a SQL Server script by ObjectGraph  ) Stack Exchange dump of public data   Also see: AdventureWorks OLTP Database Diagram HOW TO use Wikipedia content in your application HOW TO back up a database (schema and data) as a SQL Server script Database Schema Samples