Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

About a fortnight ago, Google highlighted on its official blog how "two clever Translate trends caught our eye—perhaps one of them will inspire you to come up with a fun Translate trick of your own." . Folks around the world were making fun remixes First, some creative folks translated strings of consonants into German to create a new beatboxing tool. The phrase “pv zk bschk” didn’t initially make much sense to us, but a quick listen got us nodding our heads along to the beat. Now it seems there’s a similar trend in Taiwan: using the spoken output of Google Translate as the vocals for self-composed songs or video spoofs. A few days ago there was an announcement on the Google Code blog that the Google Translate, Transliterate & ten other APIs will be deprecated. The Google Translate API will be shut off completely on December 1, 2011 and the reason is "substantial economic burden caused by extensive abuse" .   So what constitutes "fun Translate tricks...

Tatkal train ticket reservation is a ray of hope for millions of Indians who prefer to commute by trains over other forms of travel even if they have to pay extra because the original reserved ticket quota has run out. The IRCTC website is possibly the best known site in India as it helps travellers avoid the long queues at the train reservation centers. It is also probably the most hated site as getting the more premium Tatkal ticket is a harrowing experience. ---   Update (13-Mar-2012): In an Economic Times  interview , the Head of  IRCTC, Rakesh Kumar Tandon informs that of the 8 lakh people who log on simultaneously between 8 am 8.10am, only 50,000 manage to get tickets! He attributes one customer-centric reason for the delay in completion of the Tatkal transaction to berth preference. It takes time for the system to find a particular berth. Going by this hint, a Lower berth is probably most preferred while going by experience, Side Upper is least prefe...

Introduction to Visual Studio 2010 - Part 2  importantly covers IntelliTrace & Extensions. Some interesting facts about VS from the video course - You can debug a release build. Release folder can contain .pdb. PDB – Program Debug Database Deploy Release version of build. Depending on the third party libraries you are using, their licensing terms  may not allow you to deploy the Debug version. Build > Clean Solution throws away all the products of a prior Build. This will mean that the next build will be full build. Rather than doing a Clean Solution & then Build Solution, you can directly do a Rebuild Solution Look at Locals window after a breakpoint is hit for variable values. Use Watch window for specific variables DataTip dimensions can be modified   Ctrl + Datatip – for a transparent background, useful when you want to see code behind a datatip Pin a DataTip to see variable value change dynamically inside it.It can be dragged, unpinned or closed. ...