Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Ghost in the Wires is the memoir of Kevin Mitnick, once labelled America's most wanted hacker. Besides time in jail, he received the unusual punishment of not being allowed to use a computer for eight years. His life after that term has changed for the better and he is now a Security Consultant who does ethical hacking (implying what he may have done in the past was unethical after insisting throughout the book that he never hacked for financial gain and never did anything "evil"), public speaker, & author. He has been "hired by government agencies like the FAA, the Social Security Administration and - despite my criminal history - an FBI organization, InfraGard" - some of the same agencies whose loopholes he exploited in his hacking "addiction" days. By his own admission, he has: manipulated phone company switches all across America got information from the California DMV through social engineering committed identity theft several times ...

This Week I Learned: The normal Web and Business Editions in SQL Database have a limit of 180 concurrent requests. Applications requiring more connections should use a Premium database (Premium Tier for Windows Azure SQL Databases is a new preview feature in the Azure July Update ) with an appropriate reservation size to handle the maximum number of needed requests . The July update also introduces ability to perform recurring, fully automated, exports of a SQL Database to a Storage account in the form of a transactionally consistent .bacpac file. #Azure  Coursera uses a " very JavaScript-heavy, JavaScript-dependent approach to our frontend architecture ". "To keep our JavaScript sane, reusable, and modularized", they chose Backbone.JS MVC framework.  You can use this statement in Chrome Developer Tools to view all URLs within a web page (Source: Labnol ): urls = $$('a'); for (url in urls) console.log ( urls[url].href );  It is possible to use Visual St...

This Week I Learned: $.now() is the shorthand for new Date().getTime().  #jquery Pages fetched with POST are never cached, so the cache and ifModified options in jQuery.ajaxSetup() have no effect on these requests .  Setting cache to false will only work correctly with HEAD and GET requests.  #jquery On devices running iOS6 and Safari, POST is also cached.  #jquery How does Windows detect battery issues? Laptop batteries have a small chip inside that controls/monitors the charging process and also monitors the number of charge/recharge cycles. This chip is factory programmed with information how this sort of battery typically degrades over time. It also can derive information from the charging cycle itself: The time it takes to reach full-charge at a given voltage/current changes when the battery gets worn out. (Voltage drop during discharge is not reliable as it depends a lot on the amount of current drawn while discharging, so it varies with the use-pattern...