Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned - -  On October 28th, W3C officially recommended HTML5 .  The W3C has declared HTML5 done and is moving on to HTML5.1, which will include all the features that didn’t make the first cut.  -  The W3C has been meeting for twenty years, led by its director, Tim Berners-Lee, the principal creator of the Web. Its membership is drawn from close to four hundred academic, not-for-profit, and corporate organizations. Among its most engaged participants are large companies that build Web software and host enormous Web sites—ones like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook. They all pay dues for spots at the table—sixty-eight thousand five hundred dollars a year for the biggest U.S. firms -  We still call Web pages “pages,” but many of them are actually software applications—“apps” -  The Web is a Millennial . It was first proposed twenty-five years ago, in 1989. -  Apple.com has one HTML5 validation error . The New York Times has a hundred...

I'm a book lover and I have a size-able collection of books, many of which I've left incomplete or unread. To save on storage space, I've been buying ebooks & Kindle books. While learning AngularJS, I thought I should build a webpage to track the books I have as they are in scattered & in different formats. Having discovered that data stored in a table in Google Spreadsheet can be exposed as a JSON feed, I'll being using that as my back-end . I'll keep adding or deleting books and it will reflect on the web page instantaneously. The table to store my books has just 2 columns - the book name (cell A1: bookname) & Amazon's unique identifier for the book, ASIN (cell B1: asin). I use the ASIN to generate an image for the book as well as append my affiliate id to that book's page on Amazon. Here's how the finished page looks now (with a small set of my books). Evidently, there is some work left to do with the CSS. The entire page is less ...

CAPTCHA or Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart , is a technique to stop bots from signing up for online accounts or automatically filling up forms. It works on the assumption that Humans can understand distorted text presented in a CAPTCHA image but not bots which may have a basic training in OCR (Optical Character Recognition) A Stack Exchange forum user found out that he could get past the CAPTCHA barrier even though he didn't type the last character  in the distorted text that is shown. Stack Exchange uses  reCAPTCHA - Google's implementation of CAPTCHA . I don't agree with Google  when they claim " Our easy CAPTCHAs are a breeze for legitimate users. " Also see:  Lazy-Developer-CAPTCHA Text Extractor Bookmarklet