Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

I recently filled my Gmail id in an application form (on paper) that asked for my email address. The period in my email address probably got overlooked by the guy at the other end who punched in the details manually and as a result although I received a mail that I had successfully registered, they would not identify me as a valid registrant when I visited their website providing my email id for logging in. I discovered this goof-up after I composed an angry letter to their Support folks on how I got the successful registration mail but their website would not let me in and before I was about to hit "Send" . Just out of curiosity I looked into the mail header details (by clicking on the "Show Details" link in the GMail interface). Next to my mis-spelt email address was a note - ( Yes, this is you. Learn more ) And this is what I learnt from the Gmail Help Center - "Gmail doesn't recognize dots as characters within usernames, adding or removing dots from a ...

I worked with Safari on an iMac many summers ago to test a web application as the project's SLA required strict cross-browser compatibility. Of what I remember from that experience, I had to do a good deal of tweaking & implementing CSS hacks to make the application work fine all across. I was surprised to read from Scott Hanselman's blog posting today that a Windows version of Safari (v3 Public Beta) is out and my first thought was - What is the need? If I can confirm that the behavior of web pages is the same for the Mac & Windows versions of Safari, I would probably use it when I'm testing for strict cross browser compatibility without requiring a Mac. A few things I noticed: Although the Safari 3 Public Beta Download page does not explicitly say it, it works on Windows 2000. Safari Auto-Suggests URLs. Unlike IE, Firefox, Opera which have a Tools option in the menu & Options/Preferences under it, Safari has Preferences under Edit. I could not get Edit ...

A good & simple way to master HTML, CSS & Javascript is to view & understand the source of web pages that are innovative & exemplary. GMail's clever use of the OptGroup tag and the Auto Suggest feature in Google Search are some things among scores of other inventive features on the Web that are worthy of study. Now, many websites compress Javascript code to remove unwanted whitespace and line-breaks to make the page load faster . In this process they also make the source extremely difficult to read. So how can an avid web developer unscramble the convoluted code? Use Einars "elfz" Lielmanis' free online Javascript beautifier that comes with the source code in PHP Similarly to make CSS understandable, use this customizable source code beautifier/formatter that works for Javascript as well . ( Thanks Amit ) On a slightly related note, Jean-Claude Manoli has an online tool that allows you to format your C#, VB, HTML, XML, T-SQL or MSH (code name Mona...