Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Firefox 3 REVEALED - What's New, What's Hot & What's Not by Fabio Cevasco is a free ebook from SitePoint . You need to provide them your email-id & they send you the link to the 1.2MB zip file. It covers the new features of Firefox 3 from the regular user's & Developer's perspective. At just 30 pages it is a quick read. The author thankfully does not eulogise Firefox. Read along with the tips & tricks on the Firefox website , it's a good introduction to Firefox 3. There are many new changes that make for a good reason to upgrade to Firefox 3. I liked the fact that the IE 7 feature of enabling / disabling Flash on the fly is possible now from the menu option Tools > Add-ons | Plugins. This is good if you are visiting websites that have pesky Flash based ads. Used along with the "Block images from .." option, we can get rid of irritating image ads originating from parasitic websites as well. There is a noticeable performance improv...

Updated (30/Jun/14) to include new resources and remove dead links If you work in a small team or as a solo developer, there is a chance that you will miss out on new developments that are happening in the tech world. Podcasts and videos featuring developer discussions not only help you gain new information and perspective but also aid in understanding small details like pronunciation & emerging jargon. Here is a list of geek talk resources that I know about: 1.  Scott Hanselman's podcasts  ( RSS Feed ) - Scott picks an interesting technical topic each time & discusses them with experts. The conversations are engaging and generate a lot of insightful thoughts to ponder upon. The PDF transcripts for it are also available. I liked a recent episode where Richard Campbell and Scott shared war stories about scaling large websites. Excerpts: I'm consistently surprised at how many sites don't have a geographic failover. So, what is the differenc...

What is the bored mother of a geek called? Motherboard There are a bunch of SQL Server 2005 Keyboard Shortcuts on MSDN , but I find these 20 super convenient & use it very often. Description Shortcut Create a New File CTRL+N Toggle full screen mode SHIFT+ALT+ENTER Set or remove a bookmark at the current line CTRL+K, CTRL+K Next bookmark CTRL+K, CTRL+N Previous bookmark CTRL+K, CTRL+P Clear bookmarks CTRL+K, CTRL+L Make the selected text a comment CTRL+K, CTRL+C Uncomment the selected text CTRL+K, CTRL + U Make the selected text upper case CTRL+SHIFT+U Make the selected text lower case CTRL+SHIFT+L Toggle between query and results pane F6 Display Object Explorer F8 Output results in text format CTRL+D Output results in a grid CTRL+T Cancel the executing query ALT+BREAK Display the estimated execution plan CTRL+L Display the Replace dialog box CTRL+F Display the Find dialog box CTRL+H Start incremental search CTRL+I Find the next occurrence of the previous search text F3 Related link...

A s per this Excel report "An Analysis on the behaviour of Payment Gateways during the month May-08" on IRCTC (Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation Limited) , the Indian Railway's internet ticket booking website logged over 3 million (3,403,495) transactions amounting to Rs. 233 crores (INR 233,80,39,488) or roughly $58 million ($58,450,987) in a single month of the holiday season. I guess this should make IRCTC the most popular E-Commerce website in India. The average time taken for refund against cancellation of tickets is roughly 3 days. Among all the Indian Payment Gateways, the ICICI Payment Gateway recorded the highest number of transactions. The application has been built using BroadVision . I feel IRCTC is the best and the only way online for most people to buy railway tickets in India and avoid the perennially long queues at the reservation centers. Online users are however milked Rs.15 extra as service charges by IRCTC and a similar additional amount...

Y ou know your day is not going well when you are prevented from logging into a website that you visit everyday because you typed the wrong password. Panic can strike when you realize that you have just one more chance before you Internet banking account or some equally important website account that holds your critical personal details can get locked. You re-check your password by looking up whatever secret place where you write down your passwords as you curse the world of identity theft we live in. And then you retry again..... Even if you are not faint-of-heart, it can be disturbing to be told by a stupid web page that your account has been disabled. As you ponder on various conspiracy theories, it will hardly be obvious that your account has got locked because the caps lock key was on. This chain of events is possible when your login id is a number or pre-filled and you get no clue that the caps lock key is switched on. However this scenario is often overlooked by developers ...

A nice explanation from a detailed article in SQLMag - Using the T-SQL EXISTS keyword to perform an existence check is almost always faster than using COUNT(*). EXISTS can stop as soon as the logical test proves true, but COUNT(*) must count every row, even after it knows one row has passed the test. I like collecting tips like these to supplement the numerous tips, tricks & checklists in the (freely downloadable) Patterns & Practices guide " Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability ". I wish they upgraded this .NET bible to include the advances that have happened since the guide was published in 2004.

T here are free HTML to PDF online/desktop converters that can convert web pages to PDF. Web2PDF Online is a free service that accepts a URL & generates a PDF file for it. But what if you wanted to convert web pages that are authenticated / protected to PDF for convenient offline access? CutePDF Writer is a free (for commercial and non-commercial use) tool that lets you 'print your document as PDF'. It works in the same way as you get a printed hard copy of a web page by specifying File > Print (the browser normally picks the default printer automatically). To print as PDF, you need to specify CutePDF Writer as the printer type. You can virtually generate PDFs with any tool that supports Print functionality by downloading and installing Ghostscript (Post Script to PDF converter, GPLGS8.15; 5.01 MB) & CutePDF Writer (Ver. 2.7; 1.54 MB) Related links: HOW TO mimic Google Search/GMail's “View as HTML” feature to browse PDFs/Word docs online