Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Google's prime properties like Google Earth, Gmail, Picasa, Google Docs, Blogger, YouTube, Google Calendar are said to have been developed in the "20 percent time" or one workday a week Google gives it's developers to work on whatever projects fan their passions. Among the other "20 percent time" projects that NY Times's tech columnist David Pogue highlights is a somewhat trivial but interesting Google Sets . ...type in several items in a series (like “cleveland browns” and “dallas cowboys”); Google fleshes out the list with others like it (all the other football teams). Great when something’s on the tip of your tongue (a kind of fruit, president, car, holiday, currency) but can remember only something like it. These are nice conveniences on the Internet that let you find you what you want based on correlated things. You can now even search an image with a correlated image or identify a song by humming a few lines on your mobile.

A study on team dynamics has found that groups that had a bad apple (a person with a personality type of "Depressive Pessimist" or "Jerk" or "Slacker") would perform worse and other team members begin to take on the bad apple's characteristics. ...the worst team member is the best predictor of how any team performs. Jeff Atwood writes... While it's depressing to learn that a group can be so powerfully affected by the worst tendencies of a single member, it's heartening to know that a skilled leader, if you're lucky enough to have one, can intervene and potentially control the situation. Still, the obvious solution is to address the problem at its source: get rid of the bad apple. Even if it's you. So how to spot a bad apple in a team or know if you are turning into a bad apple? Jeff quotes Steve McConnell on the possible warning signs that you're dealing with a bad apple on your team: 1. They cover up their ignorance rather than...

Speaking at WSDM 2009, Google Fellow Jeff Dean in a keynote talk shared how Google has grown from 1999 to 2009. Various search engine enthusiasts have blogged about the facts presented in the talk from their own notes. Excerpts: Google handles 1000 times more queries now with 1000 times more processing power (# machines * speed of the machines). It uses 1000 machines to handle a single query compared to just 12 previously. Query latency has improved from under 1000ms to normally under 200ms now. Crawler updates now take minutes compared to months in 1999. For many pages, search results now change within minutes of the page changing. Rolled out seven major rearchitecture efforts in ten years. In-house design from the ground up: rack design, pc class motherboards, linux, and in-house software (GFS, BigTable, etc...) Google's machine translation models use a million lookups in a multi-terabyte model just to translate one sentence. Popularity comes at a price. Google is now accused...

neXpert is a add-on to Fiddler similar to the YSlow add-on that integrates with Firebug on Firefox. The version 1.0 released recently still has some rough edges but looks to be a good addition to any ASP.NET Developer's toolkit. neXpert looks for performance issues and generates a HTML report with recommendations based on it's findings. Some recommendations include - Be aware that IIS is case-sensitive and changing the case (Upper, lower, Title) for an object requested is considered a new request. ..the best practice is that the size of the ASP.NET View State does not exceed 30% of the total page size. The ETag header is used for validation of objects in a user's cache. There have been many issues with the implementation of ETags in both web servers and web clients. The current performance best practice is to verify the correct configuration of ETags if the(y) are necessary and to turn them off if not. But as Jeff Atwood says about YSlow - There is no such thing as one-s...

Analogous to the collective wisdom of the masses that some websites mine for the benefit of users, it is heartening to see competing search engines join hands to make search results and the Web more effective.  Microsoft Live, Yahoo & Google now allow you to "normalize" urls by picking one "canonical" url so that you link consistently within your site. This feature will help search engines solve complex duplicate content issues and make search results more relevant. To implement this simply add the following link tag inside the head section of the duplicate content URLs to specify your preferred version of several similar URLs: <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/products" /> A few technical details: This is a hint, not a directive/mandate/requirement. Search engines choose when to use the suggestion You can use relative or absolute URLs in the “href” attribute of the link tag. The page and the URL in the “href” attribut...

Optical Character Recognition, or OCR, is a technology to convert different types of documents, such as scanned paper documents, PDF files or images captured by a digital camera into text so that they are editable and searchable. There are both free & commercial tool-kits. Free - SimpleOCR - 9.3MB application. SDK/Command Line versions are commercially available InstantOCR - web based OCR OCR Terminal beta - web based OCR, converts TIFF, JPEG, GIF, BMP formats to .doc, .txt, .rtf, .xml formats; PDF to Word Free, Under development - GOCR Tesseract Commercial OCR Toolkits - ABBYY FineReader OmniPage Also see: Experimental OCR feature to create editable Google Documents from high-res images HOW TO identify a Font

FFmpeg is a free computer program that can record, convert and stream digital audio and video in numerous formats. It contains multiple components including a a command line tool to convert multimedia files between formats. FFmpeg is developed under Linux, but it can be compiled under most operating systems, including Apple Inc. Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows and AmigaOS. An indirect proof of it's popularity is the number of imitators who flout FFmpeg licensing terms . WinFF is a GUI for the command line video converter, FFmpeg. It can convert multiple different files all to the same format at once. You can for example convert mpeg’s, flv’s, and mov’s, all into avi’s all at once. WinFF is available for Windows 95, 98 , ME, NT, XP, Vista. The WinFF version 0.43 Windows Installer is just 3.4MB and is available on Google Code. WinFF is published under the GNU public license. Also see: HOW TO view YouTube videos offline

If the text for which you want to know the font type is editable, you can identify it using it's related application. If it is on a website, you can usually find it by viewing it's HTML source. If the character is in an offline source like a newspaper, it would take a human font expert to identify a complex font type OR you can turn to two free online resources - WhatTheFont   Identifont On the WhatTheFont website you would need to submit the digitized form of the offline source like a scanned or photographed image of the text containing the font or submit the URL containing the image. To let Identifont find the typeface you have to answer approximately twelve questions questions to get the closest match in their huge database of typefaces. Related:   Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar Color Picker

"Why do people go to India to find themselves? India is where you go to LOSE yourself." ~ found on the Internet I love watching movies on DVD with subtitles turned on as I can understand the dialogues better. Captions/Subtitles make videos and movies accessible to a wider audience. In India, PlanetRead reaches out to 300 million early literates by providing automatic reading practice using their Same Language Subtitling (SLS) technology on Bollywood songs shown on national television - Doordarshan. There are numerous other indirect advantages of Subtitling . Last year, YouTube launched a Captions and Subtitles feature . YouTube currently supports a subtitle format that is compatible with the formats known as SubViewer (*.SUB) and SubRip (*.SRT). A SRT file (see sample ) is a text file with captions and time at which it should appear in the video, written in a predefined format. YouTube Help Center has an entry on the list of free & commercial tools that can help you g...

"How does a project get to be a year late?... One day at a time" - Fredrick P. Brooks When you are setting out on a long journey along an unknown path, it pays to seek advice from folks who know that path well. Similarly you can count on the book Software Project Survival Guide by Steve McConnell, the accomplished author of the classics Code Complete and Rapid Development, for guidance on completing your project successfully. The author draws inspiration from the best practices suggested by numerous Software Project Management publications and his rich experience to prescribe a Staged Delivery approach to tackle small & medium sized projects. His pragmatic & optimistic approach has some elements from the Agile methodology. He emphasizes the power of "Process" and shows how it can lead to better predictability, visibility and control. There was just one instance where I felt this may have been romanticized - The completed Software Project History provides a...

It is said that A R Rahman , the Mozart of Madras, composes his tunes for film songs first & then the song-writers fill in the words. He is also said to have a bank of tunes that he mixes and matches to create award-winning songs. Everyone likes to sing (some at least secretly). Although only a talented few can have the chance of singing for the likes of Rahman, you need not any longer keep your song inside. Songsmith (a 98MB download) is a fun application developed by Microsoft Research that provides adaptive musical accompaniment as you croon. You can save the songs you record in MP3 or WMA format. The tool may not help you win you awards but it may well bring out the singer in you. SeattlePi nicely describes how it works: Start up Songsmith, pick a style and a tempo, click record and sing a melody to the beat. Songsmith tracks the pitch of your voice. An algorithm, trained by analyzing the chords in a database of 300 songs, takes the pitches and figures out what chords match. ...

If you are planning to AJAX-enable a ASP.NET website, a good option is of course the ASP.NET AJAX Framework from Microsoft due to it's better integration with the Visual Studio IDE and documentation. Occasionally I see questions on the Forums from folks having issues making ASP.NET AJAX work. Very often this is because they have not picked the correct version of ASP.NET AJAX to go with the ASP.NET Framework version. So here is a quick summary. If your web application is based on ... ASP.NET 3.5 - you need ASP.NET AJAX 3.5 and it comes built-in with VS 2008. If you need specialized controls from the AJAX Control Toolkit use Toolkit version 3.5. If you are specifically building on top of .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 using Visual Studio 2008 SP1, use Toolkit version 3.5.20820. (System.Web.Extensions, Version= 3.6.0.0 corresponds to ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions December CTP) ASP.NET 2.0 - you need ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 and you have to manually install it in VS 2008 or 2005 and make sure the web.confi...

Cloaking hyperlinks is a cunning trick that comment spammers & phishing attackers use to ride on the popularity of websites that are in the good books of search-engines. If you run a public website that allows comments or accepts input, you should keep an eye on URLs submitted by users that could be cloaked under unsuspecting hyperlink text. Developer Tools has a nice feature called Link Paths that will show the URLs corresponding to hyperlinks on a specified page as labels overlaid on the link text. You can also have it generate a report of all Links in a page. This can also be helpful while debugging a database-driven web page that you may have built with dynamic URLs based on values retrieved from a database. To try this feature, open Developer Tools from the menu or using the keyboard shortcut F12 after you have opened the web page whose hyperlinks you want to inspect. From the View menu, select Link Paths. Switch to the web page and you will see the actual URLs as labels wher...

Debugging CSS in an inherited web application or trying to adapt CSS from an inspiring design of someone's website is generally not an easy task. One of the interesting features in IE 8 Developer Tools is the facility to edit CSS visually. After you open the desired web page of which you want to debug CSS, open Developer Tools from the menu or using the keyboard shortcut F12. Click on the CSS tab. If you already know the Class and ID information, select it from the treeview of all Class and ID style definitions for the corresponding web page otherwise go to the View menu in Developer Tools and select Class and ID information. On choosing this all the CSS Classes and IDs will be displayed as small labels on the web page that you are debugging CSS for. You can see how the attributes of a particular style definition operate by un-checking the checkboxes next to each element's style definition & view the changes immediately in real-time by switching to the web page.

Developer typically look at the HTML Source to locate possible coding issues. Notepad is not an ideal viewer as it lacks the sophistication of EditPlus or NotePad++ or any of the numerous editors. Luckily it is easy to change the viewer in IE8 (RC1). Hit F12 to invoke Developer Tools. From the menu, choose File > Customize Internet Explorer View Source and then from the cascading menu, select Other. This will allow you to specify the path of your favorite editor's executable. Once you set it, the HTML Source will be shown in your favorite editor whenever you choose View Source from the browser.

Although it lacks the friendliness of world-class e-Commerce websites, IRCTC.co.in (Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation), the train ticket booking website of Indian Railways is possibly the most trafficked e-Commerce website in India due to the monopoly it enjoys in online ticket reservation & the sheer volume of transactions that it processes. There is news of IRCTC offering APIs for external parties to carry out reservations from their websites. (Update: 27-May-10) If you wish you did not have to use IRCTC at all but still book tickets online, you can consider using alternative websites    Till the time there are more such user-friendly options, here are some tips to make the most of IRCTC - Checking for accommodation availability, status of wait-listed tickets etc is much faster on IRCTC than the official Indian Railways website that has umpteen ads & a clumsy interface. You can book tickets online up to 90 days ahead of your planned traveling...