Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

If you like your browser to remember your passwords, you would have to be careful if you are agreeing to this setting in Chrome & Firefox, especially on a shared computer. Any unscrupulous person can find them out with little effort as this post by Roy Osherove explains . With Firefox, the default behavior is to allow anyone to see your passwords as well, but you can actively choose to use a master password in firefox to make this less accessible. the default is that it’s open for anyone to see. With Chrome, there isn’t even a “master password” option. IE, Opera, Safari store passwords if you ask them to remember but do not display them. Also see: IE8 Developer Tools Tips & Tricks Erasing Saved Web Site Passwords

Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight. – Bill Gates Nachi Nagappan, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research worked with Microsoft development teams to validate conventional software-engineering wisdom and came out with these findings (copied almost verbatim) - * Code coverage measures how comprehensively a piece of code has been tested; if a program contains 100 lines of code and the quality-assurance process tests 95 lines, the effective code coverage is 95 percent. Higher code coverage is not the best measure of post-release failures. The reason is that software quality depends on so many other factors and dynamics that no one metric can predict quality—and not all metrics apply to all projects. Two of the most obvious reasons why code coverage alone fails to predict error rates: usage and complexity. ..it is more beneficial to achieve higher code coverage of more complex code than to test less complex code a...

Jeff Atwood points out that key interviews from the book Programmers at Work (1986) are available online. This includes 6 out of the 19 interviews in that book with the following luminaries - Charles Simonyi Butler Lampson John Warnock Gary Kildall Bill Gates John Page Also see: "The History of Microsoft" Series The Visual Studio Documentary

There are quite a few free mapping services for India on the Web but only some among them offer APIs that web publishers can extend & integrate in their own websites. There is news now that BIG Maps has also released its application programming interface (API). The documentation is pretty comprehensive with demos but it looks like it's not all official yet as the home page of the website currently sports a "Coming soon" label. The FAQ informs that coordinate system that BIGMaps follows is proprietary but there are ways to import and export data from/to other formats. This is an interesting development & I hope the competition among the players results in better products. Also see: 2 months of BigFlix

The SEO Cheat Sheet I ran into recently ...... ...reminded me of all the other Cheat-Sheets that have helped me in the past - CSS Cheat-Sheet JavaScript Cheat-Sheet jQuery Cheat-Sheet Regular Expressions Cheat-Sheet Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet Also see: Keyboard shortcuts common to Firefox & IE 8 My Favorite Visual Studio 2005 & SQL Server 2005 Keyboard Shortcuts My favorite Foxit Reader keyboard shortcuts

I found that the column T is the last you will find by default in a sheet in Google Spreadsheets. After a little digging, I found that it can have up to 256 columns, or up to 200,000 cells, or up to 100 sheets -- whichever limit is reached first. There's no limit on number of rows. So how do you go beyond column T? One way is to right click on the column header & then select "Insert 1 right" from the context menu. Here are some more size limits of Google Spreadsheets - Each spreadsheet can have up to 20,000 cells with formulas. Of this total, the following limits apply: Up to 1,000 GoogleFinance formulas Up to 1,000 GoogleLookup formulas Up to 50 Import formulas You have a limit of 1000 spreadsheets. The spreadsheets that are shared with you do not count against 1000 limit. The limit on spreadsheets open at one time is 11. You can import spreadsheets up to approximately 1 Mb in xls, xlsx, csv, ods, txt, tsv, or tsb format. Also see: HOW TO get date N working days...

I recently came across a query posted by a puzzled developer - Why does SELECT DATENAME(MONTH,GETDATE()) return '09' instead of the obvious result of 'September'? The DATENAME function, after all, returns a character string representing the specified datepart of the specified date. It turns out that if the language environment is set to Japanese, Korean or Traditional/Simplified Chinese (during installation or using SET LANGUAGE ), months are stored as numerals instead of words for those languages & that's how they show up. This can be verified by running the sp_helplanguage system stored procedure which reports information about a language. Also see: HOW TO find a column's value without specifying the column name

There are at least 36 AV software tools for the Windows Platform out of which about a dozen are free . Now, Microsoft Security Essentials joins that list. It is a free download that requires the OS where it is installed to be genuine Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7 It is lightweight & provides real-time protection against viruses, spyware, and other malicious software without hogging system resources as most AV software do. MSE replaces Windows Live OneCare and Windows Defender.

Microsoft recognizes those who make contributions to technical communities with the annual Most Valuable Professional award. I'm thrilled to receive the news that this award which I first received in 2005 & in subsequent years has been renewed for this year as well. I thank everyone who made this award possible. The best part of the award is that you get to hobnob with folks passionate about Microsoft technologies - authors, speakers and other technical community leaders. Contributing to technical forums is part of my continuing education & it is gratifying to be rewarded for that. There have been many people who have inspired me with their work towards technical communities but I would specially like to mention Martin Honnen & Scott Mitchell . Related: Be a Microsoft MVP I attended MVP Summit 2008 MS MVP Authors from India