Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

"..I started out as an economics major and then switched to mathematics. I loved math, but I wasn’t sure that I wanted to spend my life being a mathematician. I thought for a while about studying psychology and I even considered the possibility of studying law. I’m not sure what I would have gotten a degree in if I hadn’t left Harvard to start Microsoft before I graduated." - Bill Gates The website of Bill Gates interestingly has a section "What I'm Learning". In a posting under that, the billionaire-philanthropist-geek says that he likes viewing courses online from MIT’s OpenCourseware, Academic Earth among others . For those fond of learning continually, there is no dearth of material on the Web - Academic Earth MIT’s OpenCourseware Carnegie Mellon's Open Learning Initiative The Open University, UK University of California, Berkeley Khan Academy Stanford Courses on iTunes U (Apple iTunes is a freely downloadable software. There is currently a co...

The system restart dialog from Windows Update that pops up unexpectedy when you are busy with some important task is probably one of the most annoying issues with Windows. Bertrand Le Roy, a member of the Microsoft ASP.NET Team, has candidly reported a scenario involving Windows Update that represented a clickthrough attack . While he was typing out a wiki page, the Windows Update dialog box put itself into focus & before he noticed it, a Space key he had intended for his wiki page took effect on the default “Restart” button of the Windows Update dialog causing his machine to shutdown without his wiki page getting saved. A reader of that blog post pointed how this  Windows Update “Restart now” dialog can be avoided by going to Control Panel, Windows Updates, and changing the option there to download updates but let the user decide when to install them. Alternatively, from the command prompt  type in either net stop "Automatic Updates" or sc stop wuauserv

I came across several interesting beginnner level articles on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) last week & thought of compiling them all here for easy reference - Google SEO resources for beginners Learn SEO in 30 Minutes a Day Beginner's Guide to Search Engine Optimization Rewriting the Beginner's Guide - The Outline The Beginner's Checklist for Learning SEO The 12 Skills That Have Served Me Best in My SEO Career

As the Web got more popular in the last decade, it has been common to see advertisements carrying not much of details but just a terse URL prompting those interested to visit a website to get more info. As Mobile Internet gets more affordable & handsets with cameras get cheaper, a number of applications that leverage both those features have started to emerge. Microsoft Tag & QR Code are visual tags that use proprietary technology to encode data in a 2D "barcode". They pack a lot of information in a small space. These visual tags can be used in traditional marketing media like print advertising, billboards, packaging and merchandising. A user capturing a visual tag through her mobile phone camera can be directed to a website for detailed information (that can include online photos & video) by a barcode reader application (that needs to be installed before hand on the mobile). Picture courtesy: Wikipedia Google utilizes QR Code to promote the most sought ...