Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

I came across these free ebooks on the InfoQ website that look like good reading material - Scrum XP From The Trenches Kanban and Scrum - making the most of both Scrum Checklists Downloading them requires prior registration. The first book on the list has some good reviews on Amazon . 30

The IRCTC.co.in website has to be the most trafficked e-commerce site in India as you can book a train ticket online within minutes by paying a few rupees extra rather than buying them from a Railway ticket counter which has perennially long queues. In April 2010, there were over 7 million transactions carried out. The website has an Alexa Rank of 474. These impressive figures are probably not due to the quality of the website but due to the monopoly that it enjoys. Like many, I've endured the slow-loading pages but since the last few months I'm happy to have discovered alternatives to IRCTC. Since a couple of years, IRCTC has started providing an API at a hefty fee for third-party vendors. As a result, there are now a bunch of websites now that offer a superior interface & experience for buying train tickets online at a slightly higher cost, like - Cleartrip MakeMyTrip Yatra Thomas Cook (India) via.com I've tried the first two & am impressed with the...

In a brief span of four years, jQuery has become one of the most popular JavaScript Frameworks. Among the many websites & organizations that have adopted it is Microsoft and we are going to see a lot more of jQuery being used in ASP.NET websites than earlier. I've been using jQuery on & off for more than a year now. I more than agree with jQuery's motto that you will start writing less code & doing more with this nifty JavaScript Framework. What's more, it's all cross-browser code! The book Learning jQuery 1.3 is written by Jonathan Chaffer and Karl Swedberg. Both are members of the core jQuery team and John Resig, the creator of jQuery speaks glowingly about them in the foreword of the book. This book builds on the earlier edition which was one of the first books on jQuery. I've benefited from reading this book & recommend it to everyone working or starting to work with jQuery. This book is a comprehensive guide for beginners & a handy refe...

There are a bunch of web page performance analysis tools like Page Speed , YSlow , AOL Pagetest , MSFast , VRTA , neXpert   but the first two are probably the most popular among web developers. I have used YSlow in the past & was curious to know how it differs from Page Speed. There are a few articles that talk about the differences but the Page Speed FAQ sums up it up well - YSlow and Page Speed use some common "rules" that are based on industry best practices. There are, however, some rules, such as deferring JavaScript until after the page has loaded, that Page Speed implements exclusively. In addition, Page Speed provides you with an activity panel that allows you to do a "before and after" comparison when considering the implementation of Page Speed's suggestions. Finally, Page Speed is an open-source tool that is open to community contributions. YSlow & Page Speed can be used together but using them both may not be a good idea as it will ...

Google has made available the Flash-based Pacman game that it put up as the first-ever playable Google doodle commerating the 30th anniversary of PAC-MAN. It was first intended to be there for only a few days. Expecting the Flash-based Google Pacman game to be taken off, some enterprising Stack Overflow users have put together an offline copy of it on Github Commenting on the playable Google doodle, a friend tweeted - Waiting for #google to celebrate #Scrabble's anniversary. #Hasbro, you watchin? The MAD magazine cover of September 1982 Also see: Al Jaffee's Mad Fold-Ins in Flash 40

Like me, if you have wondered how the R2 in Windows Server 2008 R2 or SQL Server 2008 R2 differs from a SP (Service Pack), the freely download-able MS Press ebook "Introducing Windows Server 2008 R2" has a good explanation - An R2 release is more than an SP, but less than a full major release. Beginning with Windows Server 2003, Microsoft moved to a server release cycle that was designed to have a major release every three to fve years (Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008), with a minor release at the approximate midpoint of the major release cycle (Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2008 R2). This change allowed Microsoft to move away from including new functionality in service packs (SPs), while providing customers with a more stable and predictable server environment.  An R2 release is more than an SP, but less than a full major release. Windows Server 2008 R2 includes Windows Server 2008 SP2, but it also adds many new features and functionality that were no...

I discovered today that you could just type the command "F username" into the What Are You Doing? text box to follow any user on Twitter. I picked this tip from the Cheat Sheet of the book Twitter For Dummies that is excerpted on the Dummies website. Impressed with all the tips I found on the Dummies website , I've started following it on Twitter A fading alert shows up to notify confirmation I noticed that when you copy and paste content from that site, the URL of page you have copied it from gets added at the end with a "Read More:" label Thanks Joe Mayo for the link to the excerpts of the book Also see: Explaining Technology in Plain English 180

Whether you are getting started with Web development or need a good reference, W3Schools is a great online resource you can turn to. In over a decade of it's existence, the Norwegian family-owned company Refsnes Data that runs W3Schools has meticulously created tutorials on close to 50 Web development topics. The tutorials are in plain-English, thorough and to the point. I was glad to see today that jQuery has been added to that growing list of topics.   Also included is a tutorial on HTML5 , the next generation of HTML. W3Schools has been a dependable companion to me for much of my web development career. Just yesterday, I learnt that the rel attribute of the anchor tag is not really supported by any major browsers and it can take over a dozen possible values. rel="nofollow" is used by search engines to let search spiders know they should not follow a link which contains that attribute. W3Schools is currently ranked 341 on Alexa & enjoys over 103+ million mon...

Microsoft Press plans to release an ebook "Moving to Microsoft Visual Studio 2010" for free later this year. It has the following parts: Part I, “Moving from Microsoft Visual Studio 2003 to Visual Studio 2010.” Part II, “Moving from Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 to Visual Studio 2010.” Part III, “Moving from Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 to Visual Studio 2010.” The draft of the 6 chapters that make up Part II & III are currently available in PDF & XPS format for download. Also see: What do CTP, RC, RTM, RTW mean? 25

Microsoft User Group, Hyderabad (MUGH) was formed in 2003. It has members from many of the 100+ software companies in Hyderabad. Since being at the very first UG meeting, I've made many friends over the last 7 years at these meets. For long, I've been a member of the audience but last Saturday on May 15th, I delivered a session on jQuery . I had a kind & patient audience who sat attentively for more than an hour while I went on with all the jQuery tips, tricks and trivia that I've picked up during the past year. I also showed some simple code samples & explained about Plugins. Accomplished MVP & author, Arun Ganesh presented an engaging session on Cloud Computing with Azure. It included a demo on Visual Studio 2010 & Windows 7. Phani of Brainscale showed what's new with SharePoint 2010 from a developer's perspective . He made an interesting observation that SharePoint 2010 works best with the 32-bit version of Office 2010, because quite a f...

As the software industry gets increasingly globalized, getting along with counterparts in other countries to accomplish team goals is going to be a challenge. Jeff Atwood & more recently, Scott Hanselman have shared their experiences & tips on working with remote development teams . It's essential reading for geographically distributed teams. Also see: Top 10 Developer Skills for the Future Building non-technical skills

Although Hindi is the national language of India, it is spoken by less than half the population. For those among the other half & non-citizens who want to learn Hindi, Google Translate's text-to-speech functionality can be a good tool. Hindi is currently the only Indian language supported. On clicking the Speaker icon in front of the translated text, the Hindi words are read out by a female voice. This feature relies on Flash. The translation is not perfect always. As Google admits... Clear and accurate speech technology is difficult to perfect, but we will continue to improve the performance and number of languages that are supported. I hope more Indian languages get supported by Google Translate & it's text-to-speech functionality lets Indians appreciate languages they don't know. Also see: Google Script Converter transliterates between Indian languages Read Telugu news sites in transliterated English 40

Have you ever felt hassled by a website that provides continuous updates (like cricket scores or live event updates) but requires you to reload the page manually? While Opera browser has an option to automatically reload a web page at pre-defined intervals , Internet Explorer, Firefox & Safari do not have any such feature by default. I found this code for a browser bookmarklet to automatically refresh any web-page in IE on StackOverlow - javascript:( function(){ i=0;setInterval("i++;var x=new ActiveXObject('Microsoft.XMLHTTP'); x.open('GET',location.href+'?'+i,true);x.setRequestHeader('Content-Type', 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded'); x.onreadystatechange=function(){if(x.readyState==4) {document.body.innerHTML=x.responseText;}}; x.send(null);",5000); }() ) I made the following minor change to it by replacing the use of Microsoft.XMLHTTP ActiveXObject with XMLHttpRequest object so that it works in all new browsers - j...

This week's Swaminomics column in the Sunday Times of India , based on an article in The Atlantic Magazine explains how India's Noble prize winning scientist C.V. Raman's discovery has finally become a breakthrough technology. Handheld scanners called Raman scanners, weighing just one-third of a kilo, are being used by US narcotics squads and airports to detect drugs. The scanners work by detecting the molecular structure of the object they are scanning. If you shoot a beam of light on an object, a very small part of it interacts with the atoms of the object and scatters light in a pattern or spectrum unique to that particular molecule.This is the Raman Effect. It is difficult to detect, and typically needs lasers to amplify the signal. Every molecule has a different Raman pattern. This is why Raman scanning has been called the fingerprinting of the universe: it can identify substances as surely as fingerprints can identify humans. Scanners have a laser, spectroscope and...

Google Code University hosts tutorials on a variety of topics including Web Security . A recently added tutorial is called "Web Application Exploits and Defenses". A blog post announcing this has an interesting statement - The maxim, "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" is only true if the eyeballs know what to look for. For web developers interested in security, Microsoft E-Learning offers a two-part course called Microsoft Security Guidance Training for Developers Also see: Google Browser Security Handbook OWASP Development Guide

Stuck with a JavaScript issue & need help debugging it? jsFiddle & JS Bin are online Web editors that save your samples & generate a random URL for it so that you can share it on a forum or with those who can help you with it. Though both are not ready for prime-time, jsFiddle currently appears to have more options than JS Bin. It can format code to make it more readable. Both of them help you build quick & dirty code samples using Frameworks like jQuery, while you are experimenting or building a prototype. Without having to sign-up, you can save your code & generate a public link for it. You can then send this link to others anywhere across the world to review or seek help with debugging. (JS Bin - click on the image to view enlarged screen-shot) .60

Life is a team sport - Janine Benyus If you have to engage school-going kids constructively, there is nothing like introducing computers to them  through the Tux4Kids line of free & Open Source products - Tux Paint   is a free drawing program for children (ages 3 to 12) TuxTyping is an educational typing tutor TuxMath is a fun way for kids to practice their mathematics Tux the penguin can only catch the fish if you type the right letters in time If they are ready for programming, there are some good & free options, like - Microsoft Small Basic Scratch C# Small Basic IDE (to be continued...)