Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Bill Gates has posted an interesting video on his site about his thoughts on vaccines The video presents facts through entertaining comic art with voice-over by Bill Also see: Software industry related comics

HTTPWatch Blog has a nice article debunking these HTTPS myths - Myth #1 – My Site Only Needs HTTPS for the Login Page Myth #2 – Anything can go in Cookies and Query Strings with HTTPS Myth #3 – HTTPS is Too Slow Myth #4 – New SSL Certificates Have to be Purchased When Moving Servers or Running Multiple Servers Myth #5 – Each HTTPS Site Needs its Own Public IP Address Myth #6 – SSL Certificates are Expensive Myth #7 – HTTPS Never Caches Also see: A Web App Is As Secure As You Make It & the Browser It Runs On Prevent identity theft with HTTPS browsing

The software industry inspires cartoonists & vice versa . From The Oatmeal: Why some emails go unanswered Here is a list of software industry related comics from a question on the Pro Webmasters StackExchange forum  - Dilbert - Keyword search is now available on the site. There is also an unofficial Dilbert Strip Finder  which explains its popularity. This strip where Asok, the IIT-ian intern takes a jibe at a senior colleague over how experience doesn't matter in the software industry , garnered 50+ comments. Smashing Magazine cartoons - cartoons on web development & design, published every Friday xkcd - comic titles & transcripts are searchable The Oatmeal Abstruse Goose Mashable Comics I'll add more as I find them

Did you know, Apple was founded on April Fool's day in 1976 by Jobs, 21, & Wozniak, 25. This is how their first product Apple I looked like - Check out NY Times' History of Apple in pictures . Also see: Google Timeline History of Microsoft The Apple Museum - 30 years in 2 minutes

WebPageTest is a powerful online web performance testing & analysis tool that has been adding a lot of interesting new features .  Their list of test locations to check a page from is growing (currently 17) & now includes Delhi, India. It makes it easy to do "what-if" testing on production pages by showing what performance gains can be achieved by removing ads, widgets, JavaScript. It looks simple on the surface but once you start poking around Advanced Settings & see its analytical review of web pages you test, you'll wonder how it's even free. I highly recommend this tool to web developers who want to improve performance of the web pages they build. If you never tried this tool or gone through it superficially, check Patrick Meenan's  video to get started and learn directly from the creator of the tool.

Some native browser Developer tools  & external   web performance analysis tools   visualize data that is generated by the series of actions that occur between a user and the server from the time a request is made till it is completely delivered, through HTTP Waterfall charts Joshua Bixby's Waterfalls 101 article explains in plain-English the parts of the Waterfall chart & how to analyze it.

Performance & Security are non-functional requirements which cannot be taken for granted. Here's a compilation of Security testing tools for Web apps, drawn from an answer on the  Pro WebMasters StackExchange forum & other sources - Netsparker Community Edition - detects SQL Injection, XSS & other vulnerabilities Watcher - Fiddler plugin that works as a passive-analysis tool Microsoft Web Protection Library (WPL) Web Application Configuration Analyzer (WACA) - analyzes server configuration for security best practices related to General Windows, IIS , ASP.NET and SQL Server settings. AntiXSS 4.0 - protects ASP.NET web-based applications from XSS attacks CAT.NET HP Scrawlr - scans for SQL injection vulnerabilities Exploit-Me - suite of Firefox add-ons Websecurify  - also available as a Google Chrome Extension Acunetix Free Edition N-Stalker Free Edition Google's Skipfish RatProxy - passive web application s...

SearchEngineLand & NotLong have compared popular URL Shortener services. Google offers its own URL Shortener service called goo.gl ( gl is the country-code top-level domain designated for Gibraltar). It now also has an API . Pingdom, the uptime & performance monitoring service, has found goo.gl to be one of the fastest and with 100% uptime . For spam, security or legal reasons, the goo.gl service can disable some short URLs Related: A comparison of go.gl, bit.ly, t.co

For years, the JavaScript section at W3Schools.com has been a indispensable source of reference for me . It will now not be my only source. After going through Stephen Walther's JavaScript Reference built with HTML5 & jQuery, I'm impressed with all the useful & up-to-date information that it contains. Unlike W3Schools which shows what browsers support (or don't support) a particular method or property, without explicitly specifying the version... ...this new Reference shows which browsers support each of the Objects, Functions, Properties, Statements, Operators, Comments, Directives. Only the latest versions of popular browsers are taken into account & surprisingly Opera is excluded. The complete source (15.2MB) of this HTML5 JavaScript Reference application is available for download & review. Update(14/Jan/11): If you work with JavaScript, also get this bookmarklet -  Steve Souders has created a meta-bookmarklet that i...

If you like web page performance analysis & optimization tools like YSlow, you will love DOM Monster (thanks @souders) "DOM Monster is a cross-platform, cross-browser bookmarklet that will analyze the DOM & other features of the page you're on, and give you its bill of health." The good thing about this tool is that you wouldn't have to update it when a new version comes out as it is in the form of a bookmarklet . DOM Monster suggestions for a ASP.NET Forums page (click to enlarge)

Al Jaffee is a tireless satirist , inventor of the MAD magazine “fold-in” 1  & my all-time favorite cartoonist . At 89, he is MAD magazine’s oldest & most prolific artist, having actively contributed to it for over five decades. His biography titled Al Jaffee's Mad Life tells the tragic story of this creator of incredibly funny cartoons and how this “master adapter” has surmounted overwhelming odds. His childhood was short-lived as he had a overly religious & negligent mother & a caring but absent father. His mother uprooted him & his three brothers from the US & the twentieth century and moved them to their native country of Lithuania which was still in the nineteenth century in terms of development. His father’s career as a manager at a department store took a hit and progressively went from bad to worse after he had to transport his family back to the US not once but twice. Despite flitting between countries & cultures, Al adapted well to...