Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

I asked on the WebApps StackExchange forum a few months ago out of curiosity, if it is possible to know where a Content Delivery Network's servers are located ? The unanimous answer was that it is not possible to know unless the CDN vendor gives it out. Both the respondents to the question also mentioned that big CDNs don't reveal exact details. I was therefore pleasantly surprised when I recently came across a Windows Azure Team blog post that lists all of Windows Azure CDN's (currently) 24 physical nodes .

Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art by Steve McConnell is a book that meets my definition of a good technical book . In my opinion, Estimation is an underrated subject. A lack of understanding of this topic among team members (not just the PM) can negatively impact the success of the project. This is because the Project Manager has to draw on the judgement & experience of the software development team as well. This book is written for developers, leads, testers, and managers who need to create estimates occasionally as one of their many job responsibilities . It gently guides the reader through the esoteric art of software estimation with lots of practical real-world advice. Within the 300+ pages of the book spread across 23 chapters, the author explains 32 Estimation techniques graded according by these factors of applicability: What's estimated (Size, Effort, Schedule, Cost, Features)  Size of project (Small, Medium, Large) Development stage (Early...

Ignore this post if you live on the web & rarely turn off your computer. On the other hand, if you have a favorite set of websites that you open everyday, you can automate the process of starting these sites in multiple tabs within a single Firefox window by using a Windows Batch file. To create such a Windows Batch file, open Notepad or any text editor & paste these lines - @echo off start firefox.exe "stackoverflow.com" "twitter.com"  Change the URLs in the example to your own favorites & save the file with a valid name and a .bat extension. Related:  Setting Browser Tabs to Open at Start-Up

This question came up StackOverflow . For me, the following ingredients make a good technical book great - Written mostly in plain-English No-fluff, straight-forward tone & a conversational style Author identifies the needs of audience in the beginning & meets the expectations set Has some kind of takeaways you can benefit from like crisp summaries, checklists, practical examples, re-usable code samples. Content is well-organized & structured. Attention is paid to technical accuracy, grammar, layout & fonts used Illustrations, backgrounders & infoboxes are provided where required & important information is highlighted. The author is an expert on the topic and isn't under the " curse of knowledge ". A person contributing to the technical community (via online forums, meetups, source code donations, blog articles) would be more hands-on & therefore be a better teacher and author.

If you were searching for videos that reference the Razor (view engine) from among Microsoft videos from events like PDC, MIX 2010, Channel 9 , MAVIS can get you results with direct links to the precise moment that word was uttered in a video . This feature has also been implemented on  the U.S. Department of Energy's videos at ScienceCinema . MAVIS uses the Windows Azure cloud which affords massive scale & on demand computing capability to crunch through the videos. The Microsoft Research Audio Video Indexing System (MAVIS) is a set of software components that use speech recognition technology to enable searching of digitized spoken content, whether they are from meetings, conference calls, voice mails, presentations, online lectures, or even Internet video. Did you know, speech-recognition technology is already integrated in a number of Microsoft products, such as Windows 7, TellMe.com, Exchange 2010, and Office OneNote? Using integrated speech-recognition tec...

In the NewYork Post article "The machine age" , Peter Norvig traces the progress of Artificial Intelligence over the years. He cites interesting examples of how we are already using applications that utilize AI - * Spam filtering programs using A.I. learning and classification techniques correctly identify over 99.9% of the 200 billion spam e-mails sent each day.   * Your Android smartphone can recognize your speech and transcribe it into words quite accurately, despite your “New Yawk” accent and the honking cabby passing by on the street behind you.   * A.I. chess programs play at the level of top human champions (defeating the world champion 40 years after Simon’s prediction, not 10). IBM’s Watson computer will eagerly take on “Jeopardy!” champs starting tomorrow. In checkers, an A.I. program has achieved perfection — it can play flawlessly and it proved for the first time that checkers always results in a draw if both sides play correctly.   * With Google’s machine t...

Steve McConnell identified "Noisy, crowded offices" as a "classic mistake" in software development , in his book Rapid Development. This finding has been substantiated by the results of multiple surveys . However, nothing much seems to be done about it. A recent CNN report reveals that the average (American) office space has been shrinking over the past 20 years . In 1994, the average office worker had 90 square feet of office space, but the area had been whittled down to 75 square feet in 2010, according to the International Facility Management Association, a professional network for the facility management industry. Chart from the article in CNN. Click to enlarge An interesting tidbit from that article - For two years in a row, Fortune magazine has named SAS, a business intelligence software company in North Carolina, the No. 1 place to work. Company officials say they give almost all their employees private offices, which they say contributes to their succ...

Who says India is a poor country? Did you know 315 of the 545 MPs (Members of Parliament) in the current Lok Sabha or Lower House of Parliament are crorepatis (have assets greater than 10 million Indian rupees)? Out of 543 MPs (Lok Sabha), 153 are facing criminal charges. Fifty-four are facing charges of very serious nature, including murder. Who says having  35 criminal cases filed against an individual can stop that person from becoming a law-maker? The Association for Democratic Reforms' National Election Watch is a web-based application that has collated details about India's elected government representatives, both at the state & national level, from their own sworn affidavits. It lists details like their constituency, Party, involvement (if any) in criminal cases, education, assets and liabilities. Find out how the representative for your region stacks up against the rest and be better informed while voting at the next elect...

David Chappell has posted a video series on Visual Studio 2010 on YouTube . In all, the seven sessions are of roughly 45 minutes duration & cover the following topics - The Big Picture Team Foundation Server 2010 Requirements and Architecture Development Fundamentals Testing Managing and Tracking a Project Adopting Visual Studio 2010 Here are a few screenshots related to VS 2010 from his talk - VS 2010 components TFS 2010 Uses VS 2010 Pro/Premium/Ultimate - Comparison Click on images to enlarge

There are some odd words in English, especially those originating from other languages, that are not pronounced the way they are written (wonder if there is a word for these kind of words). Mispronouncing such words could make you a laughing stock. Unlike some other online dictionaries that just read out the pronunciation, Bing Dictionary for China also has karaoke-style videos for some 10 million sample sentences. According to PCWorld , Matt Scott, the project lead for Bing Dictionary is the model for the videos currently online. And no, he has not actually spoken all those 10 million sample sentences "Rather than repeatedly tape a person speaking the different sample sentences over and over again, Microsoft has found a way to synthesize the sounds and artificially mouth the facial movements of the model speaking in the videos. It works by capturing shots of all the different pronunciations the model can express in a five-hour process that maps t...

PrestaShop is an open-source e-commerce solution that is built with PHP. It is reportedly used by more than 50,000 webshops throughout the world . Like any PHP app, it runs under both Apache & IIS. While trying PrestaShop version 1.3.6 out, I ran into a few issues. After spending some time googling for an answer, I decided to do some experiments of my own and lo and behold, they worked! Let me tell you how it went - A simple way to install it on a Windows PC with IIS is to extract the contents of the PrestaShop app that's packaged as a compressed file into the wwwroot folder of Inetpub. Now type this URL in your browser address bar to start the Installer Wizard - http://localhost/prestashop/install/index.php The first hurdle came at the second step of the wizard, which is System Compatibility. The Wizard complained that my configuration was invalid as GD Library wasn't installed. Click to enlarge all images To correct this, I went to the Add or...

My Career Roadmap is a Microsoft India site that has resources on career advancement.   One of the learning resource there is a 32-part screencast series called “Driving Your Career” by Brian Prince. Each screencast is typically less than 10 minutes in duration and available for download as a WMV & MP3 file. There is no way to directly view it on the site.   I found some of the tips like "Use metaphors to communicate with humans" to be interesting. However, there were some that had profound titles but not equivalent content. Your mileage may vary.   Also see: Top 10 Developer Skills for the Future Building non-technical skills