Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

There are numerous ways to archive tweets but rather than use yet another tool, I prefer using Google Reader to preserve the tweets I mark as favorite on Twitter .  Google Reader can preserve your tweets, favorites or those of others from the time you subscribe to a corresponding Feed.   You can access any individual public users timeline or their favorites in RSS, ATOM, XML and JSON formats: https://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/<username>.rss https://twitter.com/favorites/<username>.rss Replace the username in the links above with the Twitter handle. To track your own timeline with updates from your follower, try this - https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/following_timeline.rss?user=<username> Search results for your keywords or hashtags can also be tracked.   With  Google Reader's "Send to" feature , you can post links from a subscribed Twitter feed to other social networking sites like Facebook, Redd...

Compiled from multiple resources that I've gone through over the last few months: * What is Cloud computing? Cloud computing is Internet-based computing, whereby shared resources, software and information are provided to computers and other devices on-demand, like electricity. * What are the key features of Cloud computing? Pooled resources - Available to any subscribing users Virtualization - High utilization of hardware assets Elasticity - Dynamic scale without CAPEX (capital or upfront expenses) Automation - Build, deploy, configure, provision, and move, all without manual intervention Metered billing - Per-usage business model; pay only for what you use * What are the benefits of Cloud computing? Economic - shift of capital expenses (CAPEX) to operational expenses (OPEX), and the potential reduction in OPEX associated with operating the infrastructure. Agility benefits - not having to procure and provision servers Efficiency - time-to-market advantages...

These days all popular browsers - IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, come with Developer Tools that help web developers debug HTML, JavaScript & CSS issues & build better web pages. It's probably the Netscape browser that first started helping developers with the Error Console option that would specify on which line a script error occurred & the possible cause. Firefox inherited that option while Firebug, the Firefox add-on, extended debugging facilities within Firefox to a different level. Firebug's feature-set is so comprehensive, it is possibly the inspiration for all the Developer Tools within popular browsers. Each browser's Dev Tools have some special features & they are continously evolving, thanks to the competition among themselves. The Developer Tools option can be invoked with the keyboard shortcut F12. Here is a compilation of links to the official documentation, tips & tricks for the Developer Tools - Internet Explorer: How to use F...

Key takeaways from Chapter 13: Using Iframes Sparingly of " Even Faster Websites ", a guide for performance vigilantes - Relative URLs inside the iframe are resolved relative to the iframe’s base URI, not the parent’s. JavaScript included in the iframe has limited access to the parent.  An iframe from a different domain can’t access the parent’s cookies. Iframes are one to two orders of magnitude more expensive to create than other types of DOM elements. An alternative way to insert ads with better performance would be for the main page to create a DIV to hold the contents of the ad.  We want the onload event to fire as quickly as possible. Iframes block Onload. A workaround to blocking behavior in Safari and Chrome is to set the iframe’s URL dynamically with JavaScript instead of setting it with the HTML SRC attribute. Resources in an iframe are downloaded in parallel with resources in the main page.  Using an iframe does not increase the number of parallel down...

CAPTCHA or Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart, is a technique to to stop bots from signing up for online accounts or automatically filling up forms. It works on the assumption that Humans can understand distorted text presented in a CAPTCHA image but not bots which may have a basic training in OCR (Optical Character Recognition) Hotmail's sign-up page uses Google's ReCAPTCHA service - I found the words in the image-text that Google's reCAPTCHA presents so complicatedly warped that it felt like taking an eye test. Check these samples - Does beating bots have to be such a big deal? ...and what's more Microsoft & we may unknowingly have become part of a Google's "experiment that involves using its reCAPTCHA spam-fighting system to improve data in Google Maps by having users identify things like street names and business addresses." TechCrunch reports that some of the new reCAPTCHAs present an ...

[Update: 2024]  -  Google has discontinued the Web Light service and retired the Web Light user agent. Therefore, this bookmarklet doesn't work anymore. [Update: Jan 2018] - The original Google Mobilizer service page isn't available anymore & the term Mobilizer doesn't appear to be used by Google anymore. While the bookmarklet mentioned below still works, it redirects to the googleweblight.com domain & then transcoded . I'll further update this article later. You can use Google Mobilizer application, when you need a mobile-friendly version of webpage. If you are on a low-bandwith Internet connection, Google Mobilizer can be used on a PC or laptop to view just the text (and optionally images). Before you read further, you can see how this page looks with and without images after being processed by Google Mobilizer. While you're there take a good look at the URL if you want to understand the bookmarklet code that I'm going to talk about next. ...

The local trains in Hyderabad, also referred as MMTS (Multi-Modal Transport System), are one of the best modes of transport within the city. There are often long queues for the tickets. I noticed that though the Automatic Ticket Vending Machines (ATVM) are present at almost all local stations  (introduced in February, 2010), they  are not patronized due to lack of awareness and inadequate advertising. ATVM Smart Cards can be used to purchase Platform Tickets, first & second class tickets for MMTS trains and unreserved Tickets for express / ordinary trains for travel from the station of issue to any station in the South Central Railway zone. The cost of the ATVM Smart Card keeps changing once in a while (I bought mine for Rs 100). The cost includes a refundable security deposit & ticket value. Smart Cards can be topped up to a maximum of Rs.1000, in multiples of Rs 50. It is valid for one year. Ironically, these cards are sold at the same booking counters at MMTS ...

Excerpted from "Chapter 7: Writing Efficient JavaScript" of the book " Even Faster Websites ": Performance .. is not just about how long it takes for the page to load, but also about how it responds as it’s being used. Out-of-scope variables take longer to access than local variables. A very common mistake that leads to performance issues is to omit the var keyword when assigning a variable’s value for the first time.  If an array item or object property is used more than once, store it in a local variable to speed up access to the value. Generally speaking, interacting with DOM objects is always more expensive than interacting with non-DOM objects. The if statement is best used with a small number of discrete values or a range of values; the switch statement is best used when there are between 3  and 10 discrete values to test for; array lookup is most efficient for a larger number of discrete values. To make a loop the most efficient, reverse the order in w...

Notes on SSRS from the Pluralsight course SQL Server Business Intelligence Overview and other online resources - * SSRS is a server based reporting platform * When you install SSRS it creates Report Server Databases in your SQL Server Instance. These databases are ReportServer and ReportServerTempDB * Features: Can report from a variety of data sources - Relational databases, XML files & feeds, multidimenstional data (OLAP), any ODBC or OLE-DB compliant source Visualize data into a variety of formats - Tabular, matrix & free form reports, Charting & interactivity capabilities, Export to PDF, Excel, text, XML Extensibility - Extend with managed code, Add new data sources, report logic & render formats * SSRS is made up of 3 server components: Report Manager – manages permissions, data sources, authorization settings Report Server – Report processor/brain of SSRS, manages scheduling (auto generated reports) & delivery, URL access reports, provides Web ...

There may be times when you have to make do with a low bandwidth internet connection. Don't despair for that may be a good time to discover how fast & clutter-free the mobile version of popular sites are on your PC/laptop. Here is a list of such mobile sites: Popular: YouTube Wikipedia Yahoo Slideshare Project Gutenberg Social media: Twitter Facebook Search Engines: Bing   (~4.3KB) WolframAlpha E-Comm Amazon.com Amazon.in Flipkart.com Banks Standard Chartered India State Bank of India ICICI HDFC Utility: GMail  (login page 1.3KB, Inbox 4.2KB) Google Reader   (~8.3KB) Google Mobilizer  - converts websites to mobile-friendly format IRCTC  (India) Burrp TV  (India)- tv schedule Newspapers/News : The New York Times Economic Times Times of India  ( city editions ) The Hindu Business Line Business Standard The Hindu CNN IBN Live NDTV Magazines : The Atlantic MIT Technology Review Ou...

All these days I've been thinking of writing a location-aware app that would tell me about interesting sights & news-worthy facts about places that fall in the way of a train journey. It turns out @codepo8 already has a sample app   on something similar WITH source  [zip file] that I can adapt. There are also a host of other  demos of the Geolocation API, with source, on the Mozilla Demo Studio site . Related links: 12 Cool HTML5 Geolocation Ideas MSDN: How to Create a Location-Aware Webpage