Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

The second edition of Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug which came out in 2005 is a short 200-page stylish book on Web Usability. It has glowing reviews on Amazon. Jeff Atwood (I'm a long-time follower of his blog and I discovered "Code Complete" after reading through some of this articles) is a big fan of this book. Going by the reviews, I picked this book thinking it is a classic on this topic. I found that one-fourth of the short book was just pleasantries, credits, index, author plugging about his successful career as a consultant ["I'm writing this book for people who can't afford to hire (or rent) someone like me."], workshops & his (then) forthcoming book and lots of blank space. The author tells us 'I was proud of how short the book was. It took a lot of work, but it was an important part of the "practices what it preaches" business' but when you read the chapter  "Omit needless words" that has  4 pages...

[Update - 2022]  YouTube now automatically generates a transcript & timestamp that can be toggled Subtitles within videos help non-native speakers clearly understand & follow what's going on while the video is playing. If you wish to take notes from a YouTube video, you will find this tip for extracting the subtitles from a YouTube video (that has subtitles) to be a time-saver. I have adapted this tip from an answer to a related question on the Quora website - Open the video page in Chrome browser (or any other browser that provides HTTP debugging/Developer Tools) and pause the video Right click anywhere on the page, and click on Inspect Element OR hit the F12 function key. Click on Network tab Under the Network tab look for an item called timedtext.  Right click on it and open that file in a new tab. An xml file containing subtitles with their timestamps(the stuff inside of <>) opens up. To get rid of the timestamps and just have the plain transcript...

The Twitter micro-blogging service converts URLs within a tweet to a shortened form using its t.co domain to conserve the number of characters so that users can pack more into a 140-character limited tweet. Some evil guys misuse this service to cloak hyperlinks to shady websites. An unsuspecting reader may fall into the trap if the tweet is crafted to make the user click the link. While security is one reason why a developer may want to show the expanded form of the URL while displaying a customized view of a Twitter stream, there are other benefits of using the expanded URL that the Twitter API provides. If the expanded URL points to an image or video, the URL can be parsed to show it directly in the customized view. Here's a code sample to show expanded URLs alongwith tweets . It utilizes a script from the CodeBrunch site that displays a collection of Tweets with "infinite scrolling" -

JavaScript cannot be used to load a feed if the domain from which the feed is originating is not the same as the site where it is going to be consumed programmatically. That's were a JSONP feed can be helpful. JSONP does not use XMLHttpRequest (XHR). It uses the script element so data can be pulled into any site, from any site. The purpose is to circumvent the same-source policy limitations of XMLHttpRequest. Google provides a REST-based feed conversion API, Google Feed API , to convert a RSS feeed to a JSONP feed on the fly. Here's a code sample that shows the latest 15 article titles from Scott Gu's RSS blog feed - If Google ever pulls this plug off for this service, there are alternatives .

jQuery Succinctly by Cody Lindley is an ebook that Syncfusion is offering as a free download (requires registration). I've been working with jQuery on & off for the last four years and this book made me realize there is so much more to my favorite JavaScript library. The book lives up to the title as it covers the practical aspects of jQuery  in a straight-forward manner in just 100 pages with 100 code samples. This is a gem of a book - the best technical book I've read this year (I read about one a month) and one of the best books I've read on jQuery (jQuery in Action and   Learning jQuery are the others I read earlier) It meets all the expectations I have of a good technical book - author is an expert on the topic, it's written in plain-English with no fluff and it provides a number of take-aways that you can apply at work. I had several 'aha' moments while reading through the facts like these - The nth-child() filter doesn't have a zero ind...

Windows 8 is reportedly due to arrive by this year-end. For those who can't wait to try out Microsoft's newest "reimagined" Windows operating system, there are preview releases - the latest one is called Windows Release Preview. If you don't have spare hardware to experiment with the new OS, you can try out Windows Release Preview with free Virtual Machine software like VMWare Player or Oracle's VirtualBox. Unlike VirtualBox, VMWare Player requires registration but it is worth the effort as it provides a better experience. Step-by-step guides for installing Windows 8 Preview in VirtualBox and VMWare Player are available. So what's new in Windows 8? Start screen - the Start button is no more the focal point. Faster startup - 30 to 70% faster than Windows 7 Metro style UI - clean typography and animations, touch-optimized interface, Metro style apps fill entire screen Works on a variety of devices - x86 and x64 PCs, ARM devices IE 10 - touc...