Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Pogie awards celebrate the best ideas of the year: ingenious features that somehow made it past the lawyers, through the penny-pinching committees and into real-world tech gadgets — even if the products overall are turkeys.   Here's a paraphrased summary of the winning ideas: Power Nap is a feature of OS X Mountain Lion that works on recent MacBook models. It lets the laptop keep backing itself up, downloading e-mail and syncing its online data (calendars, calendar notes, reminders, photos) & allows the network activity to chug away even when the lid is closed. In Windows Phone 8, Kid’s Corner is a sanitized version of the operating system that contains only apps, music and videos that you’ve handpicked in advance. With this feature web browsing, e-mail, phone calls  and in-app purchases can be made off limits for kids and it can be activated with a quick left swipe from the Lock screen The Ciago iAlert and Cobra Tag are Bluetooth keychain fobs that communicate with...

Vocabulary.com does a great job of "gamify-ing" the process of building your vocabulary through its adaptive learning system It is among the PC Magazine's Top 100 Websites & the Time magazine's top 50 websites of 2012   The site's main attraction, the quiz, has some 100,000+ questions and the answers are educative. The site reportedly contains over 100 million sentence examples. The site is ad free Their dictionary is blazing fast. In an unscientific comparison, it seemed to beat another contender, thefreedictionary.com with the print layout , for the title of world's fastest, smartest dictionary.  Often, it has light-hearted word definitions and explanations that make learning new words more memorable. Sample this explanation for  filibuster, which means "to obstruct legislation by talking at great length."  As a parliamentary tactic, the filibuster dates back to at least the first century B.C.E. The rules of the Roman Senate required tha...

From his interview in the Economic Times - "We, as Google, are not in the search business. We are in the business of knowledge." - Google's Senior Vice President for Chrome and Apps & IIT-ian, Sundar Pichai  (40) A few facts - About 20% of the queries we get everyday are new. Our user base for Gmail has grown to 50 million users in India.  Chromebook will be available in at least two countries in the Asia Pacific region, excluding India, by March 2013.  It appears that Sundar Pichai likes taking potshots at Microsoft. Samples - "Windows 8 breaks the backward compatibility of its own end-toend ecosystem." "...we are constantly changing the Gmail code. It is like refuelling a plane in mid air. It happens on a day-to-day basis. If you compare it with Windows, one gets to see only four versions of Windows in five years." 'IE 10 makes available cloud experience but they (Microsoft) expect you to use Windows." Sundar ...

Taking advantage of the free Exam Voucher for the Microsoft exam 70-480: Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3 , I  passed the 70-480 exam yesterday. I used the following resources for preparing: W3Schools - I've been referring to this awesome tutorial site since a decade and preparing for this exam gave me a chance to dig deeper into the HTML5 & CSS3 sections Microsoft Virtual Academy course Developing in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3 Jump Start   Hello! HTML5 & CSS3 by Rob Crowther MSDN Internet Explorer API reference This exam whetted my appetite for learning HTML5 & the bold new possibilities that it opens up.

Vital stats & interesting facts about Reddit paraphrased from this article on Forbes : Reddit was started in 2005 by two fresh University of Virginia graduates, Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman (22), after they couldn’t finance a previous brainstorm: An online food-ordering site. Ohanian created a zany aura, doodling up a goofy red-eyed alien named Snoo that became Reddit’s logo. Reddit’s visitor traffic was so feeble at first that the founders spent hours posting content under a variety of fake names. Despite a clunky user interface that has barely been updated since 2005, Reddit attracts 3.4 billion page views a month, putting it among the 70 most visited sites in the US. Reddit spends just $7 million a year to support a 22-person payroll and 75 servers rented from Amazon’s cloud. Most of the content on offensive subreddits is posted pseudonymously and lives on the outer edges of what’s tolerable under the First Amendment. Exact terms haven’t ever been disclosed, but i...

Lucene & Hadoop are both created by  Doug Cutting  and they are open-source. Lucene is a text search engine API. It can be used by applications which requires full text indexing and searching capability. Lucene.Net is a port of Java Lucene written in C# and targeted at .NET Framework users. Hadoop is a framework that enables the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of commodity hardware. Hadoop is a clone of Google’s MapReduce number-crunching platform. Hadoop consists of a file system (HDFS) and a number-crunching platform (Hadoop MapReduce). The file system lets you spread data across a cluster of machines, and the MapReduce processes this data by sending little pieces of code to each individual server. In 1998, Google was the 19th search engine to enter the market. Google’s implementation of MapReduce on GFS and [Google's distributed database] BigTable vaulted them to leadership within two years . 

Notes from the Pluralsight course  SharePoint 2013 Developer Ramp-Up - Part 1 : Significant changes in SharePoint 2013: New development model - SharePoint Apps - ideal for Office 365, App Marketplace Minimal Download Strategy (MDS) UX Web Apps support claim based authentication by default Architectural changes: Workflow Search Web content management Deprecated capabilities SharePoint Designer's Design view Meeting & Document Worksapces BI: Chart Web Part, Status Indicators & Status Lists An app can contain a solution. A solution can contain one or more features A *.app file is a .zip file containing a package of files. Contains a manifest file. Server-side code is completely inaccessible inside an App Sharepoint 2013 deployment options: On-premises (behind firewall) Hosted aka Office 365/Sharepoint Online Hybrid - mix of On-premises & Hosted SharePoint 2013 won’t work on a client OS; needs Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1(x64 only) or Windows ...

A recent Wall Street Journal article reveals that companies today are increasingly tying people's real-life identities to their online browsing habits. WSJ also provides these startling privacy insights among others - Americans' license plates are now being tracked not only by the government, but also by repo men who hope to profit from the information. The government follows the movements of thousands of Americans a year by secretly monitoring their cellphone records .  One of the fastest growing online businesses is that of spying on Americans as they browse the Web. Here are some ways drawn from online resources , to protect your privacy online  - 1. Log Out of Social Networks When Browsing and Clear Cookies All those little “Like” buttons and other social-networking technologies across the Web can inform the parent company of your browsing habits whenever you encounter them. This is true even if you don’t actually click the button. Did you notice, m...

A list of India's luxury trains: Palace on Wheels   Royal Rajasthan on Wheels   The Golden Chariot   Maharajas' Express   Deccan Odyssey India The Indian Maharaja

From Bill Staples TechEd 2012 presentation on Windows Azure Web Sites  - VMs, Cloud Services, Web Sites in perspective Related:  Windows Azure Websites, Web Roles, and VMs: When to use which?

In about 21 minutes, Jai Haridas runs through the basics of Windows Azure Storage in the Channel 9 video  Windows Azure Storage Introduction of the  Meet Windows Azure series (June, 2012). This video is a shorter form of his more detailed TechEd Europe 2012 session, Windows Azure Storage: How it Works, Best Practices and Future Directions Some pictures from his slides (link to PPT)  - Related: Introducing Table SAS (Shared Access Signature), Queue SAS and update to Blob SAS Introducing Signed Access Signature Creating a Shared Access Signature