Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Ghost in the Wires is the memoir of Kevin Mitnick, once labelled America's most wanted hacker. Besides time in jail, he received the unusual punishment of not being allowed to use a computer for eight years. His life after that term has changed for the better and he is now a Security Consultant who does ethical hacking (implying what he may have done in the past was unethical after insisting throughout the book that he never hacked for financial gain and never did anything "evil"), public speaker, & author. He has been "hired by government agencies like the FAA, the Social Security Administration and - despite my criminal history - an FBI organization, InfraGard" - some of the same agencies whose loopholes he exploited in his hacking "addiction" days. By his own admission, he has: manipulated phone company switches all across America got information from the California DMV through social engineering committed identity theft several times ...

This Week I Learned: The normal Web and Business Editions in SQL Database have a limit of 180 concurrent requests. Applications requiring more connections should use a Premium database (Premium Tier for Windows Azure SQL Databases is a new preview feature in the Azure July Update ) with an appropriate reservation size to handle the maximum number of needed requests . The July update also introduces ability to perform recurring, fully automated, exports of a SQL Database to a Storage account in the form of a transactionally consistent .bacpac file. #Azure  Coursera uses a " very JavaScript-heavy, JavaScript-dependent approach to our frontend architecture ". "To keep our JavaScript sane, reusable, and modularized", they chose Backbone.JS MVC framework.  You can use this statement in Chrome Developer Tools to view all URLs within a web page (Source: Labnol ): urls = $$('a'); for (url in urls) console.log ( urls[url].href );  It is possible to use Visual St...

This Week I Learned: $.now() is the shorthand for new Date().getTime().  #jquery Pages fetched with POST are never cached, so the cache and ifModified options in jQuery.ajaxSetup() have no effect on these requests .  Setting cache to false will only work correctly with HEAD and GET requests.  #jquery On devices running iOS6 and Safari, POST is also cached.  #jquery How does Windows detect battery issues? Laptop batteries have a small chip inside that controls/monitors the charging process and also monitors the number of charge/recharge cycles. This chip is factory programmed with information how this sort of battery typically degrades over time. It also can derive information from the charging cycle itself: The time it takes to reach full-charge at a given voltage/current changes when the battery gets worn out. (Voltage drop during discharge is not reliable as it depends a lot on the amount of current drawn while discharging, so it varies with the use-pattern...

In the article, Which JavaScript Library Should I Pick? , Pamela Fox has listed some practical points to consider before you settle on a JavaScript Library (or a jQuery plugin) for your project. Here is a summary check-list based on her article: * Will it be a good developer experience? * Well documented * Flexible * Responsive community + Number of forks + Number of issues + Vibe on issues + External community * Actively maintained * Future thinking * Tested * Clean code * Will it be a good user experience? * File size * Performance * Browser support * Accessibility * Responsive To me, good documentation (including samples) and visibility on StackOverflow are the most important factors.

This Week I Learned: Scott Allen who is a big name in the ASP.NET community & one of the most popular teachers on Pluralsight, the video training website, has made a million from his training courses on Pluralsight .  Allan Jardine, the creator of Visual Event bookmarklet has also authored the DataTables jQuery plugin and other JavaScript goodies .   Reflector is also a compiler. It translates IL into C# VBScript will gradually be retired from Internet Explorer   Minified.js  is a fully featured client-side JavaScript library and a 4KB alternative to jQuery or MooTools -  You can check all the internal Chrome URLs in one place chrome://chrome-urls/ (via Labnol) The U.S. leads the world in software developers, with about 3.6 million. India has about 2.75 million. But by 2018, India will have 5.2 million developers, a nearly 90% increase, versus 4.5 million in the U.S. "I would have been fired a hundred times at a company run by MBAs. But I never w...

Feedly , the popular Google Reader alternative , shows unread posts only by default, possibly to reduce clutter. This may lead new users to believe that old feeds cannot be retrieved later unless is it "Saved for Later". It is only when you go to Settings (represented by the cog icon) that you realize that there is a filter called Unread Only that is selected by default which causes only unread posts to be shown. To view both read and unread posts, you will need to un-check this for each category.

There are multiple ways to write a LINQ query in C#: Use query (comprehension) syntax. Use method or Lambda syntax or Fluent syntax. Use a combination of query syntax and method syntax. So which syntax is better? MSDN recommends writing most queries using query syntax to create query expressions . The general opinion in this StackOverflow thread seems to be - "it depends". One Lambda syntax fan converted the MSDN 101 LINQ Samples which were in query syntax to Lambda syntax using  LinqPad .

This Week I Learned: Chrome DevTools can list the event handlers registered on any element .   Visual Events is a nifty bookmarklet that shows the events attached to each of the elements in a webpage.  MiniProfiler is a minimal but very effective tool for .NET and Ruby applications. It's targeted primarily for data access performance problems and supports ADO.NET, Entity Framework, LINQ-to-SQL, and other data access technologies.   The size of the Indian e-commerce market last year was estimated to be only between $1-2 billion. These estimates exclude $6-7 billion worth of travel bookings that are made online. Amazon's 2012 revenues were over $61 billion Irony - Hewlett-Packard won a Rs 400-crore technology outsourcing contract from public sector lender Corporation Bank, beating India's largest IT firm Tata Consultancy Services and Wipro. The contract is for switching and managing the bank's core-banking software from the current version made by Chennai-based sof...