Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

HTML5 Pocket Reference is a handy resource for both rookie and experienced web developers who work with the shiny new version of HTML. The book starts with a quick overview of HTML5. The meat of the 184-paged book is the alphabetic listing of all HTML5 elements and attributes and concise explanations about them. HTML5 has taken over a decade in the making and it is still evolving. There are two organizations, W3C & WHATWG, maintaining slightly different HTML specifications. Not all browsers support all of the HTML5 tags. There is still debate regarding the supported video formats for the video element. No single video file format is supported by all browsers. Inspite of all this, HTML5 holds promise. If you've only worked with HTML 4, you will be surprised with all that is new in HTML5. It includes a bunch of new APIs (Application Programming Interfaces standardize tasks that traditionally required proprietary plug-ins or custom programming) and a slew of new elements and ...

This Week I Learned: A good way to setup Development, Staging and Production environments for a Azure cloud application is to have either three separate Cloud Services, or even 3 subscriptions. The benefit with the different subscriptions is (a) you can control/restrict access to only those that should have access, and (b) it provides an easy way to view costs for each environment (since billing is done at the subscription level). Amazon EC2 and Windows Azure offers the lowest price at $0.12 per hour. However, Windows Azure performs much better than EC2 in one study (approximately 3 times). Worldwide internet traffic dipped by a stunning 40 per cent during the brief minutes that Google's services were offline last week . Patrick Juola, a computer linguistics expert figured that JK Rowling, not Robert Galbraith, was indeed the author of The Cuckoos Calling using a program called JGAAP (Java Graphical Authorship Attribution Program). JGAAP does a mathematical analysis of the...

When we get onto the Internet, we trade our privacy for convenience. Everyone from marketers, ISPs to Governments can watch our activities on the Internet. I chuckled when I saw a question on Stack Exchange from an enquirer wanting to find how he can get Google to save not just his search queries but track every URL he types browsers across multiple machines he uses. When we are already giving away so much information, why not leverage these services to the fullest? Google Web History can be set up to track things other than just search. If you're using Internet Explorer, install the Google Toolbar (only available for Internet Explorer) which will then submit all the URLs you access to Google Web History. If you're using Chrome, all of the features of Google Toolbar are already built into it. Signing in to Chrome brings your bookmarks, history, and other settings to all your devices . Anything you update on one device instantly updates everywhere else, and your Chrome ...

The Indian Railways ticket reservation website, IRCTC.co.in,  is possibly the most used utility site in India that is also the most complained about. It can get hopelessly slow when you need it the most and even fail totally. The IRCTC (Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation) website keeps introducing new features. Indian Railways lets you show the e-ticket SMS that you get from IRCTC on booking a ticket to the ticket examiner (TTE) instead of a print-out of the e-ticket. This is a great idea to save paper! However if you've changed your mobile number, you'll have to manually modify the mobile number that is pre-filled for you in the online reservation form based on the number you provided at the time of registration. If you omit this step while you're in hurry to book your ticket, there is no way you will get a text message. In the Booked Tickets History section, you have a way to re-send yourself an SMS but that will go to mobile number that you original...

The intent of the book Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5 Quickstart Cookbook by Jose Luis Latorre Millas, to cover the new features of .NET Framework 4.5 in just 226 pages is too ambitious - it covers too little and will please no one. It covers a broad-range of .NET related topics: Windows Store Apps CLR Networking EF ASP.NET WPF WCF ASP.NET Web API WF However, the recipes chosen are random and few for each topic. I feel the organization of the book is flawed and the book reads more like a draft. It was a little annoying to see keywords not capitalized properly. Almost every instance of "ASP.NET Web API" in the chapter devoted to it has the W in Web in lower-case (like this - ASP.NET web API). The chapter about new features in ASP.NET has sections on WAI-ARIA (Web Accessibility Initiative-Accessible Rich Internet Applications) - not the hottest of topics & Page Inspector , Visual Studio 2012 features which are completely unrelated to the central theme of the...

This Week I Learned: RuPay is the Indian domestic card payment network being set up by National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) at the behest of banks in India. This project had been conceived by Indian Banks Association and has the approval of Reserve Bank of India. On Jun 21, 2013, NPCI launched RuPay PaySecure to enable e-commerce or online transactions using RuPay debit cards.  Rare are companies like Infosys and MindTree, which had seven founders apiece. With 12 founders—all aged 23-24 years, all engineers from IIT Bombay, all friends—housing.co.in has outdone them all . Flipkart founders Sachin and Binny share the same surname Bansal but they are not related. #trivia Nearly 80% of smartphones shipped run Google's Android software. (Source: WSJ) A study shows that on social media, hype can work and feed on itself as well. Very small signals of social influence snowballed into behaviors like herding. "Cumulative advantage" is the idea that something that st...

An "answer box" is a SERP feature, usually displayed in a light-gray box, that occurs above the organic results (left column) and tries to directly answer a question. This Moz article lists 101 practical Google Answer Box queries or variations of them that you can pose  and get direct answers.  So, where do these answer boxes come from? Some, like stock tickers and weather charts, are clearly custom designed and can involve exclusive data partnerships. When it comes to the factoids, though, most of these answers come directly from Google's Knowledge Graph. I tried adapting some of the queries in the article designed to fetch US-related info to find India-related facts. I learned that the size of New Delhi (1484 km 2 ) is more than the size of Bangalore (741 km 2 ) and  Hyderabad (650 km 2 ) put together. Surprisingly, it can't currently (as of August 8th, 2013) tell what the size of Mumbai is or give the answer for "How tall is the Qutub Mina...

This Week I Learned: jQuery's .data method ignores case in attribute data names - The value of a HTML5 data attribute like  data-sampleAttributeName="example" or data-sampleattributename="example" can be accessed using the jQuery .data('sampleattributename'). Note that the same statement works for both the variations; camel-casing of the key is ignored and attribute is accessed by the lower-case name. If the attribute key value pair is data-sample-attribute-name="something", the value can be accessed with jQuery using this: .data('sampleAttributeName') Typing document.body.contentEditable = true; into DevTools makes *all* of the text on a page editable. Useful for prototyping  BBC uses has an open-source front end regression testing tool called Wraith to visually compare CSS regressions  To use Google as a countdown timer, enter “timer 10 minutes"  xkcd webcomic titled “Time” which was first published on March 25, has 3,0...