Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned: Azure Previously, Azure Virtual Machines deployed in suspended subscriptions would be deleted when the spending limit was passed (the data drives would be preserved – but the VM instances themselves would be deleted). Now when a subscription is disabled, VMs deployed inside it will simply move into the stopped de-provision state that was recently introduced (which allows a VM to stop without incurring any billing). JavaScript   Editing JavaScript code in real time is possible in Chrome and Chromium based browsers . After loading a web page completely, press the F12 key to open Developer Tools, then open the 'Sources' tab. Now open any JavaScript file loaded on the browser and you can directly edit it by clicking anywhere in that file. After making modifications press Ctrl+S to save the changes. The browser will automatically take in the new code. If there are some syntax errors in your code then it will display them in the console. So keep an ey...

Here are a few examples of services that can manage social media on your behalf: The Kit Kat Social Break desktop widget can automatically Like, Re-tweet, Share posts from your contacts on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. For a fee, HeadHonchos offers to manage & possibly furbish your LinkedIn Profile The times we live in!

Top 10 Free Security Apps for Android phones as rated by Right Choice magazine : McAfee Antivirus & Security Avast Mobile Security & Antivirus BitDefender Antivirus Lookout Security & Antivirus  Norton Security Antivirus ESET Mobile Security Trend Micro Mobile Security & Antivirus TrustGo Antivirus & Mobile Security Kaspersky Mobile Security Dr.Web Antivirus Some of the features provided by these apps include blocking spam text messages, backing up your data, remote locking and remote deletion (you can wipe data on your phone or SD card remotely)

This Week I Learned: Tools & Services: DbVisualizer generates better database diagrams than SQL Server Management Studio. It also lets you export the diagram to JPG, GIF, PNG, SVG & PDF format files. You can take any bit.ly link and add a + symbol to the end to see stats and details about the link. draw.io is an online diagramming application built using the mxGraph JavaScript library Site44 turns Dropbox folders into websites. You can edit your HTML locally, and your website will always be up-to-date. With their Starter plan , they offer free hosting for one free website with a data transfer limit of 100MB/month Health: 35 million people worldwide live with Alzheimer's disease. The onset of the disease is most likely to occur after the age of 60 years. While age is generally considered to be the primary reason, stroke that leads to vascular dementia is the second major known contributor to the disease. (Source: Times of India) Dentists suggest brushing twic...

A HTTP Waterfall chart can provide a quick visualization of what is wrong with a slow loading website. Chapter 3 of Stoyan Stefanov's Book of Speed has a nice explanation of what the colors in the a bar of Waterfall view (of twitter.com) generated by WebPageTest, mean: Dark green represents the time taken to perform a DNS lookup. DNS (Domain Name Service) lookup is the process of matching the friendly domain name twitter.com to an IP address (such as 128.242.240.20), which the browser needs in order to know how to get in touch with the server.  Think of the DNS lookup as being like a phone book: your browser knows the name (twitter.com) but needs the number (the IP address). You can see on the waterfall chart on Figure 3.2. that a separate DNS lookup needs to be done for every domain (twitter.com, a1.twimg.com, a3.twimg.com, s.twimg.com) because sub-domains may live on a different server with a different IP address.  Orange is the time to establish a con...

This Week I Learned: Azure + If you own a MSDN subscription you can use up to your monthly Windows Azure credits at no charge. If you exceed your monthly credits, your service will be disabled for that month.  I found out the hard way that the 10 "free" Azure Web Sites that you get will be disabled too if you exceed the limits of any of feature categories. For testing, if you activate the Azure SQL Reporting feature that comes as a MSDN benefit, make sure you stop it after you finish testing or else it will count towards your quota limit. +  A Windows Azure CDN customer's traffic may not be served out of the physically "closest" node; many factors are involved including routing and peering, Internet "weather", and node capacity and availability. Web Development + With the Emulation tool in Internet Explorer 11 F12 developer tools you can simulate a GPS receiver and enter GPS coordinates to test location-aware features in a webpage. +  c...

Microsoft Visual C# 2012 Step by Step is a good book for beginners. It covers a considerable breadth of the C# language in 800 odd pages while showing how to program with the language using Visual Studio, the most commonly used IDE. As with other books in the Step by Step series, the explanations are pretty detailed but never boring. The coverage of Visual Studio features while explaining C# programming topics is interesting. There are tables & illustrations to make the content engaging. The Quick Reference at the end of each chapter with brief C# snippets is a valuable addition. I guess there is no other IDE as full fledged as Visual Studio for coding with C#. Considering there are free Express editions of Visual Studio, I wonder if the vast majority of C# programmers use anything other than Visual Studio for building real-world application. Therefore I found it unusual that C# in the book's title should be referred as Visual C#. MSDN informs that Visual C# is the offici...

The transparent overlay image to introduce web site features/elements is an interesting UI Pattern to do more with less - a visual explanation is better than reams of notes. Don't know if Gmail was the first popular website to use this idea but I now see a lot of other websites use this kind of an overlay to visually explain new UI elements or features that are added. Gmail used this overlay idea earlier to show Gmail keyboard shortcuts with the "?" keyboard shortcut.

The GoogleFinance function  can be used to fetch current or historical data for a specified time period. It supports some international exchanges including India's Sensex & Nifty indices, stocks & mutual funds. Update (6-Sep-2021)  - The value for the "ticker" attribute has been changing at different times. Get the ticker symbol for Indian exchanges, stocks & mutual funds from the Google Finance site. The Google Sheets formula has one mandatory & four optional attributes - GOOGLEFINANCE(ticker, [attribute], [start_date], [end_date|num_days], [interval]) Not all attributes values work for Indian markets so check the documentation to experiment and find out which attributes work. The following examples return results for the HDFC Index Fund Sensex Plan-Direct Plan mutual fund and SENSEX - = GoogleFinance ( "HDFC_INDE_SENS_12V3KIA" , "close" , "09/06/2021" ) = GoogleFinance ( "INDEXBOM:SENSEX" , "close" , ...

JavaScript Pocket Reference isn't really a dictionary styled reference that I imagined it to be. This book reads more like a O’Reilly book in the Nutshell series than a Reference. It should have been called JavaScript in a Nutshell for this is a distilled & condensed version of the author's immensely popular JavaScript: The Definitive Guide . It is however a well-written book that covers the important parts of JavaScript and the essentials of ECMAScript 5 in less than 300 pages. This book is like a quick tour of the modern-day JavaScript landscape by an expert guide. The author fills the discourse with interesting facts: Division by zero is not an error in JavaScript: it simply returns infinity or negative infinity. ...and explains relevant details concisely: "use strict" does not involve any JavaScript keywords: it is simply a JavaScript string literal expression, and is ignored by ECMAScript 3 interpreters. When placed at the beginning of a script or of...

This Week I Learned: Bing and Google Search make extensive use of localStorage for stashing SCRIPT blocks that are used on subsequent page views.  localStorage is a HTML5 API within modern browsers to allow web developers to store small amounts of data within the user's browser. To view list of Chrome URLs:  chrome://chrome-urls/  & to see what's stored in your the Chrome cache: chrome://view-http-cache/ PC Maintenance Tip - Use System Restore : You can create a System Restore Point to save current settings and revert to those settings if your computer begins having problems. This can happen after installing a new program or driver for hardware. URL shortening website Bit.ly’s URLs are case-sensitive. http://bit.ly/YFTTDo leads to different page while http://bit.ly/yfttdo takes you to another. Your age, gender and interests as determined by Google based on what websites you visit. See what Google knows about you  (Source: Labnol) Google has done away ...

Windows Azure SQL Reporting Succinctly is a freely downloadable 100-paged (90 without the pleasantries) e-book (available in Amazon Kindle and PDF formats) from Syncfusion . The ebook provides a great overview of Windows Azure SQL Reporting that will be helpful to developers and architects. It starts with a comparison of SQL Reporting and SSRS & takes the user through Report Development, Report Management, Report Parts, Security & Report Access. I feel the major failing of the book is that it doesn't provide any examples to follow along with the theory that it explains. As such this book is better read after you've tried out a few things with Windows Azure SQL Reporting. This 13-minute video from a 21-part series on Channel 9 provides a quick introduction.Both the book and the video reference the AdventureWorks database that you can get from this CodePlex location . The Windows Azure Management Portal keeps changing so I noticed a few of the points in the b...

An enterprising supermarket I go to is concerned that I may not be checking the promotional offers that they send to my Gmail account. They sent me steps on how to force Gmail to show emails they send always under the Primary category: To disable the Tabbed Inbox feature click on the settings cog in the upper right-hand corner, go to "Configure Inbox," and uncheck everything except "Primary." This will remove the tabs and bring you back to the old, familiar, one-inboxed interface. To see total count of unread messages (and not just the newest unread emails) click the More link in the left sidebar and you will see all your categories. The categories name will list the number of unread emails beside it.

This Week I Learned: You can track Indian Stock Exchanges Sensex and Nifty indices using these formulas in Google Spreadsheet - =GoogleFinance("BSESN","price") and =GoogleFinance("NSEI","price") respectively. It is possible to have Google Docs send updates about changing values as a text message . Amazon Web Services & Microsoft Azure aren't the only places where you can host a Cloud-based .NET application. There are atleast 4 other .NET PaaS-like providers .  The learnings of one experienced developer : There is no "right way" in software development Reading a book cover-to-cover is not the best way to learn -  You don’t really learn a technology until you’ve solved real problems with it. Learning particular technologies in-depth is a waste of time Community is extremely important in your software development career Always have a side project HTML5 does not use a Document Type Definition (DTD). Instead, it uses...