Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

- 0 - Related: From The Case of the Bonsai Manager : Lessons for Managers on Intuition : .."the 'cabbage', or neo-cortex...is present in a rudimentary form in mammals. In humans, it is uniquely well-developed, that is, the 'cabbage' is large, complex and nuanced. Though early mammals possessed this part of the brain, it is far more important to human functioning." The neo-cortex or the "cabbage part of the brain is the repository of complex emotions. For example, it can hold multiple and opposite emotions simultaneously. This is why you can hate someone's guts, yet appear polite and loving towards him. An animal cannot do that. It either loves you or hates you. Dogs are loved because they cannot feel one way and behave another way towards you; they always appear faithful in exactly the same way. Not true with human beings! In this respect, dogs are better off without a frontal cortex or a huge neo-cortex."

Also see: HOW TO overcome the Windows Update Restart dialog annoyance The trouble with Kindle is... More of my cartoons

This book, Exam Ref 70-486: Developing ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Applications , does a good job of covering the objectives of the Microsoft exam 70-486 . Passing the 70-486 exam earns you a Microsoft Specialist Certification besides being a credit towards the Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer (MCSD) cred. These exam preparation guides from Microsoft Press also serve another purpose. If your job requires you to be an expert in a Microsoft technology, you would first need to know the specific topics within that area which matter in the real-world. Whether or not you take a Microsoft certification exam, the objectives laid out for the exam give a clear learning plan and the Microsoft Press exam preparation guides follow a presentation pattern that makes learning and retention of the essentials effective. The author covers a huge breadth of topics related to ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Applications in less than 400 pages while making the exam objectives appear less intimidatin...

Paraphrased from a Right Choice magazine article with my own opinions: Keep the brightness of the screen as low as possible. If portability & long battery life are important for you then buy a laptop with a lower screen size. The laptop's biggest power drain is the screen. Disable Wi-fi and Bluetooth when not needed Unplug all external devices Run only as many programs as you need.  If you have a 100 browser tabs open, your battery life will be about 1 hour shorter. Lower or turn off the volume Keep the laptop in a cool place and avoid propping it on a pillow as this blocks airflow to the fan, causing it to heat up. Defragment your hard drive Clean the battery's metal contacts. Clean contacts increase the energy efficiency. Always clean them when the battery is fully-drained, and use a cloth that's only slightly damp, to avoid electric shocks and short circuits.  Shutdown or hibernate your laptop instead of putting it on standby if you're going to be away ...

It cost at least $400 million to put together the problem-plagued HealthCare.gov website.  What went wrong? The PM perspective (from Don’t Blame IT for Obamacare’s Tech Troubles ): Blaming programmers, coders, and project managers for disgraceful design flaws and technical turmoil is too easy and obvious. Crap rolls downhill. Look deeper. The underlying truth for virtually every large system’s implementation initiative is that success demands leadership and oversight that holds itself accountable for assuring best practice. Good governance, not superior technical chops or ready access to alpha geeks, is how you build complex systems that deliver reliable and resilient value for money. Good governance provides oversight, insight, and foresight. Emerging problems are flagged sooner; project leaders present their testing protocols and outcomes; and updated expectations are clearly communicated throughout the enterprise. Contingencies are constantly reviewed and appropriately revi...

This Week I Learned: Browsers: The auto-fill feature in Chrome also fills hidden fields . Like in Nigeria, the top three browsers in India (UC, Opera Mini,Nokia Xpress) are proxy browsers — browsers that leave the interpreting and rendering to the server and only show the resulting page. This process saves their users a lot of money, both because an old device is sufficient to run a proxy client, and because they essentially get one image instead of a full web page, which leads to low data usage. Security: eBooks have one feature that can't be found in print: the ability to have live hotlinks embedded in the text. And that presents an open field for scammers to spread malware. Science: The technical term for the physiological study of laughter is the not-so-funny-sounding word, gelotology.  In terms of what we find funny, there seems to be three general categories of what makes us laugh.  The incongruity theory suggests that it is humorous when logic is...

I was pleasantly surprised to find that Wordament, my favorite word game , is available as an Android app . Wordament is an addictive MMOWPG or Massively Multiplayer Online Word Playing Game built by 2 Microsoft-ies using the Google App Engine. I found it funny that the Content Rating for this app is "Low Maturity" Microsoft currently has 21   37 (as on Dec'14)  87 (as on Dec '16) apps on Google Play . Among them, SkyDrive, Bing & Lync 2013 apps are highly rated. It has published 78  (as on Dec'14)   of its own apps on the Windows Phone app gallery Google, which owns the Play store, has developed 53 79  (as on Dec'14)  apps . It has contributed just 1 app to the Windows Phone app gallery - a Google Search app Related:  My first impressions of Nexus 7 tablet

uCertify is a provider of test preparation software for 400+ IT certification exams from 18 different Testing agencies including Microsoft & PMI. uCertify offered me access to an online PrepKit in exchange for an unbiased review. I tried their PrepKit for the PMI Project Management Professional (PMP) course and found it to be comprehensive and useful. For me the best part of the PMP v-5 online PrepKit is the collection of 710 Practice Questions with full explanations. Besides that, there are 110 Interactive Quizzes & a Pre-Assessment Test. The Practice Questions can be taken in Test, Learn & Review mode. There is also review study material based on the Fifth edition of PMBOK which includes Tips & Flash Cards to highlight points important for passing the PMP exam. Test history & performance analytics reports help in gauging your progress, identify the areas you have mastered and help you focus on areas which need improvement to pass the actual exam. The PrepK...

This Week I Learned: Web: Google crawls for websites. Shodan crawls for devices . The Shodan search engine crawls the internet looking for devices, many of which are programmed to answer. It has found cars, foetal heart monitors, office building heating-control systems, water treatment facilities, power plant controls, traffic lights and glucose meters. It has become a crucial tool for security researchers, academics, law enforcement and hackers looking for devices that shouldn’t be on the internet or devices that are vulnerable to being hacked.  Its creator & sole operator, 29-year-old John Matherly says "I don’t consider my search engine scary. It’s scary that there are power plants connected to the internet". Matherly hopes Shodan leads to more transparency and public shaming of companies that are selling vulnerable systems Google is extending its Vulnerability Reward Program to include " key third-party software critical to the health of the entire Interne...

After deprecating Image Charts within Map Charts, Google has added  Geochart & Geomap  as part of the Google Visualization API. A Geochart is rendered within the browser using SVG or VML while Geomap is rendered using an embeddable Flash player. Both types of maps don't allow dragging or scrolling. I adapted a code sample meant to show a chosen State in USA to highlight a chosen State in India . You can adapt the original sample to make it work for any country. You have to use the ISO 3166-2 Province/State codes (example: India ) for the Country you choose. Also see: Google Maps Driving Directions gadget - useful for a "Contact Us" page Display region, route or location with Google Static Maps HOW TO visualize approximate radial distance from a fixed point on a map A geography game made from a mashup of Picassa & Google Maps

I've been using the Nexus 7 (Wi-Fi, 16 GB) tablet for the last ten days and I'm impressed. I plan to use it primarily as an e-book Reader to clear off at least a part of the pile of e-books I've collected over the years. Current prices of Kindle devices in India (click to enlarge image) I had to take a call between buying a Kindle or Nexus 7 but the superior hardware specs of  Nexus 7 (NVIDIA Tegra 3 Quad Core Processor, 7-inch HD Display) and the relatively cheaper price made me fall for it. (I bought my Nexus 7 on Flipkart for INR 9999. For the next few days it will be going for less than Rs. 9000 as part of their Diwali Cyber Sale promotion) Thankfully, Amazon offers their Kindle app for Android devices which makes reading Mobi & Kindle  (AZW) files on Nexus 7 as good as reading it on Amazon's own Kindle. It's a 22.49MB download for Nexus 7 (the size of the app installer varies according to device). This app also helps you sync up your readi...

I've graded the answers to this StackOverflow question about APIs & online services to generate screenshots of web pages based on whether the service can be used directly without any API key or require a key: No key required: immediatenet.com kwout   API (generating screenshots is not the primary intent of kwout so it doesn't directly give you an image to save) Requires (free) API access key: URL2PNG Browshot   API GrabzIt thumbalizr   API  (Simple syntax to use the API: http://api.thumbalizr.com/?url=http://mvark.blogspot.in&width=250 ) ConvertAPI  ( Free 500 one-time credits ) There are also online tools can generate screenshots of websites: Browsershots.org WebShots Pro ShrinkTheWeb Amit Agarwal's Screen Capture tool GrabzIt

This Week I Learned: Programming: ASP.NET's Request Validation feature is not enough to avoid XSS   It is possible to inject values in a drop down list .  Developers shouldn't trust input. Anything sent by the client should be suspect, there's no guarantee that it's what you expect, and it must be validated on the server before acceptance. India: Commenting on the scale of biometric date captured for the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) program, Nandan Kilekani, the UIDAI head, calls India the tech capital for biometrics . UIDAI is yet to finalize breach of disclosure and liability policies in case Aadhar’s biometric data are compromised or stolen. The UIDAI is a lean organisation with less than 300 people (but lots of vendors). The voluntary use of public transport once in a week is part of Oil Minister Veerappa Moily's fuel conservation campaign launched this week, which aims to save $5 billion oil import bill.  Moily saved Rs 40,000 ...

What is a Mixed Content Warning ? This blog post explains it well: HTTPS-enabled sites require all resources on the page, including the ads, to be SSL compliant to protect the user against man-in-the-middle attacks. If an HTTPS page loads an HTTP resource, the page is considered mixed content, and the browser displays a mixed content warning (like the padlock with warning triangle in Chrome).  New browser releases like Firefox 23 are starting to block mixed active content (scripts) but still display mixed content warnings for mixed passive content (images). The mixed content warnings vary in aggressiveness among browsers.  One way for developers to fix this issue is by using a Protocol Relative URL . A Protocol Relative URL is just like a regular URL except that you leave out the protocol prefix:  //mvark.azure-mobile.net/client/MobileServices.Web-1.0.0.min.js A protocol relative URL is just a URL without the scheme. For example  //billpatrian...

Kovid Goyal Antony Lewis They are both PhDs in Physics and creators of free software applications that have been downloaded by millions. Kovid Goyal is the creator of calibre ,   a comprehensive suite of utilities for managing/converting/viewing e-books and news in digital formats while  Antony Lewis is the creator of WordWeb ,   English dictionary, thesaurus and word finder program for Microsoft Windows, iOS, Android and Mac OS X . The free version of WordWeb has been downloaded over 5 million times  while calibre has been downloaded by 18 million people . calibre is released under GNU GPLv3 as the author did " not want people creating proprietary software based on my work ". One of his goals in developing calibre was to provide an open and independent platform for managing a ebook collection. He feels " DRM is snake oil . It does not achieve its stated goal, of preventing piracy. It’s only effect is to create vendor lock in". WordWeb ...

This Week I Learned: Browsers Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition (formerly known as Portable Firefox and commonly known as Firefox Portable) is a repackaged version of Mozilla Firefox that can run from a USB flash drive, CD-ROM, or other portable device on any Windows computer or Linux/UNIX computer running Wine. The program does not require Firefox to be installed on the computer, nor does it leave personal information on the computer or interfere with any installed versions of Firefox, though installation on a hard drive is possible. Personal settings, bookmarks, and any installed extensions and themes are stored on the flash drive along with Firefox Portable. This allows the user to move from computer to computer without losing application settings. Web Development To test a web app with multiple simultaneous sessions , you can create Profiles in Chrome and Firefox . In IE, you can use File > New session.  Despite increases in bandwidth, the load times of web pages...

It is also funny that they landed one after another. Related:  Tweetcheero

The Project Management Institute offers the Project Management Professional (PMP) certification program. Even for experienced Project Managers, achieving the PMP credential requires significant effort. To pass the PMP Exam, not only a thorough study of the Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge ( PMBOK Guide ), Fifth Edition, but also a good understanding of the project management stages (defined by 5 Process Groups) and project management topics (47 Processes in 10 Knowledge Areas, was 42 Processes in 9 Knowledge Areas in PMBOK Guide, 4th Edition) is required. PMP Rapid Review by Sean Whitaker is a good exam-prep resource that summarizes & highlights the important topics of PMBOK Guide. There are plenty of questions and answers, some of them in true/false format, to recap your understanding of the essentials. The study material is interspersed with exam tips which point out things to note from the exam's perspective. There are five chapters corresponding to t...

Windows Azure Mobile Services provides a JavaScript client library that can be used to perform CRUD operations using HTML and JavaScript in a HTML5 web app. There is a Mobile Services quickstart project to manage a TODO list that you can download from the Windows Azure portal. If you wish to create a custom table for a similar app, you have to first provide a table name within Windows Azure portal and set a permission level against each operation for the table (as shown in the diagram below). click to enlarge image Instead of doing this, if you directly create a table via the SQL Server Management Studio or the Silverlight-based Azure SQL Database portal, you will encounter the error  Table ' sometable ' does not exist. - 404  when you try to access this table using a script.  To resolve this issue after you've created the table, you can go to the Mobile Services section in the Azure portal, select the Data tab and click on the Create option at t...