Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned: There are many sites that insert something like "Read more: www.site.com" into your clipboard when you copy text in your browser. These websites use the Clipboard APIs. There are multiple ways to block this behavior . Facebook knows what you looked at on Amazon . Demand Side Platforms (DSP) give Facebook the unique identifier for an individual's browser as well as the cookie data containing the browser's history. With 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors a month, Wikipedia relies on a diligent army of roughly 75,000 volunteers each month to edit the articles. The Maha Kumbh Mela, the world's largest religious gathering , drew 30 million pilgrims on the peak day in February, 2013 Mark Twain was perhaps the first American to attend the Kumbh back in 1885 #trivia "When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to 21, I was astonished at how mu...

I found the Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA) free course  Developing Windows Azure and Web Services Jump Start  more interesting and useful than the Microsoft Press exam training guide for the 70-487 . MVA also provides preparation material for exams 480 & 486. For becoming a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer (MCSD:Web Applications) , you have to pass the exams 480, 486 & 487. The slides used in the course are very well done! Also see:  I passed the 70-480 exam!

It is not possible to watch subtitles for YouTube videos if the author of that video has not provided one. However, you can open the video URL within VLC Media Player with the Media > Open Network Stream... and use your own subtitle file ( supported by VLC Media Player that you acquired or wrote yourself) using the Subtitle   menu option. If you are watching a MSDN Channel 9 video with a downloaded copy, you can get a copy of the related Web VTT caption file to view video with subtitles offline. Also see: HOW TO extract subtitles from YouTube videos as plain text HOW TO remove time codes from a WebVTT file

This Week I Learned: The infinite scroll UI pattern is not search-engine friendly, but you can change that . Humans now account for less than 40% of web traffic with search engines, scrapers, hacking tools, spammers and other impersonators constituting the other 60% . Only 20 percent of the readership of the English-language Wikipedia, the "free encyclopedia that anyone can edit", comes via mobile devices , a figure substantially lower than the percentage of mobile traffic for other media sites, many of which approach 50 percent. It is illegal to use your phone as a GPS in California so don’t showcase it on the dashboard. Three is the most powerful number in communication theory .  The best presentations include a balance of words and pictures. Crows can recognize faces, communicate details of an event to each other and even avoid places they recognize as dangerous

I helped a relative who needed a list of words from an Excel sheet to be automatically highlighted within a Word document by writing  this macro based on samples from the Internet: The macro can be called by a menu item from the Word document in the Ribbon or Quick Access Toolbar. I set the name of the main macro while configuring the option for the Quick Access Toolbar. The Word macro will read words in a column  of a Excel sheet (from Column A of a sheet whose path is C:\wordlist.xlsx in the snippet and this can be changed) and then search & highlight all instances of these words or group of words within each cell that appear in the content of the Word document. As a Office Macro programming newbie, I found this MSDN article useful for getting started. Also see:  HOW TO create a Ribbon-less pre-Excel 2007 look

Andher Nagari  (City of Darkness) is a play written by Bharatendu Harishchandra (September 9, 1850 – January 6, 1885) who is known as the father of modern Hindi literature.

With popular browsers like Firefox & Chrome updating themselves automatically, the odds are high that you wouldn't know the version number of the browser you're using. You'll need to track the versions however if you are a web developer or have to troubleshoot a browser bug or a defect within a website to its owners. Here is a handy list of links to know about current releases of browsers: Chrome Firefox Internet Explorer Opera Safari

xkcd 's take on smartphone apps Sir Tim Berners-Lee I'm a fan of the World Wide Web. It feels good when experts also advice building mobile web applications instead of native apps. I wanted to list the experts who hold this view and their reasoning for it: +  Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web +  Scott Hanselman +  Christian Heilmann + Chris Wilson in the Udacity course  Mobile Web Development One of the biggest advantages of a native app is that it can leverage internal features of the native mobile device's OS (" a closed ecosystem ") that are not available to a mobile web app. I plan to collect practical & less obvious views against mobile web apps as well - From a comment to this article > the web is winning that's what they were telling us for a little more than 10 years now. and yet still everyone I know who is in the software business makes more money with old fashioned desktop software than with "SAAS" web...

MSDN Channel 9 has started providing captions for videos in WebVTT (Web Video Text Tracks) format. This means, you can use that file to read it as a transcript when you are on a low bandwidth Internet connection instead of watching the video. You can grab the subtitles file by appending /captions?f=webvtt&l=en to the Channel 9 video (if it is available for that video). For example, http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Azure-Friday/Scott-Guthries-explains-SQL-Databases-in-Azure /captions?f=webvtt&l=en will get you the captions file for the Azure Friday discussion on  SQL Databases . A typical WebVTT caption file looks this - When the time codes (representing the time within the video when the words are spoken) are present within the text file it is a little distracting to read the content. You can get rid of the timestamps using an editor that supports finding & replacing text using regular expressions. Use the expression  \d{2}:\d{2}:\d{2}\.\d{3}(\s)+...

This Week I Learned: Cookieless auth will never be secure.   Out of nearly 2,000 PowerShell 3.0 cmdlets (and functions) on Windows 8, over 25 percent of them use the verb Get. The  Battery API  within  Mozilla’s WebAPI  can inform about the status of the battery. MSDN Channel 9 has started providing Web VTT format captions for its videos . One nice side effect of this feature is that you video content will now be searchable and you can read a transcript when you are on a low bandwidth Internet connection instead of watching the video. Currently, Google isn't indexing those files yet but Bing does and you can get at the content using Bing's advanced operators . Sam Dutton has built a nice tool to read transcripts of videos related to Chrome Development Tools. Google was orginally named Backrub   An ant can lift up to 50 times its own body weight .  The human brain represents only 2% of the body weight but consumes up to twenty percent of the ...

The Project Manager’s Tool Kit, 100 Tips and Techniques for Getting the Job Done Right by Tom Kendrick is a useful collection of short summaries on project management  practices that make for easy reading. The recent Third Edition of this book is based on the processes in the Project Management Institute (PMI) PMBOK Guide, Fifth Edition (2013) but it focuses on the practical aspects of project management like Conflict Resolution, Influence Without Authority, Motivation, Project Metrics, Responsibility Analysis etc in an informal way. This is a good book for project managers and leaders - a handy guide for beginners and a reference for the experienced. While bullet points are liberally used, I would have loved to see more of them to highlight actionable points. I feel information conveyed through bullet points make summaries sticky. All keywords are marked in bold face and that will help novices pick up on the project management terminology and improve their business communication...

Firefox allows you to block images originating from a specified domain. This trick can be used to block image ads  without bothering about installing a browser add-on. In Firefox, right click on the offending image ad on the page you are viewing in Firefox & from the context menu, you have to select View Image Info & click on the checkbox "Block images from {site name}". If you don't like Flash ads or Flash content that auto-starts within Chrome, type chrome://settings/content in your address bar and then press enter. In the scrollable "Content Settings" panel that opens, scroll down to "Plug-ins" and click on "Click to play". From then on, Flash content will wait for you to click them before they run. Similar settings exist for other browsers as well. Google Adsense now spews SVG & Data URI based image ads too to get past blockers: Firefox (v26) doesn't consider the above SVG ad as an image and the View Ima...

This Week I Learned: You might not need jQuery always. Just plain JavaScript should do in most cases. Fake Follower Check  checks your Twitter followers to see if they are real or fake. Requires logging into your Twitter account. The original name of the start-up Jeff Bezos started in July 1994 from his garage was Cadabra. Flipkart which has cornered more than 20 per cent of the online retail market is #1 in India. Currently, Amazon is at #3. Source:  Business Today India has the world's third largest Internet user base Forty per cent of e-commerce is over mobile.  India Post, the world's largest postal service reaches 21,000 PIN codes, compared to the 12,000 served by courier companies. Chandigarh is officially India's cleanest city   India's 40-year-old, $108-billion information technology sector has a three-million-strong workforce. The average employee age at Infosys was 28 while at Wipro, 34.5 per cent of the workforce were aged between 30 and 50...