Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned: Windows Azure Traffic Manager (WATM) now supports Windows Azure Web Sites. This will enable directing web traffic across multiple regions in different load-balancing methods: performance, fail-over, and round robin. Using Microsoft's Disk2VHD tool, you can convert a physical disk into a VHD so that you can use it as a  You can interact with a Office 365 tenant installation with Windows PowerShell. JSON became a built-in feature of JavaScript when the ECMAScript Programming Language Standard - Fifth Edition was adopted by the ECMA General Assembly in December 2009. Google rolled out something like 665 different changes to how they rank search results in 2012 Google's Penguin algorithm is targeted towards web spam while the Panda algorithm is targeted towards quality content on the web. The idea for FusionCharts , a popular HTML5 charting library, was born from an article written by Pallav Nadhani to make more pocket money as a teenager. The US S...

In his article  The Risk of Running Windows XP After Support Ends April 2014 , Tim Rains explains how software researchers and criminals exploit software vulnerabilities. Though it pertains to Windows, the process is illuminative: "When Microsoft releases a security update, security researchers and criminals will often times reverse engineer the security update in short order in an effort to identify the specific section of code that contains the vulnerability addressed by the update. Once they identify this vulnerability, they attempt to develop code that will allow them to exploit it on systems that do not have the security update installed on them. They also try to identify whether the vulnerability exists in other products with the same or similar functionality. For example, if a vulnerability is addressed in one version of Windows, researchers investigate whether other versions of Windows have the same vulnerability.  To ensure that our customers are not at a...

PowerShell is a very powerful scripting language for Windows - it's a Swiss Army knife for Windows developers & server administrators. What I love about it is its low barrier of entry. It's easy to get started considering that the shell & ISE (Integrated Scripting Environment) come along with the Windows OS (Windows Vista & higher) so you practically need nothing extra to learn. The third version of PowerShell comes built into Windows 8 & Windows Server 2012. You have to explicitly install it if you're using an older version of Windows. Windows PowerShell 3.0 First Steps is an excellent book for absolute beginners, written by a PowerShell expert, Ed Wilson , who has hugely contributed to the PowerShell community and product. This book has all the characteristics that make it a good technical book . With gentle hand-holding, the author walks you through the important commands (or cmdlets). There are plenty of snippets that you can try out while you read a...

While reading the announcement that Windows Azure will be renamed to Microsoft Azure , beginning April 3, 2014, I thought about all the products that Microsoft has renamed in the past: Recently, SkyDrive became OneDrive. SkyDrive was previously  called Windows Live SkyDrive and Windows Live Folders. Microsoft account , Microsoft's single sign-on web service, was previously called Microsoft Wallet, Microsoft Passport, .NET Passport, Microsoft Passport Network, and most recently Windows Live ID Bing was known previously as Live Search, Windows Live Search, and MSN Search  Windows 8 "Metro-style apps" are now referred as "Windows Store" apps. Metro, the typography-based design language, is now called Microsoft Design language Launched as MSN Hotmail, Microsoft's mail service was re-branded to Windows Live Hotmail and its latest avatar is called Outlook.com Windows Azure SQL Database was formerly called SQL Azure, SQL Server Data Services, and later S...

A recent blog post by Somasegar had an image with a list of open source projects used in various Visual Studio offerings. There were some that I knew about and some that I encountered via NuGet packages while using the ASP.NET MVC Internet Application template but didn't really use them. The purpose of the open source projects that are relevant to web developers is listed: ASP.NET SignalR is a library for ASP.NET developers to add real-time web functionality to their applications. SignalR uses WebSockets (a new HTML5 API that enables bi-directional communication between the browser and server) under the covers when it's available, and gracefully falls back to other techniques and technologies when it isn't, while your application code stays the same. SignalR also provides a simple, high-level API for doing server-to-client RPC (call JavaScript functions in a client's browser from server-side .NET code) in your ASP.NET application, as well as adding useful ho...

This Week I Learned: Sean Parker, who founded Napster and became Facebook’s first president has no college education to speak of. Thiel Fellowships, financed by the PayPal co-founder and Facebook investor Peter Thiel, give $100,000 to people under 20 to forgo college and work on projects of their choosing . The TED in TED conference stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design. Add "/transcript" to a TED.com video session URL to read the transcript Harland Sanders started KFC at 65 years of age. John Pemberton invented Coca Cola at 55 and Ray Croc started McDonald's at 52. Craig Newmark  founded CraigsList at 42 and Robert Noyce founded Intel at 41. Source - Funders and Founders Though christened Mother of all grains, quinoa is technically not a grain but a seed Cancer is usually caused by gene mutations that occur randomly in one or a few cells of the body. Such gene changes, called somatic mutations, may arise as a natural consequence of aging or when a cell’s...

If you use Windows Vista or higher, PowerShell comes along with it. So if you have to download a list of files, you can do that easily with this PowerShell script instead of installing any other tools (command-line or GUI) To get a single file, you can use just this line of code : (new-object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadFile('http://www.xyz.net/file.txt', 'C:\tmp\file.tx‌​t') You can also use the PowerShell  Invoke-WebRequest cmdlet:

Google ate Microsoft's lunch by offering its cloud-based Google Docs / Google Drive for free and getting into a territory that was Microsoft's cash cow. Microsoft now offers Office Online that includes online versions of popular applications in the desktop Office suite. Some of the web applications were available earlier as well but now they are under a single umbrella. What's more, there are also APIs  for programmers to extend these services.

This Week I Learned: When you select some text on a webpage within Chrome and right click, there is an option "Search Google for '%SELECTED.TEXT%" in the context menu. You can change your default search engine in Chrome from Google to Bing or anything else. This is possibly the only change you can make to the Chrome context menu. You can however modify the source code to change the context menu options in Chromium, the open source equivalent of Chrome. Kindle Cloud Reader web app makes 'buy once, read everywhere' a reality. It utilises HTML5, jQuery and jQuery plug-ins extensively. Reddit, Netflix and CERN use Cassandra for their data In 1990,  Berners-Lee wrote the first browser  and editor, called “WorldWideWeb.app,”  which ran on a NeXT computer. WorldWideWeb.app, which took 2 months to write, was also an editor. The WorldWideWeb browser was made available on on the public Internet by FTP, and promoted on network news messages in August 1991. Mosaic, whic...

There is a question on the Super User forum from a guy who has a ton of bookmarks in his bookmark bar . Each one shows the full text which causes the bookmarks to run off the window in Google Chrome. He wants to know if he can have them show as icons only like in IE? One possible way, according to a comment there, is to remove the bookmarks' names - by editing the names of existing Bookmarks in Bookmark Manager or removing the name while adding a bookmark.

The right way to do things is to publish a web site from source control but if you run a hobby site or have just a few seconds to fix an absolutely critical situation of a site running live ( fully aware of the dangers of doing so ), you can edit code of a website hosted on Azure Web Site in your browser. Go to your Windows Azure Web Site’s Kudu dashboard using this URL -  https://{your site name}.scm.azurewebsites.net (in other words, add .scm in front of the site name). Choose  Debug Console > CMD menu option. The list of folders and files of your site will be listed: Edit the required file and hit Save to see the changes reflect on your site.

This Week I Learned: Udacity had 1.6 million students registered with it but just about 10% of them actually finished the course they enrolled for. And of those, about 5% qualified for a passing grade. According to one study , the most popular TED presentations shared three basic principles. Ideas that spread are emotional, novel, and memorable. TED talks are memorable because no speaker is allowed to talk for more than 18 minutes on the TED stage. The first two stanzas (out of six stanzas) of Vande Mataram were given the official status of the "national song" of the Republic of India.  Fearful of the potential danger of an incited Indian populace, the then ruling British Government at one point banned the utterance of "Vande Mataram" in public forums. Constables consitute 92% of the India's Police force. According to the Union finance minister, P.Chidambaram rice is not an "agricultural produce" since it undergoes processing in a rice mill t...

A.R.Rahman is a national icon whose chartbusting songs are popular throughout India & abroad. You don't get to see much of him on TV or read about him in the newspapers. Of course, now he is on Facebook and Twitter but his soulful songs will make his fans wonder how he churns out music that is always path-breaking and make them want to know about A.R.Rahman - the person. In her book A.R.Rahman, The Musical Storm , Kamini Mathai has attempted to tell the story of India's most commercially successful musician. It is the author's first book and it shows. You have to be a committed ARR fan to oversee the flaws, monotonous and disorganized writing to gather bits & pieces about him that you haven't already read elsewhere. The author takes liberty with facts; some of the bloopers are so shocking you'll suspect if she knows much about Indian Cinema and if some of the details that she writes confidently about, are correct. Writing about Ram Gopal Varma's Ran...

Let's say you have a link on your website that should work as normal on all days but Sunday. On Sunday, you wish to redirect users clicking on the same link to be redirected to a different page. You can detect the day of the week and redirect the user clicking on the link to a different URL dynamically - <a href="http://www.example.com" onclick =" var d = new Date();var n = d.getDay(); if(n==0){ event.preventDefault(); location.href='http://www.example.com/sunday.html' } "> Carpe Diem! </a> event.preventDefault()  cancels the default action of the anchor tag. This is kind of sneaky as the URL that the user sees in the status bar on hovering over the link will be different from the one he will be redirected to. But then, URL shortener services  & Opera browser do such sneaky things too in a different way. Don't know from which version of Opera this started but in version 16, the protocol and querystring part of a URL ar...

JavaScript was originally developed by Brendan Eich of Netscape. Netscape delivered JavaScript to Ecma International,  a non-profit standards organization for information and communication systems, for standardization and the work on the specification, ECMA-262, began in November 1996.  ECMAScript is the name of the scripting language standardized in ECMA-262.  Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, commented that "ECMAScript was always an unwanted trade name that sounds like a skin disease." All the newer versions of popular browsers support ECMAScript 5 (the fifth edition of the standard) or ES5. More specifically speaking it is supported fully by: IE 10 and above Firefox 4 and above Chrome 19 and above Safari 6 and above Opera 12.10 and above  Also see:  What is the version of your browser?

It is about two decades since the Internet came into the being for the general public but boy, how dramatically the software tools we use have changed! There are benefits for both companies offering a software as a service and their consumers but there is also a risk of breaking changes & reliability taking a back seat. Most software applications, both online & installed apps these days are dynamic & sometimes less trustworthy - they update themselves (if you're using Chrome or Firefox, do you know the version you're using ?), their owners may change & so can the original terms of use and privacy policies. When the stakes are high, you have to prepare for sudden changes & downtime. And keep alternatives handy. Updates will happen when they like & an Internet "moment" may not be a few seconds Welcome to the Age of the Cloud.

A recruiter looking for resources in a narrow area of a technology asked me if there was a way to know the hottest talent in that field in the country. Finding the right candidate for a job is easier said than done. However one way to know about the top programming talent in India is to check the reputation points of users on StackOverflow, the internet's best known online forum for programmers. If you searched online for an answer to a programming question, the odds are very high that an answer from StackOverflow would be among the top 10 results thrown by popular search engines. I pointed him to the StackOverflow site and asked him to look for users from India who answered questions with the tag of that technology area. This is as easy as finding a needle in a haystack. Luckily, Stack Exchange, the parent network under which StackOverflow and 100+ other Q&A sites exist, provides an API and a database to query for data collected through the sites. I tried this query at S...

This Week I Learned: Azure  Windows Azure Table service does not support wildcard queries For bulk inserting records into a Windows Azure Table through a CSV file, you can use Azure Management Studio or this open-source custom tool by Chris Woodill . The custom tool adds records from the CSV file in batches. Transaction costs are calculated per call, so adding records in a batch is considered one transaction from a billing perspective. A maximum of 100 entities can be added in a batch. All the entities in a batch must have the same partition key. Chris Woodill found that in comparison to his custom tool, Azure Management Studio is significantly slower . It can take up to 40 seconds for the actual delete to happen and if you try to create the table while its in progress of being deleted, you will receive a StorageException with a “409” error . The FedRAMP seal for Azure certifies that it can be used in U.S. government work.  Making a Classic ASP page work ...