Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

There aren't many books on Google Apps Scripts. The convenience with a technical book of this sort is that they consolidate information so that you don't have to hunt for it all over the web. With an ebook, you can also search by keyword. As a complete newbie to Google Apps Scripts I started reading the book Google Apps Script: Web Application Development Essentials with great expectations. I was disappointed though. The writing is monotonous and detached. The explanations are verbose. Sample this: I have saved the best for last—or maybe the easiest part, depending on how you look at it. The app you have been building has all the features needed to interact with the user, but we are lacking the most important thing: a place to store the data and a way to get it there. Not to worry: Google has provided us with several data-storage options that should work for most applications. One great option is a spreadsheet, and this is typically where you would store data like this. ...

This Week I Learned: Azure BizTalk Services Free Edition makes it easy for developers to use Hybrid Connections (5 per unit, 5GB data transfer per unit) at no charge. Hybrid Connections can move existing web workloads to Azure Websites whilst still connecting to on-premises data without changing any code. Ref - TechEd PPT   Cloud computing was invented by Amazon. Netflix built its TV and movie business atop the Amazon cloud. Dropbox erected its file-sharing operation there . Netflix, Reddit and CERN use Cassandra for their data. Out of National Geographic's 5 step plan (first four are freeze agriculture's footprint, grow more on farms we've got, use resources more efficiently, shift diets) to boost food availability for the world's growing population, reducing wastage of food is the most effective.  An estimated 25 percent of the world’s food calories and up to 50 percent of total food weight are lost or wasted before they can be consumed.  Example...

You can change the look of websites that you don't own within your browser by hiding or manipulating elements within the web page using Developer Tools (usual keyboard shortcut - F12) that come natively with the browser. The website redesign of a newspaper website that I read takes up nearly a third of the browser real-estate on my 15 inch laptop. As that site supports jQuery, the command to type to hide the header is simple:  $(".header").hide() Using JavaScript & CSS, you can change the original style settings to your own liking. Also see: HOW TO block IFRAME based ads HOW TO block images/image ads originating from a specific domain in Firefox 4 & above Google Adsense spews SVG & Data URI based image ads too to get past blockers

Effectively giving and receiving feedback is important for any working professional but especially crucial for managers. Aimed at newly hired or promoted managers, Glenn Devey's The Manager's Guide to Employee Feedback is an anecdotal, light-hearted ("being a manager is like running an adult day-care center"), straight-forward and well-written book that offers strategies & feedback skills to deal with people above and below the management chain in both regular and complex interactions at the office. It has tips and tricks to handle typically unpleasant situations like delivering a reprimand and disagreeing with higher-ups. The author explains how you can put his points to use with example sentences that you can adapt for your own needs. This book had many takeaways but there are a couple that I would like to point out - * For a reprimand to be effective and not raise a discussion or debate, the last part of the delivery can be a closed question like "Do...

1. Airtel money on account of being India's largest cellular service provider in India (with 192.22 million subscribers as of August 2013) has been a popular mobile payment system. On its website, it calls itself a  semi-closed wallet - "a prepaid payment instrument that is redeemable at a group of clearly-identified merchant locations/ establishments, which contract specifically with the issuer (airtel M Commerce Services Limited (AMSL) is the issuer in this case) to accept the payment instrument. These instruments do not permit cash withdrawal or redemption by the customer.". Built in collaboration with Infosys and SmartTrust, the platform was launched on 5 April 2012. 2. Vodafone India's m-pesa launched in April 2014 now offers competition to  airtel money.  Popular in Africa, M-Pesa is considered to be the most developed mobile payment system in the world . 3.  Immediate Payment Service (IMPS)  is provided by National Payments Corpo...

This Week I Learned: Web Performance Zeitgeist - An analysis of the top 1000 websites reveals that images comprise a whopping 57% of the average page’s weight. Third-party calls can make up more than 50% of page requests. According to Facebook,  about 10 billion social log-ins were made last year using Facebook identities . CPU-Z is a freeware that gathers information on some of the main devices of your system. Speccy and SIW are similar products that can help manage asset inventory by generating reports. Bangalore-based Infosys got 9,11,220 job applications in the year ended March 31, 2014, almost two-and-half times the previous year. In fiscal 2014, Infosys made a gross addition of 24,517 to its headcount, compared with 22,019 the previous year. But with attrition having increased to 18.7%, from 16.3% the year before, net addition was just 801. Source - Economic Times Only 2% of Indian investors invest in equity HDFC Bank was the only one among a group of ten new p...

The Visual Studio Icons are helpful as they pictorially convey a lot of meaning. However, as there are so many of them it sometimes gets hard to know what an icon denotes. In some cases, icons within Visual Studio have tool-tips that convey their purpose but not always. After extensive searching, I have found that MSDN doesn't have a single point of reference or a map where all the icons & their descriptions are listed. I plan to compile them here whenever I spot a table reference while I'm MSDN surfing. Class View and Object Browser Icons Icon Description Icon Description Namespace Method or Function Class Operator Interface Property Structure Field or Variable Union Event Enum Constant TypeDef Enum Item Module Map Item Intrinsic External Declaration Delegate Macro Exception Template Map Unknown or Error Global Type Forwarding Extension Method The following signal icons apply to a...

I normally use SQL Management Studio to query tables on Azure SQL Database. You have to explicitly white-list the IP address from which you want to connect by a specifying a firewall rule in the Azure Management Portal. You know you're missing this step when you see a message of this sort - Cannot connect to your_sql_database_name.database.windows.net. Additional information: Cannot open server 'your_sql_database_name' requested by the login. Client with IP address ’xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx' is not allowed to access the server. To enable access, use the Windows Azure Management Portal or run sp_set_firewall_rule on the master database to create a firewall rule for this IP address or address range. It may take up to five minutes for this change to take effect. Login failed for user 'SQLAdmin'. This session has been assigned a tracing ID of '5534b48e0110'. Provide this tracing ID to customer support when you need assistance. (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 4...