Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Our World Tour: A Photographic Journey Around the Earth is a book of photographs & travel notes by ace photographer Mario Dirks. His world tour of 50 weeks was sponsored by SIGMA Corporation, a lens and camera manufacturer, after he was chosen as the ultimate winner in a contest among more than 1000 photographers. In 50 weeks, Mario visited 6 continents, 48 countries, and 77 cities. He writes that to get to those places he took 101 flights on 56 different airlines and logged 264 hours in the air and on the ground, he trudged almost 2,500 miles by foot! The book contains breath-taking photographs of landscapes and landmarks as well as of exotic places and people. The narration of his travels is peppered with enlightening tips on photography. Our World Tour will especially appeal to those who like travelling and photography. Having read & enjoyed, Cooking for Geeks , I liked the concept of this book mixing two different topics in an entertaining way. I have a fascination f...

This Week I Learned: Co-administrators can fully manage the services within an Azure subscription . The owner can  delegate co-admin access to other Microsoft Accounts Responsive Design View feature which can be invoked with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+M in Firefox is great for testing RWD view of a website on the desktop and generating screenshots  JSter , JSWiki , CDNJS , jsDelivr ,  this article on Wikipedia  are good sources to track JavaScript utility libraries  More software programmers moved to Bangalore, India’s technology hub, in the past year than the original Silicon Valley, says data by  LinkedIn Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL), a $66 billion energy firm, announced that it would spend Rs.4,000 crore to take complete control of Network18 in the biggest takeover in India’s media industry. With 100% control, RIL now has access to all the content put out by the Network18 Group. This includes in.com, IBNlive.com, Moneycontrol.com, Fi...

This Week I Learned: Azure Web Sites can be used not just for hosting web apps but also for hosting REST Endpoints, SharePoint Apps and executing scheduled jobs . Geo-replication is not just limited to Azure Storage. The Premium service tier of SQL Database includes “active” geo-replication It is possible to hyperlink superscripted text by enclosing sup tag within anchor tag Interesting use of hyperlinked superscripted text Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter had 160 mn users but made less than Rs 100 cr in 2012-13 Web Hacking Incident Database , or WHID for short, is a Web Application Security Consortium project dedicated to maintaining a list of web applications related security incidents.  WHID's goal is to serve as a tool for raising awareness of the web application security problem and provide information for statistical analysis of web applications security incidents.  Apollo Robbins is a self-described gentleman thief and deception specialis...

It is possible now to chat with your Skype/Microsoft Account contacts right from Outlook.com . However, there is no way I could find to sign out from Skype when I just wanted to check my email. If it were not for the tiny icons in the page footer of a normally hidden Messaging panel, you wouldn't know that your Skype contacts see you as Online even though you just logged into Outlook.com to check your email. One aggrieved user posted this common issue on the the Skype forum - " I keep my emails open 24/7 to check them, I don't want to be on Skype 24/7 " and found a possible resolution: 1) Go to Skype.com 2) Login with your Skype Id/Microsoft Account and password. 3) My account page will open. On that page, click on the Account settings link under  Settings and preferences . 4) On the Account settings page, you will find a Unlink hyperlink next to your Microsoft account name. 5) Click on Unlink and confirm the action if you're prepared for the sugg...

One of the oldest and most authoritative resource on improving front-end performance is the list of 35 best practices identified by the Yahoo Exceptional Performance team. The main contributor of that list is Steve Souders who also went on to write books on Web Performance Optimization and possibly contributed to PageSpeed Rules  while he was at Google. The original 35 best practices are neatly structured into 7 categories. There are additionally some best practices identified by other  Web Performance Analysis & Optimization tools . I plan to consolidate them all (points other than those in the original list will be italicized & linked) so that I have a single list which is easy to refer. I'll keep looking out for newer findings from the WPO community and add them here as & when I find them. So here goes my custom list: Content     1. Make Fewer HTTP Requests 2. Reduce DNS Lookups 3. Avoid Redirects 4. Make Ajax Cacheable 5. Postload C...

This Week I Learned: IIS 7.5 Express can run on Windows XP and above while IIS 8.5 Express can run on Windows Vista SP1 and above Compared to most other web servers and operating systems, something unique to IIS and Windows is their lack of case sensitivity when it comes to the names of paths and files. While case insensitivity may seem harmless and maybe even a little convenient, taking advantage of that flexibility (on purpose or not) can lead to unnecessary cache misses for your users. A request for the image http://asp.net/images/ui/asplogo-NEW.png is not cached if it is subsequently called via requests that don't have consistent casing - http://asp.net/images/ui/asplogo- NEW .png or http://asp.net/images/ UI /asplogo-NEW.png. The IIS performance best practice is to is to pick a file casing convention and adhere to it strictly throughout your entire site. Using tracking cookies, Facebook is able to determine the sites you visit. Faceb...

This Week I Learned: The debug console page in the Azure Kudu  tool offers a File explorer for your site, where you can view your site’s content, download files (or full folders), delete files (or folders), edit files and even upload files using drag and drop. When you download a folder via the file explorer, it’s delivered to you as a ZIP file containing the entire folder structure. A SQL subquery may contain another subquery. In fact you can nest as many levels as you need.  However, for most applications more than four levels is an indication of poor database design "Some data scientists say that they can spend up to 70% of their time in data wrangling (extracting and cleaning data) data munging" JSNice.org  can nicify JavaScript through Statistical renaming, Type inference and Deobfuscation  India is the world's second largest textile exporter lagging behind China whose exports are nearly seven times higher Today, based on the HTTP Archive data, the avera...

*  Data Science Curriculum from Microsoft on EdX *  Azure Machine Learning Resources *  Big Data University run by IBM has free & fee based resources * The Johns Hopkins University in collaboration with Coursera is offering a series of   9 courses on Data Science  that starts from today. The courses are free to watch but to get a certificate, you will need to pay. The duration of each course is of 4 weeks and the estimated workload is 3-5 hours/week Each course consists of weekly video lectures, weekly quizzes, and a final peer-assessed project. The suggested order is to complete The Data Scientist's Toolbox and Introduction to R Programming first. The other courses may be taken in any order, and in parallel if desired. These courses may or may not be offered after the 4-week period. The course home page recommends reading the following web sites to get a sense of the field of data science: Simply Statistics R-bloggers   DataTau ...