Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

The dictionary service provided by Vocabulary.com is blazing fast . In an unscientific comparison, it seemed to beat another contender, thefreedictionary.com (with the print layout ), for the title of world's fastest, smartest dictionary. Rather than open the URL to the Vocabulary.com dictionary every time, you can add this service as a search engine provider within Chrome. Go to the Vocabulary.com Dictionary page , right-click within the search box and select Add As Search Engine... from the context menu. In the dialog box that appears, the text boxes will be pre-filled. You can choose to change the value for the Keyword box to v instead of Vocabulary.com Now the Dictionary is ready to use from the Chrome Omnibox. Type v in the Chrome address bar and then press space or tab followed by the words you want to find the meaning for - The assignment of the keyword can also be implemented manually .

This Week I Learned: Regex Golf is a fun way to test your knowledge of regular expressions. Facebook has essentially solved the visual, contextual, and endogeneity problems of mobile advertising . If your Windows laptop isn't getting the battery life you'd expected, it's possible that Chrome is the culprit. Consider shutting down Chrome when you're not using it on your laptop. - PC World The network of sites that make up StackExchange, which includes StackOverflow, is now ranked 54th for traffic in the world; they have 110 sites and are growing at a rate of 3 or 4 a month; 4 million users; 40 million answers; and 560 million pageviews a month. This is with just 25 servers. For everything. -  High Scalability 45% of the total reserved tickets of Indian Railways are issued over Internet . Of the 13,000 employees at Flipkart, 7000 are engaged in last-mile delivery.  Salaries of deliverymen have nearly doubled in 2 years. Flipkart, Amazon and other online retailers ...

This Week I Learned: The most common form of scaling in the cloud is horizontal—adding additional compute instances that allow a Web application to run simultaneously on multiple Web servers (instances). Taking the necessary steps to ensure your Web application is stateless is probably the most meaningful task during the development of a Web application. The ability to safely run across multiple Web server instances, with no concerns about user state, data corruption or functional correctness, is one of the most important factors in scaling a Web application. - MSDN Magazine The normal Web and Business editions of Azure SQL Database have a limit of 180 concurrent requests. Web Storage (which includes sessionStorage & localStorage) can provide up to 2MB and 5MB of key/value storage  per domain whereas a cookie can store only text up to a size of 4KB (20 per domain). You can view the contents of localStorage with the help of browser Developer Tools.  Some parts ...

If you're a fan of minimalism and want the web pages your frequently visit without the bells and whistles that make use of large CSS & JavaScript files sucking up the bandwidth that you pay for, the are a few ways to block those CSS & JavaScript files: 1. Use Google Mobilizer  to let it show you just the text of a web page with or without images. To make it easier to use, you can configure Google Mobilizer to work like a search provider in Chrome . You can then assign a letter like M to this app, so that you can type M in the Chrome address bar/omnibox & then the type the URL you would like to see via Google Mobilizer. 2. Use the browser's Developer Tools to disable CSS and JavaScript. This has to be done each time you visit a website and it is not quite convenient unless you're a developer who likes tinkering with the dependent files that the original web page needs. On Firefox, the simplest way is via the menu command View > Page Style > No Style. ...

All MSDN subscribers receive monthly credits for Azure services. The benefits vary according to the type of MSDN Subscription . There are so many things with a MSDN Subscription that it is easy to miss that this benefit exists. So what can you do with these MSDN Azure free benefits? I wish the Azure documentation answered this long back. I was happy to see a promotional web page that clearly mentioned the ways to use MSDN credits. It detected from my IP address that I'm from India and even showed me the value of the benefits in Indian Rupees. Things you can do with $100 or Rs. 6100 per month of Azure Credits Scott Guthrie estimated that 90 percent of MSDN subscribers would be able to cover all of their dev/test costs through the benefits without any additional charges to their company, involvement from their IT department or need for a credit card number. I plan to compile ideas that I hear or read about on ways to put the benefits to good use: ...

There are at least 10 ways to persist user state in an ASP.NET application. There are also client-side storage options : Cookies - useful for storing text up to a size of 4KB. Most browsers allow 20 per domain Web Storage (includes sessionStorage & localStorage) - most browser implementations give you between 2MB and 5MB of key/value storage  per domain. Indexed DB - is also a key/value store but it allows persistence of JavaScript objects unlike Web Storage which allows only (UTF-16) strings. FileSystem API - supported by Chrome 27+, Opera 15+ and Blackberry 10 Out of these only the first 2 more types - Cookies and Web Storage, are supported by all modern browsers. You can consider using the other two if your application does not need to be cross-browser. Cookies and Web Storage can be valuable in some scenarios but the biggest drawback with client-side storage options is that the data is not truly persistent as the user can nuke it at any time. Moreover, like c...

Tamal Bandyopadhyay's A Bank For The Buck: The Story Of HDFC Bank informs as well as entertains. To his credit, the author has made a serious topic like banking and setting up of a bank read like a piece of fiction. The background information for the characters and plots in the story also tell the story of contemporary India. Packed with facts, anecdotes and trivia, the book is engaging. Sample these - By one estimate, the value of gold with Indian households could be as much as Rs28 trillion, 50% of fixed deposits in the Indian banking system in June 2012 ...before founding HDFC, his ( Deepak Parekh's ) uncle, Hasmukh-bhai, had headed ICICI, the development finance institution that spawned ICICI Bank. HDFC Bank learns patiently from the experiences of others before it steps into a new business, whereas ICICI Bank loves playing the pioneer. The ICICI Bank stock is volatile; HDFC shares are range-bound. The same applies to earnings. ICICI Bank is often unpredictable, bo...

This Week I Learned: OpenID (OID) is an open standard and decentralized protocol by the non-profit OpenID Foundation that allows users to be authenticated by certain co-operating sites (known as Relying Parties or RP) using a third party service. Several large service providers like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Twitter, LinkedIn either issue or accept OpenIDs on their websites according to the OpenID Foundation.  Google has deprecated OpenID 2.0 and will shut it down after a migration period. In the AWS cloud, firing up a Windows box takes a good 10+ minutes. I can fire up a simple Linux box in about 15-20 seconds. When it comes to cloud scaling, it's really important to be able to scale quickly because 10-15 minutes is an eternity when scaling is important. -  Jonathan Oliver A Blogspot blog is redirected to a country-specific URL (ccTLD) . For example, if you're in Australia and viewing [blogname].blogspot.com, you might be redirected to [blogname].blogspot.com.au. P...

Images make content more interesting. There are many websites that offer free photos and images under liberal licensing terms. There are also many web services that can generate & manipulate images on the fly by altering values within their URLs - * Placeholder images - useful for web developers & designers when they don't have actual images yet. This link has a bunch of such image generation services which can create images of specified dimensions with color or celebrities or kittens  in them. Right click on the image, choose the option to open it in a new tab from the context menu & inspect how the URL is constructed * Google Chart API can generate dynamic Icons, Bubbles, Pins, Fun Style Notes, Weather Forecast Notes, Outlined Font Text Blocks, Contextual Icons, Flags & miscellaneous images of short sizes. You just have to specify some querystring parameters within the URL to get different types of images. * Update on 4/Sep/2015 - This f...

Responsive Web Design (RWD) means having a single website that “responds” to the current device, and changes its design accordingly. Responsive Web Design is a good alternative to creating mdot websites as it can cater better to users accessing web pages through a variety of devices. Talking of devices, it is reported that Facebook is accessed by  more than 7,000 device types every day (a figure that is two years old and likely even bigger today) The free O'Reilly ebook Responsive and Fast by Akamai CTO, Web performance researcher and evangelist Guy Podjarny reveals that websites implementing Responsive Web Design can suffer from serious performance problems. This is mainly because irrespective of the screen size of the device, the same web page resource elements are downloaded even for the small screen. As examples he points out that the websites of Boston Global and Smashing Magazine (which have implemented RWD) hide some elements for the mobile view and still download r...

This Week I Learned: MessagePack is an efficient binary serialization format. It lets you exchange data among multiple languages like JSON. But it's faster and smaller. I learnt about it in this article which uses MessagePack to serialize Web API data. Polyfills are JavaScript libraries that let you pretend that browsers support a newer standard they do not yet support.  The dynamic blinking messages you see in Gmail in the browser tab when you receive a chat reply is due to a timer written in JavaScript which make use of the setInterval method. You can override such browser tab notifications with a timer of your own . Many free apps quietly raid users’ personal data — from geolocation info and address book contacts to FitBit details, to sell to marketers - The Economist A few of the factors which a prediction algorithm that can find out which tweets are more likely to be retweeted are that such tweets “have more content”, have rarity and novelty which often contribut...

There is a question on the SuperUser StackExchange forum where a person annoyed with the Gmail Chat notifications in the browser tab wants to hide the blinking messages . If  Doe sends you a chat response, you would see the message "Doe says…" in the browser tab's title alternating with the text showing the count of unread email in your Inbox. Such blinking messages are shown using a timer written in JavaScript  which make use of the  setInterval method. My solution to the above scenario was to mask that timer with a timer of my own that sets a fixed text message (I used the text "Advanced Rocket Engineering" so that anyone snooping on your computer may be impressed with your deep interest in science). Now how do you activate the timer? I'm fond of bookmarklets , so I thought a bookmarklet could do the job of overriding the blinking messages with custom text with just a click while you're on the Gmail tab. The actual bookmarklet cannot be placed dire...