Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Github Pricing (click to enlarge image) *  GitHub is a web-based Git repository hosting service , which offers all of the distributed revision control and source code management (SCM) functionality of Git as well as adding its own features. * The site was launched in April 2008 by Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath, and PJ Hyett. * As of 2014, GitHub reports having over 3.4 million users and with 16.7 million repositories making it the largest code host in the world. It is written in Ruby. *  Peter Levine, general partner at GitHub's investor Andreessen Horowitz, stated that GitHub had been growing revenue at 300% annually since 2008 "profitably nearly the entire way" Visual Studio Online pricing & features   (click to enlarge image) * Microsoft announced the release Visual Studio Online , Microsoft's hosted version of Team Foundation Server in the cloud. in November 2013. *  Visual Studio Online expands over Team Foundation Serve...

The YouTube API has comprehensive documentation. I wish more API providers had such detailed docs. It is a pity though that many of the Google APIs have got deprecated or removed all together. I think we should still exploit them while they are there. I compiled the parameters for YouTube API v2 Search for quick reference. Parameter Value alt atom , rss, json, json-in-script, jsonc author uploader max-results default is 25, maximum value is 50 start-index first result is 1, needed for paging caption true/false d...

This Week I Learned - *  Backstretch  is a  MIT licensed jQuery plugin that allows you to add a dynamically-resized, slideshow-capable background image to any page or element. *  The latest Azure SQL Database V12 (preview) provides nearly complete compatibility with the Microsoft SQL Server engine . * The G-Series provides more memory and more local solid-state drive (SSD) storage than other Azure virtual machine (VM) sizes. The largest VM size in that series, Standard_G5 offer 32 Cores, 448 GB of RAM, 6,596 GB local SSD storage. * Not all OData operations are supported by the Azure Table Storage REST API * There are currently 3  Microsoft Azure certifications : Developing Microsoft Azure Solutions - 70-532 Implementing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions - 70-533 Architecting Microsoft Azure Solutions - 70-534 * Microsoft Virtual Academy has video courses for  70-532  &  70-534 . One of the p...

Though the book  The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer , is about a morbid topic, Dr Siddhartha Mukherjee does a great job of explaining the science behind the dreaded disease and the doctors & scientists who strive to conquer this almost immortal disease.  I highly recommend the 500+ paged "The Emperor of All Maladies" to all those who love science. It is not surprising that this book won the author the Pulitzer prize & garnered over 1000+ reviews (unusual for a non-fiction book) on Amazon for his excellent science writing. There are many layers to this book. What appealed to me the most were the stories of humble & dedicated scientists who overcame great adversity & sometimes ridicule, to make ground-breaking discoveries. In particular, I found the perseverance of Yellapragada "Yella" Subbarao , Dr. George Papanicolaou (Dr. Pap) & Dr. Barry Marshall very inspiring. Yella (as he is referred in the book) had to work as a night po...

This Week I Learned: *  Azure Redis Cache provides a session state provider that you can use to store your session state in a cache rather than in-memory or in a SQL Server database. * According to the Mobile HTTP Archive (which tracks page metrics for the top million Alexa-ranked sites), the average page served to mobile devices carries a payload of 1109 KB . Images account for 64% of the average page’s payload. More than half of all pages served to mobile contain 11+ JavaScript requests. Almost half of all pages served to mobile use custom fonts. * Google doesn't assure that you can remain invisible all the time when you use their chat service. It warns you after it makes you visible.  When you log into Outlook, you will appear as visible in Skype even though you don't wish to appear online . * http://www.googleusercontent.com/ is the  domain path used for resources inserted by users into Google documents, etc . * HTTP/2 vs SPD...

The Microsoft Virtual Academy course Building Responsive UI with Bootstrap  covers the framework from the perspective of a ASP.NET MVC developer. Summary of points: + The Bootstrap framework simplifies building web pages with a responsive layout (by scaling for differing device resolutions and sizes. + A big part of Bootstrap functionality involves controlling features through HTML class names & CSS + Bootstrap works on a grid system. The grid has 12 columns + The Bootstrap 3 grid system has four tiers of classes: xs (phones), sm (tablets), md (desktops), and lg (larger desktops). You can use nearly any combination of these classes to create more dynamic and flexible layouts. Each tier of classes scales up, meaning if you plan on setting the same widths for xs and sm, you only need to specify xs. + Any library used in conjunction Bootstrap may break it if it has classes similar to those used by Bootstrap. A workaround is to prefix an unique alphabet char...

While working with the YouTube API, I needed to populate the value of a anchor's title attribute with text generated dynamically from YouTube's JSON API On inspecting the HTML source code of a rendered page, I noticed that if the title had double quotes it would disturb the double quotes that it is already enclosed within. I used this custom function to fix it

This Week I Learned: * Unlike web pages, mobile apps do not have links and so it is much harder to share the information found on them. In tech speak, the problem is known as “deep linking,” the technological hurdle of giving apps some sort of links — those identifying lines of letters, dots and slashes that make up a web address or URL. The app problem traces its origins to 2008, when Apple introduced the App Store for iPhones. Unlike websites, apps were set up to be separate little boxes whose technology prohibited them from interacting with one another. But today, apps have begun to eclipse the web. Americans spend about half of their time online using mobile apps, according to comScore. Many companies including Google, Facebook, Twitter are working on deep linking - NYTimes * Cancer Is Mostly Bad Luck - Scientists at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in the US found that the majority of cancers are not linked to environment or lifestyle. More than two thirds of ca...

I noticed that Bing provides code snippets extracted from MSDN within search results when you query for programming topics related to Microsoft technologies. It prioritizes results from the Stack Overflow forum to show questions which are resolved. What I especially loved was that Bing shows a date next to the link (though it is not clear if that date is day the question was resolved. For the question " Why seal a class? " the date indicated in the search result doesn't match any date on that page). As technology evolves constantly, I strongly feel that all technical literature should have dates as they provide context to the content. It is sometimes possible to guess if the result page could be stale. If there is a recent tweet corresponding to your search keyword, it gets that too - Way to go, Bing!

This Week I Learned - *  HTML Inspector is " a highly-customizable, code quality tool to help you (and your team) write better markup. It aims to find a balance between the uncompromisingly strict W3C validator and having absolutely no rules at all ". To try it with any web page, open your browser’s developer tools console and run the following commands: var htmlInsp = document.createElement("script"); htmlInsp.src = "//cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/html-inspector/0.8.1/html-inspector.js"; document.body.appendChild(htmlInsp); After those are executed, you can then run the following in the console: HTMLInspector.inspect(); *  Support for conditional comments has been removed in Internet Explorer 10  * The  T. Rex infinite runner Chrome Easter egg  can be accessed from the network error page. When you get there all you have to do is tap the spacebar to start the game. *  Ali Julia who has written has written more than 2,800 reviews, is the No...