Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

If you use Public APIs (like Bing Search, Google Maps APIs) in your applications, it helps to be aware of performance and availability issues that those services may face. Thankfully, there are some free tools that monitor popular APIs & websites - Api-status.com  tracks 40+ Public APIs every five minutes from one of its 49 global monitoring stations. Social Down Or Not tracks uptime and performance status of social networks Neustar Webmetics Lab project Crowdsourced Monitoring tracks the health of popular services by monitoring Twitter for mentions of downtime or performance problems.  (broken) Google Apps Status Dashboard shows performance information of its consumer services as well as services for organizations using Google Apps. Facebook has a Platform Live Status page that shows current status & reports issues that arise. Amazon Web Services Service Health Dashboard shows up-to-the-minute information on service availability & also...

Deepak Shenoy informs that as per Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) data, India has nearly 10 million Broadband connections in India (not just users). As per current TRAI norms, a broadband connection should have a speed of 256 kbps. According to World Bank data , only 4.5% of the total Indian population has access to the Internet (as of 2008) while the world average is 24% India is however, the  fourth-largest country in terms of internet users and is turning out to be an important market. Also see: Browser Usage Stats for India

Wordle is a fun web application for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. It can also be considered a “information visualization” or a text-analytics tool. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends. Wordle is implemented as a Java applet. It’s popularity can be gauged by the fact that its users have over 2,000,000 word clouds to  Wordle's public gallery . The tool’s creator Jonathan Feinberg built it while he was at IBM Research and he now works for Google. He has authored a chapter for the book Beautiful Visualization , where he explains how Wordle came to be & how it works. Below is the “tag cloud” of labels/tags (click to enlarge) that I’ve used on my blog, created wit...