Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

I asked on the WebApps StackExchange forum a few months ago out of curiosity, if it is possible to know where a Content Delivery Network's servers are located ? The unanimous answer was that it is not possible to know unless the CDN vendor gives it out. Both the respondents to the question also mentioned that big CDNs don't reveal exact details. I was therefore pleasantly surprised when I recently came across a Windows Azure Team blog post that lists all of Windows Azure CDN's (currently) 24 physical nodes .

Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art by Steve McConnell is a book that meets my definition of a good technical book . In my opinion, Estimation is an underrated subject. A lack of understanding of this topic among team members (not just the PM) can negatively impact the success of the project. This is because the Project Manager has to draw on the judgement & experience of the software development team as well. This book is written for developers, leads, testers, and managers who need to create estimates occasionally as one of their many job responsibilities . It gently guides the reader through the esoteric art of software estimation with lots of practical real-world advice. Within the 300+ pages of the book spread across 23 chapters, the author explains 32 Estimation techniques graded according by these factors of applicability: What's estimated (Size, Effort, Schedule, Cost, Features)  Size of project (Small, Medium, Large) Development stage (Early...

Ignore this post if you live on the web & rarely turn off your computer. On the other hand, if you have a favorite set of websites that you open everyday, you can automate the process of starting these sites in multiple tabs within a single Firefox window by using a Windows Batch file. To create such a Windows Batch file, open Notepad or any text editor & paste these lines - @echo off start firefox.exe "stackoverflow.com" "twitter.com"  Change the URLs in the example to your own favorites & save the file with a valid name and a .bat extension. Related:  Setting Browser Tabs to Open at Start-Up