10 ways to make laptop battery last longer

Paraphrased from a Right Choice magazine article with my own opinions:

1. Keep the brightness of the screen as low as possible. If portability & long battery life are important for you then buy a laptop with a lower screen size. The laptop's biggest power drain is the screen.
2. Disable Wi-fi and Bluetooth when not needed
3. Unplug all external devices
4. Run only as many programs as you need. If you have a 100 browser tabs open, your battery life will be about 1 hour shorter.
5. Lower or turn off the volume
6. Keep the laptop in a cool place and avoid propping it on a pillow as this blocks airflow to the fan, causing it to heat up.
7. Defragment your hard drive
8. Clean the battery's metal contacts. Clean contacts increase the energy efficiency. Always clean them when the battery is fully-drained, and use a cloth that's only slightly damp, to avoid electric shocks and short circuits. 
9. Shutdown or hibernate your laptop instead of putting it on standby if you're going to be away for long hours
10. Turn off unwanted programs or processes that work in the background.

From Wired magazine: In order to squeeze as much life out of your lithium-polymer battery, once your laptop hits 100 percent, unplug it. In fact, you should unplug it before that. Battery University states that a battery charged to 100 percent will have only 300-500 discharge cycles, while a battery charged to 70 percent will get 1,200-2,000 discharge cycles. So  ideally charge batteries to 80 percent then let them drain to about 40 percent.

Related:

• HOW TO prevent Skype from auto-starting after Windows boots
• HOW TO speed up your Windows PC
• Highest voted questions (with answers) tagged Laptop Battery on the Super User Stack Exchange Forum

Read More

Learnings in S/W Engineering from the HealthCare.gov website fiasco

It cost at least $400 million to put together the problem-plagued HealthCare.gov website. What went wrong?

The PM perspective (from Don’t Blame IT for Obamacare’s Tech Troubles):

Blaming programmers, coders, and project managers for disgraceful design flaws and technical turmoil is too easy and obvious. Crap rolls downhill. Look deeper. The underlying truth for virtually every large system’s implementation initiative is that success demands leadership and oversight that holds itself accountable for assuring best practice. Good governance, not superior technical chops or ready access to alpha geeks, is how you build complex systems that deliver reliable and resilient value for money. Good governance provides oversight, insight, and foresight. Emerging problems are flagged sooner; project leaders present their testing protocols and outcomes; and updated expectations are clearly communicated throughout the enterprise. Contingencies are constantly reviewed and appropriately revised. That’s what serious systems developers do.

Web Performance Engineering perspective

Top Performance Problems:

• Too many HTTP Requests (46)
• Overuse of JavaScript (12 files total, 166K compressed, 464K uncompressed)
• Use of large offsite web fonts
• Poor caching of resources
• Use of offsite third party widgets
• Slow TTFB times
• Uncompressed images (251K total, 75K could be saved losslessly)
• Use of SSL resources on non-secure page
• Unminified JS and CSS files

to be continued...

Read More

TWIL - Week #29

This Week I Learned:

Browsers:

• The auto-fill feature in Chrome also fills hidden fields.
• Like in Nigeria, the top three browsers in India (UC, Opera Mini,Nokia Xpress) are proxy browsers —browsers that leave the interpreting and rendering to the server and only show the resulting page. This process saves their users a lot of money, both because an old device is sufficient to run a proxy client, and because they essentially get one image instead of a full web page, which leads to low data usage.

Security:

• eBooks have one feature that can't be found in print: the ability to have live hotlinks embedded in the text. And that presents an open field for scammers to spread malware.

Science:

• The technical term for the physiological study of laughter is the not-so-funny-sounding word, gelotology. In terms of what we find funny, there seems to be three general categories of what makes us laugh. 
• The incongruity theory suggests that it is humorous when logic is turned on its head, as when a joke or story takes an unexpected turn, or when non-sequitors are used.
• The superiority theory (aka Schadenfreude) focuses on laughter that arises at someone else's mistake or misfortune, as when a cartoon character slips on a banana peel or has an anvil drop on them out of the sky. 
• The relief theory posits that laughter arises as a relief to pent-up emotions or passing danger.

India:

• Overseas workers from India are expected to send back home $71 billion this year. Remittances exceed the country's earnings from information-technology exports. China is the No. 2 recipient of remittances after India, at $60 billion, according to the World Bank. (Source: WSJ)
• Only three per cent individuals pay taxes. Of this number, the government earns more than half from those earning Rs 20-25 lakh (Rs 2-2.5 million) or more, annually. Officially, there are only 42,800 individuals in the department’s records who have declared taxable income of over Rs 1 crore (Rs 10 million). (Source: Rediff)
• India has the highest petrol-price-to-income ratio in the world.

Read More

MS currently has 21 apps on Google Play, incl. Wordament!

I was pleasantly surprised to find that Wordament, my favorite word game, is available as an Android app.



Wordament is an addictive MMOWPG or Massively Multiplayer Online Word Playing Game built by 2 Microsoft-ies using the Google App Engine.



I found it funny that the Content Rating for this app is Low Maturity

Microsoft currently has 21 apps on Google Play. Among them, SkyDrive, Bing & Lync 2013 apps are highly rated.

Read More

Review: uCertify PMI PMP v-5 Online PrepKit

uCertify is a provider of test preparation software for 400+ IT certification exams from 18 different Testing agencies including Microsoft & PMI. uCertify offered me access to an online PrepKit in exchange for an unbiased review. I tried their PrepKit for the PMI Project Management Professional (PMP) course and found it to be comprehensive and useful.

For me the best part of the PMP v-5 online PrepKit is the collection of 710 Practice Questions with full explanations. Besides that, there are 110 Interactive Quizzes & a Pre-Assessment Test. The Practice Questions can be taken in Test, Learn & Review mode. There is also review study material based on the Fifth edition of PMBOK which includes Tips & Flash Cards to highlight points important for passing the PMP exam. Test history & performance analytics reports help in gauging your progress, identify the areas you have mastered and help you focus on areas which need improvement to pass the actual exam. The PrepKit is a a confidence booster and great complement to the PMBOK Guide which is essential reading.

There are some grammar issues here and there but as the course material is continuously updated, they will probably go away. The test interface is neat but not accessible with the keyboard. It could have been beneficial to navigate through the practice questions & tests with arrow keys. To their credit however, the site is responsive and well-designed. It is easy to jump to topics of interest easily. The PMP v-5 online PrepKit costs USD 139.99 or INR 7606.47. As it requires Internet to access, you will also have to factor in Internet costs but that's probably a non-issue these days considering its ubiquity.

Will this PMP v-5 online PrepKit help you pass the exam? I don't know. Certification watchdog CertGuard rates it well. Also considering that they offer a 100% money-back guarantee and have decent study material and lots of practice questions, it is worth trying out. uCertify offers a free evaluation version of its Prepkits with limited features.

Read More

TWIL - Week #28

This Week I Learned:

Web:

• Google crawls for websites. Shodan crawls for devices. The Shodan search engine crawls the internet looking for devices, many of which are programmed to answer. It has found cars, foetal heart monitors, office building heating-control systems, water treatment facilities, power plant controls, traffic lights and glucose meters. It has become a crucial tool for security researchers, academics, law enforcement and hackers looking for devices that shouldn’t be on the internet or devices that are vulnerable to being hacked.  Its creator & sole operator, 29-year-old John Matherly says "I don’t consider my search engine scary. It’s scary that there are power plants connected to the internet". Matherly hopes Shodan leads to more transparency and public shaming of companies that are selling vulnerable systems
• Google is extending its Vulnerability Reward Program to include "key third-party software critical to the health of the entire Internet".
• Since more and more websites are trying to tailor their content to you, you may get caught up in a digital “filter bubble” and not get “exposed to information that could challenge or broaden [your] worldview”.
• Everywhere you go online, you’re tracked; a lot more than you might suspect. Web tracking isn’t 100% evil, but websites certainly track you a ton, so it’s worth informing yourself what they use that information for. (The above 2 links & a few others are from the post "100 incredible things I learned watching 70 hours of TED talks last week" on A Year of Productivity blog. The author of the blog has licensed all original content under an Attribution 3.0 Unported copyright license and encourages his blog readers to steal his posts.)

Science:

• Bees have been around for 50 million years, but they recently started dying en masse because of “parasitic mites, viral and bacterial diseases, and exposure to pesticides and herbicides”.
• Tropical cyclones are formed in eight basins - Northern Atlantic, Northeastern Pacific, North Central Pacific, Northwestern Pacific, Northern Indian Ocean, Southwestern Indian Ocean, South and Southwestern Pacific and Southeastern Indian Ocean. Each basin has a different naming system. In the North Atlantic Ocean, Northwest Pacific Ocean east of the International Date Line and South Pacific Ocean, they are called hurricanes. Typhoon is the name given to a tropical cyclone formed in the North west Pacific Ocean west of the dateline. In the southwest Pacific Ocean and southeast Indian Ocean, its called a severe tropical cyclone.  Naming of cyclones started in early 20th century when an Australian forecaster named the cyclone after politicians whom he disliked. Now, cyclones are given names contributed by member nations of the World Meteorological Organisation. The new names include those of men, women, flowers and so on. In the North Atlantic and Northeastern Pacific, feminine and masculine names are alternated in alphabetic order during a given season. (Source: Times of India)

Numbers:

• 66% of the U.S. is obese 
• This year, there are 1426 billionaires in the world, according to Forbes. 960 of them are self-made, while the rest inherited their wealth. 
• About 0.7% of individuals world-wide are millionaires - about 32 million people. They control 41% of world's wealth (Source: WSJ)
• 35% of Russia's wealth is in the hands of just 110 people.

India:

• In India which has a total population of over one billion, only 50 million people have passports which is a mere five per cent of total population, around 30 million people pay taxes and over 150 million people have driver licence. One of the reasons for setting up the Aadhaar program is to give everybody an ID. 
• ICICI Bank actually has a page on its website informing that "customers found to be offensive in their interaction with us will be required to close all their relationships with ICICI Bank".
• The first book of the bestseller Shiva Trilogy, "The Immortals of Meluha" by Amish Tripathi was self-published.

Everything else:

• We don’t feel fear because of a potential loss of income or status, we feel fear because we’re afraid of being judged and ridiculed.
• If you’re arguing with someone to win the argument, you’re doing it for the wrong reasons. You should be arguing to learn.

Read More

HOW TO highlight a Province within a Country with Google GeoChart

After deprecating Image Charts within Map Charts, Google has added Geochart & Geomap as part of the Google Visualization API. A Geochart is rendered within the browser using SVG or VML while Geomap is rendered using an embeddable Flash player. Both types of maps don't allow dragging or scrolling.

I adapted a code sample meant to show a chosen State in USA to highlight a chosen State in India.

You can adapt the original sample to make it work for any country. You have to use the ISO 3166-2 Province/State codes (example: India) for the Country you choose.

Also see:

• Google Maps Driving Directions gadget - useful for a "Contact Us" page
• Display region, route or location with Google Static Maps
• HOW TO visualize approximate radial distance from a fixed point on a map
• A geography game made from a mashup of Picassa & Google Maps

Read More