Pogie awards celebrate the best ideas of the year: ingenious features that somehow made it past the lawyers, through the penny-pinching committees and into real-world tech gadgets — even if the products overall are turkeys. Here's a paraphrased summary of the winning ideas:Power Nap is a feature of OS X Mountain Lion that works on recent MacBook models. It lets the laptop keep backing itself up, downloading e-mail and syncing its online data (calendars, calendar notes, reminders, photos) & allows the network activity to chug away even...
Thursday, 27 December 2012
Wednesday, 26 December 2012
Vocabulary.com does a great job of "gamify-ing" the process of building your vocabulary through its adaptive learning systemIt is among the PC Magazine's Top 100 Websites & the Time magazine's top 50 websites of 2012 The site's main attraction, the quiz, has some 100,000+ questions and the answers are educative. The site reportedly contains over 100 million sentence examples.The site is ad freeTheir dictionary is blazing fast. In an unscientific...
Sunday, 23 December 2012
From his interview in the Economic Times -"We, as Google, are not in the search business. We are in the business of knowledge." - Google's Senior Vice President for Chrome and Apps & IIT-ian, Sundar Pichai (40)A few facts -About 20% of the queries we get everyday are new.Our user base for Gmail has grown to 50 million users in India. Chromebook will be available in at least two countries in the Asia Pacific region, excluding India, by...
Taking advantage of the free Exam Voucher for the Microsoft exam 70-480: Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3, I passed the 70-480 exam yesterday.I used the following resources for preparing:W3Schools - I've been referring to this awesome tutorial site since a decade and preparing for this exam gave me a chance to dig deeper into the HTML5 & CSS3 sectionsMicrosoft Virtual Academy course Developing in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3 Jump Start Hello! HTML5 & CSS3 by Rob CrowtherMSDN Internet Explorer API referenceThis...
Monday, 17 December 2012
Vital stats & interesting facts about Reddit paraphrased from this article on Forbes:Reddit was started in 2005 by two fresh University of Virginia graduates, Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman (22), after they couldn’t finance a previous brainstorm: An online food-ordering site.Ohanian created a zany aura, doodling up a goofy red-eyed alien named Snoo that became Reddit’s logo.Reddit’s visitor traffic was so feeble at first that the founders spent...
Thursday, 13 December 2012
Lucene & Hadoop are both created by Doug Cutting and they are open-source.Lucene is a text search engine API. It can be used by applications which requires full text indexing and searching capability. Lucene.Net is a port of Java Lucene written in C# and targeted at .NET Framework users.Hadoop is a framework that enables the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of commodity hardware.Hadoop is a clone of...
Monday, 10 December 2012
Notes from the Pluralsight course SharePoint 2013 Developer Ramp-Up - Part 1:Significant changes in SharePoint 2013:New development model - SharePoint Apps - ideal for Office 365, App MarketplaceMinimal Download Strategy (MDS) UXWeb Apps support claim based authentication by defaultArchitectural changes:WorkflowSearchWeb content managementDeprecated capabilitiesSharePoint Designer's Design viewMeeting & Document WorksapcesBI: Chart Web Part, Status Indicators & Status ListsAn app can contain a solution. A solution can contain...
Friday, 7 December 2012
A recent Wall Street Journal article reveals that companies today are increasingly tying people's real-life identities to their online browsing habits.WSJ also provides these startling privacy insights among others -Americans' license plates are now being tracked not only by the government, but also by repo men who hope to profit from the information.The government follows the movements of thousands of Americans a year by secretly monitoring their...
Thursday, 6 December 2012
Monday, 3 December 2012
Sunday, 2 December 2012
In about 21 minutes, Jai Haridas runs through the basics of Windows Azure Storage in the Channel 9 video Windows Azure Storage Introduction of the Meet Windows Azure series (June, 2012). This video is a shorter form of his more detailed TechEd Europe 2012 session, Windows Azure Storage: How it Works, Best Practices and Future DirectionsSome pictures from his slides (link to PPT) -Related:Introducing Table SAS (Shared Access Signature),...
Wednesday, 28 November 2012
Click to view enlarged imageSome interesting facts & trivia from this infographic on the Microsoft Careers Facebook page -Bing Translator for Mobile - lets you translate any printed language MS Office is now reported to be used by over 1 billion people worldwide Windows 8 Phone capabilities include multi-core processor support, Micro SD support, NFC wireless sharing and easier development of applications Kinect is a groundbreaking...
Tuesday, 27 November 2012
Paraphrased suggestions from a Wired magazine article to make your passwords harder to crack -Don't reuse passwords. If you do, a hacker who gets just one of your accounts will own them all.If you must a dictionary word as your password, then string several together into a pass phrase.Avoid standard number substitutions. Think “P455w0rd” is a good password? N0p3! Cracking tools now have those built in.Use the longest possible password.Enable two-factor authentication when offered. Give bogus answers to security questions - not something hackers...
Monday, 26 November 2012
"Through 20 years of effort, we've successfully trained everyone to use passwords that are hard for humans to remember, but easy for computers to guess." - XKCDWhile some websites have a password strength checker to gently suggest that a chosen password may not be good enough others don't give you the liberty of choosing your own password pattern while framing one.Some websites enforce rules that THEY think will be right...
Friday, 23 November 2012
Wednesday, 21 November 2012
The O'Reilly book "97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know" is available for free in Wiki format. The wiki contains original, unedited contributions. Some essays are also un-formatted.The feedback on Amazon for this book is not generous. So you can read the original drafts to check if the material suits your tastes.Also see: 100 Interview Questions & Answers For Software Develop...
My wife and I built a simple Windows 8 Store geo-location based app called GeoBuzz. It is a free app that lets you discover the world around you. It uses your location coordinates to fetch geo-tagged articles from Wikipedia about or related to the places around you.This app makes use of -HTML & JavaScriptGeoNames APIMediaWiki APIWorld Weather Online APIjQueryIt is based on an idea by Chris Heilmann. My wife wrote most of the code while I threw...
Tuesday, 20 November 2012
Where in the World? is a simple game that is a mashup of Picassa & Google Maps. This geography game lets you view public photos stored by users around the world on Picassa and guess where they were taken.There is no information on how exactly points are scored. The closer your guess is about where a geo-tagged photo is shot, the more points you win. I noticed that if your guess about the location is close to 150 kilometers,...
Sunday, 18 November 2012
Before you set out to write your own Windows 8 Store App, it helps to know how others have done it. Here's a list of case studies I have come across -Development of the Wikipedia app, source on GithubChannel 9 video: Media app case studies Channel 9 video: Shopping app case studiesChannel 9 video: Gaming reimagined: Gaming case studies Shufflr social video discovery appMSDN Windows 8 Store apps - Case stud...
Friday, 9 November 2012
Some notable India-centric Windows 8 Store Apps -The Economic Times Hindustan Times Times of India NDTVNDTV Play Aaj Tak Rediff Realtime News India Today Make My Trip Gaana BookMyShow Flyte MP3 BurrpZomato Thomas Cook, India work in progress...Also see:HOW TO quickly find if a site/service is available as a Windows 8 appFree print version of Indian Newspap...
Thursday, 8 November 2012
Jatinder Mann's presentation at the Build 2012 conference "50 performance tricks to make your HTML5 apps and sites faster" has some interesting facts & 50 tips on improving performance -* 3 dimensions to improve web performance -- Network- CPU- GPU* AJAX performance does not wholly depend on JavaScript performance* Where does the CPU time go?NetworkingHTMLCSSCollectionsJavaScriptMarshallingDOMFormattingBlock buildingLayoutRenderingMost of the 50 tips are well covered in Souders' book High Performance Web Sites and the YSlow...
Tuesday, 6 November 2012
Microsoft is offering a voucher code (of $80 value, available through 3/31/2013 while supplies last) to take the Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3 exam (70-480) for free.The code is in the fourth para of this linkWhen you pass Exam 70-480: Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3, you complete the requirements for the following certification(s):Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3 SpecialistExam...
Friday, 2 November 2012
In this Channel9 video, 15 well-known developers tell what they love about programming. My favorite among them -"The geekiest thing about me is I actually write code on the weekends for fun but don't tell anybody"Did you know, Matt Mullenweg created WordPress when he was eighteen and John Resig was 22 when he started jQuery in 2006.Also see:More Quo...
Thursday, 1 November 2012
Till a few years ago, MSDN subscribers could opt to receive the MSDN documentation on a CD\DVD. Though this facility been discontinued, the MSDN documentation is now available for offline use even for the free Visual Studio Express edition users. Local availability of the documentation is most helpful if have a low bandwidth Internet connection and you need faster access.To access MSDN documentation locally in any edition of Studio...
Tuesday, 30 October 2012
HTML5 introduces custom data attributes for tags - these are attributes that starts with "data-". These will be treated as a storage area for private data.If you rely on element class names or rel attributes to store arbitrary snippets of metadata and still look for "hooks", these data attributes will come as a relief.Prefixing the custom attributes with data- ensures that they will be completely ignored by the user agent. As far as the browser and indeed the website’s end user are concerned, this data does not exist.Every HTML element may have...
Friday, 26 October 2012
As the Tablet wars get fiercer and accessing the Web moves beyond desktop browsers, web developer face the challenge of making web pages they create work on all kinds of devices. Thanks to CSS3, there can just be a single web page that can be made to work on a variety of screen resolutions.While there are a bunch of ready-made templates and frameworks like Twitter Bootstrap to build responsive pages, understanding how they work is important...
Wednesday, 24 October 2012
Brick & mortar companies face a tough competition from online shopping sites as they offer greater convenience & cheaper prices. But should you trust these websites with your credit or debit cards?Here are some interesting question (& links to answers) from online technical forums to help you take better decisions -How are Cleartrip & PayTM able to store the credit/debit card details of the customers for future purchases...
Sunday, 21 October 2012
Wordament is an addictive free 4×4 grid MMOWPG or Massively Multiplayer Online Word Playing Game, available for users of Windows Phone 7+ & Windows 8.Here are some tips drawn from others & my own (limited) experience to score better -Hunt for patterns, not words. Practice looking for common letter combinations and roots, which can help you quickly rack up points. A nugget like EAD, for example, can lead to BEAD, DEAD, HEAD, LEAD, MEAD,...
Wednesday, 17 October 2012
Wikipedia's API or more appropriately MediaWiki API, lets you programmatically fetch content & metadata related to thousands of its articles.I built a small custom Wikipedia search application - Q-Wikipedia, to get just the first paragraph of a Wikipedia article using jQuery with help from online resources.The REST-based Wikipedia API has many configurable options. It's easy to select the options you require using the Wikipedia API SandboxAs I need only the first paragraph I set the value of the sections...
Sunday, 14 October 2012
This list of Q & A is compiled from multiple resources (see links at the bottom). I have edited, added links and paraphrased original content at some places to provide context & improve readability1. If we make an application for WinRT, how much work will be required to get it to work whenever Windows phone 8 comes out? Will WP8 support WinRT at all?Jeff Brand: First, I am not a WP8 expert. You will need to do some rework, most of it centered...
Thursday, 11 October 2012
While working on a geo-location application, you would want to see how your app works for different coordinates.Windows 8 has a very helpful simulator that makes testing your geolocation based web application or Windows 8 Store app, easy.The Windows 8 Simulator exe can be found at this path (assuming your system files are in the C Drive): C:\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\Windows Simulator\11.0The Simulator can also be invoked through...
Wednesday, 10 October 2012
PPK, a JS guru, published a public poll to know the popularity of JavaScript libraries. Among 3200+ votes cast, 91% said yes to the question "Do you use any JavaScript library in more than 50% of your projects" and the same percentage of people who participated in the poll said they have used jQuery in the last year.Popular JavaScript libraries can be accessed from Google's & Microsoft's CDNs. CloudFlare's CDN offers 158 JavaScript libraries that you can include in your code (for improved performance) instead of having a local copy. For...
Considering that there is currently no official Windows 8 app directory, how do you search for apps related to a keyword?Let's say, you wanted to know about Twitter or FourSquare client apps. Type in the following queries into Google or Bing to see what related apps are already in the Microsoft Store & get more information about them -site:apps.microsoft.com foursquare site:apps.microsoft.com twitterThe root site, apps.microsoft.com, currently throws a "403 - Forbidden: Access is denied" error message. A Windows 8 Store directory...
Tuesday, 9 October 2012
Yesterday W3C announced the creation of a new website WebPlatform.org as a "place to come for answers to your trickiest (and simplest) development and design questions about the Open Web Platform."Microsoft, Opera, Google, Facebook, Mozilla, Nokia, Adobe and W3C will contribute content.The Web Platform Docs (WPD) Getting Started page loftily announces that "Anyone can contribute to WPD. To get started, you'll first need to register and verify your email address....The community is friendly and welcoming to newcomers..."When I tried to register...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
