Paraphrased from a Right Choice magazine article with my own opinions: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.Disable Wi-fi and Bluetooth when not neededUnplug all external devicesRun only as many programs as you need. If you have a 100 browser tabs open, your battery life will be about 1 hour shorter.Lower or turn off the volumeKeep the laptop in a cool place and avoid propping...
Monday, 28 October 2013
Saturday, 26 October 2013
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...
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...
Tuesday, 22 October 2013
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 MaturityMicrosoft currently has 21 apps on Google Play. Among them, SkyDrive, Bing & Lync 2013 apps are highly rat...
Sunday, 20 October 2013
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...
Saturday, 19 October 2013
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...
Friday, 18 October 2013
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...
Tuesday, 15 October 2013
I've been using the Nexus 7 (Wi-Fi, 16 GB) tablet for the last ten days and I'm impressed. I plan to use it primarily as an e-book Reader to clear off at least a part of the pile of e-books I've collected over the years.Current prices of Kindle devices in India (click to enlarge image)I had to take a call between buying a Kindle or Nexus 7 but the superior hardware specs of Nexus 7 (NVIDIA Tegra 3 Quad Core Processor, 7-inch...
Monday, 14 October 2013
I've graded the answers to this StackOverflow question about APIs & online services to generate screenshots of web pages based on whether the service can be used directly without any API key or require a key:No key required:immediatenet.comkwout API (generating screenshots is not the primary intent of kwout so it doesn't directly give you an image to save)Requires (free) API access key:Browshot APIGrabzItthumbalizr API (Simple syntax to use the API: http://api.thumbalizr.com/?url=http://mvark.blogspot.in&width=250)ConvertAPI (Free...
Sunday, 13 October 2013
This Week I Learned:Programming:ASP.NET's Request Validation feature is not enough to avoid XSS It is possible to inject values in a drop down list. Developers shouldn't trust input. Anything sent by the client should be suspect, there's no guarantee that it's what you expect, and it must be validated on the server before acceptance.India:Commenting on the scale of biometric date captured for the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) program, Nandan Kilekani, the UIDAI head, calls India the tech capital for biometrics. UIDAI...
Friday, 11 October 2013
What is a Mixed Content Warning?This blog post explains it well:HTTPS-enabled sites require all resources on the page, including the ads, to be SSL compliant to protect the user against man-in-the-middle attacks. If an HTTPS page loads an HTTP resource, the page is considered mixed content, and the browser displays a mixed content warning (like the padlock with warning triangle in Chrome). New browser releases like Firefox 23 are starting to...
Wednesday, 9 October 2013
Kovid GoyalAntony LewisThey are both PhDs in Physics and creators of free software applications that have been downloaded by millions.Kovid Goyal is the creator of calibre, a comprehensive suite of utilities for managing/converting/viewing e-books and news in digital formats while Antony Lewis is the creator of WordWeb, English dictionary, thesaurus and word finder program for Microsoft Windows, iOS, Android and Mac OS...
Sunday, 6 October 2013
This Week I Learned:BrowsersMozilla Firefox, Portable Edition (formerly known as Portable Firefox and commonly known as Firefox Portable) is a repackaged version of Mozilla Firefox that can run from a USB flash drive, CD-ROM, or other portable device on any Windows computer or Linux/UNIX computer running Wine. The program does not require Firefox to be installed on the computer, nor does it leave personal information on the computer or interfere with any installed versions of Firefox, though installation on a hard drive is possible. Personal settings,...
Friday, 4 October 2013
The Project Management Institute offers the Project Management Professional (PMP) certification program. Even for experienced Project Managers, achieving the PMP credential requires significant effort. To pass the PMP Exam, not only a thorough study of the Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide), Fifth Edition, but also a good understanding of the project management stages (defined by 5 Process Groups) and project management topics (47 Processes in 10 Knowledge Areas, was 42 Processes in 9 Knowledge Areas in PMBOK Guide,...
Thursday, 3 October 2013
Windows Azure Mobile Services provides a JavaScript client library that can be used to perform CRUD operations using HTML and JavaScript in a HTML5 web app.There is a Mobile Services quickstart project to manage a TODO list that you can download from the Windows Azure portal. If you wish to create a custom table for a similar app, you have to first provide a table name within Windows Azure portal and set a permission level against each...
Sunday, 29 September 2013
This Week I Learned:AzurePreviously, Azure Virtual Machines deployed in suspended subscriptions would be deleted when the spending limit was passed (the data drives would be preserved – but the VM instances themselves would be deleted). Now when a subscription is disabled, VMs deployed inside it will simply move into the stopped de-provision state that was recently introduced (which allows a VM to stop without incurring any billing).JavaScript Editing JavaScript code in real time is possible in Chrome and Chromium based browsers. After loading...
Saturday, 28 September 2013
Here are a few examples of services that can manage social media on your behalf:The Kit Kat Social Break desktop widget can automatically Like, Re-tweet, Share posts from your contacts on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.For a fee, HeadHonchos offers to manage & possibly furbish your LinkedIn ProfileThe times we live ...
Thursday, 26 September 2013
Top 10 Free Security Apps for Android phones as rated by Right Choice magazine:McAfee Antivirus & SecurityAvast Mobile Security & AntivirusBitDefender AntivirusLookout Security & Antivirus Norton Security AntivirusESET Mobile SecurityTrend Micro Mobile Security & AntivirusTrustGo Antivirus & Mobile SecurityKaspersky Mobile SecurityDr.Web AntivirusSome of the features provided by these apps include blocking spam text messages, backing up your data, remote locking and remote deletion (you can wipe data on your phone or SD...
Sunday, 22 September 2013
This Week I Learned:Tools & Services:DbVisualizer generates better database diagrams than SQL Server Management Studio. It also lets you export the diagram to JPG, GIF, PNG, SVG & PDF format files.You can take any bit.ly link and add a + symbol to the end to see stats and details about the link.draw.io is an online diagramming application built using the mxGraph JavaScript librarySite44 turns Dropbox folders into websites. You can edit your HTML locally, and your website will always be up-to-date. With their Starter plan, they offer free...
Wednesday, 18 September 2013
A HTTP Waterfall chart can provide a quick visualization of what is wrong with a slow loading website.Chapter 3 of Stoyan Stefanov's Book of Speed has a nice explanation of what the colors in the a bar of Waterfall view (of twitter.com) generated by WebPageTest, mean:Dark green represents the time taken to perform a DNS lookup. DNS (Domain Name Service) lookup is the process of matching the friendly domain name twitter.com to an IP address (such...
Saturday, 14 September 2013
This Week I Learned:Azure+ If you own a MSDN subscription you can use up to your monthly Windows Azure credits at no charge. If you exceed your monthly credits, your service will be disabled for that month. I found out the hard way that the 10 "free" Azure Web Sites that you get will be disabled too if you exceed the limits of any of feature categories. For testing, if you activate the Azure SQL Reporting feature that comes as a MSDN benefit, make sure you stop it after you finish testing or else it will count towards your quota limit.+ A...
Thursday, 12 September 2013
Microsoft Visual C# 2012 Step by Step is a good book for beginners. It covers a considerable breadth of the C# language in 800 odd pages while showing how to program with the language using Visual Studio, the most commonly used IDE. As with other books in the Step by Step series, the explanations are pretty detailed but never boring.The coverage of Visual Studio features while explaining C# programming topics is interesting. There are tables & illustrations to make the content engaging. The Quick Reference at the end of each chapter with brief...
Wednesday, 11 September 2013
The transparent overlay image to introduce web site features/elements is an interesting UI Pattern to do more with less - a visual explanation is better than reams of notes.Don't know if Gmail was the first popular website to use this idea but I now see a lot of other websites use this kind of an overlay to visually explain new UI elements or features that are added.Gmail used this overlay idea earlier to show Gmail keyboard shortcuts with the...
Monday, 9 September 2013
The GoogleFinance function can be used to fetch historical data for a specified time period.Try these to get historical data of Sensex & Nifty indices for the first 9 days of September 2013:=GoogleFinance("BSESN", "close", "09/01/2013" , "09/09/2013", "DAILY")=GoogleFinance("NSEI", "close", "09/01/2013" , "09/09/2013", "DAILY")You can even go back in time. The Sensex was at 4031.55 this day in 19...
Sunday, 8 September 2013
JavaScript Pocket Reference isn't really a dictionary styled reference that I imagined it to be. This book reads more like a O’Reilly book in the Nutshell series than a Reference. It should have been called JavaScript in a Nutshell for this is a distilled & condensed version of the author's immensely popular JavaScript: The Definitive Guide. It is however a well-written book that covers the important parts of JavaScript and the essentials of ECMAScript 5 in less than 300 pages.This book is like a quick tour of the modern-day JavaScript landscape...
Saturday, 7 September 2013
This Week I Learned:Bing and Google Search make extensive use of localStorage for stashing SCRIPT blocks that are used on subsequent page views. localStorage is a HTML5 API within modern browsers to allow web developers to store small amounts of data within the user's browser.To view list of Chrome URLs: chrome://chrome-urls/ & to see what's stored in your the Chrome cache: chrome://view-http-cache/PC Maintenance Tip - Use System Restore: You can create a System Restore Point to save current settings and revert to those...
Thursday, 5 September 2013
Windows Azure SQL Reporting Succinctly is a freely downloadable 100-paged (90 without the pleasantries) e-book (available in Amazon Kindle and PDF formats) from Syncfusion.The ebook provides a great overview of Windows Azure SQL Reporting that will be helpful to developers and architects. It starts with a comparison of SQL Reporting and SSRS & takes the user through Report Development, Report Management, Report Parts, Security & Report Access.I...
Wednesday, 4 September 2013
An enterprising supermarket I go to is concerned that I may not be checking the promotional offers that they send to my Gmail account. They sent me steps on how to force Gmail to show emails they send always under the Primary category:To disable the Tabbed Inbox feature click on the settings cog in the upper right-hand corner, go to "Configure Inbox," and uncheck everything except "Primary." This will remove the tabs and bring you back to the...
Sunday, 1 September 2013
This Week I Learned:You can track Indian Stock Exchanges Sensex and Nifty indices using these formulas in Google Spreadsheet - =GoogleFinance("BSESN","price") and =GoogleFinance("NSEI","price") respectively. It is possible to have Google Docs send updates about changing values as a text message.Amazon Web Services & Microsoft Azure aren't the only places where you can host a Cloud-based .NET application. There are atleast 4 other .NET PaaS-like providers. The learnings of one experienced developer:There is no "right way" in software developmentReading...
Tuesday, 27 August 2013
HTML5 Pocket Reference is a handy resource for both rookie and experienced web developers who work with the shiny new version of HTML. The book starts with a quick overview of HTML5. The meat of the 184-paged book is the alphabetic listing of all HTML5 elements and attributes and concise explanations about them.HTML5 has taken over a decade in the making and it is still evolving. There are two organizations, W3C & WHATWG, maintaining slightly different HTML specifications. Not all browsers support all of the HTML5 tags. There is still debate...
Sunday, 25 August 2013
This Week I Learned:A good way to setup Development, Staging and Production environments for a Azure cloud application is to have either three separate Cloud Services, or even 3 subscriptions. The benefit with the different subscriptions is (a) you can control/restrict access to only those that should have access, and (b) it provides an easy way to view costs for each environment (since billing is done at the subscription level).Amazon EC2 and Windows Azure offers the lowest price at $0.12 per hour. However, Windows Azure performs much better than...
Wednesday, 14 August 2013
When we get onto the Internet, we trade our privacy for convenience. Everyone from marketers, ISPs to Governments can watch our activities on the Internet.I chuckled when I saw a question on Stack Exchange from an enquirer wanting to find how he can get Google to save not just his search queries but track every URL he types browsers across multiple machines he uses. When we are already giving away so much information, why not leverage these services to the fullest?Google Web History can be set up to track things other than just search. If you're...
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