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

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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...

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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My first impressions of Nexus 7 tablet

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 HD Display) and the relatively cheaper price made me fall for it. (I bought my Nexus 7 on Flipkart for INR 9999. For the next few days it will be going for less than Rs. 9000 as part of their Diwali Cyber Sale promotion)

Thankfully, Amazon offers their Kindle app for Android devices which makes reading Mobi & Kindle  (AZW) files on Nexus 7 as good as reading it on Amazon's own Kindle. It's a 22.49MB download for Nexus 7 (the size of the app installer varies according to device). This app also helps you sync up your reading with other devices that support Kindle.

The Kindle app has the Send to Kindle by E-mail feature that lets you send documents to your Kindle as an email attachment.

Kindle Personal Documents Service supports the following file types.

• Microsoft Word (.DOC, .DOCX)
• HTML (.HTML, .HTM)
• RTF (.RTF)
• Text (.TXT)
• JPEG (.JPEG, .JPG)
• Kindle Format (.MOBI, .AZW)
• GIF (.GIF)
• PNG (.PNG)
• BMP (.BMP)
• PDF (.PDF)

These files can be combined into a compressed ZIP (.ZIP) file. ZIP files are automatically opened by the conversion service, converted to the Kindle format, and stored in Your Kindle Library.

To convert your personal PDF documents converted to the Kindle format, type "convert" in the subject of the e-mail when you send your personal documents to your Send-to-Kindle address.

The conversion is not immediate but you get a status report by email upon completion. A few of the many PDFs that I emailed to my Kindle account could not be converted. I wonder if there is anything about the contents of the PDF (images?) that causes the conversion to fail.

Another interesting feature of the Kindle app is that it can learn your reading speed and tell you what percentage of the book still remains and provide an estimate of the time you would need to finish the book based on your reading speed.

One thing I sorely missed in Nexus 7 was the lack of a file explorer. Owing to the popularity of the Android platform, there is no dearth of information. I was quickly able to find out that ES File Explorer (4.08MB) was a free, popular file manager with several other features.

(Update 28/Oct/2013) Right Choice magazine gives Nexus 7 a score of 72 (In its tests, iPad with Retina Display which sells for ~32K gets the highest score of 82)

click on image for enlarged view

I'll keep updating this review with more of my findings.

Also see:

• 10 Free Security Apps for Android phones
• There is an app for that?
• AnandTech: Google Nexus 7 and Android 4.1 - Mini Review 
• AnandTech: The Google Nexus 7 Review

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Free APIs, online services to generate screenshots of web pages

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.com
• kwout 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 API
• GrabzIt
• thumbalizr API (Simple syntax to use the API: http://api.thumbalizr.com/?url=http://mvark.blogspot.in&width=250)
• ConvertAPI (Free 500 one-time credits)

There are also online tools can generate screenshots of websites:

• Browsershots.org
• WebShots Pro
• ShrinkTheWeb
• Amit Agarwal's Screen Capture tool
• GrabzIt

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TWIL - Week #27

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 is yet to finalize breach of disclosure and liability policies in case Aadhar’s biometric data are compromised or stolen. The UIDAI is a lean organisation with less than 300 people (but lots of vendors).
• The voluntary use of public transport once in a week is part of Oil Minister Veerappa Moily's fuel conservation campaign launched this week, which aims to save $5 billion oil import bill.  Moily saved Rs 40,000 in fuel cost by taking public transport to office. One of the many perks that Members of Parliament and some Government "servants" enjoy is free fuel.
• Currently, of the 35 women in the Bihar Assembly of 243 members, roughly 70% have husbands who are politicians. The trend of politicians using their wives as a front to keep their seats safe started in 1997 when Bihar chief minister Lalu Prasad Yadav, facing arrest by the CBI in the fodder scam, stunned political circles and 'shocked' his wife Rabri Devi by asking her to step out of the kitchen and occupy the chair he was going to quit. A mother of nine, Rabri Devi was a housewife unlettered in politics until then, but continued in office for over seven years. Like Yadav, other politicians in Bihar see the elevation of their wives as the best way to keep the power in the family. (Source: Times of India)

Trivia:

• Benjamin Franklin swore by "air baths", which was his term for sitting around naked in the morning, whatever the weather. Franklin was chronically disorganised.

Everything else:

• FB Reader & Kindle are free Android apps that allow you to open both PDF & Mobi files.
• Google has developed cutting-edge face and license plate blurring technology that is applied to all Street View images. This means that if one of our images contains an identifiable face (for example that of a passer-by on the sidewalk) or an identifiable license plate, our technology will automatically blur it out, meaning that the individual or the vehicle cannot be identified. If our algorithms missed something, you can easily let us know.

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HOW TO prevent mixed content warning in web pages

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 block mixed active content (scripts) but still display mixed content warnings for mixed passive content (images).

The mixed content warnings vary in aggressiveness among browsers. 

One way for developers to fix this issue is by using a Protocol Relative URL.

A Protocol Relative URL is just like a regular URL except that you leave out the protocol prefix:
 //mvark.azure-mobile.net/client/MobileServices.Web-1.0.0.min.js

A protocol relative URL is just a URL without the scheme. For example //billpatrianakos.me is a protocol relative URL. These types of URLs are meant to be hit by a browser only. The point is that a browser can fetch a resource from whatever protocol the site is telling it to use.

You get the automatic use of HTTPS on secure pages and avoid the overhead of HTTPS on non-secure pages.

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What's common between Kovid Goyal & Antony Lewis?

Kovid Goyal

Antony Lewis

They 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 X.

The free version of WordWeb has been downloaded over 5 million times while calibre has been downloaded by 18 million people.

calibre is released under GNU GPLv3 as the author did not want people creating proprietary software based on my work

WordWeb is free subject to very unique licensing terms:

You may use the program free of charge indefinitely only if

• You take at most 4 flights (2 return flights) in any 12 month period

• AND you do not own or regularly drive an SUV (sports utility vehicle).

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TWIL - Week #26

This Week I Learned:

Browsers

• Mozilla 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, bookmarks, and any installed extensions and themes are stored on the flash drive along with Firefox Portable. This allows the user to move from computer to computer without losing application settings.

Web Development

• To test a web app with multiple simultaneous sessions, you can create Profiles in Chrome and Firefox. In IE, you can use File > New session. 
• Despite increases in bandwidth, the load times of web pages has increased by 48% over the past two years. The average page load time of the top 100 websites is 11.3 seconds
• To compare how the print and screen view of a web page would look, in Chrome Developer Tools settings (right bottom corner),  Overrides tab, select the option "Emulate CSS media" and choose print or screen.

India

• Lawmakers turned lawbreakers  - Lalu Prasad (aged 65), Member of Parliament for multiple terms, Cabinet Minister and former Chief Minister of Bihar, has been convicted in the fodder scam that he took part in 17 years ago along with another former Chief Minister of Bihar. "Those involved (in the scam) were amply rewarded: Animal husbandry officer R K Rana, who purchased pigs from Ludhiana before falsely claiming half of them died near Varanasi, rose to become RJD MLA and then an MP." Rajya Sabha member Rasheed Masood (aged 67) has been convicted for fraudulently nominating undeserving candidates  including his own nephew to MBBS seats in 1990-91. (Source: Times of India)

Everything else

• Wolfram Alpha provides Personal Analytics for Facebook 
• Difference between GPS, GSM, GPRS with respect to location
• GPS is global position system, which uses timings from satellites to determine location. It has no relation to GSM or GPRS, except in the case of A-GPS (assisted GPS) which might use mobile data provided via GSM/GPRS to get a better starting point for your location which enables the GPS to have a better idea of which satellites are overhead where you are.
• GSM is a standard for mobile telephone and describes how the phone should communicate with the phone network to make and receive calls. It does not provide any location services in itself, but as GSM will communicate with mobile phone radio towers that are known and have a fixed location, you can get an approximate location by knowing which towers your phone can talk to and where they are.
• GPRS is an extension to GSM which allows packet switched data - mobile data, which can be used to access the internet. This does not provide any location services, other than that which can be obtained using GSM tower locations.

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FB & Twitter spam me with similar subject line

It is also funny that they landed one after another.

Related: Tweetcheero

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Book Review: PMP Rapid Review by Sean Whitaker; MS Press

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, 4th Edition) is required.

PMP Rapid Review by Sean Whitaker is a good exam-prep resource that summarizes & highlights the important topics of PMBOK Guide. There are plenty of questions and answers, some of them in true/false format, to recap your understanding of the essentials. The study material is interspersed with exam tips which point out things to note from the exam's perspective.

There are five chapters corresponding to the five Process Groups. The author has broken down the contents of each Process Group into Tasks. Though well-written, I found the book needlessly long. The content could have been better organized to avoid repetition of the title of the Tasks which don't really add any value. The author also plugs his other book "PMP Training Kit" by referencing it in the More Info section of most of the Tasks.

Though not as a sole resource, this book is a fine complement to the PMBOK Guide for the PMP exam.  I received a ebook copy of this book via the O'Reilly Blogger Review Program.

Also see: Book Review: Head First PMP

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Windows Azure Mobile Services - Error: Table 'sometable' does not exist. - 404

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 operation for the table (as shown in the diagram below).

click to enlarge image

Instead of doing this, if you directly create a table via the SQL Server Management Studio or the Silverlight-based Azure SQL Database portal, you will encounter the error Table 'sometable' does not exist. - 404 when you try to access this table using a script. 

To resolve this issue after you've created the table, you can go to the Mobile Services section in the Azure portal, select the Data tab and click on the Create option at the bottom. Give the table the same name as the one you've created outside the Portal and you should then be able to overcome the error. 

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TWIL - Week #25

This Week I Learned:

Azure

• Previously, 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 a web page completely, press the F12 key to open Developer Tools, then open the 'Sources' tab. Now open any JavaScript file loaded on the browser and you can directly edit it by clicking anywhere in that file. After making modifications press Ctrl+S to save the changes. The browser will automatically take in the new code. If there are some syntax errors in your code then it will display them in the console. So keep an eye on the console whenever you apply changes. If the part of code you modify is going to be executed by future events then you can see the effect of the modification. There is no point in changing the code that is not going to be executed in future events on that web page. For example, the code that is getting executed while the page is loading and making modifications to that code has no effect.

Browsers

• To view the source of a web page directly you can use the view-source URI scheme in Chrome, Firefox (but not IE): view-source:somedomain.com
• Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface (NPAPI) is a cross-platform plugin architecture used by many web browsers. Internet Explorer dropped supported for NPAPI in version 5.5 SP2. Starting in January 2014, Chrome will block webpage-instantiated NPAPI plug-ins as per an announcement by Justin Schuh, Security Engineer and Plug-in Retirement Planner. However, the built-in Flash plug-in and PDF viewer will be unaffected because they don’t use NPAPI.

India

• The Apollo Clinic lets you view your diagnostic reports online which is nice. Wonder if there are privacy standards defined for health records in India and if the website maintains those standards.

Trivia

• Ernest Hemingway, author of The Old and the Sea and Nobel Prize winner in Literature (1954) committed suicide in 1961 after a long battle with depression. 
• Many writers of the popular The Simpsons animated comedy series have a background in mathematics and they have injected math references that are not so easy to catch.

Everything else

• ZXX, a typeface by designer Sang Mun, includes 4 different font styles designed to thwart optical character recognition.
• 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. (Source: Wired)
• The EFF has a series of free articles as part of the The Surveillance Self-Defense Project which teaches people how to remain anonymous on the Internet and in the physical world. While you can have security without privacy, you cannot have privacy without security.
• Microsoft spent $1.2 billion last year to acquire Yammer, which lets companies create private networks among their employees through an interface that looks almost exactly like Facebook.

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Finding social media stressful? Outsource their maintenance

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 Profile

The times we live in!

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10 Free Security Apps for Android phones

Top 10 Free Security Apps for Android phones as rated by Right Choice magazine:

1. McAfee Antivirus & Security
2. Avast Mobile Security & Antivirus
3. BitDefender Antivirus
4. Lookout Security & Antivirus 
5. Norton Security Antivirus
6. ESET Mobile Security
7. Trend Micro Mobile Security & Antivirus
8. TrustGo Antivirus & Mobile Security
9. Kaspersky Mobile Security
10. Dr.Web Antivirus

Some 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 card remotely)

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TWIL - Week #24

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 library
• Site44 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 hosting for one free website with a data transfer limit of 100MB/month

Health:

• 35 million people worldwide live with Alzheimer's disease. The onset of the disease is most likely to occur after the age of 60 years. While age is generally considered to be the primary reason, stroke that leads to vascular dementia is the second major known contributor to the disease. (Source: Times of India)
• Dentists suggest brushing twice a day, for two minutes each time. If you can only do it once, bedtime is best, since that is when your mouth salivates less, allowing cavity-causing substances to take hold. Rinsing after sipping sugary drinks is always a good idea. (Source: WSJ) 

India:

• The power of the Internet to build public opinion is making Governments frame new laws to keep their countrymen under control. A new law in China stipulates that a person would be punished if a rumour posted by him/her is retweeted more than 500 times on the Twitter-like Sina Weibo site. Section 66A of India's Information Technology [IT] Act is sweeping in its powers - it can send a person to jail for three years for sending an email or other electronic message that "causes annoyance or inconvenience". It is controversial as "the phraseology of Section 66A is so wide and vague and incapable of being judged on objective standards that it is susceptible to wanton abuse". Section 66A makes certain kinds of speech-activities ("causing annoyance") illegal if communicated online, but legal if that same speech-activity is published in a newspaper. 
• Despite having the third largest coal reserves in the world, India has currently become a massive coal importer.
• Film critic, Khalid Mohammed calls The Lunchbox a "tasteful take on an ageless metropolis malaise: coping with loneliness in a crowd." 

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What do the colors within the horizontal bars in Web Performance HTTP Waterfall Charts indicate?

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 as 128.242.240.20), which the browser needs in order to know how to get in touch with the server. Think of the DNS lookup as being like a phone book: your browser knows the name (twitter.com) but needs the number (the IP address).

You can see on the waterfall chart on Figure 3.2. that a separate DNS lookup needs to be done for every domain (twitter.com, a1.twimg.com, a3.twimg.com, s.twimg.com) because sub-domains may live on a different server with a different IP address. 

Orange is the time to establish a connection between the server and the browser. 

Light green is the time-to-first byte (TTFB) when the browser waits for the very first piece of information to be sent by the server. In the case of dynamic HTML pages this is the time spent to assemble the whole page on the server. If you're busy optimizing databases and server-side code, you'll actually be optimizing the TTFB of the page. As you can see, in the grand scheme of things, this is not where you should be focusing because it has relatively low impact (unless, of course, there's something seriously wrong on the server-side)

Blue is the time spent actually downloading the component 

As Steve Souders has rightly pointed out, different Web Performance tools & the Dev Tools within browsers use different colors in the horizontal bars in Waterfall Charts and that makes it a little difficult for web developers to interpret a waterfall chart which is different from what they typically use.

Table from Steve Souder's blog showing inconsistency in colors used in horizontal bar within HTTP Waterfall chart

Zoompf found that websites with the top search rankings had TTFB as low as 350 ms. They recommend that ideal targets for your initial HTML page load should be:

• Time to First Byte of 500 ms or less
• Roundtrip network latency of 100 ms or less
• Back-end processing of 400 ms or less

TTFB has 3 components: the time it takes for your request to propagate to the web server; the time it takes for the web server to process the request and generate the response; and the time it takes for the response to propagate back to your browser. Latency captures the first and third components of TTFB, and can be measured effectively through tools like WebPageTest and ping. Server processing time is simply the overall TTFB time minus the latency.

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TWIL - Week #23

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 Windows Azure CDN customer's traffic may not be served out of the physically "closest" node; many factors are involved including routing and peering, Internet "weather", and node capacity and availability.

Web Development

+ With the Emulation tool in Internet Explorer 11 F12 developer tools you can simulate a GPS receiver and enter GPS coordinates to test location-aware features in a webpage.

+ conditioner.js is a JS library for loading and unloading behavior based on environment conditions

+ HTML 5 web app vs Native mobile apps - HTML5 does give you some access to your phone's sensors, such as Geolocation (GPS) support; and some access to your phone's operating system, such as Web Storage. But the bottom line is, there's far more denied to you than made available to you. And we should point out, the most innovative mobile apps tend to take advantage of the phone's hardware and operating system.

+ Taking advantage of the fact that Rovio uses HTML5′s LocalStorage to cache game files, web developer Wes Bos hacked the Chrome version of Angry Birds to gain access to all of the levels. LocalStorage is editable by the user, it's similar to the cookies.

+ basket.js supports locally caching scripts in any browser with localStorage capabilities.

Tools

+ Chrome Sniffer is a Chrome extension that is capable of identifying more than 100 popular content management systems and JavaScript libraries  running on a website that is being accessed in the browser.

+ VLC Media Player can convert MP4, FLV files to MP3 as well as handle conversion between many other formats

Health

+ There hasn’t been any conclusive research on whether cracking one’s own neck is dangerous or contributes to long term health problems; however, given the risks associated with having a professional perform the procedure, it seems that self-neck manipulation is to be avoided. Having your neck cracked by a professional is called cervical spine manipulation. It can be dangerous because it involves a small risk of compressing one of the major arteries bringing blood to the brain, leading to stroke. Someone who gets their neck cracked is 3.6 times more likely to have a stroke than someone who doesn’t. (Source: Go Ask Alice)

Science
+ The Feynman Lectures on Physics: Online Edition

Quotes
+ Tell me, I'll forget. Show me, I'll remember. Involve me, I'll understand - Benjamin Franklin

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Review: Microsoft Visual C# 2012 Step by Step by John Sharp

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 C# snippets is a valuable addition.

I guess there is no other IDE as full fledged as Visual Studio for coding with C#. Considering there are free Express editions of Visual Studio, I wonder if the vast majority of C# programmers use anything other than Visual Studio for building real-world application. Therefore I found it unusual that C# in the book's title should be referred as Visual C#. MSDN informs that Visual C# is the official term for the implementation of the C# language by Microsoft but it is uncommon to hear C# being called Visual C#.

Though the code examples in the book are well explained, they aren't really practical and may only help beginners to get started. Several chapters of the book have examples on Windows 8 Store Apps, a Windows 8 specific application format that hasn't taken off as much as it was envisaged. If your operating system isn't Windows 8 or if you don't have any interest in building Windows 8 Store Apps, some chapters of this book will be unusable.

I rate this book 4 out of 5 for its presentation.

I received a ebook copy of this book via the O'Reilly Blogger Review Program.

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Transparent overlay image to introduce web site features/elements

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 "?" keyboard shortcut.

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HOW TO view historical data of Sensex & Nifty indices with Google Docs Spreadsheet

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 1997!

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JavaScript Pocket Reference by David Flanagan; O'Reilly

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 by an expert guide. The author fills the discourse with interesting facts:

Division by zero is not an error in JavaScript: it simply returns infinity or negative infinity.

...and explains relevant details concisely:

"use strict" does not involve any JavaScript keywords: it is simply a JavaScript string literal expression, and is ignored by ECMAScript 3 interpreters. When placed at the beginning of a script or of a function body, however, it has special meaning to an ECMAScript 5 interpreter.

This is a book that serious JavaScript developers should have handy so that they don't have to be distracted jumping off to look up things in online references.

This review is based on the ebook I received through the O'Reilly Blogger Review Program.

Related:

• JavaScript: The Good Parts - photo gag
• Free JavaScript & jQuery learning resources

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TWIL - Week #22

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 settings if your computer begins having problems. This can happen after installing a new program or driver for hardware.
• URL shortening website Bit.ly’s URLs are case-sensitive. http://bit.ly/YFTTDo leads to different page while http://bit.ly/yfttdo takes you to another.
• Your age, gender and interests as determined by Google based on what websites you visit. See what Google knows about you  (Source: Labnol)
• Google has done away with the notorious brain teaser component of its interviews after statistics showed the ability to ace them had no correlation with success at the company. On average, Google takes about 45 days to hire. (Source: The Washington Post)
• The development of general anaesthesia has transformed surgery from a horrific ordeal into a gentle slumber. It is one of the commonest medical procedures in the world, yet we still don't know how the drugs work. Perhaps this isn't surprising: we still don't understand consciousness, so how can we comprehend its disappearance?
• According to one estimate, 65% of India’s 860m mobile subscribers prefer it to a quick call. The Philippines is considered the SMS capital of the world.
• India imported crude oil worth $170 bn and gold worth $60 bn last year 

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Book Review: Windows Azure SQL Reporting Succinctly by Stacia Misner

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 feel the major failing of the book is that it doesn't provide any examples to follow along with the theory that it explains. As such this book is better read after you've tried out a few things with Windows Azure SQL Reporting. This 13-minute video from a 21-part series on Channel 9 provides a quick introduction.Both the book and the video reference the AdventureWorks database that you can get from this CodePlex location.

The Windows Azure Management Portal keeps changing so I noticed a few of the points in the book aren't true anymore. For instance, the geo-replication option that persists data in multiple locations was available at no additional cost earlier but there is a charge now for geo-replicated storage.To access the Silverlight portal earlier, you had to click on your user name in the top right corner of the Windows Azure Management Portal and select Previous Portal but that's gone now. Considering these dynamic portal changes, future books on Azure that explain techniques and new features step by step may have to be produced as an online Wiki.

Related: Windows Azure - Learning Resources

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HOW TO make emails that land in Promotions go to the Primary tab in Gmail

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 old, familiar, one-inboxed interface.

To see total count of unread messages (and not just the newest unread emails) click the More link in the left sidebar and you will see all your categories. The categories name will list the number of unread emails beside it.

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TWIL - Week #21

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 development
• Reading a book cover-to-cover is not the best way to learn -  You don’t really learn a technology until you’ve solved real problems with it.
• Learning particular technologies in-depth is a waste of time
• Community is extremely important in your software development career
• Always have a side project
• HTML5 does not use a Document Type Definition (DTD). Instead, it uses the Document Object Model (DOM, the "tree" formed by a document's structure) as its basis rather than a particular set of syntax rules. It also differs from previous recommendations in that it includes instructions for how browsers should handle malformed and legacy markup - from HTML5 Pocket Reference
• Google Suggest was built by Kevin Gibbs in his 20% time. Though it was launched in 2004 as a Google Labs feature it was finally made default on Google.com as well as mobile, maps and browsers in 2008
• Capitalist Individualism means becoming brilliant at something that people need, so that they pay you lots of money to do it.
• All that is necessary for the triumph of evil, is that good men do nothing - Edmund Burkes, Irish political thinker 

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HTML5 Pocket Reference by Jennifer Robbins; O’Reilly Media

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 regarding the supported video formats for the video element. No single video file format is supported by all browsers. Inspite of all this, HTML5 holds promise. If you've only worked with HTML 4, you will be surprised with all that is new in HTML5. It includes a bunch of new APIs (Application Programming Interfaces standardize tasks that traditionally required proprietary plug-ins or custom programming) and a slew of new elements and attributes. Elements that weren't in HTML 4 are clearly marked out.

This reference book doesn't cover HTML5 APIs. Otherwise, it wouldn't have been a "pocket" Reference. As HTML5 is yet to become a Recommendation and due to the evolving nature of the topic, some details in the book MAY change.

I loved reading this book that I received through the O'Reilly Blogger Review Program and I will be referring it quite a lot. For anyone with an interest in building HTML5 web pages, this is a good book to own - whether you buy, beg, borrow or steal it.

Related: Free 42 episode video series on HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript for Absolute Beginners

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TWIL - Week #20

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 EC2 in one study (approximately 3 times).
• Worldwide internet traffic dipped by a stunning 40 per cent during the brief minutes that Google's services were offline last week.
• Patrick Juola, a computer linguistics expert figured that JK Rowling, not Robert Galbraith, was indeed the author of The Cuckoos Calling using a program called JGAAP (Java Graphical Authorship Attribution Program). JGAAP does a mathematical analysis of the degree of similarity across a huge number of features, far too many for any human analyst to keep track of. JGAAP can keep track of every word in a set of encyclopedias. According to Juola, Stylometry or the study of writing style, is much less reliable and accurate than DNA...a DNA match simply means that the person of interest or someone with similar genes, possibly a family member, was involved. Anonymouth helps authors disguise their writing.
• The origin of Luddites - When the Industrial Revolution began in England in the 19th century, a group called Luddites started wrecking textile machinery because it displaced traditional hand-spinners and weavers.Luddites saw industrialization as a recipe for pauperization of artisans of all sorts.They couldnt see how industrialisation would transform living standards.
• What is the driver that stimulates adventure-seeking behaviour? The answer, it turns out, is quite unglamourous. It is a simple organic chemical called dopamine, released by nerve cells to send signals to other nerve cells. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter. It controls motor skills, but it also helps drive us to seek out and learn new things as well as process emotions such as anxiety and fear. It also drives risk-taking behaviour. Motivation is driven by the dopamine system. Dopamine is often confused with adrenaline, which drives thrill seekers. The latter is triggered when the brain perceives a threat, and stimulates the body to better respond to the threat. Once the threat has passed, adrenaline creates a feeling of exhilaration. (Source: Times of India)

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HOW TO let Google watch over your web activity

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 using Internet Explorer, install the Google Toolbar (only available for Internet Explorer) which will then submit all the URLs you access to Google Web History. If you're using Chrome, all of the features of Google Toolbar are already built into it.

Signing in to Chrome brings your bookmarks, history, and other settings to all your devices. Anything you update on one device instantly updates everywhere else, and your Chrome stuff is safe in case anything happens to your computer. 

With Chrome, you don't just centralize the storage of your browsing history but also all of these:

• Apps - Add an app on one computer. Access it on all your computers.
• Bookmarks - Quickly go to your favorite sites, no matter where you are.
• Extensions - Use your custom features on all your computers.
• Settings - Browse the web with familiar settings, like your home page, on all your computers.
• Omnibox - Get autocomplete suggestions for the sites you visit most.
• Passwords - Retrieve your saved passwords whenever you need them.
• Autofill - Fill out forms faster on all your computers.
• Themes - Color your Chrome and bring it with you to all your computers.

Related: Don't let Chrome & Firefox remember your passwords on a shared computer

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