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Sunday, 28 April 2013

TWIL - Week #4

Posted on 01:11 by Unknown
This Week I Learned:
  • Twitter is in the process of testing a new feature that lets you discover tweets from people within a certain distance of your location. 
  • Students participating in the Mono Project in the 2013 Google Summer of Code can get paid $5,000. Mono is an open source, cross-platform, implementation of C# and the CLR that is binary compatible with Microsoft.NET. Google Summer of Code is a global program that offers post-secondary student developers ages 18 and older stipends to write code for various open source software projects.
  • A good way to send yourself an email via text message is to send yourself a Twitter Direct Message after setting up your account to notify you of direct messages via email. 
  • Google manages a whopping 343 million active Google+ accounts. Story of a guy whose account was disabled without any prior notice. He now prefers storing his data in spiral notebooks and relies on his handwriting to encrypt his data.
  • Google's Android OS currently powers 70 percent of smartphones worldwide.
  • Dark side of the Internet - A short-lived hoax on Twitter briefly erased $200 billion of value from U.S. stock markets; The surviving Boston Marathon bombing suspect says the brothers acted alone and learned bomb-making methods through the Internet.
Read More
Posted in TWIL | No comments

Thursday, 25 April 2013

Today, I'm 5 Twitter years old

Posted on 10:56 by Unknown

Twitter DM'ed me a "Happy 5th TwBirthday" along with this online greeting:



How time runs!

In these 5 years, Twitter helped me -

  • ...find insightful information in my areas of interest
  • ...reach out to people whose email addresses I don't know 
  • ...complain against or compliment service providers who have a Twitter presence
  • ...saved time by giving me the gist of whatever is making news
  • ...publicize my blog posts 
  • ...learn about brevity and still be expressive
Related posts:
World Citizen News - mashup based on Twitter Trends
Twitter Search Tricks
HOW TO add hashtags while auto-publishing posts to Twitter
Get fresh news fast from Twitter and Google News JSONP feeds using jQuery
HOW TO show expanded form of shortened URL within a tweet using Twitter API

Read More
Posted in | No comments

Wednesday, 24 April 2013

Default ASP.NET MVC 4 Solution created with Basic Template is 24MB!

Posted on 10:30 by Unknown

While copying a basic ASP.NET MVC 4 project sample from a different machine, I noticed that the project created using the Internet Application template was a whooping 27MB in size.

The Packages folder takes up 27.4MB while the DLLs (47 of them compared to 29 in the MVC 3 project template) in the Bin folder were 5MB in size.

The default ASP.NET MVC 4 Solution created with Basic Template was 24MB (Packages folder - 18MB, Bin folder - 4.34MB)

Is there really a chance that anyone uses all of the DLLs?

I looked up what some of the non-Microsoft DLLs among the list of 47 DLLs do -
  • Antlr:  (ANother Tool for Language Recognition) is a powerful parser generator for reading, processing, executing, or translating structured text or binary files. It's widely used to build languages, tools, and frameworks. 
  • DotNetOpenAuth:  Compiled library that adds support for your site visitors to login with their OpenIDs by just dropping an ASP.NET control onto your page.
  • Newtonsoft.Json: Json.NET is a popular high-performance JSON framework for .NET 
  • WebGrease: suite of tools for optimizing javascript, css files and images. 
If you were looking at a ASP.NET MVC project and wanted to know if it was built using version 3 or 4, a quick way would probably be to look at the count of DLLs in the bin folder.
Read More
Posted in ASP.NET-MVC, Trivia | No comments

Sunday, 21 April 2013

TWIL - Week #3

Posted on 00:05 by Unknown
This Week I Learned:
  • New Azure VM Image Templates include SQL Server, BizTalk Server, and SharePoint Server (2013?) images. This can be handy when you don't have time to build the environment to try one of those server technologies
  • It is possible to run a ASP.NET web page on a Raspberry Pi
  • Code School has a nice set of video tutorials on learning about Chrome DevTools. The videos are downloadable for offline viewing.
  • If you want to show someone how your responsive website looks in just a single image, here's a nice tip
  • Download progress indicator is shown next to the address bar in Firefox version 20 & upwards
  • You can use the Alt-click combination on a link in Chrome to download a page as HTML. There are also a bunch of other time-saving shortcuts mostly specific to Chrome
  • The Calculator program in Windows 8 can be used to calculate the difference between two dates in years,months,weeks and days
  • A handy guide to severing your ties with social networks 
  • Going a step beyond identifying objects by images and color, WolframAlpha has search filters for color blindness, dog vision, comic book effects

    Comic book effect applied to an image of Mahatma Gandhi, using WolframAlpha
  • ..in New York City, many of the more than 4,000 surveillance cameras include advanced technology that can read license plates, and sensors detect elevated levels of chemical and radiological material - a real life application of computer vision.
  • If you're an Indian who has studied in a English medium school and lag in Indian regional languages, you have the same woes as Britishers when they landed here in the 1800's. Some enterprising authors of those times have written dictionaries and language reference books for those proficient in English and keen to pick up the local tongue using English as the learning medium. You can search for such books which are now out of copyright and free to download from the Google Books collection using a little app I wrote. Just type an Indian language (like "Telugu" or "Tamil") as a keyword to search. I discovered a fascinating book on Telugu proverbs from the year 1868
  • The web comic XKCD has fans who maintain a wiki where they discuss each comic that Randall Munroe publishes (under a Creative Commons copyright licence that allows reuse for non-commercial purposes so long as the work is attributed.).
  • If you're weight watching, say this to yourself the next time you're tempted to eat something sinful - "A minute on the lips, a lifetime on the hips" (via Big Bang theory)
  • In order to believe in a new identity, we have to prove it to ourselves (by starting with small wins).

Read More
Posted in TWIL | No comments

Sunday, 14 April 2013

The iPhone Story - Infographic

Posted on 06:32 by Unknown
I "discovered" this infographic which shows the iPhone models released so far along with their specs, on flickr via my World Citizen News app:
click to view enlarge image

The first iPhone was released on 29th June 2007


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Posted in Trivia | No comments

Saturday, 13 April 2013

TWIL - Week #2

Posted on 09:15 by Unknown

This Week I Learned:
  • Microsoft offers a minimum of 10 years of support for Business and Developer products. 
  • Microsoft is getting ready to pull the life support on Windows XP. 
  • Mixed Active Content is now blocked by default in Firefox 23. It has been happening already in Chrome. 
  • With Click-to-Run, you can start using Office before the whole suite or product has been downloaded. While you are using your application, the rest of Office is being downloaded quietly in the background. Click-to-Run uses Microsoft virtualization and streaming technologies. 
  • You can save a Word document as a PDF. Word 2013 can directly open, view, as well as edit PDF.
  • You can install and use both Microsoft Office 2013 and Microsoft Office 2010 on the same computer. However Microsoft does not recommend this. 
  • Google's most recent spring cleaning brings the total number of services it has discontinued to 70 in just a year-and-a-half.
  • A Google engineer once accidentally published an internal communication meant for for other Google employees to his 2,000 or so followers as he was not a "experienced Google+ user".
  • Infosys has 1,56,688 employees as of 2013



Read More
Posted in TWIL | No comments

Friday, 12 April 2013

HOW TO show local time for a location based on its latitude and longitude

Posted on 11:17 by Unknown

Here is a GitHub Gist snippet that shows how to get local time for a location based on its latitude and longitude using World Weather Online's Time Zone API & jQuery -

This can be useful in scenarios where you have to display time for a location relative to another.
Read More
Posted in APIs, HOWTO, Javascript, jQuery | No comments

Thursday, 11 April 2013

HOW TO display book titles in Amazon ads dynamically based on context or custom keywords

Posted on 05:48 by Unknown
The Recommended Product Links Amazon widget can be adapted to display book titles in Amazon ads dynamically based on context or custom keywords.

Here is a GitHub Gist snippet that illustrates this -

I have used this in our app to search for free eBooks from the Google Books collection. It improves the app by showing results from an additional info source and helps surface free Kindle eBooks that may be available for a specified keyword.
Read More
Posted in HOWTO, Javascript, jQuery | No comments

Tuesday, 9 April 2013

The World Citizen News mash-up

Posted on 12:55 by Unknown


Our latest app, World Citizen News gets you:
  • the Twitter buzz
  • weather forecast, local time & map for popular cities around the world
  • images of selected location from flickr
  • news based on the trending Twitter topics
It makes use of the following APIs:
  • Twitter Trends
  • flickr
  • World Weather Online for the local time
  • MapQuest 
  • Yahoo Weather via YQL
  • Google News
Whether you're a world citizen or a geography buff, try the World Citizen News mash-up to see what's happening around the world.

The following links explain how different features of the mash-up were built:

  • Weather information for a place based on its WOEID using YQL & jQuery
  • Finding the latitude, longitude of a location based on WOEID
  • Local time for a location based on its latitude and longitude
  • Display book titles in Amazon ads dynamically based on context or custom keywords


Read More
Posted in APIs, App | No comments

Saturday, 6 April 2013

TWIL (ThisWeekILearned) - Week #1

Posted on 07:02 by Unknown

The bookmarking sites Delicious and Google Bookmarks haven't been working well for me. So on the lines of the TodayILearned section of Reddit, I plan to jot down interesting things I've learnt from the internet each week under the TWIL (ThisWeekILearned) label.
  • Snipping tool isn't available in Windows Server 2012 & Windows Server 2008.
  • Everything is a proprietary freeware Windows desktop search engine that can rapidly find files and folders by name on an NTFS volume. (found via SuperUser)
  • The Mouse Keys feature that lets you control your mouse with your keyboard appears to have a few more options in Windows 7 than in earlier versions.
  • Does your computer have DDR2 or DDR3 type of RAM? You can use the freeware tool CPUID's CPU-Z tool to find out.
  • Don't like the styling of a web page you're browsing? You can view it with your own User style sheet.
  • I've seen image ads being shown using Data URIs. Data URIs are now supported by all the popular browsers. You can block URLs originating from a domain. Wonder if image-ad data URIs be blocked.
  • Need to find the current time in some other part of world? Time.is is a nice-looking useful site.
  • jQuery 2.0 will not run on IE 6, 7, or 8
  • SharePoint 2010 can be made to run on Windows Vista & Windows 7. MSDN used to have a detailed step by step article that I had bookmarked. When I recently visited that link, I noticed that the content of the page had got replaced. Can't believe MSDN can remove it just like that instead of archiving it! Thankfully The Wayback Machine has a copy of  Setting Up the Development Environment for SharePoint 2010 on Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008.
  • The Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority (IRDA) of India has a Consumer Education website. Nice.
  • The video sharing site DailyMotion has a lot of cool features that YouTube doesn't have. The video controls include a "Turn off the lights" option to black out everything except the video. Unlike in YouTube, you are not forced to watch ads before a video; you have a choice of closing the ad in the beginning.
Read More
Posted in TWIL | No comments

Thursday, 4 April 2013

Salary comparison websites - India

Posted on 21:10 by Unknown
A list of websites that use crowd-sourced information to compare salaries offered by Indian companies -
  • PayScale
  • Glassdoor
  • SalaryKhoj
  • Jobiness
  • Zuby
Also see:
  • Comparison of Payment Gateways
  • Aids for comparative analysis of software tools/products
  • Indian comparison shopping sites
  • Comparison of URL Shortener services
Read More
Posted in India, Lists, Websites | No comments

Visual Studio 2012 Annoyances

Posted on 11:29 by Unknown
Having spent a few months with VS 2012, I like Visual Studio 2012 more than Visual Studio 2010 as it feels faster. Although I don't mind the menu titles in upper-case, there are quite a few features that annoy me -

Track Active Item in Solution Explorer - I don't understand why this option has to be unchecked while almost all the rest in the group are checked.

Word Wrap - why can't this be activated by default?


Solution Explorer - When I open a project, the Solution Explorer stays closed. In all the older versions, Solution Explorer would be in an expanded state once a project has finished opening. I thought there would be a setting hidden in the gazillion settings within Tools > Options but I haven't found anything related so far.

Find & Replace - The Find & Replace box feels smaller than in older versions. It is so crammed with options, it makes me feel claustrophobic.

Related: Why are these Visual Studio Settings not enabled by default?
Read More
Posted in VS2012 | No comments
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      • Today, I'm 5 Twitter years old
      • Default ASP.NET MVC 4 Solution created with Basic ...
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      • The iPhone Story - Infographic
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      • HOW TO show local time for a location based on its...
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