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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HOW TO change mobile number in your IRCTC.co.in profile

The Indian Railways ticket reservation website, IRCTC.co.in,  is possibly the most used utility site in India that is also the most complained about. It can get hopelessly slow when you need it the most and even fail totally.

The IRCTC (Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation) website keeps introducing new features. Indian Railways lets you show the e-ticket SMS that you get from IRCTC on booking a ticket to the ticket examiner (TTE) instead of a print-out of the e-ticket. This is a great idea to save paper!

However if you've changed your mobile number, you'll have to manually modify the mobile number that is pre-filled for you in the online reservation form based on the number you provided at the time of registration. If you omit this step while you're in hurry to book your ticket, there is no way you will get a text message.

In the Booked Tickets History section, you have a way to re-send yourself an SMS but that will go to mobile number that you originally registered with. So how do you change your mobile number in your Profile information?

As per information from a IRCTC Customer Care executive, you can update your profile just once in a month. The Update Profile link will appear under the User Profile tab after 11 p.m. and before 7 a.m.

Your modified mobile number will be used to send text messages for subsequent bookings and it cannot be used for getting SMS for an e-ticket that is already booked.

Also note that for some reason if you don't get a SMS soon after you reserve a ticket, you can request for it only 3 days before the date of your journey. You can request an SMS for an e-ticket only upto 5 times.

Is there any logic behind the "3 days" & "5 times"? I guess, when you run a monopoly, you can set your own rules that suit your whim.

Also see:

• Technical stats & info about IRCTC
• IRCTC Alternatives
• Tatkal Train Ticket Reservation Tips
• Make the most of IRCTC
• E-Commerce in India

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Book Review: Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5 Quickstart Cookbook

The intent of the book Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5 Quickstart Cookbook by Jose Luis Latorre Millas, to cover the new features of .NET Framework 4.5 in just 226 pages is too ambitious - it covers too little and will please no one.

It covers a broad-range of .NET related topics:

• Windows Store Apps
• CLR
• Networking
• EF
• ASP.NET
• WPF
• WCF
• ASP.NET Web API
• WF

However, the recipes chosen are random and few for each topic. I feel the organization of the book is flawed and the book reads more like a draft. It was a little annoying to see keywords not capitalized properly. Almost every instance of "ASP.NET Web API" in the chapter devoted to it has the W in Web in lower-case (like this - ASP.NET web API).

The chapter about new features in ASP.NET has sections on WAI-ARIA (Web Accessibility Initiative-Accessible Rich Internet Applications) - not the hottest of topics & Page Inspector, Visual Studio 2012 features which are completely unrelated to the central theme of the book. Other recipes in the chapter about the Extract to User Control option and Page Inspector are great features in VS 2012 to know about but these have nothing to do with .NET Framework 4.5.

Except learning new things out of academic interest, I doubt if any single developer can make use of all the recipes or read the book end-to-end.

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TWIL - Week #19

This Week I Learned:

• RuPay is the Indian domestic card payment network being set up by National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) at the behest of banks in India. This project had been conceived by Indian Banks Association and has the approval of Reserve Bank of India. On Jun 21, 2013, NPCI launched RuPay PaySecure to enable e-commerce or online transactions using RuPay debit cards. 
• Rare are companies like Infosys and MindTree, which had seven founders apiece. With 12 founders—all aged 23-24 years, all engineers from IIT Bombay, all friends—housing.co.in has outdone them all. Flipkart founders Sachin and Binny share the same surname Bansal but they are not related. #trivia
• Nearly 80% of smartphones shipped run Google's Android software. (Source: WSJ)
• A study shows that on social media, hype can work and feed on itself as well. Very small signals of social influence snowballed into behaviors like herding. "Cumulative advantage" is the idea that something that starts slightly more popular will build upon that popularity until it is far ahead of its competitors — and conversely, something that does not catch on will usually fade away whether or not it is good. “The Cuckoo’s Calling” by Robert Galbraith, received good reviews but tiny sales when it was released in April. When it was revealed that Galbraith was a pseudonym for J. K. Rowling, the book suddenly had the cumulative advantage conferred by the Harry Potter series and jumped to the top of best-seller lists. The biggest obstacle to success is just being noticed. 
• GitHub (launched in 2008) has three and a half million users working on close to seven million projects, and it grows by ten thousand users on a typical weekday. The GitHub Web site is built around an independent piece of version-control software called Git (released eight years ago), which was created by the developer Linus Torvalds. (via excellent article in NewYorker that your grandmother may follow)

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Google's "answer box" gives direct answers

An "answer box" is a SERP feature, usually displayed in a light-gray box, that occurs above the organic results (left column) and tries to directly answer a question.

This Moz article lists 101 practical Google Answer Box queries or variations of them that you can pose and get direct answers. 

So, where do these answer boxes come from? Some, like stock tickers and weather charts, are clearly custom designed and can involve exclusive data partnerships. When it comes to the factoids, though, most of these answers come directly from Google's Knowledge Graph.

I tried adapting some of the queries in the article designed to fetch US-related info to find India-related facts. I learned that the size of New Delhi (1484 km²) is more than the size of Bangalore (741 km²) and Hyderabad (650 km²) put together.

Surprisingly, it can't currently (as of August 8th, 2013) tell what the size of Mumbai is or give the answer for "How tall is the Qutub Minar" though it can tell us that the Space Needle in Seattle is 184 metres long. Google doesn't seem to know India too well to answer some questions directly. 

A broad view of live traffic of major Indian cities can now be seen from the answer box itself. Don't let the green lines (indicating fast moving traffic) in the map showing Bangalore traffic fool you into thinking everything is hunky-dory. The screenshot above was taken well-past midnight.

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TWIL - Week #18

This Week I Learned:

• jQuery's .data method ignores case in attribute data names - The value of a HTML5 data attribute like  data-sampleAttributeName="example" or data-sampleattributename="example" can be accessed using the jQuery .data('sampleattributename'). Note that the same statement works for both the variations; camel-casing of the key is ignored and attribute is accessed by the lower-case name. If the attribute key value pair is data-sample-attribute-name="something", the value can be accessed with jQuery using this: .data('sampleAttributeName')
• Typing document.body.contentEditable = true; into DevTools makes *all* of the text on a page editable. Useful for prototyping 
• BBC uses has an open-source front end regression testing tool called Wraith to visually compare CSS regressions 
• To use Google as a countdown timer, enter “timer 10 minutes" 
• xkcd webcomic titled “Time” which was first published on March 25, has 3,099 installments that continued to change every half-hour for the next week – and every hour for months after that. A Youtube video compilation of these panels runs more than 40 minutes from start to finish.
• As per this MIT Technology Review infographic, Silicon Valley has 64% foreign workers 
• Microsoft sees itself as a devices and services company
• FBI taps hacker tactics to spy on suspects 
• In the last 20 years, the BSE S&P Sensex has gained 11.4% on average annually. The gains are much higher if dividend income and bonus shares are taken into account. Over the same period, the value of gold has risen about 10% a year. (Source: WSJ). One reader commented: BSE gained 10%…well inflation is 10%…so…do the math #india
• As of 2013, Milkha Singh is the only Indian male athlete to win an individual athletics gold medal at a Commonwealth Games. Though he won gold medals in the Asian Games, I was surprised to learn that he never won an Olympic Gold. He was a also-ran in 3 Olympic Games, finishing fourth-place (like P.T.Usha in the LA Olympics) in the 400 metres final at the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome. 
• A brief biography of Sugar - Excerpts: The Arabs perfected sugar refinement and turned it into an industry.  In the mid-17th century sugar began to change from a luxury spice, classed with nutmeg and cardamom, to a staple, first for the middle class, then for the poor. By the 18th century the marriage of sugar and slavery (slave trade was banned in Britain in 1807) was complete. In 1700 the average Englishman consumed 4 pounds a year. In 1800 the common man ate 18 pounds of sugar. In 1870 that same sweet-toothed bloke was eating 47 pounds annually. By 1900 he was up to 100 pounds a year. Sugar may be the reason for obesity, high BP and diabetes (one-third of adults [worldwide] have high blood pressure, when in 1900 only 5 percent had high blood pressure. 153 million people have diabetes in 1980, and now we’re up to 347 million) Sugar provides calories with no nutritional benefit & it’s toxic. Why do we crave it? The short answer is that an injection of sugar into the bloodstream stimulates the same pleasure centers of the brain that respond to heroin and cocaine...In this sense it is literally an addictive drug.

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