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...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
