Web Development Tips, Tricks & Trivia

PDF Security - a myth?

2009-11-10T18:38:00.000-08:00

In the whitepaper "How Secure is PDF?", Adobe Certified Expert (ACE) Bryan Guignard's conclusion on PDF security is -

The only way your property can be safe is if you keep it to yourself.

The site Giveaway Of The Day (GAOTD) is even giving away a commercial tool called Recover PDF Password for free. This tool unlocks restricted PDF documents & recovers passwords of protected PDF files.

As per comments at GAOTD, this isn't also the only tool. This comes as a rude surprise to me.

Sometimes, ignorance is not bliss.

Resize an Image & Email with just 2 steps

2009-11-06T20:02:00.000-08:00

Got to know from Vinod Unny's tweet that you can select some pics in Explorer and click the "Email" button to auto-resize to emailable format in Windows7.

This feature works in Windows XP & Vista too! Right click a large image that you want to email. Choose Send To > Mail Recipient -

As soon as you do that, Windows XP provides an option to let you resize it -

The dialog box is a little different in Vista -

That's it!

Also see:
Crop Images online
Free tools to generate screenshots

Say Goodbye to Privacy

2009-11-04T18:20:00.000-08:00

Don't take yourself so seriously. No one else does.
Regina Brett

Danny Dover makes an interesting point on privacy -
The privacy conflicts .. encountered in the offline world are nothing compared to those .. in the online world.

With a story & hard facts he illustrates how our private details are tracked by popular websites -

Google is storing hundreds of .. metrics about it's users.
Apple is rumored to be building a $1 billion data center..
In total, 25 Terabytes of user activity data is stored daily by Facebook.
AT&T reportedly has 20,268 servers. This is infantile compared to Google's estimated 1,000,000 servers.
Twitter recently peaked at 5,000 messages a second following Michael Jackson's death. Odds are one of them was yours.
Digg says that only about half of its server load is from visitors to its website. The other half is a mix of Digg buttons and API calls. This means a non-trivial amount of information that Digg collects is from people who are not even on the Digg domain.
Youtube serves over 1,000,000,000 (billion) views a day. Odds are you are one of them.
The major credit card companies (like Visa) are now hiring psychologists and statisticians to mine your buying data and figuring out who is a liability.
Microsoft is in the process of finishing one of the world's biggest data centers in anticipation of creating the world's first mainstream cloud-based operating system, Microsoft Azure. In Microsoft's eye, the future is in your data.
Amazon has more than 55 million active customer accounts.
Mint Software was recently bought by Intuit Inc. making its combined collection of personal finance information one of the biggest in the world.
The United Parcel Service (UPS) can reach more than 4 billion of the earth's 6.3 billion people to which it delivers more than 13.3 million packages each day.
Each of the 40,000 systems in Domino's Pizza's franchises are connected to their global network. Your pizza order is not alone.

And some people actually think nobody is interested in them :-)

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

2009-10-30T21:22:00.000-07:00

If you like your browser to remember your passwords, you would have to be careful if you are agreeing to this setting in Chrome & Firefox, especially on a shared computer.

Any unscrupulous person can find them out with little effort as this post by Roy Osherove explains.

With Firefox, the default behavior is to allow anyone to see your passwords as well, but you can actively choose to use a master password in firefox to make this less accessible. the default is that it’s open for anyone to see. With Chrome, there isn’t even a “master password” option.

IE, Opera, Safari store passwords if you ask them to remember but do not display them.

Also see:
IE8 Developer Tools Tips & Tricks

Some Software Engineering Myths Busted

2009-10-27T19:11:00.000-07:00

Nachi Nagappan, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research worked with Microsoft development teams to validate conventional software-engineering wisdom and came out with these findings (copied almost verbatim) -

* Code coverage measures how comprehensively a piece of code has been tested; if a program contains 100 lines of code and the quality-assurance process tests 95 lines, the effective code coverage is 95 percent. Higher code coverage is not the best measure of post-release failures.

The reason is that software quality depends on so many other factors and dynamics that no one metric can predict quality—and not all metrics apply to all projects. Two of the most obvious reasons why code coverage alone fails to predict error rates: usage and complexity.

..it is more beneficial to achieve higher code coverage of more complex code than to test less complex code at an equivalent level

* Test-Driven Development - TDD teams produced code that was 60 to 90 percent better in terms of defect density than non-TDD teams. They also discovered that TDD teams took longer to complete their projects—15 to 35 percent longer.

...the tradeoff is that you reduce post-release maintenance costs significantly, since code quality is so much better.

* Assertions are contracts or ingredients in code, often written as annotations in the source-code text, describing what the system should do rather than how to do it.

More assertions and code verifications means fewer bugs.

Looking behind the straight statistical evidence, they also found a contextual variable: experience. Software engineers who were able to make productive use of assertions in their code base tended to be well-trained and experienced, a factor that contributed to the end results.

* Organizational metrics, which are not related to the code, can predict software failure-proneness with a precision and recall of 85 percent. This is a significantly higher precision than traditional metrics such as churn, complexity, or coverage that have been used until now to predict failure-proneness.

* Distributed-Development - One of the most cherished beliefs in software project management is that a distributed-development model has a negative impact on software quality because of problems with communication, coordination, culture, and other factors.

Does distributed development affect software quality? ...the differences were statistically negligible.

Organizational cohesiveness plays a bigger role than geographical distance.

Interviews with Programming legends

2009-10-19T18:36:00.000-07:00

Jeff Atwood points out that key interviews from the book Programmers at Work (1986) are available online.

This includes 6 out of the 19 interviews in that book with the following luminaries -

Also see:
"The History of Microsoft" Series
The Visual Studio Documentary

Mapping APIs for India

2009-10-09T08:01:00.000-07:00

There are quite a few free mapping services for India on the Web but only some among them offer APIs that web publishers can extend & integrate in their own websites.

There is news now that BIG Maps has also released its application programming interface (API). The documentation is pretty comprehensive with demos but it looks like it's not all official yet as the home page of the website currently sports a "Coming soon" label.

The FAQ informs that coordinate system that BIGMaps follows is proprietary but there are ways to import and export data from/to other formats.

This is an interesting development & I hope the competition among the players results in better products.

Also see:
2 months of BigFlix

My favorite Developer Cheat-Sheets

2009-10-08T08:03:00.001-07:00

The SEO Cheat Sheet I ran into recently ......

...reminded me of all the other Cheat-Sheets that have helped me in the past -

Also see:
Keyboard shortcuts common to Firefox & IE 8
My Favorite Visual Studio 2005 & SQL Server 2005 Keyboard Shortcuts
My favorite Foxit Reader keyboard shortcuts

Google Spreadsheet Size Limits

2009-10-06T19:22:00.000-07:00

I found that the column T is the last you will find by default in a sheet in Google Spreadsheets. After a little digging, I found that it can have up to 256 columns, or up to 200,000 cells, or up to 100 sheets -- whichever limit is reached first. There's no limit on number of rows.

So how do you go beyond column T? One way is to right click on the column header & then select "Insert 1 right" from the context menu.

Here are some more size limits of Google Spreadsheets -

Each spreadsheet can have up to 20,000 cells with formulas. Of this total, the following limits apply:
- Up to 1,000 GoogleFinance formulas
- Up to 1,000 GoogleLookup formulas
- Up to 50 Import formulas
You have a limit of 1000 spreadsheets. The spreadsheets that are shared with you do not count against 1000 limit.
The limit on spreadsheets open at one time is 11.
You can import spreadsheets up to approximately 1 Mb in xls, xlsx, csv, ods, txt, tsv, or tsb format.

Also see:
HOW TO get date N working days ahead in Excel & Google Spreadsheet

SQL Server DATENAME function returns Month number instead of name?

2009-10-05T18:36:00.000-07:00

I recently came across a query posted by a puzzled developer -
Why does SELECT DATENAME(MONTH,GETDATE()) return '09' instead of the obvious result of 'September'?

The DATENAME function, after all, returns a character string representing the specified datepart of the specified date.

It turns out that if the language environment is set to Japanese, Korean or Traditional/Simplified Chinese (during installation or using SET LANGUAGE), months are stored as numerals instead of words for those languages & that's how they show up.

This can be verified by running the sp_helplanguage system stored procedure which reports information about a language.

Also see:
HOW TO find a column's value without specifying the column name

Free Anti-Virus Software from Microsoft

2009-10-04T19:17:00.000-07:00

There are at least 36 AV software tools for the Windows Platform out of which about a dozen are free. Now, Microsoft Security Essentials joins that list. It is a free download that requires the OS where it is installed to be genuine Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7

It is lightweight & provides real-time protection against viruses, spyware, and other malicious software without hogging system resources as most AV software do.

MSE replaces Windows Live OneCare and Windows Defender.

MVP award renewed

2009-10-01T18:57:00.000-07:00

Microsoft recognizes those who make contributions to technical communities with the annual Most Valuable Professional award. I'm thrilled to receive the news that this award which I first received in 2005 & in subsequent years has been renewed for this year as well. I thank everyone who made this award possible.

The best part of the award is that you get to hobnob with folks passionate about Microsoft technologies - authors, speakers and other technical community leaders.

Contributing to technical forums is part of my continuing education & it is gratifying to be rewarded for that. There have been many people who have inspired me with their work towards technical communities but I would specially like to mention Martin Honnen & Scott Mitchell.

Related:
Be a Microsoft MVP
I attended MVP Summit 2008
MS MVP Authors from India

The Beauty of Command-line Utilities

2009-09-25T06:45:00.000-07:00

I like the way command-line tools can be adapted for automating complex tasks.

For instance, if you had to populate the list of names of computers in your LAN in a combo box, the net.exe command can be utilized with the Process.Start() method in C#

Process netsend = new Process();
netsend.StartInfo.FileName = "net.exe";
netsend.StartInfo.CreateNoWindow = true;
netsend.StartInfo.Arguments = "view";
netsend.StartInfo.RedirectStandardOutput = true;
netsend.StartInfo.UseShellExecute = false;
netsend.StartInfo.RedirectStandardError = true;
netsend.Start();

StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(netsend.StandardOutput.BaseStream, netsend.StandardOutput.CurrentEncoding);

string sss = "";
while ((sss = sr.ReadLine()) != null)
{
if (sss.StartsWith("\\"))
comboBox1.Items.Add(sss.Substring(2).Substring(0, sss.Substring(2).IndexOf(" ")).ToUpper();
}

sr.Close();

Setting the CreateNoWindow property to true hides the console window.

Here is a list of command-line tools that I've found helpful (work in progress) -

bcp - great for importing/exporting data to/from Excel. I was able to able to export over 7 lakh records to a .xls file from SQL Server in just 21 seconds.
FFmpeg - records, converts and streams digital audio and video in numerous formats.
pdfsam-console - merges & splits PDF files.
Tasklist, Taskkill - quick way to kill a process on your system, or kill and restart an ASP.NET or IIS worker process.

Dear Reader, what are your favorite command-line tools?

Book Review: Beginning SQL Server 2005 for Developers

2009-09-22T18:31:00.000-07:00

Beginning SQL Server 2005 for Developers by Robin Dewson lives up to it's title of being a helpful resource for beginners to SQL Server 2005. The author patiently walks the reader through the basics & a wide breadth of topics with adequate examples in the 500+ paged book spanning 14 chapters. Many of the examples are demonstrated using multiple modes - SQL Server Management Studio, TSQL & Templates.

The book is filled with interesting facts, "gotchas", practical tips & tricks that make the chapters engaging. I have used the SELECT statement for years but I did not know that $IDENTITY & $ROWGUID can be used with the SELECT statement to return the value from the IDENTITY column & the ROWGUID column if such columns exist within the table being querying upon. Similarly I have used the COUNT function but didn't know there was a COUNT_BIG function as well that returns a bigint data type value unlike COUNT which returns an int type value.

I feel the information in the book could have been better presented & organized. There were some places where the examples of usage could have been closer to the topic for better assimilation.

My rating: 4/5

Also see:
SSMS Tips & Tricks
Free SQL Server 2008 Learning Resources

Book Review: Cancer Has Its Privileges

2009-09-19T19:23:00.000-07:00

We have put a man on the moon decades ago, but it's sad that science doesn't have a solution yet to wipe out the scourge of Cancer which has been there for centuries. The Big C is a devastating illness that cripples it's victims physically, monetarily & more than that, mentally as it affects their loved ones as well.

Cancer Has Its Privileges: Stories of Hope and Laughter is a poignant compilation of thoughts, anecdotes, poems and "chicken soup for the soul" type of experiences by brave cancer survivors & their loved ones. This is the fourth book of the author Christine Clifford, a cancer survivor & founder of The Cancer Club, who believes in the therapeutic value of positive thinking & humor.

The book has tips for cancer patients, their family & friends on coping with the dreaded illness. Sometimes well-meaning well-wishers of a patient get disconnected not knowing how to help. There is a chapter on how friends & family can help. Some ways of showing care & support to the afflicted is by spending time together, accompanying them on their visits to the hospital, offering to help with daily chores, preparing meals, being a "nap nanny", gifting them their favorite books & music and complimenting them on their positive changes.

This is a good book for anyone whose life has been touched directly or indirectly by cancer.

Doloto - useful addition to a Web Developer's Toolkit

2009-09-14T19:11:00.000-07:00

I have been using the following Web Development tools over the past few years and they have helped me to be more productive -

I discovered 2 new tools that not just tell you what is inhibiting performance of a page but also cut the fat off web pages making them speedier - Doloto & Smush.it

Doloto is a JavaScript download optimizer developed by Ben Livshits of Microsoft Research.

Smush.it is an image optimizer. It reports how many bytes would be saved by optimizing the page's images and provides a downloadable zip file with the minimized "lossless" image files.

Are there any other indispensable Web Developement tools that I'm missing?

Free eBook: The Principles Of Successful Freelancing‏

2009-09-10T09:52:00.000-07:00

SitePoint occasionally gives away ebooks of some of their publications. In the recent past, they have given away titles like "The Art & Science Of CSS" and "Firefox 3 REVEALED".

For a limited time, they are offering a free eBook "The Principles Of Successful Freelancing" if you follow them on Twitter or provide your email address (they will email the link from where you can download the eBook).

The book has around 200+ pages & 8 chapters -
Chapter 1: Considering Freelancing?
Chapter 2: Prepare for the Transition
Chapter 3: Manage Your Money
Chapter 4: Set Yourself Up
Chapter 5: Win the Work
Chapter 6: Give Great Service
Chapter 7: Achieve Work–Life Balance
Chapter 8: Where to from Here?

Also see:
Startup 101 - free, online serialized book for first-time entrepreneurs
Giveaways
Building non-technical skills

See what Google is suggesting

2009-09-09T19:55:00.000-07:00

Google does not seem to keep the secret questions we ask anonymously to itself :-)

... nor does it mind poking fun

Appending to file with BCP

2009-09-08T18:44:00.000-07:00

I found an interesting tip about BCP (the SQL Server command line tool) on the MSDN Forums

While exporting data from SQL Server to a file using BCP, it always overwrites the contents of the file specified in command if it already exists or creates a new file but it cannot append.

If ever you need the output of a query appended to the info in a existing data file, use an intermediary file to manage the updation of the data file -

Exec master..xp_cmdshell 'bcp "select name from sysobjects" queryout "c:\tempexportfile.txt" -c -T -SYourServerName'
Exec master..xp_cmdshell 'type "c:\tempexportfile.txt" >> "c:\mainexportfile.txt"

Also see:
Exporting to Excel with bcp

Excel Tips & Tricks

2009-09-01T18:46:00.000-07:00

My Wife & I, share a liking for Excel (& good food). Once in a while, we exchange Excel tips & tricks that we may have picked up. I recognized this common interest a couple of years ago, when she pointed out that the count of rows & columns have thankfully increased since Excel 2003 and marvelled at the improvements in Charts in Excel 2007 with the same excitement that is usually reserved for a special dish. I did not loose a chance then to tell her how to get a Ribbon-less pre-Excel 2007 UI.

Just so that I do not forget the tips & tricks we discuss, I plan to document them here.

1) Find & replace a special character - This trick is adapted from a response on the MrExcel Forum

Let's say you have received an Excel file with a pesky non printing character at several places in a sheet and now you need to replace it with something else. How to go about it?

Get the numeric code of the pesky character using the CODE function. For instance, the formula =CODE("!") will display the numeric code for ! or 33

Next, invoke the Find box using the shortcut Ctrl + F. Click in the Find box, hold Alt key and type 0 followed by numeric code of the mysterious character you have encountered(for example, for "!", you would type 033 instead of 33), on the number keypad and then the release the Alt key. As soon as you release the Alt key the character whose numeric code you typed will appear in the Find box.

Now go to the Replace tab, place the character to substitute in the "Replace with" textbox, and hit Replace All.

Excel Help suggests in the topic "Remove spaces and non printing characters from text" that you can also use a combination of the TRIM, CLEAN, and SUBSTITUTE functions to remove non printing characters

2) Matching row, values of adjacent cells - I find this question frequently being asked on technical Forums. To get a result that is based on values of adjacent cells in a row, use the combination of INDEX & MATCH as explained in the topic "Look up values in a list of data" in Excel Help.

3) (Added: 17-Sep-09) Increment numeric values in a range of cells by a standard value - Jonathan Van Houtte's tip shows you how to add a value of 10 to large number of existing cells containing (let's say) salary amounts at one shot.

Type 10 in any empty cell.
Copy that cell.
Select the range of cells containing Salary amounts
Right-Click, and choose Paste Special.
On the Paste Special dialog box, click the Add radio button (in the Operation frame)
Click "OK"
Clear the cell with the 10.

To be continued...

Also see:
HOW TO create an Excel 2007 Macro
HOW TO conditionally format entire row/s based on a cell's text value in Excel 2007

Exporting to Excel with bcp

2009-08-29T19:05:00.000-07:00

I was recently looking for a quick way to export SQL Server table data (over 1,00,000 records) to a Excel file.

I found that the bcp command line tool can export SQL Server table data to a .xls file but when I export it to a Excel 2007 (.xlsx) file, I couldn't open the file. It throws a warning - "Excel cannot open the file because the file format or extension is not valid. Verify that the file has not been corrupted and that the file extension matches the format of the file".

The fix to this issue reported in ASP.NET Forums which points to a MS KB article, is complicated.

I wondered, if bcp can export to a .xls file why can't it smoothly export to a .xlsx file?

Curiously, I was able to able to export over 7 lakh records to a .xls file (which is supposed to have a row limit of ~65K rows in 22seconds) with bcp and the .xls file opens fine in Excel 2007 displaying all the 7 lakh records.

Vinod helped me understand how the process actually works -

Fundamentally, you need to understand that the BCP command doesn’t actually write as a real XLS file. Try to open it in Notepad and it would be a mere csv format. It is just that Excel seamlessly opens it without any problem. Now with .XLSX extension Excel 2007 expects the same to be in the XML format (which it isn’t actually) and hence the error.

BTW, the format of XLS or XLSX doesn’t determine the number of rows. It is the version of Office (2003/2007) you are running.

Travel Planning & Reservation Tips using Online Tools

2009-08-21T18:46:00.000-07:00

A number of online tools & services have emerged for travelers in India in the last couple of years that help you plan & complete reservations, faster than ever.

What is the fastest and/or cheapest way to travel between two places in India?
Try 90di.com's online travel search engine. It gets you possible routes by bus, train, flight or train & flight. The best part is (in most cases) you get to view the fare & duration in the search results that are delivered amazingly fast. You can choose to sort on the results by Departure time, Arrival time, Duration, Transits, Fare. The search results contain links to book tickets online through a service provider's website.

You can also send your travel search queries in subject field of email to the emailID 90di.com@gmail.com and you will get your search result in your inbox within minutes. For instance, to check availability of Second Class AC reservation on Coromandal Express (Train # 2841) on 25/Aug/2009, type "AVL train 2841 HWH to MAS on 25/Aug/2009 2A" as your email subject & send.

When is the latest date by which I can get confirmed (or wait-listed) train tickets?
Use Cleartrip's Availability calendar for Indian Railways trains. It shows you availability starting from the current day to the next 3 months.

How to find train or flight info when you don't have access to the Internet?
You can dial 139 from your landline, mobile & CDMA phones for railway inquiries or try Indian Railway's SMS Enquiry Numbers: 57886, 54959, 5676747. I have tried & found Google India's SMS service to be a better proposition. To find the PNR Status, SMS "pnr {number}" to 9-77-33-00000. You can similarly find a train's schedule ("train schedule 2926"), trains between stations ("train delhi to mumbai"), train seat availability ("train avail 1018 Bangalore to Mumbai on 24-04"), train fare ("train fare 1018 Bangalore to Mumbai for SL")

To check the status of flight IT 302, send SMS with the query "it302"

Also see:
Make the most of IRCTC
E-Commerce in India

Microsoft Office Labs Community Clips

2009-08-19T19:19:00.000-07:00

I knew that there were free screencasting tools available, but I did not know about the Microsoft Office Labs Community Clips until I read about it on Channel 10. Community Clips provides a little app that on installing integrates into Office applications. It lets you record a clip or a tutorial in Office and then share it with others online on SoapBox. As the SoapBox service will terminate soon, uploading the WMV file of the screencast is currently disabled.

I hope they bring out a new avatar of SoapBox that uses Silverlight instead of Flash to run the videos while also supporting subtitles.

Update(22-Aug-09): Community Clips works not just for Office applications but also any application that is currently open. Once Community Clips is invoked, it sits in the system tray.

It can be managed with these hot keys -

To start recording: Windows key + Alt + R
To stop recording: Windows key + Alt + T
To pause recording: Windows key + Alt + P

This screencasting tool can also be put to good use for error reporting. It is not uncommon for developers to receive complaints on their application although it has been aggressively tested & found to work great on the developer machine. In addition to programmatic error logging, certain issues arising due to a browser toolbar or other environmental settings on the end-user's computer which are hard to replicate on other computers can be better captured with a video recording using the screencasting tool.

Spelling & Grammar Check in Browsers

2009-08-16T19:22:00.000-07:00

It's good to see browsers picking the good features of each other & in some cases refining them so that it becomes a standard in subsequent versions of other browsers. Tabbed browsing, In-line Search, "Find As You Type", Undo Close Window (Ctrl+Shift+T), built-in Developer Tools are all innovative features started by one browser brand & supported by the rest.

An interesting new feature that has come up in Firefox, Safari & Chrome that I'm really finding useful is Spell-Check. Every time there is a typo or a spelling mistake in a text area within a web page that you are typing into, the red squiggles show up when you commit a spelling mistake & you can pick up the correct spelling from the context menu. Safari 4 also introduces Grammar Check, although it's not as refined as we see in MS Word. I hope Spelling & Grammar Check go on to become a standard browser feature.

Also see:
Keyboard shortcuts common to Firefox & IE 8
The Collective Decisions of Competitors

Virtual TechDays

2009-08-14T19:46:00.000-07:00

If you work with Microsoft technologies, there have been a lot of new developments that you may have to keep pace with to stay current. Microsoft India is conducting free online sessions (nearly 50 in all) from August 19 to 21st on the following topics:

Web Development
Windows 7 and Client Development
Microsoft’s Cloud (Azure) Platform
SQL Server
Windows 7

The Virtual TechDays sessions will be delivered by experts through live streaming. Register to take part.