If you want to display your blog’s Facebook fan page like count as text, simply add the following code in your theme files

<?php
$data = json_decode(file_get_contents("https://graph.facebook.com/techdreams"));
echo $data->likes;
?>

Don’t forget to replace techdreams with name or id of your Facebook fan page.

This article titled,How to display Facebook fan page Like count in WordPress blog, was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

(a+b)^2=a^2+2ab+b^2 is one of the elementary formula  thought in high school mathematics. Almost every one of you knew this formula and applied while solving mathematical problems during school days.  But did  ever wonder why (a+b)^2=a^2+2ab+b^2? Why not (a+b)^2=a^2+b or something else?

In this video Khurshed Batliwala, a gold medallist in Mathematics from IIT, Bombay explains this formula in very simple terms and makes you wonder how easy mathematics is when we understand the concepts behind them.

If you are student it’s a must watch video and if you have kids studying elementary school it’s must to show it them.

This article titled,Myth Busters: Do you know why (a+b)^2 = a^2+2ab+b^2?, was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

Achieving greater heights in career is one of the most important goals to many of us. We work hard and try to do what ever it takes to be ahead of our peers and move to the next level in career ladder.

But knowingly of unknowingly few of us might be doing few mistakes that may be really sabotaging our career progression. According to Ronald E. Riggio, Ph.D., Professor of Leadership and Organizational Psychology at Claremont McKenna College, in an article for Psychology Today, here are five behaviours that could derail you on your career path

1. Over-Controlling and Inability to Delegate: If you are micro managing and not empowering your team to be independent in decision making and task execution then your career is at risk. We have only limited amount of time, energy and he cant do everything on our own. We should learn to delegate tasks to the team members and help them to complete the tasks successfully.

2.Inability to Adapt: If at all a well established organization falling on its knees, it’s mostly because of it’s inability to adapt to the changing dynamics in the world. Change is the only constant thing that keeps organisations going ahead. This applies to every individual too. Either it may be technical skills, management skills or any other skills required for the career, we should be able to adapt to the rapid changes happening in the field.

3. Poor Interpersonal Style: However we may be good at technical skills, we can not go the higher levels in career if we have poor interpersonal skills. Interpersonal skills include not only how we communicate with others, but also our confidence, and our ability to listen and understand. Problem solving, decision making and personal stress management are also considered interpersonal skills. People with strong interpersonal skills are usually more successful in their professional and personal lives.

Continue reading Are You Sabotaging Your Career? 5 Behaviors You Need to Avoid for the rest.

Image credit: flickr/hygienematters

This article titled,5 mistakes that could derail your career, was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

Even though I’m not a fan of Valentine day celebrations, I love Google search engine’s hidden gem that let you express your love through a simple search query. If your valentine is a geek for sure he/she would be surprised to see this.

To try this on your own you can copy past the following in Google search bar

sqrt(cos(x))*cos(300x)+sqrt(abs(x))-0.7)*(4-x*x)^0.01, sqrt(6-x^2), -sqrt(6-x^2) from -4.5 to 4.5

Why Google renders a heart shape for this query?

The sample query given above is a algebraic expression that plots several shapes to create a heart graph. If you remember high school mathematics it would be very easy to decipher the equations and understand how the shape is drawn. If you don’t remember, like me, never mind just enjoy this geeky greeting and share with the people whom you love. via labnol.

This article titled,Use Google to wish your valentine in a geeky way, was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

The rumours about the next version of most popular PC operating system, Windows 8, are picking up the heat and making rounds on all the popular websites and blogs. According to ZDNet the first public beta of Windows 8, called as Windows 8 Customer Preview, will be released on Feb 29th in conference to be held at Barcelona.

With Metro UI being the talk of techies these days, there is lot of excitement in early adopters to have their hands on with Windows 8 metro interface. Few weeks ago Microsoft released developer preview of Windows 8, which was too rough to try for non-developer. The Customer Preview version of Windows 8 is expected to be smooth and have less glitches.

Folks at The Verge got access to some leaked information what metro apps would be part of Windows 8 29th release and their list includes

• Camera
• Messaging
• Mail
• Calendar
• SkyDrive
• People
• Photos
• Video
• Music

The application are expected to be pre-installed and the updates to them will be delivered through the recently launched Windows Store.

Personally I’m pretty excited to have Windows 8 installed on my desktop and play with metro UI as well develop windows 8 app using HTML & jQuery.

This article titled,Windows 8 Public Beta release on Feb 29 [Rumours], was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

Have you noticed the way how Facebook changes URLs in address bar without reloading the entire page? To check it, go to your Facebook wall and click on any photograph shown in the stream, the photo is displayed as a popup with AJAX techniques on the same page but the URL in address bar changes. Close the photograph, address bar points back to the URL of your wall without reloading the page.  Would you like to implement such features on your website? Continue reading.

The trick to implement this feature on any website is to make use of HTML5 history APIs – pushState() & replaceState(). These APIs lets you change the URLs in address bar without actually reloading the entire page. Mozilla developer network has a great tutorial on HTML 5 history API.  The history APIs makes it very easy to change the URLs of address page in ajax mode.

As most of the browsers are catching up with HTML 5 specifications, each browser has followed it’s own way to implement history API and that resulted in the age old problems web -inconsistent behaviour and cross-browser compatibility issues. So if you directly use HTML 5 history APIs in javascript, your code may not work consistently across all the browsers or at least to make it work you have write a lot of code.

In order to avoid cross browser compatibility issues, jQuery has a nice plugin – History.js. History.js ensures all HTML5 browsers work as expected with History API and also optionally provides a hash-fall back for HTML 4 browsers.

Demo & Resource Links

Here are few useful links on HTML 5 history API

• Demo: Change page url without refreshing the page
• History.js plugin on github
• Mozilla developer network  history API tutorial
• Popular sites that use history API: http://facebook.com , http://lifehacker.com, http://gizmodo.com/ (try in chrome or firefox)

This article titled,Ajax:Change browser url and page content without refreshing the page [Facebook style], was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

Microsoft OneNote is one of the most popular applications among college student and Information Technology workers. Taking notes, managing to-do lists in OneNote is very easy and users love the experience. Microsoft earlier released OneNote application for Desktops, Windows Mobile, iPhones and iPads.

Now the same OneNote application is available for Android mobiles with all the goodness available for other mobile platforms. With the free OneNote application on Android devices, you can take notes, capture images, manage to-do lists and sync your notes with other devices and PCs with Microsoft SkyDrive service.

Other features of the application are

• Text formatting, images, and bulleted lists
• To-do lists with clickable checkboxes
• Quick photo capture with your phone’s camera
• Quick access to recent notes
• Store and access multiple OneNote notebooks
• Sync to your free SkyDrive account for access anywhere
• Offline access to your notes
• Option to sync notebooks only over a Wi-Fi connection
• Built-in spelling checker
• Support for external hyperlinks
• Table editing

If you using Android mobile, it’s must to try and experience the ease managing notes on the go. Android tablet user have to wait for some more time as the app is not yet optimized to work with devices with large form factors.

Download Microsoft OneNote for Android

This article titled,Do you love taking notes on Android? Get Microsoft OneNote App, was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

Amazon has announced that it is slashing the cost of S3 cloud storage service for all the user by at least 10%, effective from Feb 1st. Thank you amazon for reducing the price and now my Amazon monthly bills for hosting images of this blog are going to look 10% less fat. I like it.

In the past one year the number of objects stored in Amazon S3 cloud has increased from 262 billion objects to 762 billion objects. With the rapid increase of of customer base Amazon is able to innovate and reduce the operation costs for cloud storage and the resultant savings are passed to it’s customers. You can read the official blog post for more details.

This article titled,Amazon S3 slashes storage cost by 10% –13%, was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

Traditional asp.net web applications maintain their configuration settings in web.config files, where as Windows Azure based applications should have configurable entities into Service Configuration files. What if the application needs to run on Azure as well as traditional environments? Where do you store the configurable entities and how do you access them depending on the environment?

The solution for this problem is to maintain the configurable entities in both web.config as well as Service Configuration files and read from appropriate source depending on the environment in which the application is deployed.

With the help of RoleEnvironment.IsAvailable property we can detect whether the application is running in a Windows Azure environment or not and the following code snippet lets you read the settings from appropriate source

By making use of simple techniques like this developer can write code that runs on multiple environments without much changes.

Happy coding!

This article titled,Windows Azure: Read settings from web.config instead of service configuration file if the app is running on non-cloud environment, was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

GRASP Lab at U Penn has developed tiny flying robots that amaze you by performing some pretty advanced manoeuvres. These tiny flying Nano quadrocopters (a multi-copter that is lifted and propelled by four rotors) are agile, intelligent and social in coordinating with their peers to perform flying stunts.

Check out this video making round on the web and amazing every robotics fan. It shows a set of Nano robots righting themselves when dropped from heights, thrown in random directions. Also they perform some interesting feats to impress you.

This article titled,The swarm of flying robots will amaze you [video], was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.