Technology Zen

Make your sites searchable better...

2011-10-28T20:57:00.000+05:30

The three search giants have come together to improve search engines by urging webmasters and web developers to include more semantic data on their websites. For this they have launched schema.orgwhich will be a repository for common structured data types on the internet.

The web has a lot of data, especially text data, however it can often be difficult to figure out the context and semantics of the large volumes on text one can find on the internet. Is "Orange" a fruit? It is a colour? Or is it even someone's name?

HTML Microdata, a standard being developed along with HTML5 can be used to specify the semantics of content on web pages. For example, if you are mentioning a name on your webpage, you can use microdata as follows:

1	`The next event will be hosted by` `itemprop="name">Rupert Orange`

Google, Bing, and Yahoo! will be supporting this format for specifying semantics on a page, thus improving the reach and power of search engines.

The newly launched schema.org will be hosting the schemas of various types of data, such as books, movies, TV series, music, audio, video, image, events organizations, and much more.

Data usually contains other kinds of data associated with it, for example, a music album might have a title, a band, and a listing of tracks, which themselves will be audio objects with their own properties. The band itself will have more data associated with it, such as a list of members, an image, anaddress, a url etc. The band members themselves are people with further data associated with them, a name, a birthdate, a phone number etc.

Let's take a look at an example from schema.org of how this will work:

itemscope itemtype ="http://schema.org/Movie">

itemprop="name">Avatar

itemprop="director" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">

Director: itemprop="name">James Cameron

(born itemprop="birthDate">August 16, 1954)

itemprop="genre">Science fiction

href="../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html"itemprop="trailer">Trailer

The outermost div establishes that it is enclosing information about an item by including theitemscope attribute. It also establishes that it is talking about a type of data defined athttp://schema.org/Movie via the attribute itemtype. The Movie as expected has a name, a director, a genre, and a link to a trailer.

The director is a Person (defined at http://schema.org/Person), and hence has further information defines about him in another div that has his name and birth date.

In another listing somewhere about James Cameron, this association could be reversed. The article could be talking about James Cameron, and instead listing his movies, with Avatar being one of them. One can imagine how search engines could find this data useful, as it associated two pieces of clearly defined information and provides a clear relationship between them.

Source Credit:- http://devworks.thinkdigit.com//Internet/Google-Yahoo-and-Bing-collaborate-to-make_6908.html

MS OS on Flash Drives

2009-07-25T14:35:00.000+05:30

http://lifehacker.com/5302971/microsoft-may-sell-windows-7-on-flash-drives

Now this is a good news. I have been wanting to see this happen for a long time and seems like the time has finally come!

Soon we will see pen dives being used often instead of CDs/DVDs

Soon we will see ATM like machines in the cities which will work as upgrading machines for these drives. You insert the cash and plug in your flash drive and voila! You get an updated OS installed on your drive.

Then we will also see OS running like any other ‘portable’ application right from within the flash drive, no need of installation. Today I might run my system with Win XP drive and tomorrow with win 7 drive. How simple the life would be if your OS could not be corrupted by those nasty viruses.

Thought in a future...

2009-06-22T08:20:00.002+05:30

I was just wondering how hard it is for me to maintain so many email accounts, couple of them in virtually every major provider Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL...

Though we have facilities of auto forwarding( read filters), we still do manage multiple user names and passwords. This in the world of internet seems less right to me.

So here is a wild guess in the future to come:

Why not all these email providers merge and give me ONE large account with a facility of ‘Nick names’ to my email address, yes you got that right, my office colleagues know my email address as myprofessinalid@GYHA.com and my friends know me as myfunckyid@GYHA.com, though all these mails/messengers/talks come to just one uniqueemailaddress@GYHA.com. Well we have Gmail’s facility of “+” filters that can be used to serve the purpose to some extent, but I am sure you get what my intent is over here.

The move towards integration has already started with Yahoo & Hotmail sharing the messengers, Gmail & AOL sharing their messengers! What also has started is that we have lots of ‘third-party’ sites doing the job for us, but hey another email! Another password!! NO, we do not want that to happen anymore, do we?

I would love to see all (most of) major providers join hands and provide me better service, guaranteed 24x7 availability and infinity storage space!

I believe that day would come. Let me know your thoughts about it.

Collections Decision Tree (.Net 2.0)

2009-06-22T08:19:00.000+05:30

I have tried to create a collection decision maker for .Net 2.0 Framework. You can find the same published @ http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dcjt98k6_39fn23df9j

Collections CheatSheet .Net 2.0

2009-04-06T21:24:00.000+05:30

I have created this cheat sheet with the aim to provide you with quick reference of various collections/data structures options available in 2.0 and an attempt of guide for usage of each one contained.

Hope this helps. Find it shared @ http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dcjt98k6_38f5zb6khp

There would be lots of different opinion on its usage part.

Comments welcomed!

Validate HTML using RegEx

2008-11-23T22:24:00.001+05:30

Here is a quick RegEx that will help you validate HTML:
<\/{0,1}(?!\/|(a\s|a>)|(strong|b\s|b>)|(em|i\s|i>)|(u\s|u>)|(p\s|p>)|strike|li|br|sub|sup|ol|ul|blockquote|table|tr|tbody|thead|tfoot|td|th|div|h1|h2|h3|h4|h5|h6|font|abbr|samp)[^>]*>
The center part of the RexEx, where you can see the HTML elements is the list of HTML you would want to allow/pass-through this RegEx and the rest would be filtered. While most of the basic explanation can be found here, following is one of the important explanation that I feel was missed out there:
In the above RegEx, you will see '>' symbol explicitly added after selected tags. This is to emphasis that it would mean only for those tags that are mentioned and not tags with 'similar' name. Example: Element 'i'. This will mean 'i' tag as in italics and alphabet 'i' of tag img. Element 'b' could be for bold tag, alphabet 'b' for br tag or alphabet 'b' for blockquotes. Some tags/elements can also have attributes like tag 'a'. so for them we should also have an option to recognize the tag. This is done by 'a\s' RegEx. This checks for 'a' followed by space (\s). So final RegEx for such 'small lettered' tags will be something like "(p\s|p>)".
Let me know if you have a better solution through comments.

When do we get Windows OS 2.0?

2008-09-21T11:24:00.001+05:30

In the web of 2.0, we have seen tons of web utility that has been a counter part to desktop application. I am sure most of us would be using many of those services today. When we come across a new site, we often save it for later use and when we do that we often 'tag' it or assign keywords to it so that it's a easy find for later recovery from our huge list of links database. It works out pretty well this way, isn't?

I just wonder if desktop applications and even OS would have to be competent and smart enough to have capabilities that a web world can provide. One of the examples that come to my mind right now is the 'labeling' feature that Gmail provides us with. Earlier we were use to 'folder' structure that we probably used in Yahoo! or Hotmail and even use it today in MS Windows OSes, but since Gmail we all are fond of 'Labels'! Saying it in layman’s term 'You can store a single mail into multiple folders!' I hope you are getting to the point where I'm heading...

Can MS Windows OS not have 'Tagging/Labeling' structure instead of its out-dated folder structure? I believe it's possible and MS should think about it in next Windows version they come up with. I am sure the idea would be a hit (It already is, in Web!)

Your thoughts and ideas welcomed for Web 2.0 features you would like to see in the next version of your favorite OS.

System specific web.config

2008-06-10T19:26:00.002+05:30

Many a times we have an issue with web.config file checked out be a team member where s/he is actually temporarily changing some values for unit testing purpose whereas another team member is waiting to check-in a new app setting to the file. A simple scenario would be to set the session timeout value to something lower while you are testing the error page on session timeout. This seems quite logical since you would not want to wait for say 30 minutes for the session to timeout each time. However, what doesn’t seem logical is the checking out of the web.config file which actually is not required to. Sometimes it also adds on to the hassle of remembering ‘not to check-in’ config while with your other changes.

To solve this such kind of problems, you can specify an external config file to web.config which can remain local to a system and make system specific changes there instead of original web.config. This is how it can be done:

1. It’s as simple as adding the highlighted attribute to appSettings tag in your web.config

2. Here the name “local.config” can be any custom name.

3. The file should be placed in the same folder as web.config.

4. The local.confiog file will look something like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>

Once this is in place, the asp.net runtime looks for the mentioned file to override changes of any key setting you provide there with the version of web.config. This also helps us ensure that the main web.config file always has the settings that need to go into production and development/machine specific settings always remain in local configuration file.

Utilizing the powers of IMs / Google Talk

2008-02-20T17:25:00.001+05:30

I had earlier talked about the Gmail ID feature which can be customized for better use, mainly for creating filters. This post will focus on some hidden features of another simple yet excellent tool from Google: GTalk (Well, it could be other IMs as well. I have specifically targeted GTalk here).

1. Suffix the name with a grouping information: This will work same as Contact Grouping feature of other IMs. You would be able to search on the group name as well. I do it as <contact name>_<group name>, e.g. adityap_coworker. Now when I search for “coworker” in GTalk search, I get all the users list that have the string in it. Pretty simple, is it not?

2. Storing the numbers with name: When you add a friend to GTalk list, it automatically displays the Id of the user. However, you can rename it to give your own friendly alias. Now, If you, like me, have a huge list of friends, relatives and co-workers added to your contact base and often need to search through your mobile contact list (with those small number keys) to get to the mobile number for whatsoever reason, then this tips would do more good to you. With a contact name you can add the user’s numbers, say in order <Office Extension, if co-worker> / <Mobile Number>. Now the next time you need to call a co-worker and you do not recall his extension, you now know what to do! J How easy that would be as compared to searching the Active Directory Listing for a contact detail? I know you already would have started thinking of applying this for you contact list. Try this out in combination with previous tip and you would be happy later on!

3. Utilizing the status message as a medium to spread news/information: How many of you usually check the status messages of your contact in your free time? I do it and it really makes my day. Some good quotes, thoughts, or some important message you want to share with your contacts and others quite funny to have that smile on your face! The kind of information that you can share is just as limited to the extent your thinking goes! Yes, the status messages on IMs (not only GTalk) is slowly becoming an active medium to share some information with all your contact at an instant. With the Social Networking taking up much of the Web space today, I just wonder, if web advertisement companies are already thinking of pushing ads into our status messages (Oh Yes, I could tell this to my Boss and he would be happy to see a business opportunity we could get from here. J)!

I would invite all my readers to share their tips for tweaking IM to suit out needs.

Download Site

2008-02-10T17:45:00.001+05:30

One of the very well organized download site. Ofcourse there is a lot in store for you if you have nothing in you pocket.
ENJOY!!!

Download Skype

2008-02-10T17:44:00.000+05:30

kype is a messenger utility. You can register for free and start communicating with you pals all over. If you are thinking that I am being payed for promoting skype, then you are at wrong site.

Wanna get 3D??

2008-02-10T17:43:00.000+05:30

Because even you can now!!
Yes,It's party time now. Pov-ray is one such application which enables you to create 3D images without any pain. It's simple as writing a "Hello World" program.

Don't think just grab the application from the site and don't forget to have a look at the image gallery, you would love it. Don't you feel like partying already :)

Good news for blogging geeks!!

2008-02-10T17:40:00.000+05:30

This is my first blog entry with a blogging software. I had installed two of those :Windows Live Writer and Zoundry Blog Writer. I have posted this blog through the latter though. Obviously I found Zoundry better because it features many blog accounts, Word Like editing. Of course Windows Live Writer was not that bad too ( I love MS products! But only when they are free ), but currently it's the beta version and doesn't support FTP uploads ( which is required for blogger). You have the SDK available for the same to enhance the writer to suit you (If you can write codes, or wait for someone to write some ).
For now I would suggest you to opt for Zoundry. Go ahead and enjoy another free day ;)

Worried about your mobile bills!!

2008-02-10T17:39:00.001+05:30

Well do not worry now!

Coz there is a site which would assist you to reduce it to minimum.Ofcourse, it would not pay you bills ( lol), but it would surely give a definite answer to reduce you current bill. Well friends I have tried it personally and have attained great benefits from the analysis this site produces. Good work guys :)

Umm!! still reading the blog!! Oh well here's the link to it.
Reduce My Bills Too

Tired of giving presentations??

2008-02-10T17:38:00.002+05:30

Why not record you presentation from ur desktop PC and send it around !!

There are many softwares that can help you do that. I tried many of them untill I found Zd Soft's Screen Recorder. It's free (ofcourse) and gives a variety of option of file type you want to save the recording into. But, I would suggest SRV file type(It's in there!), the quality of recording is no doubt good but it also helps in keeping the file size small. One more thing you can trade-off between quality and file size too (Default is good though).

So now record what ever you want to say to others and mail them. You can for example explain the procedure of installing an application and send it to your clients or persons who have problem installing it.

Sounds Interesting!!! :0

Need some space management?

2008-02-10T17:38:00.001+05:30

Are to tired of clicking through you folder and right clicking through the properties to find which folder is sucking your hard disk space???
Need some one to help you out on this?
If yes - Use Fosix

Do you need to dress up your desktop?

2008-02-10T17:37:00.000+05:30

Ok, here's your chance to know about two brands making our desktop better place to live.Yahoo Widgets & Google Desktop is a utility that can be used to accessorise you desktop.
Personally, I prefer Yahoo's utility ( actually both: its hard to leave one ) because of the Rich UI it provides. It really lights up my desktop. Google's UI though plain, but offers more flexibility in development options.

Get 25GB of HDD Free!!

2008-02-10T17:35:00.000+05:30

YES!!!! Thats not a joke.

Finally, I could put up some time to update the blog :)
I was in requirement of some online space, in GBs of course and I got many solutions. But, what I required was something large and FREE :) as always. Well as this blog's title says it all, I found a site which offered me 25GB of storage free of cost.
I already had a account in eSnips, but it offered me 1 GB which was too small with my growing needs ;). I had the option of Gmail Drive ( 2GB approx), but it was better off to cater my mail storage requirements.There were many others at my disposal but with some or the other limitation. And, finally I came across MediaMax and Bingo!, I already have an account created :). I can store videos, musics, pictures, virtually any file. Not only this, it has basic capability to fucntion as a mailbox. What else do you require? Nothing better than to have a capability to have your hard disk data be with you at any place in world (where internet is accessible, ofcourse!). Well this is it, wait for some more of such sites or when MediaMax has something more to offer :)

And, where you thinking to have a xxGB harddrive for FREE!!!!!!!????????????
C'mon, Give the makers a break, will you!

What a Browzar!!!

2008-02-10T17:34:00.000+05:30

This is the coolest browser I have ever seen. Thanks to Digit Mag's People who provided it to their readers in the March issue and of course the developers who have done an excellent work!!
Now for the browsers any words would be less..
File Size of mere 204KB, No installation, Privacy totally maintained, Awesome UI, Tabbed Browsing, Fast, Memory Effective etc. etc..
I have just installed it and am addicted to it. Just one feature request to the developer, in the contrary to the purpose of the browser. Can u please provide a quick save list of all my open tabs and an option to "Open" the bookmark list!
Edit: Just noticed the request at Comming Soon.
One more feature I forget completely, obvious though, It's Free ;)

Now Paint it better...

2008-02-10T17:31:00.000+05:30

....with Paint.NET!

If you are a person like me who uses Paint application oftenly for saving and basic editing of the scrrenshots and use other image editing softwares for various advanced editing, search no more because Paint.NET besides providing good sense of re-sizing the canvas size based on the dimentions of the image in the clipboard, it also provides some of the advanced image editing features.

I specifically like the sense re-sizing part, it saves me a lot of time when taking screenshots.

So, wait no more and go and start playing with it.

One more free tool to my library! :)

The EditorBrowsableAttribute Class

2007-11-29T14:13:00.003+05:30

EditorBrowsableAttribute is a hint to a designer indicating whether a property or method is to be displayed. You can use this type in a visual designer or text editor to determine what is visible to the user. For example, the IntelliSense engine in Visual Studio uses this attribute to determine whether to show a property or method.

Example:

int ageval;
[EditorBrowsable(EditorBrowsableState.Never)]
public int Age
{
    get { return ageval; }
    set
    {
        if (!ageval.Equals(value))
        {
            ageval = value;
        }
    }
}

The Age property does not appear in the Editor.

The member of the "EditorBrowsableState" Enumeration are :

Member name	Description
Advanced	The property or method is a feature that only advanced users should see. An editor can either show or hide such properties.
Always	The property or method is always browsable from within an editor.
Never	The property or method is never browsable from within an editor.

Are you a interested in .NET???

2007-06-16T11:14:00.000+05:30

And you have never heard about The Code Project site!!
Well well, this is shocking but here's your chance to have a go at this site.
I personally feel this site has a great collection of articles { and source code of course} mainly relating to .Net technologies, although you would find many other technologies too. Go and get yourself registered(free of course).

Mind you this site is giving a close competition to Experts Exchange site!! ;)

Gmail ID Facts

2007-06-07T11:50:00.001+05:30

If you are already unaware of, here are few facts about your Gmail Id:

First, the dot ( "." ) in your id doesn't matter! This means that if your id is techno.zen @ gmail.com, for example, it's same as technozen @ gmail.com. Yes you can try this on your account. Try mailing to your account and you can bet you are going to receive that mail. The dit is only considered while providing logging information. It also means that tech.no.zen , techno.zen , technozen ( and all it's Permutation and Combination) are effectively same and hence has to be unique.

Second, you can add meta information to you gmail id using "+"! This means that I can attach some meta string to my email id, for example technozen+blogposts @ gmail.com and/or techno.zen+comments@gmail.com. This can effectively used to create filters.

Enjoy Gmailing...

Auto Intellisense in Web.config

2007-04-19T19:23:00.000+05:30

We all know that, in .Net 2.0, Auto-Intellisense in Web.config is built in.

But this intellisense no longer continues, once you access the 'Web Configuration Utility' using the last link button provided in 'Solution Explorer'.

For Reference: 'Web Configuration Utility' is the Web-Tool [New feature in 2.0], oftenly used to configure the non-rememberable attributes of Web.config.

The reason being is the addition of an extra attribute [xmlns="........."] to the root tag i.e tag xmlns=".........", as shown below.

xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/.NetConfiguration/v2.0">

Now, If you wish to bring the auto-intellisense again, just remove this new addition.

Qucik fix to bring Web Application Offline.

2007-04-19T19:15:00.000+05:30

Normally to bring any Live Application Offline, either we thought of making few fixes in IIS or may be in the applications code.

However, below are the two quick approaches to achieve the same.

Make Application Offline:

1. Add below to your web configuration file:

Add a file with the name app_offline.htm to the root of your application.

Now if you try acccessing any page of the Web Application, you can't.

Note: It is not a recommended approach. It is just a quick fix...

The Blog in Nutshell!

2007-04-12T17:36:00.000+05:30

This is the first blog and thus it gives you the description in nutshell :)
You can create for your's too at this link