I generally count on Gmail’s virus scanner to scan the emails and report any potential problems and have taken it for granted. That is why I was surprised the other day to get this message:

Gmail virus scanner just failed to scan it.

I always have my desktop antivirus running so it was not an issue for me but if you do not have it you should. Check out the free alternatives here.

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Google adwords blog post carries an announcement about new improvements to the Google Quality Score, a system which Google has been improving over the years to enable it to show quality ads.

The recent improvements are:

• Real time quality score calculation, at the time of each query
• Keywords would not longer be marked “inactive for search”
• ‘Minimum bid’ to be replaced by ”First page bid”

Read more »

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Recently I was introduced to a site which has a nice matrix of comparison of online video sharing sites based on the following parameters:

• Price
• Converts file?
• Download files?
• Max upload size
• Storage space
• Privacy
• Time Limit
• Revenue sharing
• Ease of account creation
• Ease of Uploading a video
• Video quality
• Recording tools
• Editing tools
• ….

you can find it here: http://www.blogtechguy.com/video_ebook/video_comparison_matrix.html

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Loads of widgets, integration with third party tools using JavaScript APIs, high performance AJAX. All this is causing sites to slow down. Staff which nobody cared about, now need to be looked into to ensure that the site loads faster.

Optimization Techniques

I will present some optimization techniques  in several easy to use and understand categories. This will allow you to pick and choose one category and focus on it at any one time.

1. General Optimization Tips
2. Optimization Techniques for Images
3. Optimize HTML on the page
4. Optimize JavaScript and CSS Files
5. Optimization tips for Documents on Websites
6. Tools to help with Optimization

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On September 25th, 2007, David Gainer of the Microsoft Excel group did a post acknowledging a Microsoft Excel 2007 math bug involving calculations of numbers around 65,535 and 65,536.

An example bug is: 77.1 * 850 for which Excel returned 100,000 instead of 65,535.

According to David, the issue was due to change in the Excel calculation logic in Office 2007. The bug affects Excel 2007 and Excel Services 2007.

The patch has been posted here.

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Mary Jo Foley, in her blog All About Microsoft on ZDnet has an interesting video on Microsoft code names.

What is a codename?

Microsoft products start life as a project codename (e.g. Longhorn which later was launched as Vista).

Some Revelations

Let us take the Operation System Line up from Microsoft:

All of them have something in common, they are all skiing resorts in British Columbia.

Coming to the development tools:

All of the code names are islands!

You can find more info on codename on the video here.

Wikipedia has a comprehensive list of Microsoft Codenames for those interested.

Source: (here)

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With web applications pushing the technology to the limits, memory leak issues have gained prominence and need to be dealt with.

What is IE Memory Leak?

To begin with let me clarify that memory leaks are not restricted to Internet Explorer but it can happen in any browser. We are talking primarily about IE as over the course of my time, I have found it to cause this issue more often than any other browser.

Memory leak is a condition where your web application keeps consuming more and more memory as you keep navigating or refreshing. This causes decrease in responsiveness of the application and in situations can crash the browser itself.

Can we predict IE memory leaks?

Justin Rogers, a Microsoft employee, discusses in detail the patterns of memory leak in his article titled Understanding and Solving Internet Explorer Leak Patterns.

How can I try out and see memory leaks?

Please read Memory Leak in Internet Explorer - revisited which has code samples for you to try out and see for yourself.

How to test for memory leaks?

Drip, a memory leak detector for Internet Explorer, is a free open source tool available for download here.

It is an executable which can be downloaded and run directly.

(you can see in the graph above for www.Microsoft.com site that IE is continuously consuming more and more memory)

Start the application and enter the URL of the site you want to monitor. Click the “Auto Refresh” button. It will keep refreshing the site and plot the memory graph at the bottom.

How to diagnose memory leak issues?

There is a screencast on Diagnosing JavaScript Memory Leaks in IE which might be useful resource to start with.

Resources

Drip Home Page | Download Drip

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With increasing acceptance of smart mobile phones, web browsing over mobile phones has gained prominence.

Researchers at IDC say that 1.3 billion people will connect to the Internet via mobile phones by 2008.

Which means your site needs to be mobile ready. You can obviously spend time and energy coming up with mobile version of your site but won’t you like to know first as to how your current PC web site shows up on mobile?

Try this easy test and get detailed reports:

All you need to do is enter the URL of your current web site and sit back, relax and get detailed reports. The advanced options give you more control over the way tests are conducted (can configure custom user-agent, test for a particular model of phone etc.)

Here is a portion of report for my site technacular.com:

Obviously, I need to work hard to make my site mobile compatible.

Is your site mobile ready?

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