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 use of Ajax, lot of data is rendered using JavaScript and even though you have a friendly “Loading …” message for the user, it is a must to render the content fast. This is applicable even to sites which do not use Ajax but have images on them.

Recently I was working on developing a Google Maps tool which renders lot of content (including images) on the page using JavaScript. Performance was a big issue and one of the things we looked at was compressing the images for the icons.

The tool which we used was http://www.giftools.com/gifcompress.html (GifTools).

It is an online tool to which you can hand the URL of any gif image and it will give you a compressed version of the gif image.

On icons we achieved more than 50% reduction in size (remember icons are small and you can compromise on the quality of the icon without much impact visibly for the user).

The original size was around 1044 bytes which got reduced to 398 bytes.

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For any browser on any machine which I own, the first thing I install is the Google Toolbar. It is a very useful tool and I like to search directly from there as well as monitor various sites, my Gmail, my Google bookmarks and of course PageRank for web sites.

Google toolbar is being used by millions of individuals all over the world. By allowing people to access your web site’s RSS feed through a button on Google toolbar, you are giving your site the ability to be exposed to millions.

I will show you a very easy step by step way to create a simple Google Toolbar button which will allow users to view your web site content. It uses your RSS feed as the source of data (People who do not know about RSS, please visit Wikipedia to know more about it).

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If you ever wondered why people would want to use Linux when there is windows around, then please head over to http://www.whylinuxisbetter.net/ and Manu Cornet will give you more than a handful of reasons to use Linux.

Assuming you would be very eager to switch to Linux after reading it, or you would be wiling to give it a try, there are two options presented to you to enjoy Linux:

Try Linux without touching Windows (Linux will run off the CD, no install needed)

Install Linux (and still keep Windows) (Install Linux while still keeping Windows on the PC)

The page is available in 19 different languages so you cannot complain that you cannot read it!

Please share your thoughts on where Linux stands as a desktop OS.

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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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Antivirus is a must for any system these days but do not come cheap. So what do you do when you do not have the luxury to spend money on yearly subscription for the likes of Norton Antivirus, McAfee, CA Antivirus etc?

The answer is, you have several options:

1. Go and download Google Pack from Google which gives you free subscription to Norton Virus scan 
2. Get free AVG Antivirus from Grisoft. The free version is only available for private, non-commercial use. This is supported on  Windows Vista and Linux.
3. Get free avast! 4 home edition Antivirus. This is also available for free for home users and non-commercial use. This is supported on Windows Vista as well. avast have their Antivirus version available for Linux also.
4. ClamWin Antivirus for Windows (not available for Vista). This is an open source project. It does not however include a real time scanner and you will have to manually scan files.
5. Comcast customers get McAfee Internet Security suite free with their Comcast account. They can download it from here. You will need to register with Comcast first.
6. Avira AntiVir Personal Edition Classic is available for free and can be downloaded from here. It supports all windows versions (including vista), Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris.
7. If you feel your computer has been compromised, you can try McAfee free scan available at http://us.mcafee.com/root/mfs/default.asp. This web based tool will help you detect viruses but unfortunately won’t clean them.

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 Recently I was introduced to a very useful service for people who are into videos and have a need of submitting their videos to online video networks. You can be an Individual,  Company, Marketer, Web Agency or an Artist.

It is called hey! spread and using the tool you can submit your video files to the best video networks out there. You need to have accounts on all the supported networks on which you want to submit your videos.

The list of supported networks includes:

• YouTube
• MySpace
• Google Videos
• Yahoo Videos
• Dailymotion
• Blip.tv
• Photobucket
• Metacafe
• Bolt
• Putfile

The limits on the video are around 10 min and 100 MB.

Submission is a three step process. In the first step you upload your video file (with a title, description, tags and a category information)

In step two: you need to enter your login details for all the supported networks on which you have accounts.

In step three you have an option to receive all your links in an email to you.

By paying a fees, you can also get your video network listed there.

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You have a huge excel file and you want to copy all the cells in one column which match your search criteria and place it may be in another excel sheet.

Here is how you can do it:

Select the entire column on which you want to search:

Search using Control + F:

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