As I started getting too many spams because of bots, I implemented Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) in all the interactive pages of my site.

Took the control from here http://www.codeproject.com/KB/custom-controls/CaptchaControl.aspx, and customized according to my needs. The code was easy to understand and customize.

You can add your own configuration sections in Web.config or App.config file. There might be some good way to do it, if so, please let me know.

Step 1

Add the follwing inside <configSections> tag:

<configSections>

    <section name ="customSection" type ="System.Configuration.NameValueSectionHandler"/>

</configSections>

 

Read

Feature 1 - Face recognition: Though this feature was released on 9/02/2008, I noticed it only recently. Worth trying it!

How to use it?

• Log into Picasa Web Album, go to Settings (top right corner) page, you will be able to find a section ‘Name Tags’, and right below it there should be a button ‘Turn name tags ON’, click it. After few seconds Picasa will start auto face recognition, you should be able to see the progress on the right side of your picasa home page.
• Once it is done, you can click a photo (your photo or any of your friend’s photos) from any of your albums, picasa will show a rectangle around the face of the person in the photo, you can add a name tag.
• Now, go to ‘People’ tab and add more name tags. See below video for more info.
  
  Read

I'll usually set my font-sizes in units of 'pt', but this gave me weird results when I increased my monitor's DPI from 96 to 120 (as all the fonts were too small in my HD wide-screen monitor, I increased it). I was doing some research on this and I came across this article, this article clearly explains the right unit to use while developing websites. Though this article says percent (%) is the best, I have used 'px', as it gave me consistent results in IE, Mozilla and Chrome.

Read

One of my friends forwarded this article to me sometime in 2007, as it was too lengthy, I didn’t read at that time, and few months back I got a chance to read this; only then I realized I should have read this in 2007 itself, because this article had changed my life in many ways since I read this … hope it will change yours too!

Read

This works in Oracle, hope there is something similar to this in Sql Server too! There might be some other good way to do this, if so, please let me know.

SELECT * FROM TABLE1 WHERE COLUMN1 IN (‘ABC’,’XYZ’,’PQR’) 

Say suppose the strings ‘ABC’,’XYZ’ and ’PQR’ need to be grouped as a single string in the frontend and to be passed as a parameter.  How can we do it? We cannot write like this –

Read

I came across this article on The Hindu magazine, this article clearly tells why Lehman Brothers collapsed? ...and the reason for the eventual economic crisis, a video is also added under resources/videos tab 'The Crisis of Credit Visualized'.

Read

Here is a method to import/send XML to Oracle and thus we need not call the database repeatedly for mass insert, update etc. DBMS_XMLSTORE has been used here. There might be some other good way to do this, if so, please let me know. 

Read