Super Cookies - New Internet Threats

A few new things to be aware of while you are browsing the internet (surfing the NET).

Types of Super Cookies:

1. Flash LSO’s (Local Stored Objects):  Uses flash code to store tracking info that cannot be removed by browser functions because it is store in the flash plugin and works across multiple browsers
2. Zombie Cookies:  Placed on websites by individuals with no affiliation, for use in attaching to a visitor to use for tracking and gaining a person’s personal information, even after deleting this cookie it can be recreated and still track you because it also uses flash
3. Browser Finger Printing:  Identifies users for tracking based on their browser configuration signatures, IP addresses, plug-ins, system fonts, and operating systems
4. Client-Side scripting:   A website stores information of visitors and stores the information in a database located on their site

New Threats:

ETags:  Are an identifier that a Web server assigns to a specific version of a resource found at a URL. If the content at that URL changes, the Web servers assign it a new ETag.

This lets a system recognize when content hasn't changed between server requests for URL and that the information that browsers have cached is still current. The tags thereby eliminate the need for servers to resend the same information. This makes the process more efficient.

However, the approach also lets online advertisers utilize ETags — which contain information about visitors to sites — as another technique for tracking users.

People who track users via ETags generate unique identifiers that recognize visitors across multiple returns to a given site.

ETags are stored in a browser's cache and aren't eliminated when users delete cookies. Instead, users must manually clear their browser caches to get rid of ETags.

Top 12 Excel 2010 formulas

LEN - It will count the number of text in a given string. The string can be referenced from another column or hard coded inside the string.

=LEN(A1)

=LEN("1234asdf") Output:8

LOWER - This formula makes all character to lowercase

=LOWER(A1)

=LOWER(AsDF) - Output:asdf

UPPER - This formula makes all character to upper case

=UPPER(A1)

=LOWER(AsDF) - Output:ASDF

PROPER - This is like Init Caps or capitalizes the first character.

=PROPER(A1)

=PROPER(asdf) Output:Asdf

TRIM - Used to remove trailing and preceding spaces. Remove all blank space before and after the content.

=TRIM(A1)

=TRIM("  asdf 1234  ") Output: asdf 1234

Note: It won’t remove space in between the words

SUBSTITUTE - This formula used to replace or substitute a text with another text.

=SUBSTITUTE(B1,” “,”-“)

=SUBSTITUTE("asdf 1234",” “,”-“) Output:asdf-1234

=SUBSTITUTE("asdf 1234",” “,”!@#$“) Output:asdf!@#$1234

CONCATENATE - This formula is used to concatenate or join two or more text

=CONCATENATE("1234","asdf") Output: 1234asdf

TEXT - Used to format an existing column data to a new format. This is very useful to change date format.

=TEXT("12/31/2001","DD-MMM-YYYY") Output: 31-Dec-2001

LEFT - Return the number of characters from left

=LEFT("asdf",2) Output: as

RIGHT- Return the number of characters from right

=LEFT("asdf",2) Output: df

HYPERLINK - Used to open a folder or file from the local or network share folder.

=HYPERLINK("C:\Blog","Open Blog Folder") Output: when the user clicks the link it will open the folder C:\Blog from the local machine.

Count: This will count the number of NUMBERs in the given range. It will ignore the string or any other special data.  

=COUNT(H6:H11) Output: Identify the total number of excel cells which has numbers and ignore all other cells. It will provide the number of cells matching the count.

Time Management - Nutshell

If you have to do it tomorrow then do it today and if you have to do it today then do it NOW.

Never leave ’till tomorrow which you can do today.

Work:

Plan your day as the first task in office with Priorities 1, 2 & 3. Do the same at home also.
Clean Desk and Arrange Folder (Desk & Computer)
Clean the inbox daily and arrange the document based on sender.
For every email either reply or delete/read state. Don’t keep it unnecessarily. Track the follow up item in work tracker or to do list.
You mail content should be Brief, Clear, Simple, Prompt and Careful.
1. Unsubscribe unwanted spam mails or mark it as spam to move to spam folder.
2. Meeting plan



Create checklist for the meeting
Start on time
End before the planned time
Action items based on each category
• Recap at end of the meeting.



Make sure MOM is shared.



Weekly meeting with your team to make sure you are on track. 
Plan for your team members for better result. Instead of just giving a new task to your team member, give the task with guidance for prompt and better result. This will avoid wasting time in rework.

Real Life:

1. Start your morning the night before. Plan your dress, food etc. 
2. Set your clock 10 or 15 min ahead
3. Avoid wasting time in any activities. Ask yourself every time whether you are spending the time effectively.
4. Give proper Voice message to all missed calls. 
5. Keep a separate document to maintain your contacts. It will be handy to contact quickly. 
6. Utilize the wait time in meeting or flight with podcast or mails or documents or something useful.
7. Stand and work for better brain access. It helps you back too. 
8. Plan your travel to avoid traffic & prepare well for the trip with Map, Itinerary etc
9. Do additional activities on the way home like grocery shopping, visit to bank or post office etc. 
10. Keep emergency cash to avoid running to ATM or Bank. Keep at least one or two check leaf in your purse. 
11. Full your car/motor cycle/bike tank promptly. 
12. Perfection Analysis – Think the gain from perfection. Sometimes less perfection is better then spending a whole lot of time to make something perfect. 
13. Clean your mind for better thoughts
14. Rest well (At least 6 hours sleep) & physical Health (At least 3 days of physical exercise) 
15. Do something other than your regular work for freshness like cooking or reading etc. 

Excel 2010 - How to bring all your data are inside the table

When a table is designed, all the data has to be mapped inside the table. So mapping means that the entire data should be referenced as a single table. If the data is not inside the table then it will cause problem in formula or printing or usage of pivot table.

 So here are the steps to do.

Excel 2010 - How to print the table header in all pages

Here are the steps to print a single row in all the pages ONLY while printing. This will be helpful to print a table header in all pages for better visibility.


1. Click “Page Layout” tab in the Ribbon

2. Click “Print Titles” and the following dialog box will open.



3. Click the button (1) to select the necessary row.NOTE: We can select only one Row.
4. Select the necessary row to repeat in all your page.

5. Click the button (1) to confirm the row selection
6. Click Ok to confirm

Quick way to find the number of lines in your project using Eclipse.

1. 1.     Select Search -> File from eclipse menu or press ALT+A+F to open the file search dialog box.
2. 2.     Enter \n in containing text
3. 3.     Select Regular expressions checkbox or select ALT+X
4. 4.     In File name patterns: Enter *.* for all files or *.java, *.jsp [For java & jsp files]
5. 5.     Scope: Select workspace to search all open workspace or select Working Set to select one or more selected projects.
6. 6.     Click Search and it will give you the number of lines. 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Before you understand the most interesting topic Search Engine Optimization, you have to understand the basics behind the scene. The search engines are connected to the World Wide Web (WWW) and it gets the exact WebPages to its users. These engines are huge systems which can crawl through all the websites through the internet. The most famous search engine is Google which is followed by Yahoo and MSN. The Google search engine receives few hundred million searches every day. The search engine technology is developing everyday and the user experience is increased exponentially.

Introduction to SEO

Search Engine Optimization is the process to increase the number of requests or leads to your website from search engines. The SEO techniques will help the search engines to find your website and give proper ranking based on the site content and popularity. This optimization technique is a win-win situation where the search engines can find the best page for their users and the website owner can promote the website.

SEO techniques in a glance

Here are the lists of most important factors that will affect the ranking of your site either positive or negative.

The content of the site is the backbone to attract the users. The content should be unique and it should force the reader to come back again to your site. If you search for a product or a keyword there will be at least 10K sites with the keyword. The content should be good enough for the search engine to display your website on the top of the search result page and users should be impressed to click the link. The more number of clicks from the search engine’s result page will help to increase the relevance and ranking of the site.

The title of the page is the key driving factor for the search engine indexing process. Due to the importance of the ‘title’, spend ample time to select the right title for the page. The page title should be unique and user friendly to get a good page rank from the search engine. The best keywords should be earlier in the list followed by the regular keywords.

The next important activity is to identify the perfect keywords for your website. The keyword has to be decided based on how the user will search for your products. The keyword should not be too common to avoid the competition from other established competitors. The keywords should not be too complex because the probability for a user to search that keyword is very minimal. The keyword should be kind of balanced between the above two factors. The best practice is to rank all the possible keywords for your product and rank it based on the relevance and complexity. Select only the top ranked items for your keywords. These keywords have to be revisited frequently based on your Google ranking and business changes.

URL: The search engines will consider the URL as one of the factor for relevance. When you select the URL make sure it is representing your theme or your products. When the users search for a keyword which is in your URL then most likely you will get a good ranking from the search engine.

Heading: The HTML heading tags (<h1>, <h2>, <h3> etc) will have better visibility to the search engines. Keep all your best keywords in the heading tags. The heading should be short and effective to communicate your business or products to the users and also to the search engines.

Images: Images are the key components in the website and it communicates the most to your customers. But search engines crawlers cannot read and understand the images. To hint the search engine give the description of the image in the ‘alt’ properties in the image tag (<img>).

Inbound Links: The rating of your website will increase based on the number of inbound links to your site in other external sites. The search engines will rank your site high if the inbound site has higher ranking in their search engine or a highly authorized site. The link text in the anchor tag (<a>) is very important and it should reflect the exact keywords related to the link. The links on the other page should not mark you as no-follow. No-Follow links will be not given any advantage in the SEO and it will be ignored by the search engine crawlers. Most of the blogs will mark other website links entered in the blog comment as no-follow.

Meta-Tag: The meta-tag is the next area where you can enter the keywords and additional details. You can generate the meta-tag for your business website using free online tools. The tools can generate the meta-tag based on your data. So the quality of the meta-tag is based on your knowledge and input. You have to make sure to put all your keywords in the description and keep the best in the initial part of the description. Some search engines crawler will truncate long descriptions.

http://www.webweaver.nu/tools/meta-generator/
http://www.state.ky.us/kystandards/tools/metadata/

Add URL: The website URL can be added to the search engines to crawl though our site for indexing. The Google or any other search engine ranking is based on two important factors

• Relevance - Close or exact match to the user searched text.
• Authority - Google will rank the websites based on the number of website leads in other site.

Website links to add URL to the top search engines.

http://www.Google.com/addurl
http://www.search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
http://www.search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx

Social Networking: You can create a business page in the Social networking sites like Facebook. This business page will give you an opportunity to open your websites to many users in your list and also in your friends list. The business page in Facebook can be created using http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php link.

Digg: You can submit your best documents through sites like Digg (digg.com) to drive more visitors to your site. Based on the user vote, the documents will be visible on top of the page. Make sure to participate, make friends to vote for you and write good comments to be appreciated by the reader.

Google Alerts: Google can send alerts to you for the searches performed in their site. Go to the site and register for the specific alerts to make sure that your keywords are searched by the users. http://Google.com/alerts.

Sitemap: Sitemap is the index page for your site which has all the website links. The sitemap is an xml or text file with the list of links. There are many online tools which can generate the sitemap file for your site. The Google sitemap online tool can be accessed using this link http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/. This is free and effective to list your site in the Google search crawlers. Again, the ranking is not affected either positive or negative with this activity. But you have taken an additional step to inform Google to crawl your site and index the pages. Adding your sitemap to yahoo is bit different. In yahoo you have to create a text file with the list of your URLs in your site. The list file has to be in the root folder in your server and add your site to yahoo through http://www.submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request

Blog

Blogging is the best way to increase more traffic to the site and also to increase the ranking in search engines. The blog will help to demonstrate the capability of your company. Most famous blogging site are blogger.com, typepad.com, wordpress.com. When you are blogging, make sure that you give permission for the users to give comments in your blog. You can also setup your account to send an alert in the form of mail or message if your document received any comments. The number of comments in a document is directly proportional to the value of the content. People will comment on any document either favoring or disfavoring the content only if it is interesting. The most important part is the title of the document. The reason being it is used by the search engines to identify the perfect document for their users. The title should be catchy to the users and make them to read the document. Giving a better title will not bring your webpage to the top in the search engines, but it will help your ranking. Human minds are interested in numbers. If the title has a number or rating then it will be more attractive to the human eyes. But the numbers won’t thrill the search engines. An example of a catchy title is “Top 10 routines to lose 10 pounds in 1 week”. Now it is time to publish the document. Until you publish the document in the preferred market or medium you are not in the race. There are multiple ways to publish your creative document in the internet. You can use any of the Social Media to publish your document. The famous Social Medias are Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Once you have posted, your document will have greater visibility to all your contacts and their contacts. The document should not be a self advertisement to you or to your product. It should be targeting the audience and related to your technology. Blogging will not give success overnight. Your dedication to create new contents and active participation in the blogging will yield success eventually. So be patient and continue the good work to succeed.

RSS

The RSS reader is another best option to drive more traffic to your website. You can use the Google reader http://google.com/reader. It is free, it is online and it is one of the famous RSS readers. You have to utilize this RSS tool very frequently and effectively to get the maximum output from it. Read the documents relevant to your technology and give thoughtful and efficient comments. The comments can be either positive or negative based on your thoughts. Most of the RSS readers will give an option to give your website address when you give your comments. The comment should not contain any information that is advertising the company or the products. This will degrade your credibility and it will affect the leads to his documents.

Tracking Your Progress

Your site should be tracked, monitored and validated frequently. You can use the site website.grader.com to monitor the site ranking, status, any errors in the site. This site provides a detailed report for any site and the exciting news is, it’s FREE. You can track the number of users bookmarking your site in the centralized bookmarking websites. The complete details is available in Delicious.com. These are the most important SEO techniques to raise your site ranking in the search engine ranking. These techniques will guide you to improve the ranking and monitoring the progress. Wishing you all the best!

Office 2010 – The first feel

When I started using office 2007 in April 2010 I felt an ocean of difference between office 2003 and office 2007. Initially it was difficult to adapt to the ribbon structure. I was surviving with Office 2003 menu shortcuts. Once familiarized with the ribbon structure I could see the robustness and effectiveness of it.

Ribbon Image
Within five months I got opportunity to use the latest Office version 2010. I got the Office 2010 installable yesterday and started using it. Here is my first feel about the application.

Performance
I opened the MS Word 2010 application and it took a long time to load. The overall performance for all the operations is little slower than 2007. Microsoft would have added new functionalities in the 2010 version which might have reduced the performance!?!.

File page
The File menu, actually I like to call it as File Page is no more a menu like in 2007 or its previous versions. The menu is a complete page. You can see the current document properties in this page which were hidden in older versions. This will help you modify the document properties easily. The file page is one of my favorite features in Office 2010.

Sky drive
How many times have we worked late night on an important presentation or document on our personal systems and forgot to take it to the meeting? Sounding familiar?? Microsoft has a solution for this – The skyDrive server. The office 2010 documents can be stored directly in the SkyDrive server from MS Word or Excel applications. This will help to keep your documents in a global share drive. You can download and use it anywhere in the world. SkyDrive provides 25GB space for each id which is pretty huge. This is similar to Google Docs, but has lots of office 2010 editing features which are missing in Google Docs. The documents can be edited in the web browser itself. But the web browser version of Office 2010 is not same as the local version. It has most of the frequently used components but not all. My recommendation is to use the locally installed application if you have one and then you can upload it again to SkyDrive. I also noticed that the formatting changes when I open a document in the web version. It is not able to handle multiple columns and image alignments properly.

Portable document format
All of us are so used to PDF that some of us do not even know what the abbreviation means! PDF – Portable document format – this is one of the moist widely used formats to share data. We always stumble upon converting office documents to PDF and end up using PDF software generators like primopdf. This is no more a laborious process. Microsoft has added the PDF generator in Office 2010. This is available in the Save and Send option in the File page. I created a PDF of this document and its pretty neat. You can generate either a high quality version ஓர் a low quality version for online purposes.

Ctrl +P
The print & print preview page has improved a lot in both look & feel and functionality. You can see the complete print option in a single page. Also you can see the print preview side by side when you make changes in the properties and settings.

Screenshot Capture
Another feature implemented in all the Office 2010 applications is the screenshot capture button. When you click the screenshot button, the office application will be minimized and any component behind it will be captured. You can use the mouse to select the area you want to capture. The captured screenshot will automatically be pasted in the activated office application. This is the screenshot I took it from my desktop image (My Daughters eye)

Ribbon structure
One of the main difference between 2003 and the newer versions is the ribbon structure. It is very tough to find a desired component in the ribbon until you are familiar with it. In Office 2007 Microsoft provided an option to create custom quick access bar. This will help you to access the most used components on top of the application. In
Office 2010 they have moved a step forward and have given options to customize the components in the ribbon itself. We can add or remove existing ribbon components.

Navigation
The New navigation bar or panel on the left side of the document will help you to navigate through any big documents at ease. The headings or sections in the document will display on the panel. You can navigate to any part of the document just by clicking the heading. This is a great feature to read huge document.

Smart Art
In Office 2010 we can add images to the SmartArt diagrams. The SmartArt diagrams are one of the most used components and it increased its prospection with the new image tag. You can rearrange the components of the SmartArt and also you can replace one with the other. These SmartArt will give great professional look to your documents and also to your presentations. Here is a sample SmartArt diagram created using Office 2010. The pictures can be modified to a great extend using the tools provided in Office 2010. You can change the color saturation etc and make it more artistic. This will add value to your documents and presentations. You should practice more on how to use these image control tools to get the most and best out of it.

Excel Sparkline
Excel Sparkline is a new functionality in 2010 and it is very useful to understand the trend of the records in a row or a column. We can’t use this to compare data in multiple rows or columns. You can add a new Sparkline component in the last column of a row or column and configure it to display the trend in a bar or line chart or win/loss format. This is pretty easy and more visualizing to the users. Pivot tables are good to drilldown a tables, but this is pretty straight forward and easy for users to understand it clearly. Here is the sample data model with Sparkline chart.

Document Translation
Translating your document is pretty simple and exhaustive in Office 2010. You can translate a set of words or you can translate the whole document. The whole document translation is performed outside the office application. The document content will be sent to

http://www.microsofttranslator.com site and you can see the translation in the site itself,

On the fly
You can filter the data on the fly in the pivot table. On the fly option is introduced in 2010 version. This is more effective when you are drilling a huge table with complex data.

Embedding
You can embed web videos in the PowerPoint presentation. This is a cool feature which will help to have a lively presentation. You can get the embedded object code form the video sharing sites like YouTube and paste it in the presentation. You have to add the video embed code using Insert Video comment in Insert tab. The flow of the video
depends on the quality of the internet connection and video quality. When I tested this functionality at my home, the video loaded pretty fast and the quality was good.

Broadcast
Another good feature in PowerPoint is that the presentation can be broadcasted to anyone in the world who has access to internet. No setup is required either in your machine or the listener machine. When you select the broadcasting option, a link will be generated by the PowerPoint application which will open the gateway to your listeners. This web link will open the presentation in the web browser.

Video Editing
Now you can edit the video files in PowerPoint. This is a cool feature to trim a part of the video or to change the coloring. You can convert your slide show as a video and can distribute it to your clients or broadcast it in video sharing sites like YouTube. This is a cool feature to spread your company news through the powerful video media. You can select the interval between the slides and also the quality of the video.

Oops I did not save the file!
Oh my God! Did your system blue screen, restart or was there a power outage? Often we hear from colleague “ I lost all the work done for hours”. Until 2010, when you are working on a saved document, Microsoft office will able to retrieve the latest data. But from Office 2010 even the unsaved document is saved automatically every 10 minutes in a specific folder. The duration and the folder location can be changed from the options dialog box. This is very useful to retrieve your work from an unsaved document which you have lost during the power outage or when you have closed the document without saving it.

Outlook & Multi tasks
You can create multi-task buttons in outlook. This is pretty cool stuff which will increase the productivity. You can create a button as ‘Sent’ and move the mail to special folder. From outlook you can add contacts to your social network group like Facebook. This is a cool feature in the real
world.

Now if you have reached this point and have not had a look at 2010 yet – I am sure you would want to explore the new features!