What is Caret Browsing?

It is the new accessibility feature in IE 8.0. You can use less of the mouse and more of the keyboard to select portions of content in IE 8.0.

It is not turned on by default, but you may turn it on by pressing the key F7 when your cursor is placed on a web page opened in IE 8.0.

The first time you click F7 while you are on web page you will see the following message.

You can read more about it by clicking on the hyperlink in the message.









Here is a demo.

Caret Browsing turned off (default)
Click any where on a web page opened in IE8.0 and then try to use your Shift and the navigation keys (right,left, top, down) to highlight content. You will not be able to select text.

Caret Browsing turned  on
Click anywhere on the web page. Hit F7. Enable the Caret browsing.  Now with the Shift and navigation keys (right,left, top, down) you can select content just like you were able to do with your mouse.

The only problem is IE 8.0 is very slow!!

Can you chain remote desktop connections?

Yes you can.



You can link up multiple machines. Of course you will be using only one computer.

I have computer XPHTEK which I can access from my computer Hodentek.

I have a Laptop with WIFI wireless connected to the above two computers. I can access Hodentek as a remote connection from my laptop HODENTEK2 and from within the remote connection I can remote access XPHTEK. I have some word processing in a language other than English in each of these computers but I can work on them in my laptop and print it out to a shared printer on HODENTEK.

I installed MySQL, how do I know what version I have and how to start and stop it?

If you installed MySQL it is probably in the directory where it is installed. For example, I recently installed XMAPP which brings in a bundle of stuff like Apache, MySQL, PHP etc. In this case, it was installed in the Xampp directory in the C drive.

You have to see if you have an executable program called mysql.exe among many other executbles and confi files.

If you have mysql.exe you should try to connect to it as in the following
snippet:

C:\xampp\mysql\bin>mysql
Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 36
Server version: 5.1.30-community MySQL Community Server (GPL)


Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer.


Try the help and get everything you need

The control should now go over from C:\ to mysql>

The first thing to do is to verify the version you have on your computer.

For this, do this, do not forget the semi-colon:

mysql> Select version(),Current_Date;
+------------------+--------------+
| version()        | Current_Date |
+------------------+--------------+
| 5.1.30-community | 2009-04-13   |
+------------------+--------------+
1 row in set (0.05 sec)

I assume you have no start and stop shortcuts for the server. If you do have you can start and stop from the shortcuts or when you have a window with start and stop buttons for the server.

What are 'breadcrumb' links?

This is a navigational aid in web pages. In Figure 1, I have gotten to the last page on a shopping site and the highlighted region is where you find the 'breadcrumbs'. One step back (which you can reach by clicking on that particular crumb[Brand:Acer Comuter]) will bring you back to the page pointing to that crumb, Figure 2.

Figure 1

Figure 2

How can I change the color of the DOS screen?

I am bored of the black color, how can I change it?

It's rather easy. You can configure the DOS window and change some of the things around. Color for one is easy to change.

Open a DOS Window from Start | Run

Right click the top of  DOS window inside the title bar. From the drop-down click on Defaults. This opens the following window.

Now click on the Colors tab in the above window. I have changed both the Screen Background as well as the Screen Text. You can immediately see the changes you are making.

The next time you open the DOS window you will see the changes provided you clicked OK to the above screen after the changes.

What is Upsert?

Upsert provides the following SQL functionality:

If something does not exist in a table then insert it. If it exists then update it.

This is something like what happens when you move a file to a folder, if the file exists it will ask you whether you want to replace it with a new version or not. If the file does not exist it is inserted, no questions asked.

This is implemented by MERGE in SQL Server 2008

What is JSON?

 JSON stands for Javascript Object Notation. It is a special object notational construct and is a subset of JavaScript. It can be used wherever JavaScript can be used and you do not need to download anything. There is no need to worry about the version of JavaScript, It works with all JavaScript versions.



RFC 4627 describes all aspects of JSON. JSON was designed to be brief (small), textual, and portable. The MIME Media Type is now registered as application/json. JSON can handle exchanging data in applications written in different programming languages such as C, C#, ColdFusion, Perl, Python, Ruby, and so forth.



On getting JSON data from SQL Server read this interesting artilce by William Brewer.