There always arise a need for converting content from one file format to another one. Some may need to convert some text into HTML and some may need to convert some HTML content to an image format. The main reason for the need to convert from one file format to another is because the target file format is best suited for targeted medium where the content need to be displayed. The targeted medium may be an email, a printed hard copy or a web browser. The text format is best suited for sending emails, as the possibility of the email contents getting corrupted in the transition is much lesser, wh...

The comments in the previous post touched on surprising applications of math, so I thought I’d expand this theme into it’s own post. Below I’ll give a couple general examples of surprising applications and then I’ll give a couple more personal applications I found surprising.Number theory has traditionally been the purest of pure mathematics. People study number theory for the joy of doing so, not to make money. At least that was largely true until the advent of public key cryptography. The difficulty of solving certain number theory problems now ensu...

Anyone seeking to succeed in investment banking in China should live by one rule alone: it’s not who you know, but how well you know them. In China, more than any other country where I’ve worked, the professional is also the personal. Comradeship, if not friendship, is always a necessary precondition to doing business together. If you haven’t shared a meal – and more importantly, shared a few hundred laughs – you will never share a business deal. Competence, experience, education and reputation all matter, of course. But, they all play supporting roles.The st...

"Multitasking means screwing up several things at once," somebody once said, wrongly. In fact, we don't do many things at once, ever. We do many things in quick succession. And some of us are very good at it.Nagy-Bagoly Arpad/ShutterstockEverybody multitasks. We have conversations while driving. We answer email while browsing the Web. It's hard to imagine living any other way. What would be the alternative, removing the seats from your car to ensure you only drive alone? Block every website not named Gmail? A world of constant single-tasking is too absurd to contemplate.But science suggests th...

IntroductionVS 2010 and C# 4.0 introduced so many new features. Here in this article, I try to cover some very simple, yet very useful features of both.1. Hiding the Selected Part of CodeMany a times, a situation arises when we want to hide a specified piece of code rather that hiding the entire region. This has become easier in VS 2010. Just select the part of the code that you want to hide and right click selectOutlining -> Hide Selection.Same way like a region code also gets collapsible and expandable area. Anytime you wish to remove this hiding of text again, select right click, select&...

It's an interesting time to be working on the frontend now. We have new technologies such as HTML5, CSS3, Canvas and WebGL; all of which greatly increase the possibilities for web application development. The world is our oyster!However, there's also another trend I've noticed. Web developers are still stuck in the request/response mindset. I call it the 'click and wait' approach - where every UI interaction results in a delay before another interaction can be performed. That's the process they've used their entire careers so it's no wonder most developers are blinkered to the alternatives.Spe...

In September 2010 we announced the WebP image format with lossy compression. WebP was proposed as an alternative to JPEG, with 25–34% better compression compared to JPEG images at equivalent SSIM index. We received lots of feedback, and have been busy improving the format.Last month we announced WebP support for animation, ICC profile, XMP metadata and tiling. Today, we introduce a new mode in WebP to compress images losslessly, and support for transparency – also known as alpha channel – in both the lossless and lossy modes.With these new modes, y...

So you've got a DVD stuck in the external USB SuperDrive that connects to the MacBook Air? And you've tried hitting the magic Eject button on the keyboard to no avail?And you've tried drutil tray eject at the command-line? And you've tried booting with Option held down and clicking eject? And you've tried plugging the drive into other machines (Macs, Windows PCs, Linux machines) to no avail?What do you do?Clearly you hit the physical eject button, right? Every DVD drive has one of those. On the SuperDrive you first look for it on the front:Hmm. Nothing there. Perhaps it's one of those pinhole ...