Beware of spam surveys for PayPal

Today I got an email from a very legitimate looking email ID survey@paypal.com which asked me to fill up a survey and in return I would get paid for it. I have a PayPal account and greed almost took me over until I noticed something odd. Below is the mail that was sent to me (emphasis mine).

Dear ABC XYZ,

In a continuing effort to provide our customers with the best possible payment experience, we randomly select customers like you to participate in surveys. Your feedback will help us to enhance your PayPal experience.

To complete the survey, simply click on the web address shown below (or copy the address into your browser). If you complete the survey, we will send you a check in the amount of $930 INR as a token of our appreciation for taking the time to share your opinions.

<URL>

Sincerely,

PayPal

If you look closely at the amount it says $930 INR. That's what prompted me to call up PayPal customer support and they confirmed this is a spoof mail and I (and you too) should not be responding to this mail.

Issue with Indic keyboard and SwiftKey on HTC One X

I recently updated my HTC One X with OTA Android 4.2.2 and HTC Sense 5. This new version comes with Indic (for Indian languages) and Vietnamese (don't know why was this added) keyboard. I prefer to use SwiftKey and have it installed on my phone. One issue that I found was that whenever my phone is rebooted ‒  either by me or some random crash ‒  my keyboard used to get changed from SwiftKey to Indic keyboard.

To let you know Indic keyboard is not the same as HTC Sense Input. Here's how it looks like.

Indic keyboard

Creating Web Part Page in SharePoint 2013

Creating a Web Part Page required you to follow just two simple steps in SharePoint 2010.

1. Go to Sites actions > More Options.

2. Select Web Part Page.

That’s it you are done. But SharePoint 2013 complicates this a little. So here’s what need to do if want to create a Web Part Page in SharePoint 2013.

Menu appearing in left side in Windows 8

I recently bought a Windows 8 PC and it had a weird issue (well what did you expect, that it would run flawlessly).

All my menus were being shown on left side to be precise on the bottom-left side, even the context menus.

Searching your contacts by Company name in HTC One X

Update 22 Dec 2013: This feature does not seem to be working in Sense 5 after I updated my HTC One X to Android 4.2.2.

While putting in contacts in my phone I generally put the Company name also. But to search by Company name you need to enable a setting which is not enabled by default in your People app of HTC One X.

Go to your People app and open the menu. Tap on "Settings".

Using dojo.query with IDs containing colon symbol

While working on my XSnippet to move between pages in a pager control using arrow keys I required to get elements based on pager ID. So I went with dojo.query. But selectors in dojo.query cannot contain characters like colon which XPage extensively uses for generating IDs.

So the code dojo.query("view:_id1:viewPanel1:pager1") will not work. To make it work you need to escape the : with \: or even better with \3A, for backward compatibility with IE.

I wrote a simple helper function escape colon characters from ID.

function escapeColon(controlID) {
    return controlID.replace(/:/g, "\\3A");
}

Writing to log.nsf via Formula, LotusScript or Java

While debugging @Formula code I was using a lot of @StatusBar command to output values in status bar to debug. But the status bar in Lotus Notes shows only around 20-30 last entries. I was looking for a way to write that information to my local log.nsf where I could see the entire trace and analyse it. That's when I ran into this post on Notes/Domino 8.5 forum. It says that by adding LogStatusBar=1 to your notes.ini all the messages that get printed to status bar will be written to log.nsf. And problem solved!

As this method writes every message printed in status bar to log, it works for any language running on client.