Compile C++ easily with online cpp shell

Of all the myriad programming languages there are quite a few that stand out in the coding world, and none perhaps so much as C, or it's big brother, C++.

While Java and JavaScript has had breakout years recently due to the explosion of internet facilities (and websites for seemingly EVERYTHING) and the massive popularity of Android, C++ was the original language for making some awesome stuff from the times that kicked off the computer era, and is still the go-to language for many hardcore programmers for developing their biggest projects.

But for newbies that are just starting out in C++, starting out can be daunting task. Many once-popular C++ IDEs (Turbo, Dev etc) are just outdated these days. And many don't want to go through the process of downloading and setting up Eclipse or Visual Studio for just getting their feets wet in the ocean of C code.

Well, for such people, good news : There is a simple, easy to use and up-to-date C++ compiler that
does what it says on the tin avaiable on the net (Of course on the net...where else?).

Even the link shouts out simplicity: cpp.sh (=P)

The link loads up a page with 3 sections: One for the compiler output, one for the execution output, and one to write your code in. It by default loads up a hello world code.

It won't be useful in running anything other than basic programs, but it's more than ample to determine whether C++ suits you enough to go for a proper IDE, or postpone the learning for some more time.

Nitro Type takes typing to the next level

Continuing on the series of typing trainer websites and softwares, this post introduces you to yet another website designed for increasing your typing speed.

You might be thinking "Blah. Another speed typing website.". Well, this particular websites takes things to another level, with a touch of gaming. (Ever heard of using Nitro boosts during a typing race? Yeah...)

Visiting Nitro Type loads up a website resembling decals on an American muscle car. The effect is immediate. The website is a deal bigger than the previous typing websites mentioned in this blog. There are international leaderboards, stats, an option to race with friends, and even a garage!

You can just race with players around the world (The faster you type, the faster your car goes) as a guest, or make an account and unlock the plethora of options offered by this site that makes it more of a MMO game than a typing trainer. Customise your car, challenge users, knock off milestones and gain reputation. Heck, you can even join a bunch of your mates together in a team and wreck havoc in the typing charts across the globe (Finally something that allows us to truly become 'Keyboard Warriors' =P ).
The racing part is complete with engine revving sounds and dubstep music playing in the background.

And there is nothing more satisfying than seeing your user name sitting on top of the 'fastest racers' chart. Or using nitro near the end of a race to blast ahead of the leader in the last few microseconds.

Simply addicting.

Discover how fast you can type with 10 Fast Fingers

Several weeks back, I posted an article on Speed Typing Online, one of the best places to discover your true typing speed. ( Read it here.)  As promised in that post, This post will introduce you to another such website, called 10 Fast Fingers.

The setup is pretty simple. You wait for the website to load, and simply start typing the words given in the box. The one minute countdown starts as you start typing, and the test is over when the timer runs out. A box shows up immediately showing your typing speed in WPM (Words Per Minute), your keystrokes, correct words, wrong words and where you stand in all the users who used took the test in the last 24 hours.

A big blue 'share on facebook' button makes showing off to your friends hassle-free, and the screenshot link re-creates your 'report' as an image for embedding anywhere you wish.

Simple,efficient,effective and a helluva lot of fun.

Embed images easily with Base64 encoder

This article will explain all about Base64 encoding of images and how it can be useful to you.

So what is Base64? According to Wikipedia, "Base64 is a group of similar binary-to-text encoding schemes that represent binary data in an ASCII string format by translating it into a radix-64 representation." Doesn't explain much, does it? Well, I'll make it simpler: Base64 encoding converts an image to a series of characters that can be used in HTML webpages.

By now, you would have figured out that the rest of the article is not going to be of much use to you if you don't know or if you don't do any HTML programming.

Base64 encoding works for many things other than images, but in this article, I'll be dealing with encoding of images only.

So why would anyone want to convert images into a string of characters? Base64 encoding has multiple applications. You might simply want a webpage to not make a reference to any assets on your computer to load an image. This is extremely effective for loading small low-quality images fast without putting extra stress on your server. Or you might just want to hide images in a HTML file that you are sharing with someone so the content of the images are not easily visible to them.(Tech savvy people will just inspect the code and pull out the images from any browser, but still...)

So let's get to business. How do we convert images to Base64? There are multiple websites that does this. http://jpillora.com/base64-encoder/ is a simple example. All you need to do is drag and drop images into the white area. The page spits out the Base64 in mere seconds.

Now all you need to do is copy and paste the code in the 'src' attribute of the <img> tag.
The ends results will look like this:



That's it!

NOTE: Internet Explorer 8 has a Base64 length limit of 32Kilobytes.(But who the hell uses IE8 these days? )

Hope that was useful to some of you!

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Create chat rooms easily with Freenode

While for those who already know what Freenode is this post may sound obvious, but there are thousands of internet users out there that will greatly benefit from using such a service. So I decided to put this down on a post.

Freenode is known all over the world as the largest IRC network that still sticks around.
Don't know what is IRC? Well, IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat, and is one of the many internet protocols obscured by the popularity of HTTP (Which stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) . IRC networks were the primary way of chatting for folks around the globe before the viral spread of Facebook, Whatsapp and other social networks.

IRC networks essentially allows any one to create a chat channel, and any number of people can log in to a channel to discuss anything in a group. It's probably the next best thing for group chatting after a Whatsapp/Facebook group. But the icing on the cake is that chatting on Freenode does not require signing up or logging in. It's come, chat, and go. Simple as that.

You can use a nickname as an alias, create a chat channel, and give the channel name to your buddies and get going. Go to webchat.freenode.net, enter a nickname, a channel name (Which should begin with 2 hash tags, unless you have a registered channel), verify the captcha and click connect.

But before you do that, I highly recommend going to https://freenode.net/ and read the documentation so that you don't end up doing something wrong on the network, and to get information of how to create registered channels and registered nicknames.

That's it, and I hope this was useful!