brokenshard

… and celebrates it with a brand new release.

jQuery is now 3 years old and is already living the life of a rock star!. Within a small span of time, it has become one of the most used JavaScript library/framework. If web development is your cup of tea, then jQuery is like… well… the tea itself.

The new release (1.3) comes with major performance improvements across many of its core features as well as adding some cool new event based features. Here are some of the highlights:

• A brand new selector engine, aptly named - Sizzle!
• Live Events: Apply events to elements even before they are rendered!
• jQuery Event and HTML Injection Rewrite: SPEED! more SPEED!

There are many other small and big enhancements, you can get the complete list here. The good thing is that upgrading should not cause any major issues. The new jQuery is already available on Google’s edge servers @ http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3/jquery.min.js

I am off to check whether my plugin works fine with this release or not.

admin scripts jquery

How many times have you said to a friend that if you liked this movie, then you will love that movie? I for sure have recommended movies to my friends in such a way. Actually, it always is a chain reaction. I don’t know how would I ever come across movies like Shawshank Redemption, Seven Samurai, etc etc unless somebody thought that I would probably like them. The keyword here is “recommendation”.

We have already seen how successful recommendations can be. Then I came across this new site called clerkdogs. Its a movie/tv show recommendation site. So, if you type in the name of a movie that you like, it will find you other movies which people think you would like.

To test it out I did some random testing. The results are as following:

• Search query: “Prison Break” | Top 3 matches: “Oz”, “Escape from Alcatraz” and “24″
• Search query: “Slumdog Millionaire” | Top 3 matches : “Monsoon Wedding”, “Millions” and “Salaam Bombay”
• Search query: “Saw” | Top 3 matches (apart from saqw sequels) : “Vacancy”, “Seven” and “Hostel”

* Clerkdogs is currently in beta and they say only crime and suspense movies will be matched the best *

So how did it fare? The results are pretty darn good. I was looking for a TV Series which is similar/as good as Prison Break. It gave me Oz. Oz is rated 9.3 at IMDB, which is a really high score. The recent blockbuster, Slumdog Millionaire gave me very accurate results as well. Monsoon Wedding and Salaam Bombay are movies that you may enjoy if you like Slumdog. I have no clue about how Millions fit into the picture though. Similary, Saw was matched prefectly as well. I searched a bit more and found a TV series called Twin Peaks (9.5/10 on IMDB) when I search for Lost.

The good thing about this site is that it is powered by humans and not some automated algorithm running in the background. Stuart Skorman, Founder, CEO and former video store clerk says this on the site’s about page:

…our database is made up of literally hundreds of thousands of individual recommendations from dozens of former video store clerks.  Our former clerks, who understand why customers like movies, have analyzed all the characteristics of movies to create a database that is much richer and deeper than the collaborative filtering engines.  Our system was designed to allow customers to interact with our database and to take control of their movie selection experience…

Overall I loved the site. It gave me a whole lot more to look forward to. One feature, which I think is a bit far fetched, would be to see the site extend to support Bollywood movies as well.

admin new cool website clerkdogs, movies, recommendations

Google has started working on the next version of its browser - Chrome. Rather, they have already updated the latest dev build with many features that had kept me away from Chrome all this while.

Personally, I think Chrome is a superior browser to any other offering in the market - even better than my all time favorite Opera. The browser is incredibly smooth to use, the UI is extremely polished and innovative and not to mention the speed it works at.

But the lack of basic stuff like auto-scroll, bookmark synchronization, auto-complete, etc made me stick to Opera/Firefox. The latest build however has made me “make the move”. Here are some of the highlights:

1. Form Autocomplete. Google Chrome remembers what you’ve typed into fields on web pages.
2. Full-page zoom. Previously, page zoom (Ctrl++ or Ctrl+-) increased or decreased only the text on a page. Zoom now scales everything on the page together, so pages look correct at different zoom levels.
3. Autoscroll. Many users have asked for this and (thanks to our WebKit update), we now offer autoscrolling. Middle-click (click the mousewheel on most mice) on a page to turn on autoscroll, then move the mouse to scroll the page in any direction.
4. Docking dragged tabs. When you drag a tab to certain positions on the monitor, a docking icon will appear.  Release the mouse over the docking icon to have the tab snap to the docking position instead of being dropped at the same size as the original window.
5. Import bookmarks from Google Bookmarks. The [Wrench menu] > Import bookmarks & settings… option now has a Google Toolbar option to import Google Bookmarks.
6. Use different browser profiles. You can start a new browser window that uses a different profile (different bookmarks, history, cookies, etc.). Use [Wrench menu] > New window in profile.
7. Experimental user script support (similar to Greasemonkey). You can add a –enable-user-scripts flag to your Google Chrome shortcut to enable user scripts.

Now thats a lot! and to add to that, the points mentioned above are not all of them! Read teh complete changelist here.

If you are wondering how to update your current chrome build to the latest dev build. Checkout this cool little tool - chrome channel chooser. Switch the channel and then use Chrome’s auto-update feature.

Get the latest dev builds

Now lets see how long can this new build keep me to Chrome. I am sure I will start missing my extensions.

admin software chrome, google

What would you do, if you are asked to teach someone Web Development? JavaScript, HTML and all. I recently faced such a situation and thought it would be nice to share what I came up with.

1. Start with w3schools
   • HTML -> DOM -> CSS -> JavaScript

   There is no better place to begin than w3schools. I used it myself, and I still go there every now and then to reference something or the other. The tutorials are designed for the absolute beginners and explain every section in just the right way. It’s the first place I recommend anybody to start with who wants to learn about web development. Considering that web development in today’s world is not as vanilla as it used to be - I would begin with the following on w3schools:

   HTML is again the most obvious. Knowing the DOM is next as you will probably be using it the most in JavaScript. CSS is critical to know because most web 2.0/AJAX stuff requires you to manipulate CSS via JavaScript.

   One thing to remember here is not to do any assignments other than the ones present on w3schools. Even looking at any assignments beforehand will make you think about them and you may end up skipping some topics, which can come back to haunt you later. Trust me on this one.

2. Create a website

   Yeah. There is no better way to learn than to start experiencing. So, I would recommend you make a simple site. Nothing fancy. A simple, 2 column  website with links on the left and content on the right - and do this using only CSS and HTML. No JavaScript should be used here and don’t use tables for layouts.

3. Mod the website with JavaScript

   Make the links on the left fade in and fade out. This will enable you understand CSS manipulation and JavaScript timeout features. From this point onwards everything in the site should be added via JavaScript. Creating almost every single HTML element in the page using JavaScript will enable a good hold on DOM parsing, attaching events, etc.

4. Get the Holy Grail

   Time has come to get the holy grail of web development. Install Mozilla Firefox followed by Firebug. Open up the website you just created and use Firebug’s inspect tool to inspect your HTML code. Put a breakpoint in your JavaScript code and see how the DOM looks. Use watch expression to check out how JavaScript behaves.Firebug is probably the best way to understand what you learnt in Step 1, 2 and 3. It will provide you with details of how the DOM looks like, how JavaScript behaves and what objects contain which attributes and properties.

5. Back to w3schools

   Go back and learn the AJAX tutorial. Understand how it works across browsers. Use Firebug to see how request are made in the background and how the response comes back. Here you may slow down and also look at how HTTP headers look like. If you want to indulge deeper, you may as well read more about them.

6. Convert your website into an AJAX powerhouse

   Whatever you designed in step 3, should now be AJAX-ified. Convert all link clicks to load content on the right pane using AJAX. No page refreshes and show a proper loading icon when an AJAX request is made.

7. JSON

   This may not be an absolute requirement, but I would say you learn it right now. JSON is the preferred response type in most AJAX calls, so understanding how it looks and behaves is extremely important from a long term perspective.Convert your AJAX responses from Step 6 to return JSON objects. Parse them and show your content. modify your content to have multiple headings and paragraphs.

8. More Assignments
   • Create a fluid three column layout with a header and footer - which works across all browsers.
   • Put some links in the left panel, the right panel and the footer.
   • Create navigation controls in the left panel using unordered lists and CSS.
   • Use JavaScript Timeouts and CSS to animate the navigation panel.
   • Make all clicks on the navigation panel load complex data through AJAX and JSON.
   • A search box at the top of the navigation panel should filter the links in the panel, as you type.
   • Clicking any links in the footer should open a popup inside the same page - positioned dead center of the page. Turn the background gray. - ala Lightbox type effect. No popup windows.
   • Clicking any link on the right panel should open actual popup windows.
   • Try loading content from a different domain using AJAX calls (Cross Domain Issues and Scripting).

   This is the time I would really start doing some hardcore coding. I usually ask people to extend on what they have already done.

9. Pick up a JavaScript library

   The last thing is to pick up a JavaScript library, if you are allowed to ;). In my case the requirement was of jQuery (thankfully). Check it out and then redo all the previous steps using the Javascript library/framework.

As of now, I don’t know how effective this would be to get somebody started with. I will keep updating this post, each time I think that I shouldn’t have done that.

admin know-how javascript

I absolutely love those auto-completing, always-remembering launcher applications. I have been using them for ages now. It has also made its way into Vista’s start menu, but there is so much more that a launcher should do.

The first launcher application that I used, and still do is LSXCommand. Its a module for the alternative windows shell called LiteStep. I will not write about it here because it requires you to ditch your windows look and feel and switch to LiteStep. So, when I did not have that option, I started my search for an alternative windows only application which is fast, simple, takes really less real estate and well - does the job.

I came across Launchy, used it for quite some time, and its great. It even made me an alt+space junkie. Launchy indexes the start menu, or any other folder I want, with whatever extensions I want as well.

It looks amazing, has a lot of skins available and we have the option to add custom commands. After using it for a while, I realized that Start Menu indexing is something that I hardy used. It kinda makes Launchy eat more resources while most of my work was around my custom defined commands.

As always when I started getting bored of Launchy, I started my search again and came across SlickRun. An even more lightweight launcher which is a lot similar to LSXCommand.

It does everything that other launchers do, but does not index any folders - which is precisely what I was looking for. Custom commands can be added as MagicWords, which can take parameters for dynamic content as well. I configured it to my alt+space hot key, added all my magic words and have never since looked for another launcher.

So, if you prefer the keyboard over the mouse, and are constantly using the Vista Start Menu or the good old Windows Run option, give one of these launchers a shot. You will absolutely love it!
Next up: Organize your files with a better file manager.

admin software autocomplete, launchers, launchy, slickrun