These days I have stopped working in Rent A Coder and have team up with bunch of Harward Alumni in creating a music site.
Its main page is located at awaaaz.com and still there is lot to be done. The site is going to be designed in Django.
I hope I can work on creating a real world site and to see this company raise from the beginning.
It is very rare that a website makes you feel really happy, that brings years of memories back, that is what I felt with Google map maker. Save the social, ecomonic, web 2.0, ajax buzz, I care more where I came from, what did I do for the first 20 years of my life, where I first saw the world, where there are tons of my pictures when I am 2 foot tall, where I was standing when I proposed my fiancee, where I studied for 4 years.
Google map maker enabled me to see and relive all those emotions, I can see my home, the street name which I first learned to rememeber, my first school, the school which I matriculated from, my undergraduate college, this is truely awesome.
When I was a kid, if I had this map I would have known how to get around the city more easily, aslo finding the shortest paths, movie theatres etc. I used to wonder how would my place look from a map, how would a super being look at the town, now everyone with a broadband has that power. This is truely exhilerating and my heart sings for the google map maker team. Kudos for the idea and for the implemention.
I think this is the way economically not so lucrative places can be mapped. I would spend time on this now and try to improve the maps and contribute.
I am trying to create an account with Weave, which seems a very interesting idea. But i am not able to create an account. I tried repeatedly for a few days like 10-15 days ago but I got a message saying that, accounts are limited for this round of beta testing.
Today I again tried to create account and it seems to working until in the final step which said- server error. Any suggestions on how to make it work?
This is my first major stumbling block on RAC. I’ve had a conversation with the buyer on yahoo chat and connection broke in between and without knowing that he was responding, I asked he would like a mediation- since he was not responding.
He got superly angry and start cursing me and insulting my code and all and put the bid in arbitration. Ah, this is unpleasant, but I have deal with it. He refused to tell me where the error is and arbitrator has to enter. They gave him the option to wait till deadline and then find faults with my code and he accepted it.
Luckily for me, yesterday I was able to overcome the problem and I am on way to complete it. But the problem would be with the additional requirements put forth my the buyer, I don’t how the arbitrator would look at them. They are ambiguous and they are cost him extra money, which he never paid- so I think I am the safe side but who knows.
There is some good news in the next post..
Just now I came to the jQuery site rather accidentally. And found out that its awesome, most of the top companies are using it. I should say I am only starting to learn web development. There are lot many people doign it from a considerably more time. So everytime I see a new JS library, I think voila, this is cool.
So to make my assumptions valid, I checked for the three JS libraries- dojo, prototype and jQuery I know in Alexa.com and found out that jQuery has the highest ranking of all. Awesome, in the next project I am going to use jQuery and then I will put it in my resume !
I heard about this word MetaProgramming in my class and yawned ! One more meta to this world. The instructor introduced it in context of Ruby’s capabilities and I thought will I or anyone use it? But only recently I realized its usefulness in used it sucessfully in my pet language- JavaScript.
Basically, metaprogramming is to write code that will write code. So, you write 1 block of code and that code will create some 10 or n blocks of code. And this code will also be executed/compiled/interpreted at the same cycle. So you can see the results of this along with other pieces of code.
I was working on this Yahoo Maps project using Yahoo maps Ajax API, and I had to create as markers as there are accomidations in the database. I found a clever way of populating everything into JS arrays and then iterating over the array to create markers and i was successful. So the code is something like this
for(var i=0;i<accom_type.length;i++)
{
var geoPoint = new YGeoPoint(lat[i],longt[i]);
marker[i]=new YMarker(geoPoint,markerImage(accom_type[i]),”marker”+i);
marker[i].addAutoExpand(title[i]);
var markerMarkup=”Information about the hotel”;
YEvent.Capture(marker[i],EventsList.MouseClick,
function (){
marker[i].openSmartWindow(desc[i]);
});
map.addOverlay(marker[i]);
}
So for each marker i have to add a YEvent to open a smart window. I have tested this code in FF and thought its working fine and I am done. Only later I realized IE had started shouting at me with a bug.
And I started the usual hate mantra against IE and started looking at the code more closely- no use I am using standard JS with no extras. IE is breaking at the exact line
marker[i].openSmartWindow(desc[i]);
with marker[i] being null. Then why is Firefox not breaking? So to test it I put a hardcoded string in the smartwindow
marker[i].openSmartWindow(”dummy description”);
Ah then I got it, only one marker event is being created all the times. This is one of those strange moments you feel IE has helped you than FF to iron out the bug.
Now, how to solve this? I have to create events for each of the markers seperately otherwise the code is not working. But I can’t write manually an event for every marker and also markers might increase in future. So almost first time I did not use google but I used my knowledge of JS and looked into JS definitive guide for reference for eval. And aha, now I see it how to code this intelligently and put events code in an eval statement and it worked !
So the final code looked like this
for(var i=0;i<accom_type.length;i++)
{
var geoPoint = new YGeoPoint(lat[i],longt[i]);
marker[i]=new YMarker(geoPoint,markerImage(accom_type[i]),”marker”+i);
marker[i].addAutoExpand(title[i]);
var markerMarkup=”Information about the hotel”;
map.addOverlay(marker[i]);
//We have to add as many events as there are markers
// To avoid verbosity using eval to create kind of meta JS
eval(”YEvent.Capture(marker["+i+"],EventsList.MouseClick,”+
” function (){”+
“marker["+i+"].openSmartWindow(desc["+i+"]);”+
“});”);
}
This code gave me a lot of satisfaction since I’ve been able to figure out something on my own and also use knowledge gained in my class ! A MS degree is definitely worth it !
I have recently got firefox 3 and liked the enhaced way of storing passwords - i.e. the message asking if firefox wants to remember the password comes at the top.
This is very useful especially to me because I tend to try wrong passwords and then used to gets stored in the password manager. Now I am clicking ok only after I am succefully logged in.
While browsing addons on FF I came upon Sxipper, I installed it rather skeptically but was overwhelmed by its features ! It seems like on of those addons that makes your online life simpler and you can’t go back to the previous stage.
First it got information from password manager of firefox, that very useful since you don’t want to train each site again. (Is this feature in Roboform?)
My problem used to be that I have several gmail accounts and if I am not using the default one or if I am on my apps page I had to type in the name only then get the password. Now sxipper- as soon as the page loads creates an overlay with all the user ids that I used on tha page. And if you select one - you need not even click login- sxipper does it for you. Pretty neat
Then comes online form filling- sxipper has all the features of google form fill and also more , you can train it. And the stroke of genius comes that you get credit for training. Future users of the site will see your name- viola !
Also sxipper nicely integrates with OpenId, it gets your profile from openid and stores it for form filling.
One complaint is it stores a lot of junk(may be it imported from FF password manager) you can see it zipcode form filling. I have no patience to delete it all manually.
I am happy that I am able to get the domain that I wanted. Its prolificcoder.com. It summirizes what I am and what one can expect in this site.
Basically this will be the homepage of my activities on the web. I would post about my web site development experiences, RAC bids, interviews and if i am able to get a job in this domain.
I am positive that I will keep posting often here
