Author Archives: greenido

Design, webdev

A List Of Great Free (Developers) Books

Let me start with MindView Inc – Bruce wrote, may be, the best books you can find on Java and C++ and they are free on the web.

Meta-List

Language Agnostic:

Android:

Bash

C/C++

Django

Git

HTML

Java

JavaScript

Linux

Maven

Mercurial

NoSQL

Objective-C

Perl

PHP

PostgreSQL

Python

Ruby

Scala

Subversion

SQL (Implementation agnostic)

Standard
life, Sport

2010 Overall It Was A Good Running/Reading Year

Good running year

Good running year

I had lots of time during the long run to do lots of things: listen to books, thinking and analyzing problems. Here are few tasks I’ve been able to accomplished during 2010 runs:

  1. Listen to great audio books like (the best are in bold):
    • Predictable Irrational
    • Freakonomics
    • Stumbling on happiness
    • Nissim Taleb:  The black swan and Fool by randomness.
    • Stieg Larsson: The girl who… (all the three books).
    • The warren buffet way.
    • Malcolam Gladwell: The Tipping point, Blink, Outliers, What the dog saw.
    • Lost Symbol
    • David Baldacci: Deliver us from evil, first family
      hell’s corner, saving faith, stone cold, the camel club, the while truth and Divine justice
    • Harlen Coban: Back Spin, Caught, Swimsuit, TA, The Christmas train and Wish you well.
    • Thomas Friedman: Languidness and attitude and The World Is Flat – Globalization
    • Unleashing The Idea virus (you can skip this one… wasn’t worth the time).
  2. I’ve meet a lots of amazing people on and off the trails.
  3. I’ve been lucky to be in nature for long period of time.
    Both in summer (Colorado back country) and winter (Colorado – off pistes like: Vail snowboarding).
  4. I did some cool races: Tel Aviv Maraton (so hot you can’t imagine) and the Bay Trail Marathon (so much rain it’s not funny).
  5. I wish 2011 will bring in more of #1 #2 and of course #3 and #4 🙂

Happy New Year to you and yours!!!

Happy new 2011

Standard
JavaScript, webdev

New Features In High Gear Media API

Here is some improvements we have put in our API to make it (even) better to developers.
After How To Work With High Gear Media RSS Feed In (less then) 4 Minutes
and How To Deal With High Gear Media API Using XPath

Here are some new parameters that will make your (=the developer) life happier and healthier.
We have a new ways to output the data or in other words more control on the output format.

Format

the feed format, can be JSON or XML.

Examples:
1. http://feeds.highgearmedia.com/?format=xml is the same as http://feeds.highgearmedia.com , because xml is the default value.
2. http://feeds.highgearmedia.com/?format=json <– This is the better way to work with our feeds, specially, if you are hacking some new cool web2.0 mash up.

Other API parameters

Sites

You have full control on the sites that you wish to fetch information from. Here is a list of all the sites.

Examples
1. http://feeds.highgearmedia.com <– All HighGearMedia content
2. http://feeds.highgearmedia.com/?sites=thecarconnection <– get feeds from thecarconnection.com
2. http://feeds.highgearmedia.com/?sites=familycarguide,motorauthority

tags

Comma separated list of tag names to filter the content by.

Examples
http://feeds.highgearmedia.com/?tags=los-angeles-auto-show
http://feeds.highgearmedia.com/?tags=good

image-size

Size code for images in the feed (t/s/m/l/h)

  • t – thumbnail (default). Unless you are building some new iPad app, this is the best way to have it.
  • s – small
  • m – medium – on iPad or Chrome you might want to use this size or even ‘large’.
  • l – large
  • h – huge

Examples
1. http://feeds.highgearmedia.com/?image-size=t is the same as http://feeds.highgearmedia.com, because ‘t’ is the default value
2. http://feeds.highgearmedia.com/?image-size=m

Car

name of the car :_(optional)_(optional)

Examples
1. http://feeds.highgearmedia.com/?car=Honda_Civic_2003 (__)
2. http://feeds.highgearmedia.com/?car=Honda_Civic (_)
3. http://feeds.highgearmedia.com/?car=Honda ()

How NOT to do it:
http://feeds.highgearmedia.com/?car=Honda_2003 _

Type

type of content items, can be reviews/blog/all (default is ‘all’).

Examples
1. http://feeds.highgearmedia.com/?type=reviews
2. http://feeds.highgearmedia.com/?type=blog
3. http://feeds.highgearmedia.com/?type=all is the same as http://feeds.highgearmedia.com, because ‘all’ is the default value.

Please let me know if you wish to see more/other options.

Happy new 2011

Happy new year!!

Standard
life

The East Cost Snow Storm On The Table

Wow! Very cool video.


So much snow… No wonder JFK (and all the other airports) are closed for now.
I wonder what is going on all the ski resorts in Vermont.

Standard
Sport

30 Mile Week

Overall, this past week wasn’t so bad… 30mile week is ok when you don’t have a lot of time. I sure hope to be able put more miles in the up coming weeks. The main part is to be able to put some bike rides – that’s the part the I love but it’s hard to find 3-4h in the middle of the week.

Good running week

Good running week

I’ve still got some times before the official plan to Big Sur International Marathon (it’s sold out already!) – so I hope to enjoy the upcoming weeks of ‘easy’ runs before the big push will start kick in.

BTW, in case you are wondering where online you can get a good plan for your marathon – this is the best site I’ve found (so far):

http://www.halhigdon.com – Hal is a true expert and I like the fact that his plans can be customize to fit into your busy life.

Standard
JavaScript, webdev

Massive CSS/jQuery Mistakes

I’ve found these two good and short videos (last week – by mistake) and wanted to share them with other friends/developers. The theme for both of them is ‘common mistakes’ most of us are doing. Both presenters are the top of the top in the area of CSS (Nicole Sullivan) and  jQuery (The one: @jdsharp ). Good stuff…

The Top 5 Mistakes of Massive CSS

jQuery mistakes you’re probably making in your project

Core Concepts Starts at 5:20 Actual “5 Mistakes” content starts at 12:00.

Last but not least, here is a little (very) useful bookmarklet that let you have jQuery fun inside firebug.

Standard
life

Mammoth Is Full With Fresh Powder

I wish I could be there…

Happy Holidays to you and yours!!

 

Standard
life, Sport

The Bay Trails Marathon (yes – lots of rain!)

Have you ever run for more then an hour in heavy rain? Well, it is an ‘experience’… I had it several times in life (mostly 20 years ago). It’s not an easy as it sounds, but if it is not too cold, you can even enjoy it.

I had just landed after 34 hours flights from the other side of the world (ya… the holy land). It wasn’t the best way to start a long run, but that’s life. After the first mile, I felt good so I’ve push and the first 6miles where in less then 40min (too fast for me). In that point of the race, I thought it’s going to be an easy sub 1:30 half… however, the body and specially the legs thought they need more rest, and then next 6.1mile where slower and slower up to 7:28 per mile. I’ve finished around 1:40. Well, you better start in a pace you can keep… and try not after long flights.

Here is the start – you can see my number 265.

265 it's me :)

Before the start of the race… last check that the iPod is working

Rain or Shine

This is the look of the trails when the sky gave us 10-15min of break between the rains…

Here are more photos from the event.
Here is a good post that cover the event.

Standard
Business, life

Do You Want To Learn How To Think Like a Lawyer?

I’m so lucky to live near Stanford… It’s the trails, art and the pubs (well… all true except the pubs) that make this place one of its kind. Plus, it’s a good location to gain some new knowledge, no?
Here is a course I’m going to take this winter semester in the Stanford Continuing studies. It’s no secret that anyone that start a business will work with lots of lawyers during her/his course of life… Well, it’s make sense to try and learn, how they think and what driving their decisions. I hope to be able to gain some tools to work with them better in the future.


Disclaimer: I’m married to a lawyer.

Standard
JavaScript, webdev

25 Good (to Great) jQuery plugin to keep in mind

Here are few good (and some great) jQuery plug-ins that can boost your next proejct.

Cookie

Source:  http://plugins.jquery.com/project/cookie

Set and get cookies with jQuery.

Slideshows

There are lots of them, but this one is good in terms of the set of features.

http://jquery.malsup.com/cycle/ Slideshow plugin that supports many different types of transition effects.

Another option (simpler) is jCarousel:

http://sorgalla.com/jcarousel/ Control a list of items in horizontal or vertical order.

Date Range Picker

http://www.filamentgroup.com/lab/date_range_picker_using_jquery_ui_16_and_jquery_ui_css_framework/

Built on jQuery UI. You might want to use it only if the ‘default’ jQuery UI widget is not enough for you.

Flip

Simple & cool animation: http://lab.smashup.it/flip/

Flip your elements in four directions.

Flot: Charting

Source: http://code.google.com/p/flot/

A pure Javascript plotting library for jQuery. It produces graphical plots of arbitrary datasets on-the-fly client-side.

Form

Source: http://jquery.malsup.com/form/

Allows you to easily and unobtrusively upgrade HTML forms to use AJAX.

Hotkeys: Keyboard Bindings

http://code.google.com/p/js-hotkeys/ if you want your web app to be ‘reachable’ using keyboard – this is your plugin: Add and remove handlers for keyboard events anywhere in your code supporting almost any key combination.

Masked Input

Selection: http://digitalbush.com/projects/masked-input-plugin/

Allows a user to more easily enter fixed width input where you would like them to enter the data in a certain format (dates,phone numbers, etc).

Jcrop

Source: http://deepliquid.com/content/Jcrop.html

A quick and easy way to add image cropping functionality to your web application

jGrowl: Messaging System

Source: http://stanlemon.net/projects/jgrowl.html

Unobtrusive messages within the browser, similar to the way that OS X’s Growl Framework works

jqGrid

Source: http://www.trirand.com/jqgridwiki/doku.php

Represent and manipulate tabular data on the web.

JSON: Utility

Source: http://code.google.com/p/jquery-json/

Serializes a javascript object, number, string, or array into JSON (and a few other utilities).

JS Tree

Source: http://www.jstree.com/

jsTree is a javascript based, cross browser tree component.

UI Layout

Source: http://layout.jquery-dev.net/

Create any UI look you want – from simple headers or sidebars, to a complex application with toolbars, menus, help-panels, status bars, sub-forms, etc.

MarkItUp

Source: http://markitup.jaysalvat.com/home/

Allows you to turn any textarea into a markup editor.

Meta Data

Source: http://plugins.jquery.com/project/metadata

Extract metadata from classes, random attributes, child elements and HTML5 data-* attributes.

Popeye: Inline Gallery

Source: http://dev.herr-schuessler.de/jquery/popeye/

An advanced image gallery used to save space when displaying a collection of images and offer your users a nice and elegant way to show a big version of your images without leaving the page flow.

Quicksand: Animated Filtering

Source: http://razorjack.net/quicksand/

Reorder and filter items with a nice shuffling animation.

scrollTo

Source: http://flesler.blogspot.com/2007/10/jqueryscrollto.html

A small, customizable plugin for scrolling elements, or the window itself.

Spell Check

Source: http://github.com/brandonaaron/jquery-spellcheck

Adds spellcheck support to inputs. It uses Google’s spell checking API and requires a server to handle the communication with the API. An example php implementation is provided.

Star Rating

Source: http://www.fyneworks.com/jquery/star-rating/

Creates a non-obstrusive star rating control based on a set of radio input boxes.

Table Sorter

Source: http://tablesorter.com/docs/

Turn standard HTML table with THEAD and TBODY tags into a sortable table without page refreshes.

Uniform

Source: http://pixelmatrixdesign.com/uniform/

Uniform masks your standard form controls with custom themed controls.

Validate

Source: http://bassistance.de/jquery-plugins/jquery-plugin-validation/

Add client-side validation to your forms.

Standard