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Showing posts from August, 2011

Ah, the joys of poor messages, brief documentation and faded memories!

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Today, I was at Hack Dev days in Vancouver, B.C. and enjoyed the group and the presentations. Two recent Uni-grads and I teamed up and proceeded to define a project and work away for most of the day.  We were using the TinEye.com API, specifically a collection of 10 million images from Flickr that they have in one of their libraries. We decided to create a Chrome Extension on the API (one of the other dev’s had done one of these recently).   It’s been 16 months since I have done any serious JavaScript/Ajax stuff, and that was (in hind-sight) unfortunately against the website where the pages were hosted…   The code that consumed most of the day… The code below should have been up and working in 15 minutes… < script type ="text/javascript"> var ApiUrl = 'http://piximilar-rw.hackdays.tineye.com/rest/' function myData() { var fd = new FormData(); fd.append( "method" , "color_search" );

Windows Azure Service Dashboard OPML Feed File

In case you don’t want to add all the RSS feeds on the Windows Azure Service Dashboard , I’ve created an OPML file you can import into your ( Google ) reader. The file is up on Windows Live Skydrive but in case you can’t get to that, the file contents are below. If you found I’m missing a link or the link has changed, please let me know.   <? xml-stylesheet type ="text/xsl" href ="http://www.microsoft.com/feeds/msdn_opmlpretty.xsl" version ="1.0" ? > < opml version ="1.1" > < head > < title > Azure Service Dashboard Feeds </ title > </ head > < body > < outline text ="AppFabric Access Control [East Asia]" title ="AppFabric Access Control [East Asia]" type ="rss" xmlUrl ="http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/support/status/RSSFeed.aspx?RSSFeedCode=NSACSEA" htmlUrl ="http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/support/status/servic

Tech Qu: The checking your degree questions…

University transcripts are no longer trusted because of grade inflation and even bogus degrees. The result is that often people are asked questions that anyone that has taken a 3rd year computer science course (recently) should be able to answer. Personally, I feel these questions are biased for recent graduates and against those that have been in the industry many years. They are theory centric and not practical center.   On Glassdoor, one contributor says it perfectly: There are many question which will from you university course of Informatics, so worth to renew that knowledge. Many puzzles, and mostly of them you can find in internet. Nothing difficult, just good exam on things which you will never use in real life .   A few examples are: Differences between Array, Linked List, Heap etc You could dive into mechanisms of implementation, or cite a table (i.e. rote learning) such as   Linked list Array