First Ascent

I was watching this series First Ascent recently and got amazed by the adventurous adrenaline pumping actions performed by the people in the series.... before that i never imagined such actions are ever possible to do... but now, i have a whole new feeling & confidence that day after day we humans will break every possible achievements and make the impossible next to nothing... if you are an adventurous person with a love for new age action sports, then this series is a must watch for you.... don't miss this...

check out the details in the website http://www.senderfilms.com/firstascentseries.com

each episode in this series exposes different action skills and all of them are presented in high quality with detailed narration, historical stuff on such stunts performed earlier, background information about the sport, people who contributed to it, people who got affected due to the risk involved in it...

the most inspiring one for me out of the series is episode 6 - FLY or DIE... action stunts by Dean Potter
he jus climbs on any mountain with just raw hands... no ropes, no holders... jus a life saving parachute in his backpack and nothing else except for his skills and amazing confidence...
check his website http://deanspotter.com/

no words after watching the series.... it gave me so much inspiration & confidence... jus go for it...:-)

why apple avoided flash in ios mobile platform

for all those apple users who wondered why apple avoided flash in their mobile platform...
here is the explanation from Steve...
http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

my recent client side web development experience...

just wanted to share some of my recent web development experiences...
Requirement
one of my recent project is to rewrite an existing desktop application for internal users and we wanted to go web based this time instead of windows application. Most of the core logic for the old app was in database in the form of complex stored procs, but the existing windows application was also having lot of custom override logic rewritten many times over the past few years which made it run slow and completely block lot of other internal users during its execution time. our task was to increase the performance, remove the locks, redesign the application interface with more flexibility and to simplify the overall process.


Design


Data Layer
as part of the redesign, the first task was to update the database procs with all the additional custom logic moved into them from the client app and kept the client layer very light. literally the client layer is just a view now.
Service Layer
then we added a light weight service layer in between the web client and the database layer. this service layer is to support the ajax calls from the client layer and to do the required data transformation. no business logic again  here.. all the database calls are asynchronous ones taking advantage of the async options avaialble in the ado.net framework
Client Layer
we started building the client interface using html5, css3 and jquery... but then we realised some of our users are still running IE8 or less in Win XP so we can't make the interface to fail.. so we limited ourself to safe use of jQuery & jQuery UI with additional client side UI plugins which runs fine even in old versions of IE.

first we broke down our layout into 5 steps based on the existing logic and the new requirements we gathered from the users, then started building up the interface based on these 5 steps. we wanted to keep the UI as simple as possible, so tried to limit everything in 1 page with no additional navigation, extra tabs, links..


Panels
So we kept all 5 steps in 1 page with each step as a collapsible container. the requirement is to display data @ each step based on the business rule. the users can then select, filter, modify the data in each step and take additional actions on them and process the data into the next step and it continues till step 5. we encapsulated all the controls required for each step into a panel using the jQuery plugin Expandable.
https://github.com/flamewave/jquery-ui-expandable/

Grid
To achieve our goal to display, filter, sort, edit, update the data entirely on the client side we looked around for a client side grid which can bind to the data using ajax calls and manipulate the html data using javascript fast and neat. then we ended up using one of the best available
http://www.datatables.net/

Action
all of the actions that the user perform on the data which needs to submit/retrieve the data and for which calls hops thru service and into data layer, we need to display a confirmation message and block the page till the user confirms. we used the simple blockUI plugin from jQuery
http://jquery.malsup.com/block/

Ajax/Async Calls
we made all of the service calls from the UI ajax based and kept all the database calls from the service layer as Async calls taking advantage of the inbuilt ado.net asynchronous support. this made the user to trigger the calls and get back to the interface as fast as possible without any blocks so that they can carry on with rest of their work. all of the service calls uses JSON data format and the parser we used  is available here
https://github.com/douglascrockford/JSON-js

Final Line
all these plugins used are simple, opensource, jquery based which made our client side web development much easier and faster. and the good part is we were able to make some adjustments and customise some of these plugins based on our needs with very less code change...

happy coding :-) 

HTTP Status Codes

Below is the consolidated list of standard HTTP status codes taken from Wikipedia HTTP Status Code List

1xx - Informational
100	Continue
101	Switching Protocol
102	Processing
103	Checkpoint
122	Request URI too long
2xx - Success
200	OK
201	Created
202	Accepted
203	Non Authoritative info
204	No Content
205	Reset Content
206	Partial Content
207	Multi Status
226	IM Used
3xx - Redirection
300	Multiple Choices
301	Moved Permanently
302	Found
303	See other
304	Not Modified
305	Use Proxy
306	Switch Proxy
307	Temp Redirect
308	Resume Incomplete
4xx - Client Error
400	Bad Request
401	Un Authorized
402	Payment Required
403	Forbidden
404	Not Found
405	Method Not Allowed
406	Not Acceptable
407	Proxy Auth Required
408	Request Timed out
409	Conflict
410	Gone
411	Length Required
412	Pre Condition Failed
413	Request Entity too large
414	Request URI too long
415	Unsupported Media type
416	Request Range Not Satisfied
417	Expectation failed
418	I am a teapot
422	Unprocessable Entity
423	Locked
424	Failed Dependency
425	Unordered Collection
426	Upgrade Required
444	No Response
449	Retry With
450	Blocked by Windows Parental Control
499	Client Closed Request
5xx - Server Error
500	Internal Server Error
501	Not Implemented
502	Bad Gateway
503	Service Unavailable
504	Gateway timeout
505	HTTP version not supported
506	Variant also negotiates
507	Insufficient Storage
509	Bandwidth Exceeded
510	Not Extended

SnowyMountains

a kind of travelog about my recent trip to snowy mountains...

we missed last year snow season as we just arrived in Sydney the same time last year and felt bad when most of my friends were visiting snowy mountains in 2010 winter...

but, we made it this year... with little analysis and planing, the trip was a memorable one for us...

few useful links to check...

www.snowymountains.com.au

www.thredbo.com.au

www.perisher.com.au

after spending time in internet analyzing & comparing thredbo and perisher, reading more about the mountains, where to stay, how to reach there, what to do in snow, we decided to go to thredbo, travel by coach, stay in a self contained studio apartment right in the snow peak, take up ski for a day...

Friday
Started our trip Friday morning 7am from Sydney central by greyhound coach... Travelled via Canberra, cooma, jindabyne, and reached thredbo @ 3:30 pm... Checked in @ karas apartments , freshed up and went for a walk in the snow.. It's a nice long walk enjoying the mountain views filled with snow, had a great mexicana pizza customised for us by replacing pepperoni with chicken.. Returned back to hotel around 7 pm.. Had a good rest so that we can be of full energy next day
Saturday..
Me & kanishk Woke up @ 7 am and was passing time listening music and watching cartoons and waiting for Gayathri to wake up.. Finally she got up @ 10 am and we all got ready for our first time snow ski experience... Reached Friday flat @ 11:30 and rented all the required ski , boots, helmets, tracks and got into snow.. Struggled a lot to get the initial movements and grip but after few mins was on my way easily on the shorter slopes.... Got a lift pass and the only time I used it is to go on a round trip on the gun barrel express lift, the longest lift reaching the highest peak in thredbo. Wat a view I got from the chair lift up & down... It almost 30 mins roundtrip, can never forget the views though I didnt ski from that place... Kanishk & gayathri were having fun in making a snow man and when finally it got into a shape, kanishk had put helmet and gloves to it giving a finishing touch... aroun 4:30 we all were tired & exhausted.. Returned all the rented stuff and went back to hotel...
Sunday
Got up @ 5.30 fresh up and got bus @7.15 ,bus was waiting for us...if we where few mins late we would have missed the bus...it's all becoz Gayathri was busy taking some videos of snowfall...at last we saw snow shower on our return...was a beautiful and a romantic trip ... Luv u Gayathri & kanu