November 2008

I hadn’t jumped on to the Twitter bandwagon for a while. I’m not much of a conversationalist, nor am I a very sociable. I also tend to stay away from social networks. But I figured I would try Twitter out for a while, mostly because it’s an outlet for short comments. For long articles, I have my blog. For sharing links, I have Google Reader and del.icio.us. I don’t quite have anything for that occasional moment when I want to say, “Hey! A great way to shred mint leaves is to freeze them!” ...

The popular way to create a class in Javascript is to define a function and add methods to its prototype. For example, let’s create a class Node that has a method hide(). var Node = function(id) { this.element = document.getElementById(id); }; Node.prototype.hide = function() { this.style.display = "none"; }; If you had a header, say Heading, then this piece of code will hide the element. var node = new Node("header"); node.hide(); If I wanted to hide the element a second later, I am tempted to use: var node = new Node("header"); setTimeout(node.hide, 1000); … except that it won’t work. setTimeout has no idea that the function node.hide has anything to do with the object node. It just runs the function. When node.hide() is called by setTimeout, the this object isn’t set to node, it’s set to window. node.hide() ends up trying to hide window, not node. ...

Some months ago, I was working with a client who wanted to set up a website with social commerce elements. (That’s Web 2.0 in fancy words.) They only seemed to have a very rough idea of what they wanted, so asked them right at the start of the meeting: “Why do you want social commerce?” Their answer was interesting, and one that I had not expected. They said, “We want to project the image of an honest an open organisation.” ...

I left my camera near the window of my office at Canary Wharf in time lapse mode on a cloudy day. The video is playing at 60 times normal speed. Check out the related time lapse videos. They're stunning. With this one, you can figure out which firms work till late in the night. Comments Sumit Dhar 27 Nov 2008 6:27 am: Hey Anand, Did you require some additional equipment to take snaps at particular intervals? Cheers, D. S Anand 27 Nov 2008 6:58 am: Nope – my Canon IXUS 70 has a time-lapse mode. I just placed the camera on the floor and let it do it’s job for an hour :-) Balaji 10 Feb 2009 7:53 pm: Really nice Anand… Fantastic to know that this can be done by a normal user too…