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Showing posts from June, 2012

Back to quality education with Udacity and KhanAcademy

A slight deviation from my usual posts and this time I am reflecting on the state of education, when I was a school student and the new digital era being revolutionized by the likes of Udacity, KhanAcademy and Coursera. Every child goes through this phase, and its the decision that he makes, at that point, that may change the future course of his life. Every child has a dream and every dream has some limitations, which are constrained by our imaginations and most of which are self created.  As a child I always wanted to study and understand mathematics and its applications, but was never able to. I never understood what my teacher was teaching, as it was a pure mechanical process.  Put a formula, here and a formula there and you get the solution.  They never made us ponder why things work the way it does. For me mathematics was one of most dreaded subjects and also one which I loved most, for being one of the subject on my top hate list.  Pretty contradictions, and that's

Quickly build a jQuery watermark plugin with HTML5 and modenizr support

In this edition of blog post, we will quickly build a jQuery watermark pluigin for input controls.  This is an adapted post from   http://uniquemethod.com/html5-placeholder-text-jquery-fallback-with-modernizr .  I have quickly refactored the code as a jQuery plugin.  The author in the above blog post has done a great job of summarizing the concept. A watermark or placeholder text is an indicator by input controls as to what data could be enter in the field.  It's kind of a hint to user entering the data. HTML5 has native support for watermark in the form of "placeholder" attribute.  Any text that you put in the placeholder attribute will show as watermark in modern browsers. For browsers that doesn't yet support HTML5, jQuery comes to the rescue.  Also, we are using Modernizr for feature detection. Modernizr is an excellent feature detection library, with which we can detect for support of modern standard by browsers. You can see a working version here

A new startup initiative: Ownabook.org - A community site

Lately there has been a traction from my usual work, and was thinking about starting something very different and helpful to the community.  Various ideas where jumping in my mind, but as usual ideas are ideas and of no use unless it sees the light of the day.   Did tried attempt at various small open source projects, in PHP, rails, MVC, jQuery, but never completed any of them fully.  Something always stopped me at the last moment. But the good thing is there was tremendous learning in all these activities.  Learned a ton.  But one thing always hounded my mind, my incomplete OSS projects. So, this time, didn't thought much,  just jumped straight in, took the code editor and begin designing my ideas as code.  One of the outcome is http://ownabook.org , a community initiative were some lucky bookwormers may get cool books, absolutely free.  That's not all, once the site is up, there will be unique features and opportunities to grab. The idea behind this is to keep the read