code dot joe-kanakaraj dot com

My buddy Brian and I decided to take part in the Foursquare Global Hackathon this last weekend. We both wanted to work on something together – with him doing the backend API work, and me working on the front-end engineering pieces – so this seemed like a good idea. Foursquare has a pretty well documented API that can give you some pretty interesting information on where people are going and what they’re doing.

We decided to build an application called Homefield Advantage. We wanted to see who was checking into baseball games, and to take it one step further, figure out who you were rooting for. We hacked for about 12 hours and came up with a pretty slick little application.

http://hfa.brnstz.com/

We have some great ideas for this as well. Aksay over at Foursquare suggested that we authenticate the user to let the user to declare their allegiance – which we did! Also, Dennis pulled us aside and said he liked out application and he voted for it, and that he would be interested in seeing NFL data.

Sounds like I know what’s going to be in the 2.0 release!

I ran into some serious IE8 issues today and I found this to be totally useful.

http://paulirish.com/2009/browser-specific-css-hacks/

First off, sorry for the delay in posting. Since the holidays, I’ve been pretty busy. Actually, I just got back from a trip to Vail for a couple days of snowboarding and hanging out with some friends.

Anyway, I saw this before I left and meant to post this. Paul Irish has thrown a second installment of what’s important to know from the jQuery source. His first lecture, I found to be incredibly insightful, and I have to be honest – I’m pretty excited to check this out tomorrow.

11 More Things I Learned from the jQuery Source

Wishing everyone a happy and healthy holiday! Merry Christmas, everyone!

So, for those who are interested, you can go ahead and start testing the beta release for Firefox4. Aside from some nice aesthetic enhancements, the big addition is the switch over from Tracemonkey to Jägermonkey as the javascript engine. According to David Mandelin’s blog, these are some of the improvements you should see:

• Big improvements in benchmark scores. Those aren’t the main goal–but they are a really convenient target for us to aim at.
• Things just feel faster, especially big JavaScript-heavy things like Gmail and Facebook. That’s subjective, so as an engineer I feel a bit funny touting it, but that’s what early users are saying, anyway. :-]
• Cool demos and games work great now. You can play a good game of Super Mario Bros in JavaScript now. Or play some Gameboy. Or try a fluid simulator.

Another good step forward in using HTML5 and OOP techniques to create rich, dynamic charts without the aide of Flash. I’m really interested in Raphael, but I think this is a great example of where technology is headed for displaying various forms of data.

How to easily create charts using jQuery and HTML5

I’m happy to announce that we’ve finally made the first steps in giving up support for IE6. This is something the front-end team has been pushing towards for quite sometime. Check out our statement.

Browser Support

Granted – I’ve been a big advocate of just abandoning IE6 and leaving the users to just fend for themselves, but I respect the direction that MLB.com is going in with this issue. My only concern is if they upgrade to IE7, which basically now becomes the new IE6.

So, i made it a point to start moving my development work from my local machine and FTP server, into GIThub. I’m fairly familiar with command line cvs, so jumping into GIT wasn’t that bad. After a snafu that involved me having to reset the HEAD for the master branch, i was able to push up a simple jQuery plugin I wrote that allows will calculate skeeball averages.

• DEMO
• Github
• JS Source

*UPDATE*

Actually found this great blog entitled “25 tips for intermediate Git Users.”

This is the fourth minor release on top of jQuery 1.4 and lands a number of fixes for bugs including some nice improvements over 1.4.3.

Aside from a new .fadeToggle() method that’s been added, there have been a large handful of bug fixes and performance optimizations that have been made.

Read more about it here!

Found this awesome 50+ minute screencast of Paul Irish’s presentation at the TSJX conference. According to Paul:

It’s jQuery on the big screen. We’ll open the jQuery source and run through how the jQuery object works, covering self-executing anonymous functions as a global abatement technique, several interesting jQuery methods, internal jQuery paradigms, and hiddenhancements. You’ll learn JavaScript techniques you can apply to your own code, as well as the basic workings of jQuery itself.

For anyone who wants to get a better understanding of javascript, and run through some concepts that are practiced by the masters, it’s a must see!

10 things I learned from the jQuery source