New Breed of Geek

14km Sri Chinmoy Centennial Park Cross Country Run

2011-12-18T23:00:00.000-08:00

I ran my first Cross Country Run around a week back and it was a brilliant course. The weather was a bit on the hot side but in the end I managed to pull through comfortably although my time was not as fast as I wanted. I'm starting to really like running off track now and have even started to incorporate cross country running into my weekly training runs. I also find that running on grass and

8km Sri Chinmoy Cooks River Run

2011-11-28T22:14:00.000-08:00

I had a fun 8km run over the weekend at the Sri Chinmoy Cooks River Run held near my old suburb at Hurlestone Park. I didn't know what the route would be and when I rocked up for the run at 7am in the morning I was very excited because I realized that I had run that route many times when I lived in Hurlestone Park, in fact it was the same route I used almost very day when I trained for my first

A Demo Showing the Performance Benefits of using HTML5 Web Workers

2011-11-13T18:09:00.000-08:00

Javscript is fast becoming my favorite programming language and its popularity is only growing as it becomes the core language behind HTML5 based web applications as well as standard web sites. At my current job, I work with a team that builds the user interfaces for IPTV connected set up boxes (STBs), We primarily use Javascript as the programming language and work on very strict performance

Is Facebook Tracking our Web Surfing Activity?

2011-10-05T23:19:00.000-07:00

Over the last few days, every since Facebook did the major update to it's user interface I have been reading a lot of articles on the web relating to the topic "Does Facebook track our web surfing activity even after we log out". This is clearly a very major breach of online privacy as no website has the right to track our surfing activity without our knowledge. Out of curiosity, I decided to do

My First Duathlon - Parramatta Park Duathlon

2011-08-29T21:14:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday I completed in my first Duathlon which was the last race as part of the Hills Tri Club's yearly Duathlon Series and was held at my regular training location, Parramatta Park. This was also the first time I had taken part in a race that involved Cycling. The race was 3.2km Run - 19.2km Cycle - 3.2km Run and was conducted with standard Triathlon Australia rules (No drafting, blocking on

14km 2011 Sydney City2Surf

2011-08-16T19:07:00.000-07:00

2011 has been a pretty bad year for me with injuries, it started off really well and I was getting fit gradually just in time for the running season. Unfortunately I then had a pretty bad fall playing indoor soccer and badly injured my right knee around two months ago. It took me more than a month to be able to walk without a limp and a few more weeks before I could run. So City2Surf was a real

Apple JavaScript Coding Guidelines - Issue with Recommended "Inheritance" Use

2011-07-05T19:29:00.000-07:00

Today at work, one of the devs pointed to this "Apple JavaScript Coding Guidelines" document and expressed some concerns about some of their tips. http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/ScriptingAutomation/Conceptual/JSCodingGuide/JSCodingGuide.pdf I was reading though it I came to the bit about "Inheritance" which is explained as below: "JavaScript allows an object to inherit

Advanced JavaScript Tip #3 - Beware of the Date() Object, Its Evil!

2011-06-08T00:12:00.000-07:00

Ok, it's not evil at all. It's actually a really useful object. But today I came across a weird issue (although it may be an issue for me, maybe its just the intended core JavaScript design). Either way, this has not been documented well and could cause a lot of issues. As you know you create a new Date object like this: new Date(); This returns the datetime of now, which looks like this:

Advanced JavaScript Tip #2 - On the fly Casting of Primitive Types Into Objects

2011-05-19T00:26:00.000-07:00

I just found out today that NOT everything in JavaScript are objects, I thought they were because if I do something like this: var a = 10.1234; var b = a.toFixed(2); // b = 10.12 I used to think that the .toFixed() method was only available on the Number() object and therefore the moment I initialized "a", it had to be a Number() object rather than the native "number" type. That's the only way

Advanced JavaScript Tip #1 - Object Checking

2011-05-16T00:22:00.000-07:00

Following up on my "Tricky JavaScript Questions" series of posts, I wanted to also share some advanced JavaScript tips I come across that I find useful. So today's tip is for a simple function that can be used to confirm if something is of an object type or not. The Code: function isObject(a) { return Object(a) === a; } The Explanation: When you pass in a argument into the standard "

Tricky Javascript Question #1 - "Declaring Object Properties and Shorthand Syntax"

2011-05-11T00:26:00.000-07:00

I have always had an obsession with the javascript language and to learn new things daily. The fact that you can do so many things with javascript makes it a real challenge to master the language as well as the the various coding patterns. So to keep myself up to speed (as well as challenge my readers) I'm starting this "Tricky Javascript Question" section to post my learnings on a particular

Using Bayesian Average to “Rank” Content Based on User Ratings

2011-02-24T16:07:00.000-08:00

I recently completed the rollout of a brand new “Rating” system for our ninemsn site image content, essentially allowing users of our site to use the familiar “Star” method to rate each image in a slideshow like so: Here, the user is about to rate this image “4 stars” and this image already has an “Average Rating” of 4.0 stars. How is the “Average Rating” calculated?Simple, let’s say that prior

Blogger XSS Attack + Hack

2011-02-08T22:04:00.000-08:00

Today I found that my blog was hacked and an XSS vulnerability of blogger exploited. So, What Happened? 1) Basically, somehow, someone had managed to post two new blog entries in my blog like so 2)I did some tests and it seems the "body" entry area for Blogger allows you to enter any script code you want, and Blogger does not check or filter out possible XSS attacks. Here is an example 3

Announcing FacebookTV : A Pure HTML5 Web App

2011-01-28T19:05:00.000-08:00

After working on this idea for around 2 months, I officially released FacebookTV last week. FacebookTV (www.Facebooktv.co) is a web app that has a unique "look and feel" that automatically fits screens of all sizes, so it looks good on both your computer and mobile screens. I am also looking at ways to improve the user interface to fit television screens as well, so it can be used on Internet

Extreme Beginner Triathlon Swimming

2010-10-17T01:41:00.000-07:00

I'm been trying for a very long time to get started with triathlons but have not been able to find the motivation to keep up with a regular training program. In the past I've started a few training regimes but almost always slipped away from the programs after a few months. The main reason for this being that my swimming skills are really very poor and i find it very hard to drag myself to a

Chevron Perth Marathon

2010-09-05T23:59:00.000-07:00

On Sunday 29 August I ran the Chevron Perth Marathon. It was the most gruesome run I have done till date and I somehow managed to finish the 42km distance in 6h 07m. Before the Race: Leading up to the race, I had not run as much as I had planned. Unlike my first marathon last year I took this run a little less serious. I only did a half marathon and two long 30km runs around 5 weeks before this

14km Sydney City2Surf

2010-08-10T17:17:00.000-07:00

I completed my first Sydney City2Surf yesterday with a time of 1h 23m (83m). It was an amazing experience with 80,000 runners taking part in the “largest fun run in the world”. There were so many people at the start line and I had to line up for more than 40 mins with the Blue group to get going, after which the roads were jam packed with runners for at least the first 3 kms. At around the

Yahoo Pipes and My Garmin Connect Runs Feed

2010-07-24T06:09:00.000-07:00

My running watch of choice is the Garmin Forrunner 310XT, it stores distance, location and heart rate information (amount other cool stats) and lets me uplaod them to an online to a Garmin website called Garmin Connect. This website is super cool and shows me amazing graphs and stats on each one of my runs, but the only downside is that is has very bad 'sharing' options, the only thing i get is

21km Sri Chinmoy Dolls Point Half Marathon

2010-07-14T18:53:00.000-07:00

This was my first race for 2010 and it was good to be back, I did this more as a training run than a serious race but did end up running the 21km in a time of 2h 15m which is usually faster than my training runs so I was happy. I was also happy that I managed to do the whole run without consuming any Gatorade, I have been trying to cut down my dependency on the sports drinks for longer runs so

Facebook JavaScript SDK Code + Hidden iframe + IE = Facebook API Not Responding

2010-07-14T18:34:00.000-07:00

I just wanted to write up a quick post on this little scenario that can drive Facebook developers crazy when trying to work out why their Facebook code does not work in IE. If you are using the Facebook JavaScript SDK on your site to connect and use the Facebook Graph API, chances are you usually would code all our Facebook JavaScript code in a separate html/js file and include it as a hidden

Released Facebook 'Like' Button on ninemsn Sports

2010-06-11T05:22:00.000-07:00

On the eve on the Fifa World Cup 2010, my team at work just released a powerful new slideshow tool (Backend built using Silverlight) to let our content producers pump out new slideshows at a very fast rate. I cant show you guys the back end but the front end looks like this. http://wwos.ninemsn.com.au/worldcupslideshow/92676/opening-concert-in-soweto.slideshow This is essentially a very simple

Migrating from the Facebook Connect JavaScript Library to the new JavaScript SDK and Graph API

2010-05-22T06:55:00.000-07:00

Around a month ago I worked on a project at work to rebuild the ninemsn commenting tool which lets our users post comments on our website content (I’ll post a full review when we go live next week - End May 2010). I spent a lot of time working with Facebook and Twitter integration so that comments that users post on our sites seamlessly flow into Facebook and Twitter as well (the user gives us

Facebook’s New Social Graph Platform

2010-05-04T23:17:00.000-07:00

Another one of my "What Me Thinks" articles... ‘Facebook Connect’ is being replaced by the ‘Facebook Social Graph Platform’, which can basically be described as a vast network of people and the things they like. I believe this is the first step to a global shift in the WWW where content will be personalised based on your likes no matter what service or website you visit on the web. Why do I

10,000 Sit-ups in 30 Days

2010-02-22T02:36:00.002-08:00

As mentioned in my last post, I’m still not going to be able to do anything physical for around 2-3 more weeks, but I really want to set a new goal and aim for it during my recovery stage. I’ve been busting my brain trying to work out a realistic goal that I can attempt without making my injury worse and I think I’ve got it. It’s not a crazy goal but I believe it’s going to be challenging for me

I'm Injured Again

2010-02-22T02:36:00.000-08:00

Over the last two and a half months I have been forced to stop running and doing anything physical, due to a really bad infection in my right foot that started after I didn’t treat some running blisters I got after my last marathon. Even though I’ve taking really good care of my foot over the last couple of months, I unfortunately got struck down with some other internal allergy my body formed