1. Dive into HTML5 by Mark Pilgrim

Excellent free online book about HTML5 features with a lot of examples. Unfortunately,  Mark has stopped maintaining this project, but community still actively maintain it it.

2. Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte

In his book Ethan explore CSS techniques and design principles, including fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries, demonstrating how you can deliver a quality experience to your users.

3. Mobile First by Luke Wroblewski

Luke explains why we should switch from graceful degradation to progressive enhancement and how to adopt best mobile experience.

4. Pro JavaScript Techniques by John Resig

Great book which explains tricky JavaScript techniques from creator of Jquery library John Resig. Despite it was published in 2006, it’s still topical.

Familiar situation?

There are a lot of solutions proposed on different blogs and forums – most popular among them are disabling ipv6 both in Ubuntu and FF, using alternative DNS resolution service (like Google Publis DNS), playing with MTU parameter of your connection, etc. But unfortunately, nothing works for me.

Finally, I found a solution for this problem. It was in nsswitch.conf - system databases and name service switch configuration file.

Try the following:

Output will be like this:

It means, that first Ubuntu will check files records (like /etc/hosts), then wins, then mdns4_minimal and finally dns. These records were added by Samba, so everything what we should do is change their order to:

Reboot to apply changes.

Lua is a powerful, fast, lightweight, embeddable scripting language. It’s name comes from the Portuguese word lua meaning “moon”.  Lua combines simple procedural syntax with powerful data description constructs based on associative arrays and extensible semantics. Lua is dynamically typed, runs by interpreting bytecode for a register-based virtual machine, and has automatic memory management with incremental garbage collection, making it ideal for configuration, scripting, and rapid prototyping.

Where Lua can be used?

Lua is intended for use as an extension or scripting language, and is compact enough to fit on a variety of host platforms. It is widely used as a scripting language by game programmers (in Blizzard’s World of Warcraft for instance), perhaps owing to how easy it is to embed, its fast execution speed, and its small learning curve. Besides, Lua used in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom for user interface, in MySQL Workbench for extension and add-ons, in VLC media player to provide scripting support and in many other products (list of products that uses Lua on it’s official site and Wikipedia list).

How to get started with Lua?

First you need to download and install Lua for your system. Lua distributed in source code, already compiled binaries and special “Lua for Windows” version. I’ve tried Windows version which include command line Lua interpreter and Lua IDE (“SciTE”) with syntax coloring, debugging, etc.

If you don’t want to install anything and just wanna play with Lua you can try online Demo interpreter.

Lua Basics

The most recent version is 5.1 – released in 2006 (5.2 still under development). Lua written in ANSI C so it’s very fast. Lua has a simple and well documented API that allows strong integration with code written in other languages. It is easy to extend Lua with libraries written in other languages. It is also easy to extend programs written in other languages with Lua. Lua has been used to extend programs written not only in C and C++, but also in Java, C#, Smalltalk, Fortran, Ada, Erlang, and even in other scripting languages, such as Perl and Ruby.

Lua’s syntax is very easy, so it shouldn’t be a problem for any developer to understand it. Two dashes introduce comments. An end statement delimits control structures (if, for, while). All variables are global unless explicitly declared local. Lua’s fundamental data types include numbers (typically represented as double-precision floating-point values), strings, and Booleans. Lua has true and false as keywords; any expression that does not evaluate to nil is true. Note that 0 and arithmetic expressions that evaluate to 0 do not evaluate to nil. Thus Lua considers them as true when you use them as part of a conditional statement.

Usual “Hello World” example looks like this:

Let say “Hello” three times:

Cool, isn’t it?

I would like to recommend you great Lua tutorial by Lee Gao - The.Lua.Tutorial to quickly get started with Lua syntax. If you’re interested to get more information about Lua please check last section with recommended links.

Further reading

Official site: Lua – the programming language

Embeddable scripting with Lua – at IBM developerWorks

Introducing Lua – at O’Reilly OnLamp

It brings a lot of new great features that will drastically change the World Wide Web in the nearest future. Actually, this changes are already there – Google used HTML5 features for video at Youtube.com and Apple launched special promo page on their site to show the advantages of creating rich multimedia web-applications without Flash – yes, they hate Adobe . Even Microsoft announced about HTML5 support in IE9.

Here is the list of main differences from previous (X)HTML versions:

• New layout tags: <article>, <section>, <header>, <footer>, etc.
• Native media playback directly in browser (i.e. without Flash).
• Canvas for drawing.
• New form controls: date and time pickers, fields for email, url, search, etc.
• Ability for applications to working offline (bye-bye Google Gears).
• Drag-and-drop.
• Geolocation.
• Websockets.
• Etc, etc, etc – please refer to the language reference on w3c site.

Because HTML5 standard is quite new, a lot of new features still not supported by browser vendors. Here you can find detailed information about HTML5 support by most popular layout engines and here you can test how well your browser support HTML5.

It’s very easy to get started with HTML5. All you need to do is change your doctype to <!DOCTYPE html>. It don’t break your existing layout, because all tags from previous HTML versions still works in HTML5. After doctype switching you will allow to use new tags like <article>, <section>, etc. and start playing with other new features. You can look at several HTML5 experimentation and demos at HTML5Demos

So this is very quick and short introduction to HTML5. In next series we will try to dive deeper into it and try to understand how to use it in real-world projects. Stay tuned

P.S. I would like to recommend your great book “Dive into HTML5″ by Mark Pilgrim which freely available online.

JavaFX 2.0 will also come with an embeddable browser and will itself be embeddable into… wait for it… Swing. On the surface, it looks like they’re essentially turning JavaFX into another set of libraries for RIA. One tweeter called it “swing++.” This will also make JavaFX resemble Apache Pivot in a few more ways.

via java.dzone.com

So let’s try this plugin and create a small demo to build a tree of my followers from Twitter.

Click here to see the final working demo

Twitter has own great API, but there are many ready to use libraries for all popular programming languages. For this example I will use PHP Twitter class by Tijs Verkoyen.  This class usage is very simple: just include it to your page and instantiate new Twitter object.

To use jsPlumb you need to load jQuery, jQueryUI, ExplorerCanvas and, of course, jsPlumb itself into your page:

I’ve created the following class-wrapper for generating diagram with my Twitter followers:

So finally, our page will have the following content:

You can check final demo here or download zip archive with sample files here. Don’t forget to change Twitter login and password to yours to run this sample.

It’s amazing, really. Just check it out.

Google Weather API

One of the easiest ways to get weather condition and forecast is use Google Weather API. You just need to make the following request:

and you will receive replay in XML format.

I’ve created small PHP class that loads weather condition for specified city. Save it as weather.php

Generate VXML file

Here is our final script. Save it as index.php

You can check the final result here – http://puzanov.info/examples/voicexml/index.php.

Setup your application

Let’s setup our application using Voxeo services. To do this create new application using “Account” => “Application manager” menu item (please check previous part which have detailed description with screenshots how to do this) using script that we created as Voice URL.

Test it

You will find application contact methods in special tab

You should hear a female voice prompt “Please, specify your city”. Say “London” for instance and get an answer about current weather condition in London.

Summary

In this short 2 series article I introduced the process of developing telephony applications and familiarized you with two standards – VoiceXML and CCMXL.  The W3C’s Speech Interface Framework also defines these other standards closely associated with VoiceXML: Speech Recognition Grammar Specification (SRGS), Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML), Pronunciation Lexicon Specification (PLS) and many others.

There many companies that works in this area and provide tools for developers which you could try for free. One of them is Teleku which support different phone markup script languages and provide HTTP RESTFUL XML/JSON.  You could try them as alternative to Voxeo.com.

Further Reading

If you are interested in these theme I would recommend you to read great set of articles on IBM developerWorks section.

Introduction

VoiceXML (VXML) is the W3C’s standard XML format for specifying interactive voice dialogues between a human and a computer. It allows voice applications to be developed and deployed in an analogous way to HTML for visual applications. Just as HTML documents are interpreted by a visual web browser, VoiceXML documents are interpreted by a voice browser. A common architecture is to deploy banks of voice browsers attached to the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) to allow users to interact with voice applications over the telephone.

CCXML (Call Control XML) – is the W3C standard markup language for controlling how phone calls are placed, answered, transferred, conferenced, and more. CCXML works hand-in-hand with VoiceXML to provide a 100% standards and XML based solution for any telephony application.

In this post I will use Voxeo.com (IVR and VoIP provider) developer tools to run our examples. Please register your own free account here to get started.

VoiceXML has tags that instruct the voice browser to provide speech synthesis, automatic speech recognition, dialog management, and audio playback. The following is an example of a VoiceXML document:

When interpreted by a VoiceXML interpreter this will output “Hello world” with synthesized speech. Some applications may use static VoiceXML pages, while others rely on dynamic VoiceXML page generation. In this example we will create very basic voice recognition application that takes in user city from predefined list and provide current weather condition for it.

Create static VXML application

So let’s start with static VXML file first. Create the following file and save it as “weather.vxml”:

Test it!

1. Upload your application

Login here into your Voxeo.com developer account

Click on “Files, Logs, & Reports” link

Upload your application into “www” directory

2. Assign a phone number

To test out a phone-based application, you obviously need a phone, and that implies a number to call. You will get a free Voxeo phone number by creating new application.

Under “Account” menu select “Application Manager”

Create new application with such parameters

3. Run it

Now you can test your application by calling the preferred number from “Contact Methods” tab. Calls from Skype to Skype VoIP number are free

You should hear a voice prompt “Please, specify your city”. Say “London” for instance and get an answer “Currently in London +5″.

Got it? Great.

That’s all for today. In next part we will generate our VXML file dynamically to get actual information about the weather. Stay tuned.

You’ll then need to name your label with slashes (/) to make it the child of another. For instance, if you want to organize your “Work” label messages to appropriate clients just create the following labels: “Work/Client1″, “Work/Client2″, etc.

Gmail team said that this lab doesn’t play nicely with the “Hide Read Labels” lab. You might not get exactly what you expect if you have both labs enabled; for example, the collapse/expand icons won’t always appear when they should.