Yahoo! Weather report for India

In my last post I showed how to find weather information for a place based on its WOEID using YQL & Yahoo! Weather API. The Yahoo! API will get you weather info for ANY place that has a WOEID - including a country. How do you generalize weather conditions for a country as big and diverse as India?

The current conditions description (Smoke!) made me chuckle.

Also see:

• JavaScript: The Good Parts - photo gag
• "Had to scramble to get dressed when someone wanted video on a call."
• The trouble with Kindle is...

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HOW TO find weather information for a place based on its WOEID using YQL & jQuery

There are many free Weather APIs that can fetch your weather details for a location but if you had to fetch it based on WOEID, you can turn to YQL or the Yahoo! Query Language & Yahoo! Weather API. Interestingly, unlike other free Weather APIs, YQL can also return JSONP results over HTTPS.

Here's the code (from my first GitHub Gist) -

The default unit of measurement of the temperature in the results returned by the API, is Fahrenheit. You can specify "c" or "f" for the unit parameter to get results in Centigrade and Fahrenheit respectively. Note that lower-case "c" or "f" has to be used.

Also see:

• Screen scrape with jQuery, AJAX, JSONP & YQL
• How can I bulk query the Yahoo Weather API for more than one location at a time?
• StackOverflow Yahoo Weather API, YQL Q & A

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HOW TO play videos from mobile YouTube on your desktop Firefox browser

If want to check a YouTube video without waiting for it to buffer while you're on a low bandwidth Internet connection or just want to preview a video quickly on a decent connection, you can try out the mobile version of YouTube.

However, the videos on m.youtube.com use the Real Time Streaming Protocol (RSTP) to show videos in 3gp format so it won't normally play on a desktop browser. You can copy this URL to play it in VLC Media Player. Alternatively you can use the Vlc context menu Firefox add-on to the add URLs of  mobile YouTube video files to VLCs playlist via the context menu of your Firefox browser.

Open m.youtube.com in Firefox and search for the video  you want to watch. After you locate it, right click on the Watch Video link & choose Add URL to VLC Playlist option

Is the Vlc context menu Firefox add-on safe to use? I don't know. It has been in the Mozilla Add-on directory since August, 2010 with 7 user reviews and 30K+ users so it's probably safe.

Also see: Low bandwidth? Try mobile version of popular websites on PC/laptop

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The many uses of Virtual Machines

My first experience using a VM was with a Virtual PC VHD that Microsoft offered to test IE. Over the years, I've worked with VMWare Player and Hyper-V virtual machines and I love the convenience they provide - so much so that whenever I start a major project, I prefer having a new VM. For those that have not experienced the joy of VMs, here is a list of its uses:

* Save time on environment build-outs - building a development environment from scratch can be a time-consuming affair. With a VM ready, you can instead focus on real work and never worry about any rogue software messing up your environment. With a backup of that VM in hand, you lose no time in getting up and running again.

* Testing new software without disturbing your host environment - whether its beta software or a version of a software that cannot parallely with what's already on the host OS, VMs help you play safe.

* Manage hardware crunches - when you don't have the luxury or budget to have physical machines, VMs are indispensable

* Archive software project environment - even after you've closed a project, you don't know if it may have to be revived in the future. With a VM containing the working software in the environment required for it, you can rest assured. I once worked on a project that utilized a free copy of a limited version of Crystal Reports that was given away with Visual Studio. Years later, when a feature request came up to modify some Crystal Reports code I found to my dismay that a newer version of Visual Studio no longer carried a free license to CR and the ownership of Crystal Reports software itself had changed hands.

* Easy to share - if you have to pass your work around when you're working with a team, it is easy to pass a VHD (virtual hard disk)

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HOW TO find the latitude, longitude of a location based on WOEID

Yahoo! has devised a unique identifier called the Where on Earth ID, or WOEID - for almost any named place on the Earth. This is used by APIs like Twitter Trends, flickr etc.

However, a majority of geo-location related APIs require latitude, longitude of a place to provide their services. So if you're building a mash-up that has to deal with latitude, longitude and WOEID, you can resolve a WOEID to a place with this call:
http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/place/2507854?appid=[YourYahooAppidHere]

Replace, 2507854 in the above example with the WOEID of the location whose co-ordinates you want to find.

The results can be requested in XML or JSON format.

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SQL Azure Q & A - 1

The Stack Overflow forum's Azure section is a great place to know about real-world issues and find answers to them. As part of my learning, I plan to collect short summarized answers of questions that I find useful, for quick reference -

Q. What is the difference between the Web Edition and Business Edition of SQL Azure?
The two editions are identical except for capacity. Both offer the same replication and SLA.

Web Edition scales from 1GB to 5GB, whereas Business Edition scales from 10GB to 50GB in 10GB increments, plus 100GB and 150GB.

Q. How to change maximum capacity or edition of a SQL Azure database?
To increase (or decrease) capacity -
ALTER DATABASE Test MODIFY (EDITION='WEB', MAXSIZE=5GB)

To switch to the Business Edition -
ALTER DATABASE Test MODIFY (EDITION='BUSINESS', MAXSIZE=10GB)

You can also change the size of the database through the Azure SQL portal. Simply choose the database and go to the scale tab and select the size you want.

Q. When should i use SQL Azure and when should I use Azure Table Services?
SQL Azure is more expensive than ATS (Azure Table Services). A popular opinion is that frequently accessed data that does not need huge scalability and is not super large in size should be destined for SQL Azure, otherwise Azure Table Services.

Q. How to profile queries running on SQL Azure?
Though not as detailed as the results of SQL Profiler that is available for a local database, SQL Azure now has some native profiling capabilities.

Q. What are the differences between SQL Server and Windows Azure SQL Database?
This MSDN & Technet articles explain the differences.

For migrating data from local SQL to SQL Azure, use the SQL Migration Wizard that is available on Codeplex

Also see:
Best of Google Webmaster Help videos

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Search for free eBooks from the Google Books collection

I & my wife have a fascination for Web APIs that return results in JSON or JSONP format. We noticed that Google Books doesn't readily show if a out of copyright book is available for free download in PDF or EPUB format. You have to go through multiple steps using Advanced Search to find this.

Luckily, Google provides a Google Books API that exposes this information and it returns the results in JSON format. We wrote a web app that searches for free eBooks from the Google Books collection.

It uses a responsive HTML5 Boilerplate template generated using Initializr.

The H5BP template's view for Mobile

Some other interesting things we discovered while building this app:

• Results returned by Google Books API may vary by country. When a programmatic request is made to their book search API via the app, the same code will return different results for different countries. 
• Project Gutenberg doesn't have an API but they provide one huge file that contains the RDF data for all books. 
• Open Library has a RESTful API that provides useful information about books.
• Calibre is free and open source e-book software that can convert ebooks into many formats 
• Flipkart lets you download over 9000+ ebooks for free but you will need their app to view. 
• Programmable Web maintains a directory of Web APIs & tracks news about mashups built using those APIs. The site is a treat for developers who like Web APIs & creating mashups.

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Big Data and Machine Learning make protecting your online privacy even more challenging

Your personal details are safe only if the people you've shared it with also realize the importance. With the cost of computing power and storage drastically coming down, it's getting cheaper & easier for social media to entice you and your connected circle into revealing personal information to forward their commercial interests by breaching your trust.

image from Google Play

TrueCaller is a mobile app that will show you the name of a caller that's not already on your mobile contact list. The app's website claims that it is a collaborative  global phone directory with over 700 million numbers. Don't be surprised if your carefully guarded phone number is in their database. The novelty of finding the identity of an unknown caller may have suckered someone known to you to give away their contact list that includes your number.

Thanks to Big Data and Machine Learning, the individual datapoints (phone number, date of birth etc) can be aggregated to paint a more detailed picture of our real lives than any SSN or Driver’s License ever could.

It's a tragedy of our times that we are asked to use disposable email addresses, use fake names online, give bogus answers to security questions and use grammatically incorrect passphrases to beat grammar-aware password-cracking algorithm ('Andyhave3cats' is a better password than 'Shehave3cats') to protect our online privacy & security.

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