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...

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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) - This file contains bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below. To review,...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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 PlayTrueCaller is a mobile app that will show you the name of a caller that's...

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