Firebug simplifies programming with JSON

The Developer Tools (F12 keyboard shortcut) of popular browsers show the JSON output returned by an API, like this -

Firefox add-on Firebug's JSON tab within the Net tab, presents it neatly like this -

This makes it easy to extract the specific details that you are after. 

The above view helps to visualize how to get to a flickr photo's id on making a call using the jQuery getJSON method to one of the flickr API services - data.photos.photo[i].id

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HOW TO batch Geocode a set of addresses

Geocoding is the process of taking an address and getting the associated latitude and longitude so that it can be visually represented as a a point on the earth with any mapping service.

MapQuest API has a free batch geocoding service that allows multiple locations to be geocoded at the same time. A limit of 100 locations exists for one call. I haven't seen any of the popular mapping services offering this kind of a bulk geocoding facility.

An AppKey is needed to run that service & you can get it by creating a free Community Account.

An AppKey is generated when requested but it will take approximately 1 hour for your AppKey to be active.

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SharePoint 2013 NAPA Keyboard Shortcuts

With a Office 365 Preview Developer account, you can build SharePoint 2013 & Office 2013 Apps. This account includes an app called NAPA that contains a small subset of Visual Studio features to build an App within the browser & run it. As a keyboard person, I like that it includes keyboard shortcuts for common tasks. Here are my favorites:

F1                  : Show & trigger commands
Ctrl+F            : Find
Ctrl+H           : Replace
Ctrl+/             : Comment
Ctrl+L            : Jump to specified line number
Ctrl+E            : Quick Open
Ctrl+D           :  Delete line
Ctrl+A           :  Select all
Ctrl+Space    :  Intellisense
Ctrl+G           :  View Methods?

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Voice Fingerprinting

The Independent has an interesting article on voice fingerprinting -

Fuelled by 9/11, spurred on by the advance of our digital society and made possible by raw computing power, the development of increasingly sophisticated automated speaker recognition systems (ASRS) are now bringing the prospect of a voiceprint enticingly close...These systems can in as little as 15 minutes use a background population of voices to make a statistical judgement on the significance of any similarity or difference between the voice of the criminal and that of a suspect that could have taken a human 15 hours to complete.

Like computer vision and video fingerprinting, voice fingerprinting will be a great digital frontier to conquer.

Also see: Raman Effect can fingerprint the universe

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HOW TO handle a API's JSONP response that uses a static or fixed or named callback function

Script and JSONP requests are not subject to the same origin policy restrictions. Most APIs that return JSONP data will generate a dynamic callback function name and they typically have a parameter like jsoncallback=?.

However some API's like flickr, Facebook require that you use the callback function name that they specify.

Here are a couple of ways that you can tackle that scenario -

window.fixed_callback = function(data){
  alert(data.title);
};

$(function() {
  $.getScript("http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=cats&tagmode=any&format=json&jsoncallback=fixed_callback", function(data) {
  alert('done'); } );
});

click to enlarge code snippet

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Tweetcheero

I found it funny that two separate tweets on the same topic but in different contexts and having the opposite effect landed one after another on my Twitter timeline.

As I can't think of a word for this coincidence, I'm calling it Tweetcheero - a take on Switcheroo

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Fix for "The page at https://*.sharepoint.com/* ran insecure content from http://{3rdparty_json_api_call}" error in a NAPA app

If you are receiving data through a JSONP API call from a third party service in your SharePoint 2013 NAPA app and you get an error of this pattern -
"The page at https://*.sharepoint.com/* ran insecure content from http://{3rdparty_json_api_call}"

... make the JSONP API call from its equivalent HTTPS URL i.e. replace http with https. This fix will work provided the third party API supports HTTPS.

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