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I wish to thank all my friends, readers and well wishers. Your constant encouragement and support helped me complete my very first published book. I'm now very glad to announce that my book jQuery Mobile Cookbook just got published by Packt Publishers. The link is here:  http://www.packtpub.com/jquery-mobile-cookbook/book Extract from the publisher website: Overview: Create applications that use custom animations and use various techniques to improve application performance Use and customize the various controls such as toolbars, buttons, and lists with custom icons, icon sprites, styles, and themes Write simple but powerful scripts to manipulate the various configurations and work with the events, methods, and utilities which are provided by the framework What you will learn from this book: Create single-page and multi-page applications that use custom CSS and JavaScript transitions; improve performance using Prefetch, DOM-Cache, and Application Cache Use fi...

To install Node.js, first install the below prerequisite and add the node.js repository. # sudo apt-get install python-software-properties # sudo apt-add-repository ppa:chris-lea/node.js  Now install Node.js and npm (the Node Packet Manager). # sudo apt-get update # sudo apt-get install nodejs npm Thats it. Your Node.js is ready. Test by running the below command. # node -v v0.6.18 Node.js stable releases are done quite frequently. To upgrade run, # sudo apt-get update # sudo apt-get upgrade nodejs npm   You could also use the Ubuntu Update Manager to do the update. If you are the kind who prefers to directly build from the sources then, # cd <directory> # sudo wget http://nodejs.org/dist/v0.6.18/node-v0.6.18.tar.gz # sudo tar -zxf node-v0.6.18.tar.gz # cd node-v0.6.18 # sudo ./configure # sudo make # sudo make install # node -v v0.6.18 The latest version was v0.6.18 at the time of writing this post. For other platforms, installation is...

I like using Notepad++, but it is a windows program and is not available for Linux. There are some jQuery Mobile apps that I need to test on IE. I need a Windows platform. But my primary laptop has Ubuntu. The solution is to use Wine and boy does it taste good! First install wine # sudo apt-get install wine Download the latest notepad++ installer from http://notepad-plus-plus.org/ and launch it using wine. # sudo wine <download folder>/npp.xxx.Installer.exe This will launch the Npp installer and you can complete the fairly simple installation. Thats it, you are done ! Now you can just launch Npp and its a touchdown ! # cd ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Notepad++ # ./notepad++.exe There is a version of IE available too  # cd ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Internet Explorer # ./iexplore.exe This IE scores pretty decent on www.html5test.com . Now how about try installing other Windows apps on Ubuntu and having more fun...

Had to fix all time related issues on a remote RHEL 6 server which runs without any windowing system. Plain ol' command line. Documenting steps here for future reference: Check to see if your date and timezone settings are accurate: # date # cat /etc/sysconfig/clock The server I accessed had wrong settings for both the commands. Here are the steps I used to correct: Find out your timezone from the folder /usr/share/zoneinfo # ls /usr/share/zoneinfo Mine was pointing to America/EDT instead of  Asia/Calcutta Update and save the /etc/sysconfig/clock file to # sudo vi /etc/sysconfig/clock ZONE="Asia/Calcutta" UTC=true ARC=false Remove the /etc/localtime # sudo rm /etc/localtime Create a new soft link to your time zone # cd /etc # sudo ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/Asia/Calcutta /etc/localtime # ls -al localtime Now it should show the link to your time zone Set your hardware clock to UTC # sudo hwclock --systohc --utc # hwclock --show Update your t...

Had to install a Couch DB instance on a fresh Red Hat Enterprise 6 Linux Box and it required some time before I got the whole thing up. Better have it documented here for future reference: 1. Get the Prerequisites First you will have to add the RPM Forge YUM Repository if not already available. Add the new repo: sudo vi /etc/yum.repos.d/rpmforge.repo # Name: RPMforge RPM Repository for Red Hat Enterprise 6 - dag # URL: http://rpmforge.net/ # (Put "x86_64" instead of "i386" if appropriate.) [rpmforge] name = Red Hat Enterprise $releasever - RPMforge.net - dag baseurl = ftp://ftp.pbone.net/mirror/atrpms.net/el6-i386/atrpms/stable enabled = 1 protect = 0 gpgcheck = 0 Save the file and get the prerequisites: sudo yum clean all sudo yum groupinstall 'Development Tools' 'Development Libraries' 'GNOME Software Development' sudo yum install \   cvs zip gcc-c++ glib2-devel gtk2-devel fontconfig-devel libnotify-devel \   libIDL...

In my earlier post I had written a simple demo to show the various transitions that are available with jQuery Mobile. The official documentation v1.0.1 for page transitions is available here . But with jQuery Mobile v1.1, the official documentation has been updated and is much better compared to the older version. You will also see the page looks much simpler and showcases how the transitions would look for pages and also dialogs. Just click on the buttons and you can see the live demo. Excellent work on updating the documentation. Also very exciting to see that two new transitions have been added, the Turn and the Flow . So now we have a total of 8 transitions that are available by default. Pretty cool. Of course the brave can extend the framework and try to create their own custom transitions using CSS3 and JS.

The idiot box finally graduates to an internet box! Internet on TV is catching on quite fast. I've been reading reports that predict a billion(s) dollar market that will open up for TV apps. Ah the hype .. these things are always in billions. But anyways, considering the number of people who have a TV and the number who watch it (almost everyone?), I guess this could be quite realistic. Many advantages I guess, lesser strain on the eyes, no burnt laps and no lost fertility with laptops on top of laps. I'm online 100% of the time. Definitely I stand to gain. My 6 year old kid too. I'd rather have him play Angry birds and all those HD games on TV compared to him holding my super heated mobile and straining his eyes watching the small screen. So now that I've made my point beyond all doubt, it is agreed that TV apps is the next big thing! So where do I start? I do not have an Internet TV yet! Not to despair, one could install the recently launched Opera TV Emulator...

" See one, Make one, Teach one! " - [video:  Charles McCathieNevile (Opera) , see @00:19:00] Working on a pet project, I stumbled upon jQuery Mobile a few months ago and have been hooked on to it since then. There were quite a few things that I learnt and few more things that I discovered. I started to blog a few posts on the topic and boy does it pay to blog! One morning I log on to my blog and find that the traffic had jumped by a few hundred page views within a single night. I used to have just a handful of daily visits earlier. Initial thought was that some bot had tried to wreck havoc on my blog. Eventually I found the true reason. My post on prefetching pages using jQuery Mobile , had been  retweeted by @jquerymobile . Traffic hasn't looked down since. Even today the number of pageviews on a daily basis, is tenfold more than the earlier days. Its been two months now. Within a week of this, I got an email by a leading international publisher asking if I w...