False Positives

Last year I posted JavaScript for a single element radio button list, referring to a issue I had with getting the value of generated radio button list. (All the standard solutions / samples that i found assumed the there are 2 or more choices.  And I had a case were an optional field might only have one value.  So I had to detect / trap and report on the value of this boundary case.)

I recently had reason to revisit my solution  and have since corrected two things.

In my original posting I had hard coded the name attribute of the radio button array.   Very bad,very lazy!That’s been rectified by passing the value of the name attribute into the function and using the forms element collection like this:

var ne = document.forms[0].elements[name];

Much better!

I also had cause to see if I could do better using the Prototype javascript framework? How about reducing 12 lines to 1 line like this :

selected = $$(’input:checked[name=”‘+name+’”]’).pluck(’value’);

You gotta like that!  (I’m also using the Google AJAX Libraries API to load the latest 1.6.0.3 release.)

As I mentioned in last years post all this also works for Check Box lists as well a Radio button lists.

I have a demo of this in serbl.html, showing the js running on a single radio button list, as well as a multi value radio button list and (because I don’t expect one to take my word) single check box button list, as well as a multi value check box button list.  The javascript functions used (getSelectedOW for OldWay, and getSelectedPW for Prototype Way) are in sebl.js

Enjoy.

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as demonstrated during the recent The Amazon Web Services (AWS) StartUp event in Toronto by Idee’s CTO Paul Bloore,  TinEye Mobile is soon to be showing up in the iPhone App store to melt your brains… or just take an image of product (a CD, DVD, book or game etc.) and then send you on to read reviews, sample music or do price comparisons.

Leila Boujnane, Idee’s CEO, has a video showing off TinEye Mobile and Mathew Ingram writes Idee does visual search, iPhone-style, as does Jevon MacDonald (StartUp North) in Idee’s new iphone app - TinEye Music.

Let the melting begin….

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With the arrival the fall Equinox, the summer (such as it was) is over.  It also marks the start of our tradtion of talking walks thur the neighbourhood and down to the the Humber River and Etienne Brule park (thanks to the Hurricane Hazel of 1954).

facing South

and North.

I also means checking our raspberry bushes for the fall crop every couple of days.

a benefit of all that rain, and if the frost stays away a couple more weeks, we will continue to have more berries to eat till thanksgiving.

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The team from Amazon Web Services (AWS) came to Toronto (at the MaRS Building)to show us their stuff, and demo’s from some local folks showing the “what”, “where”, and “how” to their use of  AWS in real life. (no admission cost for the event. Yea!)

Tracy Laxdal did a great job on all the the logistics and organizing.

Prashant Sridharan and Mike Culver, the Director and Evangelist for Amazon Web Services (respectively) kicked off things with comments and a presentation giving some background to the history of AWS, where things are too today and where you can expect this to go.

The overall focus was on the Infrastructure Services : in particular things like S3 Storage and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), but it did touch on the other parts (which is good because it did clarify some of them for me).


Updated Sept 18th : Amazon CTO Werner Vogels has announced that Amazon is releasing a Content Delivery Network (CDN) in Expanding The Cloud, and on the AWS blog.

The meat of the afternoon was in  Customer Presentations :

Carlos Barrettara is from Polar Mobile, a solution for publishers and adversiters on mobile platforms which -for example -would allow BlackBerry users to receive the latest headlines, news articles, feature columns, and editorials directly from Maclean’s and Canadian Business. As a very new startup they have been able to embrace AWS from the start.

Carlos’s presentation is now on SlideShare.

Ilya Grigorik is from AideRSS, which is a site and add-on and web service which acts as an intelligent RSS assistant to allow you to focus on the most information content of the Websites and Blogs you follow in your News Readers.

Ilya talked about how they moved (in great detail, with numbers of servers : 14 for infrastructure and 70 (!) for web crawlers) the various parts onto the AWS cloud (including using Simple Queue Service ) as they gained comfort with it. Ilya’s presentation is now on Slide Share. (also their presentation from last year)

Chris Thiessen is from Zoomii, which is bringing online the real bookstore experience of browsing bookshelves and making it an vivid experiance (SeaDragon meets Matrix meets Amazon?).
.

He also showed off the custom scripting he uses. We should get Chris out to a Demo Camp! Chris’s presentation is now on Slide Share.

Farhan Thawar is from I Love Rewards whom enable corporate incentive programs.

They moved from a traditional self hosting infrastructure to the amazon cloud for all but some legacy application. Given they are a Software as a Service and integrate with SalesForce (another SaaS) it made sense to embrace this style of hosting. Farhan’s presenation is now on Slide Share.

Paul Bloore from Idee talked about their newest product TinEye, (I promise I will stop call it TinyEye some day, Paul!) their image search engine that tells you where and how that image appears all over the web—even if it has been modified.

Paul talked about how they used EC2 to build a spider army to scan the web for new images, (and process the imaging matching secret sauce?) (currently at  900 million, soon to be 1Giga+! images indexed, he said in this best Doctor Evil voice.) Then he showed of a unreleased iphone app that takes a book or cd cover and uses a similar algorithm as TinEye to identify it and fetches reviews. Which caused my brain melted down ….

(Update : see TinEye Mobile : iPhone visual search for stuff )

Okay, they they also did a Group Q&A

The Start-up Tour is well worth your time, and is still to come to New York City, Boston/Cambridge, London, Amsterdam and Seattle.

Some of the Presentation from last year went up on SlideShare (which uses AWS), so I hope this years will too!

Update :  34 on the Toronto presentations are now on SlideShare the startup project, plus those for other locations.

(and Hello to Mugur Marculescu of WeGif who has new take on doing animated gifs, and more, online, and is moving to AWS.  I hope the visit to Toronto was a good one!)

Now excuse me will I do some Cloud Hacking…

minor updates :

other posts about the amazon web services start up tour in Toronto :

• TechVibes on Amazon Web Services Startup Event in Toronto
• Luke Rodgers aka everything flows on Amazon Web Services Start-Up Tour in Toronto
• Foobartastic on Amazon’s Cloud looks to solve many problems

and thinking about “use cases which are different form the usual uses” :

• batch processing, either semi temporary or semi permanent (how often do temporary - or short temp - system and applications last for years and years? often), when you need 1 or more (or 100) computers to process a set of data needed by other processes.
• those semi temporary or semi permanent applications that are needed until the real solution comes along
• Transitioning from one version of the infrastructure to the next, one customer at a time, and still roll back to the previous version.
• Real testing infrastructure that actually look like the production infrastructure.
• thinking about some side discussions I had with Chris Nolan who has a Comic Books application on the FaceBook platform (see the about for more info), I though of anther scenario : if you know you have big spikes in the traffic or processing demands : one day of the week -new comics come out on Tuesday- or year -election day-, or Month - Xmas-, then add servers only for that known period (and only pay for them during on that period).  You could also monitor loads and start adding servers auto-magically when you exceed a threshold and remove them when you go before certian thresholds.

Any other suggestions come to mind?

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Toronto Ukrainian Festival had a successful return to Bloor West Village last weekend (September 12 - 14, 2008), the weather during the day behaved itself, and the crowds where out to enjoy.

Winnipeger Randy Bachman (of Guess Who, Bachman-Turner Overdrive (or BTO) fame, currently hosting on CBC’s Vinyl Tap) was the 2008 Festival Parade Marshal.

This was the Chevrolet Impala he rode in :

Randy also came out to play that traditional Ukrainian tune : “Taking Care of Business”

I understand this was a un-rehearsed (and a complete surprise to the bassist and drummer)

Families came out, of all backgrounds and generations, with many people in their finery:

with traditional activities for families

and adults :

and non traditional ones for the kids

Lots of food and booths.  Everyone had a great time.  It was good it see the Festival (formerly the Bloor West Village Ukrainian Festival) back in the Village! (I also has a set of photo’s from 2006)

* “pyrohy“  are what us uniformed Canadians call “perogies“

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The 16th annual Junction Arts Festival has been a big success as the area ( Junction City in Toronto’s west end) celebrates the Junction’s Centennial of becoming a city in 1908, but on a big and crowded festival.

minor update : Junction Art Festival main page and the Junction Art Fest blog linked back! (and with a few links to others)

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Be sure to throw out all Maple Leaf products as a precaution against Listeria.

Via my Brother, who lives in Ottawa.

If you really need a proper list see A Full List of Recalled Maple Leaf Meat Products [Updated] from Joey.

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This was our first trip back in exactly 7 years, having been there in at this date in the days before that awful day. We have only just resumed traveling to the “States” again, a combination of things, including the exchange rate but mostly friends, having drawn us back.

We left early Sunday morning via Porter Air and the Toronto Island airport. I had several positive reports from people doing the same trip, but I had mixed feelings. Having lived on the harbour front and dealt with the planes flying in and out of that airport I was not a fan. But the new air line (Porter has been flying less than 2 years) and their planes have won me over or at least made me neutral. The planes seem quiet, and the fly in and out away from the inner habour and most of the residential. The departure was smooth and painless, which is saying something in these days and times! The Porter lounge was stock full of (free) coffee and cookies (and Mac’s and open Wifi), again a pleasant throw back to better times.
We even got a muffin and yogurt on the 1 hour flight. (shocking). The Newark New Jersey airport was bigger than expected with a fair number of international flights, but customs was no problem. The New Jersey Transit staff was helpful getting us into NYC and in no time we were at Penn station. We were staying at a friend on the upper West side of Manhattan, off the red line.

That afternoon we popped into the East Village to discover a wonderful Jazz festival in progress, as well as to explore a bit of that area and Union square area, before joining a dinner with our friends, and friends of friends.

One of the best decisions we made on this trip was to get an unlimited Metro Card which allowed use to pop on and off of the subway and buses before we got too tired walking everywhere.

That Monday we dived on the subway (quickly getting the handle off the local and express trains) down to Battery park and then up a very nice pedestrian mall to the busy site that is Ground Zero.

After that somber site, we left for Chelsea Market and the Meat Packing District for its food and buzz. Then a stop for more coffee at the Manhattan location of Mr Grumpy Cafe Café Grumpy and it’s excellent coffee and staff, as recommended to me (I got the John Allison mug!)
, before shopping from the Rockefeller Center to the (..sorry “THE”) Apple store and it’s madness (I thought the “piston” elevator was very neat).

Tuesday was all about US Open Tennis, and the first round. Getting there via Subway was smooth, but then the wheels came off. Part of it was my fault: we should have come much earlier (before the gates opened at 10). The line for day tickets was huge, in part because the web site was crappy, confusing and unsure (not just to us but to other people we talked to). Then I was not allow edto bring my Aspire One laptop in (I was told because of security?!), so that went in a locker. And there was problems / huge lineups with food and under cooked hamburgers. And a (very) few (very) rude people. Ack! We did however enjoy the Tennis and the venue’s and hope to go back soon.

Seeing the grounds of the 1964 Worlds Fair was a treat!

Afterwards we connected with some other friends from Toronto (who also watched the Tennis and better planed it) and had an excellent dinner at the Old Homestead in the Meat Packing District, amongst several tables of boisterous gentleman. Our friend was telling us about the days events including Marat Safin’s temper tantrum on court (before coming back to win it), when who walked back to his table - next to us - but Mr. Safin himself! Whoops! The girls would have liked a photo but he ignored us.

Wednesday was SoHo in the morning including a great lunch at local place 12 Chairs

and then seeing the exhibits at the MOMA.

On Thursday we only had time to walk around the neighour before catching our noon flight back and popping on the TTC home.

My only regret is not having more time and not going to Williamsburg and seeing more of Brooklyn. That will have to be for next time! soon(er)

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 The Toronto Ukrainian Festival (formerly the Bloor West Village Ukrainian Festival) is comming back to Bloor West Village (it was “away” last year at Toronto’s waterfront Harbourfront Centre) and will be on September 12 - 14, 2008.

This is the 12th year of the Largest Ukrainian festival in North America.

Rock musician (and Winnipeger) Randy Bachman (of Guess Who, Bachman-Turner Overdrive fame) has been appointed the 2008 Festival Parade Marshal.

Come and join the fun, bring the family (take the TTC), check out the music, dancing, and food (you don’t have to be Ukrainian), but save some peroigies for me.

Here’s a set of photo’s of 2006 Bloor West Village Ukrainian Festival, or enjoy the slide show below :

if your a Yahoo Upcomming user it’s http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1023075/

if your on face book it’s an event : http://www.new.facebook.com/event.php?eid=8374960969

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via the Toronto Star (  Toronto rated as powerhouse: City rubs elbows with likes of New York and Tokyo on Forbes list of urban economic giants comes news of Forbes crunching the numbers from PricewaterhouseCoopers “GDP urban economies”, MasterCard’s “centers of commerce” index, and an UBS “estimate of living expenses and earnings” to produce : World’s Most Economically Powerful Cities.

In summary : 1. London; 2. Hong Kong; 3. New York 4; Tokyo; 5. Chicago; 6. Seoul; 7. Paris; 8. Los Angeles; 9. Shanghai; 10. Toronto

The Details for Toronto (the GTA) read : GDP (2005): $209 billion; GDP (2020): $327 billion; Growth rate: 3%; MasterCard ranking: 13; Population (2007): 5,213,000; Purchasing power (NYC=100): 113.8%

Forbes also had this to say :

Toronto only narrowly edged out Madrid, Spain; Philadelphia and Mexico City, Mexico, to hang on at No. 10. Toronto is still the economic heart of one of the world’s wealthiest countries, and it’s projected to keep humming through 2020. Along with London, Toronto is the fastest growing G7 financial center.

The other interesting comment from Forbes is :

For sovereign nations, it’s easy to find measures of almost every variable imaginable–gross domestic product (GDP), inflation, money flows and other metrics. After all, the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund all deal with governments at the national level. But for corporations, cities and their economies matter most, since picking the right city will be the key to prosperity in the future.

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