iphone4

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

British dishes

Is it true that a lot of British dishes are named after places?
The rich variety of British regional cooking is reflected in the names of our favourite dishes. Many regions have their own particular speciality of sweet or savoury fare, or are famed for their local produce.
Cheeses are produced in many regions, although Cheddar, a hard cheese with a strong, nutty taste, is the most popular variety. It originates from a village in Somerset in Western England, also famous for its gorge. Other types of cheeses include Cheshire, Lancashire, Stilton and Wensleydale.
Cornwall in south-west England is famous for its Cornish Pasties – a pastry case filled with meat, potatoes and vegetables, which was the traditional midday meal of workers in the region.
The town of Bakewell in Derbyshire has a rich pastry tart named after it. The Bakewell pudding or the Bakewell tart was said to have been invented by accident, when a cook forgot to put jam over the custard filling of a pudding – instead she apread it straight onto the pastry case and poured the custard on top. Thus a new dish was born!
Welsh cakes, a kind of sweet cake cooked on a griddle, were originally served to hungry travellers when they arrived at an inn for the night while they waited for their supper to be cooked.
Many other dishes are named after plates – from Lancashire hotpot (a casserole of meat and vegetables topped with sliced potatoes) and Dundee cake (a rich fruit cake) to Anglessey eggs A dish of leeks, mashed potato, hard boiled eggs and cheese sauce) baked Ulster ham, and Bath buns ( a sweet bun containing species and dried fruit, originally made in Bath, western England). Indeed, dedicated gourmets could happily munch their way from one county to another!

Decide whether these statements are true or false.
1. All the cheeses come from Somerset.
2. Cornish Pasties were usually eaten for lunch.
3. A Derbyshire cook was trying to bake a new dish when she created the Bakewell Pudding.
4. Travellers used to eat Welsh cakes as a dessert.
5. Both Lancashire hot pot and Anglessey eggs have vegetables as ingredients.
6. People who are fond of eating will find good local specialities in very few regions.

Self-Access Group Ciefp Santander

KEY
1. False
2. True
3. False
4. False
5. True
6. False

British dishes

Blog and Wiki

The Internet and Education

Until quite recently Silicon Valley and its innovations had little effect on teaching and learning. But with the rise of the Internet, information technology is now beginning to have much more influence on education. Two areas which are becoming more and more significant are ‘blogs’ and ‘wikis’.

The word ‘blog’ is short for ‘weblog’. A blog is an online diary or ‘blog’ of someone’s life, thoughts, or opinions. Anybody can create their own ‘blog’ and blogging is becoming extremely popular – type ‘blog’ into Google and you’ll get over 500 million results. For educational purposes, academics, teachers, and students create blogs as personal online study sites: places to work together and share information and ideas. Some universities even give their students and staff free space on a server to start their own blogs.

‘Wikis’ are websites where anyone can add content and make changes, so that the site becomes a group creation – ‘wiki’ stands for ‘What I Know Is’. These sites can be a valuable source of information and opinion for students, though the information may not be totally accurate – some academics refuse to use them. Perhaps the best-known wiki is the online encyclopaedia, Wikipedia, which has more than one million entries in over 100 languages. Wikipedia is working hard to make sure that its information is completely accurate, so students will be able to use it with confidence and there’s no doubt that it is an incredible resource.

Read the artic1e and find the answers to these questions.
1 Is information technology more or less important in education than before?

2 Where does the word 'blog' come from?

3 What is a 'blog'?

4 What are blogs used for at universities?

5 What does 'WIKI' mean?

6 Who puts the information on this wiki websites?

7 Why do students need to be careful if they use 'Wikis' when they study?

8 What is Wikipedia?

KEY

1. More
2. blog is short for weblog
3. A blog is an online diary
4. For educational purposes
5. What I Know Is’
6. Anybody
7. the information may not be totally accurate
8. An online encyclopaedia.

Blog and Wiki

Monday, February 16, 2009

Interesting Resources to learn Object Oriented Design

In this post I want to reply to all my readers which wrote to me in the past weeks asking to me to suggest some interesting resources for beginners to learn Object Oriented Design methodology.

This is a small list with some basic references about Object Oriented Design process and it includes an UML guide, some articles about how to write OO javascript, PHP and Perl code. I also included some video tutorials about an useful introduction to OO PHP. If you have some interest link to suggest about this topic, please leave a comment, thanks!

UML Guide
The Unified Modeling Language is a standard design specification that is overseen by the Object Management Group (OMG). UML provides a nice framework for designing and analyzing process, structure and their relationships. UML is a collection of the best technical modeling specifications and practices is use today. It is mainly used in developing software requiring Object Oriented Analysis (OOA) and Object Oriented Design (OOD).

Design Patterns | Object Oriented Design

Design Patterns OODesign provides general design principles about Object Oriented Design with some well explained tutorials and examples about this topic.

Object Oriented Analysis and Design
OOAD.com provides a lot of interesting link about Object Oriented Analysis and Design resources, forums, links, basic methodology, book and programming roadmap.

Object Oriented Design with Javascript
This is a serie of three article which discuss object-oriented features of JavaScript. Part one provides background on how JavaScript supports the main principles of object-oriented programming. Part two demonstrates how JavaScript constructs can be used to build a class inheritance framework and write scripts supporting a JavaScript class hierarchy. The third and final part shows how to use the JavaScript class framework to build object-oriented client-side abstractions of ASP.NET user controls.

- Writing Object-Oriented JavaScript 1/3
- Writing Object-Oriented JavaScript 2/3
- Writing Object-Oriented JavaScript 3/3

Javascript is not a OOP (Object Oriented Programming) Language, but it supports objects, so why don’t use them? It may not be the best thing if you just want to create some small scripts, but as soon as you do a bit more than just reading some data from a form, it can definitely make sense to use objects, because it’s much easier to reuse this code later on. Take a look at this interesting post about this topic from nino.net.

- 5 reasons to write object-oriented (oo) javascript
- Create Advanced Web Applications With Object-Oriented Techniques
- Understanding scope in object oriented JavaScript

Object Oriented Ajax Application Design

Greg Brown explains how to use basic object-oriented techniques to build more robust AJAX applications. The demands on JavaScript as a development platform are growing with the increasing popularity of so-called AJAX applications. The procedural development model commonly used to add basic client-side interactivity to web pages today will not scale to support the level of UI complexity required by these applications. Fortunately, and contrary to popular belief, it is possible to apply object-oriented (OO) design principles in JavaScript, which can help manage this complexity.

SUN | The Java Tutorials

If you've never used an object-oriented programming language before, you'll need to learn a few basic concepts before you can begin writing any code. This lesson will introduce you to objects, classes, inheritance, interfaces, and packages. Each discussion focuses on how these concepts relate to the real world, while simultaneously providing an introduction to the syntax of the Java programming language.

- What Is an Object?
- What Is a Class?
- What Is Inheritance?
- What Is an Interface?
- What Is a Package?
- Questions and Exercises: Object-Oriented Programming Concepts

Object Oriented PHP for Beginners

Stefan Mischook wrote this practical tutorial to teach total beginners object oriented PHP. So before you begin, get out your favorite PHP code editor and be ready to write and run some object oriented PHP code. You can also download a PDF version of this tutorial or watch the following videos:

- Introduction to Object Oriented PHP (4:05)
- Why learn Object Oriented PHP (14:46)
- Objects and Classes in PHP (5:26)
- Build Objects in PHP - Part 1 (9:14)
- Build Objects in PHP - Part 2 (9:41)
- Build Objects in PHP - Part 3 (6:18)
- Calling Functions from Another Class (5:36)

Perl Object Oriented Programming
Most people are not aware of the fact that Perl has support for object-oriented programming. If you've used another object-oriented programming language such as Java or C++ or been exposed to object-orientation, then object oriented programming in Perl is nothing like that. To do real useful object-oriented programming in Perl take a look at this article.

Sunday, February 15, 2009

Useful Ajax Auto Suggest scripts collection

This post is a collection of some interesting and useful Ajax Auto Suggest scripts ready to use (from beginner or professional web developers) in your web projects. This collection includes standard auto suggest scripts, del.icious tag suggestion, autosuggest control to search images on Flickr, and advanced table filter with auto suggest control.

If you want to suggest other interesting links please add a comment, thanks!

1. Ajax Auto Suggest v.2

The AutoSuggest class adds a pulldown menu of suggested values to a text field. The user can either click directly on a suggestion to enter it into the field, or navigate the list using the up and down arrow keys, selecting a value using the enter key. The values for the suggestion list are to provided as XML, or as JSON (by a PHP script, or similar). This auto suggest class is very simple to customize and reuse in your web pages. Take a look here for the demo.

2. Woork PHP component: Autosuggest
Woork Autosuggest is a simple "PHP component" ready to use which implement autosuggest feature using PHP and MySQL. The component is lightweight (only with 8Kb) and ready to use simply customizing some parameters.

3. Spry Auto Suggest Widget

Spry Auto Suggest Widget (provided from Adobe Labs) use Adobe Spry framework to implement auto suggest feature in a input field. This is an example of using a Spry region and non-destructive filter to create an auto suggest widget. The suggestions can be displayed in any HTML structure. Spry uses the the tag ID to identify the suggest list container. In this example, there are three different HTML structures based on: table, div-span, ul-li.

4. Facebook-Like Auto Suggest

Guillermo Rauch's Facebook-like Auto Suggest is another auto suggest script which simulate Facebook auto suggest feature. It works by caching all the results from a JSON Request and feeding them to the autocompleter object. When a item is added as a box, it’ removed from the feed array, and when the box is disposed it’s added back, so that it becomes available in the list when the user types.

5. jSuggest 1.0
jSuggest is yet another auto-completer for your text input box. It mimics the functionality of Google suggest. jSuggest will also bind item selection to your up and down arrows and also allow you to select the suggestions using your mouse.

6. Yahoo! UI Autosuggest Control

Yahoo! UI Autosuggest Control uses AutoComplete to find images by tag from the Flickr webservice. A simple PHP proxy is used to access the remote server via XHR. The generateRequest() method has been customized in order send additional required parameters to the Flickr application. The formatResult() method has been customized in order to display images in the results container, and the default CSS has been enhanced so the results container can scroll. Finally, a itemSelectEvent handler has been defined to collect selected images in a separate container.

7. CAPXOUS.AutoComplete
CAPXOUS.AutoComplete is a standalone widget without dependencies, lightweight (only 4 kb) which provides auto suggest feature with an huge scrollable drop down list. It's simple to customize and implement on your web pages with a lot of languages.

8. jQuery Tag Suggestion

jQuery Tag Suggestion plugin simulates del.icio.us tag suggestion as-you-type feature (when you save a bookmark on del.icio.us). Tag suggestion helps you create a subset of tags that you commonly use for different types of links.

9. Google Suggest Style Filter with the AutoComplete Control

Matt Berseth's AutoComplete control provides smarter filtering capabilities for data tables which allow the user to select a filter column from a drop down list. Take a look here for the live demo.

Thursday, February 12, 2009

Interesting html FORM Validators for web developers

This post illustrates how to use some interesting HTML Form validators to check FORM fields writing only some lines of HTML and JavaScript code. All these proposal are lightweight, cross-browser and simple to use and customize in your web projects in few minutes.

If you have some suggestion about this topic, please leave a comment. Thanks!

1. MooTools FormCheck
FormCheck is a class that allows you to perform different tests on form to validate them before submission. FormCheck is lightweight, shiny and fast, supports skins (using CSS), 10 different languages, and shows errors as tips. It support basic validation (required, alpha, digit, alpanu, lenght, confirm...), regex validation (phone, email, url) and a lot of options that allow you to customize this class to fit exactly as you want.

FormCheck is really simple to implement. In the <head> tag of your page add the folloing lines of code:>

Add a link to MooTools Framework:

...choose FormCheck language (in this case english):

...include the FormCheck script:

... and initialize FormCheck using this code:

You can use default CSS theme for your form using this code:

At this point, create a form in the tag <body> of your page:

... and add some fields into the form like these:

How you can see in the previous code, the syntax to use this validator is really simple. You have to add this code into attribute "class" of the input field:

class="validate['required','length[6,16]','alphanum'] text-input" />

...it means: validate this field; this field is required, min lenght is 6 chars and max lenght is 16 chars; this is an alphanumeric field. When an user submit the form, the result is the following:

Simple No? Take a look at the demo.

2. Live Validation

LiveValidation is a small open source javascript library for making client-side validation quick, easy, and powerful. It comprises of two main parts. Firstly, it provides developers with a rich set of core validation methods, which can also be used outside the context of forms. Secondly, it provides your visitors with real-time validation information as they fill out forms, helping them to get it right first time, making the forms easier, quicker and less daunting to complete. In this example you can see how to match the value contained in two fields.

In the <head> tag add a link to the livevalidation script:

...create two fields:

...and than add this script below the second input field:

This is the result if the content in the first field matches the content in the second field:

...and this is the result if the content doesen't match:

Take a look at this page for a full documentation support about LiveValidation.

3. ProtoForm

ProtoForm is an unltra lightweight, unobtrusive cross-browser and very easy to customize form validation + submit with Ajax based on prototype.js framework. It checks required fields and validate Email, Date, Telephone number and Url, send data and shows response with Ajax, highlight the form field on focus and on error.

You can implement this script on your page with only some lines of code. In the <head> tag add a link to the Prototype and ProtoForm script:

Then, create a form within a div with ID="box":

At this point add some input field into the form like the following:

In the propery id I highlighted in bold validation options (_Req, _Email). The ID property of fields you have to validete will be something like: name + _option1 + _option2 +....

The "title" attribute is used to display an error message. For a full documentation about this script take a look at the official page.

That's all. If you have some suggestions add a comment, thanks!

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Monday, February 16, 2009

Sunday, February 15, 2009

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Thursday, February 12, 2009