I once again managed to abandoned my lovely blog for months.  It's not that I didn't had time, it's just that I started using facebook a lot more and it is much more interactive.  That doesn't mean I won't update this blog every once in a while but yes if I could somehow integrate the two, it would be a match made in a heaven. I had a nice conversation with someone about twitter.  This girl said that she "tweets" on tweeter and also posts her "window weather".  That is the weather as she sees it from her window.  Maybe I'll open up an account soon as well as starting tweeting.

So it's 2009, nothing really knew.  United States is in recession, we have a popular president elect who will be inaugarated in 2 days and Israel is waging a war against Hamas. I signed up to see the live CNN telecast of the inauguration on facebook. Hopefully I will rremember to watch it.

I went to Skiing recently, it was a fun experience.  I should hopefully be going a second time.  I need to work on my turns.  I will take a video next time and post it here.

 Here are some pictures of the trip:

I recently started developing a small PHP website to access a web service using AJAX.  Now, the last time I dealt with AJAX I using XML to communicate between client and server.  XML needed to be parsed and that usually meant additional time spent debugging.

I had heard of JSON, so I went over to http://json.org to understand how to implement.  It took me about 30 minutes to understand the syntax and another hour or two to implement.  I implemented a PHP page to access parameters via query string and return a JSON object.  I implemented an HTML page to consuned the JSON output by using prototype and eval function in JavaScript. I am so relieved that I no longer need to generate and parse XML. Whew!!!

The application works great.  Now I have a seen a lot of site that use animation to provide some feedback to the user that an AJAX request is being processed by the server.  I thought perhaps I can find one of those animations and plug it in the top right hand corner of my application.  I came across this great site: http://www.ajaxload.info/.  This site can dynamically generate over a dozen different progress indicator in the background and foreground color of your choice.