Is Google is so kind or what? One more great tool and FREE of course that leashed by Google is the Google Chart API.

By their introduction, The Google Chart API returns a PNG-format image in response to a URL. Several types of image can be generated: line, bar, and pie charts for example. For each image type you can specify attributes such as size, colors, and labels.

If you want to generate charts, graphs, pies etc. this is a great tool for you - the web developer. This tool gives a good fight to all other charts generator like .NET Charting for example and other unwanted ActiveXs modules that need to be installed on the client (we always want to avoid this action - at least me), because it is FREE and also because it is Google.

So I already generated myself:

You can find it here.

I got a recommendation from my friend about great Israeli Jazz band. This band is called: thirdworldlove and i think that is one of the finest original materials bands that I've heard in the last year.

So if you're Jazz lovers/fans or even not, I recommend you about them.

Almost forget one more great thing, you can listen to their materials here just FREE.

Enjoy...

By the formal definition, Microformats designated in the first place for humans and just after to machines. Actually, this is a set of simple informational formats that based over generic and well unified standards. This set of formats comes to simplify common problems into a behavior and common templates (like XHTML, XML etc...).

The main goal of this formats is not to invent a new language or force these kind of changes over the 'world', however it comes to adapt a different way of thinking regarding storing information and publishing it to the world.

I going to apply this set of formats in my new web 2.0 working application. By doing it I can publish to a third level party data from my site easily in unified structure.

So what is the main different from what we have today?

Today we are using XML structure in order to keep data and to publish it or even publishing a specific  API that will explain the consumer the way she can retrieve the data. These kinds of solutions spends the developer's time that wants to get the data (she has to learn the API in order to use it); the Microformats comes to save up this time because it's a well know formats.

You can use RSS or some other feeds you'll ask not? In fact yes! BUT, these Microformats has a variety of patterns that help you publish extended unified structure data which supplies you more functionality.

Common standards are: hCalendar which supplies a calendar format in order to publish events, hCard which is a format for personal details card.

One more good advantage is search engines. Step by step, search engines crawlers starts to learn this kind format and knows to index this data in efficient way; this is also improves your site's SEO.

More details regarding it you can read here - http://microformats.org/

I introduces by Erez Eden (a friend and a colleague) to several tools that can track, watch and record your visitors behavior in order to give you some more details to improve your actions, publishing and more stuff in your website.

Although I am using the Google Analytics, which is great tool itself and supplies great statistics and analytics I decided to install one of them and to know my readers behavior and actions - maybe I could do something regarding it to improve the browsing experience in me weblog (sounds very sexy isn't it? ;)

RobotReplay
This one is very easy to install - all you need to do is to add simple script snippet into your master page header and let things go...
They are offering you:

• Improve your site's usability
• See where your readers get bored
• Convert more visitors to buyers (if you sell something e.n.)

Sounds interesting...
You can enjoy this service at: www.robotreplay.com

ClickTale
I quote: "Record visitors' every action as they browse your website. Watch movies to understand visitor behavior, gain valuable insights and improve your website's usability."

This tool created by couple Israeli people that I think they did here great job (I didn't investigate it deeply but it surely looks good). They offering free version of this one that limits the pages' reviews to 100 per week (is that enough for you?) and supply you also great information about your website surfers.

You can check it out yourselves here: www.clicktale.com

Enjoy...

After a year and a half of posting (most of the time) not included weak periods of time, Google ranked me as 4 in their PageRank.

I just want to mention it, KUDOS

Firstable, before I am going to write the following words, I want to mention and admit that I am realy a big fan of Microsoft technologies, its innovetions and its line of philosophy; Most of the time they are doing good job (in some cases I would implement some things in other way, but this issue if for other post...).

What I want to talk about in this post is the C# language's development from the first version of .NET until the further to come which is .NET 3.5 in Visual Studio 2008.
In the beginning of .NET 2.0 there were great and major language improvement, like generics, anonymous methods/delegates and more nice things (that indeed, helps us to write more nice, agile and elegant code). BUT major things often require new keywords to support the 'enhanced' language, for an example: the <TEntity> syntax in order to use and implement generics.

In the generics case, this syntax is required in order to make a usage with this great feature, but in most cases new keywords are BAD, just bad because developers have the annoying habit of using non-keywords as identifiers. An example for new keyword is the pair: return yield. In the first version of iterators, you had to use yield when you wanted to "return" an iterator value back, and as we know everything worked just fine, so why should they need to add the return keyword in order to return the iterator's value? (I'll be glad to get the answer if you got it...)

I tried to figure out and see what Microsoft tried to do regarding this issue and found that they ment to provide a utility that you could run over your source code, and it would replace any identifier that had become a keyword with the escaped version. It should do this by putting an "@" sign in front of it. I don't think that tool at least was published...

Today, just before .NET 3.5 is releases out (not in beta of course), we can see on beta versions and examples the new keywords and innovations that had been added to the language which demands from us to adjust ourselves to the new syntax.

At the bottom line, it makes us a little bit of hard time at the begining, but it enhances our language and gives us a learning challenge and the ability of upgrading our code (maybe not easy to read on the first time but easy to implement and to make it more agile and generic). 

I encourages these changes, but don't forget - everything could work just fine without these new stuff.

After squeezing pandora radio from all sides (and songs ;)), I discovered a great internet radio website, called: bee.fm.

The greatest thing about this site is the ability of listening almost all (and whole) albums of the chosen artist. So, if you are music fans, that like to listen to great music while working, this is the site for you (and NO, I am not getting from them any comission ;)).

So, cheers by now... I going back to listen some Frank Sinatra, Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, Jetru Tull, Madonna, Sade and more and more...

I know it's maybe a little bit banal, but Tzippi (my beloved wife) wanted me to publish it, so here it is:

Egozi, Oren, Dror, when do we make avatars union?

I got an email the other day from Omer Rauchwerger, the developer and the man who stands behind a nice tool (addin that runs over the Visual Studio 2005) called Regionerate. I had requested to 'play' with this tool and give an opinion about it, and so I did...

(Note: I heard about it earlier than Omer's email, Ken Egozi's had posted about it on his blog).

Before I outlines my impressions, comments and feelings about it, I want to give some words about the Regionerate website itself; The man did here realy good job. There are great detailed demo movie that displays the work of the tool, some tutorials, gallery and more...

About the tool, well I'd downloaded the latest version (beta) on my PC and played with it a little bit. The usage is very convinient and indeed saves time while reagioning your code, it all being done by a single right click and gives nice and elegant outcome.

I very impressed from the custom Code Layout of this tool; By Using this tool you can customize your final layout of code by simple XML file editing (fully intellisense adapted).

On the  end of the day, a great work has been done here and I am looking for more innovetions in the next versions and for the final release of course.

Omer, if you'll find a way to give the ability of titling each specific region in addition to the current titles (before regioning of course) it will be great one.

Download is here.

I sat yesterday in front of my big screen LCD TV at home, and I must tell you that I've enjoyed every step on the game between Real Madrid and Mallorca.

1456 days - this is the time that had pass from the last Real's championship until yesterday evening. After a great comeback from the men in white, (3:1 on Mallorca), this club earned his 30th championship. Until the 79th minute of the game, Barca (the previous champion) was virtually saved its title, but of course Capello's team did the unbelivable, the substitue - Rayas ripped the net twice and lead the men in white to its championship.

I am glad and think that it's a good refreshment (Barca had become a little bit boring...), after all the Spanish league is the best, don't you think?

 (A.P)

I know that I am a big fan of Microsoft products and technologhy, but I read today the Safari (from Apple) is ready to download.

Despite this version is still a beta, you can download it to your PC and start playing with it.

I downloaded it just to get the feel impression of it and also to has an idea how my web applications are being showed there... (good for cross browsers suitabilities). And it's nice...

Download is here.

Hey, I just can't wait this movie will be coming on screens already, so I have decided to remind you that in 4th of July will be the premier.

Is this logo reminds you somthing...?

So, here is a link to to countdown to Transformers movie with trailers, photos and more (from Yahoo! site)...

See you at the theaters...

After doing great usage with CAPTCHA in my site (when adding comments - if you didn't try it I am inviting you to give it a try and add some comments after reading this post...), I decided to give some words about it...

Some definitions...
a CAPTCHA is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to determine whether the user is human, aka "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart". A CAPTCHA involves one computer (a server) which asks a user to complete a test. While the computer is able to generate and grade the test, it is not able to solve the test on its own. Because computers are unable to solve the CAPTCHA, any user entering a correct solution is presumed to be human.

There are several approaches to this CAPTCHA mechanism, that comes to supply the same idea of effect (to differ a human user from a computer user of course), like:
- Carnegie Mellon's PIX CAPTCHA, which the user here sees few images and need to differ which one is exceptional.
- Oli Warner's KittenAuth, the user here needs to select all animals of specific speices in the proposed images.
- Microsoft's Asirra, quite similar to KittenAuth, but works under larger amount of images.

Some issues that are important in order of using CAPTCHA in your web site:

• You must dock the CAPTCHA image/s in a non dominant place in your web site - think about it, the CAPTCHA mechanism is comes to help you to avoid bots, not to take a central place in your site.
• The CAPTCHA image/s supposed to has as much as small weight (something like between 4 to 8 kb), the site should not be affected from the CAPTCHA image/s creation. I'd rather creating the CAPTCHA image/s using HttpHandler that display the image/s from an outside mechanism.
• The area of the image/s should be appropriate to the site isuue. Images of cats should not be appropriate to a government site for example, therefore select the image/s properly.
• Store the CAPTCHA in a safe place and name them in appropriate names in order to use it properly.

OK, what about some implementation? There are a lot of ways to implements this algorithm, which is not so complex. You can find a lot of written open source small application that implements this CAPTCHA mechanism.

In the web application that I am working on at work, we saves all distorted images in a DB (and its images' values of course) and grabs it randomally on each request of the specific page that holds the CAPTCHA. The distorted image is shown to the user and its value is stored in the page viewstate (which is also encripted of course).
After that user enters her input, that value is being validated against the distorted image's value and if it's correct, moves on...

Do you have more suggestions of CAPTCHA implemetations?

Hey fellows...

I wanted to share you with an event that happened these days, my friend - Oded Balilty won the Pulitzer Prize for his photograph.

This is a great honor also to Oded and as well to Israel state of course.

This photograph displays a lone settler woman defying Israeli security forces, so take a look:

Well done Oded, keep successing alive...

With regards,
Eran

Hello guys, how are you?

In this post I wanted to talk about some code managing. As we all know (the Microsoft environment developers of course...) the 'natural' way, that Microsoft pushes into, that exists (if you are working with Visual Studio) is to work against Visual Source Safe. In all my (3 years) career progress I was working against this tool, which was not so bad, but in fact, it has some disadvantages and problems (do not mention the incidents of code losting and lack of doing merging between code files).

So, let's talk about the SubVersion control system and give some overview about this open source and free product.
'The goal of the Subversion project is to build a version control system that is a compelling replacement for CVS in the open source community. The software is released under an Apache/BSD-style open source license.' (taken from the SubVersion site).

OK, some basics facts:

1. FREE FREE FREE - As they claims (in the above paragraph) this product is free to use, so you don't need to buy this kind of a tool (if you are lack of money... :))
2. Directories, renames, and file meta-data are versioned. Lack of these features is one of the most common complaints against each source control. Subversion versions not only file contents and file existence, but also directories, copies, and renames. It also allows arbitrary metadata ("properties") to be versioned along with any file or directory, and provides a mechanism for versioning the `execute' permission flag on files.
3. Apache network server option, with WebDAV/DeltaV protocol. Subversion can use the HTTP-based WebDAV/DeltaV protocol for network communications, and the Apache web server to provide repository-side network service. This gives Subversion an advantage over CVS in interoperability, and provides various key features for free: authentication, wire compression, and basic repository browsing.

and more...

I found this tool best to use now, because in the existing project that I am working on, the work is also overseas (I am working commonly with developers in the US), and the only tool that provides that is the SubVersion.
Another good thing is that I can get as much as I want a file to work on, and even if another developer is working on it in the same time, at the end of the work SubVersion will know to merge the code in a smart way, which Visual Source Safe run into problems occasionally.

So, if you want to explore some more details about it and download it you can go to the SubVersion site at: http://subversion.tigris.org/

Comments will be appriciated.

Hey guys, how are you these hot and exhausting days?? I am pretty OK, except for the heat...

If you didn't hear about the ReSharper yet, some words about it:
ReSharper is an add-on to Visual Studio 2003 and 2005, It comes equipped with a rich set of features that greatly increase the productivity of C# and ASP.NET developers. With ReSharper you get intelligent coding assistance, on-the-fly error highlighting and quick error correction, as well as unmatched support for code refactoring, unit testing, and a whole lot more. All of ReSharper's advanced features are available right from Visual Studio.

This add-on includes features like: Error Highlighting and Quick-Fixes, Advanced Coding Assistance, Numerous Refactorings, Navigation and Search, Unit Testing, ASP.NET Editing, NAnt and MS Build Scripts Editing. More details you could read in the link attached below.

So, you can try using this good add-on by downloading a 30-day evaluation from the jetbrains.com site here, and if you will like it I suggest to buy it (on your company account of course :))

This post refers to all of you that holds a personal site or administrates sites and wants to know some analytics and statitctics about site fraffic.

Google (the amazing...) came out with very sophisticated site analytics tool that can tell you "everything you want to know about how your visitors found you and how they interact with your site. You'll be able to focus your marketing resources on campaigns and initiatives, and improve your site to convert more visitors" (Google's qoute).

I had very impressed, initially, of the user's interface graphic design and the diverse statistic summaries, and the most valuable thing here is that, this is very easy to implement - you need to add small script to your site and that's it!!!

For more info you can try it here. I already inserted the script code on my differents sites.

Bye for now...

Hello!

Today my blog has ranked on google for the first time, everything is a result of good SEO (Search Engines Optimization) actions on my web site..

Try to find me :)

While searching for new features and products from Microsoft's breeding ground, I discussed with my team leader Egozi, about nice advanced graphical editor that will be easy to use (not like professional editors and studios like: Photo Shop or FreeHand etc...) to design simple and well graphically designed web controls, like buttons, tabs, tables, grids and more... I wanted a nice graphical editor to create the above controls to be well designed and interactive for my private 'developing at home' application - Haverut.co.il.

He introduced me the Microsoft Expression tool (or product, call it whatever you like...). This product is still in BETA version but it works fine (for the most features I've tried).
The Product contains 3 tools:

• Graphic Designer
• Interactive Designer
• Web Designer

I will focus on the Web Designer CTP1 (Community Technologhy Tool)!
This tool is very easy to use and supplies you greater flexibility to create sophisticated applications and contents. It contains nice code editor, that enables you to write code easily (with extended and comprehensive intellisense), sophisticaed CSS-based layouts, rich data presentation and more.

I played a little bit with that and created nice designed interactive button, that on hover and on click changes its color and design.

The regular design of the button:
The on mouse over design of the button:
The on mouse click design of the button:

And the coolest thing with this button creation is that you don't need to upload images or to create the javascript methods and CSS layouts, you design the button only with the graphical designer and saves the content - the tool generates the code automaticlly and creates the GIF or JPEG files and CSS code.

So go and download this, just play with it from: http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/default.mspx

Bye for now...