AJAX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. It has been around for ages but made popular with the so-called Web 2.0 sites. With AJAX you can update parts of a Web page after the Web page has loaded – hence asynchronous. You do not have to use XML at all – well – usually you return HTML and HTML is XML (Note: I have dropped the xHTML and just gone back to calling it HTML and assuming that is properly formed XML).

Tapoll is pictured above. It is a site where you get to predict polls as you vote on them created by professor Dan Zen some years ago. Circled are places where AJAX is used to:

• Send an e-mail and receive confirmation in the same area without refreshing
• View links and stats for all the user’s polls should they wish to see them
• Display related content from YouTube, Flickr, etc. to inspire new poll creation

There are a number of JavaScript classes out there to handle AJAX ranging from a dozen lines to a thousand.  Libraries like jQuery often come with their own AJAX class.  You do not need to know what is in there – just how to use them.   Usually you have a command to call a server script such as PHP and then you specify a function that will run when the server script replies – this function receives a result.  You then put the result into the innerHTML property of a div for instance.  The result might be from just a little text to a huge chunk of HTML.

// import the custom AJAX class once (go find one on the Web)
<script type="text/javascript" src="ajaxclass.js"></script>
callbackFunction = function(result) { 
document.getElementById('messagebox').innerHTML = result; 
}
ajaxCall('ajax.php?parameter=value&parameter2=value',
     callbackFunction, 'POST');

At the heart of AJAX is a JavaScript object XMLHttpRequest() and Microsoft may have something specific – I don’t really know anymore – we just use any of the multitude of classes available and they work it out along with cuing issues.  I think I used this in the late 90′s for polling (fake sockets) for a banner chat idea.  People could chat with anyone else seeing the same banner ad.  I went with Flash in the end which has had asyncronous communication with servers since somewhere around 1997.  It is obviously very important for Web applications but it is over 10 years old so not exactly new.

Professor Dan Zen and Technician Alex Geddie demonstrated a Sheridan iPhone application called The Magic Cue Ball – a play on the Magic Eight Ball prediction game.  The students worked in Apple’s xCode and Interface Builder to connect up the interface and change the predictions used by the Cue Ball.

The students had a great time and loved working with the new technology.

Jocelyn Piercy, the Dean of Applied Computing and Engineering Sciences reports:

Phil Stubb’s work with our local school boards resulted in 400 very energetic grade 7 and 8 students from both Halton and Peel boards (Dufferin-Peel for the first time) spending a day on campus in technology workshops and getting a sense of what great futures they might have in science and technology. A Principal from Dufferin-Peel who was in attendance told me how impressed she was with the way our workshop leaders had engaged their students, and how the day would go a long way towards these students considering college programs and encouraging them to focus on science and math courses in high school … which it turns out might actually be fun! Those giving workshops really went above and beyond. Thank you for this. Workshops were:

• Crimp my cable – Bob Pearce
• Hook a crook – Tom King
• The amazing renewable race – Herb Sinnock and Dave Clark
• Pneumatics – David Felice
• Hubble bubble toil and trouble – Terry Davison and Mike Dancziger
• Creative modelling – Michael Arthur
• Computer throw down – Phil Stubbs
• I love iPhones – Alex Geddie and Dan Zen

Thanks to Julia, and to Angela and the folks in Recruitment, for organizing a terrific day for these students.

ATTEND THE INITIAL INFORMATION SESSION:

Date: November 19th, 2009
Time: 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Location: Davis Campus (Room B301)

PLEASE email Meenu (meenu.seda@sheridanc.on.ca) to introduce yourself or just to say hello and to confirm your attendance.

What is KNOWIT?

KNOWIT is a support system for Women majoring in Information Technology field. KNOWIT club connects women to boost their participation and advancement in the high growth technology sector allowing them to be successful in their education as well as advance in their career.

Why KNOWIT?
1. Get mentorship from women currently working in Information Technology field
2. Increase awareness about Information technology sector
3. Remarkable Networking opportunities
4. Increase your leadership and communication potential
5. Reach professional and personal goals

We are “Knowledge Network For Women in Technology”.

JOIN US for knowledge, empowerment and support.

Contact: Meenu Seda,  Sheridan College Alumni, Founder of KNOWIT

Email: meenu.seda@sheridanc.on.ca

Click for Interactive Invite

We are having our Sheridan Interactive Multimedia Open House at Function 13 this year in Kensington Market in Toronto. This is the home of FITO – the largest Flash User Group in the world and also FITC – one of the top digital media conferences. As such… we are thankful for Shawn and the crew for providing a FREE FITC Ticket as a door prize! So come on out!

The invite this year is exciting as usual. It was created by the students and in particular Rob, Salpy and Matt with theme and organizational help from all of us. It includes an interactive augmented reality 3D portion. You print a page and look at the page with a Webcam and it shows a surprise 3D figure. This is something that we will be continuing at the open house in a very amusing way and also is involved in how we give away the FITC ticket.

Here is a link to the Invite:

http://imm.sheridanc.on.ca/go/openhouse2009wp

Anyone can see the invite but for the second stage with the FLAR and 3D portion you will need to have a Webcam – if you don’t or just want to take a quick look at what it is like… here is a video of professor Dan Zen trying it out:

http://imm.sheridanc.on.ca/go/youtube2009wp

Please drop on by the event page in facebook and RSVP!

IT’S ALIVE – Modeling Life…
Sheridan Interactive Multimedia Open House 2009

addEventListener…

April 22, 2009
2PM – 7PM
Function 13 Gallery (Home of FITO and FITC)
156 Augusta Ave – Kensington Market (at Dundas)
Toronto

var tech:Array = ["AS3", "3D", "Inverse Kinematics", "Tilt", "Motion Graphics",
"AIR", "PHP", "MySQL", "JQuery", "AJAX", "Project Management", "Web Design"];

var apps:Array = ["Adobe CS4", "Flash", "DreamWeaver",
"Photoshop", "Illustrator", "Premiere", "AfterEffects"];

All the best… Dan Zen

-09-

You see, I only mention it because she lived in a little farming village in Eastern Ontario where my siblings and I, our spouses and all the kids gathered at her house for a few days for the usual formalities.  I didn’t take my computer but among the eleven of us, there were three who did.

At one point I was sitting in Mum’s living room numbly watching my nephew play one of the Halo games (on a big-screen, flat panel TV by the way) when I suddenly heard a sound I hadn’t heard for years:  the sound of a modem hooking up on the telephone line.  You know, the brief dialtone, the beep-bit-bop-bit dialing, the nerve-jangling, multi-pitched, overly-loud whistling noises and then finally, the sweet white noise crackling sound as the modem went into its state of technological bliss, connecting with its own higher power.  As you can see, it was a pretty spiritual few days all in all.

The thing is, the next sound I heard was the voice of my sister, complaining that “Geez, dial-up is slow!”

It made me think.  She’s on a 56k modem and she thinks it’s slow.  My mind leapt to the early afternoon of Sunday May 4, 1980.  I know the precise date and time because that was the day that Josep Broz Tito, the dictator who led the former Yugoslavia after World War II, died.  Geez. there’s a lot of death in this blog.

Yes, Tito died that day, or at least the news of his death emerged that day.  And this is the point of this blog entry:  I was the ‘first kid on my block’ to know it.

That’s because the Friday before, my boss had handed me a cardboard carton and said “See if you can get this working.”  It turned out that the box contained a 300 baud acoustic modem.  You’ve seen these things – in museums.  It was the kind of modem that you set your telephone handset into, you know, the kind with the two rubber cups.

Well I did get it going and, long story short, I connected to the Reuters news service.  For the next half hour or so I leaned in to the green monochrome screen of a Commodore Pet microcomputer and watched the news roll across the screen.  And that’s what it did: roll.

Back in the day most consumer-level modems connected at a speed of 300 baud.  Baud?  Look it up.  And then stop right there.  How do you look it up?  If you’re like me, you Googled it and then shame-facedly sneaked a peek in Wikipedia.  Oh, and by the way, most likely you weren’t connected at 300 baud when you did this and you aren’t right now as you read our blog.  You see, 300 baud – the number of signal events per second – is really slow.  Really slow.  It’s slow enough that your eye can keep up with the characters displayed on the screen as the modem receives them off the wire.  There are no buffers, no full screen windows of any kind.  No, it’s a o-n-e- -c-h-a-r-a-c-t-e-r- -a-t- -a- -t-i-m-e- -d-i-s-p-l-a-y-.

So anyway, there I was on May 4, 1980 watching the news stories come over the line.  I kept reading long enough that the stories began to repeat themselves in a loop.  I noticed on the odd one that small additional facts  were edited into the original messages as they came around again.  And then, out of the blue, came a brand new message:  the news that Josep Tito had died.

Politically speaking, this was a major development because old Joe, well he was an iron-fisted dictator who literally held the region and its society together single-handedly.  Everybody knew that once Joe was gone, all hell was gonna break loose.  It took until 1991 as it turned out, and it was bad.  Really bad.

Less importantly, but still important enough to me – a young geek at the time – was the fact that I had learned about the news even before it was reported in newspapers or in the broadcast media.  The immediacy of the news blew my mind.

You see Marshall McLuhan, the University of Toronto communications theorist, had coined the term “global village” in 1962 in his book “The Gutenburg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man” and then had elaborated on it in his 1964 book “Understanding Media.”  The concept, original at the time but now a bit of a yawner, was that high-speed electronic communications would shorten the lag time in communications making it seem as if the world were getting smaller, so small in fact that it would seem as if the entire planet were but a village.  Oh, and the little farming village where Mum lived is a case in point:  news travels fast in Vankleek Hill.

McLuhan’s ideas were not new to me because my high school English teachers – very modern people or so they believed – had force-fed us this nonsense in their Grade 13 classrooms.  It turns out though, that it wasn’t just theoretical nonsense firehose-blasted in our direction by too-cool-for-school Mr. Klassen.

For me, on the afternoon of May 4, 1980 the Global Village became real, right then and right there in the spare bedroom of our first apartment.  Yikes!

So that was the Global Village at 300 baud.  My sister’s ‘too-slow’ dialup connection last week was 56 kbps and I’ve written this blog sitting at home on a 54 Mbps wireless connection.  When I get back to campus on Monday I’ll have to check my subnet’s bandwidth and twenty-five years from now, you’ll tell me the bit rate and I’ll have to re-start this rant from the beginning.

Yikes again!

Sheridan Super Computer 2009 / 1950

The other day I bought myself a new digital P&S camera. It’s top of the line and for me at least, pretty cool. Naturally I had to buy some memory so I also picked up an 8Gb SD chip. No big deal, right?

Wrong! Think about it: for under $30 in a retail store I was able to buy 8 gigabytes of memory on a digital device the size of a freaking postage stamp! Yikes!

Why am I getting so carried away? Well you see, I’m a gray-beard, a veteran of around 35 years of technological advancement and I’ve experienced a lot of the digital technology history first hand. That’s first hand, not just read about it (on Wikipedia – and that’s a whole other story), and not just told about it by some crusty old guy such as myself at the front of a classroom. Nope. First hand.  Please note that the advent of steam power was before my time.

My own technological infancy took place on a computer having 4,096 12-bit words of iron-core memory in a form factor a bit bigger than a bar fridge, and that needed a 220V power supply and cooling.  Roll the tape forward 35 years and there I am buying 8Gb of memory I don’t need a truck for to get home.

Yikes!  Wow! I mean WOW! On the one hand I can hardly believe this is true, but on the other hand we all kind of knew back in the day that this was going to happen.  I remember a seminal conversation – seminal conversations are usually over beer, but on this day it was coffee – with a guy named Steve here at Sheridan.  It was the Fall of 1978 and we were playing ‘predict the future of computers’ that day.  And you know what?  On some aspects, mostly conceptual, we got it pretty close:  unfathomable miniaturization and power efficiency, networks, flat screens and foldable keyboards, shirt-pocket computing and massive memory.  That much we got pretty close, but on the matter of scale we weren’t even in the right galaxy.  You see when we were thinking massive amounts of memory we were thinking mega, not giga and certainly not tera.  Yikes again.

So what’s important here?  Well, I think it’s important always to be amazed at the right things in technology as it progresses.  Watch out for the quantum leaps – by the way, quantum mechanics already has been applied in the field of cryptography in secure key exchange.  My hope for you is that you never become so inured by technological advance that you give it a big yawn.  Be amazed by it, maybe even a little scared by it if that’s what keeps you learning.  Never lose your capacity for needing to exclaim about it.  Yikes!

In future posts I’ll share some of my own first hand experiences of technological history in the hope that you’ll be amazed by them as well.  Gather round children…

WordCamp Toronto Open Source Festival May 8-10th

Speakers and schedules are just being worked out for the Toronto WordCamp – WordPress and friends – festival from May 8-10th but you can get your tickets for $50 – amazing price… $35 for students and $185 group rate for up to 7 employees.

http://phug.ca/wordcamptoronto/

WordPress is the most popular Web content admin system famous for its bloggers and open source community.  This blog is a WordPress blog

Sounds like a great event to get our students and friends out to and you can’t beat the price.  As a matter of fact… if we can we should try and sponsor the event.  I have put in a request to marketing and we will see what happens.

Hope to see you there – leave a comment if you and a group are coming.  Oh… I am giving a talk there from a content creator standpoint at least.

Dan – 09

At Sheridan Institute, we have a number of passionate educators, staff and students with diverse knowledge and skills.  It is the purpose of this blog to share our interests with respect to curriculum, industry, events, and even personal hobbies and philosophies.  The hope is to pollinate ideas,  gain community and ultimately enrich our lives.

The posts on this blog are by the  faculty and staff at ACES – Applied Computing and Engineering Sciences and in particular the IT areas of ACES.  As a guide, here are some things that we can blog about – have a look at the Blogging Tips too:

• Curriculum
• Awards and Events
• Philosophies
• Industry News
• Technologies and Techniques

The intended audience is certainly our colleagues but we should aim to provide a broader perspective to our students and grads.  The industry and general public may also be interested in the site or our more specific blogs.  Prospective applicants as well may find the blog through search engines or links and appreciate the community that we share.