Kim Dotcom launches the new cloud storage 'Mega' exactly 1 year after the shutdown of MegaUpload. In January 2012, MegaUpload was shutdown due to copyright infringments. The Judiciary and FBI called this MegaUpload copyright case "among the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought by the United States."

Mega cloud storage is a new beginning for Kim Dotcom, based in New Zealand.  Why New Zealand, is that because of the implications of MegaUpload in US? Found it in FAQ of Mega's official site.

It's doesn't matter Whether its an escape from MegaUpload's copyright cases for Mega to provide their services from New Zealand, because this new cloud storage is worth trying. Dotcom says that this new venture is not a revenge on MegaUpload's end, Mega cloud storage is bound to all legal factors.

This new cloud storage provider is similar to 'DropBox', 'Boxnet' etc. One cool feature of Mega is free storage limit.  Mega provides 50GB free storage and also there are other premium storage plans to choose from. Another important feature is the security and privacy of the user's data by HTTPS secure access and other encryption modes for the data. Mega is browser based and you don't have to install any client applications to upload or download files. Mega promises that Mega users can expect friendly client applications for Mobile, Tablets and other devices.

Mega loves google Chrome, if you are using any other browsers other than Chrome, Mega will suggest you to install chrome for better experience in uploading and other functionalities.  If you are using chrome browser, you have the choice to Drag and Drop file uploading.

For developers, Mega offers an API.  This API is based on HTTP/JSON request-response scheme.  Developers can use the Open JavaScript source code for API reference samples.  This is the code used for browser interface of Mega.  Mega also assures that, they will be providing the libraries and SDK's for various programming languages in the near future.

Windows Azure Media services are now available in production. Microsoft officially released the Azure Media Services and are available now in cloud.  This release promises the best use of media platform to build scalable media solutions available in Windows Azure Media Services.

You can easily set up media services for your website. With Windows Azure Media Services, you can stream video to HTML5, Flash, Silverlight, Ipad, Iphone, XBox, Android and many other clients.  Azure media services supports a wide range encoding for your videos and you don't have to set up any encoding utility softwares to encode your video, Azure media services supports the built-in encoding to convert your video into different file formats to support the clients.

On-Demand streaming enabled in this release and Microsoft's focus now will be on Live streaming, says Scott Guthrie in his blog post.  Media services also support DRM/Content protect for your videos, currently MicroSoft PlayReady and Apple AES content protection formats are supported.

Using REST API's or .NET you can upload assets to the cloud, bulk upload is also supported or you can upload your files through Windows Azure Portal. Upload files will be automatically encoded to the media format for the clients.

Registration started for 'Facebook Hacker Cup 2013'.  Hacker Cup is an annual programming competition organized by Facebook to find the best hacker in the world.  Hacker Cup was started in 2011, and this is the third time Facebook conducts this hackathon.  Petr Mitrichev was the worlds best hacker of 'Hacker Cup 2011', and winner of 2012 hackathon was Roman Andreev. 

Anyone can register and participate in the competition to find the Mr./Ms hacker of the year 2013.  Qualification round and first 3 rounds will be conducted online and final round will be at Facebook office in California.

Hot & Cool awards and prizes for the winners :

• 1st Place  - 10,000$
• 2nd Place - 2,000$
• 3rd Place - 1,000$
• 4th to 25th Place - 100$
• Tshirts

Qualification round starts on 25th January 2013 4 PM PST and the allotted time for this round will be 72 hrs. 1st round of 'Hacker Cup' 2013 start on 2nd February 2013 10 AM and this round will last 24 hrs. Round 2 and Round 3 will be conducted on Feb 9th and 16th, and these rounds will last for 3 hrs.  The final onsite round is conducted on March 22nd 2013.

Are you a good programmer? Do you want fame in the programming world, can you solve a problem in less than 6 minutes? Get ready for 'Hacker Cup 2013, register now :

D3.Js (Data Driven Documents) is an open source JavaScript library to provide native visualization of data. Its uses HTML, CSS and SVG to graphically represent and animate your data in a web page. You don't need to use any additional updates or plugins to map data to drawings.  The data can be in JSON, JavaScript array, or can be an external CSV file.

Most of the modern browsers support SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics).  If you are good in HTML, CSS and SVG, you can present your data in a graphical way.  Design your page using HTML, CSS, SVG -   bind data, format, animate and transform  it with D3.JS. The below snippet is a sample SVG to generate a circle.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<body>
<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" version="1.1">
   <circle cx="100" cy="100" r="60" stroke="black" stroke-width="1" fill="orange" />
</svg>
</body>
</html>

We just drawn a circle! <circle> element lets you create a circle. Above SVG will generate a circle of radius - 50, Left and Right (x , y) 100 and 100, black outline, and filled with orange color.



With D3.Js you can easily transform your data into SVG, say bars, charts, pie diagram. D3.JS is the new Protovis.  Learn more about from D3.Js website and also site has number of kick start tutorials in Gallery. Download D3.Js Library from D3.Js site, or you can include online CDN script file to your site.

<script src="http://d3js.org/d3.v3.min.js"></script>

If you are using any external resource as data, like CSV, to view it on web page you will need to host it somewhere.  If you have IIS, Apache, XAMP, LAMP you can host it there and access the web page through : http://localhost/d3sample.html.  The alternate way is the emerging Node.Js :)

Learn SVG tutorials from W3schools
Know D3.JS : http://d3js.org/
Gallery and Example D3.Js : https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Gallery

Typed superset of  JavaScript!! Microsoft's contribution to the programming world in the late 2012.  So whats new in store?? Lets start from official Typescript site. 

Yes, I am kind of excited about TypeScript.  Typescript is new born, but not just a baby.  It sounds promising, but not late to start coding on it, it will help us a lot, i am sure. So lets explore the new born -TypeScript.

TypeScript is a language, that will assist you in JavaScript development.  Whether its small-application or a large-application, TypeScript helps you create better, clean and simple JavaScript codes.  Write in TypeScript, Compile into JavaScript and use it. Now you might be thinking, we know JavaScript well, we code in JavaScript, why do we need a language to create plain JavaScript code now?  Did you guys ever feel like coding in JavaScript is a mess, especially when its a large-application?  My answer is a Yes!!  Typescript allows you to create less error JavaScript codes, with the help of refactoring, statement completion, static typing, warnings, references to the objects, renaming as you do in visual studio and  support for classes and interfaces.

TypeScript is rich and helpful to the developers with its features like Type annotations, static type checking in compile time, classes, interfaces and modules, and the Lambda functions. There are other languages that compiles to JavaScript  like CoffeeScript, Google Dart.  If CoffeeScript is simple for Ruby developers then TypeScript is quite like you code in C#, C++.  Here a notable feature is, you can include JavaScript code in TypeScript, but in CoffeScript, you cannot.

Lets start our TypeScript experiments from the TypeScript play ground. Yeah, lets play! :) In official website you will find a play ground, an editor for TypeScript, and the compiled native javaScript code . Oh sorry, I forgot - TypeScript files are not .js files, they are .ts files - just some file extension thing.

Type annotations :

Type annotations/static typing allows you to set a type to the variable.  In JavaScript a variable type is dynamic, you declare a variable with the keyword var, followed by the variable name.

var myData = "Some Data"; //Here the type of the variable 'myData' is string, because it holds a string.

myData = 100; 

Oh! whats just happened, myData is a number type? This is a problem with JavaScript, there is no type declaration in JavaScript, it can hold any data in a variable (really a variable, not only data, but the type as well).  It won't warn you in compile time if you performing some operations on a variable, its type doesn't support. So in large application, if you assign a value in a variable and somewhere later in the code you may overwrite the data, and if you perform any incompatible operations on it, it will throw exceptions in run time. 

var myData;

myData = "123_activeData";

var id = myData.substring(0,3);

....

....

myData = 1234567;

id = myData.substring(0,3);

In the above snippet, we are declaring a variable myData, it can hold any data - yes, its type is 'any'.  We are assigning a string value to the myData variable and extracting the number from it using substring function. It will return you the first 3 characters from the '123_activeData', ie '123'. Later in the code accidently we changed the value to a number, this changes the type of myData variable to type 'number', and we are trying to call substring function on it. This will result in  run time error (Object doesn't support property or method 'substring'), because substring supported by string types, not by number.

TypeScript lets you strongly type a variable to a type. It will show you errors, suggestions, warnings, while you typing or at compile time. You can strongly type a variable as follows in TypeScript :

var myData: string;

myData = "123_activeData";

var myData2: string = "100_passiveData";

myData = 12345; 

The last line will show you error warning by formatted the '12345' with a red underline. Hovering the mouse on that, will show you a error message : Cannot convert 'number' to string. Because we strongly typed myData as string, it won't allow you to assign a non string value. Go to the TypeScript play ground and try this. Hover on the variable names, errors, you will find it yourself.

In the next session we will discuss about the other features, integrating it in Visual Studio and Node.JS. So Play in the ground, find the big deal!