Category: General

General

JavaOne Day1 Highlights

Posted on by devender
  • The coolest thing I saw today was sentilla , I have been looking for something like this for so long and add Phidgets to it and the possibilities are limitless.
  • Sun wants to JavaFX on every device that runs Java from Mobile to BlueRay some of the demos crashed but it does look cool check it out here, I was not too impressed with the Key note I felt last year’s was much better.
  • Fortress a new language from Sun, Motto is Fortress should do to Fortran what Java did to C. Uses some functional programming paradigms written to run on top of the JVM still in very early stages, I seriously doubt if this will take off syntax was weird who well it will inter operate with other Java Libraries is still to be seen.
  • More Effective Java was awesome !! I am definitely going to get the new edition, revised and a lot of stuff rewritten.
  • You can get a free edition from MapQuest to develop your own MashUps and do cool stuff.
  • Cacheonix is a new Cache Product Find a bug and get a free License!!
  • To get GeoSpatial information on Wifi devices Sky hook was recommended to me.
  • Use OpenGeo.org or DeCarta to do maps and mashups instead of using from google and friends since there are no restrictions and will always be free and will never add Ads.
  • Intel is collaborating with Java to make the JVM highly optimized on Intel architecture out of the box. Link
  • Fork/Join and JSR 166 for all the new concurrency features in 1.7

Annoyances

  • They ran out of Veggi food !! and then they ran out of place to sit and eat !!
  • Some Speaker blasted through the sessions and since they do not give out hand outs like the NFJS guys it is hard to follow.
  • The download link for the presentations is broken!!

Check Me Out on YouTube

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General

A Seti for the Human Brains

Posted on by devender

Do you know what the Seti for the Human Brain is ? it is the TV (read this) thousands of hours of brain cycles waisted. How can we utilize these waisted cycles ?

We need the brains to rest after a full day, but at the same time we need entertainment, so I propose we make a game like warcraft or something like that where people can put interesting questions and others can come and try to solve it. It doesn’t have to be all solving equations but maybe by moving objects around someway to represent interesting problems in a game that will have some actual value in the real world.

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General

Free Source Code Repositories

Posted on by devender

If you are looking to host your project in some repository , I would highly recommend Assembla , they not only provide you with a free account with 500Mb space to start off, but also provide you with a team group chat, blog, task tracker, bug tracker and a whole lot of other features. You also have a choice of using SVN/Git/Mercurial and their paid subscription with which you get 5gig of space is only $12 a month.

GitHub also gives you a free account of 100Mb but it is not Private, with Assembla you have a choice of making it private or public.

I found a lot of places (including google code) that let you host your project IF it is an open source but not too many ones for private, if you know of any other good ones please post in the comments.

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General

Dilbert Comic

Posted on by devender

This is so true at my present employer ! I dread the annual security audit we have to fill out why we still need access and then cross our fingers in the hopes that they do not mess it up , which they will and then pain for 3-4 months.

0
General, random thoughts

Monday Morning Blues

Posted on by devender

Man, it was an hectic weekend now I am tired my eyes are droopy and I am drinking a cup of joe to get a jump start. Can’t complain the weekend was a blast.

Anyone read Dilbert ? http://dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/images/dilbert2008031349276.jpg if you have read code complete or programming pearls you will realize that “measure twice cut once” does actually work. I think programmers are by nature intelligent. Sometimes we just get carried away by the excitement of the very first idea we get and since we are so optimistic we just keep working away at it till it is a big mess. If we could just train ourselves to be a little lazy think twice before we code it would result in great software.

Most reservations systems written in the 70s are still around, most of the big mainframes still around with old code. But new projects new code keeps dying (take Vista for example) maybe those old timers had it write, document flow chart…. before you code. The more agile we get the worse things seems to be, agile now sounds like a four letter word if you ask me. What ever the original meaning was is lost, sailed away into a black hole. Now Agile means we can do anything in whatever amount of time.

Anways enough of that.

Fork: Why did they call if that ? Not that I have anything against it, it actually sounds pretty cool. They could have called it “Create another process” CAP now that would have been lame. Good they went with Fork, but still how did they think of that name if you know leave a comment.

Brain Fork. I know brain can do more than one thing at a time, I can eat, talk and drive a stick shift at the same time 🙂 wouldn’t it be nice if we could fork a process in our brain and assign it some thing to think about hmm maybe our thread pool size for thinking is limited to one.

Ok better get to work now 😦

2
General, random thoughts

Random Musings

Posted on by devender
  • Started using NetBeans for ruby development after a colleague pointed it out to me, so far I am quite happy with the choice.
  • Just finished listening to Rubiverse Podcast on Zed Shaw leaving ruby it is very interesting and I would recommend you hear it, if you have read Zed’s Rails is a Ghetto rant.
  • I love VIM
  • Why is Outlook so slow and if that was not enough my workplace adds more stuff on top of it. I really hope they open up IMAP so that I can use any email client. You know what email client I really like, “Pine” and I also like gmail.
  • Not going to this year’s Rails Conference, I felt let down by last year and I just looked at the schedule for this year and I don’t think I am missing much.
  • I feel really sorry for good programmers who have become nothing more than email processors, so much talent waisted.
  • Every time you attend a meeting a small part of your soul dies compensate it with equal amount of hacking.
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General

The Big 31

Posted on by devender

Sorry for not writing, lately I have been caught up in my head.

This past Jan 26 I have turned 31 years old, Jan 26th is also the republic day of India, while growing up this day was a guaranteed holiday :-). But what really made the day special was my Dad, he would spend a lot of time with me on this day, buy me presents and always be nice to me. It was probably the one day out of the whole year when he gave me a break, rest of the time he was a drill Sargent riding me.

He passed away four years ago, birthdays have never been the same since it’s just sad now. There are so many times I wish I had more time with him.

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General

Jruby Blues

Posted on by devender

Man today was one of those days, I am about to give up on Jruby. Don’t get me wrong I absolutely love the idea of Jruby, great way to sneak in Ruby into the enterprise. But I don’t think it is quite there yet.

If you want to use Jruby and Spring all you got do is include these dependencies into your pom file.

<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
<artifactId>spring</artifactId>
<version>2.5</version>
<scope>compile</scope>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.jruby</groupId>
<artifactId>jruby-complete</artifactId>
<version>1.0.3</version>
<scope>compile</scope>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>cglib</groupId>
<artifactId>cglib-nodep</artifactId>
<version>2.1_3</version>
<scope>compile</scope>
</dependency>

And it works great,……………as long as you don’t have to use Hibernate. It just so happens that Jruby uses asm-2.2.3.jar file and Hibernate uses asm-1.5.3 and apparently the api is very different between these two versions, result is

java.lang.NoSuchMethodError: net.sf.cglib.core.Signature.(Ljava/lang/String;Lnet/sf/cglib/asm/Type;[Lnet/sf/cglib/asm/Type ; ) V

Man this is frustrating, I spent all day trying to work around the problem but no go. Now here is the kicker, it works perfectly fine in eclipse and I am using maven 2 ide .

I spoke with my colleague (Tim) about this and he thinks it works because of OSGI which allows different jar’s depend on different versions of other jars.

1
General

Erlang Blues I

Posted on by devender

So yesterday I had this bright idea to connect to MySql using Erlang, so in order to do this there seems to be two options one is to use a native interface completely written in Erlang or use ODBC . So I tried to use the native interface first.

There seems to be no documentation on how to use this, I finally found a blog with some so I gave it a try, apparently it only works if there is a password, if your password is null it will not. Frustrated I pulled out the source of the implementation, with the idea that I could somehow mess with it enough to get it to work, but the Makefile does not work. It was already 1 in the morning so I just gave up.

The second option is to use ODBC, but if I am reading this correctly you have to get erlang from the source and compile it with MySql ODBC drivers in order for this to work ! I had compiled Erlang on my computer last week, but I have no clue as to what ODBC driver I had used to compile. And too lazy to do it all over again.

Maybe I am doing something stupid here, maybe erlang is not really meant to be talking to traditional relation databases, after all once you start connecting Erlang to Mysql will it really be parallel ?   Maybe I should be extracting all the data into Mnesia.

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