kvrlogs

I have Ubuntu dapper running on Dell Latitude D610 - with some help and inspiration from my colleague Josh Cronemeyer - a linux whiz. I have tried linux in fits and starts but never covered so much ground as I have in the past 2 months - and now very rarely I boot into Windows world. Pros : Stable. Gnome. Boots up fast, everything is ultra responsive - compared to windows xp on the other side of the laptop. Lotus notes on wine works surprisingly ok. ( damn you IBM for lotus notes ) Cisco VPN !! Java compilation time - 20% less time than windows apt-get install Multi desktops, desktop spanning. Wireless support much better from Dapper onwards. Hard drive never starts threading - uses virtual memory the way it is supposed to be. I run lot of stuff all the time and the OS never twitches. Cons : No TextPad No TortoiseSVN Lotus notes ( damn damn you IBM ) Colibri - perhaps there is an equivalent - havent researched Lot to catch up with OS X - but far ahead than that thing called windows.

Who is this post for? Anyone trying to switch careers ( I was in mainframes, asp then php developer then a swing developer before I switched to this web-app java development), or who is already in Java and wants to get to the next level. What this post is about? Few years back I was slogging on a swing app without knowing what the market was all about - though the swing app taught me the good and bad about Java - it did not help me in getting a job. This post is a guideline for that directionless soul... this.post : Heres some philosophy of mine. Ask yourself - how much did you spend last year on books on technology? If technology is your livelihood, think of it as an investment. You need to invest a lot ( and read a lot ) to get good returns. So do not hesitate to buy books, magazine subscriptions - its worth every penny/paisa/rouble. Lets start. Step 1 : Get to know Java's strength. Assuming it was me years ago, happily coding php in dreamweaver and nodding along with the posters...

I messed up the Java that came with Fedora linux and had JAVA_HOME pointing to Sun's JDK. Then I downloaded Ant, set ANT_HOME to this new location and whenever I typed ant i got an error message : Unknown argument: -cp Even though when I did a "which ant" it pointed to the correct location which was in ANT_HOME/bin/ Googling did not give me any useful results. Then I thought am I the only one having this problem - so I tried in yahoo ( was planning on trying dark lord's search if it didnt work) - and got the first result with the solution itself. You can try this search query "ant unknown argument: -cp" to see how Yahoo trumps Google in this. Google if you are reading this clean up your act. Anyways heres the solution. Remove the ant that came with fedora. Become root and type : "yum remove ant" Done.

Well heres a primer for the un initiated in the new www. Googling for something has become so 90s. I will list some tools/techniques I use daily which are far more effective. 1. RSS - RDF Site Summary, or Rich Site Summary, or Really Simple Syndication Think of it as SMS text messages sent by websites all the time. Once you subscribe to it you need not hit the website to see if there is any new content. Firefox, Safari, Opera all have RSS built right into them ( The Dark Lord is still building as of this post) . So if you have the urge to see whats happening in the world you need not type cnn.com - instead you can just pull up the RSS list to see if anything interesting has happened before you last checked - It saves time, saves bandwidth and you can quickly check across multiple such websites in under a minute. The above screenshot is one I took just now. 2. del.icio.us - A social book marks manager. Before I go further lets go back to early 90s - pre Google days. There was this ...

I heard this song in a home made video that I saw in google videos. It piqued my interest and found this song. Pretty hilarious. First watch this Steve Balmer's monkey dance. Next watch this music video. And read the lyrics . Now have a good laugh.

EPIC. I found this link on a ThoughtWorks employee's blog. The flash movie is so engrossing, for the rivetting presentation and the content. Its a nice guess, gotto wait and watch to see how it all develops.

The next firefox. Instead of slapping RSS, Blogging, Flickr,Del.icio.us onto the existing browser, these fine folks have created this new browser called FLOCK. Now I am blogging with FLOCK. Hope I can blog at a faster pace henceforth with blogging toolbar built right onto the browser window.

Our goal : First Iteration : * set up a login page, login formbean, login process Actionservlet stub Second Iteration : * set up log4j for logging purposes * use a pattern - Data Access Object pattern * talk to mysql database * logic for authentication in login actionservlet First Iteration : Setting up login page, login process servlet stub, welcome page Lets build this project iteratively. First the skeleton and then slowly we will start adding sinews adding more complexity. A simple login page that submits the values to the login servlet. ( Well it has to go through the controller servlet - we will see that in a minute ) - and the login process servlet right now doesnt do anything big - just accepts the values and displays the username being entered. It still does not have the ability to talk to database - it has to wait !! We need to create 4 files ( 2 JSP,2 Java) and tamper with struts_config.xml Login.jsp <%@ taglib uri="/WEB-INF/struts-html.tld" prefix="html...

Steps to build a struts application Struts has become a standard for web applications. It lets you fit your web application in a MVC framework - which earlier I had wrongly thought - MVC is only for desktop GUI clients. What is MVC? M-Model V-View C-Controller Model deals with the data - JavaBeans containing the data. View deals with how you want to display the model Controller - How the model and view are to be controlled Lets take the example of a login process. Here is the scenario : User enters login name, password hits submit. The form data are sent to a servlet that talks to the database to see if the information is valid. If it is valid, it puts the name, role information in a javabean and sends the browser to a welcome page. If not it sends the browser an error page. Now with MVC scenario. When the user hits submit, the control does not directly go to the servlet but to a controller servlet. The form values are put in a javabean ( model ). The controller's main job is to se...

I am a multi tasker. I have a minimum of 5 applications running simultaneously. Exposé offers a beautiful solution to manage this mess. It has spoilt me !! Now I open even more apps and do not bother to close them. Ah the power of OS X in managing memory. These are the applications I was running when I took this screen shot. Eclipse Mail Safari ITunes 2 Text documents Terminal CocoaMySQL 2 Finder windows Now when I have to switch between apps all I have to do is click my middle mouse button or press F9 or move my mouse to the left most top corner ( my choice ) - and everything zooms out neatly to this ( see screenshot below) - and I just click on the window I need. Fast simple easy. OS X started small. Jaguar did not have much fancy stuff other than the eye candy gui. With a solid foundation built with Jaguar, OS X engineers started innovating on top of it. Exposé was introduced in Panther. Things are just getting started. On April 29th Tiger is being released. It will be a while befor...

Starting today, I am going to write about how on a mac you can do more things. Of course you can do the same or even more in Windows - but you have to bend your back. I will examine each of the applications, tricks I enjoy in my mac - also to be fair will try to find equivalent application in windows and linux and review them. Mac sets you free...!!

UML is like the Grand Unified Theory (GUT) for physicists - only difference is UML has been developed and is being used everywhere. I started this book a few days ago and I am hooked. I will be telling you some of the interesting things I discover in this journey. As a briefer : UML defines nine types of diagrams 1. Class diagrams 2. Sequence diagrams 3. Collaboration diagrams 4. Object diagrams 5. Statechart diagrams 6. Activity diagrams 7. Use case diagrams 8. Component diagrams 9. Deployment diagrams

Incredibles poster Originally uploaded by haikvr . I remember 1992 when I saw Terminator 2 - I thought this is it - we have reached the end of graphics and imagination - nothing else can be made which can top this. 12 years later I want to laugh at that kvr who watched Terminator in awe. Sangeeta and I went to the 12.00am show on Nov 5th to see Incredibles. There was a sparse crowd so we could choose our seats. The movie rolled and it looked like some ordinary cartoon movie. The movements were smooth, animation was amazing but still nothing ground breaking. You have to wait till the jungle scenes to realize Pixar's prowess. The leaves and greenery were real. I dont know if they used real shots and mixed it with the virtual scenery - or they recreated it. I gotto wait for the making of Incredibles DVD to know how they did it. The greenery was real. The rocket, the buildings - I had to keep telling myself this is all CGI and its not real. Thats for the graphics and animation....