Mobile blog

So looks like i need to have mms enabled to send pics. I have a nokia m-blog acct where i upload them. I will have to see whether i can refer them from here. Otherwise i will just post a link to it

Mobile blogging

I have decided to upgrade myself in the blogging world and linked this blog account to my mobile. Hence, i should now be able to post content from my mobile to this blog (atleast thats what google says). Let me test and see how well it goes on. This would definitely be much better than having to upload photos to picasa and putting a link to it from here

The new nokia N97 preview

A simple dojo based calendar

I was looking around the web for javascript based client side calendar implementations (with no server back-end) to use in one of my projects. The calendar should
- show me a daily/weekly/monthly view
- allow me to create tasks
- show me a list of created tasks on each of the above mentioned views
- click on a task to see task related information.

I came across a dojo based calendar here . It has a very simple UI but rich in functionalities. It is built on dojo 0.4 . But a link down below in the comments section is available where the user has ported the app to a 1.1 release. This should be useful for people looking around for a calendar widget with above mentioned functionalities.

Infact, i saw a post on the dojo website where it mentions that it has plans to make a complex calendar widget similar to the one above with dojo widgets. I am definitely lookng forward to such a kind of widget too..

Infact there seem to be a lot of other implementations which offer a calendara "package" (with a backend infrastructure too). A lot of them are commercial implementations but they have a very rich UI and a lot more functionality. Examples of them are:

zimbra calendar
Ultra apps calendar
Trumba calendar
zapatec calendar

and of course...
google calendar
yahoo calendar

The space time continuum

I got this into my head when i was walking towards an hotel to attend my friend's marriage. I have travelled through that particular road many times on which i was walking right now.. I walked through it five years before when i was in college, five years before that when i was in school.. would probably walk through that road again ten years down the line with wife and kids.. Each time i pass through that particular road, i always consume a particular amount of time..
This means that each time i pass from point A to point B, in a 3 dimensional space, i always consume a constant amount of time.. Even if i decide to stay at point A, i can still consume that same amount of time.. This means that no matter what i do in the 3D space, i still get to travel through time at a constant pace..

So, we can safely say that in the three dimensional space, there is a constant flow of time which we are flowing along with.. We can travel anywhere in the three dimensional space going along with the constant flow of time..

Now, if we assume that time is the fourth dimension, we can think about a few more things.. First imagine an imaginary 2-D object inside a cylinder. This object can see things only in 2-D and has an imbibed a logic which is based on 2D physics.. It can move "along" in a 3-D space (at zero height). It cannot change its position relative to the third dimension. If some one tried explaining moving "IN" a third dimension, it would also probably violate its 2-D physics..
We humans are living in a 3D space. If now, one says that some one could move along the 4th dimension (i.e time) with a different speed at which time is moving right now then, this would essentially mean that one can travel through time. This could probably be true for a 4-D creature which can imagine a 4D space and relate to 4D physics (which would be different than the 3D physics). But this would create a lot of anomalies in our space. Things like killing your father before you were born or meeting yourself a couple of years earlier and changing some of the stuff that you did earlier.

Again, the abstract thought of time flowing through space in a constant speed brings about a thought of "time warp". If we can bend the three dimensional space so that the start and end points that we want to travel to, coincide, then we can travel between these two points in zero time no matter how far apart these two points are in linear 3 dimensional space.


As one of my friend put in, these are just random thoughts that went through my brain when i was walking down the street. It does not attempt to explain any phenomena or try to prove a point about 3D/4D space.

Servlet 3.0 spec

I am not sure how many of us follow the servlet 2.5 spec, but the 3.0 spec is in the process of being implemented in glassfish v3 nightly builds.. Rajiv Mordani has more in his blog about the new features in JSR 315. Would like to give it a try some day

Last.fm firefox plugin rocks!

I have heard about all the hoopla about last.fm and the kind of music it plays.. I have never tried it out until today.. there is a plugin available for firefox for last.fm which allows you to play last.fm from firefox. Curious, i just checked out the plugin on my firefox 3.0.2 browser. And i have to admit that this last.fm thingy absolutely rocks. Last.fm looks very similar to what pandora started out to be.. But maybe with a bit more of features (i could be wrong.. its been ages since i checked out pandora) Pandora is not available outside to US (something similar to hulu). So, i guess i dont have a chance anyways..

Now, since i like last.fm so much, i searched out an installer that can play last.fm on my nokia N78 S60 3rd edition mobile phone too.. Cant wait till i go home and try it out.

The curse and bane of open source software

With the economy starting to go in recession and IT spending becoming tighter, more and more people are starting to look at open source software as a viable option. New business solutions that are being developed focus more on technology and tools that are freely available rather than having to go for paid technologies/frameworks.. Linux is in the spotlight more now and traction behind open source technology is getting more and more traction..

On the other hand, there is this curse of open source software.. They have no sort of liability with respect to your project. In the sense that if the group developing the software decides to shut shop and stop developing the particular product and disperse, you are.. well.. done for it.. I was witnessing this particular scenario in a project that i was involved in some way in the past.. The powers that be had decided that the particular project was past its prime and for other reasons best known to them decided to stop developing the product and worser made the team working on that project focus on other products.

The effect was that, new bugs that came in were not addressed, critical ones were left unclaimed.. Queries on forums and mailing lists were left unanswered. After a while when the releases stopped coming out, people got concerned and started questioning the future of the product. Unfortunately there was no one responsible for that particular product to answer the queries and hence, projects which were gone into production using this particular product were left hanging with the sword above its head.

This is not the only instance i am sure. I have heard other instances of products getting affected because the excellent open source software solution that they were using has stopped further development and support. The reason: They do not have enough money to sustain their development because none of the users that are using the product have given back any monetary benefits to the particular product that they are using..

So, the more important thing than going open source is to find out a product that will actually survive through your product development lifecycle and support cycle. If not, you can be sure that you will have the rubber chicken in your hand..

the browser search

With the browser wars being revived, just for fun, i wondered what msn/google were tweaking their search engines to promote their products.

Out of curiosity, i poked the devil first and logged on to live.com and did the search term "web browser". Now, i am too lazy to take a screen shot and post it out here.. But then do the search and see the result for yourself.. First search result is from the wikipedia.. The second is APPLE SAFARI followed by FIREFOX and OPERA. Internet explorer isnt even being recognized as a web browser in the first two pages of search.. COOL! And even in the related searches section, the firefox browser scored a point above the msn browser.

I next put in the search on google.com. Even though the normal search result did not throw up the google chrome browser and the results were more or less same when compared to msn's search, they had chrome at the top of the search results over there in the sponsored search results.. So, google advertises their products in all the related searches that users do.

Interestingly, a search for "office software" on google throws up office 2007 as a sponsored link and not google's online software. Well food for thought..

P.S On a separate note, the search engines seem to be going the google way in look and feel.. Take a look at live.com (microsoft's), search.yahoo.in (yahoo's) They are not clunky and slow as they used to be earlier too.

Hug a developer day

xs:any Unique Particle Attribution violation

So, i have been trying my hand at creating XSDs for a project i am working on.. While creating it, there came a situation where in, i had to put in an "" element in the XSD.

All was fine and green until the customer complains of an validator error that happens in few of the XSDs that contain this xs:any element. It goes something like this..

WC[##any] (or elements from their substitution group) violate "Unique Particle Attribution". During validation against this schema, ambiguity would be created for those two particles.

After a few hours of searching the internet, this is what i came across.. . Since the xs:any can be used to introduce any arbitary element, it will create an ambiguous situation if the xs:any element is placed after an element whose presence in the scheme is arbitary (i.e. minOccurs=0).

Hence, while parsing, your parser gets confused and cannot parse the xsd. So, the xs:any element should always come after an element whose minOccurs=0. More information here at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_Particle_Attribution

My experiment with virtual machines

Felt a little bored today.. So thought i would muck around a bit with Sun's xVM offering.. I installed openSuse 11 on it. This runs fine without any problems.. I can use the GUI as well as use the internet without any tweaking needed. The installation of the xVM software as well as the suse OS went on fine without a hitch.. My only crib.. (if you could even call it as one) i couldnt get the 3D functionality!

Here is a screen shot

From gen

Trip to lake tahoe

Had an excellent trip to tahoe during the labor's day weekend. Here are the pics. Beautiful blue skies greeted us.. and the lake was as blue as it can get.. The southern part of the lake was cold and windy.. But the northern part was very enjoyable.

Steve Job's obituary

Steve job's obituary has been posted by mistake on bloomberg. They did manage to take it out, but not before some sharp eyed guy informed it to some one who managed to put that script online.. Here is the link to it from gawker.

A trip to West coast

As a part of my job, i am required to travel again to US this year.. But this time, i am in the west coast for a difference this month. This place looks and feels very different when compared to the east. I will reserve my comments of which one is better when compared to another..

Last weekend i did a trip to pier 39 and Golden Gate bridge. The previous day, i looked up the public transport details to go to both the places. Then we drove over to Freemont and took the public transport to pier 39 and golden gate bridge. The walk to pier 39 from pier 1 was absolutely awesome.. And so was the Golden Gate bridge. We were so thankful that we did not take our car all the way up to SFO. The traffic was horrible and given that me and my other team mate were totally new to this part of US, we would have a hard time with the directions.




This weekend we happened to go for a longer drive along the coast to half moon bay-> pigeon point -> 17 mile drive -> bixby creek bridge. This ride was really enjoyable (given the fact that i didnt drive a single mile of the 300 mile drive). The weather was very pleasant.. a bit cold at times.. and the scenes were awesome. We had a minor scare when the right rear tire blew up on the way home.. But we sort of managed to trudge along..

ironing wrinkles and those nasty wires

They two actually have nothing in common. Yet, they both are some of the most irritating things as far as i am concerned.. I will try to vent my thoughts out on these two in this entry.. The main reason being that i just finished ironing up my clothes now..

Being a pure indian, i am used to doing what a lot of indians do.. Give the clothes for ironign to the nearest iron"kaaran". They charge rs. 2.50 per cloth which is not a lot and manageable. The bottom point is that i have never ironed out my clothes in my life.. Except.. except.. only when i have to come to US for a visit. The damn laundry is expensive as it is.. But there is no service around for ironing the clothes.. Atleast not as cheap as what i mentioned above.. And this thing.. this particular thing.. ironing clothes is one of the things i dread in my life the most. I can even figure out the most complex of algorithms and programming logics.. But ironing a dress with wrinkles is something which i have never been able to figure out. Those damn wrinkles always seem to follow the iron box whenever i try to smoothen them out.. And ironing out the wrinkles seem to be the hardest part.. Creating them(even while ironing) seems to be very easy. When i finish ironing one side, i find that the underside has generated wrinkles and when i iron that out, i find that the other side which i ironed first has wrinkles.. yeah yeah.. i can hear most of you guys shouting out that those heavenly "wrinkle-free" thngies were created just for us.. But my wardrobe doesnt consist of only those wrinkle-free thingies... and maybe that wrinkle-free technology is not perfected to the hilt because whenever i take my stuff out of the washing machine, they always seem to be wrinkled anyways...


The other thing that i get very irritated about are the wires.. wire wire everywhere.. a wire here.. a wire there.. one for laptop.. one for cell phone.. one for camera.. one for mp3 player.. short ones.. long ones.. thick ones.. thin ones.. pluggable ones.. usb ones.. they are every where.. OMG! help.. i walk over them.. i trip over them.. i miss them.. i find them.. you cant run.. you cant hide.. they will find you out.. you cant live without them.. my table is filled with them.. will there ever be wireless charges?

gMail localizations..

Localized offline mode message in google mail.. The "achacho" exclamation really made me smile..

Setting headers for HttpClient request operations

I was searching through the internet for a while and though the answer finally seemed pretty simple i could not get a solid code snippet and hence i am jotting it down here for some future reference.

Say suppose, i want to set a request header for an HttpClient request that i am sending to a URL (it could also be a REST based service), here is how i would go about doing it.

HttpClient client = new HttpClient();
PutMethod method = new PutMethod();
Header head1 = new Header("foo", "f");
method.addRequestHeader(head1);
int statusCode = client.executeMethod(method);


Now, there could be other ways to do this same thing too.. But hey i got a start!

JSFOne happening

Never thought there would be a separate conference for JSF developers. This finally seems to be happening though. Got the news from the ever reliable aquarium blog about the JSF one conference. Biggies like Roger Kitain, Ed Burns, Kito Mann are supposed to be there. The event though seems to be taking place not in US but in Vienna from sept 4 - 6th. There has been a buzz forming around JSF 2.0 for now.. Hopefully there will be more light on it in this conference. To know more about the conference, you can go to the JSFone's website.

Rangaswamy Betta trip

Last weekend, i happened to go to a couple of places around bangalore. This being despite the serial bomb blasts that ripped apart bangalore.. After much consideration, me and my friend Bharathi decided to go to Rangaswamy Betta near kanakapura village. The inspiration got from the ever reliable dreamroutes.org description on this hill.

We started around 12 noon and took the kanakapura road on my super splendour. The blog had mentioned to take the harohalli road and get around from there to the particular hill. Harohalli village is around 30 odd kilometers from JP nagar. After taking the diversion there, missing the route twice, i thought this was the hill we were going to climb.



But then, after enquiring with some locals over there, we found that the route described in that blog was actually meant for trekking. You would need to go to the base of the hill and then trek up from there.. Since it was a fairly big trek and it was drizzling on and off, we decided to take the proper road up to the hill.

To do this, we had to catch kanakapura road, get back to kanakapura and then take another diversion from there.. Even though we lost time in this process, we did manage to get a good feel of rural bangalore..



Amazingly, roads in this part of the state are incredibly good barring a few minor potholes and the ride was smooth. After reaching kanakapura, you need to take a left immediately after the bus stand. After that, you just need to close your eyes and follow the well laid road (atleast as of july 2008). The best thing if you are in doubt is to stop and ask for directions. This hill spot is very famous among vilagers and every one will be more than happy to help you out.

We had reached a point in the hill where there was a small temple and some kids playing around. After that point, the good road ended and the path after that was very muddy with stones.. Also, the drizzle added to the complications and we didnt want to risk going any further with our two wheeler. Apparently the peak is about 4 kms from that point.




We decided to return since it was already 4:30 and light was beginning to fade fast. So after taking some quick snaps, we stopped by the temple again. We had a small photo session with the local kids who were more than excited to see a digi cam and some one interested in shooting them.











By the time we returned back to bangalore it was around 7pm and we found that some savages had bombed out ahmedabad..

Yet another search engine (YASE)

We should seriously start considering hosting a site called yase.com which lists a list of available search engines, link to their sites and what differentiates it from the rest of their peers. There is a new search engine around the block called cuil (http//cuil.com). Initially i thought it was the tamil world "kuyil" spelt in a cool way, but apparently its supposed to be pronounced as "cool" in a much cooler way.

This site, launched by ex-googlers is supposed to have indexed through a much larger set of pages than google currently does and also faster than google. I tried out a couple of searches though and i found that google gave me much more satisfactory results than cuil did.
Maybe its still catching up with the search algorithms and in the future would be considered as a serious competitor with google.. But for now, i am satisfied with googling for stuff on google! ;-)

The process

No words at all to describe this hilarious video!

A complex Hello World

Every one likes to start off learning new technology with a simple hello world application. It is a quick and easy way to get your hands dirty.. My first C program was an hello world 3 line code and my first JAVA program was an hello world program too.. with a simple static void main() function.. I have started looking into mule now.. And the tutorial mentions about a hello world program to start with. Well.. i took a look into it.. a couple of java files with tons of complicated xml configuration.. Looks like i am going to have a whale of time getting used to the enterprise world!

My new blog

As i venture out to seek wonderful opportunities in a different company, i realize that i cannot continue blogging in my corporate blog. So, going forward, i have decided to blog here. Hopefully i can post interesting things over here as i have done in the past.