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.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
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..
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.
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.
Monday, September 22, 2008
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
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
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..
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
Saturday, September 13, 2008
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
Here is a screen shot
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| From gen |
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
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.
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