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..