Solving your ping problem from windows xp

I had been stuck with a problem wherein, i could not ping my machine from other machines in the same intranet. However, i was able to ping others' machines from my machine. After extensive googling on and off for the past two years, it finally came to be the problem identified in the following link.

http://www.softwaretipsandtricks.com/forum/windows-xp/17248-help-my-windows-xp-box-cant-pinged.html

I have a cisco vpn client with me for vpn access.. It turns out the the Options -> stateful firewall was always set to on and this was preventing for some weird reason, other machines to ping my machine. The solution, though seems simple was pretty darn hard to find!

Google squares

Google squares looks like a really nice tool for comparing or listing different options/topics pertaining to a particular subject. Just go to http://google.com/squared and enter the subject you want to compare or get more information on. Such as "application servers" or "relational databases" for example. Now you would get various options available for application servers (such as glassfish, jboss, bea, weblogic etc.. ) or for databases (mysql, oracle, derby etc.. ) Pretty cool indeed!

"Offline" in an html5 world.

A very nice explanation of what "offline" application means in an html5 world. This explains what offline storage is, different kinds of offline storage, various implementations and how to use these techniques.

http://www.html5rocks.com/tutorials/offline/whats-offline/

Bridge over troubled waters..

When you're weary, feeling small,
When tears are in your eyes, I will dry them all;
I'm on your side. when times get rough
And friends just cant be found,
Like a bridge over troubled water
I will lay me down.
Like a bridge over troubled water
I will lay me down.

When you're down and out,
When you're on the street,
When evening falls so hard
I will comfort you.
Ill take your part.
When darkness comes
And pains is all around,
Like a bridge over troubled water
I will lay me down.
Like a bridge over troubled water
I will lay me down.

Sail on silver girl,
Sail on by.
Your time has come to shine.
All your dreams are on their way.
See how they shine.
If you need a friend
Im sailing right behind.
Like a bridge over troubled water
I will ease your mind.
Like a bridge over troubled water
I will ease your mind.

Android scripting with python

A good article describing how to do android scripting with python. I have no idea about how to program using python. But given that this is one of the languages that you can use to code for android, may be i would just go ahead and take a look at it.

Here is the link.

OAuth and twitter. A nice article

Twitter has closed down basic authentication and started using OAuth. A nice article explaining OAuth and twitter.Over here. There are also links and resources to OAuth and what it is from the page.

Custom dojo builds

Most of us would like to extend dojo widgets/make changes to dojo code and rebuld our widgets along with rest of the dojo code. Another reason would be to optimize load times for your dojo widgets. Given that the widgets are loaded lazily, you would want to load a compressed javascript dojo file which contains all the widgets you need in a compressed format.
Here is how you could go about doing a custom dojo build.

Download the dojo source from the dojo download site. 
 Unzip it, and you should find a util directory in there. Go to util/buildscripts/profiles .
Now you need to create your own profile file which you will give it as an input to the build process.
Lets call it foo.profile.js.
It could look something like this:

dependencies = {
    layers: [
        {
            name: "customdojo.js",
            dependencies: [
                "dijit.Dialog",
                "dijit.layout.ContentPane",
                "dijit.form.CheckBox",
                "dijit.form.ComboBox",
                "dijit.form.TextBox",
                "dijit.ProgressBar",
                "foo.widget.button",
                "foo.widget.table",
            ]
        }
    ],
    prefixes: [
        [ "dijit", "../dijit" ],
        [ "dojox", "../dojox" ],
        ["foo","../../web/javascript/foo"]
    ]
}

You would notice that the contents of this file are in json format. The first thing of importance is the attribute layers.name which defines the name of the output file that is produced as a part of the dojo build process. right now it is called as customdojo.js . This is followed by a list of widgets that you want to be a part of the customdojo.js file. You should notice a couple of custom widgets too as a part of the build.
Note that the prefixes define where to find the dojo widgets specified above. They point to the directories path relative to the "util" directory. Hennce, dijit resides in "../dijit" and my foo widgets reside in the "../../web/javascript/foo".
Now , the next thing is your build command.
After you have saved the above file as say foo.profile.js, go to one level above to util/buildscripts/ and run the "build.bat" or the "build.sh" file depending on which platform you are in.

If you are in linux you could do something like

build.sh profile=foo mini=true action=release version=x.x.x optimize=shrinksafe
 copyTests=false cssOptimize=comments

This should produce a "release" directory containing the customized dojo build. You could probably also gzip your resultant output as discussed in one of the blog entries earlier.
It would be much more convenient if we actually automated this whole build process with an ant task. I'll try to talk about that in my next blog entry.