Bing copies google results

Hi Friends,

This is an interesting fact to you if you are a regular searcher apart from just being a surfer. The news would not just be interesting but will be shocking as well.

The shocking news is that “Microsoft Bing Search Engine copies the results of Google Search Engine”. How bad it is? Not believing? Huh.. Go ahead and read this official blog of Google -> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses-google-search.html

My goodness!

What’s your say?

Opinions on Best Ebook Reader

Hi Friends,

It was a mail thread I had for asking the opinion on the best Ebook reader, among my friends. As usual with my own style, I am collecting all the replies and posting it here so it will be useful to all!

Here you go…

Question :

Hi Friends,

Are you using any Ebook Readers? If so which one do you use and what is the best factor your feel out of your ebook reader? I am thinking to buy one and I thought I can get your opinion on the same.

If I google out, there are so many and I am slightly confused on which one to choose.

What are the parameters one should look at before buying a device?

Which one do you think stands at its best these days? I know this is very subjective and depends on various factors.

Kindly share your views.

Thanks in advance.

Answers:

Sowmya says :

I got a Kindle just the WiFi version… I think it is very good and serves my purpose. The cost has also come down. I really love it. If you are keen on reading colourful magazines then nook is fine. Kindle has the e-ink technology that has less strain to the eye. So my suggestion go for kindle. But irrespective of opinions do an extensive research and find out what you need the most (between kindle and nook) 🙂

Upon asking about the price of Nook,

I got it from amazon for $139.

Nook is a product of Barnes and Noble… the book sellers.

Vivek Juneja says :

Hey Raghs,

I currently use the Kindle from Amazon. The 3rd generation one is pretty amazing device. Awesome battery life, great to read on for long hours, WiFi, 3G options. Plus bonus : Text to Speech (natural speech), Webkit Browser, MP3 / Music / Audio books player, On board QWERTY keyboard.

I am using this for last 3 months, and pretty happy with it. The form factor is easy to carry. I am pretty amazed by the battery life ( around a month of decent usage).

So my best bet for you would be a Kindle. Currently its a B & W with 16 shades of gray. Color is missing, but it really does not count if you are not reading colored books. It supports quite a good number of file formats including PDF, Word, MOBI, EPUB etc. PDF rendering is neat, but I support converting the PDF into the native format for all the benefits.

Overall a nice device. Ring me if you want more details.

Arunkumar K says :

best one is the kindle as it is the best for the eyes.. ipads and sony readers arent as good..

battery life is awesome as well and it is also reasonable pricewise!!

Anupama Biswas says :

i have a kindle too and its good 🙂 No complains so far 🙂

KrishnaKumar says :

You sure want just ebook reader? And seriously, noone to recommend Adam? Of course, it cannt compete with Kindle as an ebook reader, but it should do the job pretty well and much much more than Kindle in other regards. Just for the heck of it, I would wait till Adam goes to full fledged production. It has been disappointingly delayed already. It does have eInk display (along with other options). It should cost a little more than Kindle, but its worth it.

http://www.notionink.com

Ramya Anandan says :

Raghav,

I agree with below comments about Amazon kindle, go for it.

Jeevan Kumar says :

I never used a Ebook Reader so no idea which one is best in category.

Sriram Kailasanathan says :

Raghava,

I would suggest you a high end android mobile where you can install kindle software for free, with which you can double your mobile as a reader also and dont have the worries to carry 2 devices.

I hold a HTC desire, and installed the kindle on that, works fine for me

Rekha Balasubramaniam says :

Raghavan,I heard about Amazon e-book reader kindle but not sure how far it is worthwhile buying J

Ramesh VG says :

If just a Ebook then go for Amazon Kindle, but if u want more than a reader but a tablet, wait for few more month, where new tablets are coming to market.

Thank you all 🙂

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

GIDS 2009

Blogging after a long gap.. As this post is mainly for GIDS, talk about the rest of the stuff later 🙂

GIDS 2009 – Great Indian Developer Summit (Thank god, there exists other gids — Giri Institute of Development Studies in http://www.gids.org.in/) , a great technical conference from the people all over the world ranging from Java to .Net to Web 2.0 🙂

First thing to appreciate is the way the events are organized. Phew, got really amazed by the way delegates are notified of all the events and registrations and any such notices through an SMS.

Thanks to my colleague Vivek Juneja who had actually let us know and coordinated with the GIDS organizers to get the concession package for a team of 10 people from the same company! Feel like the money spent was not wasted 🙂

Moreover, happened to visit IISC, Bangalore for the first time which I had been waiting for 🙂 though it happens in JN Tata Auditorium.

Attended the Day 3 and 4 sessions on yesterday (Java) and today (workshops) .

Day 3 : JAVA

==========

1. Struts 2.0 Deep Dive by Prabhu Subramanian of DuraSoft, India

It was a nice session to get to know about Struts 2.0 — the new features offerred by Struts 2.0 , the benefits and betterments from earlier versions, significant differences of Struts 1.x Vs 2.0 were neatly covered and the session ended with a hands on demo application of a traditional “NumberGuess” application.

But the session was not satisfying the title I believe. It was  not a deep dive at all rather just a gentle intro! 😦

2. Know your Java by Venkat Subramaniam

This is one of the excellent and interesting sessions. Venkat is a very nice person and well experienced and I have already interacted with him in one of the Book Promo sessions in JavaRanch for his book “Programming Groovy” and was glad to see him in person and attend his session. 🙂 He is the directory of the company http://www.agiledevelopers.com .

The session was very good and inquisitive as he had prepared Q&A in basic Java on some categories like Strings, basics, Derived, Math etc., each with the points of  100,500,1000. Volunteers are asked to come to stage and pick up their choice of interest and give a try for answering the question. Venkat did NOT only validate the answer but also demonstrated then and there in his Apple MAC which was really satisfying and convincing  :). I got one 500 points and at the end he called up the peopel whoever has got 1000 points and handed over his books :).

I would have picked up one for 1000 points but somehow dint want to go for “derived” topic and went for my favorite “Strings” area hence I missed the book! 😦 Had I not missed the initial few minutes of the session, I would have grabbed one?

Tea break 🙂

3. Unleashing the power of Java on Intel by Mukeh Gangadhar

It was an informative session by an Intel engineer and nice to rehearse the electronics terms (processor, cpu cyles, throughput etc., after a decade) as he was demonstrating the various ways to optimize the Java applications running on Intel and other tools available for monitoring the performance.

Lunch break 🙂

4. Building RESTful applications with JAX-RS by Criag McClanahan

Was very very excited to see him as he was the original founder of popular open source J2EE Web application framework called Struts 🙂 . He had been also the one of the main persons in JSF (Java server Faces). Though I could not attend his first session “What is RESTful?”, was somehow able to cope up with this session.

5. Programming Groovy by Venkat Subramaniam

This was again one of the interesting sessions and could not even believe that the session was over after the stipulated time. It was all about Groovy a new dynamic language which runs on top of JVM and the features it offers, few excellent benefits it offers, programming features of the language etc. Of course everything with the instant demo!

Kept all the audiences in sync 😉 Kudos..

Tea break 🙂

Day 4 – Workshops

=============

1. Building external DSLs for Java by Venkat Subramaniam

Started with an introduction of DSL (Domain Specific Languages) and what it is all about and continued with the need for the DSL, the two different types of DSL (Internal and External) the present trends and activities being done on it.

The good part is the Q & A session wherein we get to know about the good collection of views and the way venkat takes them up and clarifies. He discussed about Xtext — an DSL tool comes as a plugin for  Eclipse. He had demonstrated one application with XText and the source code it generates along with the parser 🙂

[will blog in detail about the DSL on a separate post]

2. JRuby in Action by Ola Bini

Ola Bini has been one of the 8 core developers of Ruby language and he has been promoting the same thought some of them have quit in the middle. It was nice to see the Ruby features and the pros and cons with the application being demonstrated.

One thing is Ruby was developed based out of Java (following and/or keeping Java in mind) but it just works like a C program but with the Garbage Collectable facility. Has drawbacks on performance compared to Java and few others. Still people go for it due to the features, ease of use .

3. Get Connected – A web based Tutorial by Jim Webber

He is a director, architect of Thought Works and an author of the book “Building Enterprise Web Services”.

Attending right now 🙂

He is talking about the evolution of Web and the various paradigms the history has been seeing. The needs and driving factors of information sharing, various parameters such as client, ISP, Cache, Router etc., wherein some of them drive the trends while few others facilitate.

Also discusses about Http Vs Https and the different parameters associated with it.  its on going…

Today evening there is an award ceremony for which the chief guest is Cyrus Broacha. 🙂

Looks great altogether.

Few comments and suggestions to the Organizing committee

1. The way delegates are kept informed was well. Good lunch and snacks 🙂

2. The audio/video aids were neat and adding values to the talks.

3. Distributing prizes based on a lucky draw for almost all the events like the feedback form after each session,  blogging entry with the url, completion of survey, handing over a EXPO Passport which has to be stamped from all the sponsors around. 🙂 The prizes are Sony 72 MP digital  Camera, 3 days and 2 nights trip to Singapore, Technical books, Badge etc., — A way to keep the participants enthusiastic. Nice Guys!

4. Nice to see plenty of volunteers being around everywhere to assist the delegates for their queries.

4. Only one of the main halls were having an electric outlet for getting our laptops charged! Had to suffer in the sessions happening on other halls! Moroever the credentials (if any) and way to access the wireless network would have been mentioned well rather than letting the delegates suffer! Of course I did for the whole day yesterday! — Point to be noted Organizers! None of the volunteers whom I aksed had an answer for the query! 😦

5. Handing over the goodies (Tshirts) would have been done better — like giving to delegates at the time of registration itself than making all of them form a line and every individual has to spend around 20-30 minutes in the crowd just to get to know that they can get the  Tshirt on the next day as that would be their last day! 😦 Absolutely no need for all these circus guys!

6. Looked like there was no option to choose/customize the technical books given away based on the individual’s interest. I still remember and could not control my laughter on seeing my ex-colleagues face after getting a book on “Software Testing on Visual Studio .NET” when she is a hard core Java/J2EE Developer and the only sentence she could utter was, “fayda kya hai?” [whats the use!]. could have been better!

7. Upon seeing most of the speakers using my dream product Apple Mac Notebook, my craze towards the same has got drastically increased and falling in love with it more and more :)) One excellent feature in Mac which lacks in any other OS is the zooming the desktop with no compromise on the resoultion. Wonderful. Is nt it?

Well, its time to move on.. will have to finish the entry and submit this URL to the organizing committee and also to test my so called LUCK 🙂 Let me see and definitely would keep you posted on the status 🙂 (if I get).

Cya later…

Get A Trial, Get a TShirt

You can give a trial if interested. It is from VersionOne, an Agile Project Management Plan.

http://www.versionone.com/agilepmtooling/index.asp

You can get a free T-Shirt 🙂

A talk on Jakarta Digester

BOJUG – Bangalore Open Java User Group, a group formed and maintained by young Java aspirants who reside in Bangalore as the name indicates. I came to know about this group in BarCamp in the year 2007 (Barcamp meet at IIMB, Bangalore) and from then on there used to be a regular meeting every month.

As I was onsite (Bahrain) for a couple of months could not join till then. This time (Sep 08) had opted to give a talk on ‘Jakarta Digester‘ – an open source XML to Java Mapping tool from Jakarta Commons. Recently the venue has been changed to ThoughtWorks in Diamond District Building in the Airport Road. This time the meet was on 27th September 2008 Saturday and at 1130 AM IST.

The Thoughtworks building and the environment itself is worth mentioning. Awesome it was :).

The session was started exactly at 1130 AM and I happened to join a bit late :(. There were 3 topics discussed.

1. Web Application Sharing /Clustering in Tomcat – by Sriram Narayanan, a thoughtworks’ employee.

2. IBatis and ICG (Integrated Code Generator) by Sathishkumar Thiyagarajan, a Starmarks employee (Of course my good friend and BE classmate).

3. Jakarta Digester — none other than me :).

Sriram’s session was quite informative as he talked about various aspects of Clustering, load balancing and what it means to different people, how can we achieve the same using Apache Tomcat, Connector Architecture etc with some samples and Demo. It was awesome but a bit exhaustive. He could not complete as planned as others were in queue. In the middle he asked me to give a talk on ‘IPAnycasting’ as i spoke about it since the topic he covered (LoadBalancing) seemed to be related to or even a mimic of IPAnycasting. A point to mention here is, I have done my final year BE project based on that IPAnyCasting :). But I could not speak about because of lack of time. Perhaps, may give a talk in the future meets.

IBatis – basically an ORM tool was neatly handled by Sathish. But he concentrated more into his own project ICG (Integrated Code Generator) which is a platform that provides a single place to give your inputs irrespective of underlying persistence framework being used (be it Hibernate, Ibatis, Toplink etc to name a few). It is a very good initiative and he gave a small demo on the same.

Jakarta Digester – I started off with the intro of XML and its usage, the need to have a XML-Java converter, what Jakarta Digester is and how we can go ahead with converting the same, the pros and cons of using Jakarta Digester. Of course had done with a demo application and walked through it :).

The information about Jakarta Digester will be posted in my technical blog and linked here a little later.

Overall, It was a nice experience and a good day!

Cheers….

including javascript file in a jsp file

“how to include a javascript file (external .js file) into the jsp files?”. it is all about. It can be achieved by using “<script>” tag as follows

<script language="text/javascript" src="../path/to/your/javascript-file.js"/>

This link helps you for the same -> http://www.w3schools.com/js/js_whereto.asp

It all started off with the inclusion of a javascript calendar in a Web application what i am developing! At first i had searched for some cool javascript calendar stuff in google.  Though got a couple of links, got impressed very much this DHTMLGoodies stuff. The reason being it satisfies my exact requirement as it does NOT not only capture the date but also the time which is what i needed. Look at the section “A date picker for form” which is in the middle of the page.

But the issue always start with customization :). As the demo page was having some other types of calendars, i had to omit those. But my gimmics on the mimic was not working as i kept getting an ‘Object expected‘ error in the IE browser! Felt very bad and tried some work arounds, finally somehow managed to get this thing done! The real action i was doing was keeping the html page outside the folder which was actually inside a folder named ‘demos’ in the downloaded DHTMLSuite package zip file. But it dint seem to be working and i was going crazy what might be causing so. Well, one of my colleagues also attempted to debug and finally we have decided that it should be under a folder and its name should also be ‘demo’. He even searched for the same in files in demo directory for being hardcoded! I was telling that it should never be the way.  i asked him to recheck by giving a different name and he gave the name as ‘xxx’. Crazy fellow :). It did work 🙂

Finally, the mistake was there in the naming convention of .js file. There was an error in the filename as the actual filename was having a mixed camelCase (fileName.js) but inside it was referred all in small case! 😦 yuck.. It is again a silly copy-paste error! 😦

This is how we tend to do the mistakes on the things which we know we are comfortable with. Aint I?

win 2 free ebooks everyday

Hello Techies 😛

 This is one good news for the tech savvies.. today only got to know this link in JavaRanch. This is about the free e-books given every day based on the random selection out of all participants registered in manning.com a well known publisher..  They are mostly into Java, J2EE, XML related books – just fyi.

  For more info, visit this url: http://www.manning.com/free/

 All what you need to do is, just enter your first name and email address. Thats all! 🙂

  Note: This happens only from April 17 to 30, 2008! so rush up… 🙂 If you are a lucky winner, just share the glad news with me here 😛

yet another book in lucky draw

This is the second time i got a chance to know about the persistence of so called ‘luck’ 🙂 I was selected as lucky draw winner in JavaRanch forum’s Book Promotion offer on 14Dec2007 and the book was ‘Java Programming Cookbook‘ by Herbert Schildt.  The previous one was blogged here 🙂

Moreover I felt very happy for getting a chance to interact with the author(s) directly in the forum. I believe people from Computer Science/ Information Technology background might have definitely come across Herbert Schild’s famous books like ‘The Complete Reference C’, C++, Java etc., That was like adding honey to the icecream 🙂

I have got the book dispatched today (13Jan2008) to the Bahrain address and happy to share the news with you all here 🙂 [as usual by the time i blog its 14Jan08 :(]

As usual the snapshot of the forum thread which declares the winners here below.

The thread is accessible here for the Java Programming Cookbook Winners!

The other threads where Herbert Schildt is welcomed is here and one of my queries to the author is here.

The snapshot of my welcome message to Herbert Schildt is below..

Cheers!!! 🙂

The day i am exhilarated

Feel like penning down as some of my efforts are appreciated from an author of a great book. It is on 13Jan2008 but by the time i blog it somehow becomes the next day :(.

The contribution is of course subtle which was to explain the concepts of Garbage Collection in a pictorial manner for the program posted by an user asking his doubts.

The appreciation came from Bert Bates who is one of the authors of Sun Certified Java Programmer & Developer for Java 2 (and Java 5), Head First Java, Head First Servlets & JSP. The authors Kathy Seirra and Bert Bates are in short known as “K & B” in the ranch.

Just felt like sharing this 🙂 As usual, a screenshot is attached 😛

If any one is interested in looking for the images i have drawn, you may please go here for the thread that discusses about how many objects will be eligible for garbage collection?

Soon will update it in my technical blog with complete information 🙂

 Way to go Raghs…!

Happy News.. Got a book in lucky draw

Hurray….. 🙂

Whatever it is, the moment you share it does matter right..? I feel so..

Just got to know that my name was in the list of lucky draw winners of the ‘Professional Apache Tomcat 6’ book in the JavaRanch forum.  [Tomcat is a Web Server  used for hosting J2EE based Web Applications. ]

Here you go…

http://saloon.javaranch.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=56&t=005949

I repeat it, its lucky,lucky draw – purely.

Felt very happy and thought of sharing it with you.  I too have some lucky mole(s) i guess!

 As usual, pasting the screenshot here.. he he he… 🙂