Still haven’t thought of what I will be working on — I may end up joining another team, or continue with the “audio reviews for the visually impaired” hack that I created during the Yahoo! Open Hack NYC event.

{
  "success": true,
  "subject": "Some subject",
  "origin": {
    "email": "some@email.example.com",
    "fullname": "Full name"
  },
  "listresult": {
    "r1": "yes",
    "r2": "no",
    "r3": "cancel"
  }
}

The expected response, of course, was for listresult to be as follows:

"listresult": [
    {
    "r1": "yes",
    "r2": "no",
    "r3": "cancel"
    }
  ]

The response class used JAXB annotations to set the element names and all the other good stuff. But for some reason, a single element list resulted in an erroneous response. Now, out-of-the-box, WINK comes configured with JSON4J as the  provider for JSON serialization. This library has an unfortunate side effect where the array serialization shows unexpected behavior: for a single element array, it was simply collapsing the array!

Which led me to this posting on the WINK user forum. The solution was to use an alternative provider. As mentioned in that post, I decided to go ahead with Jackson, available here. I chose the easier route of simply replacing the JSON4J library with Jackson, both in my build environment and in the WEB-INF/lib folder.

This approach worked out fine for my needs. If, however, you have multiple services hosted by the same application and want each of them to have a separate provider, I refer you to this excellent post on IBM developerWorks.

While I haven’t used the client capabilities yet, the server module is pretty feature-rich. I had some issues getting authentication to work, but I think I have mostly figured it out. Will post an update once I run some tests.

You can download Wink from this link: http://incubator.apache.org/wink/

After that, I moved to a Nokia 3650 – in 2004, and did not look back. Fast forward to 2010 and I am sick of my HTC Android phone’s battery life, call quality (of course, T-Mobile is to blame), sometimes sad UI, and a bunch of other things.

This design provides a simple, extensible solution. The key module here is the card reader which plugs in to any device with an audio jack. At present, of course, only the iPhone/iPod touch feature the Square Up application. I am pretty sure it will soon be available for a plethora of smartphones out there.

Square Up

At least the reviews indicate that it’s a pretty good camcorder. Still not sure if I should go for it.

The India trip was very good, something I definitely needed – since I hadn’t been there for more than 2 years. Bangalore is growing and continues to amaze me as a city. That said, the bandwidth available there could definitely use an uplift. I wonder if anyone is bringing in fiber-optic networks. With all the digging going on, one might as well jump on the bandwagon now and save people the trouble later. In any case, I spent some much-needed time with relatives and friends (not as much as I wanted to with friends and more than what I wanted to with relatives, but o’ well).

I also managed to eat food at some of my favourite (and the city’s best) restaurants (or hotels as they are more commonly known as), including Vidyaarthi Bhavan, Dwaraka Bhavan and Brahmin’s Coffee Bar. Words can’t describe the dosas and idlis and vadas that you get at these places: they are simply mouthwatering.

Now I am back in New Jersey, more specifically Jersey City, with its plethora of Indian restaurants. Like I said in the beginning, it’s been a busy month. I should be back with more blogging next month.