Bits and Bytes

Better Samsung DeX Experience

2017-12-04T07:30:00.001-05:00

Samsung Dex is a pretty amazing technology that turns phone into a full fledged desktop PC. The original device costs about $150 but has some limitations such as not being able to use headphone jack and basically having the phone locked down.

A cheaper, and arguably a more functional device can be had for less than $40 with things like the Melopow Doc that leaves the device in a more usable state with full access to the devices ports at a much better price.

And while using DeX, make sure to use the fantastic Dex MaX app to add support for fullscreen to all your apps.

Happy DeXing!

Programming for Kids

2015-08-23T12:38:00.005-04:00

I have started to see if I can get my 7 and half year old son interested in programming. This has been quite an educational experience for me. I have always had fond memories of myself self-learning GW-BASIC as a kid in the early 80s. So I was on the look-out for a modern way to teach programming for the young minds.

I started with the usual suspect of MIT's Scratch project. However for some reason, beyond structured learning through tutorials, my kids were not too attached to the setup there. I was finding that the environment was too abstract in some sense - for example it expects you to be familiar with messaging passing techniques to do any form of mildly interactive programming. Regardless, it is a good starting point.

Similar to Scratch, the GUI based programming available with Lego's Mindstorm EV3 got my attention. Unlike Scratch, this can be an expensive venture but the physicality of actually moving parts can help connect young minds with programming concepts. And it can be quite fun if you know what you are doing. Unfortunately EV3 still requires quite a learning curve if you want to make something on your own and may be best kept for the pre-teen group.

Talking about expensive ventures, Digital Youth has a catalog of various online learning courses, including couple of Minecraft programming courses. I enrolled my kid to the Mod Design 1 course since he was into Minecraft. I appreciate the concept of the effort and the material put together is relatively well thought-out. But the course definitely needs strong adult supervision who is familiar with the subject matter. There is a lot of copy-paste style of programming here and they fail to go into deeper concepts. At the end of the course, I fail to see how a 8 year old can learn much programming with this except learn some copy-paste trickery and use GIMP to do basic image editing.

Trying to relate to the way I started learning programming, I kept looking for something rather down to earth that is easy to experiment with and simple enough to learn quickly while not limiting what you can do with the language. Something like BASIC. Then one day a google search led me to BASIC 256. It is a very interesting, free small program that is really very easy to grasp and let kids create relatively sophisticated programs without the kind of very constraint environment like Scratch.

More recently, I can come to discover another platform called Kojo that is similar to BASIC 256 but has more capabilities largely due to a more sophisticated underlying language called Scala. It seems to capture the essence of self-directed learning environment while leaving open how far you can take it. This is my current recommendation for 7 to 10 year old first-time programmers.

Some other notable tools and programs I have also tried and found useful:

Microsoft Project Spark (Based on the older Kodu program) Fancy graphics with a basic programmable environment. Great concept but may be too complicated to do free-style learning.
Alice 3D based programming - similar to Scratch but more complex. Can be a good learning platform for teens and youth.
Greenfoot is a free Java based learning environment that can be a good next step once the learner is comfortable with things like Kojo.
Tynker is another interesting commercial online platform to learn while having fun. My experience with my kid was similar to trying to learn with Scratch - great at start but limits true creativity.

Any other recommendations?

Tripping on Convention over Configuration

2015-02-20T12:34:00.004-05:00

It is with dismay that I sometimes find the trend of moving traditional configuration heavy programming models to convention based troubling. Case in point - I've been trying to adopt the newfangled Spring Data based repository framework. It's been working wonders and I got the QueryDSL support and naming convention based query generation going.

After creating a bunch of these repositories, I ran into an issue with one of my custom repositories. It was not recognizing that a method in the custom repo is part of the custom side and not to be a candidate method for spring to do its voodoo magic. For some reason Spring thought the method is a property of the entity bound to the repository. After digging through the Spring code base and spending a lot of time, it finally was clear why this was happening: I had made a typo on the repository naming and the "y" was missing from custom RepositoryImpl class. If only Spring was smart enough to tell me that this is what was causing the problem instead of point to a confusing message. So long type safety and compile-type checking, and welcome to the brave new world of magic based frameworks!

Why Microsoft fails on Usability with Win8

2013-02-11T19:47:00.001-05:00

GWT: Emulate tab on Enter

2012-07-13T11:18:00.001-04:00

Sometimes users expect text boxes to move focus on to the next element after pressing Enter, similar to most spreadsheets. If you are using GWT and jQuery, here is a little snippet to help you along:

public class AutoTabbedTextBox extends TextBox implements KeyUpHandler {

public AutoTabbedTextBox() {

super();

addKeyUpHandler(this);

}

@Override

public void onKeyUp(KeyUpEvent event) {

// emulate tab on key

if (event.getNativeKeyCode() == KeyCodes.KEY_ENTER)

focusNext(event.getNativeEvent());

}

public native void focusNext(NativeEvent event)/*-{

var inputs = $wnd.$(':input:visible');

inputs.eq(inputs.index(event.target) + 1).focus();

}-*/;

}

Microsoft Error Reporting crashed on Mac!

2012-05-24T20:26:00.005-04:00

Just got this on my Mac:

Should I report the crash of the Microsoft Error Reporting to Apple??

System Overload!

2012-02-17T14:43:00.003-05:00

Neil deGrasse Tyson on Science and Faith: Plain Wrong

2012-02-11T21:13:00.000-05:00

In the video, an argument seems to have been made that Science and Faith can not only easily co-exist, but the idea of any conflict between the two paradigm is largely non existing.

By definition, science is the knowledge obtain by rigorous empirical evidence - a body of knowledge that is continually updated, proved, dis-proved and tinkered with. Science fundamentally does not claim to know anything nor does it guarantee an answer to every question that one can pose. It is a way of thinking with clarity, without dogma and and without an overriding theology.

Contrast this with what faith in essence is - an adherence to a belief based on authority and to a large degree, fear of uncertainty.

For a renowned personality like Tyson to dismiss the contrast and make little of the very fundamental impedance mismatch is, to my mind, just amazing.

Electric Cars in Nepal

2011-08-08T22:57:00.002-04:00

Annapurna Post Coverage

Not all opinions are equal

2011-07-25T11:53:00.000-04:00

It appears that some people tend to think that to be in a democratic society, all opinions are valuable and all sides should be treated equal. If we are to go by the recent events in Texas , this line of thinking can be harmful and dangerous. Here is a prime example of what this type of culture has done to the the American education system:

Linux saves Microsoft!

2011-07-06T11:10:00.001-04:00

Google/Android is getting everywhere -- which must be making Microsoft super happy!! Oh the Irony! Microsoft making more money from Linux than Windows?

Don't switch to Teksavvy

2011-06-05T08:52:00.000-04:00

After learning that I actually have a choice when it comes to Cable Internet besides Rogers, I decided to switch over to Teksavvy two weeks ago. As it turns out, out of the two weeks, I was kept offline for 10 days. Now I regret switching over dearly!
Having to live offline was bad enough, the support I was given by Teksavvy was even worse. As soon as I went offline, I made a call to their technical support line. I was told since it was weekend on Saturday morning, someone would be sent over to look into my issue on Monday after 5PM. I was still offline till Tuesday when I got a call from Teksavvy telling me that they cannot make it on Monday and they can only send their support staff on SATURDAY after 5!! Having no choice, I agreed and despite having pre-arranged plans on my Saturday evening, I had to stay home for 3 hours waiting for a support guy to show up. As it turns out, no one came knocking in my door till 9PM and then I decided to call again. Now their story got interesting and they say they have no idea why no one was at my door but they now say my request was escalated but still cannot tell when my Internet will come back!

Bottom line: if you are thinking of switching from the big bad ISPs to the little guys, think again!

why it's a good idea to answer forum questions

2011-05-05T09:29:00.000-04:00

A lot of people use google and forums to figure out technical programming questions, but we are often too lazy to answer people's queries even if we knew the answer. Well today I had a question on how to close window from GWT and by instinct headed to google only to find a reply:
http://markmail.org/message/qqr3r7ji6hl7k5vp#query:+page:1+mid:insr656lelc5kebx+state:results
that I happened to post myself 3 years ago!

Eclipse issues with JDK 1.6 update 21

2010-07-15T08:03:00.000-04:00

A lot of users seem to be having issues running Eclipse with the latest update of Java from Sun/Oracle. Apparently they changes the metadata in the dll that shows Oracle instead of Sun. Here are the details and workarounds to fix it:

https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=319514

Find out what JAR loaded a class

2010-07-06T12:16:00.001-04:00

Here is a quick way to troubleshoot where a class was loaded from:

WSDLLocator.class.getClassLoader().getResource("javax/wsdl/xml/WSDLLocator.class")

Will print out the jar that WSDLLocator was loaded out from.

BP Spills Coffee

2010-06-14T16:49:00.000-04:00

Flash to HTML5

2010-06-06T16:07:00.000-04:00

Now here is for something completely interesting:
http://smokescreen.us/

A Flash/SWF to HTML5/JS converter! SGV will save the day;)

Automate SQL Dumps for SQLServer

2010-01-05T10:28:00.000-05:00

The backup mechanism in SQL Server may be fine for many cases, but there are limitations with it (like restoring to a different server). I really like how I can just dump the database SQL with mySQL which can be easily processed with custom scripts.

I was looking around for a mysqldump equivalent for SQLServer. I know you can do this with the SQL Management Studio through GUI in 2008 version, but I need this to be automated. This lead me to discover the SQL Server Management API . With it, you can do a SQL Dump like:


using Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo;
using Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Common;
using Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Sdk.Sfc;

namespace SQLGenerator
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            //Connect to the local, default instance of SQL Server. 
            { 
               Server myServer = new Server(args[0]);

               Database db = default(Database); 
               db = myServer.Databases["be"]; 

               Scripter scrp = default(Scripter); 
               scrp = new Scripter(myServer);

               //scrp.Options.ScriptDrops = true;
               scrp.Options.ScriptSchema = true;
               scrp.Options.WithDependencies = true;
               scrp.Options.ScriptData = true;
               scrp.Options.IncludeIfNotExists = true;

               Urn[] smoObjects = new Urn[2]; 
               
                foreach (Table  tb in db.Tables) { 

                  if (tb.IsSystemObject == false) {
                      smoObjects = new Urn[1];
                      smoObjects[0] = tb.Urn;

                      foreach (string s in scrp.EnumScript(new Urn[] { tb.Urn }))
                      {
                          Console.WriteLine(s);
                      }

                  } 
               } 
            } 

        }
    }
}

This will act just like mysqldump and now I can reuse my backup scripts written for mysql without much modification with SQL Server.

JavaFX Composer

2009-12-31T08:10:00.000-05:00

Just trying out the new FX Composer in Netbeans 6.8. Looks pretty cool!

Checkout at http://wiki.netbeans.org/JavaFXComposer

Type safe hibernate criteria

2009-10-15T12:00:00.000-04:00

Here is a cool thing I figured out today to use type safe property name in hibernate criteria. Typically this is done with strings, but with lambdaj, it can be done as:


..
import static ch.lambdaj.Lambda.on;
import ch.lambdaj.function.argument.Argument;
import ch.lambdaj.function.argument.ArgumentsFactory;
..
DetachedCriteria criteria = DetachedCriteria.forClass(Contract.class);
criteria.add(Restrictions.eq(propertyName(on(Contract.class).getContractKey()), 43));
...

public static String propertyName(Object placeHolder) {
Argument actualArgument = ArgumentsFactory.actualArgument(placeHolder);
return actualArgument.getInkvokedPropertyName();
}
...

Notice how the Restrictions does not take string literal and uses lambdaj to evaluate the property name from java method directly. Pretty cool ah?

Blame it on the Genes

2009-08-15T14:33:00.000-04:00

I was just randomly watching a PBS Nova show today

Ah ha.. that figures. When I was growing up, my parents had a big issue with me for now eating enough greens. For me, I just could not stand certain green vegetables for their bitter taste but my dad loved eating those - and forcing me to like them too. How I wish I could have told them to blame it on the genes!

2009-07-22T12:00:00.000-04:00

Google may be all cool and great, but living in Canada, Google does not seem to care as much for us. Microsoft already has traffic reports for Toronto in their maps - with that I don't really see any reason to use Google Maps anymore! Google - get your act together!

Nepal is 300 times poorer than USA

2008-10-14T23:34:00.000-04:00

Some interesting facts: An average person in Nepal earns $167 a YEAR. That's roughly a bit over what an average American earn in a day!