JAVA, Search, Gadgets and me...

Happy New Year to All

noreply@blogger.com (himanshu) — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 18:04:00 +0000

Wish you a happy and prosperous new year. What is your new year resolution? I am sharing programmer's new year resolution by HN.

Each month is an annually renewable technical or personal challenge:
Go analog.
Stay healthy.
Embrace the uncomfortable.
Learn a new programming language.
Automate.
Learn more mathematics.
Focus on security.
Back up your data.
Learn more theory.
Engage the arts and humanities.
Learn new software.
Complete a personal project.

Let me know your NY resolution.

Don't settle

noreply@blogger.com (himanshu) — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 22:00:00 +0000

Transcript of Steve Job's famous speech:

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal—just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

May you.....in 2010

noreply@blogger.com (himanshu) — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 08:59:00 +0000

May you get drunk like you've never gotten drunk before.
May you get laid like the last person on planet earth.
May your drugs be good, and your partners faithful.
May the cops ignore you when you break traffic rules.
May you win a lottery and if not that may you find money on the street.
May the people you like start to love you more than you love them.
May the good things come to you slowly, so that you can learn to appreciate them.
May your fights be tough, so that the victories are sweet.
May your heart be strong, like a Dragon's, full of fire and energy.

Countries own America's Debt!

noreply@blogger.com (himanshu) — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 04:22:00 +0000

How Genetics Works :)

noreply@blogger.com (himanshu) — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 13:26:00 +0000

Some lines...

noreply@blogger.com (himanshu) — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 16:22:00 +0000

I know a place up in the air
It’s not very far, I’ve been there before
I know a place, cool and warm
cooling my blood, warming my heart

So come on down and walk with me,
I only want to know a couple of things about you
Where were you when I was in so much trouble with myself
And do you still believe in me like I believe

10 benefits from your worst experience in life.

noreply@blogger.com (himanshu) — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 07:58:00 +0000

Recently I had a near death experience. Its been 3 months of that but I still have some hangover of that. These benefits are purely based on my own experience, may be my readers can share some of their own experience.

You will discover new dimensions of yourself. This whole unfortunate process will finally make you strong and emotionally resilient. Even during the process you will get to know your resistance to pain and trauma.
You will understand more about your parent's strength.We usually forget how our parents supported us when we were doing mistakes during our childhood. But in this situation I learned that my parents have more patience than I thought.
Crowd' will change into and 'people' and some 'people' will become part of the 'crowd'.
When you are weak and vulnerable, you get a gift from God i.e. a X-Ray vision. Its not same as the Bond goggles but it will help you identify people who really care about you.
You have to go temple more than before and if you are not as resistive as me, then you will surely be benefited by it :).
The best part of this situation is you will loose all your fake or pseudo friends, relatives or well wishers. If they will not leave you then you will be able to definitely identify them.
You will fall in for Life again. In 25 years I almost forgot to live life but this experience made me love it again.
Realizing all your dreams again is an important realization. When I came to know about my situation, my first reaction was "Shit! I need to do this, this and this.How the hell I can die without doing these things". Now I have my own 'Bucket List' and I am seriously working on it.
You will see increase in your creative momentum. Your concentration in your daily life will increase. It will actually make you more alive.
Getting new friends and fresh relationships with existing friends.

Dada ji's onversation with Nokia cutomer care (Awesome)

noreply@blogger.com (himanshu) — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 04:59:00 +0000

दादा- हैलो.. हैलो , भइया जय राम जी की , हम जगरनाथ निगोह गाँव से बोल रहे है.

कस्टमर-केयर: हम आपकी क्या मदद कर सकते हैं.

दादा- साहब, हमरे मोबैलवा को भून्गरी भैसिया ने लात मार दिस , तभी से हमारा मोबैलवा का बैलेंस ख़राब हो गया.

कस्टमर-केयर: अपना नम्बर बताएं.

दादा - नही हम को कोई नम्बर नही लगता , हम बिना चश्मा के हैं... बस थोडी अंदरूनी बताश है,जब जब पुरुवा चलती है तो थोड़ा थोड़ा पुरे शरीर में ऐठन आ जाती है.

कस्टमर-केयर: आपने अपना मोबाइल कब रिचार्ज कराया था ?दादा - रोज़ ही चार्ज होता है, रात खाने खाने के बाद हमरी बहु बिरजू से रात २ बजे तक चार्ज करती है , क्युकी रात ११ बजे के बात फोनवा का बिल कुछ सस्ता हो जाता है.

कस्टमर केयर -तो ठीक है , आज फिर रिचार्ज कर लेना....आप का बैलेंस ठीक हो जायेगा.

दादा - अच्छा बेटा ठीक है, जुग-जुग जियो.

कस्टमर केयर - और कुछ जानना चाहेंगे मिस्टर जगरनाथ.

दादा - हाँ बेटा! आज कल मार्केट में "यूरिया " का क्या रेट चल रहा है? और हमरी नहर में पानी कब आएगा?

Something different.

noreply@blogger.com (himanshu) — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 04:10:00 +0000

As I am not very busy these days. So doing a lot of surfing and reading a lot of different type of stuff. Here I am sharing one of the writings of Maya Angelou. She is an american autobiographer and poet.

"I don’t know if I continue, even today, always liking myself. But what I learned to do many years ago was to forgive myself. It is very important for every human being to forgive herself or himself because if you live, you will make mistakes- it is inevitable. But once you do and you see the mistake, then you forgive yourself and say, ‘well, if I’d known better I’d have done better,’ that’s all. So you say to people who you think you may have injured, ‘I’m sorry,’ and then you say to yourself, ‘I’m sorry.’ If we all hold on to the mistake, we can’t see our own glory in the mirror because we have the mistake between our faces and the mirror; we can’t see what we’re capable of being. You can ask forgiveness of others, but in the end the real forgiveness is in one’s own self. I think that young men and women are so caught by the way they see themselves. Now mind you. When a larger society sees them as unattractive, as threats, as too black or too white or too poor or too fat or too thin or too sexual or too asexual, that’s rough. But you can overcome that. The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself. If we don’t have that we never grow, we never learn, and sure as hell we should never teach."

Truth by John Lennon

noreply@blogger.com (himanshu) — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 13:36:00 +0000

I have experienced this recently.

I am feeling these days

noreply@blogger.com (himanshu) — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 09:44:00 +0000

Will be back with/in a bang soon...

noreply@blogger.com (himanshu) — Tue, 26 May 2009 14:36:00 +0000

This is Him's friend updating his blog as he is currently unavailable.
Just dropped to say that he will be back and back with a bang.
Will keep you updated...

Socrates to Developers

noreply@blogger.com (himanshu) — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 07:07:00 +0000

the unexamined life
is not worth living.
-socrates

what he meant:

unexamined code isn’t worth
executing.

Life and Sense of humor

noreply@blogger.com (himanshu) — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 13:56:00 +0000

Q: Isn't it strange that evolution would give us a sense of humor? When you think about it, it's weird that we have a physiological response to absurdity. We laugh at nonsense. We like it. We think it's funny. Don't you think it's odd that we appreciate absurdity? Why would we develop that way? How does it benefit us?

Ans: I suppose if we couldn't laugh at the things that don't make sense, we couldn't react to a lot of life.

These lines are taken from Calvin and Hobbes conversations not from some philosopher's thoughts.

Top 10 Movie quotes for Developers.

noreply@blogger.com (himanshu) — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 14:49:00 +0000

This article is inspired by Dustin's blog published in Java World. Top 10 movie quotes go like...

10."I had to keep digging ... without a shovel."

This quote comes from the 1985 movie Fletch. It sometimes feels like we in the software development find ourselves in situations in which we are tying to identify and resolve a bug without the appropriate tools.

9. "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it."

This quote is tken from movie Men in Black.When Jay is asking Kay why the secret Men in Black don't tell the ordinary people of Earth about the aliens living among them. This quote is Kay's explanation and it often applies in software development as well.
It is easy in our rush to stay current and relevant to make poor choices that we would not do individually when given the opportunity to think rationally about the situation. The rush to apply EJB 1.x/2.x where it wasn't needed is one example of this.

8. "If you're good at something never do it for free."

This statement is from Heath Ledger's The Joker in 2008's The Dark Knight can often apply to the best software developers.

7. "The code is more what you'd call 'guidelines' than actual rules."

These words by Captain Hector Barbossa to Elizabeth Swann in classic movie Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl refer to the pirate's code, but sometimes developers might be attempted to see requirements as guidelines rather than requirements. This is generally not a good idea, however, assuming that requirements have been accurately collected from customer input. Meeting the requirements generally means making the client happy.

6. "Houston, we have a problem."

This is a momentous quote in a terrific movie (Apollo 13) based on real events. It is now used all the time to indicate a (usually) less serious problem than when it was originally used. Software developers use this quote when they come JVM surprises :).

5. "You fell victim to one of the classic blunders."

This quote is taken from the 1987 movie The Princess Bride. We are all aware of some of the classic development blunders such as copying and pasting identical code in multiple places, hard-coding values, swallowing exceptions rather than handling them, etc.

4. "I'm trying to free your mind, Neo. But I can only show you the door. You're the one that has to walk through it."

This quotation comes from the movie The Matrix, which is wildly popular among software developers. It is important for more experienced developers to help less experienced developers through roles as mentors. This is vitally important, but in the end it is the effort of the apprentice that matters most.

3. "Show me the money!"

This quote from the movie Jerry Maguire is one most of us can easily relate to. With current economic times like they are, this may mean more than ever to us.

2. "What we've got here is failure to communicate."

This quote from 1967's Cool Hand Luke summarizes one of the most common problems facing software developers. Problem with communication can come in understanding the customer requirments, developing application with the peer who 8000 miles away etc.

1. "It's not the years, honey, it's the mileage."

This response from Indiana Jones to Marion Ravenwood in 1981's Raiders of the Lost Ark is a reminder that it is often the type of experience that we have in software development that is more important than the years of experience. For example, a software developer who works with different problems and solutions and with different approaches for seven years is very likely to have better experience than the developer who works on the same problem with the same language repeatedly for the same seven years.

Bonus:

"Sab ganda hai par dhanda hai ye. (It's all dirty but it's all business)."

This quote is taken from a hindi movie Company. It justifies the classic situation when we need to deploy the code without unit testing just to meet strict deadlines.

awwwwwwwwwww!!!

noreply@blogger.com (himanshu) — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 07:31:00 +0000

"my mobile phone quite as i tried to let my wife know that i was caught in traffic and would be late for our anniversary dinner. i wrote a message on my laptop asking other motorist to call her, printed it on a portable ink-jet and taped it to my rear windshield. when i finally arrived home, my wife gave me the longest kiss ever. ' i really think you love me', she said. 'at least 70 people called me and told me so'. "

I needed this

noreply@blogger.com (himanshu) — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 07:26:00 +0000

Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swaps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it’s yours.

--
Ayn Rand

Indian Accent

noreply@blogger.com (himanshu) — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 11:55:00 +0000

Just hilarious!!!

More useful Eclipse shortcuts

noreply@blogger.com (himanshu) — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 02:09:00 +0000

Extending to my previous post of top 5 eclipse shortcuts, here are some more useful eclipse shortcuts.

To rename in terms of refactor do not use F2. It's Shift+Alt+R.
Right click menu in eclipse is quite a long menu and some of its fields have sun menus too. In order to get quick menu of 'Source' use Shift+Alt+S.
Quick menu for 'Refactor' comes with Shift+Alt+T.
Eclipse editor highlights the closing bracket of its opening bracket or vice versa but to go to the matching bracket use Shift+Ctrl+P.
To run last launched application press Ctrl+ F11.

Spring integration with EJB 2.x Tutorial (Part 1)

noreply@blogger.com (himanshu) — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 08:36:00 +0000

In my last post on this topic I have explained two places where Spring can be integrate with EJB 2.x. In the first part of this tutorial I am giving step by step example for creating Stateless EJB using Spring. Here I am developing this application in RAD 7.

Create a new Enterprise Application Project as ‘SpringTutorial’. Add two new modules to it:
a) Application Client module named as ‘SpringTutorialClient’.

b) EJB module named as ‘SpringTutorialEJB’.
First we will work on EJB module and try to create an Stateless bean as Spring resource. In SpringTutorialEJB stateless EJB will have 3 classes as usual. Named as SpringEJB,SpringHome and SpringRemote.
Service logic can be associated with bean using interface. In our case,it will be UserNameService interface and implementation will be in UserNameServiceImpl class.
Creating UserNameService interface:

package com.company.service;

public interface UserNameService {

public boolean checkName (String name);
}
Creating UserNameServiceImpl class:

package com.company.service;

public class UserNameServiceImpl implements UserNameService{

public boolean checkName(String name) {
if (name.equals("admin"))
return true;
else
return false;
}

}
Next step is to create Remote interface SpringRemote for our SpringEJB:

package com.mycompany.ejb;

import javax.ejb.EJBObject;

import com.company.service.UserNameService;

public interface SpringRemote extends UserNameService , EJBObject{

}

Here no business method is defined as we are extending UserNameService interface to it.
Home Interface will look like:

package com.mycompany.ejb;

import javax.ejb.CreateException;
import javax.ejb.EJBHome;

public interface SpringHome extends EJBHome{

public SpringRemote create() throws CreateException,java.rmi.RemoteException;

}
Now comes the bean class:

package com.mycompany.ejb;

import javax.ejb.CreateException;

import org.springframework.ejb.support.AbstractStatelessSessionBean;

import com.company.service.UserNameService;

public class SpringEJB extends AbstractStatelessSessionBean implements UserNameService{

public static final String BEAN_NAME = "userNameService";

private UserNameService service;

@Override
protected void onEjbCreate() throws CreateException {

service = (UserNameService)getBeanFactory().getBean(BEAN_NAME);

}

public boolean checkName(String name) {

return service.checkName(name);
}

}

Few points to be noted here:

a) Bean class SpringEJB extends the Spring Base class AbstractStatelessSessionBean and implements the UserNameService.

b) This has no ejbXXX () methods as these are all implemented in AbstractStatelessSessionBean.

c) onEjbCreate() method is called during ejbCreate(). It is used to obtain any Spring-managed resources the EJB bean needs.
Bean configuration in EJB Deployment Descriptor:

<session>
<description>User Name Service </description>
<ejb-name>UserNameService</ejb-name>
<home>com.mycompany.ejb.SpringHome</home>
<remote>com.mycompany.ejb.SpringRemote</remote>
<ejb-class>com.mycompany.ejb.SpringEJB</ejb-class>
<session-type>Stateless</session-type>
<transaction-type>Container</transaction-type>
<env-entry>
<env-entry-name>ejb/BeanFactoryPath</env-entry-name>
<env-entry-type>java.lang.String</env-entry-type>]
<env-entry-value>applicationContext.xml</env-entry-value>
</env-entry>
</session>

The important part in DD is the <env-entry> tag that sets the value of ejb/BeanFactoryPath JNDI location to applicationContext.xml.
applicationContext will look like:

<beans>
<bean id="userNameService" class="com.mycompany.service.UserNameServiceImpl"/>
</beans>
You can deploy this ejb on desired server and test it using JNDI lookup.

In next post I will try to explain accessing stateless EJBs with the help of Spring.
Till then Happy Coding!!!

Did You Know 2.0.

noreply@blogger.com (himanshu) — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 11:28:00 +0000

Its just awesome.

21 Things I want in a Lover

noreply@blogger.com (himanshu) — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 07:41:00 +0000

We all have those list in our head. I came across a group blog where people have shared their wishes. Out of more than 350 wishes, I am sharing my favorites.
All these things are not necessary needs but the qualities I prefer. Enjoy :)

Someone unexpected.
Someone who won’t laugh when I tell them I want to touch the stars.
Someone who will let me curl up in their lap while I’m reading my book.
Someone who will read me their favorite verses of poetry.
Someone whose life and heartbeat is in rhythm with mine. Whether I see them once a day, once a month or once a lifetime.
Someone who is just as random as I am.
Someone who understands my "I’m an individual" moments.
Someone who will draw circles on my back to make me fall asleep.
Someone who finishes my sentences without even thinking about it.
Someone patient.
Someone who always knows what song I am humming.
Someone who has answers, not just questions.
Someone who will call me at the precise moments that I’m feeling the loneliest.
Someone who will let me play piano on her skin in the morning.
Someone who’ll write their name on my window, when it gets all steamed up in the rain.
Someone who knows I’ve had a bad day and brings home food so we don’t have to cook or worry about anything else.
Someone who wakes me up with a whisper.
Someone who will make weird noises with me all the time and then laugh hysterically about it afterwards.
Someone who understands that a random hug makes the whole day seem brighter.
Someone who will watch the clouds with me.
Someone who will start a friendly pillow fight when we are bored.

Spring integration with EJB 2.x

noreply@blogger.com (himanshu) — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 07:07:00 +0000

These days I am working on a bank web application. This application needs to be developed in synch with an 8 years old web application. The problem is as old application is running fine from a long time; manager wants us to develop it using the same frameworks. The ancient configuration is struts1.3 + EJB 2.1 + iBatis which is not it all test friendly.

Finally we are trying our luck with the kinda fusion of both old and new. For the middle layer I am trying to minimize side effects of EJB 2.1 by wrapping it around with Spring.

Spring's support to EJB integration can be grouped into two categories:

EJB access using Spring
EJB implementaion using Spring

Accessing EJB with the help of Spring, makes it easy. Spring extends basic JNDI support framework and utilizes AOP support to provide proxy-based access to EJB resources.

Spring provides abstract base classes to support EJB implementation. Abstract classes help to create 3 types of EJBs.

Stateless Session Beans
Stateful Session Beans
Message Driven Beans

There is no support to Entity beans.
Spring implementation not only eases the burden of creating EJB but makes easy access to Spring managed resources within the beans. It helps to factor business logic out of the EJB implementation and into a POJO used by EJB.

Till now I have been able to implement EJB with Spring and its successfully deployed in WebSphere Application Server 5.1.

May be next time I will post a tutorial on this exercise.

Law of Diminishing Returns

noreply@blogger.com (himanshu) — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 08:51:00 +0000

I was discussing with my roommate about Economics (theoretical) and how its laws help us to take rational decision in life. Then he told me about the Law of Diminishing Returns.

As per Wikipedia "According to Law of Diminishing Returns, in a production system with fixed and variable inputs (e.g. factory size and labor), beyond some point, each additional unit yields less and less output."

This is an universal law. It applies perfectly to various aspects of life. Take a example of learning curve.

In learning a new language an individual may reach a point at which studying that language with the same effort for the same amount of time will no longer provide the same increase in comprehension as it had it in past.

Now I will try to make it more realistic with this example.

Lets say you have a dog and you feed him with 2 breads daily. Both breads are identical, made of same material and of same size. But the response dog gives for second bread will always be less than the response of having the first bread.

It's a very basic example but helps to understand many things around us.

Please Mr Einstein

noreply@blogger.com (himanshu) — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 15:02:00 +0000

I was reading this book last month. It was like reading the part II of one of my favourite book "Surely you're joking Mr Feynman". This book is about a young woman who meets Mr Einstein. They both discuss concepts of time, space, relativity and Einstein's responsibility in the creation of nuclear weapons.

Jean-Claude Carriere's fiction was a fun to read. Both the characters try to explain physics concepts, god, society and the problem of being famous in a very witty but simple way. It reminds me one of Einstein's own quote "You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother".