Kunal

Groovier date diff

2014-03-03T00:33:00.002+05:30

HackerNews has weird habit of displaying date of the older comment in days, which sometimes is annoying especially when you see something like "1320 days ago | comments".

Worry not, Groovy to the rescue! On terminal, just write:

$ groovy -e "println new Date() - 1320"

Which nicely tells you this (well depends on when you execute the commad :-)

Thu Jul 22 00:04:53 IST 2010

That said, it is my first instinct to use Groovy but you could do the same with date command as well


$ date -v-1320d

While we are on Date and Groovy, that just reminded me of a question that I answered on StackOverflow just a few days back. Iterating over a date rage with a week at a time :


(startDate..endDate).step(7) { println it }

Glide your apps on Google App Engine

2013-05-19T20:48:00.001+05:30

I had been working on a script, which has turned into project Glide, to help me work with smallish gaelyk apps (like my homepage etc.).

While gaelyk template project provides excellent start; for simple website'ish projects, java webapp structure and the xml noise is sometimes a hindrance for non java background (web) developers.

What glide does is cut that noise off with simple defaults (while being still configurable). The only files your project is required to have is your web content (something like static html or php webapps). Plus there are some more goodies like preconfigured sitemesh etc.

I have created 4 minimal examples to give an idea of what I mean here. Each dir in the samples is a glide project and can be run locally and deployed to GAE.

Start with the `news` project a simple one filer to get sense of what I mean by no config noise. `expense` and `blog` take few steps ahead but are still very very small.

To run a glide project, just cd into the app directory and fire the 'glide' command.

Steps to install glide are mentioned in the README. It should be fairly straight forward if you have java/git/gae already installed. (if you dont use git, you can directly download the zip and extract it)

I look forward to feedback on the project.

PS :

Motivated to let it know to the world by "F**k It, Ship It"
Content almost identical to what I posted on Gaelyk User Group

Java 7 and Groovy on Mac OS X Mountain Lion

2013-01-17T21:03:00.001+05:30

I usually keep all my softwares and SDKs to the latest version but jdk7 was probably amongst the longest resisted update/upgrade. Mostly running groovy, I never got motivated enough to upgrade and then there have been several security and compatibility issues reported by many.

Anyways, today I just thought of doing it, primarily to reap benefits of invokedynamic, the thing I have not even looked at so far. The download was pretty simple in form of a .dmg and then the .pkg installer.

I fired up terminal with to check java and viola:

[~]
kunal@kaydee $ java -version
java version "1.7.0_11"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0_11-b21)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 23.6-b04, mixed mode)

The second natural thing was to just verify groovy, but what the heck, the JVM version I see is:

[~] 
kunal@kaydee $ groovy -version
Groovy Version: 2.0.6 JVM: 1.6.0_37 Vendor: Apple Inc. OS: Mac OS X

Apparently Java 7 got installed at

/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.7.0_11.jdk/Contents/Home/

But the one available to groovy was something else:

[~]
kunal@kaydee $ groovysh
Groovy Shell (2.0.6, JVM: 1.6.0_37)
...
groovy:000> System.properties["java.home"]
===> /System/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.6.0.jdk/Contents/Home

Setting JAVA_HOME Environment variable comes to rescue (in .zshrc or .bash_profile or whatever profile file you use.)

export JAVA_HOME="/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.7.0_11.jdk/Contents/Home"

Reload the iTerm and

[~]
kunal@kaydee $ groovy -version
Groovy Version: 2.0.6 JVM: 1.7.0_11 Vendor: Oracle Corporation OS: Mac OS X

My ZSH theme

2013-01-06T22:55:00.001+05:30

I was initially hesitant to make the move from bash to ZSH. But thanks to oh-my-zsh now I am just loving it. To spice up the terminal prompt it has a provision of themes (unlike PS1 environment variable in bash).

I looked around for themes and there are many great themes available in the oh-my-zsh repo. But I still wanted to customize the prompt a bit so I went ahead and created my own them called kaydee which looks something like this

It starts with a sweet (but unnecessary) apple, followed by current directory path and then git status.
Then the prompt comes on a new line preceded by username and hostname.

It leaves a blank line between last command's output and the prompt and the colors make this line stands out on black background screen and all user typed commands start at same vertical column (irrespective of what directory you are in), so that while scrolling you can keep eyes fixed and locate commands easily.

You can fork/clone my repo or just copy this theme to spice up your terminal.

Reverse scroll mouse and natural scroll Trackpad on Mac

2013-01-04T18:01:00.001+05:30

I frequently connect an external Monitor, a mac keyboard and a (non-mac) mouse to my MacBook Pro while code pairing. I love the natural scroll direction on trackpad but not so for the mouse scroll wheel. I happy to live with regular direction for scroll for a mouse.

Unfortunately, Mac OS X (Lion, Mountain Lion) does not allow such setting out of the box. There is a nice utility app called Scroll Reverser, just a few KBs in size, which can do it for you.

With the config shown in the screenshot above, you can set natural scroll for Trackpad and the reverse scroll (which we are used to) for mouse.

Reading RSS Feed in Groovy

2012-02-20T19:52:00.001+05:30

The more I explore, the more I love groovy. Last week while I was demonstrating a few colleagues of mine, that how simple things are really dead-simple in groovy, I wrote this small code that fetches the rss feed and prints the headlines. Just thought of sharing with all.

// setup proxy, if any
System.properties.putAll(["http.proxyHost":"your.proxy", "http.proxyPort":"8080"])             

// define the url, change it to whatever rss url you like
def url = "http://news.google.com/news?ned=us&topic=h&output=rss"

def rss = new XmlSlurper().parse(url) 

println rss.channel.title
rss.channel.item.each {
    println "- ${it.title}"
}

That's it! You have headlines in your output. How can you not love the brevity yet expressiveness of this code:)

ASCII Art Editor in Java

2012-02-15T23:09:00.000+05:30

I am Huge fan of README files. When looking at any new library/software, I would at least skim through a README once, if not gulp it thoroughly. So I was writing a README for my project yesterday. I wanted to have a simple diagram in the readme, but it was getting sorta complex to do that with Notepad++, Netbeans or Eclipse. I have always wondered how people make nice ASCII Art Logos (I found that 'it' is called so after some google searches) and diagrams in Text Files.

Anyways, so I found out this cool ASCII Art Editor in java called JavE. And it really helped me to create the desired diagram in the text file. Bonus: I came to know how to create ASCII Banners as well. You have to download optional FIGlet fonts (available on the same website) to create text banners like this one.

 
   _   _      _ _        __        __         _     _
  | | | | ___| | | ___   \ \      / /__  _ __| | __| |
  | |_| |/ _ \ | |/ _ \   \ \ /\ / / _ \| '__| |/ _` |
  |  _  |  __/ | | (_) |   \ V  V / (_) | |  | | (_| |
  |_| |_|\___|_|_|\___/     \_/\_/ \___/|_|  |_|\__,_|

Groovy substring

2011-12-21T16:23:00.001+05:30

Can't imagine any terser way of doing this than


println "teststring"[4..6]

Ain't it groovy :)

Netbeans not allowing to create project on windows

2011-09-23T20:00:00.002+05:30

At times Netbeans does not allow you to create projects in some directories (on windows). I searched a lot but could not find any reasonable explanation for why windows turns some folders as read only. Anyways, run the following commands on those directories in which Netbeans is not letting you create the project.


Go to the command prompt and, issue

>attrib -r -s c:\some\directory

>attrib -r -s c:\other\directory

This removes the read only status.

Script to enable/disable proxy

2011-08-16T01:09:00.000+05:30

To Enable Proxy
EnablePorxy.vbs



set shell = Wscript.CreateObject("Wscript.Shell")

shell.RegWrite "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\ProxyEnable", 0, "REG_DWORD"

To disable Proxy
DisablePorxy.vbs



set shell = Wscript.CreateObject("Wscript.Shell")

shell.RegWrite "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\ProxyEnable", 1, "REG_DWORD"

Maven: multiple builds from cmd file

2011-08-10T23:01:00.002+05:30

This is just a followup on/refinement of my previous post. This cmd/bat Script focuses on clean-build-installing multiple projects from a single script. This script halts at the first build failure. If you happen to run from window explorer by doble clicking the script, In case of error the command window stays open (Press any key to continue). If ever build was successful, the window closes automatically. In the following example, I am skipping the test execution for third project you can add/remove -DskipTests=true to any mvn calls.



REM Uncomment following if you want to clean local repo on each run

REM rmdir /S /Q "%HOMEPATH%\.m2\repository\com\mygroup\id"



call mvn -f ProjectA\pom.xml clean install 

if not "%ERRORLEVEL%" == "0" goto error



call mvn -f ProjectB\pom.xml clean install

if not "%ERRORLEVEL%" == "0" goto error



call mvn -DskipTests=true -f ProjectC\pom.xml clean install

if not "%ERRORLEVEL%" == "0" goto error



exit



:error

@echo Build Failed

pause

Hope you find this helpful.

Reference:
This question at SO helped.

Calling multiple bat files from a bat file

2011-08-05T19:29:00.000+05:30

Earlier I had posted about closing command window that is left open after executing a bat file. This post is about calling multiple bat files from a bat file.

Today, while trying to execute multiple maven builds from a bat file, I observed that only first build one was called and once the first build was over, the execution stopped. Next builds were not called at all. I Did some search and found this. Yeah mvn command is a bat file, I knew that. What i missed was putting a call before the mvn commands:



cd ProjectA

call mvn install

cd ..



cd ProjectB

call mvn install

cd ..

The post linked above goes one level further by checking the %ERRORLEVEL% and exiting the script if any any build fails.

So lesson learnt today :
If you need to call multiple bat files from a bat file, start each bat command with a call

Google Code adds Git support

2011-08-03T02:26:00.004+05:30

Git finally makes it to the Google's code hosting platform. Git happens to be third Version Controlling System supported on
Google Code, following Subversion and Mercurial.

The announcement states:

Since our original announcement of Mercurial support, Git has grown significantly more popular and user-friendly, and on the technical side, it has added an efficient “smart” HTTP protocol that fits with Google’s HTTP-based infrastructure. (Note that this feature is only available in version 1.6.6 and later.)

This is very welcome addition as Git's popularity is increasing exponentially but I am not sure how many people will actually switch to Google code for Git hosting as more open source git projects are already using trendy and hep Github. Github is more social too. This is certainly going to help those who already have projects hosted on Google Code and want to switch to git.

I personally like mercurial slightly more than git for its simplicity. Git, for novice, is overwhelming. Whatever your choice may be, Distributed Version Controlling Systems have started taking over and are becoming mainstream. If you are still unsure about what it all means, don't worry, you are just git init / hg init away.

Groovy performance : iterating with closure vs loop

2011-07-22T09:16:00.001+05:30

Toady while listening to this video I discovered an interesting fact about usage of closure vs regular loop for iterating over list. So I wrote a quick test to confirm and yes loops outperform closures in terms of performance in case of iterating over a list.

But in a slightly similar case of File.eachLine{} vs loading file in a list and then iterating with for, the closure still works out faster on the whole. I have not tested this for different file sizes, but damn, whatever it may be new File(file).eachLine{} just rocks :)

Here is the github gist, to get the latest version of code.



def file = "input.txt"

// just to heat up the jvm :)

new File(file).eachLine{

    it.toUpperCase()

}



// with closure

start = System.nanoTime()

new File(file).eachLine{

    it.toUpperCase()

}

println System.nanoTime() - start



// with loop

start = System.nanoTime()

lines = new File(file).readLines()

for (line in lines){

    line.toUpperCase()

}

println System.nanoTime() - start



// read lines into a list

lines = new File(file).readLines()



// with list.each {}

start = System.nanoTime()

lines.each { line->

    line.toUpperCase()

}

println System.nanoTime() - start



// with loop over list

start = System.nanoTime()

for (line in lines){

    line.toUpperCase()

}

println System.nanoTime() - start

Results (with groovy-1.8.0 and jdk-1.6)

 Run # 1   Run # 2   Run # 3   Run # 4
 4792229   4773791   4840280   5428064
11169576  10254934  10791595  12546008
 2638604   2424610   2477969   2466514
  465702    315403    315403    412063

Display System Properties in Groovy

2011-07-10T01:00:00.004+05:30

It can't get any simpler than this.



System.properties.each { k,v->

    println "$k = $v"

}

Groovy rocks!!

Back in the Saddle ... Back in Black

2011-07-07T21:07:00.007+05:30

I am back to blogging after a brief ;-) hiatus of 2 years. Don't get mislead by the title of the post. This post has got nothing to do with the two tracks, Aerosmith or ACDC.

It's like a rebirth. Giving a fresh life to a thing I care about. Yesterday I finished reading the fantastic book named "Clutter Busting". It has inspired me lot to clean up the junk, that i dint consider junk so far, from my life. I have started removing many of my precious belonging from my computer attic.

I cant believe its almost been a decade of getting hooked to computers. The Digital Clutter had been gathering for long time that kept me distracted and less focused. You can expect few things coming straight out of my attic making their way to this blog.

Leaking the secret of not posting for so long: I had decided that I will move to a hosted blogging platform (am a control freak, I guess) and own a domain name and only then I'll publish my next post. The sad news is neither of that happened so far and the good news is I have decided to change the way I have programmed myself to think.

By the way today happens to be the day when I started my professional career six years back.

Hello world!

BlogCampPune2

2009-06-24T01:02:00.004+05:30

BlogCampPune2 is a blogger unconference. Its happening for the 2nd time in Pune. It is completely free and sounds like serious fun. Instead of looking for more details here, I think it's better if you check out their cool wiki page.

I have registered and I'll be attending this the first time (I'll try my best to attend, unless I get some official issue to solve(slog) on weekend like every other weekend). And I hope those of you who are in Pune would be interested in it too.

Ubuntu 9.04 overheats my notebook

2009-06-14T22:48:00.003+05:30

For last few days I observed my notebook (Sony vaio FZ140E) was heating up too much. Also battery could last for only 15 mins to half hour max. I thought it's EOL(End Of Life) phase of my laptop. But then, for some reason, when I booted it in Vista, the problem was not there. A little googling suggested that there is some bug in the ubuntu that is causing this issue. I am not at all aware with all the cpu cycle/frequency related terminologies quoted, but it has got something to do with percentage of processor usage. A lot of people seem to have same complaint. So the culprit is not my notebook :)

I hope Ubuntu folks will come with the fix soon.

Ubuntu upgrade

2009-04-29T08:37:00.003+05:30

Today when I turned on my notebook, I realized that its April and the fresh new release of ubuntu should be out. I checked out the site and yeah, it was.

So I upgraded my notebook from 8.10 to 9.04. And it was a breeze. For those who wonder what the version numbers are, its really a very simple logic. The major version number is the year and the minor is month. 9.04 means released in month of April'09. 8.10 meant the version released in Oct'08. Ubuntu usually releases new version in these two months only. Can you see how simplified is the logic behind the version numbers. Doesn't it tell you about how simple this OS is?

If you have not yet checked it out, please do. Its free :)

Disable unused windows services

2009-02-28T16:10:00.003+05:30

There are lot of windows services that unnecessarily load on start-up and consume resources. You can find more info about such services here. Disabling these or turning them to manual mode instead of automatic may greatly improve performance and boot speed. I am doing it right now. Thought of sharing with all.

Go Green

2009-02-01T09:28:00.006+05:30

Maybe you and I can afford to waste, but our country and planet cannot afford to do so. Please Don't waste Food and Energy.

Here is the getting started guide:

Please turn off the computer monitor whenever not in use
Switch Off work PC when leaving for the day
Opt out of paper statement options for banking and other billing statements
Take prints only when absolutely necessary
Check the emission of your vehicle
Control the temptation to use the plastic bags, try to reuse the same ones

None of these points are very difficult to implement. It just needs to get into your habits.

PS: I know there's nothing new in this post. Just consider it as a reminder and tally yourself how many points you actually follow.

New hotmail on chrome

2009-01-24T10:40:00.003+05:30

All new hotmail is even more annoying on chrome. Earlier (Sep/2008) I blogged about hotmail having some trouble when opened on chrome. Then about some issues with new hotmail in general (Oct/2008). Hotmail has been improving (or simply changing) since then. But looks like these improvements (???) have made it complete disaster on chrome. Links are not working. I can't even reply or delete. And I guess it's not only me.

Closing cmd window after executing bat file

2009-01-22T16:39:00.008+05:30

Just a small post you may find useful if you are as annoyed as I was of a command window left open after execution of a bat file.

I had to call an exe with some options. So I wrote a bat for it. But after executing the bat file, it always kept a command window open until I explicitly close it or the executed program finishes. Actually the command window remains open till the control is returned from the exe to bat again. Point to be noted is EXIT doesn't help in this case as it's call is also deferred until control is returned back.

eg.


start-netbeans.bat
netbeans --jdkhome d:\dev\jdk

putty-to-server.bat
d:\programs\putty -pw password username@ip-addrs

Use start before the command so your bat calls the exe and continues its execution i.e. doesn't wait for the exe to complete the execution


start netbeans --jdkhome d:\dev\jdk

start d:\programs\putty -pw password username@ip-addrs

You can use pause command for "Press any key to continue . . ."

The Pen

2009-01-11T13:10:00.009+05:30

My friend calls me on my cell and wants me to note down a number. Du-uh I manage to get a piece of paper but where the hell is the pen. I search here and there and finally I end up saving that number on my cell while I put my friend on speaker. To hit the last nail, I press the end button when call is over, and Whoa.. the number is erased from the screen. The point here is not how I lost that number, the point is where do all the pens go? This phenomenon of losing pen when its required most is not limited to my home but happens every now and then at my workplace too.

No matter how safely i keep it (the pen) at some place, it is either lost or stolen. There is a big black-hole that swallows every pen that comes it's way. Strangely this AI-enabled black-hole leaves those pen that can no longer work, largely because of exhausted refill ink. In fact, sometimes the same stolen pen is also found after some days. I think the black-hole spits it out when my need is over.

At my desk, sometimes I find a pen that I neither bought nor borrowed from some one. Anyways, I use it and then one fine day that is also gone. If my black-hole theory is not correct then there is certainly a mafia involvement behind the lost and found of pens.

Recently I bought a pen and could hardly use it before it was gone (from home) and atleast 3 pens were missing from my desk when i came back from vaccation (at my workplace). So thought of sharing my grief with you guys

happy new year

2009-01-05T01:13:00.003+05:30

wish you all a very colorful and prosperous new year 2009.