Venkat's Blog

Interest in our Panchangam Lite 2010 application

2010-01-10T04:52:00.000-08:00

Recently we published our Panchangam Lite 2010 iPhone app. It is interesting to see that there are some 300 users who downloaded within 5 full days of launch. Here is a google map showing various countries from which the users came from.View Panchangam Lite downlod status in a larger map

Return to blogging

2008-05-23T00:12:00.000-07:00

There has been a pause in blogging here not because of dearth of any material, but for lack of time.I have tons of stuff to share and expect a series of regular blog posts from now. My writings will focus on experience with Ruby On Rails, JRuby, J2EE deployment and quite a bit of Ruby on Rails plugins as well.

Asrock wasted precious several hours of my time

2006-08-15T08:29:00.000-07:00

Motherboard manufacturers compete in terms of no of functions they have. In the process of cramming all kinds of functions even in low end mobos, they just don't pay attention to the quality aspect of what they do.After several months of running ok, a computer I had it assembled (AMD Sempron, Mobo: AsRock K8Upgrade-VM800) for a friend of mine starting giving BSOD, slowness etc. Not having faith

Java Docs Search made easier

2006-01-28T05:32:00.000-08:00

About a couple of years ago, as we were developing with J2EE and whole bunch of open source libraries (perhaps some 20 in number) one of the things I observed to be clumsy is locating Class names or method signatures while coding. At times you only remember a part of a class name or a method name. You end up having to go to the web to look for it. Each library's JavaDocs are in different places

Return of Waterfall Methodology

2006-01-28T04:37:00.000-08:00

Many of the thousands of readers of this blog(ok. ok. two or three readers) know that I really enjoy attending technical conferences as a way to keep myself up to date and often motivate(ok. almost coax them) others to do so.After returning to Bangalore, I do miss all the good stuff on the conference front that goes in the US. As much as it is very expensive to attend a conference in the US,

John Vlissides

2005-12-01T00:00:00.000-08:00

OO and Design Patterns has lost a true legend. He will be greatly missed. Perhaps a week or two ago, I was telling some one that there is a chance they will update the book.

Finally, the Java naming issue is over with

2005-06-30T00:55:00.000-07:00

The Java naming jokes are now finally over with.There are very simple names to follow:Java SE 6 (Standard Edition)Java ME 5 (Micro Edition) Java EE 5 (Enterprise Edition)

Java ClassPath wildcards

2005-06-28T19:46:00.000-07:00

Here is one feature that is a time saver and scheduled for the Mustang release.ClassPath wildcardsNo more writing shell scripts (Remember lcp.bat) for various platforms for looping. Endless typing of the umpteen jar files in a dir.

Large project - Result of a process or inherent?

2005-06-19T21:16:00.000-07:00

Here is was one nicely put statement about large project in the above link."I often hear developers described as 'someone who knows how to build a large system quickly.' There is no trick in building large systems quickly; the quicker you build them, the larger they get!"-- David Parnas

VSS and list of shared files for a given project

2005-05-11T22:36:00.000-07:00

Recently we have observed random corruption of a large VSS database recently at my work. As a stop gap measure, we have recreated a fresh VSS database to copy at least the latest source to proceed further. However we do have a number of shared files among projects and VSS doesn't have a built in report to list those files that are shared.So here is a quickly hacked Ruby script for producing a "

How to find out where a class is loaded from?

2005-04-24T23:26:00.000-07:00

ClassLoader cl = aClass.getClassLoader();while (cl != null) {System.out.println(cl);cl = cl.getParent();}try {System.out.println(aClass.getProtectionDomain().getCodeSource().getLocation());} catch (Exception e) {}

More about WebDav

2005-03-25T21:59:00.000-08:00

Having said good things about the WebDav earlier, I also have to point out that at times we do miss out retry and parellel connection facilities available in advanced web clients like CuteFTP or FileZilla.Here is a very cool Java library (OnJava article) that plugs into the Java's protocol handler mechanism and provides the retry and parallel connection facilities to HTTP connections. With this

WebDav and File Transfer

2005-03-25T21:53:00.000-08:00

As FTP is blocked at the firewall level in more corporations, we switched to WebDav (used the Apache 2's Dav module) for File Transfers between our offices. With WebDav, We also got an additional advantage of using the Windows OS's built in WebDav client (Web folders) rather than having to install an FTP Client or in most cases just use the Web Browser. Once the folder is setup, it is simply one

Chairs we are looking at for Bangalore Office

2005-03-21T04:45:00.000-08:00

Here are the pictures of the chair we are looking at for Bangalore officeChairs

Discussion on LDAP , OpenLDAP, etc

2005-02-18T20:40:00.000-08:00

An interesting discussion about directory services, LDAP and OpenLDAP at slashdot.org

One more celebration today

2004-11-23T18:51:00.000-08:00

We did a couple of cool things in the last few months with Deepak. To improve our application security, we now handle the data segregation at the JDBC sql statements level in a generic manner. We have a very decent set of AspectJ based aspects to do the job of scoping the SELECT sqls to only retrieve the data allowed for the specific users. We also switched to Eclipse IDE. This one is really

It is celeberation time

2004-11-23T17:27:00.000-08:00

We had a small celebration in the NJ office. We were happy to note the three major new efforts on the infrastructure side. They are: VPN I have been aiming to get the VPN setup so that we can have a secure inter office communication as well as occational on the road/home communications. It finally came to frution a few months ago when were were able to configure the FreeSWAN package on our

2004-10-02T10:40:00.000-07:00

Mail merge ruby script The other day, I needed to send the gmail invite to all the folks in the development team and it amounted to more than 30 people. Since each one would have to be sent a different invite, distribution list won't work. Here is a quick Ruby script I cranked up to send the invites. Go ruby. require 'net/smtp' receiver_list = ['x@y.com','a@b.com'] invites_list = ['invite_url

2004-10-02T10:08:00.001-07:00

Can sequence diagrams be any more simpler? For some of the work we have been doing recently, I wanted to sketch small sequence diagrams to explain the flow. As always the temptation is to launch Rational Rose. This time I hadn't set it up in my new laptop as I didn't want to bloat it with lots of software. Since I had heard about ArgoUML, I tried that next. It was very quick to launch it as it

2004-10-01T20:09:00.000-07:00

Migrating from Yahoo Mail to Gmail The Gmail service is quite impressive and I couldn't stop thinking about getting to use it on a regular basis as soon as I can. So, I decided to copy all my Yahoo mails to Gmail. Here is how did it and the steps you need to follow: Download mails to local drive Since I have a paid Yahoo account (MailPlus), Yahoo allowed the e-mails to be downloaded locally.

2004-09-28T21:52:00.000-07:00

Gmail invites - A small gift to the Bali development team As usual everybody is working hard trying to get another release out, another fix to do and a new bunch of items in the issue list. Weekends are spent debugging and troubleshooting. I wanted to distract them in a pleasant way from all the usual things in the daily life. This distraction should be a different one from the past. How about

2004-09-20T22:11:00.000-07:00

Celebrating Sastry's project completion A few days back, I sent him a note to congratulate on completing the "Generic Filter Framework" project. First Sastry didn't know what the courier was about. He thought it is some scam and wanted to be sure of what it is before signing. With a irritating voice I told him to first sign and send the courier guy off. Sastry opening the packet. As he is

2003-09-12T07:06:00.000-07:00

I was looking for an alternative solution for SourceOffSite. Though Visual WEB has a 20KBytes/second bandwidth with Bangalore, SOS 's biggest bottleneck is the project tree update is manual. Especially if one were to get the project tree updated from root, it simply takes over 30 minutes or so to do it. Their licensing model of over $300/VSS user makes it very expensive. Recently I learned about