Life without Facebook, this post summarizes my experiences without Facebook in last couple of days and how I see the future with/without Facebook.

1. Free music is kind of dead: Unless you are a guy with a cap with skulls and bones (typical pirate-wear), you must be using free music providers like Spotify or Saavan (There are some rich people who purchase music quiet often too, but for this case we are considering the others). Spotify/Saavan both use Facebook sign in, where Spotify had made it compulsory to have Facebook account to access Spotify. And here I go stumped, suddenly I lost all the music I had accumulated at Spotify. And though Saavan can be used without Facebook, it is yet to grow to the heights of Spotify and there is no doubt if Facebook wants to partner with Saavan with some funding to enable single sign in using Facebook only, Saavan being a startup would definitely like to embrace the offer.

2. Social networking for Job Search: I am fond of LinkedIn, Glassdoor and Bullhorn for maintaining my professional network and updates regarding new opportunities in my field. One of the days while browsing Glassdoor, I got a message “Sign in with Facebook account” to read more. Fortunately, Glassdoor had login via your credentials apart from Facebook login.

3. Event Invite: This was not the first party/event I missed in last few days. Facebook has evolved as the RSVP de-facto. Organizing a party, create an event and voila you are done.

4. Facebook Applications: developed by you, you lose them as well. Probably it’s a good idea to create a Facebook developers account separately from your personal account.

I believe there is lot more to experience, but one thing is for sure, Facebook has secured a strong place over the web. I still love Facebook and admire the scalable system design they have to handle over 1 Billion accounts. It is undoubtedly one of the best social network that have been around. But I am scared about the path leading the dependency with Facebook, and hope alternates shall be used by web services for consumers who does not want to use Facebook services.

Note: This Post is still under construction might be adding, editing the post with my experiences.

The recent announcement of Microsoft Surface Tablet RT version was one which everyone was looking for due to rumors like pricing to be as low as $200 to compete with tablets in the same segment. The price rage though affordable than Apple’s iPad, were not cheap enough to suddenly turn the market share in favor of Microsoft, probable reason being Microsoft had to make sure not to displease tablet manufacturers for Windows 8.

Though the announcement for Surface RT was appreciated, there were some doubts regarding Surface RT vs Pro. This post shall clear the doubts before you buy Surface.

My verdict, wait for Surface Pro to be available in Jan 2013. Buy Surface RT only if you are an early adapter and you require tablet for non- commercial / business purposes. If you are a developer/programmer/ someone who crunches a lot with numbers or one who relies heavily on third party software’s like IDE’s (different from Visual Studio), you must probably wait just like I am doing. I would be buying the tablet in early January and would try to replace my laptop with this tablet. With the promises Surface has made it is quite sure this tablet will thin the lines or possibly eradicate the lines between tablet and laptop.

You can Buy Surface Tablet starting $499 for RT version from today.

“The VPN Client driver has encountered an error.” or “Cannot initiate VPN.”

Some forums misguided me VPNClient does not works on Windows 8. Also to make sure i tried to dog the old dieing OS on my machine that was Windows 7 and found out VPN Client working there. This narrowed down my problem to Windows 8 vs Cisco VPNClient compatibility. After a lot of searching digging mining turned out there is a quick and easy fix for this.

1. From the Start screen type “regedit” or Windows Key+R shortcut and type “regedit” to launch the Registry Editor.

2. Give it admin rights when UAC prompts.

3. In the registry editor, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\vpnva

4. Double-click on the DisplayName key, and remove the INF information from the display name so the modified version appears as Cisco AnyConnect VPN Virtual Miniport Adapter for Windows x64. (or the 32-bit / x86 equivalent)

5. Click OK. Close Registry Editor and launch the AnyConnect client. The connection should work normally.

No reboot required and i am connected to my corporate Network. Thanks Tom for the tip.

Smarty is a template engine for PHP that facilitates a managable way to separate application logic and content from its presentation. This is mostly used in industrial architecture following MVC (Model View Controller) architecture. The application data that contain no information about how they will be presented. They are passed into Smarty by the application, then the template designer edits the templates and uses a combination of HTML tags and template tags to format the presentation of these elements. Smarty ensures programmer can make changes to the application logic without the need to restructure templates, and the template designer can make changes to templates without breaking application logic.

Smarty is used in *.tpl files. These tpl files can use web presentation technologies like HTML and Javascript. While working recently in a web page rendered by Smarty while using the code , It threw the following error

The specific message was: Syntax Error in template “/websites/site.local/views/manager/index.tpl” on line 564 “onclick : function() {” – Unexpected ” : “, expected one of: “}”

Now this error might look a bit weird, since you can easily access variables passed from PHP code using {variableName}

However, while using smarty variables inside a javascript, the Javascript code should be enclosed using the {literal}{/literal} tag if you haven’t. This prevents Smarty from parsing what’s in between so that the Javascript code is not being mistaken for PHP code.

So the code can look like :


{literal}

{/literal}


Smarty is a neat way to separate your code. I am still learning it and enjoying working over it. If you have nay questions regarding SMARTY you can ask by commenting here… More about Smarty: http://smarty.incutio.com/?page=SmartyFrequentlyAskedQuestions#basics-1

So, is there any difference between the various integer types INT, TINYINT, SMALLINT, MEDIUMINT, and BIGINT if you define a length of 1 for each type? And the answer is Yes there is a big diffeence between these data types though they belong to same class.

The number in parentheses for integer column types is the “display width”. This does not effect the storage requirements as they are pre-defined. INT(1) does not allow only one character, infact it sets the display width for that column in result sets. The display width is a number from 1 to 255. You can set the display width if you want all of your integer values to “appear” similarly. So INT(5) will not hold maximum value as 99999 but it will set the width of number as 5 for display and will truncate more or pad with space if less.

As an example quoted from Matthom

INT(6) sets the display as:

55
643
1098
81153

where the left side are padded with spaces.

To help visualize it easier, try this:

_ _ _ _ 5 5
_ _ _ 6 4 3
_ _ 1 0 9 8
_ 8 1 1 5 3

Notice how they all have a display width of 6.

Also, notice the datatype range and size would be different for int and tinyint. While int takes 4 bytes, tinyint takes just a single byte.

Running On ARM, Intel and AMD Chips
Windows 8 runs on x86 based Intel and AMD machines and also has the capacity to run on ARM-based hardware. Apple and Android tablets run on the same kind of hardware. Plenty of interesting kits can be expected after the release of Windows 8. If things go according to the plan, Windows 8 for ARM tablets and Windows 8 for x86 PCs should be launched together. One of the test beds for the new ARM-based tablets is the Tegra 3 chip by Nvidia. Microsoft has partnered with Nvidia to bring in high performance to Windows 8. The only issue here is that the ARM-based Windows 8 won’t really have any desktop apps except Metro apps, thus, rumors suggest that only a few tablets will be launched.

The New Metro Interface
Windows 8 tablets will have a brilliant interface called Metro. This interface is just like the Windows Phone 7. Advanced, smooth, vibrant, the whole experience has been totally transformed, while the power, elasticity and connectivity stay perfect. Even thought Metro is mainly designed and optimized keeping touch in mind, it works remarkably with a mouse and keyboard as well. This gives users the ability to use the device they prefer, the peripherals they opt to use and run the different apps their crazy about. This in-turn, will lead to a new generation of hardware and software. When it comes to portrait orientation, the Windows 8 tablets demonstrated so far have been in landscape.

Tablet Desktop
The new ARM version Windows 8 tablets have the Metro interface and the traditional desktop. However, only third-party Metro apps are allowed. The windows desktop and known apps like Internet Explorer, Windows Explorer, Windows Live and Office. All the other apps will be Metro.

Start Menu
Windows 8 doesn’t have a Start button or Start Orb as it’s known. The start button is replaced with the new Metro Interface. Microsoft might face a small repercussion with this, yet, Microsoft stand by the Start Menu decision made in Windows 8.

Windows App Store
The web will be moved with different app development and Microsoft is sure about that. So much so, that a Windows Store has been created with entrances that are manufacturer specific. In-fact, apps play in huge role in Windows 8. Several Metro apps will be pre-installed on Windows 8, which deal with elements like messaging, calendar, SkyDrive, mail, photos, videos, people, music and a camera. The apps will be in the Windows Phone Metro style, while some apps like messaging may include mobile aspects like SMS support.

Tablet Display
Windows 8 happily supports a 10.1-inch tablet display along with a 291dpi. The new iPad has 265 dpi. Thus, tablet display with HD resolution will be a standard feature offered by Windows 8 tablets. Everything displayed by this OS will be totally awesome.

High End Support
Windows 8 is a high end operating system. Nvidia has joined hands with Microsoft knowing the fact that Windows 8 has a lot to offer and a long way to go. This new Microsoft creation is completely trusted by Nvidia and several others for that matter. Motorola is ready to use Windows 8 as its main platform. There are vendors who don’t mind moving away from Android and opting for Windows 8. Windows 8 has many supporters and that stand by it, knowing that it an amazing innovation that will change many things.

Tablet Manufacturers
At Microsoft’s Build conference, a Samsung tablet with Windows 8 OS was shown. HP also intends to make Windows 8 tablets. Windows 8 has a lot of potential and that’s something Dell agrees to, after checking out the amazing capabilities in Windows 8 Beta. Dell has opted to use Windows 8 in its new tablets that will be launched during the second or third half of this year. Nokia has also planned to release a Widows 8 tablet towards the end of this year, or the start of 2013, as it considers it to be an incredible opportunity.
Nokia intends to create a tablet that can fight head to head with the iPad. Asus will sell its Windows 8 tablets in the third quarter of 2012. There are many manufacturers that will design window 8 tablets for business proposes.

Price Tag
It is obvious that Windows 8 and iPads, Android tablets along with Chrome OS netbooks will fight to be the strongest. They have to be priced in the best way possible in-order to sell, as the options of style and features and performance will come head to head.

Windows 8 is definitely the new buzz that consumers as well as manufacturers are waiting for. It does have a lot to offer and a Windows 8 tablets will probably overtake all their rivals. However, too much shouldn’t be expected at the moment, as when Windows 8 tablets are finally out, they won’t be appreciated that much. One thing’s for sure, Windows 8 is here to stay and Windows 8 tablets are going to be totally remarkable and extreme.
About the author: Brianne Walter is a blogger who also happens to be a tech freak. She loves spending on tech stuff and is a gadget freak who like to write articles on latest gadgets like Samsung Omnia W smartphone, hp envy 17 etc.

Solr, is a search platform by Apache Lucene project. It is used for full-text search and indexing. All those familiar with search engines must be knowing, how a search engine like Google provides us results.

Initially, fed with a seed file containing URLs, the search engine keeps on parsing these files (webpages) and putting all URLs into a stack. After reading each file it pops another webpage from stack and parses its URL and this goes on. During this crawling phase, all URLs interlinked to a page can be crawled. Apache Nutch is a software which can be useful for such purposes. Spider or Bots for Search engines are sued for crawling the web.

The next step for a search engine, is indexing those documents the functionality which can be provided by Solr. After indexing webpages, which are stored using an inverted index data structure, Search engine’s next step is displaying query results. These results are displayed on basis of propriety algorithms of search engines like page rank or some biasing of the results (for which Google has been recently criticized a lot).

So indexing is a very important steps in Web search engines, and often documents are indexed using tags. For indexing in Solr using custom fields, one may need to follow these steps:

1. Navigate to Solr installation folder, in my case it was inside xampp\solr\conf\ . Here in the schema.xml file the field to be indexed is added. with its properties. The schema.xml file contains all of the details about which fields your documents can contain, and how those fields should be dealt with when adding documents to the index, or when querying those fields.

Thesection inside shema.xml file is where you list the customdeclarations you wish to use in your documents along with various field options that apply to a field.

Common options that fields that can be customized are…

1. default

The default value for this field if none is provided while adding documents

2. indexed=true|false

True if this field should be “indexed”. If a field is indexed, then it is searchable, sortable, and facetable.

3. stored=true|false

True if the value of the field should be retrievable during a search

4. compressed=true|false

True if this field should be stored using gzip compression.

5. compressThreshold=

6. multiValued=true|false

True if this field may contain multiple values per document, i.e. if it can appear multiple times in a document

7. omitNorms=true|false

Set to true to omit the norms associated with this field (this disables length normalization and index-time boosting for the field, and saves some memory). Only full-text fields or fields that need an index-time boost need norms.

8. termVectors=false|true

If set, include full term vector info.

If enabled, often also used with termPositions=”true” and termOffsets=”true”.

9. omitTermFreqAndPositions=true|false

If set, omit term freq, positions and payloads from postings for this field. This can be a performance boost for fields that don’t require that information and reduces storage space required for the index. Queries that rely on position that are issued on a field with this option will silently fail to find documents.

10. omitPositions=true|false

If set, omits positions, but keeps term frequencies

To include two fields in the document which i am reading, i wanted them to index using their Author Name/ Maximum frequency term. To add these fields i simply added the code in the schema.xml under the

<field name="AuthorName" type="string" indexed="true" stored="true" required="true" omitNorms="false" default="defAuthor"/>
<field name="MaximumFrequencyTerm" type="string" indexed="true" stored="true" required="true" omitNorms="false" default="testLong"/>

Once done with editing, schema.xml, the necessary code to index files using SolrJ API for Solr is :


SolrServer server = new CommonsHttpSolrServer("http://localhost:8080/solr/");
ContentStreamUpdateRequest up = new ContentStreamUpdateRequest("/update/extract");
SolrInputDocument doc = new SolrInputDocument();
doc.addField("MaximumFrequencyTerm", MaximumFrequencyTerm,35);
doc.addField("AuthorName", AuthorName,35);
Collection docs = new ArrayList();
docs.add( doc );
server.add( docs );
server.commit();


Make sure to add any unique keys along with to add in the document before you commit. Once you run the code all files are indexed with the custom field and can be seen in the Solr search at http://localhost:8080/solr/admin using the search query as “*:*” .

Steps to install Solr on windows:

1. If you have successfully installed Tomcat Server (using Xampp probably), try opening localhost:8080. If this shows a page with message “If you’re seeing this page via a web browser, it means you’ve setup Tomcat successfully. Congratulations!” , you are good to go to second step. We assume tomcat has been installed under D:\xampp\tomcat

2. Download and unzip the Solr distribution zip file into a temp folder at D:\temp\solrZip\
Latest build (As of Apr 16, 2012) can be downloaded from here : http://mirrors.axint.net/apache/lucene/solr/3.6.0/apache-solr-3.6.0.zip

3. Create a directory as “solr home” directory called, where you intend the application server to function, You may create it inside xampp installation directory itself at
D:\xampp\solr

4. Copy the contents of the example\solr directory D:\temp\solrZip\example\solr\ to D:\xampp\solr\

5. Stop the Tomcat service

6. Copy the *solr*.war file from D:\temp\solrZip\dist\ to the Tomcat webapps directory D:\xampp\tomcat\webapps\ and rename the *solr*.war file solr.war

7. Configure Tomcat to recognize the solr home directory you created, by adding the Java Options -Dsolr.solr.home=D:\xampp\solr\ and -Dsolr.velocity.enabled=false
either use the system tray icon to add the java option
or manually edit the environment script D:\xampp\tomcat\bin\setenv.bat and add it to JAVA_OPTS

* Note: For Tomcat 7 and Solr3.6, the above option on setenv.bat may not work, so you could not use it and put this code fragment
on $CATALINA_HOME/conf/Catalina/localhost/solr.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Context docBase="D:\xampp\tomcat\webapps\solr.war" debug="0" crossContext="true" >
<Environment name="solr/home" type="java.lang.String" value="D:\xampp\solr\" override="true" />
</Context>

8. Start the Tomcat service

9. Go to the solr admin page to verify that the installation is working. It will be at http://localhost:8080/solr/admin

You are good to go with Solr over Tomcat now.. .

Sources: http://wiki.apache.org/solr/SolrTomcat#Tomcat_on_Windows