Friday, December 31, 2010

Java baseurl

PHP has a simple function baseurl() for the same functionality I didn't find an easy equivalent in Java. the one I manage to search is the following.

String requestUri = request.getRequestURI();
String requestUrl = request.getRequestURL().toString();
String baseUrl = requestUrl.replace(requestUri, "");

Saturday, December 25, 2010

Second hand Bike Market in Bangalore

This place is walking distance from Minerva Circle follow the map for further reference Map.

Friday, December 24, 2010

Project Party at Amoeba

For 2k10 last quarter project party we went for bowling in Amoeba and then dinner in Pizza Hut, both in Jayanagar 4th Block. It is a lot of fun with you are in numbers around 20+ and the per head cost is also quite reasonable as it comes to around Rs 325. The only issue is that if your office in in e-city then you don't have a direct BMTC bus to 4th block and you have to place your own transport.
Pics from Rajou's camera

Ubuntu Line in Playback Note working ?

Can't hear audio which is routed into your PC's line level inputs? That's because said inputs are muted by default in Ubuntu

To un-mute the line level inputs: Launch the Terminal (Applications-->Accessories-->Terminal), type alsamixer at the prompt, and then tap the Enter button on your PC's keyboard.

You'll see what you have to do to un-mute your PC's line level inputs (your keyboard's left & right arrow keys navigate, the up & down keys increase & decrease levels, and the 'M' key mutes & un-mutes the selected audio input(s) or outputs).

Thursday, December 16, 2010

Samsung Galaxy i899 Switch off Internet

I didn't find any easy way to switch off the internet on my phone but to have a dummy internet connection and swicth between the two.

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Clearcase tips.

Ever found yourself in a situation wherein you are working on a maintainance project and during the build phase PM comes and says "remember to maintain a list of files that you modify", I know this can be time consuming.
Here is a simple way to get your checked out files in a file if you are using clearcase
cd C:\sourcecodefolder
cleartool lsco -r -me -short>c:\checked_out_files_list.txt

find . -version "{created_since(2011-02-02)&& created_by(user1)}" -print

Sunday, December 12, 2010

GAE/J Download data from live to local datastore.

Download Data:   ~/me/apps/python/google_appengine/appcfg.py download_data --application=bollywoodabc1 --kind=category --url=http://bollywoodabc1.appspot.com/remote_api --filename=category

this one works even better
~/me/apps/python/google_appengine/appcfg.py download_data --application=bollywoodabc1 --url=http://bollywoodabc1.appspot.com/remote_api --filename=data --batch_size=2 --num_threads=2 --rps_limit=5


Restoring backup : ~/me/apps/python/google_appengine/appcfg.py upload_data --batch_size=2 --num_threads=2 --rps_limit=10 --application=bollywoodabc1 --filename=data1 --url=http://localhost:8080/remote_api

Friday, November 26, 2010

Mata Vaishno Devi Yatra 2010

Me and my friends go to Mata every year since more than a decade now. After I moved to Bangalore I had limited options while selecting dates freely for the yatra and so I decided that when I go home for Diwali I club this thing also.
Interestingly this we had a great time during yatra because there was hardly any rush and managed to get Dormitory beds at bhavan also without any prior booking.
I now feel that one of the best time to plan the yatra should be near Diwali on a weekday because this is when you won't have to stand in long queues and sleep in bhawan without a shelter :)

Architect

This reminds me of the funny incidences in Seinfled when George used to say "I always wanted to pretend as an Architect", "I can be an architect" etc.

I too always wanted to be an Architect, not that one, but Technology Architect, My Inclination towards technical side rather than management was because I had faced a hard time managing a small team in one of my previous company and it was then that I understood that I am too soft to become a manager.

Few days ago I got an email from the HR saying that you have been promoted to be a Technology Architect, at once I was happy because this is what I wanted to be since long but very soon I also started realizing the fact that am I really good enough to hold this designation

I have seen a few really good architects in my company and when I compare myself with them I find myself lagging far behind. We all often find ourselves in a situation where we are supposed to be what we never have been before and the initial time in any such situation is difficult, because the transition is hard to accept


The funny part is that you are happy with the new compensation and benefits but you find it difficult to accept the new roles and responsibilities.

I am striving hard to learn technologies as soon and as much as possible so as to rightly justify my salary some day.

Sunday, November 21, 2010

Samsung Galaxy i899 16 GB memory card issue

I installed 16 GB memory card in my Android Samsung Galaxy i899 phone, I am sick of it now it keeps on rebooting frequently and I have started getting some core process force quit thing also.

Monday, November 1, 2010

My Learnings of what not to do.

In office If possible don't escalate things. Appreciate in public and talk about shortcomings in private. This way you maintain healthy relations with your mates and then they work with a different zeal.
Make sure there is not requirement change from the client which is verbal, everything should be documented.
Assumptions can be fatal when it comes to requirements.
The moment you are out of the Airport remove the bag tags please, some people tend to keep it for months showing off that they just arrived from a flight. Me and my friends laugh at this a lot.

One year completed.

Me and Charu have completed one year of married life, life is so hectic these days that I am not feeling many things but felt nice when relatives called and wished us. many thinks to Dhiraj Ji and Ravi who wished me and shame on me I never even knew your birthdays :(
Coming back to the main topic, This one year has been full of events and learnings. Best things first ... I am feeling a lot different far more organized and complete like I had home made food in this journey to Delhi in train ( earlier I used to eat that IRCTC crap :) )
One year .. initially the honeymoon period, then came a phase when our differences started surfacing and we had a lot of fights, misunderstandings etc. slowly we learned how to get over these things and things started stabilizing. We are more tolerant and understanding now, looks like the fight phase was a good doze.
Also ever since I have been married I don't why but a lot times my mom has disappointed me a lot, she will say something which is right as per her, but since I married in a different caste the culture difference proves costly sometimes it becomes a family mess. This was ( is ) the biggest hurdle to overcome, I had to talk to my mom so many times to gear up to the modern times and bridge the culture gap.
My Papa is really cool in this context I love this personality in all the context but this part of his life is simply outstanding, how we'll he understands my issues.
I used to ask a lot of my friends after they got married as to how is life after marriage, in fact I was afraid of it that time, I am not, now. In fact life improves to a lot of extent once things stabilize. You start planning to next 5 , 10 years in your mind, something that we don't think about much when we are single.

Sept 10 project learnings.

I am in Sampark kranti train on my way to New Delhi, There is still some time when we unpack our dinner stuff and this is where I am getting time to pen down some recent stuff that happened in my life.
My current project in office - It stared off real cool and I was getting time to code and go to GYM, spend time at home almost everything was going smooth.
but I was feeling something wrong with the kind of execution that happening during the build phase. before I can explain what was going wrong it is important to give some more details about the project. I have a small good group of friends in office, also the manager and the architect that I've been working with, we have been together since almost two years now, so we have good understanding between each other.
The module that I was assigned this time had a lot of coding and was also dependent on a considerable amount of database work. The other module had relatively less coding and was coded by one of my friend. Also in this project one more friend of mine was introduced as the experienced DBA was involved in some other critical work.
So this new guy who was introduced as for database coding was relatively new to database programming ( He was a Java developer earlier ). Project started and in the build phase I was facing a lot of issues regarding the delay caused by the database developer. I was in a difficult situation as I was not able to continue smoothly and at the same time I was not able to talk about this issue to my manager because how can I speak against someone who is a good friend of mine.
During this time I was also actually thinking that do managers sometimes explicitly do this do avoid blame game situations during the project.
At times when It was becoming extremely difficult I did report about the incidents but nothing actually helped. And believe me or not I said to my self that may be this is a good proving ground where I need to prove myself.
I was also under a doubt that this proving ground could actually cost me a lot. what I started doing was that when ever I got stuck in a DB related issue I wrote him an email (and I was very careful not to keep anyone in loop, as it is not good to point someones faults publicly) and switched to some other task. All this was not so easy as it sounds it is like context switching that CPU does while multitasking :)
But I was thinking that I am now a developer with some eight years of work experience, can I take this challenge.
As things approached testing phase it looked like everything worked as planned and I was very happy about this execution within myself, I didn't blame anyone and everything finished peacefully.
In the testing phase however the on-site coordinator started twisting and turning the requirements itself I then realized that unlike earlier projects we didn't have a communications tracker about all the on-site communication taking an advantage of this the on-site guy didn't agree to certain things that we said were not requirements earlier.
I understood my mistake that I was too focused on one thing that db issue smooth working that I completely overlooked that the possible outcome in case of a missing tracker. A big lesson learned.

Sunday, September 12, 2010

Search Engine Optimization

SEO is a technique which can increase the traffic of a website.
I am not an SEO expert but I love to optimize few of my sites, and here are some of the points that I feel are important for SEO.
Submit your pages to major search engines
The very first thing is to get your site crawled by the major search engines for Google you should submit the sitemap via Google Web-master and for Yahoo it needs to be done via Yahoo Site Explorer
You would also need a good Site map generator to submit the Sitemap xml, now if your website has less than 500 pages then XML-Sitemaps is a good website to do the task quickly. If the number of pages are more than 500 then Wonder web ware is a good tool.

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Top 10 Android Applications

These are the top applications that I love in my Android phone
  1. Handcent SMS: because I love forwarding SMS to a group of my friends, I however didn't install any of the font packs available in the Android Market.
  2. RealPlayer: Full screen view of the movies that I watch on phone.
  3. My Tracks: I use this to keep track and benchmark my morking walk with this app.
  4. GTasks: If you like google tasks.
  5. Zedge: Nice wallpapers and ring-tones.
  6. Advanced Task Killer: Nice app to kill tasks running in background, if you are sick of battery getting drained out without much using the phone then it is high time for you to install this application and configure it to kill applications automatically when the screen is turned off.
  7. Sparse RSS: Nice RSS reader.
  8. GPS Test: Statistics based on GPS.
  9. Opera Mini: I like this mobile browser.
  10. Traffic Rush: A nice game.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Skype on Android 1.5 - Samsung Galaxy i899

Skype doesn't work atlest on my handset Samsung galaxy i899 as of now, there is no official version from Skype for this handset and the alternatives available like Nimbus have a bad voice quality.

Thursday, August 12, 2010

Android : How to Forward SMS to a group

I recently bought Realiance CDMA Samsung Galaxy i899 phone, but I was surprised to see that it had no option to forward an SMS to a group of friends, after few days of research I am able to do the same
You first need to create groups, and to do that you need to first make sure that your address book is in sync with the gmail contacts list, once that is done , you can create groups in gmail contacts and the same will appear in the phone.
the second part of how to send message to a group can be accomplished by installing handsend SMS software from the Android market.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Learn Kannada - Post 1

  1. Introducing yourself.
    1. naanu(I) amit ( I am Amit ) (मैं अमित)
    2. nanna hesaru Amit (My Name is Amit)(मेरा नाम अमित है)
    3. naanu kannaDa meshTru (Teacher) (I am kannada Teacher)(मैं कन्नडा विध्यापक हूँ.)
    4. nanna (My) uuru (place) Roorkee.
    5. nanna maatrubhaashe (mother tounge) hindi.
  2. Knowing the person next to you.
    1. New Words
      1. niivu ( you < with respect > ) (आप)
      2. nimma ( your ) ( आपका )
      3. eenu ( what ) ( क्या )
    2. niivu yaaru ? (who are you ? ) (आप कौन ?)
    3. nimma hesaru eenu ? (what is your name ?)
    4. nimma uuru yaavadu ? ( which is your hometown ?)
  3. Third person
    1. New Words
      1. ivaru (ये , आप )( this person < with respect > )
      2. ivara (इसका / इनका ) ( his / her )
      3. avara (वो) ( if the person is somewhere else )
    2. ivaru yaaru ? ( ये कौन ? ) ( who is he/she ? )
    3. ivara hesaru eenu ? ( इनका नाम क्या है ) ( what is his/her name ?)
    4. avara uuru yaavudu ? ( इनका शहर कौनसा है ? )
    5. avaru maatrubhashe yaavadu ? ( आपकी मात्र भाषा कौनसी है )
  4. We
    1. New words
      1. naavu ( We ) ( हम )
      2. namma ( our ) ( हमारा )
    2. namma deesha ( country ) bhartha
    3. namma uuru bengaLuru
    4. namma rajsya karnataka
  5. Misc
    1. haudu ( yes, it is) x alla ( no, it is not )
    2. haudaa ? ( is it ? ) x allvaa ? ( is it not )
    3. banni ( come < with respect > )
    4. kuutkoLi (be seated)
    5. idu (this is)
      1. idu eenu ? ( what is this ?)
      2. idu pen ( this is pen )
      3. idu yaara pen ? ( whose pen is this ? )
      4. idu nanna pen ( this pen is my pen )
    6. adu(that is)
      1. adu eenu ? ( what is that ? )
    7. adara ( its )
      1. adara bele ( cost / price ) hattu (10) ruupayii ( rs )
    8. eshTu ( how much )
      1. Q. nimma mobile phone bele ishTu ?
      2. A. nanna mobile phone bele aidu ( 5 ) saavira ( thousand )
  6. Numbers
    1. 1- ondu, 2-eraDu, 3-muuru, 4-naalku, 5-aidu, 6-aaru, 7-eeLu, 8-enTu, 9-ombattu, 10-hattu, 11-honnondu, 11-hanneraDu

Sunday, January 10, 2010

A Decent email while leaving an organization.

As many of you may have heard, I have decided to leave to pursue an opportunity at . Over the past years I have been at this company, I have been privileged to meet and work with many talented people. I have thoroughly enjoyed my time here and wish everyone nothing but success.

While I have tried to include as many people as I could on this note, I am sure I forgot a few. Please feel free to forward this on to anyone I may have missed. My contact info is below:

Email: abc@def.com

I am also available via linkedin (www.linkedin.com)