Archive for the ‘Rants’ Category

Eclipse 3.4 Ganymede Review — Bloated and dissappointing

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

Eclipse Ganymede (3.4) was released yesterday and I had a first look at it by configuring both the versions -- jee & java. Here are my first impressions and review after migrating my 3.3 workspace of projects into the new one: - Reduced memory foot print? No. Reduced distribution size? No. Java distro ...

Amazon.com site is down with a very helpful error message

Friday, June 6th, 2008

[Update: 2 hours, something]. Look's like the folks at Amazon, finally brought back the site again. Here's a report at Wired [Update: 1 hours 30 minutes] Ok, they added a nicer error message. But click on the link, it gives back the same Http/1.1 Service Unavailable message back! What's worst ...

J5EE …? JEE …? Need a better name than J2EE

Wednesday, March 26th, 2008

Are you tired of being called a Java Developer or a J2EE Developer? Strange, how buzzwords end up becoming an essential noun in your technical life. J2EE, a.k.a Java "2" Enterprise Environment has already become obsolete and the newer version 5.0 has grown increasingly popular in the last couple of years. ...

Code is a Depreciable Asset

Tuesday, March 25th, 2008

James Turner just published a thought provoking article on oreillynet, The Worthlessness of Code: The cold reality that software companies try to ignore is that ANY major piece of software needs to be rewritten from the ground up eventually. They age, get bit-rotted, are obsoleted by new technology and generally become ...

OK, listen up.

Wednesday, March 12th, 2008

LIB is LIHB, not LIBE! Do you put your executables in the BINE directory or program logs in the VAIR directory?!!! I rest my case.

Noobness Revealed

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

Post examples of Noobness in this thread. Example 1: Not understand how to use NOT logic (aka, the '!') if ((expDate!=null && expDate.isPast(null)) || (effDate!=null && effDate.isFuture(null)) || id.getRank() == null) { //Do Nothing } else return id; Example 2: Hard-coding Array indices if(person[i][3].equals("Sam") && person[i][1].equals("17")) name = person[i][3] + " " + person[i][4] + " " ...

Rod Johnson and Gavin King, head on

Thursday, February 21st, 2008

It's quite obvious that the folks at Interface 21 (Spring Source) and JBoss have quite opposite goalsets that are not necessarily complementary. While Spring subtly embraces Hibernate technology, JBoss seems to be committed to prove that _Spring_is_not_panacea after_all_. I've been working on JBoss Seam for a few days now and ...

How to find a good programming job

Friday, December 14th, 2007

You've been here before: After two weeks of working around the clock, you discover that the people handing you requirements still don't know what they want. You're delirious from lack of sleep, and everyone around you is just pointing fingers, no one is actually helping. It sucks, and it happens frequently ...

Google sponsored links point to fraud/scam shopping sites. Beware

Wednesday, December 12th, 2007

The next time you google for a Digital SLR Camera (like the new Canon 40D or Nikon 200D) or a LCD hi-def TV,  beware of fraudulent websites being shown in the Google sponsored links on the top and to your right of the browser search results! Some of these ...

Google’s MyLocation privacy concerns - a spy at your service

Thursday, November 29th, 2007

Google just launched their MyLocation feature. For starters, it looks cool, but there seems to be an incredibly dangerous plot behind it's inception. Imagine your advanced phone gadget (IPhone, Blackberry, Nokia/Symbian based) able to show you a reasonable approximation of your location, in real time, not just when you *ask* ...

Where are the women in IT?

Tuesday, November 20th, 2007

I thought the blog title calls in for an interesting research topic, however someone has already presented a paper on exactly the same name. I've been working on writing code and not-writing-code-but-getting-paid-for-getting-code-written kinda job all the while, it's almost a certainty that today, serious women programmers are as fictional as ...

Redesigning Login on the Web

Friday, August 24th, 2007

Scenario 1 - You are checking the Status of your package on Amazon. You login in the morning. Click Account. Track Packagaes. Amazon.com 'forces' you to login again. Why? Ah. Security. You do this 10 times. You are forced to login 10 times. Scenario 2. Ebay. Imagine you are bidding on an ...

The Back Button, preventing form submit

Thursday, August 23rd, 2007

"You cannot use the back button of your browser when ordering tickets. Doing so may cause inaccurate information on your confirmation and/or your credit card. If you use your back button, we cannot guarantee your ticket reservation! If you need to make a change or have made an error, you ...

What is Up With Java Dates?

Monday, June 11th, 2007

I know Java handles dates with all the finesse of a brain-damaged... Ok there must be a better way to do this: [java] //get the current time and put it in a sql.Date java.util.Date dateTime = Calendar.getInstance().getTime(); pCode.setDtActive(new Date(dateTime.getTime())); [/java]

Any Configurable Installation packages?

Wednesday, February 28th, 2007

Many a time when you are working on a web application, you would need to release your files for adopters to deploy and test early. Sometimes when your adopters are as many as 7, things dont look nice! Have a look at the following setup Typical Opensource webapp ----------------------------- 1) Download Tomcat 5.5.x/JBoss ...