Sarath Chandra Pandurangi's Blog

I was moving yesterday so I could not make a post. I will report something for your brain activity, today. For now, munch on this. the other day, I was working on Positioning in CSS. I got to this beautiful tutorial. May be it could help you too. Positioning made simple.

This is Amazing Check out what telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl gives you. On the way, if you are running vista, Telnet may not be present. Do this to get it.

Its the weekend again. Here is the offtopic beat again. I was watching titanic last weekend. And read about it in wiki . Did you know it was called RMS (Royal Mail Steamer) Titanic? Adn the wiki gives some compehensive information. read along..

What makes an Open Source Project successful? When I started web frameworks with Struts 1.1 in 2004, I had a VERY hard time learning the framework. People who have been in the same boat would remember these key words "Struttin' with Struts" which would google to Rick Reumann 's 4 or 5 chapter tutorial - that was by far the only DECENT tutorial available at that time. There may be more now, but I am not in the hunt. At around the same time, Spring was coming up. And boy did it catch up like fire. The success story highlighted the importance of documentation. Rod Johnson's Team got it right in the first time. They realised that the popularity of an opensource project is directly proportional to the quality and quantity of its documentation. Ever since, you can see there are tons documentation for anything they release, in its own space. These include a lot of examples, code framgments etc. They still need centralise the individual projects to the main documentati...

With Java 5, Collection framework got some new additions. Apart from Language defining Generics, Auto Boxing, and the all hailed new for loop (These are detailed here , here and here ) - This version of java introduced the not-so-discussed new interfaces. Check them, They may save a day at work next time :) On an birds view, These are going to be useful - in my vision - for those multi threaded applications and frameworks. The new interfaces are - Queue, BlockingQueue, ConcurrentMap (note ConcurrentMap is in java.util.concurrent). I will not go into details of these as it can be read here And look ahead.. There are some more changes coming in 6, with more emphasis on blocking, support for concurrent package, and navigability . Where is it going? research tomorrow. Leave comments in Guestbook

On my Job as a J2EE consultant, I have encountered situations where I am unable to reproduce a problem QA encountered. For one, it may be a really hard-to-reproduce or not-realistically-probable situation in a normal user interaction and just that QA stumbled on it. Or it could be a piss port job by QA that they just broke it, no idea how - but the user might have higher probability of reaching that state. Either way, My job as a developer is to see that NO probabilistic known scenario should break my application. So here is one scenario I know the system is broken but I don't know how to fix it, because I just know the problem not its cause. Its a very challenging albeit annoying situation. I find myself very energetic in the beginning but as time passes without being able to find the cause, I get stressed. I guess many of you in the business, have had this situation some or the other time. Here is where recording the whole state of jvm comes into picture. ReplaySolutions has an...

Who said it cant be cute yet striking.. Check this out Leave comments in Guestbook

I am so glad it is the weekend. Its been a long week. I will not be blogging much in the weekends but leave some rivia tidbits for you to research. I will try to be as off topic as possible. Here is one : World’s Largest 38500-meal Solar Kitchen in India Leave comments in Guestbook

I am a J2EE consultant by profession . Like in every other profession, You learn new things every day. The project I consult for, is architected viewing far ahead technologically. Although Many in my own project disagree that the project is in pristine shape (code wise). But to me, All it needs is a little tidying up (complement that superior design). However, at the core, This one is a masterpiece. And being an aspiring architect, I have had yet another those "Best so Far" projects. Here are somethings I haven't done in the past but did in this project. Filters: Recently I have had close encounters with Filters . the Advanced version of them. We have Sitemesh, OpenSessionInView, Acegi all filtering the requests. Acegi Filter itself calls its own (Configurable) Filter Chain. The most commonly use of a filter is on a url-pattern <url-pattern>PATTERN_HERE</url-pattern> - However, It can also be used on servlets using <servlet-name>directgroup</servlet-...

I'm a big fan of Stephen Colbert's show . I watch that every night - atleast on the site. I am left educated and entertained by the time I finish his videos available online. I'm not following the 2008 election very closely, but more than often I get enough of it by how Stephen covers the Clinton-Obama race. Not only him - but the whole press has the same thing going on. Many a time, I feel bad for McCain for not being given the 'hype'. But this Cliton-Obama piece got into my head so bad. I started even thinking of every day chores to be Clinton-ly or Obama-like. (I have no specific support for either) On a similar Context I was watching this 'Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who ' movie today (update: I learnt it is an old book ). It is a really nice (animation) movie. However, half way down, I felt like I were Colbert(or his writer). I would see Horton as Obama - and Jane the kangaroo as Hillary (only by the tone and a little content of the speeches they mak...

Wow.. This is wonderful.. Do you know it is as much easier to write in Telugu (or other Indian languages) in any application (not just Orkut ) Theory: There are many ways of doing it. First try to understand how it is done. The direct way is to get yourself a Telugu keyboard (or a simulator in your OS). This way you will have a steep learning curve. This is also called Inscript. Though this is hard on your mind, its good on the output - I mean - since there will be no conversion, it is the perfect way to write in digital Telugu. For the other not-so-professional-about-the-telugu-text-YET people (like me), There are two other easy ways. My favorite is RTS (Rice Transliteration Scheme). Another is WX. RTS is a little more standard and some what comprehensive for most phonetic languages. WX is another notation from IIIT - its much easier to learn with lesser rules. As they say - no pain no gain - WX offers lesser "Strict-ability" on achieving correct text. Both these work on wha...

I have started my java career with Jet Brains' IntelliJ (more lovably called IDEa). After some time, IBM gave away one of the greatest donations to OSF The Eclipse platform . For the novice of me at that time, This was huge - How come a company that build WSAD give away the foundation technology used for the same commercial product to OSF. Well for good or bad, IBM did what it did. Ever since there is no looking back for Eclipse community - which grew leaps and bounds and now there are more than 50 core projects in eclipse itself and numerous plugins for almost any kind of development and deployment on earth. Eclipse's V3.4 has moved into the direction of OSGi (one of my recently found enthusing technologies). Recently there are preparations for e4 the next version for Eclipse. Whats next? Leave comments in Guestbook

Don't panic. Its not a big deal - its only the background color. Yes - Google launched its Sky site that's a clone (or may be I should say) of its maps site and voila.. probably for the first time, it fashioned it self into black. Apart from a very tiny point in time space, when Google dressed itself in black . Google has been loyal to White - keeping it simple. Its interesting to note : Google's Moon and Mars apps have White background. So ladies and gents - welcome sky . Leave comments in Guestbook

When "Big-Wigs" (read Microsoft and Apple) began patenting their software/products, apart from triggering a proxy war - it effected end user who had to suffer in general. However it was the way software was developed as a whole that got hit. Come Open Source, These things have changed quite a bit. Innovations are now not proprietary. Look at Linux, Andriod, Eclipse, Prototype and YUI. These revolutionalised the current state of Internet and software. But the question is how can the so called patent holders pretend not to ashamed of using these components/their derivative innovations in their own space? I am amused by how redhat handles this. They have their own patent policy . And promise to keep the Open world safe from it. Red Hat has consistently taken the position that software patents generally impede innovation in software development and that software patents are inconsistent with open source/free software. ... Red Hat is also a signatory to a petition to the European...

I am big Linux Fan. And I am proud of it. There are so many occasions when I have had long, often valiant, discussions with fanatic windows users and mac fans on why Linux is much better. Of all the reasons, The old school attack against Linux is that it is not user friendly - aah its not for every users.. Well, I have been with Linux from 2000 ( Redhat 6.0) to Gutsy gibbon of today - I accept it is not a fairy tale story for a novice. But a very inspiring one for the adventurous. Times have changed.. Linux has gained user base in much number as much as the variety of it. Friends who have sneered at Linux are now trying out and enjoying the power free software. Ubuntu has taken it further - this is the worry free solution for email only grandma 's - to give away thousands of hours of your IT support. You don't even have to buy them a new computer. Bringing it to the masses. People talk about $200 laptops now. What is more, with a community as big as the whole world - you get...

Many a time, you travel on a high Air traffic day. Chances are - the flights that you are going to take have been over booked. I haven't personally given this advantage before - but it appears that airlines are authorised to give away round trip tickets and free vouchers for volunteers who are willing to take the next flight. This post from Dumb Little man's Tips for life blog gives some pointers how to score on these deals. Leave comments in Guestbook

While Design and Code makes a project successfull or otherwise - the most important facet of project life cycle is review. There is a lot of emphasis on mere occurance of this phase than understanding the Good Bad and ugly ways of reviewing code and design. This article on Antipatterns in Code Review infoq (originally from here ) enthused me much. On a lighter note.. I found this interesting metric - Kirk Knoernschild's Blog Leave comments in Guestbook

This is a remarkable tutorial on JavaScript. It gives a lot of standards, language structures, coding conventions, etc. Please note that these videos have been made in 2006. YUI was probably in its initial stages. So you can imagine how much effort has been put in the architecture. This also tells how much architecture plays as a role in the successful development of an application or a framework. To start with the first tutorial, which gives you the basics of JavaScript. The video is available in four parts. You can also get the slides of the presentation. Part 1: 31 minutes Part 2: 31 minutes Part 3: 29 minutes Part 4: 20 minutes Download slides (zipped PowerPoint file) If you like this tutorial you might also be interested in the videos that are shown in related videos section in yahoo vidoes web site. I can also visit to YUI blog . Leave comments in Guestbook

Every day, there is some tool/application on the internet. Some of them catch my eye. Some leave my circle of interest after a while. However some one else might find it interesting. I never jott down these tools that I have added to my personal favorites or stumbled upon. I should. I will start with JSlint this is a small online tool, that caught my interest right on. It does a lot of JS checking. A perfectionist out there mght be interested in this. A tool by Doug Crockford. More tools available at his website Leave comments in Guestbook

Hey all, This is my final commitment to blogging - I will blog atleast once a day. Its a good habit. I find so much on the web every day - hardly jott down what i find. So.. I made this resolution for one last time and I amd firm not to break it. Here comes the whirl. Leave comments in Guestbook