Sarath Chandra Pandurangi's Blog

I hate Microsoft. You might have heard that a zillion times in the developer world, especially in the non-microsoft-technologies world. But yesterday, I felt like killing myself because of Microsoft's IE. Here is what is happened. I was writing an error page for handling a custom Exception in filter. <error-page> <exception-type>com.so.testapp.exception.CustomException</exception-type> <location>/error.jsp</location> </error-page> and the JSP has it simple too.. <%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core" prefix="c" %> <c:set var="cException" value="${requestScope['javax.servlet.error.exception']}"/> Got Exception : <c:out value="${cException}" /> This must be pretty darn simple but IE comes with this *Friendly* error page. I have had a nightmare trying to figure out why I dont get my message, Only to realise that there is 512k size threshold before which IE hi

When I moved my website from Geo-cities (medivial ages huh?) back in 2000 to a perl based webhost, it was technically huuuge set of choices thrown at me. SSI, Basic auth protection, directory control, scripting languages etc. Most of them can be safely considered obsolete now. But there is something Apache hit straight on target. htaccess. this feature is still quite big. However, many new developers might not really know the power of this feature. for them, Here is www.htaccesseditor.com which comes handy.

Funny :D

I am a Proud Vegetarian. I don't eat Meat or Eggs. People say its hard here in US to be one. I beg to differ. The mere fact that I am hail and healthy these 4 years is a definitive proof. Apart from being bullied and trash talked by The Meat-Eaters, There is really nothing that makes this choice of mine any more than a debatable issue at a lunch or dinner. Other things aside, I am writing this blog having watched a PETA Video. Before you click on the play button, I ask you - If you are a vegetarian : Dont watch it. If you are not : Dare to watch it till the end. If you think going veg is just a fashion, think again . Even if you just want to do it for Fashion . Do it. Go Vegetarian. And Feel better asking the waiter for a Vegetarian Entrée in your next lunch.

I read Dr.Dobb's regularly. It gives a good insight on various sectors in programming. Not Just JEE. I recieve a link for online print copy. I am going to share the Dr.Dobb's Journal's Online print for y'all from this month. Here is this Month's Edition

The most awaited release of Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04) is just around the corner . I have a Lenovo with Vista Home premium and Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon. I have had problems with my ubuntu install, however, I still cherish having a linux distro on my system. With Heron, things are going to take bigger tangential. I shall spend my weekend putting my Laptop to Heron. But if you are eager to check out some reviews they are here , here and here . People have had been speculating how this version is taking linux to masses . It may be still discussed if it is, yet, but I am sure days are numbered. ps: fosswire has a ubuntu cheatsheet for the budding and the enthusiasts

All Dev: Make friends in QA team.. It's going to pay you back at some point ;)

Happy Earth Day folks. Go out there. Save something precious today for our chidren's tomorrow. Go green. you don't have to be a Super hero to save the planet. Its in crisis and it needs every one of you. And the moment aint any better than today! Save atleast ONE A4 sheet today. Feel proud about it. And Pass on the pride!

O my god so many of them. Every now and then there is a mail in my inbox that invites me to a friend's social network. I consider myself very responsible maintaining my online presence. but I am not a big admirer of these social networks. I was quite attached to orkut at one time, but having realised how unproductive it is for me, I quit. I still keep it on, but its no longer an active mode of communication. Why do we get invites? these days all the social network applications are exploiting the API by Gmail and yahoo to look up address book and invite all of them for membership. Sometimes, I hate myself being in those address books. Do you think once before you allow the applications to access your address book? Do you know what they could do? Try and find out.

In most asian contries, its much cheaper to repair equipment than replacing it. Like if some television blew out because of a small transistor, there are a thousand technitians who can fix it for 1/100th of the TV's Cost. Here in US, I found it very dissappointing to see people replace the whole TV just for a transistor. First it is very enviro-expensive and second it is very arrogant to do that.. There are so many things you can repair and reduce your enviro-footprint. Think about it.

another Saturday post.. How did history's finest keep active at their work day.. nice read.. History's finest

Alright.. That was a long absence. The whole last week I dint blog. I dint go away. I was "occupied". I was learning stock trading. Its very fascinating. I have a good weeeked blog for you all. Here is my experience. I can literally hyper-link every word from the following paragraphs, but I am writing it as simple as I can so you can look up the italicised words in wikipedia . I got a paper trading account from a brokerage firm . You need one brokerage account first. Then it can be an Equity account where all your money is yours or a Margin account , where some of the money is lent by the brokerage firm. Then I get Buying power , which is the dollor value of how much stocks you can buy. I can make profit by simple rules. Buy when Price is low. Sell when price is high. There is another more intersting way of earning money. Selling short . Thats when price is not high, per say, but when are confident that the price WILL go down. then buy back when its lowest. This is what

I am a Tree Hugger . I try to reduce my foot print on the environment. I am a proud owner of a beautiful Camry Hybrid On the same green lines, I try to help increase awareness in people about going green. Its not really hard . Do you want to peek how much happens in your daily life that effects the size of your foot print? Check this out .

Alright folks, My next programming Language venture is Python (thanks to google, this is my next resume inclusion). I am waiting for invite on Google App Engine . So meanwhile, I am setting up dev environment. While installing PyDEV for Eclipse, I got this Licensing Agreement. Ain't it refreshing than the boring 6-page agreements. I never read agreements (I dont assume anyone ever does - except Microsoft employees ;) but this one - I did read. I plan to write more about Python in coming days. Groovy was on my list, but now for GAE, Python takes precedence ;)

Not many people in my industry are comfortable about the economic situation right now. But here is some good news : 2 out of 10 best jobs to have in a recession are still Software related.

I have been working on my website from 2.0 to the next version at an extremly slow pace. But a few things have been coming up as you could see in Blogs. I have plans to integrate all information sources (My blogs, flickr, picasa, friend feed, resume) everything in a seam less website. I will write more about this integration process in coming blogs. Here Whats coming and Whats new. Plans to use more API for User login, allow openID / Google Account Blogs already are loading in JSON format, Load Comments and allow posting comments. Expose feed for my blog, burn it. Update Gallery - use and expose feeds, light interface.

తెలుగు ప్రజానీకానికి నా హ్రుదయపూర్వక సర్వధారి నామ సంవత్సర శుభాకాంక్షలు I wish you all a Happy Ugadi . I could not blog this weeked, for I was catching up with my life. Its been a while I have had a celebrated weekend. I went to Jalsa on saturday. So, technically, the euphoria carried on to sunday. And Sunday was even bigger for me. I was at TLCA Ugadi Celebrations and in the Jalsa mood, when DSP threw a challenge to come on the stage, I dint think even for a second. Its was great - to stand among DSP, Tarun and Karthik and my favorites Charmi and Sunita. I was man enough to speak to Charmi, but I was shy(or nervous?) to talk to Sunita. Sunita is a very sweet lady as much as her voice. I still despise myself for not being able to talk to her. All I said to her (Hello Andi) was in my mind the whole night. The highlights of the night were Karthik's "Oka maaru" song and Sunita's Acoustic version of "Andanga lena..". But what stole the show, was DSPs jaljalj

What happened yesterday was funny, I forgot to switch the electric on my name after the move and LIPA disconnected my power. Having realised that only in the evening, I call them up. I spoke to the manager only to get a negative response. So they need at least 24 hrs for reconnection. I hope I will it today by the time I reached home. Coming back to technology, After some research on multi-cores and java language features, I took a shift to work on some XSLT and XSL-FO. While I have extensive work on XSLT, I am just getting my feet warm on XSL-FO. In my research I found a Nice tutorial here . While I get a feeling FO is not yet a big time standard, but the paradigm, itself should take it to become one. Having one XML to generate different file formats is very effective. Keep your eyes open for XSL-FO. Leave comments in Guestbook

Moore's Law is pushing the market to speed up, and process more 0s and 1s every year. So far, Intel and co have been doing a pretty good job in keeping up. Now its the programming languages and multi cores to go hand in hand. And may be soon, Moore's Law will be rephrased (amended?) to count just the speed and exclude the transistor stuff. With Java 6's Collection api, Sun broadcasted its intention that mutli-core programming support is very much on the radar. Recent reports say Microsoft is in the club too. Google has its Map Reduce Framework. And now, Java 7 is coming with Fork Join . Leave comments in Guestbook