Yaawn ! 10 mins past midnight and I start to have guilt pangs about my blog updates . I would say there's always a reason not an excuse , but after spending close to 10-12 hours everyday and add a couple of hours to commute , plus an hour on the technical pursuits (the trail has turned cold by now) there's nothing much a guy can think about other stuff.
Technically I have found myself wanting on XQuery ,so going through the XQuery Spec 1.0 was a pretty daunting task and in between fixing targets of ant scripts,the regression test cycles and the report generation task ,and the CRs there's this task of developing the cache Management which is pretty interesting .

Downpour Stories

6:00 pm Tuesday ..
Wiping the visor of my helmet I took off from the office premises .. was unusually dark for 6:00 pm . The first km from office was a breeze and was surprised by seeing so many less vehicles on the road .. As I took the first right turn ahead ... it started drizzling , did slow down seeing the huge puddle of water .. A Qualis went by splashing water on either side of the road was fortunate not to get drenched there , since the road was pretty wet with the rains pouring from the morning I decided to go slow and stick to the main roads no more shortcuts today, the brakes were 50% efficient , so decided not to risk it .As I approached the traffic signal , I saw the dial of my watch showing 6:05 pm pretty good progress for the first 5 minutes At this rate, I thought home was just 30 minutes away
Heavy incoming traffic from the opposite direction forced us to wait for a few extra minutes at the signal .Its starting to pour now .. In my eagerness to cross the signal .. I overtook a few vehicles from the left and had to cut sharply to right where i saw a huge sea of traffic waiting at a signal. There was no traffic police in sight .. My jacket was getting drenched and was feeling a little cold .My trousers were wet as well .. Water was dripping from my helmet visor. I saw a couple of motorists around people were drenched to the bone Maybe I should call home , I thought but then I realized there was no shelter till I crossed the signal across the road .
The rain looked unrelenting and so was the traffic from the opposite side , A driver in front of me zigzagged and helped his bike across the pavement and went on it for about 500 meters . I was tempted to do that at the same time the light turned green and i sped away .. It really started to pour now and the visibility was getting less when I reached a junction , I saw a young NCC cadet around 12-13 years braving the rain trying to guide the traffic .. then the traffic jam happened .. I had to take a shortcut to avoid the traffic went across the bylanes and reached Richmond Circle , I was stuck here badly ... with rain water gushing heavily though the traffic would'nt ease until another 10 mins I had to keep my engine running .. could'nt risk stopping it since was not sure if it would start .. that's the last thing I want..

6:45 pm Still stuck at the same traffic jam .. waited for another 10 mins while considering the alternatives .. was not very sure about the bylanes since most of them were narrow and chances of water logging there was very high
The endless jam seemed to continue and I was forced to take the pavement to overtake a couple of buses on the main road .. The rain was reduced to a drizzle by now .. but not the traffic and add to it the road rage ...

7:15 pm very less progress made in the last half an hour ... It looks its going to take another hour before I reached home.The traffic around Majestic was very less and very few people were out .. I sped across the Majestic signal and reached home at around 8:00 soaked in water .good thing I did'nt get my laptop from office today

Some fancy hacks and a remote car key

1. Emergency numberThe Emergency Number worldwide for Mobile is 112. If you find yourself out of coverage area of your mobile network and there is an emergency, dial 112 and the mobile will search any existing network to establish the emergency number for you, and interestingly ...this number 112 can be dialed even while the keypad is locked. Try it out.
   
2. Locked the keys in the car? Your car has remote keys?This may come in handy someday. Good reason to own a cell phone: If you lock your keys in the car and the spare keys are home, call someone on your cell phone. Hold your cell phone about a foot from your car door and have the other person at your home press the unlock button, holding it near the phone on their end. Your car will unlock. Saves someone from having to drive your keys to you. Distance is no object. You could be hundreds of miles away, and if you can reach someone who has the other "remote" for your car, you can unlock the doors (or the trunk).
   ( sure this wont work at least now .. Why ? First of all the remote car key does work on some radio signals and mobiles need to emit those radio signals which is not the case now ..so for this to work your mobile should transmit those weak radio signals from miles away ... yawn ..anyway somebody gets this working do let me know )
3. Hidden Battery powerImagine your cell battery is very low, u r expecting an important call and you don't have a charger. Nokia instrument comes with a reserve battery. To activate, press the keys *3370# Your cell will restart with this reserve and the instrument will show a 50% increase in battery. This reserve will get charged when u charge your cell next time.
   (did'nt work on my mobile ... though some of the other mobiles showed a significant increase in battery level upto 30% )

A week that was..

Its been a roller coaster ride so far from lazing to guitar classes, to getting the code done, to the endless lectures ,to trying to make some sense of those differential equations (which was very easy back in college)and applying them to some real time problems , to the changes in the workplace ,its all happening .It was frustrating , confusing, and as well as exciting time . Wonder what's in store next ? Technology wise just picking up some stuff in SOA and Web Services need to put them use in the next project .
I"m getting ready for the hols next week ,get the much deserved break and hopefully catch with some more guitar practice .. well I"m getting there ..


Oops Did i talk about Digital Fortress , picked the book in Sunday afterrnoon ,this one too lives up to its expectations Dan Brown strikes again .. the book as one of the readers said is unputdownable .. for all those fiction buffs make sure you are not going to miss this one ..
Enuf said ... getting late ...

Darn It ,

Spent the last hour fiddling with wierd issues when starting the server.. life was good till afternoon ,it was at this point I decided to speed up things and changed the implementation , alas forgot to change the property file ... the server started to spew venom .. took me about 40 mins to get the new config back and its humming softly now ... what a rookie ?

People have already started leaving ... makes me think of the maniac traffic outside .. one of the most favorite topic Bangaloreans have ,the name driving needs to be rechristened as "avoiding"

Time's up ... Need to complete a couple of more tasks before going home

SNAFU

Thanks AK, for the term , was actually lost for words , when trying to describe my guitar classes Situation Normal but All Fouled Up .. could'nt properly get the finger shift ,if that works the rhythm is lost ..45-60 mins of practice not working at all in my fav..planning to squeeze in some practice before the weekend comes , In the days of fast foods and instant coffee.. just learnt that music is not on the instant list .. So that's the update from my guitar .

Work's been pretty fun these days ... reading code has been quite an interesting task so has been learning the framework.. My first impression from a user point of view of this framework (API) it's pretty simple and effective ,need to dig a lil deeper .
To quote Mopheus " I do need to find how deep is the rabbit's burrow"

To be continued ....

I had a guilty conscience while dusting my guitar , though now it looks pretty new and well tuned its been ages since I practised it .
Just like any of the starters started looking for the scales , continue to search for the elusive pattern yesterday and after two hours at around midnight I discovered the scale with some painful fingers .. it was worth it
Only hours of practice and toil lie between me and the music ..more updates coming soon on my journey to play a Floyd number

A thought about Equals and hashCode

The equals () and hashCode() relationship has great importance while storing objects in the hashtable/hashMap/ hashSet , for one if you dont implement hashCode at all you might end up having a duplicate values in a Set or even having objects getting overwritten in case of Hashtable or hashMap.

It is necessary to exercise caution while writing this method. We learnt this when one of the object (we are storing in a hashMap) had the same value of int for all objects in the hashCode(). This eventually was a bottle neck as we realized since we no longer got the performance we desired from Map since all the elements were in the same bucket it made retrieval expensive..

Some thoughts about AJAX

Ajax architecture has been pretty impressive at the first sight , and after having a look at Google Maps ,Google Suggest and the Java RSS the potential of this architecture is amazing .To have the web application behave like a rich client side app will no doubt be good and also is one of the takeaway AJAX gives us (we do owe it Microsoft for XHTMLRequest ) .

A couple of examples tried out with Validation using AJAX showed plenty of promise For a website to be more responsive and to avoid multiple requests to the servers AJAX can be used effectively by caching information which is typically done during validation of input fields.Also since you do not have to refresh the entire page this would also improve usability. It does not end here alongside validation , we can have features like auto completion (Google Suggest ) uses this and then there is autocompletion , autorefresh etc..

From a programmer's diary..

The following is the minimum essentials one needs to be successful

1. One Programming Language (JAVA)
2. One scripting language (Javascript)
3. RDBMS concepts
4. Know-how of DataStructures
5. One framework (Struts)
6. other utilities like ( Ant, Junit, UML)
   

The key point here is these things will atleast see us through our everyday tech challenges though tech challenges these days are becoming harder to find .. one would consider himself lucky if he does'nt have to do the mundane maintenance or fix a CR which involves changing the gif image on the jsp and producing 3 documents in the process

I"ve been churning out documents by a dozen the whole of last 2 weeks ... Interestingly found out this is an entirely different ball game as compared to technical work for one i found it this was not as easy as it appeared and also as far as the formatting was concerned its pretty time consuming.The worst part was not having anything to do technical..
as they say "Necessity is the mother of invention" I"m studying about the Head First Design Patterns . This is an amazing book in terms of clarity and the depth the author packs it in .It seems to be a long time ... and i dont like to be in the sideline for long enough ..waiting to get back in action.