Half yearly OS upgrade

Recently I floated in a 12ft deep swimming pool for an hour! This was my first time ever and I'm 34 years of age. No huffing and puffing, no extra inborn lung/body capacity, and yet there I was, and even the hand leg movements is just to relax and not to float. Don't believe me? Or maybe you believe this, and also assume that I'm kind of a mystic who can walk on water!? Of course probably not the second, but that is the kind of extreme stance we take when we encounter an balance act. If something is fantastic, either it has to be impossible practically, or it is some awesome mystery. Maybe there is another uninteresting option, that of meticulous practice: Kind of go daily to the field, slog it out, practice all day, and slowly you become a master. So anything fantastic is either one of these 3 options: Impossible, Mysterious, or Boring. Right? So not worth trying for? Now all ye non-swimmers, and even swimmers who cannot do the above, how do you see it? I can assure you I really did this (call me, I can show you), I'm no born swimmer, and finally this does not take years of boring practice (in fact I feel I can teach this to anybody interested, in under 10 minutes).

Ah! There you see it, it is kind of a trick. Right? The 4th reason for anything fantastic is a secret trick? Maybe there is a 5th reason then.

...Programing is not natural. If you consider basic global variable based programming, all you need are only 4 concepts: Maybe statements (assignment and expression), Variables, Loops, Branch. This is the complete set for even full mastery, and you might take say 1-2 hours to explain all in detail with an example. And yet the newbie cannot program even simple "Add all numbers below N" like non-trivial 3-liners. So what is the problem? Teaching methods? Maybe a programing gene?! Nope. The confidence to be able to break any logical problem into a program is also a 'Balance'. Why a balance, why not just term it as a knowledge? As we saw, not all all knowledge is a balance. Memorizing is not a Balance. You don't forget programming if you have not learned to do it once. It does not come really incrementally but only in snaps.

...Ok now for how to use Ajax. Let us go to the extreme and see. Every time I read about ajax it is only about some aspect of of the GUI being enhanced by Ajax. Like some suggesting edit boxes, some nifty validations etc. But what is the maximum that ajax can do to the Web GUI? Can we totally change the way we create web GUI?

Think of that...! The server data model being same, and the whole GUI being developed in various ways. If CSS changed the way we skin the look and feel (colors, fonts, images, and layout) of the web application, this Ajax, and the consequent standaloneness allows even the interactions and the behavior to be skinnable...

Every time I hear about the issues of Ajax, it is about it not allowing a website like usage patterns. Like, no proper back button handling, no bookmarkability, complexity of JS coding etc. But have they all ever known what it takes to build a serious desktop client with VB, Delphi or Java? Remember Ajax is used for building web applications, not web sites of static pages. And that means all the complexity and issues of an application will be true for it. And who said that a web application should be like a web site!?

...And hence comes the revelation, that the Unit Tests and the Mock Objects, both are mocks. Where Mock Objects mocks the Library, Unit Tests mock the client! So what to test? Mock the clients! That is, create a dream client that will use your component fully, and assert. By the way, this also sheds light on using asserts. Use asserts profusely in your component! Because after all, every component that uses its dependencies, act as a Unit Test for them, as a Mock Client. Maybe assert can merit more exploration in the DBC direction, but it seems its nexus with testing is clear.

AOP in its basic spirit, can be realized if you understand the nice capabilities that are possible when we can intercept any method call, or other joinpoints. Of course, understanding this way, will not teach you the various idioms in decomposing an application into aspects. That is an art (at least for now). It is like saying, that by knowing inheritance or polymorphism, conjuring the need for design patterns is not trivial at all. But that does not mean that the basic techniques are any different. It is only that knowing the tools of the trade doesn't make you a good craftsman. Knowing to play flute will not necessarily make you a musician.

My assumption all along, was that to intercept method calls, you need an AOP tool... Then I stumbled upon java.lang.reflect.Proxy. I now remember seeing it before, but have never thought of it to be useful, at least for my daily needs. The amazing thing is, it is there from J2SE 1.3...

...Without Annotation, we have to use naming conventions, or the method signature. Now we can elegantly do that with Annotation (or Metadata).

The title of this article was originally published as Volume of Sphere & Calculus. But in all its internal drafts it was provocatively called as Why Calculus? In fact, it was written mainly to understand the reasons for the existance of the math disicpline called Calculus. So after some insistance from Ganesh, the title was reverted back to its old glory. Incidently, the URL was all along having this old name, hence no change in the URL.

In Unicode character set, each character is represented by two bytes. Thus a Unicode string is a sequence not of individual bytes but of two-byte words. Check more about Unicode .

We created the XML file and changed using XSL file, thus transforming the XML to HTML. And to our surprise, we were able to see only junk characters in the 'TeamName'...

...We tried to set the encoding to 'utf-8', 'utf-16' and so on... But at last our problem came to end when we set the encoding to 'iso-8859-1'.

The updated TJ Ragam is available in the Proof of Principle Prototype (PoPP) archive. The main change is the architecture of the parser. Maybe I'll elaborate about this some day, if it is found interesting (especially if you compare with the 0.1 release). The goal of generating the .mid file, with the same time-duration as we hear, is still not very clear, though it seems to be working.

 OSS Tools 0.3

After a long time, the checklist of Open Source Software Tools - 0.3, is updated. The URL's are working now. The goal here is not to confuse you with choice, but to state only the things that seem to work in our experience. But for now, since the choices are equally interesting in some respects, all that we consider as a useful tool is listed.

For easing the article submission and the formatting of it for publication in the TATTVUM site, we encourage you to download this HTML Article template zip file. It contains the HTML pre-publication version of a TATTVUM article. You can use this tagging model for your own article, by suitably breaking your article into blocks, and copy pasting it in this template, before sending it to us. This will greatly simplify our work. This template is also a reasonably flexible model to streamline your own thinking process.

This updated version Includes a sample article as HTML and a separate article.css, to simplify the HTML page. This was standalone earlier ( during the 0.1 version), now it is included as a project in PoPP archive.

It all started with the good fortune of getting a Nokia 6610 handset for GPRS connection, thanks to my employer. Though I primarily use it as a modem and not so much as a cell phone, the fact that it is java enabled, prompted me to try that out. This being the first time ever that I come anywhere near J2ME, the process was bit frustrating but very exciting. The verdict is, J2ME is cool and pretty easy!

...The J2ME is divided into the VM of its own (JVM, KVM, CVM), then the core API called the Configuration, the linguistic abilities of Java, which are very related to the VM implementation itself, and then the Profile, which depend upon the Configuration, and add more vertical (device dependent) capabilities to the platform. Beyond this you can have many Optional Packages (like an API for Bluetooth etc.), which can be added to suite your need. Of course there are dependencies between the profiles and the Configuration. For example the MID profile need CLD Configuration (more latter). And FP can only run with CDC, and not with CLDC...

...It all started with a simple HelloWorld program (just one class file, and one method overload), using Nokia Developer Suite for J2ME, 2.0. I thought of explaining that program to you all, but it is shamefully trivial. Instead I have done the survey route of the whole terrine of small device programming with Java using J2ME. Maybe in an another installment, I can explain a non-trivial program, at least moderately useful to me, in detail. I have few ideas. Let me try and and then brag about that to you. No! games are too far away from my mind now. I'm thinking of some useful numerical applications. OK, till then happy Java-J2ME time!

...Then it struck, Why not zip each folder before burning the CD ?! This was indeed a good solution, as it elides both my long file name problem, and the deep folder problem. In fact, from then on it has become a constant practice to zip before archiving into a CD. Of course, it is prudent to have small zips, so make lot of root level folders, instead of sub folders (usually I prefix the grouping name for the flattened folders, ...).

Recursively iterating over the file system is pretty simple and an useful task. This is possible as Java treats both a file and a folder as a java.io.File... Zipping a file involves two steps: One, to put a zipentry, which is just the destination file path to be recorded inside the zip file (you can play tricks here!).

...For a long time I was procrastinating to write this tool. But when Venu asked for a neat task that can be useful, I gave this. Venu, though a new comer to Java (hardly two months now), but since he was strong in C++, completed this tool within few days, working just in his spare time. Thanks to him, this article and the zip tool is before you.