Updates from angsuman RSS
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10:09:43 am on March 11, 2010 |
Arrived in Texas for #SXSW . I wasn’t sure if I wanted to attend till the last moment, after all travelling from India is no joke. So I am hoping that event will be worth the horrendous travel by Lufthansa.
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11:21:31 pm on February 25, 2010 |
Dream Gadget by a To-Be Journalist- The following is an actual essay submitted by a B.Tech Engineer aspiring to be a Tech. Journalist:
TECHNOLOGY ENCOURAGING CHEATING “THE TOPPER”S WATCH”
The demand from technology never ends.Human mind always promotes new inventions and most of them are for their easy facilities. I remember when once without preparing for the physics parer i entered the examination hall. Sitting inside i felt nothing not be worst than this one in my life. I felt bad when everyone filled up their papers n thought of anything even some magic that could help me.I then dreamt of a wrist watch. It was like that the topper will wear a watch n likewise me too. The watch was such a gadget that whatever answer the topper thought, will be be visible in my watch and then even without preparing i could top my exams. But soon i realised my dream was a fantacy and the only thing i could do is to work hard n be sincere for my studies to be the topper.
Today when the technology is emerging in a such a large variety,i sometimes imagine if my dream gadget could really exist. In present era, brain mapping,brain computer interface etc. is easily possible with the help of advance technology. With the use of chip placed inside the brain, the computer senses the instructions and let know about the person’s thought. Moreover watches with all different funky facilities are available in the market with the help of the same advance technology. Scientists may find this realistic and then who knows my dream gadget “The TOPPER’S WATCH” may really exist.
Although it is inspired from the idea of cheating but i suppose it to be beneficial in field of security, medical etc.But for students i am sure that they will not be able to wear any kind of watch inside the exam hall. The watch could have additional features like it could be optional to access internet facilities,to be used for text and multimedia messages etc.
As we all know that security is a never ending battle. Hackers may find some sophisticated techniques to bypass the sensors in watch n may display some wrong and misleading datas. This may be one of the threat to the watch. Concluding with the fact that “The toppers watch ” does not exist but i still hope to see my dream gadget in real.
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11:41:13 pm on February 19, 2010 |
James Stevens wrote: I want to develop an application what kind of education do I need to have ? Where do I start ? How can I become a developer? Please help.
Most people normally have an engineering / science degree before they go for developing software. There are non-engineering and non-accredited institutions also which claims to teach programming but in my experience they do a poor job.
Having said that, everone can be a programmer and can even train himself. The typical qualities of a good programmer are:
- Attention to details
- Eye for perfection; perfection takes time, effort and perseverance
- Lots of patience
- Open mind and continuously learning
- Devote lots of time to the profession
I learned programming during my undergrad at IIT. I have seen a architect who was only Class / Standard 8 pass.
First you need to focus on the fundamentals of computers before you can delve into programming. Understanding of boolean logic is required and a good understanding of basic mathematics. After that you can just try your hand using a simple language like PHP to wet your hands in the land of programming.
What are your suggestions for James?
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09:44:40 am on February 4, 2010 |
- Top 10 Reasons Copywriters Will Never Stop Writing Top 10 Articles
- Top 10 Reasons Not To Write Top 10 Articles
- Top 10 Reason Why Copywriting Works
- Top 10 Copywriting Ideas Which Never Work Like This Top 10 List
- Top 10 Copywriting Tips for Copywriting Dummies
- Top 10 Reasons Why Computers Should Replace Copywriters With Better Copy Quality
- Top 10 Reasons Not To Read Such Top 10 Articles About Copywriting
- Top 10 Reasons Not To Waste Times With Top 10 Articles
- Top 10 Reasons To Fire All Your Copywriters
- Top 10 Reasons Why Top 10 Copywriting Tips Never Work
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10:03:50 pm on January 17, 2010 |
Nice explanations of volatile modifier and transient modifier in Java - https://pi.vu/6*T https://pi.vu/6*g
In short use volatile when you want to prevent local caching of member variables by thread. For example to keep a counter across threads, mark it as volatile.
Use transient when you do not want to serialize the variable.
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12:28:36 pm on January 17, 2010 |
OpenMQ vs. ActiveMQ? My current preference is Open MQ from Sun. Any thoughts?
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10:51:07 am on January 17, 2010 |
Is EhCache suffering from featuritis (creepy featurism)? There are way too many features in the product, most of which are better implemented separately like SOAP interface for example!
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10:48:51 am on January 17, 2010 |
Fastest way to copy subversion repository is cp -R the repository directory to a new directory. Works seamlessly for file system based repository ( fsfs ).
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09:06:58 pm on January 16, 2010 |
What’s funnier than a Chuck Norris Joke? - Chuck Norris’ attempt to be taken seriously - https://pi.vu/6Pl
Even NRA gets it! https://pi.vu/6PR
Frankly Chuck Norris deserves a roundhouse kick for his inane commentary.
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08:53:44 pm on January 16, 2010 |
#retweetthis if you like: How twitter killed blog -
- By removing the slow WYSIWYG editor
- By removing the need to add a title to every bits and pieces you write
- By forcing people to write less not more
- By getting Barack Obama (his aides) and Oprah to use Twitter
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08:46:59 pm on January 16, 2010 |
What are you doing today for Haiti?
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08:45:37 pm on January 16, 2010 |
You know you have a gem of programmer when he handles 3 dimensional array of pointers as deftly as Tiger Woods handles women (or golf)
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08:38:01 pm on January 16, 2010 |
swap can slowdown linux in certain conditions …
I realized the cause of progressive slowdown over time in Linux, specially for developer of designer machines can be due to utilization of swap space. I loaded over 4.3 million records in memory which necessiated the use of swap space. Unfortunately even after the program was completed, the swap space was not releasd and was used for other programs also even though sufficient memory was available.
So one a memory intensive program is run, it is likely to slow down your subsequent program due to swap usage. I think it is an implementation bug but haven’t checked enough to confirm / reject the theory.
Have you noticed this?
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07:31:44 pm on January 16, 2010 |
Beware of implementing Java Comparable.Here is why…
When implementing compareTo() the normal inclination is to provide the real difference (negative or positive) when a match is not found. Today this lead to a subtle bug which was only discovered when the software was tested over a very large data-set.
What happened: Comparing Long and providing the difference as int (return type of compareTo) is a potential sand trap. As positive Integer can only be up to 2 billion, anything beyond that and it silently turns it into a negative integer!
Bottomline: Simply return +1 or -1 as appropriate when a match is not found.
How we discovered the bug: Through high volume of unit testing using random data over the entire data range (2^32 - 1).
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03:57:12 am on January 16, 2010 |
We are range searching 4.1 million records in 0.0000009 seconds.
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11:53:39 pm on January 10, 2010 |
Moscone Center is booked from June 22nd through June 25th for JavaOne 2010 - https://pi.vu/Bjf
There were several speculations in the past to the contrary.
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05:04:18 am on January 9, 2010 |
Where do you find all pidgin log files?
You can find them on Linux system under ~/.purple/logs directory. This directory has one directory per IM protocol like jabber (includes GTalk, jabber.org etc), yahoo etc.
Within this directory there is a sub-directory corresponding to each of your ID which you use with that protocol. In that you will find one directory for each people you are connected with. And finally within this directory you will find all the log files arranged by date and time.
An example file in my system is at:
/home/angsuman/.purple/logs/jabber/ angsuman…@gmail.com/ friend@frienddomain.com/ 2008-11-30.163647+0530IST.html
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11:48:11 pm on January 8, 2010 |
If I could travel through I would go to 1880’s where I could help India get of British rule & meet Swami Vivekananda & Sri Ramakrishna. What more can I ask?
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11:44:43 pm on January 8, 2010 |
Find out your IP address and everything you ever wanted to know about IP address: https://pi.vu/xu
I intend to provide several service for free to my readers. This is one such service. A very simple service to find out about your current IP address: https://ip-address.gadging.com/
We are enhancing it with more interesting details and pictures soon
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10:23:07 pm on January 8, 2010 |
@shelisrael The twitter format made my comment obtuse. I meant that in the publish-first-filter-later model often news gets published without appropriate fact-checking which can later prove to be incorrect. While the website will subsequently change to reflect the facts, the people who visited it earlier will only know the wrong news. Over time this may dilute people’s confidence in the news media. What do you think?
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03:50:35 am on January 7, 2010 |
Was there malicious intent behind Jyoti Basu death rumors? - The whole story behind Jyoti Basu’s fake death rumors
Yesterday Twitter and later internet was abuzz with rumors of death of Jyoti Basu. Upon investigation I found out that the single website source of these rumors is a unknown site named kalponik.us.
The domain record of the kalponik.us reveals that the domain registrant is a guy named Shuvon Rudra, from Dhaka, Bangladesh. The administrative contact lists F,loreance Ria from Dhaka and the technical contact is listed as Rudra Netguru from Coochbihar, West Bengal, India. I tried all the telephone numbers listed for them and none of the number is valid!
Initially the site claimed that Jyoti Basu was dead at 1:30 pm based on insider information it has received and boasted that kalponik.us is responsible for breaking the news. Indihot soon picked up the story from there and sometime later samaylive followed. Apparently the site came under some pressure later in the day when doctors claimed that Jyoti Basu was alive and in fact improving. The text was changed. It still said that Jyoti Basu is dead but linked to the article from samaylive, which (I have read both the original articles) obviously picked up the story from kalponik (a incidentally is a Bengali word meaning imaginary), conveniently blanked out the page with zero content!
To summarize when faced with heat kalponik decided to link as source samaylive which had based its story on kalponik in the first place! Also kalponik had claimed initially that it had broken the story. So kalponik is playing an unethical game here. Additionally it removed the story from front page. It appears at this time that kalponik had staged the whole thing to probably gain some cheap publicity.
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10:23:53 am on January 2, 2010 |
How to disable updatedb on Linux / CentOS?
Open /etc/cron.daily/mlocate.cron and comment all the lines and save the file.
You can also exclude certain directories by including them in PRUNEPATHS value in /etc/updatedb.conf file.
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06:42:03 am on January 1, 2010 |
SugarCRM vs. vTiger What’s your poison?
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06:41:04 am on January 1, 2010 |
The beauty of microblogging is that you don’t have to research to make your post more bulkier. Just say what you want and now. Forget about rounding it off, adding details etc.
Microblogging is here and now. Now f only Twitter can improve their performance!
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06:39:10 am on January 1, 2010 |
Oh dear Alexa, when will you behave with even an modicum of intelligence?
When a site is less than 3 months old, how can you even give statistics for last 3 months or show how much it improved in last 3 months?
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06:29:46 am on January 1, 2010 |
I am sick and tired of free services which is nothing but either a bait-and-switch or comes with horrible quality and stability like Twitter.
I don’t care to try “free” cloud computing services from either Google (Google Cloud) or Microsoft (Azure). I want them paid but cheap. I want them to come with SLA for availability, computing power, bandwidth and low latency and possibly more. Otherwise I will opt to setup my own.
I don’t want free blogging but crippled services from WordPress or Blogger. I want them paid and with quality, stability and a bunch of SLA to prove their commitment.
I don’t want free email. I can host them really cheaply, so cheaply that they are almost free but they come with quality and stability.
Let 2010 be the year of paid but quality services, services we can rely on from day to day, services which do not rely on just their big brands and instead provide guarantees.
Free services is an oxymoron. It cannot continue in that form. Even Google search is not free. You pay by providing them with data about your search history. Let’s shed this tomfoolery and instead focus on quality but paid services which gives more guarantee and peace of mind about their continuity.
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10:52:03 pm on December 31, 2009 |
Top lie of 2009: “I just realized how bad the economy really is. I recently bought a new toaster oven and as a complimentary gift, I was given a bank.”
via https://pi.vu/!d
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05:35:51 am on December 28, 2009 |
What are your New Years Resolutions? Here are mine…
- Achieve my personal goals (2)
- Launch Plebix.com
- Meet a certain person
- Reduce weight to below 90KG
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05:31:50 am on December 28, 2009 |
I shortened https://pi.vu with su.pr url shortener - https://su.pr/2v0dP2 - a whopping 58.3% size increase
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11:55:06 pm on December 27, 2009 |
I would like to introduce pi.vu url shortener. pi.vu excels on url size, stability and speed. Will publish details soon.
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11:53:49 pm on December 27, 2009 |
Sad to see Google AdSense Blog Flooded by Spam Comments - https://pi.vu/mIMay I humbly suggest that they opt for an anti-comment-spam software for their blog. Unfortunately they are not on WordPress, otherwise I would have suggested Comment Guard Pro.
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10:03:02 am on December 26, 2009 |
To Twitter: When I blocked someone I don’t want his messages even if it is retweeted by my followers.
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10:00:47 am on December 26, 2009 |
Saw the fail whale (Twitter) again while accessing devices #fail
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09:39:17 am on December 26, 2009 |
Ad.ly ability to add twitter accounts appear to be broken at this time
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08:39:31 am on December 26, 2009 |
Check out https://pi.vu the fastest URL shortener in town, we have stats to prove it.
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08:38:38 am on December 26, 2009 |
A micro-blog to cure my Twitter addiction and without the 140 char limit - https://pi.vu/WZ
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08:32:03 am on December 26, 2009 |
https://gadging.com shortens to https://tinyurl.com/y8dra78 = 44.4% size increase using tinyurl! pi.vu gives https://pi.vu/x9 = 16.67% size reduction.
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07:22:01 am on December 26, 2009 |
The only way a java agent can start after VM startup is if its loaded using the Java Attach API
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07:20:47 am on December 26, 2009 |
How to develop JMX MBean in 5 minutes
- Create a class named say Abc.
- To expose it as MBean, create an interface AbcMBean.
- Abc should now implement AbcMBean.
- Get information with getMethodName() methods
- Set information with setMethodName() methods
- Register the MBean class separately:
java.lang.management.ManagementFactory.getPlatformMBeanServer().registerMBean(new ClassName(), new ObjectName(”com.taragana:name=NameofService”));
That’s it!
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07:18:54 am on December 26, 2009 |
JADE – Java Agent Frameowork – Free chapter from the book: https://pi.vu/W0
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07:17:32 am on December 26, 2009 |
Rules for publishing with JMX
To publish with JMX, for each base name (alpha in this case), you are allowed only- One getter with form getAlpha() OR one getter with form boolean isAlpha() OR one operation of any form.
- One setter with one argument (i.e. setAlpha(x)).
Some of these rules are enforced and some are not. To minimize chances of obsolescence, follow all of these rules.
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07:15:35 am on December 26, 2009 |
How to create javadoc for Java sources:
javadoc -link https://arjun/docs/java/api/ -d docs -package -author -windowtitle “Taragana Inc” -footer “Generated by Taragana Inc” -sourcepath . -subpackages com.sun
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10:20:02 pm on December 25, 2009 |
What is the business model of Zemanta?
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09:23:10 pm on December 25, 2009 |
Is the idea of enjoying in festivities a kind of self-hypnosis?
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09:20:15 pm on December 25, 2009 |
Changed Twitter Updater to stop adding the prefix to every tweet.
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09:18:26 pm on December 25, 2009 |
A mind is a terrible thing to waste
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09:06:50 pm on December 25, 2009 |
Can we expect fairness from an algorithm or is it too much to ask?
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09:03:08 pm on December 25, 2009 |
Gaea Times Microblog is an experiment in microblogging, content which doesn’t always fit into the 140 character limitation of Twitter and yet ideas and thoughts that are too small for a blog. All the items will be posted on my Twitter stream - @angsuman.