Book : Rise And Fall of the British Empire

Read an interesting article on http://www.rediff.com about an interview with a British author who wrote a book about the Decline and Fall of the British Empire. I think I'll have to add it to my reading list over at KCLS.

SeaJUG meeting tomorrow

We have a SeaJUG meeting tomorrow evening in case folks are interested. It seems like there is quite a push in the market these days towards writing more quality software and being able to measure the quality in a repeatable manner. I've been using some real neat tools at work like mocking frameworks and some continuous integration tools that I haven't played with in the past. It's more work but quite a lot more satisfying knowing that you always cya your code.

Cool Brother Printer

The old Brother printer that my folks had been using for over 3 years finally gave up. It had lasted a helluva long time, especially considering the fact that we picked it up as a refurb unit for under $40/- bucks. I've been really impressed by the fact that Brother is one of the few manufacturers out there who has been actively supporting Linux users and providing linux drivers for their products.

So we went out to look at what was available out there and picked up this great little Brother MFC-490CW which looks like an upgraded version of their older model. We picked it up from Staples and I had it running on their Linux box within 15 minutes - both scanning and printing. The only thing I can say about Brother printers on Linux is that their support for Linux is truly world class!

http://www.brother-usa.com/MFC/ModelDetail.aspx?ProductID=MFC490CW

SeaJUG meeting in Feb

We had the Seattle Java Users group meeting for Feb last week. I took our camcorder there to tape the meeting and see if I could manage to put it online. It took a little fiddling around with mencoder and ffmpeg because we have a JVC HD Camera and I had to reformat and re-encode the videos it produced. It appears to use FAT32 as the filesystem for the hard drive cuz the video was split up into approx 2 GB files. I finally ended up with an approx 701MB mp4 encoded file which seemed like it would work well.

I also looked around at the various services for uploading the video and ended up using Vimeo though I did have to purchase their yearly plan cuz of upload caps.

You can view the video at:
http://www.vimeo.com/3356282

India and the UAE

We were on vacation for the last few weeks so I haven't had a chance to update the blog. Here's a brief synopsis of our travels.

We flew into Delhi via Dubai at the beginning of December. Met up with the folks and drove up to Punjab in a rented taxi. We spent about 10 days there visiting friends and some family we still have left there. Some of the places we visited included Amritsar, Jalandhar, our village near Nakodar, the Mrs' village near Jagraon Ropar/Chandigarh and then back to Delhi.

The next few days were spent visiting friends in Delhi and Noida. We took the Delhi Metro and I was very impressed with it! I hope they maintain it with the same standard in the long term that they do at the moment. We stayed with family friends in Mohan Nagar near Ghaziabad during this time.

Then we flew to Bangalore and visited some family members of the Mrs who live there. We also made a side trip down to Mysore for two days. Saw the forts and palaces in Mysore and Srirangapatna. That was a lot of fun!

Next we flew to Dubai where we were going to spend our wedding anniversary and welcome in the new year. Unfortunately the rulers had canceled all fireworks and celebrations because of the conflict that erupted in Gaza so we ended up making it a quiet, intimate evening.

We spent a week in the UAE traveling to all the different emirates. Did lots of sight seeing in Dubai itself. Saw the Burj Dubai, skyline on Sheikh Zayed Road, Jumeirah beach, the malls, souks, etc etc. The trip to Al Ain and Fujairah was quite memorable. We saw some of the old forts there and drove up to Jabal Hafeet on what is apparently one of the twistiest road in the world ( the Mrs actually got vertigo by the time we made it to the top). The Mrs went to her old school and met some of her teachers. Her family used to live in Dubai before they moved to Canada and she was quite shocked by how much it had changed.

All in all it was a fun vacation but all good things must come to an end. Luckily it appears that we missed out on most of the bad weather here but ultimately there's no place like home. So now back to the regular programming :)

ramdisk on linux

http://blog.mousefeed.com/2007/12/faster-build-compilation-with-ram-disk.html

speeded up my build 3-5x .. cool!

Chak de!

Been jamming to 'Captain Bhangra Da..' at work here .. chak de! =)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1JDKyW_eag

Eclipse Equinox P2

I had been playing around with integrating some eclipse plug-ins at work here into our build system. It turns out that this functionality has changed significantly since Eclipse 3.4M6. This write-up might be helpful for folks who might be interested in this topic:

http://wiki.eclipse.org/Equinox_p2_Getting_Started

I've been working on some OSGI/Equinox stuff at work here that's pretty cool! :)

self signed certs and JSSE exceptions

been working on SOAP/REST web services at work here and ran into the old self signed cert issue wrt JSSE. Most browsers give you the ability to add a self-signed cert to your list of trusted certs so that you can proceed beyond the SSL handshake. That's a little hard to do with command line sample java apps .. until I found this little gem which lets you import the self-signed cert as a valid CA cert thus creating a chain of trust which validates the cert: http://blogs.sun.com/andreas/entry/no_more_unable_to_find

more 80s music!

MTV tries to compete with youtube .. nice! more 80s music for us :)

http://www.mtvmusic.com/

Seajug meeting last night

We had our regular monthly Seattle Java User's Group meeting last night. I've been hosting them since Jayson handed off the responsibilities to me. He's moved on to bigger and better things :)

There was a pretty good turnout and I've put up a writeup and slides in case you are interested in checking them out.

Cool Uni-motor-cycle

I know I saw this concept at one point in some Anime flick that I can't think of right now. Really cool!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufiMy87zK-Q

funny video!

I think the sysadmins will love this one ;)

http://www.nastyhobbit.org/player.php?clip=the-website-is-down

Loins of Punjab

This looks like a really good movie .. the music video is hilarious!

http://uberdesi.com/blog/2008/09/03/make-way-for-the-loins/

I also saw a pretty interesting off-beat Bollywood movie the other day called 'Summer 2007' which was also kind of interesting. Not the usual crap .. it did have songs though :(

http://ww.smashits.com/news/bollywood/movie-review/6742/summer-2007.html

Smallest PC in the world

neat article about the smallest PC in the world running Redhat Linux:

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2008/08/27/a-real-space-oddity-arrives-at-pc-pro/

embedded devices are pretty amazing. Here's a list of linux'ey things:

http://linuxdevices.com/articles/AT4936596231.html

An exploding case of mangoes

Read a really interesting book from a Pakistani writer based in London about the plane crash that killed General Zia back in the 80s. A good read!

http://www.amazon.com/Case-Exploding-Mangoes-Mohammed-Hanif/dp/0307268071/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1219345213&sr=8-1

Testing on IE/Linux

Since the majority of the browsers out there are IE it leads to some interesting problems for us devs to make sure that everything works as advertised. Some solutions I have found:

1. install different versions of IE on linux: http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/page/Main_Page
2. the brute force approach: install VirtualBOX and Windoze for the real deal. Make sure you got loads of RAM and disk apce.

Free Lunch

Read an interesting book lately called Free Lunch. It's basically a critique of government policies which enable the rich to get more breaks then the poor. Since I kind of fall in the middle there I can't complain too much I suppose :)

Still, some eye openers in there though … good read!

good movie: amu

saw a really good indian movie the other day. Not the typical bollywood crap. recommended!

http://www.amuthefilm.com/home.html

Book Review: Punjabi Century

I had been browsing around the online SPL catalog looking for books to read about Punjab or northern India. I found a really interesting book that I enjoyed reading immensely called 'Punjabi Century'. It was basically a sort of a social/cultural historical narrative on life in the Punjab before partition from the perspective of a person who was born and grew up there. A very interesting read!

Michael Jackson + Bhangra == wow!

This video is just friggin hilarious! enjoy =)

http://youtube.com/watch?v=IG7ErbtZr4s

flash on pocketpc

I've ripped a couple of movies to watch on my PPC-6800 from sprint recently. The TCPMP player works great with a lot of different a/v codecs.

A couple of good linux tools are transcode and mencoder to encode a/v from and to various resolutions and codecs. There's a decent GUI called Acidrip ( among others) which appears to work rather well.

Did you know Tivo has a hiden web server built into it?

There is a plugin to TCPMP which lets it play flash files directly also. This saves re-encoding them from flash into other formats. Works great :)

Brother printers - awesome linux support!

I mostly work on linux/BSD boxes so I've been looking for a printer with decent support for linux. HP installed like 2 gigs worth of software .. 2 gigs?! I shudder to think what all it did install. Both Epson and Canon didn't have any support for linux from what I could tell. I could try and buy one and see if the built-in drivers that come with linux support them but then I came across the solution - Brother.

Decently priced all-in-one printers with awesome support for Linux:

http://solutions.brother.com/linux/en_us/index.html

and they work as advertised. Scanner, fax, printer - all work under Linux .. installed without a hitch. amazing!

So if you're a linux user looking for a decent printer - I would highly recommend Brother!

Another good book - Fermat's Enigma

April appears to be a good month for book reading. I suppose with that rain and cold, it's a lot nicer to just chill with a good book :)

Fermat's Enigma is a very interesting book about a famous math proof which remained unsolved for 3 centuries! If you like history and math you will definitely like this book. Another good book by Simon Singh.

Curveball - good book!

I read a really good book recently - Curveball. That was the code name of the iraqi source whose info the government used to claim all those amazing WMDs they found in Iraq as the basis of the war. I guess they didn't really know what they were getting into when they started trusting the info from this dude. Didn't they know that part of the world is famous for graft, corruption and plain ol lies?!

Anyways, great read!

http://www.curveballbook.com/

Backup your phone data

I came across this really neat company called Dashwire which lets you backup all your phone data. It's a good solution for folks like me who are stuck with a windoze mobile phone and run linux at home. The really neat thing about it is that you can download a fat client to the phone and it will automagically run in the background and sync your info with the dashwire server. Neat!

Using older addons in Firefox 3.0 beta

So I've been playing around with Firefox 3.0b5 for the last few weeks now and it really rocks! It seems to have become quite the speed daemon. Unfortunately, there's quite a few extensions which haven't yet been ported to work on the new version. Luckily I came across the following tip which disables compatibility checking for firefox so you can install the old extensions. All the extensions I use appear to work fine in 3.0b5.

http://lifehacker.com/355973/make-your-extensions-work-with-the-firefox-3-beta

Code Quality

Don sent around a really funny comic about how to measure code quality at work today. It's hilarious =)

http://www.osnews.com/story/19266/WTFs_m

Playing with Firefox Beta4

I've been playing with Firefox beta4 which can be found at: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html

and it is fassssssssst! I also downloaded the punjabi version just to try it out and see how lame my punjabi reading skills had become. It turns out that I still remember some of it =)

PBS: Frontline

The show on Frontline last night was really good. It talks about the problems in Pakistan. Though the press here generally covers the big news headlines like Benazir Bhutto's assassination, etc. they generally miss the context in which these things happen. This show illustrated the destabilization that fundamentalism can cause to stable societies.

http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/pakistan703/