WYSIWYG Dreamz: Jayanth.Krupanidhi@Sun.COM

Got the SCJP certification goodies - a certificate, card & a lapel pin, in a neat package today.

A long-time aspiration...
Finally got substantiated...
I'm now a Sun Certified Java Programmer!

My score ain't impressive - just a mere 66%. Yet, am fully satisfied for more than one reason. Firstly, my preparation for the exam was very minimal (hardly 10 days). Secondly, I didn't take up any mock exam prior to taking the real one. I came to know about the JavaRanch Saloon community only on the morning of the scheduled exam date.

Finally, the actual examination experience, which was smooth during the first hour, turned out to be a nightmare when the server stopped responding suddenly and an error message popped up! That's the last (and the least) one could expect while taking an exam at an authorized Prometric testing center! After so many tense moments and unsuccessful attempts by the site administrator, I was able to resume the exam, but I'd already lost a good 10 minutes of the duration. I tried my best to complete the rest of the exam and avoid a time-out, all the way continuously fighting off the fear of facing another similar interruption. However, I managed to answer only 64 out of 72 questions!

To sum it up, it was one hell of a harrowing experience and I couldn't help but rejoice within myself when I came to know that I had passed the exam!

Moral of the story: Certifications are not for the faint-hearted! Being PREPARED for everything is the key!

You call it 'laziness'. You call it 'fear of messing something up'. You call it whatever. I'd been remiss in not installing Solaris on my Toshiba Tecra laptop all these days. Had it been my personal desktop at home, I'd not have hesitated to play around with stuff like defragmenting, partitioning, installing multiple OS instances etc. But, when it came to doing the same on my laptop, I'd always reflexively backed off from experimenting!

Moinak Ghosh (no marks for guessing, it's the Belenix guy and the pride of IEC) and team must have rightly sensed that there were so many guys like me wanting to have Solaris installed on their laptops, but restrained by similar apprehensions of a 'mess-up'.

Yesterday's InstallFest event was the third in this year (yeah, due to popular demand) and their team had already installed Solaris successfully on over 150 laptops. I'd wished to register for the earlier InstallFests, but couldn't manage to do so. Nothing to regret, coz there was an added attraction this time. They were installing the Compiz 3D Desktop (a GNOME plug-in) on all laptops that had an nVIDIA graphics card.

The Himalaya conference room in IEC was abuzz, with install volunteers briskly performing pre-install, install & post-install activities on around 20 to 25 laptops of varying configurations. Minutes after I entered the room, I had a volunteer named Mayuresh tend to my laptop. First, he had my Windows XP partition shrunk to 19 GB (from 35 GB) and created a new partition using GParted LiveCD.

After installing Solaris Nevada build 64a, they installed special drivers for Yukon Ethernet card. I walked back happily to my cubicle after filling out a feedback form for the organizers and proudly displayed the 3D desktop features to my teammates.

Kudos to the entire team of volunteers and organizers of InstallFest and to Mayuresh Nirhali, Madhu K R, Moinak Ghosh, Pavan Chandrashekar & Pradhap Devarajan in particular!

If you're a serious IM user and have accounts with almost all the IM services, here's your dream solution to bring them all under one roof! And, guess what? You don't have to actually install the individual IM clients. Here's yet another proof to Sun's popular adage, "The network is the computer" - Meebo.

Just log on to Meebo and you have access to almost all the popular IM services - AIM, ICQ, Jabber, Yahoo, MSN & Google Talk.

Now, would anyone still want to "install" IM clients? Go ahead and get yourself Meeboed!

I'm enlightened!

Till this moment, I
* was in the idea that both Telnet and SSH were almost similar protocols.
* never knew Telnet transmitted all information as plain text, including sensitive information like passwords etc.!
* was unaware that SSH uses a very strong cryptography mechanism to shield the connection from possible hijackers & eavesdroppers.

Though there's a lot of debate going on about the "latency" and the "bandwidth hit" that comes along with using SSH, I guess those would make sense only if we're talking about a 33K or a 56K modem connection. With broadband connections of upto 1 Mbps being available so easily today, these questions of "latency" and "bandwidth hit" just don't arise! Even if it arises, I'm convinced that it's "pros" definitely outweigh its "cons".

It causes me jitters to even think of how faithfully I'd been using Telnet for around 3 years now without realizing the security threats it posed.

I've switched to SSH once for all. Is anyone going to talk to me about Telnet again? Ssssssssssssssh!

I ran a program that creates a start menu launcher on a GNOME desktop and after the program finished executing, started looking for the launcher in the Applications menu. I couldn't find it & initially thought that my program failed to create the launcher, but later discovered (accidentally) that the launcher was indeed created, but GNOME required a manual refresh either by a "logout and a re-login" or a "killall gnome-panel".

The same behaviour is observed in the Nautilus File Browser that shows a particular folder, when a file in that folder is being modified in another window.

Being a loyal and true supporter of the GNOME community, I only wish that small nice-to-have features like these are made available in its future versions.

Yes, I'm finally here! The place where I wanted to be when the first thoughts of blogging bubbled inside my brain; a place in the technical blogosphere. All it took to get here was some personal blogging exercise, you know, just to get a hang of the habit. With about 7 personal blog posts till date, I'm comfortable enough with blogging.

A quick intro about myself. I'm an engineer working out of India Engineering Centre, Bangalore, since Monday, the 19th of September, 2005 [I joined Sun having around 2.5 years of experience in Java EE technologies like EJBs & Servlets @ Hexaware Technologies, Chennai]. I'm part of a vibrant group of engineers working on a next-generation installation framework that is code-named Purple Haze. With goals like rolling out Java Enterprise System 6 with our installer & open-sourcing the installation framework, we're all set and focussed to make it happen.

Initially, I started off with working on the UI framework of Purple Haze and gained hands-on development experience in a couple of exciting open-source technologies like SwiXML and FreeMarker, besides designing custom UI components. Later, I moved on to work on MI5, a proof of concept for multi-install of Web Infrastructure Suite (Web Server, Application Server, Directory Server & Access Manager), while also working in parallel on bugs-fixing in Purple Haze.

MI5 gave me a wonderful opportunity to work on a cool feature of installation frameworks - Desktop Integration, by means of which shortcuts for desired targets of the installed product could be created in easily accessible areas like the user's desktop or the Start menu or Programs menu. I continue to work on this and believe me, it's been so much fun playing around with this stuff.

So, in this category, you can see me blog on topics related to SwiXML, FreeMarker, GNOME, Netbeans, Solaris, Java & ... err..., well, just anything technical.