..bits & bytes teleported

Wednesday Nov 19, 2008

NetBeans 6.5 and NetBeans IDE for Python EA

Hi Folks

NetBeans 6.5 is out and even greater news is that the NetBeans IDE for Python EA is out. Wow

Congrats to Alley, Tor, Ted and all others (yours truly as well

) involved in Python development! Its a 27 MB download.

Download:

Python

The Python development effort is being tracked at http://wiki.netbeans.org/Python. Feel free to join us. Share with us our early experiences. Feel something is missing from the Help sets? Want to show a way out? Contribute to the NetBeans Community Docs

See you there!

Posted at 07:42PM Nov 19, 2008 by Amit in NetBeans | Permalink

Sunday Nov 16, 2008

Terracotta

It was a nice experience to hear about Terracotta from Tanay at the BOJUG meet yesterday.Tanay also raffled a copy of Terracotta: The Definitive Guide to the group.

PS: If you are interested in talking to a dynamic group of Java folks, let me know

Posted at 08:02PM Nov 16, 2008 by Amit in BOJUG | Permalink

Saturday Nov 15, 2008

MySQL: Introducción Características Beneficios

Antonio Carlos González Cabrera, of the University of Spain has kindly sent me the Spanish translation of the slides I used for a session on MySQL couple of days back. Antonio is going to use the slides in his database class.

Thanks Antonio!

Here is the slide deck: http://amitsaha.in.googlepages.com/MySQL-Intro-features-benefits-SPANIS.ppt

Posted at 03:11PM Nov 15, 2008 by Amit in MySQL | Permalink

Friday Nov 14, 2008

BOJUG November Meet

Hi Folks!

We have the BOJUG meet tomorrow- November 15th, 2008. Details here at http://groups.google.com/group/bojug/browse_thread/thread/487ee99b0975e5d4

We feel great to have Tanay from Terracotta, Inc. speaking to us tomorrow!
If you are a Java guy in Bangalore, do not miss this.

PS: We are working out on a solution to stream the meet via Giss.tv accessible here at http://giss.tv/interface/?mp=bojug.ogg

If we get it working, it will be a last minute announcement this time, but from next time on it will be a regular feature. Any other free Audio/Video conferencing system you know of and would recommend? I was checking out DimDim, but could not find a way out to use the Audio/Video. Any ideas?

Posted at 05:48PM Nov 14, 2008 by Amit in BOJUG | Comments[2] | Permalink

Building MySQL from a Bazaar Checkout on OpenSolaris

This document here details on how you can do a checkout and build the MySQL codebase from the Bazaar repository.

Some additional points for OpenSolaris 2008.11 :

When you execute $ BUILD/autorun.sh, you might get errors complaining of 'aclocal' and 'automake' not found:


BUILD/autorun.sh[23]: aclocal: not found [No such file or directory]
Can't execute aclocal

Checking for the autotools, I found that 'aclocal' and 'automake' was installed in /usr/bin, as the following binaries:


/usr/bin/aclocal-1.10:	executable /usr/perl5/bin/perl script
/usr/bin/aclocal-1.9:	executable /usr/perl5/bin/perl script

and similarly for 'automake'.

To get around the errors, just create a symbolic link to any of the binaries with the name 'aclocal' in /usr/bin:

$ pfexec ln -s /usr/bin/aclocal-1.10 /usr/bin/aclocal

Now, it should work fine.

Posted at 01:52PM Nov 14, 2008 by Amit in MySQL | Permalink

Thursday Nov 13, 2008

MySQL University: MySQL and OpenSolaris

Entered 50 minute late (thanks to a wrong timezone calculation) into the MySQL University Session: MySQL and OpenSolaris by Martin MC Brown.

Incase you have missed it altogether, go grab the slides from the Wiki page.

Future and past univesity sessions are listed here at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQL_University

Posted at 08:38PM Nov 13, 2008 by Amit in MySQL | Permalink

Python for NetBeans EA Coming Soon

Just read from Alley's blog post that, EA release of Python support for NetBeans is going be released alongwith NetBeans 6.5. Great news!

This is the first NetBeans product release I am going to be associated with. Wow

Posted at 10:18AM Nov 13, 2008 by Amit in NetBeans | Comments[2] | Permalink

Tuesday Nov 11, 2008

MySQL: Introduction, Features and Benefits

I took a 1-hour long session (was supposed to be 2 hours, but my planned agenda was exhausted) for students of engineering colleges across Karnataka studying in colleges under VTU. The session was delivered via EDUSAT under the Sun Microsystems- VTU EDUSAT e-learning programme.

It was fun. However, the fact that there was no interaction with the students felt a little dumb. (I was speaking on the camera which was beamed live)

These are my slides:

http://blogs.sun.com/amitsaha/resource/MySQL/MySQL-Intro-features-benefits.pdf

I also put together a short Quiz for them:

http://blogs.sun.com/amitsaha/resource/MySQL/MySQL-quiz.pdf

While preparing the slides, the basic fact that I kept in mind was market MySQL to the students and the teachers so that they start using it in their classes instead of expensive, proprietary databases. This perhaps is the biggest challenge for MySQL- to be adopted in educational institutions in India where the use of other databases is a norm for years.

Posted at 07:35PM Nov 11, 2008 by Amit in MySQL | Permalink

Monday Nov 10, 2008

Terminator

Discovered a neat terminal emulator- Terminator while going through the OpenSolaris 2008.11 package manager.

Think about Draggable, Resizable, Horizontal and Vertically-splittable terminals.

Found its available on Linux, as well. Cool.

Posted at 03:38PM Nov 10, 2008 by Amit in Unix | Comments[1] | Permalink

Saturday Nov 08, 2008

OpenSolaris 2008.11 on Ubuntu 8.10 using Sun xVM VirtualBox

Release Candidate of OpenSolaris 2008.11 is out. We shall take it for a spin using Sun xVM VirtualBox 2.0 on Ubuntu 8.10.

Download the OpenSolaris 2008.11 RC1 ISO from here:

Create a new Virtual Machine using VirtualBox with the main points of the configuration, as follows:

Make sure you set up your VM to boot from the ISO you just downloaded
I have allocated ~ 1.5 GB of primary memory to OpenSolaris. You may give more, or less (1 GB is recommended)
I have allocated a Virtual Hard disk of 21 GB. You may use less, depending on your usage. OpenSolaris 2008.11 when installed takes about ~ 2.5 GB of disk space
I want to use my USB devices on OpenSolaris, so I have enabled them. You may *not* enable them

Start the VirtualBox and you will be greeted with the GRUB boot menu. Select the first option:

The Live session is now ready for use:

To start the installation, Double-Click on the 'Install OpenSolaris' Desktop icon. The installer starts, showing the current disks available. Select the one you want to use and also choose the mode of partitioning. I am using: Use the whole disk.

Then, in a next step you will have to provide access credentials:

The installation process should now start and enjoy the eye-candy tour of the various features:

Time-Slider:

The installation finishes up after sometime, and you are asked to reboot:

On reboot, you will be pleasantly surprised to see the white characters on black screen no more there. What you see is a cool blue background with a progress indicator in the foreground:

After you are done logging in at the GDM, your OpenSolaris session is ready to use:

VirtualBox Guest Additions:

To get the Full Screen mode working properly and better mouse integration, install the VirtualBox Guest Additions:

Go to Devices > Mount CD/DVD ROM Image and Add the VirtualBox Guest Additions ISO
It will be mounted under /media/VBOX-*
Navigate to that directory, and do: pfexec pkgadd -d VBoxSolarisAdditions.pkg

Posted at 11:30AM Nov 08, 2008 by Amit in Solaris | Comments[6] | Permalink

Power Editing

Due to necessity, off-late I have had to increasingly use Vi in text mode over a SSH connection on a Unix box. I have already picked up some Vi skills, ones I didn't know before, or to be put in a better way- never bothered to. I am using Regular Expressions more than I ever did.

Today morning, I just read the chapter on: The Basic Tools, from The Pragmatic Programmer and in the section on 'Power Editing', the authors talk about your personal toolkit's editor of choice.

Just reading this Slashdot article http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/11/06/206213&tid=185

All falling in place. The Universe is conspiring (for the better) to hone my text mode Unix skills. Amen.

Posted at 09:56AM Nov 08, 2008 by Amit in Programming | Permalink

Tuesday Nov 04, 2008

NetBeans IDE Beta Certification Exam

I took the NetBeans IDE Beta certification exam today.

Just as NetBeans IDE Betas are, the exam went on smoothly, with no bugs except for a few typos here and there (which I commented).

I answered some dilligently and some intelligent guesses

. Too bad, there was no Coffee in the exam centre. I finished the paper in 60 minutes!

6 weeks to get the results

Posted at 03:19PM Nov 04, 2008 by Amit in NetBeans | Permalink

Monday Nov 03, 2008

Exploring Scalable Data Processing with Apache Hadoop

I had the opportunity to review the article -Exploring Scalable Data Processing with Apache Hadoop- by Tom Wheeler, which is now published.

Posted at 09:44AM Nov 03, 2008 by Amit in Technologies | Comments[1] | Permalink

Friday Oct 31, 2008

Articles: Google Chrome, Code For Freedom

The November, 2008 issue of Linux For You, carries two of my articles:

Google Chrome: A Fresh Take On Browsers
Are you ready to Code For Freedom? (PDF)

Go Grab it if you are in India!

Posted at 07:03AM Oct 31, 2008 by Amit in Personal | Permalink

Thursday Oct 30, 2008

NetBeans 6.5 RC 2

The second Release Candidate of NetBeans IDE 6.5 is now available. The release is also multilingual—downloads are available in Japanese, Simplified Chinese, and Brazilian Portuguese.

Posted at 03:59PM Oct 30, 2008 by Amit in NetBeans | Permalink

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About

I am Amit Saha and worked for Sun Microsystems, India from May, 2008 till July, 2009 in the India Engineering Center (IEC).

This weblog is a compilation of bits on OpenSolaris, Linux, NetBeans, Java, Python, MySQL and other miscellaneous related and sometimes, unrelated topics.

Contact:amitsaha.in@gmail.com

Disclaimer

All news/views/opinions expressed in all these posts are purely mine and not of my employer. Mistakes/Controversial Comments are all mine.