Tuesday July 28, 2009 In the past, I blogged about Cricket (the sport and not the insect!) in this space. Once angry reader questioned me why I was writing that here. I guess people read my Sun blogs only tech. stuff. That is fine. So, I've revived my twitter login. I'll be posting my one liners (tech as well as non-tech) there. Longer posts on tech. (mostly Java, JavaFX) topics will continue here.
Tuesday December 23, 2008
I wanted to install Ubuntu on my PlayStation 3.
The installation was smooth except for one small issue - the installation seemed to hang in "Select and install software" step. After 6% the progress bar did not increase at all! Fortunately, this seems to be a known issue with text mode installer. Please refer to Ubuntu 8.10 release notes and bug 290234. I pressed Alt-F4 and Alt-F1 to toggle between logging console and main screen to check the progress. Eventually, the installation completed! While installing I configured network as well -- i.e., giving WEP password etc. -- not sure if this is mandatory, but in my case I have wireless connectivity and so I supplied the configuration values for the same.
sudo boot-game-os
[Settings] -> [System Settings] -> [Default System] -> [Other OS]
Friday June 27, 2008
I work from home in Chennai, India. There is maintenance power shutdown in my part of the city today [from 9.00 AM to 5.00 PM). I'm writing this blog from a Sun office in Apeejay Business Centre, Chennai. It is nice to be in an office after quite some time - at least as a change! But, I think I'd rather prefer to avoid travel, preparation to go office etc. every day 
Saturday July 28, 2007 I've been receiving many "wrong" calls these days. Apparently, there is a hospital with a telephone number starting with "2664". And my telephone number starts with "2446" and the rest of the digits are same! Looks like folks get confused and dial "44" instead of "66". I end up receiving calls to "Dr. XYZ" at odd times!! Now, I understand what doctors have to go though in their life. Our after working hour conference calls are lot better - at least our US friends understand time zone difficulties and schedule meetings around 8 AM west coast time (which is ~ 8.30 PM in India).
Monday July 09, 2007
One of the frequently asked questions to me is this: "do you know one Mr/Mrs/Ms/Dr XYZ at Sun Microsystems?". Invariably, I don't seem to know the person mentioned I tend to explain that Sun is a big company and it is not possible to know each and every engineer/manager/support staff and so on. And full time work-from-home does not help either - one gets even less chance to meet people I've to wait till next JavaOne/Sun Tech Days or some other event to meet my friends.
Monday June 18, 2007
There are many
Software Configuration Management (SCM) systems also called Revision Control Systems and trillion other names ....
Being a Sun employee, I've been using Teamware ever since I joined Sun. During the development of JDK 6, I became involved in integrating JSR-223 reference implementation (RI) code into JDK 6 (javax.script package and Rhino based JavaScript engine). During this effort, I had to learn CVS - because the RI code was kept in CVS repository.
In a recently started project, we have started using Subversion. I read The Subversion book. When I say I "read", I mean I read it just enough for working with a repository. I don't attempt to read to become an expert - I've not done that with Teamware either!
But, OpenSolaris uses Mercurial. Also, OpenJDK will use Mercurial. So, I woke up finally and started learning Mercurial I found the following resources very useful:
I hope I won't have to learn yet another SCM before 2015
Friday March 09, 2007
My blog is worth $30,485.16.
How much is your blog worth?
I do agree with Melanie Parsons Gao. I too leave my blog link in blog comments that I make! But, like Kevin, I'd love to know how to cash this 
Tuesday February 13, 2007
No, this is not about scratching head when your manager asks for status I'm talking about the M.I.T Scratch programming language which is based on Squeak. I just downloaded Windows version and played with it for sometime. My son played with it too! They have a very nice Getting Started Guide!
Saturday October 28, 2006
This morning my son (3 year old) was watching some video on my PC. He kept pressing keyword - suddenly the screen started looking like this...
I couldn't find how he managed to change (some) setting. Re-starting Windows didn't help. Kannan Balasubramanian helped me. Thanks Kannan! (Sustaining saves the day again!).
Steps to fix "tilted Windows":
For some reason, while Kannan was able to make it "Normal" and immediately view the change, I had to re-boot! Anyway, now it is "Normal"
Thursday July 27, 2006
I was in India Engineering Center, Bangalore for the last 3 days to attend the Global Technology Leadership Conference. Sun's Distinguished Engineers visited from the US. There were few Sun customers. And there were local tech. leads from Bangalore. It is good to know about various product offerings from Sun and to hear from the customers. I visited Banglore after quite some time (yes, I work from home @ Chennai). It is always a great pleasure to meet friends!
Solaris sustaining friends helped by installing Solaris Nevada on my Dell laptop - the trick was to install without disturbing the other OS in the laptop. Thanks to Venky T.V and friends! (sorry for not being exhaustive)
Met AppServer friends - Sahoo, Binod and Java sustaining friends (Kannan, Thilak...). We discussed many things - this is one thing that you miss with work-from-home - these informal face-to-face meetings/chat are great.
Monday January 10, 2005
I was reading on Apache Tapestry web application framework. It seems to me that the main advantage of Tapestry is this: HTML authors ("page designers") can use standard HTML editing tools and view the page in webbrowser -- without requiring any special edit tools and/or webserver along with that. Dynamic portions of HTML page are identified by a special attribute used with standard HTML tags. Because browsers ignore attributes that are not understood, these special attributes are ignored while viewing. Server side components replace/modify the tags with these special attribute to generate the dynamic content. This way, roles are very clearly separated. Page designers don't even need to know or use any special tags or scripts.
With JSP and JSTL, we can completely avoid scripts in dynamic web pages. But, still the dynamic webpages can't be edited/viewed with standard HTML editing tools/browser. We have to use a webserver. More importantly, page designer is not isolated from JSP tags. i.e., s/he needs to know/use JSP/JSTL tags for dynamic content.
How can we achieve Tapestry-like separation of concerns with JSP/JSTL model? I think that is where XSLT can help us. Page author uses standard XHTML editing tools and identifies dynamic portions of the page by special attributes (jsp:id?). Then, we transform the XHTML page using a XSL stylesheet. The XSLT sheet transforms the XHTML page into a JSP page. i.e., dynamic content writer writes a XSLT sheet that transforms page author's XHTML page into a JSP page. Contract b/w page designer and dynamic content author is list of special attributes and values of the same.
This transformation mentioned above can be done either at development time or at runtime. In development time transform, JSP generation occurs by a build step in ant or other make tool. The XHTML page is kept in the webapp only for future static content editing -- not for serving clients. In runtime transformation, XHTML page is translated by JSP page to put dynamic content in it at request time. We may use JSTL XML transformation tags in the JSP page (instead of XSLT). To make runtime XML manipulation faster, JSP container implementations may have to "inline" JSTL XML tags (i.e., specially compile JSTL XML tags instead of calling Tag classes) -- may be, generate XSLTC-like code in the resultant servlet? or is it possible to compile such a XSLT file (that transforms input XML into JSP) as a servlet directly?
Apart from separation of concerns, there is atleast 2 advantages I can see with this style.
Friday December 31, 2004 Chennai, India's leading telephone service provider BSNL has this site : http://chennai.bsnl.co.in. This site has directory search facility by which we can find number by name, number by address, name by number and so on. Very useful to search with incomplete information.
Tuesday December 28, 2004 http://www.tsunamihelp.blogspot.com/ has news and information about resources, aid, donations and volunteer efforts.
Monday December 27, 2004 Tsunami hits south asia. I stay in Chennai. On saturday, I was in a beach resort - enjoying 11'th year re-union after graduation. Just the very next day, the east coast got washed away. Death toll seems increasing continuosly :-(
Thursday December 23, 2004 
