Book review: Struts survival guide

From past couple of days I was looking for some book for struts(free pdf) which is good fun to read and refreshen up the whole concept and at the same time have good setup for examples which can be tried without much efforts.
I tried many which includes Struts live but was really disappointed by the quality of book, till I got this book,struts survival guide from Shrikant Shinoy. He has made it really interesting read and told quite practical problems which people in day to day face, and comes up with good setup of examples too :)

Eclipse 3.1 is out

Long time I waited for full support of J2SE 5.0 language changes in eclipse, Now Eclipse 3.1 is here. What's new?

Late in the Game: Sun Enters Laptop Game

Exactly when most big companies are trying to get out of desktop business and laptop business is at it all time high, Sun has entered laptop business, And good thing this time is that price is quite competitive, But again I think they missed current demand, which is full multimedia support, as even people they targeting(Scientist and engineers) keep tons of multimedia contents.

Slow but still sweet

I am getting this WIFI signal from my bed room window which is stopping me to take my own connection but sometimes it is too slow, wondering should I install a wifi signal booster or my own connection.

Church of XML

I was part of the discussion where someone was determined to remove X from AJAX, that means no xml in returned call ... He made few really strong comments in favour and requested/begged that we don't need to use it just to follow standards which are mistake by itself, and than this hilarious link came-up, I loved it :))

Church of XML
Have you ever felt that empty feeling inside, the feeling that something in your life is missing? If you have, then you probably don’t know about XML yet. XML is like all your dreams fulfilled; everything that seemed unrelated, coming together. See the light, taste the honey, enter the world of XML
Read complete here

Steve Jobs: 3 stories of life

I just now readed the Steve Jobs speach which he gave around a week back in Stanford uni.
He told 3 tails of his life, really interesting, highly suggested.

Looking at Ruby on rails and ajax

It is being really interesting to see how many web frameworks have been developed now(IBM WSBCC, struts, spring, tapestry, JSF) and sometimes I feel like a standardization is really needed in case of webframeworks also, But again I think, it is probably non-standardization probably which is driving this market largely, as different people in the world have really all different kindof needs and it is really not easy to standadize, okay I re-phrase it as standization is needed but not in the early stages, In early stages things should go wild and there should be good amount of competition between all of these frameworks.
Sometimes I feel how about merging some webframework with ajax? To me it sounds like a marriage made in heaven, But I wonder why anyone havn't done this. As even with ajax we can probably reduce the number of pages required in application but we will still have different pages, so we will still require some webframework to manage them.

Okay, it is being long day now ... :)

Tried a hack on ipod mini

I tried a old hack today on ipod mini
And it still works, here is how it looks after changing image




This hack was originally posted on ipod hackaday, can also be found here. For me firmware version was 3.2.4 on which I changed the images.

Online sight seeing

Multi tasking

--> Sipping a cappuccino in a SFO coffee bar
--> Having a cheese cake
--> Talking to my oldtime buddy on MSN(gog's) who is at unidentified location :))
--> And most important checking out googlesightseeing

Google sight seeing is really amazing hack which is build over google map, Surely this is a illegal and I have no doubt that this site will be soon down by googles legal team, oh yeah they have just successful in pulling down another very creative thing http://gmerge.2ni.net which again was build over google maps.
But again they might consider about sightseeing as to me this looks like a community tool where people are posting just some interesting photo's.

JBoss IDE giving me grief at the moment

It is being little long I really played with JBoss's eclipse IDE so decided to try what is latest in this organized shop, Latest one was JBossIDE-1.4.1-jre1.5-e31.zip so decided to give it a try, so downloaded latest eclipse also as it requires 3.1M4+ and I am still using 3.0x version.
Okay both are there, now I install and like always closed my eyes and expect it to work but get following error




Sometimes I believe they are best out there, but they still need to give that more fine touch and test there stuffs really well, Though they are still far better than even some commercial companies.
Also felt like saying, they still need to work little more in ease of read in documentation, like w/e you specify the changes in documents, please specify the changes highlighted and just below them specify the file name in which we need to change so that people who likes to try quickly can just see those blocks and can go ahead instead of reading the complete document.
But truth is, We always want more :)

Signaling thread about JVM exit

Last nite I was trying to make a small program which works something like Stop watch, I was trying to keep watch functionality totally different from presentation, Then suddenly I needed a way to "Signal thrad about JVM exit", Not sure if in past I ever needed it, but I was literally stuck kindof for a moment before I came up with 2 workarounds
1) Check for user exit event in GUI and signal thread for stopping.
2) Write a finalize method in thread container and make sure u stop thread in finalize.

But 2nd step will not work in scenario like JVM exit without doing any garbage collection, So leaving with only available option i.e. step 1.
But I wonder, What If you don't want to track of all the dynamic weak object references(having some worker thread in them) which are created and destroyed dynamically?
I am sure if we just exit the JVM it assures all threads are stopped, but what if you want to do something specifically only on JVM exit? I guess for this step 1 is the only way.

Battery FREE wireless mouse

Last nite I was surfing in a hardware shop, looking specifically for some USB mouse, wanted to avoid wireless as it requires batteries, and there I see this new innovative product it is a wireless mouse which don't need battery at all...at first glance I really picked up the product, Than was wondering why they are giving this mouse pad, and yes there is some wire inside, why it is for ? Than saw a demo of it ... okay it is battery free, and very light weight also, but catch is, it works only on the mousepad which they give, and this mousepad needs battery from your USB port, So it is actually battery FREE wireless mouse, BUT dependent on mousepad :)

Unfair preparation for jungle show to indian prime minister

Indian Prime minister went to a wildlife sanctuary and next day news come that he was lucky enough to spot a tigress during his visit, even he himself said this in press conference.
But no-one published and I wonder even Mr Prime Minister himself know that what is the background of him seeing this tigres, and how much preparation forest authority did to make sure he spot that tigres, and in this game which I will call unfair they even hurt tigres by separating with her kids, This news was present in a local hindi news paper (sorry for those who can't read hindi) but even this news paper is projecting like forest authority did some right work, Most surprising I feel about our ministers, who never tries to see what is the background of information or view they are seeing, they should go and see another side of coin too, if not often than atleast sometimes.

Here are my new dell laptop pics

Just after I got it delivered




After stripping this beautiful piece ... :)




Can't stop myself from saying good job to Michael Dell for this beautiful piece of art, I think dell is changing now from ugly piece of boxes to good design, Though still I would say they need to little better quality of plastic and not cheaper one, As it do start smelling once it become too hot
Here is the cnet review which really helped me alot to go for this.

Microsoft windows antispyware

Microsoft has recently launched a excellent tool called AntiSpyware I installed it couple of days back and it already started giving return,If any program during installation tries to copy itself in startup or run registry than this will warn you and you can decide whether you want it to allow or deny, Thus giving you better control of your system, by allowing only those services to run always which you really need them and not one which you hardly use once in a month.