What? Another blog? Why ?

Over the past few years, as part of my college and outside, I managed to read some very interesting books and some cool stuff managed to stick in my brain. A few of them got retained in few notebooks and evernotes - all of which are terribly difficult to find when you need them. So, I decided to take a deliberate attempt to take some time and log all the most interesting information in an organized manner. And in the process of doing so, I don’t want to be a selfish @$$. So, here you go. http://rerun.me

So, what’s up with arunma.com?

Oh. Yeah. I am still unsure of how I am going to use this one. Now that all my mail ids are bound by google apps, I can’t shut it down (Frankly, I don’t want to). Few of the options that I could think of is to start whining about life or how great my family is. One of my friends was suggesting that I write an autobiography (huh??!!!). Just kidding.

As always, my ideas are dumb. Mail yours to arun AT arunma.com

So, if your problem as stated here is this

The network folder specified is currently mapped using a different user name and password. To connect using a different user name and password, first disconnect any existing mappings to this network share.

and this

Multiple connections to a server or shared resource by the same user, using more than one user name, are not allowed. Disconnect all previous connections to the server or shared resource and try again.

then all you have to do is this

1) Open your Run window or Hit Window+R and type cmd. That should open your command window.

2) Type net use as in

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C:\Users\Jason>net use
New connections will be remembered.


Status       Local     Remote                    Network

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
OK                     \\192.168.1.7\IPC$        Microsoft Windows Network
The command completed successfully.

3) Type net use /delete <your serverpath\sharedfoldername> as in

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C:\Users\Jason>net use /delete \\192.168.1.7\IPC$
\\192.168.1.7\IPC$ was deleted successfully.

Now, try reconnecting.

I am still experimenting with octopress and don’t know how to trackback to the original source. Apologies.

There are some which I misunderstood or realised had few other interesting implementations or forgot they even existed.

Now, comparing and contrasting design patterns is a funny task when all my struggle goes into remembering them.

I have been using mindmaps lately to help organize my thoughts and thought I’ll convert few design patterns into maps. Hope you would find it useful too.

Click to see the full web optimized image. Mail me/Drop a comment for a bigger one or the iMindmap file.

MindMap

Implementation

This implementation snippet is from my college CA task. The idea is to read a property file and create new instances of Coin objects. The CashPropertyLoader uses the StoreObjectFactory to clone and initialize the Coin object. Both these methods are available in the Coin object. The StoreObjectFactory also uses a StoreObjectRegistry to cache the prototypes. The StoreObjectRegistry acts as the prototype manager

Class Diagram

Cash Property Loader

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 public CashStoreItem getItem(int idx){
  
      CashStoreItem   cit;

      Map<String,String> params=new HashMap<String, String>();
  
      String  item, itemv;

      item = new String("Name" + idx);
      itemv = getValue(item);
      params.put("name", itemv);
  
      item = new String("Weight" + idx);
      itemv = getValue(item);
      params.put("weight", itemv);

      item = new String("Value" + idx);
      itemv = getValue(item);
      params.put("value", itemv);
  
      Coin coin = (Coin)StoreObjectRegistry.lookup(StoreObjectEnum.COIN);
      coin.initialize(params);
  
      System.out.println("ToString" +("Idx :"+idx+ "\nCoin "+coin));

      item = new String("Quantity" + idx);
      itemv = getValue(item);

      cit = new CashStoreItem(coin, Integer.parseInt(itemv));
      //System.out.println("ToString" +("Idx :"+idx+ "\nCashstore item "+cit));
  
      return cit;
  }

StoreObjectRegistry

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public class StoreObjectRegistry {

  private static Map<StoreObjectEnum, StoreObject> storeObjectRegistry=new HashMap<StoreObjectEnum, StoreObject>();
  
  public static StoreObject lookup(StoreObjectEnum storeObjecType)  {
      
      StoreObject storeObject=null;
      
      try {
          StoreObject storeObjectImpl=null;
          
          switch(storeObjecType){
              
              case COIN:
                  storeObjectImpl=new Coin();
                  break;
                  
              case DRINK:
                  storeObjectImpl=new DrinksBrand();
                  break;
              }
              
              if (storeObjectImpl!=null){
                  storeObjectRegistry.put(storeObjecType, storeObjectImpl);  
              }
              else{
                  System.err.println("Store Object Implementation could not be resolved. Please check your store object type and store object mapping");
              }
              
              storeObject =(StoreObject)storeObjectRegistry.get(storeObjecType).clone();
          
      } catch (CloneNotSupportedException e) {
          e.printStackTrace();
      }
      return storeObject;
      
  }
  
}

StoreObject

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public void initialize(Map<String, String> params){

      ArrayList<Field> fieldsList=new ArrayList<Field>();
      addDeclaredAndInheritedFields(this.getClass(), fieldsList);
      
      for (Field field : fieldsList) {
          
          field.setAccessible(true);
          
          if (params.get(field.getName())==null){
              continue;
          }
          try {

               if (field.getType() == boolean.class) {
                  
                  field.setBoolean(this, new Boolean(params.get(field.getName())));
                  
              } else if (field.getType() == int.class) {
                  
                  field.setInt(this,Integer.parseInt(params.get(field.getName())));
                  
              } else if (field.getType() == double.class) {
                  field.setDouble(this,Double.parseDouble(params.get(field.getName() )));
                  
              } else {
                  field.set(this,params.get(field.getName()));
              }
          } catch (Exception e) {
              e.printStackTrace();
              System.out.println("Unable to map field : " + field.getName());
              e.printStackTrace();
          }
      }
      
    }


    private static void addDeclaredAndInheritedFields(Class c, List<Field> fields) {
      
        fields.addAll(Arrays.asList(c.getDeclaredFields()));
        Class superClass = c.getSuperclass();
        if (superClass != null) {
            addDeclaredAndInheritedFields(superClass, fields);
        }
    }

    public Object clone() throws CloneNotSupportedException {
        return super.clone();
    }

http://ashenfad.blogspot.com/2011/01/hadoop-cluster-on-ec2-using- cloudera.html

Alright let me tell the background of why would anyone touch Swing in 2011 unless they are maintaining a legacy JNLP talking to MQ backed by Pro-C to Oracle (btw, that combo is a real working application in Verizon).  As you know, I am taking this postgrad in Software engineering and one of the core modules is Java.  As part of the module, each group were given an small application to build using only the vanilla JDK.  No external libraries. Sounded simple initially but the project was a real eye opener at so many levels.

Don’t forget the basics :

The assignment project was JDK alone.  Over the years, I started taking the value of open source libraries for granted.  Say, log4j, commons-lang, collections, xml parsers or even an RDBMS database.  While it was funny to notice how dependent I’ve become on many of these libraries, it was very interesting to write your own and really challenging to keep the code decently readable.  So, next time I blame a framework for bad design,  I have this project to bring me down to earth.  One thing that I realised is that if your creativity is “in the flow”, you dont want to get disturbed by design constraints.  Resisting the temptation and still sticking on to a good design is a hard thing to do but you have to do it for the sake of the psychopath programmer.

Team work and delegation :

All developers are loners.  They think that they do their best when alone.  I am no exception.  However, being a part of a team and pulling each other up is real fun.  Understanding what each person is good at and adjusting your tasks according to that is real art.  We had humble beginnings - I could work only one day of the weekend but when code started pouring in, I could see what synergy really means.  It’s like the story of the stone soup. No wonder the best projects in the world are delivered by groups.

Time management :

This year (even from the close of last year),  day job has been super crazy. May be that is the reason they call it a deadline.  You really have to die to finish the project on time.  This project really means a lot to me, my team and the entire center. Working 80+ hours in the week is already taxing.   That killed the 2011 resolution right from the first week - Weekends only for personal projects and experiments.   And with the MTech, family and learning hadoop and flex, I had to do something to manage time.  Like my mentor used to say, you can’t manage time, you can just manage priorities.  I don’t have a choice at office.  I can’t do badly on MTech. If I do badly on the core module, I am out of the course.  Call it a horrible decision, but I decided to send my family on vacation to India (that was 2 months ago and they are coming back next week. I am super excited).  I’ll be learning Hadoop and cloud as part of my elective module in May.  So, pause on my hadoop/solr/lucene projects until then (trust me, they are really addictive).  Now that I have a little free time on the trains and before bed, I am currently learning Flex in what I would like to call “micro-installments”.  I am taking the Flex in a week course for the past month and still I am on Day 2 of the course.  I think I am taking “It doesn’t matter how slow you go as long as you don’t stop”, a little too seriously.  So, why am I learning flex now?  You’ll see.

All things are difficult before they are easy :

Being aware of your weakness is good.  Even better is to minimize the intensity of the weakness - from scary to manageable.  I was really worried when the front end is supposed to be on Swing and Swing gave me nightmares in 2003.  So, after designing and coding the back end of the project, I still wanted to give swing a try.  Surprisingly, I actually managed to pull it off. It is not that bad….  Ah who am I kidding. I was horrible but Google’s window builder made my job way way easier.  For some reason, I found it much better than Netbeans Matisse.  I pulled up a couple of JTables and did some fancy stuff on it. (Swing developers, please dont laugh at me).

Over all, this year has now personally rated the toughest year in the past 10 years.  Like they say, when the going gets tough, the tough gets rough (whoaa that’s a little too much boasting even for me).

1)  log4j XML Layout is not a good idea for our requirement.  I really dont want to spend time on parsing about 100 XMLs every second.  That is a lot of time even for a StAX based Woodstox.  So, I just extended log4j layout and over-rid a couple of methods to create a JSON Layout.

2)  Using Jackson Streaming API to parse the JSON string from the Layout opened my eyes.  There were too many external dependency libraries (jackson, solrj and their dependent jars) that I was adding on to the application which ultimately will all go to the host application.  That is totally insane.

So, I figured out that way to go is to use

1) log4j JMS appender to put JSON strings into

2) Active MQ running on a app server running Solr.

I am hoping that this should give us the following benefits :

1) No complications on the host application. (copying libraries, classloader issues with library version incompatibility etc)

2) Non-log4j based java applications and non-java applications could use one of the various connectivity options available with ActiveMQ to put messages into its queue.

http://activemq.apache.org/connectivity.html

3)  Extension and replacing the layout and message parsing.

4)  Solr Document construction and the interface (initial version will still be on SolrJ) can be customized.

This weekend should be pretty awesome then.

1) search the logs and the display the previous and the next 50 lines or so and

2) tail the logs

Being awful on front ends, I am trying to cookup something with GWT (a prototype version). I am planning to host the project on googlecode under ASL.

Greatly appreciate if you could throw some insights on

1) Whether it makes sense to create a project like this ?

2) Is using Solr for this an overkill?

3) Any suggestions on web framework/tool which will help me build a tab-based front end for tailing.

I owe you guys. Thanks.

So, please watch out for the updates.  I will try my best to make it regular and useful.

I wanted to restart but unfortunately the Ctrl+Alt+Delete doesnt work on my Mac the way it is intended to. After a lot of struggle, I managed to open a command window and hit ”shutdown -r”.  Does the job.

hint: specify index/type/name arguments for simple parameters to avoid type ambiguities

I was breaking my head for a while only to find later that my config XML is not even in the classpath. You can find the configuration below

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<bean id="xmlConfig"> <constructor-arg type="java.net.URL" value="classpath:alert-config.xml" />
<property name="reloadingStrategy"/>
</bean>

<bean id="alertConfig"> <property name="xmlConfig" ref="xmlConfig"></property>
</bean>

If you think 120 million is a lot, think about this :

1)      HTML5 will run against VP8 which means that Apple cannot say no to supporting it now.  All browsers have to support a STANDARD called HTML5. This will destroy Apple’s ecosystem.

2)      Google is now praised by all the open source circles.. This translates to lots of community building around its Android mobile platform.  (not to mention the huge disappointment with the selection procedure for Apple store)

3)      VP8 open sourcing would mean that Linux will now ship with VP8 out of the box.  This means that all the linux/freebsd users will now have a soft corner for Google and its products in general.  Interestingly, Google Chrome 5 which was released yesterday suddenly ate a good percentage from Firefox. Since “early adopters” primarily come from the open source circles, this would mean unconditional support for Google products from now.

4)      Sun Microsystems always had a very friendly name in the technology circles.  Now that it is dead and Oracle failed to fill in the “good Samaritan” role, Google tries to adjust its feet to its shoes.

Bottom line :   Business, all along.

What do you think? Leave your comments.

A couple of weeks back, I read a blog about Thecus NAS drives and immediately wanted to buy one.  I wanted to own it on that very day.  Then the pressure built so much that I had to sit and let it mellow.  I googled.

The noise level of most Thecus drives was a huge turn off considering the high probability of getting murdered by my wife (I fondly remember the days when my desktop was louder than an average car on the road).  Netgear NVX and NV+ series were good but they are a bit pricey for the features they offer.

Forgot to mention that my drives will be primarily used for storage and as a torrent slave.  I will also be running a few services like Photo manager, Tomcat, iTunes (more services depends on the success in setting up DDNS) . If it helps, I dont use windows at home (mac and linux) and I am planning for a RAID 5 setup.

So, I decided to get either the Synology of the Qnap drives.  Synology 1010 and Qnap 459 were my choices after long hours of search. These were the points that I considered.

1)   Buy an Intel Atom based drive because of the support for a variety of software packages.

2)

QNAP models TS-459, 659, 859

• high overall performance + supports scheduled power on and off - no RAID 10 support - no hybrid RAID functionality - storage cannot be expanded with a companion unit (# drivebays is max, you could buy a 2nd unit of course or use one of the many ports) - No biggie (I backup using my USB drives) + has 5 USB 2.0 ports + has 2 eSATA ports + volume based encryption + built-in DHCP server
• handy LCD display + USB Copy function on the frontpanel + supports the EXT4 filesystem (> 16 TB volumes) + supports WebDAV + advanced iSCSI support + all the drives are lockable with a key + in general, no problem with downgrading of firmware - one year guarantee + great build quality + already much experience, add-on software and models available on x86 platform

Synology DS 1010+

• only supports scheduled power off + RAID 10 support + hybrid RAID functionality (SHR) + storage can be expanded (with the extra 5 drivebays case, however will eSATA connection become bottleneck?) - has 4 USB 2.0 ports
• has 1 eSATA port + folder based encryption - no built-in DHCP server - no LCD display - no USB Copy function on the front - no EXT4 filesystem support (volumes > 16 TB volume will not be possible) - no WebDAV support - less advanced iSCSI support - the drives are not lockable with a key - in general, very problematic to downgrade firmware - less models, less choice + three years guarantee - build quality is not as good as QNAP - first model based on x86 platform

Source : http://forums.smallnetbuilder.com/showthread.php?t=2855

3)  At the end of the read, I wanted to go for one of those Qnap drives - 459, 509 or 659. 659 was way above my budget but I wanted to keep it in the background because it had support for 6 drives and I can always buy 4 drives in the beginning and fill up the other drives on need basis.

Later, I read that RAID is not a backup (did i say that I am totally new to RAID and the whole world of NAS drives) and does not guarantee dataloss and that I will need to have another plan for backup. I then decided to use my USB drives for the important backups (mostly my son’s photos and videos).  So, it doesnt make any sense to buy a 659 for an extra 600 SGD. May be later, I can always go for another NAS for an extra 200 SGD and have it as a backup.

So, 509 and 459. 459 had an Atom Dual core processor and 509 had a Celeron processor. The best part about 509, though, is that you can upgrade the processor to something big (say, Core2Duo) but I always have the fear to open up my system after i burnt a couple of RAMs on my first desktop (a 16 MB was a 100 USD then. that burnt a lot of my fingers) and I found very few people upgrading their processor on a 509.  So, 459 it is.

Hard drives :

Then comes the problem about hard-drives. I wanted to buy the Seagate 1.5 TB 7200.11 or any other 2 TB drives so that i can make a good 6 TB out of my 4 slot 459 (2 TB gone for parity).  Later, I found that the 1.5 TBs are notoriously fault prone. The WD Caviar Greens play horribly with Qnaps (Google “site:forum.qnap.com Caviar Green”) and so are most of the other WD drives. The Caviar blacks 1 TB are excellent drives despite their noise level but some say that the noise and the clicks are that not that troublesome. schumaku from the forum is known for his expertise in harddrives. He was suggesting not to buy the highest capacity of any drive - they are known to create the highest number of problems.

Most were complaining that Seagates gave a lot of problem and they had various problems with different drives and that they were unlucky.  (my luck factor is near to zero). I never wanted to take any risk.

The Hitachi Ultrastar A7K2000 is the best for Qnap drives. Everybody agrees to it but at 513 SGD for a 2 TB, I’ll give it a pass. Finally, I decided to go for Samsung drives F1 or F3.  They say that F3s should work very well but I dont see them on the Qnap compatibility list (http://www.qnap.com/pro_compatibility.asp).  So, here is my final configuration.

NAS :

Qnap 459 Pro (Intel Atom D510 1.66 GHz (Dual-Core) - RAM - 1GB DDRII (I might end up upgrading the RAM alone))

HDD:

4 * 1 TB (RAID 5) - Samsung Spinpoint F1 HE103UJ (buying RAID Class depends on availability)

It is saddening to leave CS.  Thankfully, it is not the “invariably saddening” kind.  I have nothing to repent.  In fact, the past couple of years taught a lot about confidence, communication, trust and that there is a time for everything.  CS is really a wonderful place to work.  Peaceful, organized and balanced.

Two years ago, I came here as a lonely man. Nobody to talk to.  But today, It is a wonderful feeling to see that all my friends came together to host a farewell lunch for me.   What did i do to them? Nothing.   You bet, I will miss all of them.   From Monday, I can’t meet them personally too often as I do today but then I learnt from life that long distance relationship don’t work, unless the relationship is friendship.

See you around.

1)    Keep an uniform font for the resume. I see a lot of profiles with different fonts spilled all over. Using italics and bold to highlight is fine but different fonts irritate the eyes.

2)    Tabulate the professional experience, education and skillsets.  I understand that it is a bad idea to tabulate when you wanted to pass the profile as plain text.  But AFAIK, doc and pdf are the standard formats i have circulated my CV as (I am a big fan of Pareto).

You will be shocked to know that the consultants take no more than 5-10 seconds to process your resume for a position (i saw it myself). Nobody except you is interested in reading the entire profile.

3)    Highlight your prominent skillsets and be precise. You are trying to sell your profile to a technical person and he will be interested in knowing the version of software you are experienced in. Spring and Java doesnt convey anything. How about Spring 2.0 or Java 1.5 or even better Concurrency API in Java 1.5?

4)    Trust me, this is not going to help —

Responsible for: Team Management, Project Management, Co-ordination with clients and Production Support.

Explain in detail your role in the project. Highlight your achievements. something like… “being a co-developer and team manager, i was involved in full development of the case folder module”.. or whatever. Please don’t lie. Sooner of later, they will find out. Just be more detailed in what exactly you did.

Highlight your expertise. If you are a developer, highlight your development experience. Highlight the various technologies you have worked in. Show the depth of your experience.  Having a tabulated list of the technology against the experience (in months) is not a bad idea.

Tally your years of experience with your expertise. Mentioning that you are into team leading and project management and have lost touch of development when you have less than 5 years experience makes no sense at all. If you are applying for a programmer role, let your resume show it.

5)    Put in an “Achievement” section and highlight only the relevant achievements - both academic and work related. People will be very much interested in looking at it.

6)    Update your skillset. Resolve to learn at least one new technology (or get expert knowledge in the known one) every couple of months. Learn a new language every year.  Not all technologies and languages will suit your taste. And you can’t develop a taste for something which you have never tried even once.

Choose essential and related skill sets: Come on, you and I know that VSS doesnt tally well with a Java developer. Gain experience in SVN at the minimum and  a DVCS (git for example) going forward. Knowledge of the automated testing frameworks (JUnit to start with) is a must.

7)    Read a lot of books or atleast the minimum needed, have a pet project (even better, involve in an open source project) and highlight it on your resume. It shows that you have lots of passion for your work.

Feel free to drop in a comment if you feel the need to add more to the list.

-better-developer/

I fondly remember the first 4 months in ML India when working till 2 AM is almost a daily event. What the heck. I am awake till 2 AM even here in Singapore fighting with the code. I love programming and i’ll do it till death does us apart. That’s right, ML is aggressive but so am I.

Now that everything is settled and I have a definite and promising road in front of me, I am resuming my work on the personal projects - our lunarcodes.

I wanted to write an app which indexes all the ebooks, movies and songs on my machine and use amazon or google or any other webservice to fetch meta information about them - including the cover pictures, popularity, reviews and any other information that could be possibly useful. I seriously dont want a bloated webapp for this. A pretty SWT/Swing would be great. Flex would be brilliant but AFAIK i dont see any good search and index libraries for Flex. Flex and Java would require a server running which I dont want to. Python, on the other hand, has Lucene extensions and has good web service support too but felt that nothing would come close to using the original lucene libraries instead of extensions.

Ah… i really love this year.

Here is the link

http://www.varesano.net/blog/fabio/installing+flash+player+plugin+firefox+wit hout+having+administrator+access+or+premissions

Works great with Firefox 3.x

fox+without+having+administrator+access+or+premissions

But here comes the spoiler. As i entered the train, i saw one young chinese woman with a very small kid in hand STANDING near the door in front of the priority seat. I was amazed and eager to see who has more priority to sit in the seat if this woman does not. To my shock and dismay i found a young local sitting and doing the “sleep act”. He looked up and saw the woman with the kid and then just continued. I was petrified.

Yes. Curse me all you want. I didnt have the balls to ask him to offer the seat but an Indian woman nearby called him and requested him. The guy was ignoring the first couple of requests and when the Indian woman touched him gently and asked him, the guy was “CANT YOU SEE THAT I AM A LITTLE BUSY”. WHAT the hell??? BUSY? really? For God’s sake he is sleeping on a freaking priority seat. I thought the woman had the right to be seated. The North-East line just went a little further to mark the seat as “Reserved Seat” just so that these morons be a little more sensible. I was so shocked and couldnt even read a single line out of my book after that wondering “can somebody be this rude?”.

I can’t now help think of my middle aged aunt in India who underwent uterus removal 5 years ago. Post-surgery she got a tummy which gave her the “pregnant look”. She used to joke telling that everytime she got into a bus she was offered a seat. If you are not aware, Indian buses are jam packed. She also used to say that she gently refuses the offer (and sometimes even shout if they still insist).

I am definitely not blaming the entire singaporean community. I have seen very generous and wonderful human beings here. I have seen middle-aged women offer seats to my wife even when we had our kid on a pram. I have seen lots of young girls and guys promptly offer seats to the elderly. But there are the sleepers too.. who simply cannot be woken up.

I just hope that the discourteous few prevent the contagious coma from spreading. (And i just hope that i can sleep tonight without feeling guilty that i didn’t do anything about it)

So, here are the upcoming tasks in the Java version :

1) SMS Service : SMS service is not a part of the the system right now. Implement SMS service into fej2me through Google Voice account

2) Encryption : The config.xml used in the project has plaintext “mail id and password”.  I was thinking on the lines of AES having an external private key stored in a non-project folder without which the password hash would not make any sense.

3) Use JavaMail instead of Commons Email : I happen to use Apache Commons email instead of for sending mails (SMTP) because it looked simple. But later i realised that we cant attach streams. What i am currently doing is that i am attaching an URL directly to the email like

emailAttachment.setURL(new URL(http://www.google.com));

which is good for our current needs but will limit our options. Plain JavaMail on the other hand will use a DataSource which will give us a lot of options.

4) Apache HttpClient : As of now, the URL is directly attached to the email. What if the target URL is down or isnt even an URL. We would want to use HttpClient to ping the URL and check whether the status code returned is 200.

5) Search functionality using Google AJAX search and JSON : Google search or Wiki search (idea by Rajesh) is not a part of the system right now. Need to use Google Ajax API and JSON to pull data from Google. Please refer to http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/documentation/

You might get some additional ideas on Book search, Movie search from the following URL (Idea by Dinesh)

http://code.google.com/apis/ajax/playground/#hello_world

6) Interactive browsing using Apache HttpUtils (functionality similar to Mechanize/Beautiful soup) : Use HttpUtils/HttpClient to simulate user browsing with Java. This will open a whole world of accessing authenticated systems.

7) Recurring updates using Quartz scheduler : Everybody would like to have recurring updates from sites, say like cricinfo or nseindia. users should be able to set a recurring job with us and get updates. something like.. “between 1 pm and 8 pm, get updates from http://www.cricinfo.com/nzvpak2009/engine/current/match/423780.html” every 1 minute”. we should enable persisted scheduling using a backend database (which is also available with quartz)

8) Multithreaded processing : Currently, the processing and handling of requests is sequential. We have to think about exploiting ThreadPool API to process multiple requests.

9) Quartz scheduler with BigTable/HBase : This is totally optional, but somebody is yet to come up with a Quartz scheduler extension using the backend as HBase. May be… may be… we could think of that. Though, HBase is good for large data, it is still an idea worth considering. Optionally, if we have a need to store large data into our systems, we could consider HBase.. Just for the fun of it.

So, this is the plan i came up with.  Bring together our old NIIT gang and -

1)    Rewrite Fetch2Me in Java using HttpUnit and Java Mail API

2)    Expose the core functionality of Fetch2Me as a REST service

3)    Write a front end for web access to the REST service. Typically we should be writing a Inbox like web page for checking gmail (or any mail for that case), sending mails (with and without attachments). This front end will be written using GWT and Guice.

4)    Write a Firefox plugin similar to the requirement in (3)

5)    SMS service should also be exposed as REST service.

Use Maven for build purposes and Git for source control.  Optionally use Hudson for continuous integration and come up with an Eclipse plugin. Write lots and lots of of JUnit test cases.  My gut feeling is that this should take at least a few months development time.

I am sure there are a million products out there which does the same thing but there are two important highlights in this effort.

1)  We get to learn a lot of new things, open up the source code of lot of other open source projects, started reading PHP, ASP.net, C#, Ruby, Python (and convert them to Java) – all those which we wouldnt have done in our day job. I thought we could learn by mistakes - both development and design, we could refactor the code as much as we want at any point of time in the project (we understand that optimizing early is a crime).

and

2)  Soon after we are done with increments in the project, we’ll open source it. People can just pick our code and host it in their domain and call it a day. I am sure many will find interest in our work and hopefully start using it.

I was talking to my wife a couple of days back on how all things in my life fell in place naturally, like the neatly arranged dominos, and how much God is great that we can never have the faintest idea of what he thinks and what he has in store for us.

Myself and Rajesh always had the inner fire to do something big and our focus has always been a new “idea” - something which dazzles. And we were pretty sure that no idea falls from the roof. We have to be into a lot of ideas to have a new perspective to see ours. We always felt that it is always not about the money. And, I, for one reason felt that contributing to open source is “the idea” to have something meaningful in your life.

This blog is not about how things went on well and how we achieved the “idea” but how bad things could go and we still have our “dream of the youth” alive and active.

I left for Singapore and a couple of months later Rajesh got laid off from Merrill. Recession hit badly all over and the only thing i could think of is to pray that i retain my job. Simply because i dont want to depend on my parents when my kid is born. Rajesh got his engagement cancelled and was at home for 9 months. If i were him, with my family, i am not sure how my reaction would be. It could either be a “face what may come” or “hibernate for winter”.  Looking back at myself and my reaction to various “things” that happened in my life, I am sure i would have given the situation a cold shoulder. But then there is this new addition to the situation called family. Nevertheless, Rajesh’s situation really scared me a lot. He was unable to find a job despite being one hell of a developer. The calls are simply not coming his way, leave alone interviews.

Singapore is a good place to live but still this is not my home. I wanted to go back and i was unable to. That was when i told to myself that none of things that happened in my life is entirely shaped by me. And i am not going to whine anymore. I decided to take up technical reading more seriously and got the national library membership. Singapore’s NLB has a very limited collection of technical books and that motivated me even more. I resolved that i am going to finish off the entire IT section (except of course, those scary looking System 3 manuals)

I read the truly random books and some recommended ones. Among the many interesting books which gives that wonderful satisfaction at the last page, I had to meekly admit that once in a while, i had to return some books half way to pick another. One amongst the beautiful ones is “Dreaming in code” - the journey of Chandler and its team. It gave a lot of insight into how everybody starts small and everybody makes mistakes. But then, they all had a bigger dream and they were focussed. The grit and the patience of Mitch Kapor all through the project was beautiful. I am yet to see a truly impressive tool like Chandler. Even today, I composed a mail (outlook) to our corporate technical group appreciating their efforts on a recent technical event. I then mentioned in the mail that we should be meeting tomorrow to see what we can do next. Only then i realised i actually needed a meeting request. So, i copied all the contents, composed a new meeting request and pasted the contents and then started typing in the whole “To” list. In Chandler, it is just ONE FREAKING CLICK !!! Your mail is converted to a meeting request.

The “better programmer” link and “Dreaming in code” made me want to learn Python. Meanwhile, Rajesh started doing projects of his own. He fell in love with Rails and became a fan of Ruby. The speed of Python and the quantity of code needed to be written to do something useful was amazing. List comprehensions and slicing had me dumbstuck. After reading ”Learning in Python”, I wanted to write something USEFUL. Rajesh got through Tech Mahindra as a contractor and moved to Pune. He didnt have internet access in office. And that was the birth of Fetch2Me - the name fondly given by my wonderfully best friend “Mirth Machine” Gaurav. Fetch2Me was a simple screen scraping application and it had a simple raison d’etre. Use your corporate id and send the url as the subject to fetch2me AT gmail DOT com and it will fetch the page. If the subject could not be resolved to a valid url, respond with the google results of the search string. But then, all my friends wanted more out of the project. I am not saying that this is all I had in mind from the start but I am considering this as a start - to be useful. Stay tuned.

programmer

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