http://code.google.com/p/fest/
This module provides a fluent interface for assertions.
September 9, 2012
September 5, 2012
Implementing custom scopes in Spring
As of Spring 2.0, the bean scoping mechanism in Spring is extensible. This means that you are not limited to just the bean scopes that Spring provides out of the box; you can define your own scopes, or even redefine the existing scopes (although that last one would probably be considered bad practice – please note that you cannot override the built-in singleton and prototype scopes).
August 31, 2012
cd to script directory
One way to change directory to executing script location…
#!/bin/sh</code>
cd "$(dirname ${BASH_SOURCE[0]})"
August 29, 2012
Regular expression to match any character including new line
Thought (.*) would match any character, but realized that it does except for new line character. For example if you want to write regular expression to validate length of a text in comments text box to be less than 500 characters then we need to write a regular expression something like..
^(.|\n){0,500}$
Try this on a free online editor http://regexpal.com/
August 10, 2011
GodMode in Windows7
This gives quick access to all the administrative tools and pretty much all the things you can do to customize windows 7. To get to this mode create a new folder on desktop and name it as “GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}” or open Windows Explorer and enter GodMode in the tool bar.
August 8, 2011
Book on modern meetings
Meetings are one of the expenses for an organization. Since time is money, unproductive meetings are waste of time and in turn waste of money. People call for meeting for various reasons and often times people attend them with out knowing its purpose. Some meetings are convenience meetings which could have been avoided by sending a email or writing a document, some are formal meetings like meetings called by managers for status updates or to disseminate some information and some are just social meetings. Often times meetings are called to make a decision or to distribute effort between people and organization’s.
Meetings do provide a value but sometimes they do not justify the cost of interruption and loss of productivity. Some of the problems with traditional meetings is that it creates a culture of compromise and they kill our sense of urgency. People would avoid making a decision and leave it for the people attending the meeting, or people would avoid taking up a responsibility and leave it to the people attending the meeting.
More often people call for meetings with out any preparation or proper agenda. They would often invite people with out understanding the value they would bring to the table. Also not having a proper agenda will bring attendees unprepared.
In the book “Read This Before Our Next Meeting” author Al Pittampalli lays out some ground rules for modern meetings. Following are the ground rules for a meeting
1) Modern meetings supports a decision that has already been taken.
A decision should not be left for a meeting. A tentative decision should have already been made by consulting people if required. A meeting should be held to ratify the decision or to make amendments to the decision. This will result in having a meeting with clear purpose and clear outcome.
2) Modern meetings moves fast and ends on schedule.
As the rule says meetings should be kept on track and on the purpose.
3) Modern meetings limits the number of attendees.
This is very important. Invite people who are absolutely necessary. If required one can convey the outcome of a meeting for rest of the people in a formal email. If more people are invoked it creates uncertainty in the decision.
4) Modern meetings rejects the unprepared.
As the rule says no attendee can come to meeting with out understanding his / her role in the meeting. Everyone should come prepared to the meeting. For ex. modern meeting is not a place to bring people up to speed.
5) Modern meetings produces committed action plan.
Every meeting should have a outcome and committed action plan.
6) Modern meetings refuses to be informal. reading memos is important.
This means people should take meetings quite seriously. They should read all the memos / documents that are sent regarding the meeting. Meetings should be very formal and should not be a place for personal conversation.
7) Modern meetings works only alongside a culture of brainstorming.
New ideas should come out of the meetings.
For detailed explanation I would recommend reading this book. As a promotion Kindle version is available free for limited time.
July 11, 2011
Finally Java 7 is out
Finally after almost 5 years, new version of Java i.e. Java7 is out for developer preview. Unfortunately many of the promised features were left out in this release, features like Lambda, Jigsaw and some part of Coin initiative are moved to Java 8 release which is expected sometime year end of 2012.
Of course with every new release comes new features, better performance, new syntax etc. Some of the noteworthy features
1) One of the biggest feature is invokeDynamic. This makes interactions between Java and other dynamic languages like JRuby, Jython, Groovy and other 200 languages that are on JVM seamless. Now JVM can optimize the bytecode produced by these languages. We can choose to write code in any language that best solves the problem and compile it against JVM to get all the JVM capabilities like optimization, garbage collection etc
2) Second big feature is language enhancements. Biggest complaint about java is that its verbose / or has lot of ceremony in writing code. With project “coin” in Java7 we will see some language enhancements. For ex
Improved type inference for generic instance creation
//In Java 6 Map<String, List<String>> mapoflists = new HashMap<String, List<String>>(); //In Java 7 Map<String, List<String>> mapoflists = new HashMap<>();
Similarly Multi Catch blocks
try {
//Do Something;
catch(Exp1 | Exp2 |Exp3) {
//Do something
}
more enhancements like strings in switch statements, Binary Integral literals and underscore literals, try with resource statements etc
3) We are in an age where servers with multiple cores are very common. Having language features that enables us to use all these processing power is very helpful. Java7 has enhancements for Concurrent and Collections API that enable us to write applications to use multiple processors.
4) Enhanced NIO
For more features and information follow these links
February 25, 2011
Android tutorials
If you are new to Android development watch this tutorial.
Learn how to develop for Android, Beyond HelloWorld
Want to learn some best practices. Title of the video is wrong, its actually not a ‘Beginners guide to Android’. Presenter changes the talk after 5 minutes into it.
December 24, 2010
Keep Flash player full screen while working on dual monitors.
Sometimes I like to watch videos on my second monitor while working on another monitor. But when ever I click on my working screen the Flash player closes the full screen mode which is very annoying. There is a patch that one can apply on Flash to alleviate this problem. Its called IgnoFlash patch.
http://deve.loping.net/projects/ignoflash/
It’s was very easy to apply the patch and now I can play my videos in full screen while working. Thank you very much Mr. Alex Gembe.
December 7, 2010
Resolving conflicts
Heard a very interesting story in one of the TED talks.
A man left his three children with 17 camels. According to the will first son gets half of the camels, second son gets third of the camels and the youngest gets ninth of the camels. Three sons got into negotiations, realizing they cannot split without killing the camels they started to argue and finally in desperation they consulted a wise old women.
Wise old women thought about their problem for long time and finally she came back and said, I don’t know if I can help, but at least if you want you can have my camel.
So now they had 18 camels….
First son took his half, half of 18 is 9; Second son took his third, third of 18 is 6; finally youngest took his ninth, ninth of 18 is 2 and yet the total was only 17 and there was one camel left over which they gave it back to old wise women.
The moral of the story is every problem or conflict can be resolved with a fresh look. Every conflict has two sides but it’s the third side ‘us’ who should participate in resolving the conflict.
a peek into my MIND 