Keep Walking!

As with any other computer geek, I was amongst the downloader’s of the new Google Open Source Browser, Chrome! Downloading and installing it was a breeze, just a couple of minutes. Upon the first start, as with Mozilla Firefox, it asked whether to import data from the current Internet Explorer. Hehe, I don’t know why all browsers target IE as their arch-rival.

I have just finished updating the Spring Presentations for Version 2.5 and am happy to announce that they are now available in the public domain. You may know more and download the presentations from here. There are two presentations covering the Basics and the Enterprise Service Abstractions.

For millions of users like me, Windows comes as the default operating system which we get familiar and acquainted with. To use it on your computer becomes more of a standard than a choice, for computer manufacturers don’t offer much systems on other OS platforms, and Apple tends to be too costlier.

A friend of mine was trying to add my blog using the recently released, My Blog List widget, in Blogger. But, an error was being thrown saying no feeds could be detected for the blog. When I gotta know of this I was surprised and a bit upset. One, for my blog could not be added to a blog roll and second, I would not be getting more visitors, doh!

Do you feel there is something wrong is saying, “Hi Sandeep”. If you DO NOT I would suggest you to read this particular post by Bob, Greeting Grammar, which is definitely an eye opener. Its an amazing post which reminds me of my grade school classes. Gosh, if only I had paid some heed to my teachers. :)

Being a software developer introduces you to many new concepts - importantly, of using and harness the technology yourself to the maximum. Slowly as you start picking up things you start using the same in your daily chores, for example, using mails to communicate often. When you are looking up for that song on your disk, you want the power of Google to do that for you. Recovering accidental deletions of files makes you think if you could have your own private repository with all files being safe. And the list goes on.

Here is another interesting service from Google. Want to know, which movie is being showed in which theater at what time? Just enter your city name and watch all the movie shows with current timings on your screen.

Chain Emails - Ones that you keep receiving all through the day and wonder why don’t they just land up in the SPAM folder. This morning I received one another: About the Birth of Orkut! I am sure most of you must have read this email for the number of times it has been forwarded is quite large. For those of you, who haven’t, lets ponder over the contents first.

Last weekend, I appeared for the SCWCD exam. Before you guys start making any guesses let me make the air clear, I had to appear, I didn’t wanted to. Last year I had bought a coupon for the exam on heavy discount. With the baniya mentality, I had thought of selling it to some one else making a premium over it. But guess what, I ran out of luck. Part due to my laziness, part due to my luck, I didn’t find any buyer. And the 31st March deadline lay approaching. I had no other option but to appear myself, lest suffer a loss of a few grands.

Now choice of exam center. I started calling each and every mentioned Prometric center to book a date. But, the way we Indians tend to leverage advantage over others limited options, is what I stood in front of. Every center was ready to give a date, but as soon as I told them that coupon was expiring on 31st Mar, they declined. A few offered me the weekday slot. I wanted weekend so as not to fail ;)

It seemed I was to loose money, which was my biggest worry. My MOM was after me reiterating that this was to happen when you do things at the 11th hour. Well with a lot of luck wishes from my friends, I finally managed to find a center and book a slot. This time I played smart, I didn’t mention about the expiry date. :)

A week before the exam I pondered over the syllabus and was surprised to find that I didn’t knew 80% of the stuff. Why? Because that was all theoretical things we tend to forget over time. A crash revision course was needed. To add more to my suffering it was UAT and release time, shit, which gave me little time to study. With the advent of IDE’s (Integrated Development Environments) and Intellisense, a lot is taken off developer’s shoulders. This makes them more vulnerable to these certification exams.

A free mock exam website came to help. The website contains many links to free Java certification exams. The only thing I could do was start giving them. What is best with these exams is you can submit the whole exam at the very first question, and then browsing answers for review ;) A trick that saved me a lot of time and generated my reading material. I somehow managed to study 50% of the questions provided, and indeed, it proved really helpful.

The day arrived. I just wanted to save my money. I prayed to the almighty to help me keep up to my reputation of being a baniya. Two hours and I was through the test and a round of revision too. I was sure that I would pass and not flunk. God blessed me and I really did pass. Alas! the exam time was over!

Paise bach gaye!

I feel the test question required more of mugging than application. Under the agreement I cannot reveal the questions per se, but what I can advise others is that leave the IDE for a month and code everything by hand, specially the deployment descriptor and other config files. The deployment descriptor structure is something that can make you look like a first-grade student even with several years of development experience. And yes, going through the mock-exams, will surely add to your success and save you lots of time ;)

If you need any help on the certification, feel free to reach me.

Hope this helps and Best of luck to all aspirants.

I had been using GMail for over two and half years now. But, still there are many tricks that you need to learn. It was one such day today, when I came to know the power (or insignificance) of a DOT in the GMail email address. May be I will take an example to start with. My email address happens to be [email protected]. Preventing spammers gain access to email address is so tough ;)

Since I had bought my laptop, I had not been able to find time to configure my emails on to my email client. Every time I had to use the web mail client and it was a pain for it gets slow, specially when you just need to review your old mails. Finally today I took the plunge and started to configure my GMail account in Outlook 2007. It was a breeze setting up specially with the help of tutorial available on Google here.

A discovery I just happened to make - there is a bug (cross-linking error) in the Google Code API documentation. Check out the page,

http://code.google.com/apis/feedburner/

I have just completed a PowerPoint theme based on the Foliage theme for Wordpress. It has the same color scheme and matching bullet style. The theme is available in formats for MS Office 97-2003 & MS Office 2007 versions. You may read more about the theme here.

We all hear about Yahoo! - the center of attraction for ground-searching Microsoft in the world of web. The post is not about what is going on these days, or how things would change in the near future.

Here in, I trace back the journey of Yahoo! as it evolved. From the official Yahoo! history page, I came to know that Yahoo! started as the Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web. The name amused as well as stunned me. Why? Three reasons:

• First, This was a startling revelation as I always thought Yahoo! to be somewhat synonymous of its coming to existence. A term coined up revolving around founders, idea or inspirational sources, with a touch of Japanese funk.

• Second, Jerry happens to be my favorite cartoon character. Anything that has the farthest linkage to Jerry - the lovely little sweet friend - catches my perfect attention.

• Third, my first open-source attempt with my friends is also known as Jerry.

Hope this amazes you too!

A while ago I was just cruising from one website to another, when I came across MJS - MyJavaServer.com. A website that provides free Java hosting to developers so that they can go ahead and hone their web application skills.

Business computations always involve the computation of Net-Work days, and if you are using Excel, you immediately find a solution in NetworkDays function. I have myself used it extensively in my computational work. But, for reasons best known to Microsoft, they have kept this function as part of Analysis Toolpack add-in. Well, to makes obviously no difference as the addin is a part of standard Office shipment. But, when you are developing a spreadsheet to be used by many, you are not very sure whether they have the addin installed/active.