Keep Walking!

Another find of the day. Security and Microsoft seem to be antonyms. And that too so easy. I had been using Excel for many-many years now, but I discovered these holes only day-before. What a fool I have been :(

As the title indicates, the post is all about creating a drop down list in Excel from ranges on different sheets. How is this tricky? Well, first excel allows you to use a single list as a dropdown for cell validation. Second, UNION is not permitted between ranges. Third, a collection can not be used for data validation. Fourth, no custom function/method from VBA can be invoked in the cell validation formula. So this complicates the matter a bit.

A recent Blogger update has broken many Javascript Blogger themes. The issue cropped up because of the way we code our Javascripts. Some of us are finicky enough to make them browser-safe for those old muggy browsers which don’t recognize the <script> tag.

Life is so busy these days, we rarely get time to pursue our dreams. Ideas keep coming in our minds, we keep planning every small detail, then throwing them into corners of our mind.

Yesterday, I was upgrading the Modified Foliage Theme for Blogger. I had been testing it out in Firefox 2.0 and IE 7.0 for long. This time it was IE 6.0 that I was testing the theme on. The theme almost behaved in the manner expected, except a few DIV issues. After fixing them, my attention diverted to a flicker that was caused in the pull button.

We all have been expecting OpenSocial API release by Google, which was supposedly expected on Thursday. But, what a goof-up by Google. It has already featured projects on its Google Code Featured Blog mentioning the OpenSocial API usage, but the link is broken. Read the entries on the blog here.

While cleaning up my Thunderbird today, I came across this issue which kept me (and my team) on toes for a few days. It is an old issue (almost an year now) which I pen down due to some fond memories. The problem is related to J2EE Web Application project. The project background is not needed to relate to the problem.

Recently, I had a requirement wherein the client wanted to edit data from a table using a grid that would be editable, sortable, paginated, with column resizing and column locking. Anyone with a .NET background would say, quite easy. But, what if you had to implement all these features in Java? This was a real challenge, for I had never in my life came across such a thing in Java. I had heard of a few libraries out there in OS (Open-source) but nothing could come even close to it. So what was the solution?

In my role as a programmer, I had the opportunity to code in many computer languages. any… ok…. would be a wrong word. When you compare a dozen to a few thousand, you can’t call it MANY. A few thousand… yes, its true. A quick search on Google on list of computer languages would reveal the magic number of 2500+ which can then be extrapolated to approx 3000. But is that it. There is more to computer languages than the above magical number. Before, we go ahead at checking out the number, here is a brief classification of computer languages.

In the past couple of months, I had a lot of discussion with people over immutable classes. From novice to experts, from beginners to leads, they were all. You utter the term Immutable Classes in front of any Java/.NET professional and the immediate response would be String class showing his command over the subject. But is that the only thing that relates to Immutability. I guess there is more. If we talk of Java only, there are so many other classes from the JDK itself, which exhibit this behavior. Surprised - Don’t be! All primitive wrapper classes such as Integer, Double, Float, Boolean, Short, Byte etc. are immutable objects.

I am really glad to say that I have updated the theme, finally! It had been long since I had been planning to change the theme, and today it has arrived. I had earlier zeroed in on Foliage , but due to certain thoughts while restructuring my blogs, I wanted a cleaner and a wider template, that had a white background. Thoughts - yes, I have given a new meaning to Azcarya - a memoir of myself playing with the technology. It would now have lots of code snippets, and hence the white background.

I have been lately involved a lot with the recruitment process for my current employer. It has in fact provided me a good platform to learn and hone my skills to the maximum. Anyways, that is not a point of discussion for now.

Last night, while developing code for MATRIKA, I came across a situation where-in I had to validate an email-address. I wanted a way to stop people putting [email protected] like I had been doing so, throughout my interactions with the Web.

Great News! I am done with the original conversion of the foliage theme completely to XML. There are slight differences, due to blogger changing its API in version 2. The theme is available for preview here. Links to download the entire theme files, would be here by tomorrow.

Google has finally released the much-awaited Presentations under the Google Documents umbrella. Since April, when Google first announced Presentations I was more than happy, now I could share more content with all my friends. Here is what Google has to say,