Good article on Frameworks

While browsing for a good discussion on the pros and cons of the various frameworks available these days, found this good blog post which talks about all the latest frameworks and provides a lot of real inputs from Architects & Developers as well as quite a few good links !

It talks a bit about Spring-MVC, GWT, Tapestry, Wicket, Seam, Struts, JSF, Portlets, etc!

Check out the post at Ha's Blog.

Got the Orange belt at JavaBlackBelt

While browsing through Java related sites, stumbled upon JavaBlackBelt.com. It's a pretty good site for refreshing your basic (and advanced) Java knowledge and to challenge yourself to a set of quality quizzes on Java & related topics. Quite a few of the questions were eye-openers - will post those observations with sample code soon.

So had been taking the quizzes in free time and today made it to Orange Belt and my name is being displayed on their home page for the next 24 hours starting at 14:30 hrs on Wednesday March 11, 2009 !

Here is a snapshot of the hallowed moment in time, recorded & stored here for posterity!




They have organized the topics & quizzes into "Belts" and the levels in the increasing order of difficulty are:
Yellow < Orange < Green < Blue < Brown < Black
I liked the concept very much - check out the JavaBlackBelt website for more info.

Palak Paneer & Sangria in 15 minutes !

I made mouth-watering Palak Paneer in 15 minutes and had Sangria while cooking it ! It was darn simple to make and came up pretty tasty. I did not know that Palak Paneer could be so spicy & tasty! Here are pics of the tasty stuff I made:
Palak Paneer: (Sadly the paneer crumbled instead of retaining consistency as cubes)



Sangria made with Lambrusco Riunite, Apples & Oranges: (Sadly we had only these two fruits)

Source Code Encoding tool for posting to a Blog

I faced a strange dilemma while trying to publish a piece of code to my blog post. The JavaScript code that I was trying to post was getting truncated and not showing up properly due to the embedded DHTML code in it. I found out a good tool to encode the markup to make it suitable for publishing in a Blog post:

SimpleBits Converter

Instructions from the website:

Enter normal (X)HTML in the markup box below.
Press "Process" and it will spit out entity-encoded markup suitable for <code> examples.
Use spaces in increments of two for nesting indents.

Now looking for a converter / tool that can beautifully format, color & print out Java Code for publishing in a post !

Neat JavaScript snippet !

1. Open any website.....which contains images (u can use ur company home page/intranet)
2. Copy below given code and paste in the Address bar of the same browser window and press enter
3. All images will start to float on the page !

javascript:R=0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300; y4=200; x5=300; y5=200; DI=document.images; DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0; i<DIL; i++){DIS=DI[ i ].style; DIS.position='absolute'; DIS.left=Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+x5; DIS.top=Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5}R++}setInterval('A()',5); void(0)

Note: Ensure that you have copied all of the above code in only 1 line.

Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street

Recently read a very good article on wired.com explaining the fall of Wall Street with a detail of the convoluted Maths involved:

A year ago, it was hardly unthinkable that a math wizard like David X. Li might someday earn a Nobel Prize. After all, financial economists—even Wall Street quants—have received the Nobel in economics before, and Li's work on measuring risk has had more impact, more quickly, than previous Nobel Prize-winning contributions to the field. Today, though, as dazed bankers, politicians, regulators, and investors survey the wreckage of the biggest financial meltdown since the Great Depression, Li is probably thankful he still has a job in finance at all. Not that his achievement should be dismissed. He took a notoriously tough nut—determining correlation, or how seemingly disparate events are related—and cracked it wide open with a simple and elegant mathematical formula, one that would become ubiquitous in finance worldwide.

To read the full article, please go to the source:
Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street

Happy Reading !

Finally started blogging...

After what seems like ages of procrastination, I finally got around to creating a blog!
This will be a journal of my rants, views, reviews, comments, experiences, experiments with Technology, cooking and life in general.
I coined "Common IT Man" as a class that extends RK Laxman's "Common Man" class and adds features specific to IT professionals of today's world!