nitin's-blog

Do you feel passionate about any open source technology? Or you want to explore one during your summer vacations? On the top of it, if you get a mentor to guide you all along and a stipend of 5000 USD, would you be interested? Yeah! Keep reading then. [caption id=“attachment_741” align=“alignright” width=“198” caption=“GSoC 2011”] [/caption] Google announced its consecutive 7th year for Summer of Code program on January 24, 2011. Google Summer of Code program encourages students from all over the world to engage in open source project development of their choice for 3 months. Look out for the details of the program here: http://socghop.appspot.com/ and the timeline: http://www.google-melange.com/document/show/gsoc_program/google/gsoc2011/timeline

a few videos and images for all of you this holiday season, few to giggle, few to laugh and other to ponder over. merry christmas and a happy new year. 300 years of fossil fuel in 300 seconds google shit revenge of the spider [caption id=“attachment_713” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“i remember too.”] [/caption] -- fya for those of you wondering where the heck uppercase letters went, google killed them.

Most of the websites today have the the pre-sales chat options on their site. These chats usually do not assure you about the quality of the product/service you are going to receive but still if the sales person can convince you to buy the product and can answer all the questions you may have about the product/service, I would say that they are giving good ROI. But what if you have a bad (read horrible) experience during the pre-sales chat? Would you still pay for the product, no matter how good you have heard about it?

We visit and revisit web pages. You will find that more than 60% of your web visits are actually revisits of some sort. But web browsers support for such revisitations is limited to bookmarks, history list, URL auto-completion and back button. Here are a few history tools which can greatly improve your experience during web browsing. Tab History: It is the simplest yet very useful extension. Usually when we open a link in a new tab, the back button history for the new tab is empty. This extensions adds the session history from the parent tab to this new tab, so that you are not lost with the question “where do i come from?”. Tree Style Tab: This extension arranges your tabs in a tree structure, like a folder tree of Windows explorer. So whenever you open a new tab from a link, this tab is added as ‘child’ node in the tab tree of the parent node. [caption id=“attachment_595” align=“aligncenter” width=“200” caption=“Tree style tab”] [/caption] You can conveniently arrange these tabs in the tree using the simple drap and drop feature. You can go through an extensive list of features on the official site. One thing I would like to mention is that if you close a tab, its children are orphaned. As the father is gone, no way children would know about their grandparents ;).

Today, while I was working on the URL encoding for the recently released Facebook-style Links module, I realized a bug with Link Attachments feature on Facebook. Before I explain, let us reproduce it: Try to attach the following link on Facebook: http://google.com/search?q=blenders%26pride. This URL actually queries Google for ‘blenders&pride’. Facebook converts/encodes the above URL to http://google.com/search?q=blenders&pride which is not the same as above and queries Google for just ‘blenders’. So, why Facebook does this? Probably Facebook tries to encode the URL to remove the characters which are not allowed by RFC 3986 and replaces them with their percent encoding. But there are certain characters which should not be encoded, such as ‘/’, ‘?’, ‘#’, ‘@’ which are the reserved characters and used as delimiters in the URL. So, it decodes these characters and converts their encoding to the original character which gives rise to the problem. Let us see an example:

Who knows more about the citizens in their own country, Kim Jong-Il or Google? Google tracks everything, your searches, web movement which arises from your search, what places you went last summer (or are planning to go, thanks to Google maps). Google not only knows about you but also understands you much better than your own girlfriend. If that freaks you out, I’d say you are in your right mind. But now you can avoid it to a certain extent by using GoogleSharing. GoogleSharing is an extension for Firefox, which will anonymize your requests to Google products which do not require you to log in but where your activities can be tracked by Google. Google keep tracks of you through cookies. If you attempt to strip off your cookies from your HTTP request, Google might tag you as spam bot and will force you to type in a CAPTCHA for your every request.

Often we need MINUS operator as defined by the SQL definitions i.e you have two sets P and Q and you want P-Q which gives all the elements in P that are not in Q. But unfortunately, MYSQL does not have any operator for such an operation (yeah, I had the same reaction when I heard this!!). So here is a way how you can implement it in MYSQL. For simplicity let us consider we have two tables P and Q (we can also have views, joins, etc instead of the tables here) which have atleast one column in common (say id, which usually will be the primary key) and we want to evaluate P - Q which removes all those rows from P whose id is present in Q....

Recently while working for my project, I came across this situation when I had a 2-D array and I needed to sort it twice on 2 of its columns. Consider the following 2D array: [cc lang=“java”] String[][] testString = new String[][] { {“1”, “2”, “6”}, {“4”, “5”, “3”} }; [/cc] Sorting the above 2D array on zero column will give [cc lang=“java”] { {“1”, “2”, “6”}, {“4”, “5”, “3”} } [/cc] whereas sorting it on second column will give [cc lang=“java”] { {“4”, “5”, “3”}, {“1”, “2”, “6”} } [/cc] I did not want to do the most common as well as tedious thing, i.e. write my own sorting function like this: [cc lang=“java”] public void myOwnSort(String [][] exampleArray) { //code for sorting the array according to my wish. } [/cc] I wanted to avoid this for 2 resons: I would have to write the code for it ( lazy me!!). Secondly, I can possibly never match the efficiency provided by the sorting functions of java.util.Arrays

Election results are out, and as I expected Congress completely overruled BJP, grabbing more than 200 seats. Do not shout that my expectations turned in favor of Congress after the election results, for proof you can ask my friends (with whom I kept fighting why BJP should not come to power!!) or just visit FriendsOfBJP where I posted several issues that were wrong in the BJP’s manifesto but unfortunately they were so confident about their views that they(supporters of BJP) kicked me out from the site (and calling me a christian, a fool, etc. ) I would like to clarify that I am not in favor of any political party, but when I have to choose I will never choose BJP over Congress for the following reasons (I am again enumerating them here not to tease the BJP supporters over their loss but so that they can improve for next elections rather than blaming media for bad publicity or congress for enjoying privileges):

“What!! He is sleeping, It’s just 10”, I screamed ,“He usually sleeps after 1, what happened? Is he ill?”. “No, No I think there is a match tomorrow morning at 6.”, the other guy answered. I was shocked to see the dedication and enthusiasm. He never attends the morning class, no matter if his attendance drops below the required 75% but he was fast asleep for the match. This is the kind of madness I am talking about but I am unable to reason this. Cricket as I define it on the basis of reactions from the audience: