Laszlo adventure continues

My laszlo app showing defects console 

So here is what has happened since my last post about my laszlo app.

1. I was able to fine tune the backend for the xml request and response processing in my Struts Action classes.

2. I played around with a number of components namely:

Views - these are one of the basic component of laszlo application

Scrollbar - this component was a real pain to master. It never clipped with the right view or it never scrolled properly but thank god after 2 days of fight i finally was able to clip it with my view which contained dataset information

Reference - how to access a particular texfield , combo , view , window was really confusing until I dug into the LZX reference manual and found out that if I called my canvas components using an id instead of using its name , I would not have to give the location of the component (parent.parent.myViewName) but just call the component by its id e.g myViewId .

Splash - I added a progress bar which is displayed until my laszlo application is loaded. However there is a point where the screen is blank and then after a few seconds the application is displayed. Reading through the Laszlo forums I understood that this was a common problem.

The picture above shows a defect console where one can log defects and assign it to employees. Of course this is just me fooling about with the interface , eventually i hope i will be using more icons and more drag and drops instead of having to fill up text boxes needless to say that the interface will change as I understand more of laszlo.

One thing to note however was that I was pretty much dissapointed by the lack of support on the laszlo forums , most of my answers I had to find myself in the LZX reference manual and also a lot of trial and error was required to understand most of the components.

Anyways this does help to prove that for any new language or technology the best way to learn is by hands on practice. Coupled with a good manual , hands on practice does help to get you started quickly and in my opinion the true way to learn.

Category: Laszlo,Flash,Struts,RIA,XML,Java

Charge your cellphone with ...air

Am sure your mouth must have dropped open on seeing the title of this post. Thats exactly what happened to me on reading the title of the article "Using air to charge cellphones? IIT-Delhi does it!".

I thought man these indian guys they are really mind blowing ,using air consisting of unreactive gases to charge a mobile wow...unimaginable.May be like in a fuel cell using only water from the air they would seperate the oxygen and hydrogen molecules ..etc.. Only that the indian guys didn't actually use air , they used wind!

They apparently created a small turbine small enough to put in your pocket and the idea is that when you are in your car , on a bicycle ,on a bus , in plane (no not in a plane), you place your turbine outside your window so as air flow makes the turbine turn and generate electricity. I can't believe that its now that they understand the concept of a dynamo.

Anyways spare you the trouble buy yourself a spare battery.

Category: Phone, Technology , Indian , Turbine , Electricity , Physics , Baterry ,Mobile

Moris.net

Just a few days after my post about not having too many mauritian bloggers around guess what I found while surfing the blogsphere?....well a mauritian blogging service which allows mauritians to blog. Now isn't that cool or what.

The blogging service is called Moris.net. Currently it seems that only mauritian chatters from servihoo chat are mostly registered there.Its still in its early stages but hopefully this will change. Although the interface is kind of annoying with the fonts set a very high size and the color is not very relaxing for the eyes.

Whats nice is the audience for this service understands both english and french, although I do have my doubts concerning the age of the people who do go on this service as most chatters are teenagers.

Category: Mauritius , Chat , Weblog

Kinja

Kinja the web portal 

Kinja is a web portal which I find very interesting. The idea is that if you want to read news from certain sites for example if everyday you read theserverside.com or bbc.co.uk well you can feed these to your Kinja account and it will provide you with latest information on these sites as they are being posted.

The idea is similar to rss readers however it also allows you to share your favorite websites to other people by making your kinja account public.It also serves as a place where you can share your weblogs with other people.

My account at kinja is at the following url : http://kinja.com/user/javed

Category: Weblogs

Mauritian Spammers the beginning

Mauritian Spam mails 

Since a couple of weeks am getting spam on my Yahoo Mail from Mauritian companies. This is something which had never happened before in Dodoland the notion of Mauritian spammers was totally unexistent.

As I was really totally annoyed I decided to dig into the matter and this is what I found. The company behind this is called R&K communications and they are offering a so called "E-Marketing service" which means a company can subscribe to their service which costs merely between rs2500 to rs 4000 which is like 72 to 114 euros per month (...peanuts)and have their personlized brochures be sent to thousand of mauritian email inboxes.

They boost about having a database of 30,000 e-mail addresses in Mauritius.These e-mail addresses keep increasing as in their brochures you are invited to send their brochure to a friend .

There are many questions which fill my mind as to where they got the email address from and how they can be making money over my email address. Not to forget that I will be having my monthly dose of new brochures.

If you ever get any of these brochures dont hesitate just block it or delete it but dont under any circumstances send it to one of your friends unless you really don't like that friend.

Category: Mauritius , Spam

Working with settings in Appfuse

Appfuse comes with its default decorators and authentication if you want to start an application from scratch, it is highly probable that you would want to get rid of some of the settings used and add your own. Am using the struts version of Appfuse as example , but it should work for any framework.

Some of the custom settings which you might want to disable in Appfuse are the following:

SiteMesh - you might want to have your own decorators or simply remove site mesh capabilities

Authentication - you might want to by-pass the default authentication screen of Appfuse

Before we edit anything please add a sub-directory to your APPFUSE_APP_DIR\web dir(APPFUSE_APP_DIR being the directory where your appfuse application resides),call this sub-directory "myPages".

All your pages will be now placed in APPFUSE_APP_DIR\web\myPages sub-directory.

So lets start with SiteMesh which uses decorators to render every jsp or html to a page with its custom decorators. To remove this simply open the APPFUSE_APP_DIR\web\WEB-INF\decorators.xml and add the following in the excludes tag:

........
<pattern>/myPages/*</pattern>
......



Now lets hack out the authentication page so as we dont need to supply login information each time we want to access our pages found in APPFUSE_APP_DIR\web\myPages sub-directory.

Open APPFUSE_APP_DIR\metadata\web\web-security.xml file add your struts actions in the "web-resource-collection" tag for example I have one action called "/laszlo" so this would mean that I would have the following in my web-security.xml file:

....
<url-pattern>/laszlo.html</URL-PATTERN>
.....


Please note: The "/laszlo" struts action has a ".html" extension instead of the common ".do" extension this is because Appfuse does not want to show the underlying technology used behind its applications it becomes an abstraction to the user.

And thats it we can start building right away our own application in myPages directory without having caused any damage to the existing default appfuse sample application.

Fossil

Fossil Abacus watch 

Just spotted this baby on the net , its made by Fossil and comes with Palm OS . I am not a great fan of watches but I must admit that this one does look kind of mega hyper cool.It has a price tag of $249 and am just wondering who is going to get this for me for my birthday? ;)

Resource:
Instructions for the watch

My Laszlo Application

Laszlo application screenshot 

Here above is the screenshot for my laszlo application on which I am working in my free time. I basically was able to perform add, update , delete and retrieve functionalities with this first version which is still in its early ages. Now I need to fine tune the graphics and build on top of what I have started as building blocks.

Laszlo allows creating Rich Internet Application , the laszlo file is basically an XML file which is rendered into a Flash swf at runtime.

The quest for Mauritian Blogs

Waking up early at 7am...yes this is early to me... i decided to look for my fellow mauritians ..not on the streets but on the web. I already knew where to find Junean and Eddy (coding.mu) but I was getting more perplexed as to the whereabouts of the rest of the mauritians.

So i consulted my own personal oracle.."Google".. and discovered another blog hosted by our friend Eddy called "priscimon.com/blog" where he gets a bit more personal. But thats it nothing else much worth stating.

I figured out that there might be a few reasons why there was such a scarcity of Mauritians writing.

Here is the outcome of my long analysis of the problem which lasted around 3 minutes and 25 secs:

1. The notion of blogs is unexistent to mauritians..its not published in l'express information technology page yet (... i love l'express.. dont you?)

2. Its not taught at school (or a proper tution would be required )

3. Mauritians are more of readers than writers ...(then come read my blogs!!!)

4. Mauritians don't like to share their thoughts to the general public (its a small island after all..)

5. Mauritians don't like waking at 7am to write blogs (...highly probable!)

6 ...or me and the rest who are writing are Pioneers and its up to us to get others to write (and save the world..batman begins)

If you feel that there are other blogs on the Net worth stating please add as a comment, and do lets get the blog word out. Its really relaxing to talk about things and having others review it .

Site feed for my blogspot

So after finally going through all the settings for blogpsot i got the site feed for my blog which is the following:

http://javedmandary.blogspot.com/atom.xml

So if you want my articles to be delivered on your blogs quickly,Vite fait , bien fait , au cas contraire la maison te rembourse ..you know what to do.

Debug codes on Tomcat in Eclipse

During the course of development of my hibernate-struts-laszlo application using Eclipse as IDE I came at a point where there was really a need to install debugging capabilities to Eclipse. The codes on which I had started to work on were becoming more and more complex and I was unable to proceed unless proper debugging was done to solve the bugs.

This is when I started a search for a proper debugger plugin which supports tomcat 5.X and I came across Sysdeo tomcat plugin for eclipse.

Installation is pretty straight forward:
1. Unzip the zipped file after you download it
2. Copy the contents of the unzipped file to Eclipse/plugins dir
3. Fire up eclipse and go to 'Window->Customize Perspective...->Commands', and check 'Tomcat' in 'Available command groups'
4. Set the Tomcat home directory: Window -> Preferences, select Tomcat and set Tomcat home

Thats it, if you don't see Tomcat in the commands view in Step 3, close Eclipse and on command prompt navigate to the eclipse directory and start it with the -clean command.. .. that is "eclipse -clean".

Three tomcat icons appear in your menu bar. If you want to debug a certain code jsp,struts, bean,etc.. just place a breakpoint next to the line where you want to start debugging in Eclipse, fire up tomcat by clicking on the start icon and thats it. Thats really cool cause you dont need to have tomcat started in debug mode... there is only one mode!

One thing to be noted is that at times you can see French text in the console when booting tomcat thats because the plugin was made by French developers but its not such a big problem for such a helpful tool.

Google Map

Google Map 
This is one yet interesting feature coming out of the Google lab , the Google Map. Not only does it give you the map of the place where you are looking for but additional information such as business places , hotels ,people , etc.. The map is rendered really fast which outbeats the speed of many map search tools I have seen so far.

Too bad there is no information for small islands such as Mauritius , it would have been really wicked. Imagine using your cellphone equiped with GPRS to find your way throughout the island...too good.. it think i should talk with the google guys!

Resources:

Google Map - start page

GMail increasing number of invites

Today I was very surprised to see that one of my Gmail accounts had 50 gmail invites. I had at most 6 invites every 2 months or so before. I quickly checked 3 other accounts and i found that each had 50 invites. That made an awesome total of 200 invites !!!!.

I think it wont be long now before GMAIL finally gets public and the invitation era comes to an end. Although there is some bugs still left , for example now for sending the invites no need to enter the first and last name of the person you want to send it to , you just insert his/her email address. However when the person accepts your invitation you get an email confirmation from gmail directly starting with "has accepted your invitation to Gmail..." . The name of the person is not displayed , they forgot to change the email template for confirmation.

These are minor bugs which need to be catered for before shifting out of its Beta version into official release. However its still the best email service on the planet.

Day at Court

To start my blog article ... we need to flashback...so...adacadabra...KABOOM..... 9th of September 2003 10:45am, La Vigie Road , Mauritius , Indian Ocean, Milky Way Galaxee .. Am driving slowly at 120km/hr (speed limit is 80km/hr..at that time) when out of the bloom a cop stops my car and hands me out an xcess form.

So the 7th of febuary 2005 i find myself in the courtroom of Curepipe with 60 other fellow law offenders. The Usher (not to confuse with the singer!) calls my name , I go to the box , he says something like blablablablab...blablablabla..accept...blabla..guilty..not guilty..blablabla I nod my head and its over. A Rs1200 fine (32 euros) and am a free man again.He didnt even check my ID or nothing , you just go there and say your guilty..thats soooo.. coool!

Then of course you need to go in the queue to pay for the stupid fine , a long loooong loooooong queue. After which you get a receipt which ressembles a supermarket receipt and you go home. Of course if you dont pay the fine after 8 days a cute little warrant is issued on your name and you get to wear those trendy black and white stripped shirt and matching pants. That was my day in court... memorable.

Finding your IP

There are basically 2 types of IP one which is static and one which is dynamic. Most of you at home , using dial up modems are assigned a new IP each time you connect to the internet this is called a dynamic IP.It changes on each new connection. As for the static IP this one does not change at all , you usually have that if you have a permanent connection to the net or at times some companies and individuals buy an IP with their ISP and they always have this IP.

IP are a set of digits which are seperated by dots (4 of them) an example is 66.249.64.14 . I won't go into the details of what an IP is am sure it would be very fascinating....but here I dont have that much time, so I will just tell you how to get your IP address when you are online.

At times for such applications such as NetMeeting or VNC, which allows you to connect to a remote computer you need to know your IP address and the address of the computer you want to connect to. showmyip.com and whatismyip.com are one of many sites available online which can quickly provide you with your IP address assigned by your ISP. This can be very helpful if you are working on systems which does not allow you to get the real externally assigned IP but returns your IP on the local network instead.

Resource:

Definitions of IP address on the net

Rain ... at last

Its now official since 10 minutes and 34 seconds... Yes ladies and gentlemen after 34 days it finally arrived in 2005 with a ground breaking music intro. Shaking the leaves , washing the souls ,and acclaimed by all, the first drops of rain hit the ground.

Now the question that many including myself (humble humanoid having not enough dough to get a car and who has to take the nearest spaceship each day..called a bus) has to ask himself keeps ringing into my ears... How the hell am gonna get home without drenching myself?...

There are thank goodness a few possibilities :

1. Walk in the rain and get "sick and tired" (courtesy of anastacia)
2. Run in the rain (no much change)
3. Accept fatality (just like in mortal kombat)
4. Take a cab (.....hmm.. too expensive)
5. Write a blog post on blogspot

I wonder which i will choose .......