Learnings from the Past: Hibernate related Best Practices

5 months ago | Amar Phadke: Amar Phadke's weblog

Back to blogging after a gap of 8 months. I have been working on some cool optimization stuff related to Hibernate. Here is a brief summary of the best practices i have come across on this and past assignments involving Hibernate. # Practice What? Why? How? 1 Use Lazy Load Don’t load objects until you need to use them. Queries involve lesser joins, so [...]

Learnings from the past: Writing jMock Unit tests in 6 simple steps

about 1 year ago | Amar Phadke: Amar Phadke's weblog

Do you ever come across a situation where your Unit test ends up testing more than what a unit is supposed to be?  Does your unit test end up looking more like an Integration test? Does it only run within a container? Does it depend on external things like records in a table, entries in [...]

Complex Programs with Simple code?

about 1 year ago | Amar Phadke: Amar Phadke's weblog

After my last post, i was wondering if really complex programs/systems/applications could be written using simple, easy-to-understand code. Code that does not span more than 10 lines a method. The most complex program that i could think of to experiment with was a Chess server – an app that would evaluate a position and suggest the [...]

Code quality and cyclomatic complexity

about 1 year ago | Amar Phadke: Amar Phadke's weblog

I recently came across this article on code quality and cyclomatic complexity. Found it interesting and so thought of sharing. Do the following phrases sound familiar to you?  They surely sounded familiar to me. Sure, it’s a bit confusing (at first), but look how extensible it is!! It’s confusing to you because you obviously don’t understand patterns.

Internet Connection monitoring script for the GNOME panel

about 1 year ago | Amar Phadke: Amar Phadke's weblog

I was having issues with my Internet connection lately. My connection used to drop after using it for a while and the router used to lose the IP address. I decided to write a simple script that would sit on the GNOME panel and tell me the current state of my Internet connection. I found a [...]

Web Server’s virtual directory and network drive

about 1 year ago | Amar Phadke: Amar Phadke's weblog

I encountered a problem today trying to create an Apache Tomcat virtual directory that pointed to a mapped network drive. Found out that this was due to the fact that Tomcat was running as a Service with a local account. It was not able to see the network drive since that used to get mapped with [...]

Update on the GreaseMonkey Custom homepage script

about 1 year ago | Amar Phadke: Amar Phadke's weblog

As mentioned at the end of my last post, i continued exploring the idea of having a custom homepage with content aggregated from different sites on the client side. I tried using the about:blank page of Firefox as the starting point on which to build content, but could not succeed. After googling on this issue [...]

Playing around with Greasemonkey

about 1 year ago | Amar Phadke: Amar Phadke's weblog

Greasemonkey is an extension for firefox which allows users to write custom scripts that can change the UI and behavior of web-pages. I tried writing a small script that would change the layout of an RSS-feed aggregator site->www.waywework.it. Here is a screen shot of how it looks after applying the custom Greasemonkey script. And here is the [...]

Sony Erricson, Toshiba, Vodafone & 11 others join Open Handset Alliance

about 1 year ago | Amar Phadke: Amar Phadke's weblog

The Open Handset Alliance announced the joining of 14 additional companies yesterday. This includes the likes of Sony Erricson, Toshiba and Vodafone amongst others. New members will either deploy compatible Android devices, contribute significant code to the Android Open Source Project, or support the ecosystem through products and services that will accelerate the availability of Android-based [...]

Learnings from the Past: Rules Engine

about 1 year ago | Amar Phadke: Amar Phadke's weblog

I was working with a bank in the mid-west US a few years back. They were building an on-line mortgage application that would allow brokers to submit loan applications and get real time product and pricing information. After some initial discussions it was decided to build a product and pricing engine in-house using an of-the-shelf [...]

Are you flocking yet?

about 1 year ago | Amar Phadke: Amar Phadke's weblog

This was about six months back. I was searching for a Linux based Flickr client that could mass upload my daughter’s birthday pictures. I came across something called ‘Flock‘. It turned out to be a full fledged browser based on Mozilla. There are a lot of things that you can “easily” do using this browser. Some [...]

Android Stock Quote Application

about 1 year ago | Amar Phadke: Amar Phadke's weblog

I got a chance to work some more on my pet project over the weekend (thanks to my wife and daughter). I started off with the idea of saving stock symbols to a portfolio. These would provide a high level picture of all stocks, their last traded price, change and movement (up/down) on one screen. [...]

My First Android application

about 1 year ago | Amar Phadke: Amar Phadke's weblog

I started developing my first Android application last week. It is a Stock quote app that fetches real time stock quotes from www.webservicex.net . In it’s current form, it simply shows the quote information given a NYSE stock symbol. It’s hosted as an open source project on SourceForge at http://sourceforge.net/projects/androidstockquo/ I am planning to add new [...]

Android v/s iPhone

about 1 year ago | Amar Phadke: Amar Phadke's weblog

There is a lot of debate going on recently about which is a better mobile computing platform. Is it the iPhone or the Android? In my opinion, Android will emerge as a eventual winner. Here’s why: It’s developed on an open source platform (iPhone runs on a closed Cocoa platform thats runs on a scaled down [...]

Confguring Firefox for Single signon

about 1 year ago | Amar Phadke: Amar Phadke's weblog

If you use Firefox for browsing your company intranet sites that are single signon enabled, you must really hate getting redirected to the login page. Ever wished there was a way you could use Firefox without stopping at the login page? Now, there is a way out. Follow these simple steps to enable single signon in [...]

Goa, Lonavla

about 1 year ago | Amar Phadke: Amar Phadke's weblog

I recently got a chance to vacation at Goa and Lonavla. I have posted a few pictures of the trips here. It was amazing to see natural beauty of these places. Goa is well known around the world for its beautiful beaches. We visited about 4-5 different beaches over the course of 2 days. Unfortunately, the [...]

YSlow from Yahoo!

over 2 years ago | Amar Phadke: Amar Phadke's weblog

What is YSlow? YSlow a plugin for Firefox which analyzes web pages and suggests changes to improve their performance. It’s developed by Yahoo! and is based upon their rules for high performing websites. It gives you a performance scorecard, list of components on the webpage including size, cacheability and load time, and a high level HTTP/HTML [...]

Thin PC’s

over 2 years ago | Amar Phadke: Amar Phadke's weblog

I had a thought the other day. What do most people use their pc for? Checking emails, chatting, tracking stocks & financial accounts, sharing pictures, reading news, researching deals. Activities that only require Internet access. Do they really need a local computing machine for all this? Can this not be done by something that has [...]

3D Printing/Rapid ProtoTyping

over 2 years ago | Amar Phadke: Amar Phadke's weblog

We all use Printers in our daily life for some reason or the other. Be it for printing photographs, resume, receipts, tickets, study material, or any other piece of documentation. All these printing applications are 2D in nature. They print an image with length and breadth. What if the printed matter had a 3rd dimension? Thats [...]

Pune visit

over 2 years ago | Amar Phadke: Amar Phadke's weblog

I recently visited some friends and relatives in Pune. This was my second visit in the recent past and i must admit that i loved it. The thing that i like most about Pune is its Food. There are several quality restaurants around that offer great food at a good price. Restaurants are also much cleaner [...]

Modal dialog on a web page

over 2 years ago | Amar Phadke: Amar Phadke's weblog

You are developing a web application that requires the user to take an action before doing anything else on the web page. Eg., Click to keep session from being timed out. Confirm changes on the web page. Rate a product displayed on the web page. Accept clauses that pertain to certain actions on the web page. Forced reading of [...]