Sun is Shining

Netbeans & mySQL Integration Demo @ Technovate 08

2008-08-10T07:30:00.000-07:00

Technovate 08, the second annual Sun CxO showcase was held in Aug 08 at Grand Hyatt Mumbai, see the NDTV coverage here.

I presented a live demo on the nebeans and MySQL seamless integration. Basically, on the stage I created an Entity Enterprise Java Beans from a simple MySQL hosted table, followed by a JSF CRUD application created from the generated entity. And, all without a single line of coding !!!

Sun Open Source Workshop at Amity Innovation Incubation on 01 March 08

2008-03-27T22:47:00.000-07:00

Wonder Why Pople Love Sun

2008-03-27T02:51:00.000-07:00

I sometimes wonder why the techies are madly in love with Sun. I though it was because we invented Java. Maybe, thats my reason. Making Solaris Open Source ? Yes! Thats another of my reasons.
But wait!!! Here is a completely new dimension for loving Sun.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Murphy/?p=1102

I guess all different people have different reasons to be passionate about Sun. But there is one common thread Passionate About Technology.

There must be something erotic about Sun Technology -- Thats Open Source !!!!

Sun is the largest enterprise contributor to Open Source

2008-01-18T05:19:00.000-08:00

Yes! Thats true, Sun is the largest contributor to the Open Source, see page 51 of the EU study:
http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/servlets/Doc?id=27255

Workflow in Portal using Java CAPS

2008-01-09T15:44:00.000-08:00

Here is a good technical article on how to incorporate workflow in Portal using Java CAPS
http://developers.sun.com/portalserver/reference/techart/workflow.pdf

Salesforce.com has Single SignOn issues

2008-01-04T21:00:00.000-08:00

On receiving a promotional email from developer @ salesforce.com, I decided to check them out. I had an user id, but had forgotten my password. Thereafter started my ordeal, they have diverse sites like wiki.salesforce.com, na5.salesforce.com, login.salesforce.com and many more...

Nothing wrong in having micro sites, in-fact it allows load balancing; But whats missing is single signon & co-ordination between the sites. Also wiki site login did not have forgot password link.

Its password retrieval process is also cumbersome. Amazon and Google have got it right and they Salesforce should learn from them.

Also I noticed a few JSP files, thus I presume they are using JavaEE infrastructure, so the question is why they haven't gone in for SSO?

The Salesforce concept is excellent and forward looking and gives Amazon and Google a good run for their money, but they need to catchup on OpenId and SSO. Maybe, they should look at Liberty Alliance for leapfrogging by using federated identity management.

Ruby On rails makes fun of Java @ You Tube

2007-12-30T06:22:00.001-08:00

Here is a Hilarius You Tube post making fun of Java, its a RubyOnRails commercial. In fact, Java runs RubyOnRails, here is the netbeans tutorial. Enjoy !!!

Java faster than C @ You Tube

2007-12-30T05:00:00.000-08:00

Just posted my first You Tube video on making Java faster than C. Here is the paper
and the open source project. Special

Thanks goes out to Nagendra (Nage), Satya (Satyajit), Ranjan and Vikas.

Java Gotchas (FindBug)

2007-12-30T04:56:00.000-08:00

Just saw a cool Google tech Talk video at YouTube. Here is their web site for open source project.
You must check this out!

Eclipse or Netbeans

2007-12-22T07:02:00.000-08:00

My two favorite IDE (Integrated Development Environment) are Eclipse and Netbeans.
The beauty of Eclipse is that it can be downloaded, unzipped and its ready to go! Also its CVS and SVN features are excellent. However, off-late, I have been using Netbeans more often. And after the 6.0 released netbeans has totally taken me off the Eclipse.

I have been thinking why Eclipse has fallen behind Netbeans? In my personal opinion, its because of the differences in backers' commitment.

Netbeans is backed, sponsored and supported by Sun, while IBM has been backing Eclipse.

Sun is committed to Netebeans while IBM is involved in Eclipse. (You may have heard the "English Breakfast" joke umpteen times that, in an egg-and-beacon breakfast the hen is involved while the pig is totally committed).

Sun is consolidating all its IDE into Netbeans and is also providing commercial support. Also ALL of Sun software IP (Intellectual Property) is mandated to be open sourced by its CEO. This includes its chip design Ultrasprac, which is its bread earner. This what I call commitment.

While IBM is involved in open source, I am yet to see it fully committed. In fact, after receiving nagging mail to stop using the software I downloaded, I have stopped using Aphaworks. In-spite of the fact that it has wonderful works, I refrain from using them. Having said that, I do appreciate IBM having donated Cloudscape database to Apache. I look forward to the day when IBM totally commits itself to open source.

Finally, netbeans is integrated in true sense of the word, while Eclipse is fragmented. I have a feeling that somehow Eclipse got left behind; as (I may be wrong) IBM has committed itself to Visual Age. Also the Visual Age page does not mentions Eclipse!

Thus I would rather stick with netbeans rather than being going with Eclipse.

HK2 (Hundred Kilobyte) Kernel How it Bootstaps

2007-12-14T08:46:00.000-08:00

Glassfish V3 is based on HK2 (Hundred Kilobyte) Kernel, here is how it bootstraps.
http://www.ashishbanerjee.com/hk2

Solaris Web Hosting

2007-11-27T07:07:00.000-08:00

You always wanted to play with ZFS and root access on a Solaris machine with a live IP, but your system admin would not let you play with fire ?

Help is at hand ;)

Gridzones.com offer Solaris Virtual Private Server with root access starting from $15 a month!

They use Solaris zones technology. Zones and ZFS are pretty cool stuff that you must check out!

Walking inside the Blackbox

2007-11-17T19:09:00.000-08:00

Recently at CEC 2007 at LAS VEGAS, I had my dream fulfilled to see, touch and feel Blackbox. Its so cool. Its basically a container on a truck, thats converted into a mobile data center.

Guess What! I actually walked inside the Blackbox. wow !!!

You load the container with servers and you are ready to go! Just feed it with power, water and Internet pipe and you can setup your data center at any place on earth! You might want to carry a generator set and a V-Sat dish on a second truck :)

Now when you go on a holiday to Goa, you need not carry your laptop and Reliance data-card. Just put your datacenter on a truck and bring it along and enjoy all the compute power.

Here is what Greg has to say about Blackbox :
http://www.hpcwire.com/hpc/1894475.html

Why I Joined Sun?

2007-11-17T09:12:00.000-08:00

I fell in love with Sun technologies, circa 1995 when it released Java. Being a hard core programmer, Java was so exciting when Internet was getting commercialized. That time I was a software director of Osprey Software (a small UK based company, now extinct). I convinced my customer to let me develop a project in Java when it was still in Alpha! It was an X.25 gateway to Internet for accessing Galileo GDS. By that time they did not have an Internet strategy then, but thats another story...
Cut to 2005, Sun had open sourced Solaris! Now that was really sexy!! How sexy? Ask any old time programmer, who worked on AT&T Unix System 7. They will tell you its like Aphrodite disrobing ;)

So I had been diving deep into the source code. Later the same year (?), while on a sabbatical, my brother called me in to help him out with a porting project . He was working for a company, who had outsourced the ISV program from Sun. They had challenge porting an intrusion prevention system from Linux to Solaris. They had hit a roadblock at the kernel architecture level. No one was willing to touch it. So, my brother remembered of a crazy old guy who was spending his sabbatical time drooling over the Solaris source code as if its hard porn!

When he described the challenge to me, I got excited. After a long fight, ably supported by a team of 4 to 5 engineers, I fixed the problem. I had to patch the GLD; just a small change of four lines!!! The open source gld patch worked on Solaris 10!

The customer who was mad at them, was thrilled. And, the patching could not have been possible without the open source Solaris.

Thereafter, to cut the long story short, I contributed a kernel module fuse, also wrote program that made Java faster than C.

I was enjoying life. But suddenly, I was reminded by my wife that I have spent away my sabbatical. She was also against my doing another startup, neither did I have any great idea, to startup anyways.

Ironically, the day, I announced to my open source commune, I got an offer from Uncle Gate's company.

Though I was feeling guilty to join a closed source company, but then I was willing to bite the bullet as the pay was good. I also reminded myself that I must have loved MS technologies, since they recognized me as Dot Net Community Star and That I had co-authored a C# web Services Book.

But thankfully, as the word went out in Linkedin, a Sun folk figured me out and offered me to join Sun. Ok, although Sun could not match MS salary, I opted for it as I would be joining the company that invented Java and owned Solaris!

I am still learning to survive at Sun, but when some of my open source community friends ask me how I feel at Sun. I hum the old Dr. Hook's Song...

Dr. Hook - The jungle to the Zoo

The tiger, he looked out of his cage and smiled
He said come here boy, I want to talk to you a while
He said I once was running wild and free just the same as you
But it's one step from the jungle to the zoo

Its one step from the jungle to the zoo
You better watch out or they're gonna get you too
They'll clip your claws, cut your hair, make a pussy cat out of you
Its one step from the jungle to the zoo

He said son when you go running through the grass
You beter look out for all the hidden traps
They'll feed you sweets and goodies 'til you're too fat to move
Then its one step from the jungle to the zoo

Its one step from the jungle to the zoo
You better watch out or they're gonna get you too
They'll clip your claws, yank your fangs, make a pussy cat out of you
Its one step from the jungle to the zoo

Only one step from the jungle to the zoo
You better watch out or they're gonna get you too
They'll clip your claws, cut your hair, make a pussy cat out of you
Its one step from the jungle to the zoo

Only one step from the jungle to the zoo
You better watch out or they're gonna get you too.....