Rampyari ki khoj

What's the big deal, one might ask? Yes, I'm looking for a car and while hunting around I found a wealth of information is available about brands and products available in the market, but one finds zero information about the dealers in the local market.

Market is full of inexperienced, uneducated, incompetent salesmen who are ready grok 'the best' car to you in no time without understanding my needs or expectations. They simply seem to be oblivious about the competition and live a ,monopolistic universe of their own brand, to such an extent that a mere mention about the competition makes them turn blue.

Further, talking to old timers, I realized that your dream car may soon become a nightmare of sorts based upon your service providers, about which you may not have any reliable information. After all any machine needs skilled maintenance and I need some one whom I can trust for the pre-defined level of quality of service in lieu of the amount I spend on the same. The need for rating dealers and service stations is both timely and important.

In the mean while in order to live in the more 'real' world I soon would have to make my choices...

Evolving programming paradigms

The free lunch is over and it simply means that;

• Our applications may no longer be able to automatically seek benefits of hardware up-gradations, we will have to plan, design and make room for concurrency.
• As a developer we need to hone our skills to make good use of hyper-threading, multi-core CPUs and caching.
• Do not get confused with marketing slogans about new found technologies. Seldom, does a technology becomes mature too fast to become main-stream, generally it is old technologies which increasingly useful with time and better understanding of its developers that can gainfully be used to solve important problems.
• Because, our applications do not automatically gain performance with newer hardware solving performance problems and performance tuning will become an important activity.
• Start preparing now.

Urban Area: Community or a Marketplace

'Mumbai for Mumbaikars' might bring bad taste to your mouth or a sense of ownership based upon your political affiliations. Whatever be your reaction it is however increasingly becoming important for us to delve deeper to try and understand the core issues lest we must reject them as pure nuisance.

From a pure theoretical perspective the urban population can be broadly divided into two sections;

• Community dwellers, who inhabits a particular place and encourage symbiotic relationship between various members of the community. They largely like to take the ownership of the place for its general well being and associated identity. Such people have high tolerance towards problems as result of scarcity of resources.
• Market dwellers, who look at an urban area as a place where market operates and they themselves form links into the demand and supply chains. Such people have high preference for quality of life.

The stated difference in their value system creates competition resulting in clashes.

What can be done about it? well .. I'm not too sure will it help if market dwellers contribute back to the community of which they are part off to avoid being  tagged as parasites and community ensures that market operates in safety  thus creating  a conducive environment to attract better talent!!

Part of the answer also requires us to understand the larger picture and avoid such local focus. Will it not help if we have more balanced growth in .. sounds wishful.

Share your mind, who knows our ideas are heard and we do reach a resolution.. let us start from ground zero again..

Mar Java, Mit Java..

... and with European Commission's nod the last hope of keeping the Sun shining too went away, while the whole software and business community is still evaluating the takeover deal, I must express that I feel bad about the whole thing.. there is something which is not generating positive vibes... although, some of you might discount me for being emotional, I have at least one objective reason to support my point in case. Old timers will clearly be able to spot the difference that post acquisition all the Sun domains have been distastefully defaced and simply reflects the tyranny, greed and callous attitude of the raiders.

I, seriously hope similar fate is not vetted out to the open source initiatives.

In bad taste...

Reality television is truly a reality today and one can no longer ignore them. There popularity can be attributed primarily because it also involves its viewers. I used to love 'Boogie-Woogie' for their plain ingenuity and honesty in bringing recognition to dancing talent. The show was conducted wonderfully well.

With time however, the production value of reality shows have increased dramatically but I'm sorry to say that they leave everyone demoralized. Particularly shows like Roadies and Splitsvilla are truly disgusting.

My whole point is that such shows are increasingly creating a 'public acceptance' for foul and abusive language in public which is one very dangerous trend. They must mend their ways or else criminal action be taken against them.

Running Java in debug mode using Apache Ant

Configure your Java task as given below;

<java classname="org.zero.Main" fork="true" failonerror="true">
            <sysproperty key="DEBUG" value="true" />
            <jvmarg value="-Xdebug" />
            <jvmarg value="-Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,server=y,suspend=n,address=8999" />
            <jvmarg value="-Xnoagent" />
            <jvmarg value="-Djava.compiler=none" />
            <arg value="${project.root}/conf/preferences.xml" />
            <classpath refid="project.classpath" />
        </java>

Further,  configure your eclipse debug remote application to listen to the specified port (8999 in this case).

Also, add Thread.sleep(1000); as the first line in your main method.

Execute Java task and try connecting from eclipse, you may need to increase the thread sleep time.