On Technology and Faith » technology

Synthetic Life

thomas — Tue, 25 May 2010 05:08:59 +0000

A historic milestone for humanity was reached when Craig Venture announced last week of his teams creation of Synthetic Life. This is the first cell in the world whose parent is a computer
Although I applaud his effort in this groundbreaking advance in science. I am concerned of patenting as mentioned in a BBC Article: Synthetic life patents ‘damaging’
The video of the announcement is embedded below

Getting Started with Trackbacks

thomas — Fri, 02 May 2008 15:53:34 +0000

Technology terms are fancy and Trackback is no exception. I’ve heard of Backtrack and trackback sounded like backtrack in reverse. Since I’ve started blogging and trackback is an important feature I thought of invistigating a little more on it and this is what I found.

Briefly put trackback is a feature which informs a site that you are quoting them. I know it is pretty easy for me to put it in a sentence when I myself had trouble understanding it from Wikipedia. For those of you who still haven’t got what trackback is I have posted a couple links below with comments for you to follow.

The first place I looked was wikipedia and found an entry for trackback at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trackback

I was not very happy with their explination. Although it was accurate. I could not figure out what it actually did. Off I went exploring the links on the trackback external links section.

The first site I went to was

What is Trackback? by Tom Coates

It had a basic explanation of the concepts and how it works but again nothing on how to get it done and what sort or results it would produce.

On I went looking of other sites.

Finally I landed at

The Ultimate Trackback Help Guide

It had quite a nice explanation on how to get it done and also encouraged you to try a trackback from your blog. That’s exactly what I thought of doing and hence this post.

Happy Blogging.

Prototype to OO Javascript

thomas — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 17:21:00 +0000

Started reading Prototype and Scriptacolous. The first example was a bit hard to chew. I realised that to learn Prototype you need to know a little bit on Object Oriented Javascript. So I started my journey and this is what I found.

To start off I found the two links give below:

The Prototype based language is new to a person who is used to traditional OO like java. But you could bend your mind to understanding it.

Hopefully I will start using javascript with Prototype in the near future.

Found quite a few references javascript at SitePoint just check it out

SitePoint javascript References.

Another good tutorial on prototye at SitePont is here.

Painless JavaScript Using Prototype

MyTop is cool

thomas — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 04:55:00 +0000

I was reading High Perfomance Mysql and in that book they mention a tool called Mytop basically it is a top clone for Mysql. Instead of running show full processlist; repetedly on the mysql console just run mytop. Helps you quite a bit.

I had an installing it. I get the foll error

Can’t locate Term/ReadKey.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /usr/lib/perl5/5.6.1/i386-linux /usr/lib/perl5/5.6.1 /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.1/i386-linux

This is because it requires TermReadKey Perl Package. Just run

yum install perl-TermReadKey

and you are ready to go.

Jasper Reports: Java Beans as DataSource for Subreports

thomas — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 11:52:00 +0000

Today I had a problem. I had a complex bean (Bean which contained other beans) which was being sent as JRBeanCollectionDataSource (JasperReports API version 2.0.2) to a Jasper Report.
This report had to have sub reports for the inner bean. I really could not find out how to pass the bean to the subreport from my main report.
Finally I cracked the nut.
What I did was set the DataSourceExpression in the Subreport element to

Where $F{taxBeanList} is a collection of Tax Beans.
In My subreport I do not have any datasource or queires. This sort of got it working.
I hope to add more to this post in future when I reread it and find some gaps.

Outer Joins Vs Inner Joins

thomas — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 11:41:00 +0000

Today I looked into Outer Joins and Inner Joins. I have never used joins (Explicit) always relied on the Implicit joins created by the where clause.

In Outer Joins we have Right Outer Joins and Left Outer Joins and Full Outer Joins. What this basically means is that if there is as foll:

Left Outer Join:
All the records in the first table will be displayed even though there is no corresponding records in the second table.

Right Outer Join:
All the records in the second table will be displayed even though there is no corresponding record in the first table.

Full Outer join.
All the records of both the table will be displayed.

A Good example is given here.
Join (SQL) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Change all Amounts to Big Decimal

thomas — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 00:09:00 +0000

Today I found out that all my currencies have to be BigDecimal. BigDecimal helps with rounding etc. Double has all sorts of quirks and cannot be relied on, especially when dividing by 3.

The downside is that there is a whole lot of legacy code that needs to be changed. Could use this as an excuse to rewriting the application.

Java Security

thomas — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 02:25:00 +0000

I tried it out today. The details of Java Policy which controls what each program can and cannot do.
However there were a some grey areas which I thought I needed to jot down for further reference.

It is best to put the policies in ${user.home}/.java.policy
If 1 is not possible then the confusion lies as to where to put the policy
1. You could put it in any file as long as you add it to the ${java.home}/lib/security/java.security file.
2. The entry to be made is policy.url.3=file:/D:/JavaTest/mypolicy (windows)
3. This works for applet viewer but not mozilla
4. Java usually downloads the latest version of JRE and installs it. Mozilla uses the latest version so. For Mozilla it is not enough to change ${java.home}/lib/security/java.security file but the /lib/security/java.security of the latest version of JRE.

Tricky CSS

thomas — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 06:55:00 +0000

Css can be pretty tricky. In this blog I will keep appending the quirks I notice in CSS.
:
When a Div is floated the div will cut across the containing div if the containing div is smaller than the floated div.
Fix:
Create another inner div at the end of the containing div and give the Css property clear:both. This will force the containing div to be bigger than the inner div’s.

Setting up Subversion

thomas — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 16:07:00 +0000

Today I will go about Setting up subversion. I am not going to install subversion since it is already installed by fedora.
The version FC 4 installs is

svn, version 1.1.4 (r13838)
compiled Apr 13 2005, 12:20:50

Copyright (C) 2000-2004 CollabNet.
Subversion is open source software, see http://subversion.tigris.org/
This product includes software developed by CollabNet (http://www.Collab.Net/).

The following repository access (RA) modules are available:

* ra_dav : Module for accessing a repository via WebDAV (DeltaV) protocol.
- handles ‘http’ schema
- handles ‘https’ schema
* ra_local : Module for accessing a repository on local disk.
- handles ‘file’ schema
* ra_svn : Module for accessing a repository using the svn network protocol.
- handles ‘svn’ schema

After doing yum update subversion

svn, version 1.2.3 (r15833)
compiled Aug 26 2005, 03:42:45

Copyright (C) 2000-2005 CollabNet.
Subversion is open source software, see http://subversion.tigris.org/
This product includes software developed by CollabNet (http://www.Collab.Net/).

The following repository access (RA) modules are available:

* ra_dav : Module for accessing a repository via WebDAV (DeltaV) protocol.
- handles ‘http’ scheme
- handles ‘https’ scheme
* ra_svn : Module for accessing a repository using the svn network protocol.
- handles ‘svn’ scheme
* ra_local : Module for accessing a repository on local disk.
- handles ‘file’ scheme

Now what I have to do is set up repositories
Get a subversion dump from the old system.
Import the Subversion Dump