A Few Author Stories

The Greatbong Blog & Podcast

1. Person at book event: “Your autograph please? This is for my husband, I would of course never read the stuff you write.”

2. Random person in store comes over to where I am sitting (just before book-event): “Give me three free copies”

3. Random person at Bangalore Lit Fest: “Are you a famous author?”

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Developing iphone apps using Java

It’s a channel on google about Education and Tech talks and in this tech talks will be talked about object c, java, apps and cross compiling. You can see the Google tech talk here

From the “City of Joy” to the “Garden City”

After 36 hours of train journey (most of the time I was sleeping) , I am finally in Bangalore . Thanks to the office rush around 9 am , I enjoyed the pleasure of sleeping even in the prepaid auto which I took from the Yashwantpur station as  I witnessed my second worst traffic jam ever , the first one being in Mumbai , that was in the evening. I am here for an Internship at Sun Microsystems Bangalore office and I am looking forward to have a nice time working for Sun. I have managed a temporary accomodation at one of my relatives’ house and would be searching for some ‘sasta’  PG type for my 2 month stay here . I had my lunch at some restaurant where  I had to pay 50 bugs  for a thali which I haven’t still been able to figure out what the hell it was . I soon realised that I had some real bad days awaiting me in terms of my        ‘ khana pina’  though I was warned about it before hand from some of my seniours and friends staying at Bengluru.

Though its been not more than 10 hours here but one thing  I have noticed about people here that they are very honest and calm in nature . Talking about the honesty I would like to share the fact that there were no TT’s to look for our tickets at the station . I am again feeling sleepy I donno what has happened to me so I feel like ending it here . More from Bangalore coming soon .

Lok Sabha Elections 2009

I feel really pity for Bharatiye Janta Dal (BJP) this time as I dont think that they stand a chance against Congress which is the party having a vibrant bunch of young leaders and workers . The Parliament desperately needs a major youth representation and Congress provides it with leaders like Rahul Gandhi (the hearth throb of the country as we see in the News), Sachin Pilot and many more . BJP , I think has really fallen short of agendas and is just monotonously sticking to issues like unemployment and lack of job security and overall country security under Congress rule which is actually very well known to the people that this issue can be in best controll under the UPA government under the leadership of the Man (Manmohan Singh Ji). From West Bengal point of view Mamta has hit the hammer on the head just at the perfect time getting together with UPA and I really feel sorry for Left as this time they dont seem to be Right with their decision of parting ways with the UPA on such extreme illogical reason like  “Nuclear Deal with the US “(I have no idea what is wrong with them). I am a excited as ever with the Elections this time and really feel sad about the fact that I dont have my Voter ID card and not even my passport ready so that I can vote . Still I expect the citizens of the biggest democracy in the world to take the right decision as they do not always do but I am sure they will this time . JAI HIND !

Restart & Shutdown the PC with Twitter

Last week a new Twitter based app called Tweet My PC was  released. This is a great app as you can Restart, Shutdown or Logoff your PC using your Twitter Account. This means that you don’t even need to be in front of your computer to switch it off. Just tweet from your mobile and your PC will shut down. We can even use this app to play pranks on other people by Shutting down or restarting their PC without their knowledge. Its totally upto you, how you would use this app.

The best thing about this app it that its very small, just 382 KB. So you don’t need to worry about it taking space and consuming the PC resources. When you install this app, it will appear in the system tray. You can see the Tweet My PC icon in the system tray. Just double click the icon to open it.

Try it out here http://www.cooltricksntips.com/2009/04/restart-n-shutdown-your-pc-with-twitter.html

Random notes

• Exams are over and its time to chillax .
• Met some of the Final years and got some invaluable advice regarding career and future .
• Downloaded about 6GB of Hollywood flicks for the holidays .
• Planning to go home tomorrow in the evening by bus . 
• Really sad about KKR’s performance .
• Got the Sun Internship confirmed . Need to go to Bangalore on the 5th of May.

Download YouTube or Similar using Copy Paste

 

We watch videos on YouTube, Google videos, and all those FLV powered video sharing portals. We all want to download it and save it for our later pleasure. Ofcourse, lots of desktop applications and command line utilities are available. But if we are on Linux we can have youtube videos with simple copy paste.

The video that you are currently viewing is on /tmp/Flashfoo (the foo can be any random string. After the video is completely buffered, we just have to copy the file to our local disk for persistent storage. That is it.

We can watch as many you want and copy them too. Each of the Flash* files have a unique random character string.

Open Source University Meetup (OSUM) now more open

I guess everybody involved in SUN activities has awareness about OSUM. OSUM was in the past very closed socical network. One needs to be registred in to see what is inside. After long time it has changed to the better way. OSUM is going to be more open to the public now. It means more information and more reasons to be registred in. I guess one of the main principes of any open community is to be open. OSUM is now going to reach this goal.  Have a look at public profile of the groups. Anyway changes are comming .

Open Source car by EDAG

 

We’re pretty comfortable with the idea of open source software running on computers and mobile phone — heck, even guitars — but cars?
That one we’re still warming up to, but this concept vehicle from EDAG definitely helps. As its name implies, the Light Car – Open Source lets developers modify and / or improve upon the auto’s technologies — or at least put a SNES emulator on the back. The lithium ion-powered bubble car also sports an OLED-infused exterior for lights and signals that are supposedly useful both to the driver and other nearby motorists, but in actuality we suspect it’d just scare anyone tailing behind. No information on the interior, but we imagine a decked out dashboard and some futuristic chairs. It’s currently being shown off at the Geneva Motor Show.

How to open a .war (web archive) or .jar (java archive) files

With Java we generate .JAR files to bundle a set of resources. For J2EE web applications, we generate .WAR (Web Archive) files for deployments. Both of these are ways of archiving a set of files.

Both these .jar or .war archives are in zip format. So there are plenty of ways to open those files to read the content. One way would be to use any tool that you use to open/extract a .zip file. Next will be to use the Jar command itself.

JAR Command

JAR (command) utility in Java can be used to open/extract these files as follows. Run following command from the folder where you need the content to be extracted by providing the path to the archive.

jar xf

options:

x – extract the files
f – file to extract

jar xf myWebApp.war
jar xf myProject.jar