Open a shell and just type in the following

defaults write -g NSWindowResizeTime -float 0.01

Apps opened after this will have faster animations, open apps must be restarted for the change to take effect

First download the file , then navigate to your eclipse installation directory , next ctrl-click on the Eclipse.app and select the option show package contents.

In the finder window, just replace the default $ECLIPSE_APP/Resources/Eclipse.icns with the file you just downloaded

That’s it , you can drag the app icon onto your dock and it will show up like this.

I booked the flight from San Diego to Jackson Hole, and was hoping that the weather would be conducive for photography, however this was not the case. I was greeted by snowfall right at the airport and it continued the whole day. Day 1 of my trip had been hijacked by travel and snowfall. Cursing the weather I toss and turn in bed that night, checking the Weather channel app on my phone every 30 minutes. This in turn ruins my wife’s sleep and she is not very amused by my activities.

Day 2:
I wake up at 5:30 am and head towards Jenny Lake, the temperature is 17 F. Braving the wind that freezes one’s privates I reach the lake to find that the lake is frozen and the Tetons are wrapped in a never clearing blanket of clouds. Sigh. I wait for 45 minutes in the cold weather but had to make a retreat when it started to snow once again. I go back to the hotel upset with the fact that I haven’t even seen the Tetons with my naked eye. The nearest town where you get something edible is 22 miles away. When I get back to the hotel I see that the wife is still sleeping, 3 hrs after I left her, cant blame her

With all the snow / blizzard I was convinced that I will not be able to get a single quality landscape picture. So we decided to just drive around and see some wildlife. Slowly and steadily I started accepting the fact that my brand new wide angle lens is of no use for this trip. We have brunch at the Bunnery – a very good place that serves fresh food. Everything is baked fresh and even the oranges are squeezed fresh. I highly recommend you try this place out if you ever happen to be at Jackson hole. After this we continue our journey to see wildlife and as we drove through the nooks and corners we started seeing Elks, Mule Deers and Moose.

The most impressive of all these were a herd of bisons that we found by accident.. My first photo opportunity was here, btw this was the first time ever in my life I saw a North american bison in flesh and blood.

Encouraged by the prospect we continued our trip to see many more Elks , one thing notable was that the moment you aimed anything at them let it be a camera, they take off like its a gun. Later that day I figured out that elks were hunted in Wyoming – that explained the nimble footed behavior. We continued our drive forward where we started seeing another bison herd crossing the road. By then it was snowing and or raining, so I decided to give the camera the pass.

I’ve seen this gorgeous picture of a barn in Kelly called Moulton Barn and thought that I drive up till there – on way to that barn we encountered a pair of prong horned antelopes

However when I reached the barn it started to rain out of nowhere and we decided to call it a day. We headed back to Jackson Hole for dinner, and had dinner at this ‘fancy’ restaurant called ‘Silver dollar bar’ , The dinner was grilled Elk medallions. I found it quite ironic to have the same animal for dinner which I was struggling to get a good picture of. However that was the last time I had Elk meat.

Day 3:
Clearer weather, heck at least it’s not snowing ! However the Tetons still hide behind a veil of cloud.. We decide to head to Yellowstone national park. We take a route suggested by our good ‘ol GPS, but after 1.5 hrs of drive we find that the road is closed, and we turn back. We head back to Jackson hole and spend the rest of the day shopping. On way back home it dawned on me that we could reach Yellowstone through Idaho & Montana. The next days plan is made.. attack Yellowstone via the west entrance.

Day 4:
Finally I see the sun shine. We drive off to Idaho and hit SR-33 and 20 to reach Yellowstone. Here Bisons are plenty, the weather is warmer. Today we just have one wish in mind. See a grizzly bear. We drove through the park , roamed around at the geothermal springs, and saw Old faithful go off , by afternoon the urge to see a bear was unbearable so we drove north east,after 1 hour of driving, all on a sudden we see this..

there it was ! the sole purpose of visiting Yellowstone. We were so thrilled that the gripe of the first 3 days of bad weather was a thing of the past. We headed back home. We enjoyed the view back on our way back through Idaho. That day I slept in peace. I know the places to go for good pics in GRTE. I’ve made up my mind to head back during the fall time.

The next day we packed our bags and headed back to San Diego.

Grand teton and Yellowstone are must see places, I figured out that the more affordable way is to fly to Salt lake city and drive from there. I will be blogging about my next GRTE trip soon ( If fate permits..) Till then, I live with the memories.

The channels are just looking for some news , any news to make it sensational- They twist the words they make their own assumptions, add their own views and politically biased views to the news items to give out a final ‘product’ that is non-palatable to any human being who thinks with a clear conscience.

Till last Sunday, the first thing I used to do after I woke up was to visit the following sites

ibnlive.com
ndtv.com
hindustantimes.com

I must say that the worst among this is ibnlive. They are following the same steps as the parent company CNN , which is another big shame.

NDTV.com seems a bit more mature / level headed in the content that they publish.

HT is more or less OK but they deliberately bend words, I ‘ve noted that at least a handful of times.

The only news sites I find that have some ethics left in them are Hindu and Indian express

I have vowed to myself that I will never again visit ibnlive / nor watch that channel. I really enjoy reading the Hindu the fonts are pleasing, the layout is nice and above all the content is great. There is some substance in the content that they post . It may be last news source that we can rely to get a generally unbiased view of things.

I have a utility for that

This code has a dependency on commons-beanutils , GSON & log4j

The container that will hold your data.

import java.util.List;

public class JQGridContainer {
	private Integer page;
	private Integer total;
	private Integer records;
	private List<JQGridRow> rows;

	//getters and setters are omitted for brevity
}

The rows within the container

import java.util.List;

public class JQGridRow {

private Integer id;
private List<String> cell;

//getters and setters are omitted for brevity

}

The class that handles the formatting

import java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;
import java.util.Set;

import org.apache.commons.beanutils.PropertyUtils;
import org.apache.commons.lang.ObjectUtils;
import org.apache.log4j.Logger;

public class JQGridFormatterUtil {

	private static final Logger logger = Logger
			.getLogger(JQGridFormatterUtil.class);

	public static String getJSON(int currentPageNo,
			int totalRecords, Set objectsToBeAdded,
			List orderedPropertyNames) {

		Integer pages = 0;

		if(totalRecords % 50 >0){
			pages = (totalRecords/50)+1;
		}
		else{
			pages = (totalRecords/50);
		}

		JQGridContainer container = new JQGridContainer();
		container.setPage(currentPageNo);
		container.setTotal(pages);
		container.setRecords(totalRecords);
		List rows = new ArrayList();
		if (!objectsToBeAdded.isEmpty()) {
			for (Object obj : objectsToBeAdded) {
				JQGridRow row = new JQGridRow();
				row.setId(new Integer(getPropertvalue(obj, "id")));
				List cells = new ArrayList();
				for (String propertyName : orderedPropertyNames) {
					cells.add(getPropertvalue(obj, propertyName));
				}
				row.setCell(cells);
				rows.add(row);
			}
		}
		container.setRows(rows);
		return JSONUtil.convertToJSON(container);

	}

	private static String getPropertvalue(Object bean, String propName) {
		String val = null;
		try {
			val = ObjectUtils.toString(PropertyUtils.getProperty(bean, propName));
		} catch (IllegalAccessException e) {
			logger.error(e);
		} catch (InvocationTargetException e) {
			logger.error(e);
		} catch (NoSuchMethodException e) {
			logger.error(e);
		}
		return val;
	}

}

The utility that JSONizes the entire data

import org.apache.log4j.Logger;

import com.google.gson.Gson;

public class JSONUtil {

	private static final Logger logger = Logger.getLogger(JSONUtil.class);

	public static String convertToJSON(Object obj){
		String json = null;
		Gson gson = new Gson();
		json=(gson.toJson(obj));
		logger.debug(json);
		return json;
	}

}

1) Fring – A swiss army knife for your IM and call needs.
2) IRIS Browser – A Webkit based browser from WM. Far advanced than IE from first impressions.
3) Google maps - Simply great, if you have a GPS embedded on your phone.

I upgraded my Samsung BlackJack 2 to WM 6.1 today and installed these apps , I love the phone once again

Assumptions

1) You are familiar with the basics of Maven.
2) The steps outlined will have a affinity to use Eclipse as the IDE.
3) You will need JDK 1.5 or higher coz we will be using annotations.

The first step in developing the web service is to get your build system up.

Task 1: Setup the project in Eclipse.

Issue the command


mvn archetype:create -DgroupId=com.cxftest -DartifactId=CXFTest


This creates the basic skeleton of the project. Next, cd in to the cxftest directory and issue the following commands

mkdir src/main/webapp

mkdir src/main/resources

Next run


mvn eclipse:clean eclipse:eclipse -Dwtpversion=1.5


This creates the basic structure of your eclipse project.

Now lets add the dependencies needed by the project

<properties>
<cxf.version>2.1</cxf.version>
<spring.version>2.5</spring.version>
</properties>
<dependencies>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.apache.cxf</groupId>
<artifactId>cxf-rt-core</artifactId>
<version>${cxf.version}</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.apache.cxf</groupId>
<artifactId>cxf-rt-frontend-jaxws</artifactId>
<version>${cxf.version}</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.apache.cxf</groupId>
<artifactId>cxf-rt-transports-http</artifactId>
<version>${cxf.version}</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.apache.cxf</groupId>
<artifactId>cxf-common-utilities</artifactId>
<version>${cxf.version}</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-core</artifactId>
<version>${spring.version}</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>junit</groupId>
<artifactId>junit</artifactId>
<version>4.4</version>
<scope>test</scope>
</dependency>
</dependencies>

Task 2 efine the contract

Define the schema / contract for communication.
a) Define the xsd schema for communication; lets call it NameFormat.xsd. This file will define both the input that the system expects as well as the expected output from the system. In other words this XML document defines the contract of the system.

Save this file under src/main/resources

Task 3: Automate all the mundane stuff.

Maven pitches in here to save a lot of time here so that we need to only concentrate on building our business logic.

First we need to setup JAXB, to execute the xjc task so that it generates Java classes from the XSD that we defined earlier.

for that add the following code to your POM.xml under the plugins section

<plugin>
<groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
<artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
<configuration>
<source>1.5</source>
<target>1.5</target>
</configuration>
</plugin>


These two plugins will read the XSD and generate the source code of the expected inputs and output objects.

This is how the final POM will look

</plugins>
</build>
</project>


Task 4: Code the web service.

Now code the implementation of the web services. Following the grand tradition of coding to interfaces lets define the interface for the web service as shown below.

After this is done, lets Code the implementation of what our web service is supposed to do.

/**
*
*/
package com.cxftest.service;

Task 5: Wire up everything

The first thing that we need to do is to declare a servlet in our web.xml and configure it to receive all incoming requests. My web .xml looks like this

Note the <context-param> and <listener> are being defined in the web.xml, this is how we bootstrap spring.
Also note how an instance of org.apache.cxf.transport.servlet.CXFServlet is used to service all requests.

The final part in the JIGSAW is the spring application context xml definition for spring.

Task 6:
Finally run


mvn eclipse:clean eclipse:eclipse -Dwtpversion=1.5
mvn clean compile


Refresh the project and fire up the webservice !

This is my first in the series of blogs that deal with an issue that is close to my heart, nature. As my first step I decided to visit Birch Aquarium at San Diego. Birch Aquarium lies nestled against the pacific Ocean at La Jolla. The aquarium founded in 1905, is a pioneer in oceanography and states it primary goals as spread awareness about the oceans through creative exhibits, programs, and activities designed to help people use critical thinking, and to make science relevant to their daily lives.

If you ask me I would say that the size of the exhibit area is modest, with maybe 20- 30 tanks in total , but the work that goes behind the scenes is tremendous with data oceanic data collection centres spread over 100 countries and various points in the international waters. In fact there are some robots designed that submerge in the oceans for a months time, collect data, pop up and then relay the data over to satellites collecting and collating them.

The exhibits involve anything from Jelly fishes to Sharks, with explanations including their habitat, the various challenges they are facing to exist and so on.

There is an opportunity to interact with the research scholars and scientists on every third Saturday of the month. I was not aware of this and reached late. I plan to attend the interaction program next month though. (Hopefully)

Overall the staff are very knowledgeable and are patient enough to explain things over and over to each one visiting the place. I plan to visit Birch aquarium in the near future and follow up on this blog series soon.

INFO | jvm 1 | 2008/05/13 22:24:22 | ADMIN : Initiating OTSAdmin
INFO | jvm 1 | 2008/05/13 22:24:22 | DAMM EXCEPTION –com.ots.admin.err.OtsException
INFO | jvm 1 | 2008/05/13 22:24:22 | INIT EXCEPTION –com.ots.admin.err.OtsException
INFO | jvm 1 | 2008/05/13 22:24:22 | ADMIN : ERR: SYSTEM ERROR..Shutting Down…for Error

I have nothing more to say !