{ proton: fever }

After an awesome weekend for Maker's Day at the Glen Rock Library. A lot of people wanted to join a Raspberry Pi club. Makers Day at the Library 2017 from Glen Rock TV on Vimeo . Those interested to join the Raspberry Jam - Fill this form out! https://goo.gl/forms/tJOXJK7h6LFRFWYf2 For those want to know what a Raspberry Pi is; What is a Raspberry Pi? from Raspberry Pi Foundation on Vimeo .

This was my second year attending QCon New York . It is an interesting conference, where market leaders & innovators come and present their ideas, implementations, challenges and what worked for them. There is always a stream of knowledge and wisdom to be gained at this conference. A could do a quick run down of the sessions I was able to attend, and what I liked, disliked, but rather I'm just going to point out some of the jewels by my experience. Talks which I attended and absolutely loved. When the presentations are made available, I would recommend a must watch! Engineering the Red Planet Dr. Anita Sengupta gave an amazing presentation on the "Curiosity Rover" landing on Mars and the 7 minutes of terror . The excitement in the room was way beyond any sci-fi finale. There were interesting questions on testing, and other details around the project. Makes you think, you are doing microservices, and others are planning missions to mars! Some links around the s...

Decided to go on a month long vacation leaving the home all by itself. This was the perfect opportunity to put a home surveillance system in place. There was nothing I could do remotely if anything happened, but would not want to let go the jackasses who broke in! Hardware in use Raspberry Pi 2 (will work with 3 too!) Logitech 720p old web cam Sony PS3 Eye 480p web cam 64GB SD card for OS and data capture.  I tore the "Easy carry Ziplock" box on the sides for the cables to pass thru. It was placed near the window, and I did not want to leave the pi running naked, since I did not have a proper enclosure, put it in this box. Placed two cameras around the room, one on the lamp, which would monitor 4 entry/exit points in the house, and the other one near the porch to monitor if anyone was approaching the front door.  Steps to install MotionEye 

Interesting article to read, rather than try to summarize or hijack the article, please read it in original. http://blog.ieeesoftware.org/2016/02/why-should-software-architects-write.html 

We started off with the default 5 shards of Elasticsearch and then suddenly realized, it was way beyond what we warranted for. After a conversation with the ES support team (which by the way is awesome! I definitely recommend them), we decided to downsize our shard level to 1. I've used elasticdump to carry out the task. It is fairly quick and versatile tool. The script assumes you have modified elasticsearch.yml to have the desired shard/index size, and have restarted the cluster for the property to take effect. The script is just a general reindexing script, it backups up the data, deletes the indices backed up and then restores from the backup. Check the script for more info.

The build always makes it to the staging and production server after a series of rigorous tests. This ensures the build is complaint with the requirement and that none of the old features have been compromised in any way. Once in a while, a rare, but an annoying " Scope Creep " scenario does happen. Just minutes before the demo some one would realize a missing feature or patch which missed the commit deadline and did not make it to the server. So as a quick temp fix we just deploy that file to ensure the code does not have to go through the grueling tests again. Some of the smart developers don't commit these hot patches to SVN or merge it with the patch branch, losing the feature again. 

Your code base is always under version control (if it's not, it's high time you did!), and developers are always scared about taking updates or committing files, under some supernatural fear, that an update will wipe out their local changes. This causes a lot of trouble in the team, when some developers have not updated their code base since a long time. I've compiled below a checklist of best practices. Before you check in your code to subversion, here are a few points to follow. Ensure that there are 0 (zero) serious CheckStyle, PMD, FindBugs error (warnings should be reviewed). If you need an exception Checked in Code must build with all dependencies (not just your module). Checked in Code must not break unit tests. Checkins without comments should be noted as a build break caused by the developer.  Before committing your changes to repository, it is advisable to synchronize the files, run an update and then commit your changes.

Software versioning for the end consumer is a very vital part of the software release cycle. It is one of the primary identifiers for consumers to report issues against in a software. It also helps the development team to identify, if the features/bug fix made it through the release. We follow a similar pattern, which can be useful for you too. The version number is strongly tied to the SVN (also valid for other version control systems) branching and tagging convention. Hudson (CI server) also plays an important role in stamping the build number.

One of my friend’s over the past few months has been speculating starting her own recruitment firm, but was not sure how to go about investing & setting it up. So we got together and brainstormed a few ideas. We created a list of tools that are of utmost importance for her work. It turns out Microsoft Office, MS Word more precisely is one of the most sought after tools by recruiters, followed by Microsoft Outlook for email. 95-98% of the people seeking jobs send their resumes in MS Word format. Time immemorial email is one of the fastest and most efficient way of bulk communication. Using MS Office is expensive, and word documents are a prime target for carrying viruses. We needed a document reader, an email client and a strong anti-virus software.

(This document is aimed more towards Java & VMWare, but the same can be replicated for any other language & environment) Abstract You have a team of developers working on different modules for a project-product which are inter-dependant. Each developer diligently writes unit & integration tests supporting their code. You want to set-up an agile test environment to run the unit tests & staging server for integration test, but purchasing hardware for multiple machines is a constraint. The following article provides a guide on how virtualization tools like VMware can be used to set-up staging or QA environment (Agile).

Time immemorial, we are all aware about the famous lazy load exceptions in Hibernate. Using a detached object does not exactly hide us from the issue. We are using DWR in our application and found that when marshalling (or unmarshalling if you insist) a detached object to JSON, DWR was erratically trying to call a null (lazyly loaded) object, causing LazyLoadExceptions. We did not want to use OpenSessionInViewFilter as it is evil (some day I'll post all the consolidated rantings as one). You can google and find a lot of info around it. As a quick fix we did what one would first think of, "It's a demo, just eager load it!". Well the demo was over and now was the time to investigate a better solution, and we did find it. It was no rocket science, the solution was available in front of us all along, we just did not look hard enough. When using DWR, there are BeanConverters available which are responsible for this marshalling process. There was one for Hiberante, ...

Should we be using interfaces for everything and making everyone explicitly implement them or should we trust that everyone follows the same convention.

Since the new project began I've been think about this over and over again reading as many posts and taking ideas from different posts and blogs. The more I read, the less I knew. Below is a collection of few links I've come across which have some conclusive and non-conclusive decisions/arguments, some of these post lean towards POJO's and some towards DTO(Data Transfer Object). Frankly I was not been able to convince myself on what to use. (Leaning more towards POJO's as detached objects).

This is an old post I had written on google docs, before VMware Server was free for the general user. Thought could be still more relevant to the general developer for testing in Linux envoirment. VMPlayer I beleive is lighter than VMware Server. There are 2 stages of setting up the development & testing environment for yourself. The preferred work environment is Linux. If you already on Linux then you can safely skip Stage I, you can directly proceed to Stage II, also if you have Linux already installed, just cross check if you have the LAMP (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP) server installed.

Disk space is cheap, starting from a 1.2GB hard drive from my first computer to a "spare" 500GB external hard drive, cheap data storage has come a long way. I click a lot of photographs ever since I got my first digital camera, and I store a lot of these photos too (locally), now since 2006 I have over 201,608 photos and some videos. My camera photo number counter has reset twice!!