Author: Gautham Pai

About me

Categories
My Updates

Super splendor – the latest ‘new’ thing in my life


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I was on the look-out for a 125 cc bike.

The bikes that I tried are:
* Hero Honda Super Splendor
* Honda Shine
* TVS Victor GLX
* Bajaj Discover

Honda Shine has the smoothest engine and good power. Next is the Super Splendor. I did not quite like Victor or Discover.

So I had to choose among 2 bikes. It was a tough choice!

Shine, being a new bike, I did not want to bet on it, especially with people commenting that although Shine has a whole lot of cool features, the looks are not good and Honda might come up with a new version of it soon. Plus there have been comments about Honda having starting problems and costly spares.

So Super Splendor was the obvious choice. It has decent power, is light and easy to maneuver and has good mileage. Plus Splendor has done well already and so this is a safe bet.

Next to decide was the color. This bike is available in 5 colors. I liked the Frost Blue colored bike. Black is good, but then it is pretty common.

So here it is. The latest in my 'belongings' list.

Categories
World Wide Web

How server side validation using AJAX may be better than client side validation

Let's say you are filling up a form and suddenly you get a popup which says that certain characters are not allowed in a field. Or an alert, which says that the number of characters entered is more than some defined limit.

Now using some fundoo plugin, you just edit that Javascript and ensure that the invalid characters are accepted silently. What will happen in this case?

The fact is, this might create problems in the system and may be a playground for hackers.

There are several solutions to this. Code obfuscation is one of them. However, to be on the safer side, it is advisable to perform server side validation before the data is processed further.

If the server side validation is not done, hell may break loose. If the server side code takes care of validation, then there are no problems. But this would mean that we are replicating the validation function in two different places. So how about combining the two and just providing server side validation using AJAX? The client will see the validation happen prior to submit (may-be a bit slow), and at the same time no code is written in Javascript to perform the validation.

Although people criticize AJAX about attacks, I feel it is an elegant solution if used appropriately.

Categories
World Wide Web

Public bookmarks, Private tags

Has anyone come across a bookmarking site that allows us to make bookmarks public, but attach private tags to them?

Here's the use-case:
Tags in my opinion are small bits of information that we attach to the entity under consideration. Now the entity itself may be public, but not the information that I attach to it.

To be more specific, let me tell you where I felt the need for this. When chatting with , I came across several books in Amazon. I started bookmarking these in delicious and attaching the tag bibliophile to them.

Then came a thought. How about storing information like whether I have read this book or not, what the number of this book is (I number all my books) and other information which might not be worthwhile to make public or for some reason does not seem appropriate.

In terms of implementation, I guess it is quite simple. You need to now track each tag and see if it is private or not (an extra field in the database) and then display them accordingly in the UI.

Categories
World Wide Web

Guest lecture in Christ College

I had been to Christ College today as a guest lecturer. The students were fine arts students, mostly in their final or pre-final year.

This was the first time I was giving a talk to such an audience. The students were receptive and expectant. There were questions; and they answered my questions satisfactorily.

My talk was on Web 2.0. So I had to tell them about blogging, wikis and a whole bunch of other jargons. There were students who knew about blogging and a majority knew about Orkut. 🙂 That made things easy for me.

This was my first visit to Christ College. The campus is huge and the infrastructure seemed quite good.

Overall, it was a good experience.

Categories
Technology

Java and pattern matching

I had a very simple requirement. I had to escape certain characters in a string using a backslash.

Backslash is a very tricky character. Escaping involves preceding the character to be escaped with a backslash. Now, suppose you have a string which contains a backslash, and if you need to escape it, you need to enter 2 backslashes.

The complexity just begins. Backslashes have special meaning in regular expressions. Strings in Java also use backslash with a special meaning.

Combine all this and you reach hell.

I wanted to replace all occurrences of ” and with ” and respectively. Guess how I use Java for this?

	returnString = returnString.replaceAll("\", "\\");

	returnString = returnString.replaceAll(""","\"");

Yeah, that's how you do it!

Categories
My Updates

About my work

Well, I hardly blog about my work. But here's something that gives moments of pride.

Categories
World Wide Web

Comments from Sir TimBl and Grady Booch

…I hope that we as humanity can learn to use this information space to understand each other, that we can form ourselves into groups in lots of interesting ways so that between us that sort of just tangled web of human groups spans the world and makes that so that it's not…you aren't too many clicks across the social Web from any one person to any other one person, so that start really pulling together in the world and solving the huge challenges which we've got without being distracted by fighting each other. — Sir Tim Berners Lee

…software mashups al la Web 2.0 technologies have gained traction — Grady Booch

Wow! The more I read about this, the more I begin to imagine what life would be were it not for the World Wide Web. It's become so easy to talk to some person who you have not even seen. Specially social networking has reached a stage where it's been more important to 'know people who know' rather than just 'know'! (Can you imagine life without Orkut?!)

If you want to have a larger picture of the way the WWW is positioned now and about its history and the way you can expect it to proceed, you need to listen to this podcast or read it here. (Source: From IBM developerworks article)

As for Booch's comment, well, if Booch says it, you better watch that space! (Here's the source for Grady Booch's comment.)

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Categories
General

Difference in interpretation?

I like blue. This has nothing to do with me being in IBM. I have always liked blue.

Now let's say you hate blue and like some other color, say yellow. What is the reason behind this?

Why do you like what you like? Why do different people like different colors? Is it possible that we all like the same thing, but the way we interpret it is different? In other words, what is 'blue' for me is 'yellow' for you?

I am not sure why I feel this, but there is no way you can deny this because in order to know what my feeling for blue is you have to be 'me', and you cannot be 'me' unless 'I' am 'you'. Further, likings are based on intuitions and cannot be reasoned.

I have had this thought for a long time. Recently I was reading something on AI and I started wondering, “If all computers are made up of the same 'hardware' how can we instill different emotions in them?” The most straight-forward thought that comes to my mind is to instill it using software. This means that you can program a computer to like something and then configure a computer to interpret things differently so that different computers behave differently.

How are human beings different?!

Ok enough of this.

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Categories
My Updates

One year up in IBM

A year back on this day, I joined IBM.

So far, so good. Lots more to do.

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Categories
Technology

Want a Linux flavor for human beings?

My first experience with any Linux flavor has been usually bad. But this one wasn't.

I had heard about Ubuntu a long time back but somehow could not use it. The requirement of the Internet for installation was too much to ask.

However, I was interested in trying out a new flavor of Linux and so asked for a CD. I like KDE more than Gnome and so I asked for Kubuntu. The coolest feature that I saw was that there was only one CD, which acted like both a Live CD and an installation CD. Boot the OS and if you like it, click on an icon and it installs as if the OS were an application.

There were no hassles. The live CD booted without any problems. I was even able to access the net. was also able to access the net using a USB modem using the Live CD (imagine doing that without even touching your hard drive!). Both of us were excited.

The installation however gave me some problems. (My success rate of installing Linux in one try, thus, still remains at zero! 🙁 ) I had forgotten that I had mounted a Linux ext3 drive and I was trying to format it during the installation. The install process crashed and asked me to refer to some logs for more info (which I did not). Failing during installing Linux is not a big deal! So I tried again.

This time I tried a slightly different option and I was given a clue that I could be trying to format a partition that is mounted.

That was it. I did not face any problems after that.

If you are like others and wants to use open source software, but are shuddered by the idea of a 'Linux installation' or 'package dependencies', try Ubuntu.

There are more packages than you can imagine. There is something (actually a lot) for everyone. You will find applications that you use in your day to day use or atleast find equivalents.

Overall, I am more than satisfied with Kubuntu. Thanks to all the developers and the people behind this wonderful revolution.

Wanna try it out? You can ask for free CD's by asking for it here.

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