Akshat's Place

Yours faithfully is back; with a loooong due update

There have been a few changes in life since I last posted. Not the least of which is being accepted at the Carnegie Mellon University

Second, is being transferred to SCA Technologies’ Pittsburgh campus, which suits me just fine. I’ll be starting with the part-time MSIT here at CMU come January. Dreams do seem to come true every once in a while, don’t they?

So, as you can well imagine I’m happy to the point of bursting. I’ve been here about a month now. And, I’m loving it.

Here’s a desktop wallpaper of this wonderful city’s skyline.

Pittsburgh Downtown

I found this amazing video on the same code-monkey song I posted in the last post. In fact, I like this one more

I’ve been having lots of Maven fun lately. So much so, that I’ve moved FreeBookMan back to design face as as to take advantage of Maven (and hibernate). FreeBookMan now lives on sourceforge at https://sourceforge.net/projects/freebookman/

At office, I’ve started a little side-project writing custom JSF components for our application. Normally this would be lots and lots of fun, but since we are using MyFaces – 1.1, it isn’t that lots of fun. Still, it is fun however :-p In addition to this  yours faithfully is wrestling with Jira Soap as well. And this is all on top of the regular assignments. As one mightguess, this makes Jim a busy busy code-monkey (and apparently a grumpy grumbling one too).

However,  life is fun One really does love coding.

The pdf reader plugin for FreeBookMan is almost ready, but I’m not very happy with it. For one, I haven’t yet figured out how to support continous scrolling (instead of page based scrolling). Secondly, zoom feature is going crazy. However, yours faithfully will soon get around these and bring you the next release of FreeBookMan, in not very distant a future, I hope.

Another feature which I desperately want is bookmarks, and read position persistence. So that,

1. You may define specific bookmarks within the file you are reading.
2. When you open a book, you should reach the point you were at the last time you closed it.
3. These features should be independent of the format / plugin.

Lets see when these materialise

Meanwhile, I upgraded to Jaunty, but the (well-known?) feud with intel integrated graphics and Jaunty crippled my Compiz enough to make ita pain to use. I tried many of the myriad solutions suggested on the forums, from downgrading my display driver to changing xorg.conf accel method to UXA. Net result, zilch.

So, we decided to take good ol’ Lenny out for a spin. And as an Ubuntu user who DOES NOT wish to become a Linux system admin, it was terrifying. Nothing comes preconfigured, not even SUDO. But SUDO and SUDOERS are the simplest of the things to achieve. Try changin any settings from the Desktop, nothign will persist.

So Lenny was definitely not my cup of <insert drink of your choice>. And yes, between these two, I flirted with Fedora. I installed the Fedore X11 preview, and found it “fast”. The thing really does boot like lightening. amazing. However, I guess Ubuntu has spoiled me for comforts :-p. I finally settled on going back to Intrepid. So here I am, posting this from the Intrepid Ibex, and I’m happy. And I’m sure the evil Jackalope won’t be welcome on my machine ever, especially since I seem to get the idea that the intel graphics issue won’t be resolved until Karmic.

And for any of you who find the Ubuntu brown ugly, try


sudo aptitude install blubuntu-look


So long!

P.S: I’m using the amazing PDFRenderer library from java.net.

This one is about my 91 Model Maruti  Suzuki 800. My 18 year old car gives me a per liter average in the vicinity of 18.6 kilometers. The last I heard, a lot of new cars were giving an average way lower than this.

And just for the record, I drive like any other 23 year old in this part of the world, and these past few days my air-conditioner has been running too (heh, the summers are here already!).

I just lurrrvvvv my car

[To know more about Maruti 800, see wikipedia].

Hi everybody. I know it’s been a while since I dropped in here. And that too when my website was broken

But such is the life of an ambitious codie. Oh well, just fixed the site’s stylesheet. I figured that the nested anchors for nested pages were giving a cool effect, so I let it be, for the time being atleast. Enlarged the masthead to accomdate the new links properly though.

And, trimmed FreeWidgets and put themonline again, with a nice MIT style license (copied from prototype.js license. They say imitation is best form of flattery). FreeWidgets depends on the prototype framework, therefore I have included the version lying with me. However, I ghly recommend heading over to www.prototypejs.org and downloading the latest version. Have fun amigos!

And the website broken. Or twisted atleast. My theme seems to be unable to show nested page-links in a pretty way. But it’s the witching hour, and I’ve got office tomorrow. Besides, I just finished writing (and uploading) version 0.1 of stylesheetutils.js (psst…go take a look). I’m bushed. Gotta sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep…….. zzzzzzzzzzzz.

Here’s the link [http://akshatsharma.com/blog/open-source-projects/styleutilsjs/]

And the holiday itself is for ‘Holi’, a festival celebrated with great fervour herein India. You can know more about it here on wikipedia.

Meanwhile, it seems we are finally done with the North Side Food release in office. Taking advantage of the lull, yours faithfully was given the task of creating an internal message board for employees. I looked at a couple of options, but finally settled on Drupal. So, for the past two days I’ve been playing with Drupal. And let me tell you, Drupal is amazing. I already have blogs, books and polls set up in addition to forums. Going forward all our technical documents and articles etc will be placed withing Drupal, as it provides features for threaded discussions, tags and searches of such material.

Sadly, all this activity means that BookMan development has fallen by the wayside, at least for the time being. Though I hope to do something worthwhile with that today. Let’s see what gives

So, half the weekend is gone, witha significant portion being sacrificed to las minute project spec changes, things which keep me working saturdays and make me a sad coder

Yesterday, my college LIMAT (a university now ) had an alumni meet. Needless to say your very own was there. Quite nice to take a trip down memory lane; once in a while…

However, had to leave early and go to office *sniff*.

Whatever (grumble grumble grrr mumble grumble).

Meanwhile, took a look at facebook’s new comments widget. Looks mighty attractive. Should I take the plunge? May be I will

On the other hand, my basement has been painted I however need to empty the workshop, move all the tools and stuff to the basement so that the painters can give some love to that as well. Huh, no rest for the likes of us I guess :-/

So, what did I do this week? Let’s see…

1. Got the BookMan project back on track. Now I’m using NetBeans (mainly for their excellent Swing GUI editor), and I have created the code from scratch yet again (well, sort of). This outing is called DT3 (for desktop version 3), and I have used quite a lot of code from DT2. Several classes are in ready enough state to get the application window up, but it’s all a hollow shell. By the end of next weekend, I hope to have at least the features from DT2 working.

2. Added the open-source projects page (look at the tabs on top!). Sadly though, it only lists DT2, while the Java paginator, Java Tree and JavaScript Cerberus projects are missing. Soon they will be here, though my priority remains BookMan DT3. I hope to get it into a stable enough shape soon to start attracting other Java developers who might be interested in working on this (anyone listening?).

3. Finished Pastwatch by Orson Scott Card. Amazing read. No one, writes quite like him, and if it were not 10:46 in the night, and if tomorrow were not a monday, I would definitely would write Continue reading And the weekend is over