micro blogging and macro narration

Twitter everywhere. I am really a fan of twitter. It’s a remarkable way to bring bloggers *together and am surprised to see it everywhere. I could also see media companies promoting twitter apps in their set top box.

But i don’t know why but for some reason i am not able to tweet much even though i like the way it takes the message to the people. I remember myself and Joseph were discussing about one such idea exactly a year before(when we never heard of twitter, or say it was not so popular) and we even kept a name for it, life blog. The word life is because, the whole intension of the platform is to narrate the life

So when did this micro blogging idea came into picture ? Is it an easy way to bring in mobile users to blog ? I feel mobile web would bring in lot of changes to the way blogs are read or say conceived. Narration !! Interesting who knows, we may even have a twitter feed running in our personal blog site sometime, Soon !

Another interesting analysis about twitter. It has enormous content nerrated by souls in this world and at times it becomes less manageable. So does it gets shaped up like how a macro blog (or blog) gets shaped? The word *shape has a deeper meaning in the world of expression, esp. in the world of blogs. I believe the regular blogs gives the author a tool to shape up information than it is with the micro blog. Tweets are some sort of expressions carried out in a *timeline. Small time !! I call it small time because it’s the very old nature of west to live every moment and gauging every second. I do not find anything wrong in this conception of “every second” living unless you carry a long size mini notes with you to remember.

It’s really nice to see what people narrate in the little time slots. Mostly it’s like communicating in pieces. Exactly like a asynchronous telephone conversation. Say telegram sort. It’s a gram basically. This little concept drags many people towards it. Say for example, how you felt when you saw you exam result, how you learnt cooking you favourite dish etc.., These things may not shape up to something big, but it has it’s own beauty and essence.

west drags web 2.0

Times of recession and it’s about business  survival. Stories of cost cutting, layoffs, no funding for research, frozen development etc…, are closely related to corporates and governance. Ok enough of those boring lines of corporate lecture. Do we see web 2.0 getting affected by these uncertainties of the business world. As a close observer of the web, i could see some sort of dizziness in the world of web development.

I don’t want to talk big players like Google and Micorosoft as they already established some sort of revenue model out of web, but i am worried about the startups. Since most of them being funded by west, aspiring startups might go for a halt for some time. I should say post 2006, the world of web saw many new ideas like Flikr, Facebook , Youtube etc.., Do they evolve as a model ?

So, how long do we wait. Wheres are those budding mobile VAS providers. Can this ecosystem sustain the tides of economic crisis ?

Another important question is: will web 2.0 take a turn someway or take a temporary halt ?

Ubuntu lappy

Wow. I really liked ubuntu. It may not be for geeks(but a contrasting info later) but it is definitely for a desktop user. And more importantly it has the heritage of the ever powerful Debian. I would definitely call this as GNU/Linux ubuntu. It pretty nicely differentiates between proprietary and non-proprietary software. I loved that part when ubuntu pop up at the first startup saying, do you want to continue with this x properitory driver software be enabled. It would be a less common work for m$ windows user though.

And the gnome desktop with Advanced Display technology shines. The laptop battery indicator is a very nice hack. It looks cool and yet very simple. I would definitely recommend it to friends who eat, drink and live redhat / suse / debian for desktop.

I thought ubuntu might not suit building / hacking gnome applications. But i should say it was in ease for me. I just tried a relatively new java-gnome build. It initially threw some dependency heck. But thanks to apt-get. It was way too cool. I was able to resolve dependencies and install. Wow. What more to ask if you are a hacker. Anyway the complete gnome build would be interesting. But still this is pretty cool.

Liferay portals

Liferay Portal

Wow. What an experience working with a beast of a portal server. It’s around 85 MB in size and does lot of stuffs when it comes to managing portals. No nasty configuration steps and easily deployable with tomcat/jboss bundled. I am waiting to see more application servers integration support. It also supports pretty good extended environment to compile our applications adding portlets.

I must say open source community is now into a new and different channel of thought. And this one is pretty big. It’s a java portal but still it should be disturbing all the perl and python developers.

I must say web developing and content management are pretty big and frequent words used these days. I had the oppurtunity to work in liferay (and still continuing) and i learnt the core idea.

I believe it will serve as a pretty good enterprise platform for content management and applications. Since lightweight java services like Springs, Struts etc creating significant market, liferay is set to get mature with them. Even though i could not work much on configuring liferay i was able to get a feel of it. Especially the themes configuration are made so simple. And not to forget user and portlet permission management. It can be just done in ease.

Once place where one as a liferay administrator can get stuck is with the versions. And it’s generally not so administrator friendly when it comes to debugging errors (apart from those typical java application errors). He/she needs a pretty decent hands on experience and must be able to master the liferay specific portlet configurations.

The portlet based application development are getting fame slowly but i believe one day they would definitely gain more space with more better standards flowing.

Issues regarding liferay and setup are pretty interesting topics to read on. I would like to devote some time in future writing them here. Happy reading.

A simple displaytag grid demo

Display tags are pretty good option when it comes to creating a enterprise class data grid.
The sample code given below is quite a head start for building up a bulky grid.

// Create class that returns a list
package org.ixfree.Displayags;
import java.util.*;
public class GridList {

private List aList;

public List getAList() {
return aList;
}
public void setAList(List list) {
aList = list;
}
public GridList(int i)
{
this.aList = new LinkedList<DataBean>();
}
}

// POJO bean that goes into the list. DataBean in our case.
package org.ixfree.Displayags;
public class DataBean {

private String name;
private String age;

public String getName()
{
return this.name;
}

public String getAge()
{
return this.age;
}

public String setName(String name)
{
this.name = name;
}

public String setAge(String age)
{
this.age = age;
}
}

// Get the libraries reffered
// Sql needed if you wanna get the data out of the table. Ofcourse there are much better ways to do it.
<%@ taglib uri=”http://displaytag.sf.net” prefix=”display”%>
<%@ page import=”java.util.*” %>
<%@ page import=”org.ixfree.Displayags.*” %>
<%@ page import=”java.sql.*” %>

<%
// Make a list of data for populating grid
List<DataBean> list = new GridList(6).getAList();

// .. Get the data into the bean and add it to the list.
// .. Every bean here refers to a row in the grid. Yeppiiie….

// Put the list in the request
request.setAttribute( “storedList”,list);
%>

// Make it as a XHTML (good for the browser)
<head>
<!– All script and style/references goes here –>

<link href=”ixfreeDemoDisplayTags.css” rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css”>
</head>
<body>
<!– If you dont want the grid to introduce scroll bar for the window, but ok for the grid –>
<div id=”My_DisplayTag_Grid” style=”width: 800px; height: 360px; overflow: auto” >
<!–
The pageSize is pretty useful when you wanna have pagination
class is just our regular css stuff
headerClass applies to the TH’s

name attribute of the display:table tag does the magic of reading our list.

–>
<display:table name=”storedList” class=”myDisplayTagStyle” id=”displayTable” pagesize=”10″ requestURI=”theCurrentJspPage.jsp”>
<display:column  sortable=”true” property=”name” title=”Name”  class=”myDisplayTagStyle” headerClass=”myDisplayTagStyle”/>
<display:column  sortable=”true” property=”age” title=”Age” class=”myDisplayTagStyle” headerClass=”myDisplayTagStyle” />
</display:table>
</div>
</body>

### ixfreeDemoDisplayTags.css goes this way ###
html
{
scrollbar-base-color: #dddddd;

}

table.myDisplayTagStyle
{
background-color: #dddddd;
}

td.myDisplayTagStyle
{
border-color: black;
border-width: 1px 1px 1px 1px;
border-style: solid;
margin: 0;
font-family:Arial Verdana;
font-size:10pt;
overflow: auto;
white-space:nowrap;
padding-top: 6px;
padding-right: 6px;
padding-left: 6px;
padding-bottom: 6px;
}

tr.odd
{
border-color: black;
border-width: 1px 1px 1px 1px;
border-style: solid;
margin: 0;
padding: 4px;
background-color: #ffffff;
white-space:nowrap;
}

tr.even
{
border-color: black;
border-width: 1px 1px 1px 1px;
border-style: solid;
margin: 0;
padding: 4px;
background-color: #dddddd;
white-space:nowrap;
}

th.myDisplayTagStyle
{
background-color: #dddddd;
border-color: black;
border-width: 1px 1px 1px 1px;
border-style: solid;
font-size: 9pt;
white-space: nowrap;
padding-top: 10px;
padding-right: 10px;
padding-left: 10px;
padding-bottom: 10px;
}