Random musings

I was trying to run the EJB 3 example at http://www.webagesolutions.com/knowledgebase/javakb/jkb005/index.html on Glassfish v3 installed on my machine. I did all the steps, but the EJB Client grinded to a halt with the following exception:

Looking closely at the exception, I found the text: orb’sInitialPort=3700 – well, that’s the default target ORB Port. But, I remembered that my GlassFish v3 app server was configured with ORB Port 3767, and I double checked it with the Glassfish Admin Console: ORB->IIOP Listeners. Yup, the problem seemed to be with the port number. I just added the following lines:

Properties jndiProps = new Properties();

jndiProps.setProperty(“org.omg.CORBA.ORBInitialPort”, “3767″);

InitialContext ctx = new InitialContext(jndiProps);

Exactly a year ago, I started this blog – and it has remained mostly unnoticed for obvious reasons. Not too many posts, not enough content – blah blah blah. OK. Deep breath. It’s start of another year. And the circumstances are similar. During last year I have managed to stay married (and quite happily at that), purchase my dream ride and live the dream by going on short trips and I have managed not to upset too many people (I hope). I also made some wonderful friends at work. Thanks to everyone for making my life meaningful.

In my pursuit of a better future, I’m joining one of the technology majors in the country and hope to do something meaningful there. I hope 2010 proves better than last year – for all.

I was trying to revisit HIbernate and I found the following link helpful:

http://www.techfaq360.com/tutorial/firstHibernateApplication.jsp

Although the tutorial explains things very clearly, I couldn’t get the damn thing work even though it passed an Unit Test that I wrote instead of the main() method given in the tutorial.I was out of my wits when I couldn’t see the data being persisted in the database even though my Unit Test passed !

It was already pretty late in the night and I couldn’t help but give up.

When I had a look at the code in the morning, I found a serious flaw with the tutorial – the statements for Transactions were missing.

I added the following lines:

Transaction tx = session.beginTransaction();

//code for saving data

…….

session.save(emp);

tx.commit();

And finally, I could see the database table populated with the data.

I learnt my lesson. And its good that Hibernate forced me to think about the transaction – it actually helps to think about the whole program flow and not just the persistence problem.

Another common problem took some while to figure as well. Sometimes, when everything else is ok, one gets this “Field xxx has no default value”. Hmmm….pretty serious. But having tried everything else, it just didn’t occur to me that the field in question must be set to “AutoInc” as I had mentioned “native” as the ID generation class (and I was using MySQL). In any case, the field in question must have a default value that can be supplied either by the code or by the DB by use of sequence or auto increment feature.

I’ve given up on online tutorials because most of them do not care about updating their tutorials. I’m going back to books. The best books in regards to learning Hibernate are :

a. Hibernate Quickly ( I found this easier to understand and implement the examples)

b. Hibernate in Action (the authoritative text on Hibernate, but better to read after one gets comfortable with Hibernate after reading the above book – its easy to get lost in all the theory and details )

I had some time over this weekend and I watched a docu-film called Home(2009). It shocked the hell out of me and reminded me of the selfish human nature. This film is for everyone on this planet and is a must watch not only for its sensational photography but also for its message : The dire need to stop consuming like mad and re-establish the link with Nature. The signs are pretty clear.

I’m sure once you see the film, you’d be ashamed of what human beings have done to Earth. Just a few fact should suffice: We’ve changed the natural balance in 50 years of ‘development’ – something that took the earth 200,000 years to create. Today, Greenland has lost 30% of its surface area thanks to Global Warming. The Coral Reef is suffering and so are several other species which face extinction in the next 5 years. Thats so damn close that the next generation might look at Elephants only in their books! We haven’t left the marshlands and the Amazon alone. We’ve built shrimp farms around it – which generates a tremendous amount of pollution that asphyxiates the forests but keeps the shrimps alive! Monocultures have replaced forests but nothing else grows in their shade since they are not suitable for any other kind of plants.

“Development”,”Progress” are the words commonly linked to today’s world. But then 80% of the world’s resources are consumed by 20% of the world. Some of the poorest countries are witnessing famine once again. Water is becoming one of those critical resources and within a few years it’ll become a deciding factor much like oil today. The disparity in social economics is immense and the gap between the rich and the poor has only widened. In the name of civilization, we’ve destroyed everything that Nature had to offer and we are not changing our model of operation. We are digging deeper wells, mining out resources, consuming tremendous amount of energy – all for the “betterment” of the world.

Great civilizations have succumbed to the fury of Nature when their luck ran out. Consider the Napa Rui civilization along the coast of Easter Island on the Pacific Ocean. The tallest Palm trees used to be there on the island. Today, there are none. The Napa Rui were exceptional navigators, innovative farmers and pretty advanced in the field of fishing. But they could not survive once they consumed all the natural resources they had – they could not build canoes since they had no trees and hence fishing stopped. They could not build any more houses and they could cook no more! The great Egyptians were obliterated in a similar manner. Lack of food and wages rendered the peasants helpless and they resorted to revolt and savagery. What resulted was a total lack of control and ultimately a complete wipeout of one of the greatest of civilizations.

If lack of resources could wipe out such civilizations, isn’t it time to wake up for us? No wonder Nature has started to show signs of discontent across the Globe – the sleeping giant volcanoes that may soon reach code red, the Tsunamis, the Mumbai flood, cyclone Katrina and several others that have wreaked havoc in the recent past.

It’s time. And its uncomfortably close to 2012. The year that has been treated in most of the ancient civilizations of Maya, Egypt, Veda and the Free Masons etc. as the year of total annihilation of the human race. It’s also the year when the unique event of the Sun alligning itself with the center of the milky way occurs (something that happens only once in 21,000 years).  If we look around we can see the seemingly disparate events – war, civil unrest, famine, flood and cyclones – shaping up today’s world.

Will all of this culminate into complete wipeout of the human race? Countries have already started taking measures – even though its pretty late – to combat this menace created by none other than us. We have to stop consuming at this insane rate and become intelligent consumers. We must also tap solar energy and become self sufficent in generating our energy requirements. The wind still blows across all places – must tap them. We must also tap the energy of the waves.

Surprisingly, technology for all of this exists already. Its just a matter of awareness and re-establishing the lost link.

 Our very survival depends on it. The sooner we realize – the better.

A journey is always about self discovery no mater how small the trip. Of late, I’ve become passionate about travelling on my Royal Enfield (henceforth referred to as Chief) and being a member of the Eastern Bulls club in Kolkata, I had the opportunity of going on a  small ride of two days to Swaroop Ganj – 140 km from Kolkata.

This was my first ever ride beyond city limits. The journey began at 4:30 am on a Friday morning. While everyone else in my neighbourhood were sleeping, I brought Chief to life with a thunder that cut through the eerie silence of the morning like a knife through butter. I was way ahead of time when I reached the meeting spot near Maharani Tea Stall opposite to Carfill – a petrol pump that stays open 24×7. I woke up the service men and filled up a container with extra fuel. I waited for more than half an hour before one of the members appeared. To add to my growing impatience, he accidentally dropped my newly bought helmet which landed visor first – breaking it beyond repair. I had to completely remove the broken visor and start my journey feeling a bit apprehensive about a ride that didn’t start well.

However, a journey is all about overcoming limitations and challenges. So, with a little trepidition I started off along with 4 other members of the club. I wasn’t conversant with the ground rules yet and a co-member had to ask me to turn on the head lights. Head lights during the day ?? I haven’t had the faintest idea why I was asked to do so. I later learnt that it was for two reasons – to identify other group members in the bike’s rear view mirror and more importantly, to avert accidents. It’s an agreed upon rule that if one is unable to see any group member in the rear view mirror, he has to slow down till the rider behind him is able to catch up. To alert the riders to stop there’s a special horn pattern that needs to be followed ! Being an amateur I had no idea of all these until the seniors did a hand holding session later in the night.

We zipped through the traffic with utmost confidence and I could feel that it looked awesome. Just imagine 5 Royal Enfields in perfect sync zipping through the traffic with style but not without consideration for other vehicles. We always took care that we followed all traffic rules and kept within safe distance of each other. We stopped once near Rajarhat so that another member could join us and again near the airport where two more people joined the group. That made a pretty group of 8 folks – all driven by just one passion for riding. Oh, what an experience it was and I was living my dream. As we took to the national highways, the motorcycles started to perform really well. The roads were in good condition and we had no difficulty in overtaking trucks. Now this was something I really came to like. Whenever we needed to overtake a vehicle, the leader took the responsibility of overtaking first, signalling the overtaken vehicle to slow down and signal us that it was safe to overtake! And all of these signals were given in a span of 3-4 seconds – an amazing ability the leader had to have.

We stopped at a dhaba near Chakdah to have breakfast. I was feeling a bit dizzy since this was the first time I was riding for so long while maintaining a consistent speed of 70- 80 kph. We had a sumptuous breakfast, took nice photos of the bikes parked outside in a single row and had great fun interacting. I got to know the members a bit during this session. All of them were very experienced riders who had gone on trips to Leh-Ladakh and many others. Many shared their rich experiences – giving tips on how to ride better, what to avoid on trips, keeping spares and many other things, In fact, I learnt something or the other from each and every member. Most interestingly, one of the members had a Nikon D90 – a DSLR camera that I came across on the Internet only a few days ago. I didn’t have the faintest idea that I could hold one in my hands so soon- and it proved true to its ability of capturing amazing photos !

On the way we stopped for water breaks and photo sessions. The locals were amazed to see so many riders with similar bikes (we had 3 Thunderbirds, 3 Standard 350s, 1 Electra and 1 Machismo 500). They enquired about our trip and many lined up to see what we were up to. It was always my dream to ride through rural India and here I was, finally doing it – I couldn’t remember the last occasion in which I felt so happy.

We finally reached Swaroop Ganj guest house at around 1 in the afternoon. The guest house had a really huge built up area and the rooms were like that of a mansion to say the least. The river Jalangla that flows through Bangladesh was no more than 50 feet away from the guest house. Sumanto da, Arijit and Praveen went on to have a bath in the river while we watched and took some great photos. We discussed everything under the sun and I was feeling lucky to be a part of the group. We finalized our plan of going on a boat ride in the evening.

After the bath, it was time for lunch. Lunch comprised of plain Dehradun rice, mouth watering daal, potato fries and delicious mutton curry. We ate like hungry jackals and the food was finished in no time! In fact, we had eaten so much that it was no longer possible to avoid sleeping.

The afternoon siesta was over in a jiffy and we got ready for the boat ride and the trip to the ISKCON temple in Mayapur which was just across the river. The boat ride was as memorable as the ride to Swaroop Gunj. The boat was specially arranged for us and the eight of us had a wonderful time cruising in the river. While Sumanto da took some excellent pictures on the D-90, we couldn’t help but appreciate the beautiful ’siuli’ flowers that looked like snow covered tops from a distance. We asked a few fishermen for availability of freshly caught fish so that we could have some in the evening – but they informed it was late and they didn’t have any stock with them.

It was already dark when we reached the ISKCON temple. We again had a great time listening to the modernized version of ”Hare Rama, Hare Krishna’ by a group of foreigners who had decided to leave their native place and become followers of Krishna. Standing amidst the people, listening to the beautiful rendition and watching the foreigners perform a slow playful dance made me realize that these people were not foreigners. They were just people like us. The concept of being a foreigner was in people’s minds. In essence, we all are equal. It felt good to be able to witness the performance and leave the temple premises with the song still playing at the back of my mind.

Leaving the temple, we headed towards the ghat where our boat was waiting to take us back to the guest house. On our way, we bought ‘nama balis’ – the yellow cotton pieces of cloth containing the inscriptions “Hare Rama, Hare Krishna” that every devotee is supposed to hang around his torso. We had a different reason though – we wanted to wear it to distinguish ourselves from the crows while riding the next day!

Once back at the guest house, four of us went to the local market to get some fresh stock of soft drinks and other supplies. While trying to rev up my motorcycle, I found out the headlights were not coming on. I also found the nut that held the rear while shock absorber had come lose. Arijit da and Biswadeep tried to fix the head light but to no avail. Even though Sumanto da had a spare bulb, it didn’t fit mine. We could fix the nut though. Meanwhile, we got news that it was raining very heavily in Kolkata and the weather had become very humid in Swaroop Gunj – apt for a downpour any time soon. We decided to keep our motorcycles in the verandah of the guest house where we expected them to be saved from getting drenched in the downpour. When we were finished raising all the motorcycles to the verandah, a lively debate and discussion regarding the current happenings in the club started. In the 3 hours of drinking booze accompanied by fried chicken, the discussion inevitably turned to ways of making the club more attractive to the outside world. The discussion was full of life and I again learnt a lot about the members as well as the club. I was finding it extremely refreshing to be a part of the group.

While the discussion went on. it started to drizzle outside at first and then it poured making the weather cool and comfortable. We stopped the discussion to have dinner and again the cooks impressed us with their culinary skills. This time it was plain roti, daal and chicken curry.

Dinner was over in a matter of few minutes and then we sat outside in the verandah discussing and sharing experiences. I was always in the listening mode since I had very little to say! I kept listening to the amazing stories they had to share. The discussion went on till quite late in the night and then we decided to call it a day since we had to leave early in the morning the next day.

Our sleep in the night was abruptly broken by the howling of foxes and dogs who probably had a very grave disagreement on something. At an interval of half hours starting at 2 in the morning, the foxes and dogs howled at each other!! In any case, I didn’t have a sound sleep as I felt I was having digestion problems. It continued to trouble me till the time I finally throwed up just before starting the ride back towards home.

Praveen wanted to continue on his journey and he decided to go towards Shantiniketan. He left early in the morning and we bid him farewell wishing him luck and a safe journey.

We started our journey back home at around 7 in the morning. This time, I was asked to be in the third position since I was trailing behind the other day unable to keep up with the group. I felt more confident this time and was actually able to maintain the position quite well. The meandering roads through the village were exceptionally good and everywhere we went, people’s eyes just followed us and when someone waved we waved them back and that made everyone smile. It was an awesome experience. We rode across the state highways in order to reach the Durgapur expressway. The road was silk smooth and we were in the midst of so much greenery that we usually slowed down to enjoy the fantastic landscape. Whenever we stopped we took photos and informed our respective families about our latest position. We all believed that the presence of our life partners would have made our experience much more fulfilling. I missed my wife for most part of the trip.

We finally reached the Durgapur expressway and took off with speeds reaching upto 90 kph. The weather was excellant for riding – it was a bit cloudy and the winds were not at all strong. This short trip had all the elements of a ride – or so I thought. We stopped at a road side dhaba for breakfast. It was only a matter of 2 hours more and I’d be home !

Well, the closer we drew towards Kolkata, the weather began to become worse. It started to rain pretty heavily and we had to put on our water proof jackets. Chief began to give me a little trouble and suddenly stopped. As it is, it was dangerous to ride under such conditions as I was unable to see anything in the downpour. The absence of the visor on my helmet made matters worse. I tried to start but Chief just wouldn’t agree. Arijit da came to my rescue and helped Chief agree with me. But then Chief had a mind of his own. I took a wrong left turn near Kharagpur-Kolkata crossing and Chief just died again. This time I got adamant and wanted to start all by myself. All the other members were suffering and getting late because of me. This time though, even Arijit da failed. Biswadeep finally diagnosed that the spark plug wasn’t receiving electricity at all. It could be a faulty engine cut over switch problem, he said. He cut the cable, making a direct connection with the spark plug. But it didn’t help. We tried for over 15 minutes to bring Chief to life while the rain poured like hell.

A kind policeman came to our rescue. He arrived with an umbrella and asked what was wrong. We couldn’t start Chief – that’s what the problem was – we explained. He let us know that a mechanic was just around the corner. Thank God !! Pushing the 175kg Chief wasn’t very easy in the rain. But then every RE owner has had to do so sometime or the other. The good part is that the shop wasn’t very far. The mechanics took a look and fixed it no time. It was a problem with a dirty spark plug and I felt like an idiot not to have thought about it. Sumanto da had to leave since he was getting late.

We started off yet again and by this time the rainfall had reduced to a drizzle. The weather was excellant again. While crossing the Vidyasagar setu, we could see the rain clouds over the city of Kolkata – it was easily raining across the bridge but it wasn’t raining while we were on the bridge !

Everyone except Arijit da and me went their way. We had a similar route to follow. City traffic was not hard for me to tackle anymore. I had overcome my fear of riding through the city and the highways. I’m just getting ready for more.

The trip was an eye opener in more ways than one. It definitely makes sense to ride in a group. It makes sense to break out of regular life and take out time to explore. I learnt that the answer to the question whether you should do something or not is to ask yourself : “Will Life give me another chance to do this again?”. If the answer is No, by all means do the thing without further ado.

Finally, one should travel just to understand that its always about the journey and not the destination. The destination is where you stop discovering.

Daily mundane work left almost no energy in me in the past few weeks. I couldn’t even nurture my dream of riding a Royal Enfield. I enquired at the showroom in Kolkata and they quoted a price for Electra and Thunderbird TS way above my budget (The price is 92k and 105k repectively as of Jul’09). I calculated everything – the meagre salary, the premiums, the insurance and finally concluded that even if I were to take a loan, I wouldn’t have enough money to buy fuel ! I almost gave up when God showed some mercy. Thanks to my Dad ( and his secret desire to ride an RE himself) we came to know of a gentleman who was willing to part with his Thunderbird (2004) which had done only 21k kms. The news had arrived through a good mechanic my father knew from his yester years when he used to own a Bullet! With utmost apprehension, we arrived at this gentleman’s house and he showed us his ride. I just couldn’t help my jaws dropping at the sight of the motorcycle. To hell with those who say that prospective buyers shouln’t show much interest in the item they are buying. We took turns test riding the bike and we knew the answer. That’s it. The bike was in a very good condition and there was no doubt that we were getting a good deal. But then haggling is in our blood. Although we tried hard not to sound cheap, we finally managed to get a decent price. We needed a few days to arrange the money and so did this gentleman. I couldn’t help but ask the reason for selling off his bike. And am glad I did. He said that he usually rides a 1948 Standard 350 and – quite, obviously, is quite valuable to him. I wanted to see the rarest of such bikes but unfortunately, the bike was getting an overhaul at the same mechanic’s place from where we got the news.

Only I know how I spent the next two days. I couldn’t sleep. Every time I saw a Bullet zip past me along the EM Bypass, I said to myself: ‘My time has come ! Two more days !!’.

Finally the evening arrived – 12 Aug 2009. My heart started to beat harder than usual when we reached the gates. The last few things happened like I was in a dream – the wait in the room, the paperwork, the signatures, the coffee in between, the chitchat, the handover of cash , and finally…oh finally, “Lets go”. The owner took a last look at the bike while my father checked out everything. The beast was about to be handed over. Time had stopped for us. Everything was in slow motion. I wanted to saviour the moment. The three of us …. silence….Dad getting the key, slight press of the decompressor, kick start and the Beast roars and thunders to life….as if it had been awakened from a long sleep.

As we pause at the gates – me following my Dad on our old bike, I am sure I saw I tricklet of tear in the eyes of the previous owner and a shadow of sadness cross his face. The gates remain open till we are out of the view. Its not proper to look back now.

We roar ahead, tearing the traffic apart. At the pterol pump, the people have a look of admiration. The thing I waited for so long to feel. To be a part of the Royal family. I don’t mind it not riding myself since its a metter of pride that my father shares the same passion (or rather, its the other way round .

We thunder across the streets and bylanes in the midst of totals darkness thanks to shoddy electric supply towards home. The headlights of the Beast makes everything as clear as daylight. It was amazing to look at people’s reaction. The small group of students following the Beast all the way till it disappears across the corner, the truck driver stopping and making way – is it really happening or will someone soon wake me up ! I ain’t dreaming any more. Its for real – atleast as real as it gets.

We arrive home – and people just look out of windows as to what is making such thumping effect! Family members rush to check out the bike and it feels great. I take on the Beast – and make the first mistake of accidentally touching the silencer with bare foot  -it instantly casues a minor burn. It takes time to tame the Beast, my father advises. It does. I just get enough of the sweet sound of thunder ! I kick start it again and call my long time friend. I just hold the phone close to the engine and my dear friend just doesn’t believe it – it was a dream we dreamt together a long long time ago.

After the fanfare is over, I bid good night to the Beast and once in bed, I can’t help thinking about the Beast. But just before I finally believe that I finally brought the Dream home, I realize that no one buys an RE – you always earn one.

Thanks to some insane political hooligans, Kolkata – my home state- was brought to a grinding halt yet again today. Not wanting to waste my day, I started to dabble in different blogs, news for interesting stuff on software development and the latest frameworks doing the rounds. Although I had heard of Wicket (wicket.apache.org), I couldn’t try it out due to lack of time. I thought of downloading the framework and get my hands dirty.

I started by downloading Wicket from the Apache site. Then I found that Maven was required to setup a sample project ( I was still not using Eclipse plugin). I downloaded the same and tried to setup a sample project but it failed since it could not download some essential components. OK. I just opened up Eclipse and created a Dynamic web project. It just requires the correct jars I thought. Surprisingly, the instructions at

http://cwiki.apache.org/WICKET/newuserguide.html#Newuserguide-MyFirstApplication are crisp enought to get started with Wicket. With the files wicket-1.3.6.jar, slf4j-api-1.5.8.jar and slf4j-jdk14-1.5.8.jar (I got the slf4j* files from slf4j1.5.8.zip file from the SLF4J site www.slf4j.org.

I put the library files in my WEB-INF/lib folder, created a package to contain the three files as given in the tutorial, tweaked the web.xml to suit my project and for the first time in my life as a web application developer, I could run the application without a single error

I’m already loving this for the simple fact that it worked the first time I tried although keeping the source file and template file in the same directory location is pretty awkward the first few times.

This experiment gave the same high as it did when I first tried Rails. I’m sure Wicket too will have its own fan following in the coming future.

A couple of friends and myself are going to organize (or atleast attempting to organize) Kolkata’s first Rails meetup group meeting. We are trying to rope in some of the leading names in Rails today to share their views there. Find more details at :

http://www.meetup.com/The-Kolkata-Ruby-Meetup-Group/calendar/10453718/

Any help in any form will be much appreciated. Help us make this successful.

I woke up early in the morning and prepared my mind to vote for my candidate of choice. This time however, the awareness about polls and candidates seem better. All thanks to advancement in use of technology. The Indian democracy is the largest electorate by all counts and heck, I was really surprised to get SMS from a few parties asking for votes I believe the next generation voting system will enable smart cards to vote. Will it not be fantastic if we could vote with the same card we shop at,say, Shopper’s Stop ? What prevents this from happening? Nothing actually. Its just the willingness and a plan to go ahead with such a system. EVMs in India and elsewhere have already reduced much manul work – its only time before a fully automated system takes over where I could just watching votes getting registered real time on a website ! That’d be awesome and more exciting than the current IPL sh*t that comes on TV these days.

When was the last time you got really ’surprised’? I don’t know about any one else but the usual ‘wow’ doesn’t come too often for me. This can only mean that I’ve turned into a zen master where everythings – good or bad seems pretty much the same or, I’ve become disinterested in most things. Just think about it for a moment – we have been sorrounded by so many technical devices like cell phones (which are less of phones and more of computers these days), laptops, desktops, cameras, satellites and what not. Weird stuff that work in a magical way for the most ignorant. Yet, we are no longer surprised. We find about a device as soon as it is conceptualized by Googling. We can find locations of our friends on virtual maps on our screens. Heck, we can talk to them using chat clients. Easy huh? Well, nothing is surprising any more.