Category: General

The child in us

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Since I was just a kid of 7/8 I am an extreme fan of origami. When my sisters learn something new from their choolmate I disturbed them until they taught me how to make that. Among them an Inkpot, Battlestar Gallactica (Oh thanks to my friend Shahadat for teaching me that amazing piece), Boat, Glider and Bird where my favorite.

Just after I pass my HSC exam, I went to Khulna Paper Mill Collony, to my sister’s house to prepare for the upcoming adminssion exam. It was a nice house with a huge lon in front. A lot of kids play there everyday. As a new comer, how can I introduce myself to them? (Oh I forgot to say I enjoy playing with kids very much being one of them) I just took help of origami and gift them something new which they never seen… boom!! they become fan of me within a while.

I miss my childhood, I really miss it. I know the child living inside me and I want to live forever as him.

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prasanna vadanaaM saubhaagyadaaM bhaagyadaaM
hastaabhyaaM abhayapradaaM maNigaNair-
naanaavidhair-bhuushhitaaM who is of smiling face, bestower of all fortunes,
whose hands are ready to rescue anyone from fear,
who is adorned by various ornaments with precious stones
Puer natus est nobis,
et filius datus est nobis:
cujus emperium super humerum…
For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given:
and the government will be upon his shoulder..
Some day you came
And I knew you were the one
You were the rain, you were the sun
But I needed both, cause I needed you
You were the one
I was dreaming of all my life
When it is dark you are my light
But don’t forget
Who’s always our guide
It is the child in us
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Enigma – The child in us

Kudos to Ipshita

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Ipshita is my colleague in somewhere in… and we both work in java desk. Ipshita recently did a very good job which really surprised me. Ipshita’s father and some of his friends run an orphanage in Bangladesh. Ipshita spend her salary of first month and bought a television for the kids in orphanage, so that they could enjoy the world cup. I am very surprised by her work.

Kudos to you Ipshita. You did really a great job.

So – I left my beard after three years

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How am I looking now? I left my beard after three years. The picture is taken today by Shahana apa while I was in our internal conference, with a cup of coffee.

In the photo from right side – Me, Hasan bhai, Rythm and T-poo bhai

hasin-small.jpg

FOSS – My point of view

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These days I am usually shouting “Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)” – and my friends and colleagues pointed their finger at me. so why I am shouting with all these non sense words? Let me explain a bit, have a cup of coffee and give me some minutes. These points are totally from my perspective. And I really don’t care if that fits for you.

First of all, I am also a closed source developer what I have to do for my living. I work for companies who definitely don’t want to publish their intelligent properties. I also work in paid projects where I just deliver the output and I don’t care what my client do with that piece of code, sole copyright belongs to them. Beside this, I have some time which I study in home and spend in research and development. Most of the developers follow this typical routine in their personal life, I guess.

Now comes the point, so why would I go for free and motivate people to use FOSS?

1. I feel pity when I see that I am using my potential solely for commercial purpose and the community gets nothing from me. I have my strength and skills to develop some cool applications which I must use for community, and I have to do that for free. So I develop free solutions, some of which are free and some open source under LGPL or CC.

2. I feel mentally happy when I contribute in open source communities and people use my code which helps them somehow (I don’t know every possible use of my code) and It inspires me a lot when I receive comments from them, or when I see the download counter increases.

3. I personally don’t like using pirated software. I like much more to pay to developers for the great works they done for us. But unfortunately I live in such a country where I am not capable of paying for licensed software. Sometime I wish to pay but due to the lack of support from payment gateways, I wouldn’t be able. So instead of using pirated solutions, I search for FOSS alternatives. If I find any (even with less features) I prefer using that instead of a paid solution (or pirated solution). For example GIMP is not a full replacement of Adobe photoshop and it has less features when compared to photoshop. But If i were capable of paying 65000 Tk for photoshop (or anyone buys me that 😀 ) I would definitely use Photoshop instead of Gimp, because of its amazing flexibility. But as I cant, I prefer using Gimp as a replacement of Photoshop or Inkscape as a replacement of Illustrator. And that is the only reason I want to work with Linux. I am a extreme fan of winXP for making life easier but as I am concerning day by day, I would like to shift to linux completely.

4. I feel great when I see that some developers are kind enough so that they share their intelligent properties at totally free of cost. I personally always congrats them and i think i will also get such comments in return when I will be one of them. This inspires me to be a FOSS developer.

5. I like to learn. FOSS, specially OS (open Source) helps me to learn how developers develop that amazing solution so that I can incorporate that into my upgrades or my personalized versions.

6. and Finally, not making this post too long, I don’t understand why I have to pay for solutions like Microsoft Office when I have it’s alternative. I am not a hyper advanced user of office solutions. In daily life I use just basic features which you do even with wordpad with some extra effort. Then Why I have to use MS Office? I have my alternatives like OpenOffice or abiWord (well, I prefer open office), moreover as a plus I get some cool features like PDF creation which I cant get in MS word until I buy some commercial add ins (well, PDFCreator is a Free solution if you don’t want to spend a single pence). I always try my best to find an FOSS alternative, If I cant find it, I would better like to skip using that software.

So I am not a Mad, Dumb headed psycho who just scream for FOSS out of nothing. I scream for my personal ethics and for my personal satisfaction. I use FOSS and motivate people to using that. Nothing more.

Links: FOSS, Creative Commons, Open Source Licenses, ITRedux Office Replacement, Open CD, Ubuntu, Suse 10.1, BDLug, BDOSN,
Ekushey and Ankur

Pathetic

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Its unbelievable and very pathetic. Germany lose the match because of the last two minute. It is extremely disappointing. It hurts me.

Last day It was great fun with RubyOnRails. I spend a lot of time for basic Ruby and rails. It is a great framework, no doubt.

Veni Vidi Vici

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It is a famous Latin phrase coined by Roman general and consul Julius Caesar which means “I came, I see, I conquer”. He announced to the Senate after his victory over Pharnaces. Well, I just finish another huge task in my desktop – Probably I am also happy as Caesar right now.

Yesterday it was full of learning and new achievements. I converted my existing database into HSQL and it was a big one, 62337 rows sized approximately 9MB. Some days ago hasan told me that HSQL is a nice embedded db solution for java, and he was right. After I examine the HSQL db I found that it stores data as plain SQL entries. Still it is so fast.

I complete the integrated spellchecker for nobobangla, a realtime help and two dictionary in java. spellchecker was a great task and I enjoy the whole work. Now it is much efficient than the previous one.

One more thing I found while working with Base64 encoding in Java. The jakarta commons package codec seems a bit confusing and I could not manage it to work as expected. It generates non compliant base 64 – I didnt know why. Well, then I found teh following routine is extremely useful for encoding – take a look at the following example

import sun.misc.BASE64Encoder;
public class Test {

    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
        BASE64Encoder b = new BASE64Encoder();
        System.out.print(b.encode("hasin".getBytes()));
    }
}

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disce quasi semper victurus vive quasi cras moriturus

somewhere in… – the interview

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somewhere in… is a Norwegian offshore software developer company based in Bangladesh. since the beginning in may 2005, i am working for this company as a web application developer. the first thing that impressed was the process of interview. the whole system is divided into three round. from each of this round you have to qualify yourself for next step.

in first round, this is just an introductory from our head of growth and head of opportunities. whoa whoa whoa!! – this is not a boring introduction but funny hilarious and definitely a phase where you can prove your attention and quality. this session with fantastic piece of cakes and drinks is a very interesting part of the whole interview process.

after you qualify in first round, well it is a bit tough and you have to prove your skill on the respective track for which you applied. for example if its under java team, you will face some problems relevant to java. most surprising part of this round is that it is a participatory problem solving part. you will find yourself with randomly chosen two team members. that means each team will have three members. after grouping, each of these team have to solve a specific problem. well, the team value will be counted and you have to prove your participating skill, inclusiveness, imagination and engagement.

from this second round, some talents are chosen for the final part. in that part these talents have to meet face to face with a team of developers and of course our head of growth and head of opportunities. this is the final round and ya, this is like somewhat a traditional face to face interview.

the whole interview process is full of fun, learning and you will experience a world class interview system, no matter who you are, somewhere in… will find out the talent inside you.

If you are interested in somewhere in… – visit http://www.somewherein.net and ofcourse dont miss our official blog to figure out whats happening inside, at http://www.somewherein.net/blog

55 ways to have fun with Google

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Its great!! simply amazing!! – Philipp Lenssen from Google Blogscoped has written a great book “55 ways to have fun with google” and he make it free for download. He released the book under CC (Creative Commons) license so that you can copy-read-share-print-distribute this book.

Visit the website : 55 Ways to have fun with Google

The whole idea of releasing the book free in internet is a great idea indeed. Like me, many other bloggers also blogging only because they read it for free, and thus make a huge publicity of this book. Though I agree, it is really a great book.

So it was a long break – How about a wakeup?

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I was extremely busy with a lot of tasks – beside these, I was able to manage really a small amount of time to spend with my family. Still I have to spend some time on nobobangla project and wordpress book. I couldnt develop myself as I used to. I lost most of study times for the little “Ubuntu”

But I am really planning to get back on the track. I am learning ruby, spending time on J2EE and definitely working with PHP. I will be regular to my group very soon, I have to.

Hey hasin, its time to wakeup….

Hey – It's just a rowCount()

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Java is a cool language, everything in the bag – but you have to search a lot for some simple tasks. Just like what I was doing few minutes ago. These days I am learning J2EE, specially JSP, Struts etc… I was searching how to find out the count of rows in a resultset which is returned by a statement. But unfortunately I found these is no builtin property/method to find it out. However, after searching in net for a couple of minutes I found the following solution

Statement st =
   conn.createStatement( ResultSet.TYPE_SCROLL_INSENSITIVE,
               ResultSet.CONCUR_READ_ONLY);
ResultSet rs =
   st.executeQuery("SELECT * FROM employee WHERE id_emp LIKE '1%'");
rs.last();
count = rs.getRow();
rs.beforeFirst();





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Down the way, where the nights are gay,

and the sun shines

daily on the mountain top,

I took a trip on a sailing ship,

and when I reach Jamaica I made a stop.


But I’m sad to say,

I’m on my way,

won’t be back for many a day.

My heart is down,

my head is turning around,

I had to leave a little girl

in Kingston Town.

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By – Harry Belafonte [Kinston Town]