Today I started doing a maintenance project. Beautiful thing is that i don’t have a functional live system, what I have in hand is code-base . Its a big system, really big. But the fact is that those who given the system for maintenance, even they don’t know what all are requirements? They have a functional requirement document very cluttered and un-managed. The system is still live but what use in having a live system buts its not functionally live. Its a bad thing right ?

The project has been live since 2005 January. They handover the code-base along with database structure but it was done in j2ee I have no idea how can make the system up for a test run at-least, anyways I have the code-base in hand I started studying the business logic from the code-base. They strongly suggest to continue with existing system and fix the bugs. But the basic thing was the system design and implementation is too bad. A lot of redundancies are there in the database structure and the application logic.

I decided to port the application to PHP, provided requirements from HTML pages. This is really a new experience for me. There is no technology crack in the system so its not so interesting in the development. The attractive feature is that we don’t need to design the HTML pages its already there. Me, sarath and sajith are into the development for this. Hope to complete this project with in one month, cos we need to deliver it as soon as possible.

Tata is now in talk with US car maker ford to buy its luxury brands Jaguar and land rover. For this deal Tata is seeking loan of $3b for its acquisition, financial times said this.

India’s second largest car makers assigned both Citigroup and JPMorgan to raise finance. Besides this international financial banks Tata had some talk with domestic group SBI. The loan should be short term financing about $2b. The other banks which are also shouldering includes Bank of Tokyo, Mitsubushi, UFG etc. Since Tata is seeking loan very fast, i think Tata is about to close the deal by next week itself.

Since all of us were using desktop applications mostly than web applications till some years back. But now its time for web applications. All most all web application lacks keyboard shortcuts. All applications by google HQ have this support they know how much important are the keyboard shortcuts. Google reader next thread key “j” is very friendly for users. Here are some of keyboard shortcuts for google reader.

j next item
n item scan down
k previous item
m mark current thread as read / un read
shift+n next subscription
t tag item
v view original (will works only if the pop up enabled)
o expand / collapse
s star item

Normally one of the main problem while using mobile web applications is the connection troubles rather than that latencies in the data network also affects application performance. Googles initiative google gears mobile solves this problem by making the mobile web application that can also work in off line mode. Google gears  is now available for internet explorer in windows mobile 5 and 6.

Then we probably get the doubt how data can be stored when the application is off line.The solution is, it use local store and when the device get online the data will be synced with server. Google gears use 2 types of syncing mechanism manual and background syncing.

Google is now working to the develop application that work with other browsers and android  version. Lets start develop your web application also with google gears mobile

Beware! That laptop could make you infertile!

Creating another point of big talk in the technology field. A non living, simple and humble lappy gonna turn the fertility weak?? Ahaa… What fun. But this is nt joke so far.

Researchers in the US have carried out a study and found that the heat generated by the laptops raises the risk of infertility in men who balance the machines on their lap.

Name is laptop and thats gonna infertile, so should the name of that machine be changed?

Laptop computers causes significant scrotal temperature elevation as a result of heat exposure and posture-related effect. The posture is the way you sit while keeping laptop a real machine by name and place of hold. Not a joke, coz, this was a news after hour holding tests for men between 21-35 of age. Better dont try it at home.

The test were conducted among the participants with desktop position and laptop positions. The temperatures at various points (above and below of the laptop) according to the way they were placed. It was found the temperature was enough(the critical temperature was crossed) to make the infertility in action.

So lets believe it and think before you move to the most easiest life and handle your nano belongings.

One of the main functionalities that lacking gmail is it’s sort functionalities by read and unread respectively. One tricky mechanism is there to for doing this. On the search textbox type “is:unread” to sort unread messages and “is:read” for read messages respectively. The feature is very useful for users, yahoo’s support is very much friendly for users. Here is a mechanism to do this in gmail.

When we search using the above query then we will get the result as unread messages in descending order.

Again what we do to search all read messages.

The results will be read mails in descending order.

Like wise we can apply different combination of search criteria in the search box. For eg: “is:unread label:inbox” will query the unread messages with label “inbox”. This is very helpful for power users. Why google is not implementing UI for this to attract normal users.

Is google mainly targeting power users ?

Google’s open handset alliance is soon gonna hit market. So its definitely worth enough trying to develop expertise in android platform. Here is a simple tutorial that describe how to start by illustrating a simple contact application by one of google developer.

Trackback is a technology used by content publishing software like wordpress, movabletype, blogger etc to acknowledge url added in the commenting of post. The trackback acknowledge is sent using network ping from the originating site to receiving site. Let me demostrate how it works with a diagram shown below.

Trackback can also be used as a link building mechanism. Let me explain how it can be implemented using php. One php library is also there to do this. But now i am going to explain a simple mechanism in php. As i already explained it is done via ping method. The ping method is normal HTTP POST. The ping is sent to the trackback uri of the receiving post. The parameter required is url. The server will send a XML response for the comment. The XML response may be either a success result or a failure result with XML format response.

Success :

< ?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>
< response>
< error>0< /error>
< /response>

Failure:
< ?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>
< response>
< error>1< /error>
< message>Error message< /message>
< /response>
PHP implementation.

$params['http']['method'] = 'POST';

$params['http']['header'] = 'Content-Type:

    application/x-www-form-urlencoded';

$params['http']['content'] = "title=$title&url=$url&blog_name=$blog_name&excerpt=$excerpt";

Send the ping command with the parameters above and capture the result. 

The parameters should be URL encoded since we are using simple POST mechanism.

 //  Create the context from the formatted array

$context = stream_context_create($params);//  Open a stream to the url, save it in the pointer $fp

$fp = @fopen($trackback_uri, 'rb', false, $context);

//  Send the header and get the results, saved in $response

$response = @stream_get_contents($fp);

//  Always close for good measure

fclose($fp);

 What next is to parse the message whether its success or not ?

//  If this is true, there was no error

if (stripos($response, '<error>0</error>'))

    $outcome = "All clear! Trackback

        was sent successfully.";

else

    {

    //  Find the beginning and end of the message element

    $start_resp = stripos($response, '<message>');

    $end_resp = stripos($response, '</message>');    //  substr will return the actual message element, 

    //    with the tags included

    $outcome = substr($response, $start_resp,

        $end_resp - $start_resp - 1);

//  Replace the tags with blank space

    $outcome = str_replace('<message>', '', $outcome);

    $outcome = str_replace('</message>', '', $outcome);

    $outcome = "Error: " . $outcome;

     }//  Echo the results.  I formatted 'error' to be red.

echo "<p class='error>$outcome</p>";

Thanks to earn web cash for the php code