Shifting domains

I am starting to blog on bytingme.wordpress.com. Blogspot sucks, your UI sucks and so does this blog :).Meet you there. Bye! :)

Sucky fonts in Ubuntu :(

This has always been pricking me for a long time. Whenever, I try to code in gedit, the fonts are so so sucky!!. I wanted a nice environment for coding, so my search for non-sucky ubuntu fonts started :)

Is there clear-type fonts in Linux ?
Yeah, very much :). All you need to do is, System->Preferences->Appearance->Fonts->Subpixel smoothing (LCD's).

You are all set to experience a sexy font style :-). Guess, cleartype fonts were patented/found my Microsoft, thank you M$ :)

Cleartype is good, but I really want those Calibri,Constantia fonts ??
Oh..yeah, Ubuntu can get you that too :). I found this neat scrip here. Just copy it, save it in your home folder as 'fonts-installer.sh', and say "sh fonts-installer.sh" on your terminal. It works :-).

Nooooooo, it doesn't :(. Tells me "There is no .fonts directory in your home.Is fontconfig set up for privately installed fonts?"

Oh..ok, nothing to worry, when Synaptic is there :).

Step 1: System->Administration->SynapticPackageManger.
Step 2: Look for the package "fontconfig" and install"
Step 3: Create a directory named ".fonts" in your home folder.

This will definitely work!!

Uh!!.. you and ur linux :P. It says "curl: not found"

Hmmm..Even I am wondering. Ideally, the code shouldn't throw that error, since it checks for wget,fetch commands on your system. Even if one exists, it should work!.

Anyways, curl is a client to get files from servers using HTTP/FTP protocol. Why fear, when synaptic is here :-). Follow the steps that I have outlined in the previous comment and install curl. Cmon, now it should work!

Arggggghhhhhhhh!!!!. Chuck it, I will code in Dev-C++. I am happy. Goodbye to your gedit and your bloddy Linux!!

Hey...Chill..what is the error now ?

trap: 47: SIGINT: bad trap!!!!!

Could you please do this ? Just comment out line number 47. Insert # before it. If you are super frust, you can go ahead and delete it. Now, run "sh fonts-installer.sh". It should work.

Wow! wow! wow!. Yaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyy, am gonna use gedit now. It definitely rocks. Thanks a ton :-)

Bookmarking favourites

I just found this simple technique of bookmarking your pages. I will talk wrt to Firefox, even though it can be extended to any browser. There are a number of sites like Php help, Java doc which provide an explanation of the API.

How nice it would be if you were to just type "php array" and the array documentation in Php comes up ? :-). Well it can be done. :-)

Step 1: Create a new Bookmark (fairly simple to anyone who uses a browser)

Step 2: Right click on the bookmark and go to Properties

Step 3: Give the location: http://php.net/%s

Step 4: Set the keyword to php

Step 5: On your location bar, say "php array", for that matter any function :-), the doc comes up :D

Am trying to do a generic method for JavaDoc also. However the Javadoc provided by Sun contains webaddress like http://blah...../api//. I am yet to figure out, how to have 2 different arguments passed to the command.
Anyways, for now be happy with this :-)

There is another cool functionality that you can add to this. Ever wondered, what your search results would be in Yahoo!, Google, etc..

Step 1: Create a new Bookmark

Step 2: Right click on the bookmark -> Properties tab

Step 3: Set location to javascript:void(window.open('http://www.google.com/search?q=%s'));void(window.open('http://www.search.yahoo.com/search?p=%s'))

Step 4: Set keyword to search

Step 5: Say "search vivek" on your location bar
Up comes 2 windows, one Google result and the other Yahoo! :D

I have another one too.
Bookmark location: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%s
Try setting this up :-)

Good Luck, have fun with bookmarks :D

Have you tested your code ?

As I work daily, I am beginning to understand the difference between a programmer and a Development Engineer. How many times would you have written a test module for the API that you just coded ? AFAIK, it only used to be a manual testing to check whether everything is working fine. Let me take you to a new domain...lets call it the 'TestDomain' :-)

In a typical S/W company, you tend to write code that satisfies some business logic. It's no longer finding out the shortest path or the MST :-). The code might involve retrieving values from databases, usage of web services, etc. Hence, each module needs to be tested. To our rescue, comes a nice neat package "JMock" !Astounded by its power, I just love writing test cases now :-).

So, what is this JMock all about ?
JMock is a library that allows you test Java code with the help of mock objects.

Mock object ? Enlighten me pl.
Hmmm.... Say you need to test a module, Module 1

Module 1

class Module1{
Webservice service;
String ipAddr;
public setService(Webservice serv){
service = serv;
}

public String getIpAddr(){
return ipAddr;
}

public void function(){
ipAddr = service.getIPAddr();

if( ipAddr == blah...blah... ){
set ipAddr value = "val";
} else {

throw Exception
}
}
}
There are 2 ways to test this module.

• Initializing the service and checking whether the ipAddr value has been set or an exception is thrown
• Mocking the service

We are here to discuss the 2nd point. Instead of initializing the service and making the call heavy, instead you can mock the service object, (i.e) JMock allows you to create a "mock" WebService object which to the Java code will look like a WebService object.

Still hazy :(
Basically, instead of hitting the service, you try to define how the service object will work given a set of parameters. To put it crudely, it essentially means, you are trying to override the WebService functions when passed with a specific set of parameters.

Nice :-), Eg?

import org.jmock.Expectations;
import org.jmock.Mockery;
import org.jmock.integration.junit4.JMock;
import org.jmock.integration.junit4.JUnit4Mockery;

@RunWith(JMock.class)
class PublisherTest {
Mockery context = new JUnit4Mockery();

/* I am mocking the webservice object here */

final WebService webservice = context.mock(WebService.class )

/* Don't panic! Its simple :-) All I am asking it to do is, when the webservice object
calls the getIpAddr() function, DO NOT call the service, instead return the value I have specified */

context.checking(new Expectations() {{
one (webservice).getIpAddr();
will(returnValue("127.0.0.1");
}});

Module1 moduleObject = new Module1();

/* Set the service used to be the mock object :-) */
moduleObject.setService(webservice);

/* When I invoke this, the original service isn't called, the mock object takes over*/
moduleObject.function();

/* Assert statments follow here */
Assert.assertNotNull(moduleObject.getIpAddr());

}

src: jmock.org

Well JMock is a huuuuuuge library with so many functions and you can keep playing around with it. With this knowledge, you can go through the cheatsheet and get greater power. And ofcourse, I am always right here to help you out with anything related to JMock :-), anything :-)

Btw, I forgot to tell you something, NatPryce replies to mail like a lightning! Till date, he has sent me about 10 mails!!

Who is NatPryce ?
Go figure it out :P

PS: Could someone pl. tell me how to indent code snippets! The blogspot "Edit Post" tab is a piece of shit!!

Java vs C++

Life at Amazon.com has been pretty good except for a few intricately hidden bugs which at times are difficult to swat! Here's one nice bug, oops! (no pun intended) I wouldn't call it a bug. Fully geared up for the task given to me this morning, the keyboard had a bad day until I had to do a swap...

Well, what's there in a swap after all ? Just out of college, you do tend to show a lot of gimmicks, don't you ? I too, am a faithful follower of the policy and wrote

x^=(y^=(x^=y)); where x,y are integers.

Now, compile successful, build successful, Yaaaaaaaaay!!! - it's a 1000 line code, so the celebration kind of justified :-). But wrong answer :-(
So, I get down to the debugging stage, I do a

while( 1 ) { debug; }

After spending a lot of time (no way, am going to tell you how much I spent :P), I realised, there was a bug in my swap code!!. Can you imagine ? It was such a common question, almost appeared in every single CS written paper. But, this is Java dear :-)

Googling Java specifications lead me to a new finding:
"A compound assignment expression of the form E1 op= E2 is equivalent to E1 = (T)((E1) op (E2)), where T is the type of E1, except that E1 is evaluated only once"

Hence, whatever assignment happens in (x^=y) has almost nil effect w.r.t this statement!!!! This one-liner won't work

To be more precise, C++ rule states
"A compound assignment expression of the form E1 op= E2 is equivalent to E1 = (T)((E1) op (E2)), where T is the type of E1"

Step 1: x = x^y;
Step 2: y = y ^ ( x^y) = x;
Step 3: x = ('x' computed from Step1) ^ (y computed from Step2 ) =
= (x ^y)^x
=y

PS: I could have definitely explained it better using opcodes, but I want to keep it as simple as possible. As long as the meaning is conveyed, I am happy :-)

Let's see what Java does
Step 1: x = x^y;
Step 2: y = y ^ ( x^y) = x;
Step 3: x = (x) ^ (y computed from Step2 ) =
= x^x
= 0

This result is attributing purely towards the wicked statement at the end :-)

At the EOD, I said "Thank God, there are no #defines in Java, God knows how many gimmicks I would have shown with that and how many screeching bugs would have been inside!!"

I want to look at the bytecodes generated, googling how to look at it now:-). My 1st lesson, well learnt :D