just my imagination

It's been a while as usual since I posted last and I guess it has something to do with how I feel these days. I think writing posts require pretty decent amount of imagination and creativity (unless you want to write just for the sake of writing something), and off-late I don't seem to have either; it's not like that I don't have anything to write about; it's just that I have don't have enough creativity to elaborate it into a meaningful post. I've been thinking about writing on some of the technical stuff that I learned in the recent past (mostly the hard way), some SEO stuff, some photography tidbits, some gear lust but every time I feel like writing something; I just draw a blank. The other thing that I always wanted to try my hands on was short stories, I have a quite a few themes in my mind (some callous, some not so) but again just don't seem to have enough steam to get those into something concrete. I know I need to be a bit more frequent with my posts (just for my own sanity) but somehow I can't get my darn act together!

Photography tidbits

One of the first thing that bites you if you're into photography is what subject to photograph? Do you just take pictures of the same ole' flowers, monuments or do you try to be different. The problem with trying to being different is finding out all those things which haven't been captured before. So, you hunt for those places/things (either mentally or physically) and then give up and in the end take the pictures of the same subjects which have been taken umpteen times before (butterfly on a flower, a flower petal, sunsets etc). You still believe that at least your photographs offer something different, maybe, a new perspective, a new *vision* (basically, all the things that you try to convince yourself with). Then, you get into some equipment acquisition syndrome and dream of owning the best in the class (read the most expensive); Zeiss & Leica lenses, Nikon D3X, Hasselblad: if something is so freaking expensive it gotta be good, right?

I am one of the 3 people in my country (the other two haven't been vociferous about it yet) who owns a 4/3rds system (a Olympus e-510), and honestly apart from a tiny-winy viewfinder; I haven't had too much to complain about the camera (I generally take all the blame for out of focus, horrifically shaky pics). Quite a few people have asked me why I invested into a 4/3rds system; well; just like my any other investment it wasn't something that I carefully thought about but was just an impulsive buy (I didn't even try it or any other brand before buying). It's a funny thing that I always believed I don't need a dSLR and was happy with my P&S (a Canon A95) till I decided to go for a trip to Corbett National Park where I had an opportunity to capture a tiger in the wild for the first time and boy, did I manage to capture it with a 3x optical zoom of Canon! I think sometimes you just need a better equipment to bail yourself out. Anyway, has the dSLR made me a better photographer than before? No, definitely not but it does allow me to experiment a bit more and push my own creative limits…it reminds me of a saying that I read long ago:

The difference between a picture and painting is that

a picture is a frozen captured moment of true life,

whereas a painting can be anything imagined in your mind.

..... someday, all these paintings will become pictures.

where art thou?

Been a while since I wrote something, have been busy off-late with doing nothing. I guess, nothingness is a hard feeling/habit to get out of! Anyway, some time back I started playing with a cooked WM6.5 on my phone and I think though there still are miles to go but it's a step in the right direction by MS (finally a WM version which doesn't require you to pull out your stylus!). Anyway, one thing that I found missing in titanium was the task plugin so the developer in me hacked together something (more on how I did it later, given that it was my first attempt at building something for the mobile device) which did what I wanted and it now is available on xda-developers with a very original name of taskanium.

Apart from that I have revitalized my love for photography (albeit in a very small way) and have been bitten by LAS (Lens Acquisition Syndrome). I also think, I should start something like "How-I-Took-It" posts, where I can just dissect my photo and the technique that I used to capture the shot (Ok, I am no pro but I guess I have the basic concepts of photography clear).

solr and locale sensitive sort

Another of those meaningless exercises:
============================
We've been using solr on our asp.net project for quite a bit now and have been quite pleased with it, everything went great till we had to support character based language (Chinese to be more specific). Based on my research, I decided to use CJKAnalyzer for analyzing and tokenizing and the results returned were generally acceptable, the only issue being the results were not sorted in any rather random order if I asked solr to sort results alphabetically. After couple of hours of hunting solr user groups and looking at the solr source, I realized that solr does'nt provide any support for locale sensitive sorting. Since finding out the problem is half the problem already solved, all I had to do was extend from solr's built-in StrField; add support for another attribute (locale) in schema.xml and pass that to new instance of SortField and voila, solr was happily returning the results sorted by pinyin. In case you are interested, below is the discussion around the problem and the JIRA issue for solr (which has the new locale sensitive custom java class):

http://www.nabble.com/CJKAnalyzer-and-Chinese-Text-sort-td22374195.html
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SOLR-1073

do we need guitars?

I was just reading the "starting over" post on Mars Need Guitars, a blog I used to follow earlier to check out music before it disappeared into oblivion. It's funny what depression can do to you, it can slowly eat away all that is inside of you and even before you know what hit you, you are already spiritually dead. A lot of things in that post reminded me of myself, someone who too is trying to get past every day; and (luckily) somehow succeeding at it. I just wish I could start afresh and do things that I want to do: write some short stories, write the book that always I wished to write, get away from this meaningless stuff and just break free. Maybe, one of these days, I will.

Questions

A new year and same day to look back at life and think about where I am. Over the past few years a couple of questions have haunted me:

1) Where am I?
I don't think I know where I am in terms of my mental & emotional state; the scary thing is that I don't even care any longer.

2) Am I happy doing what I am doing?
No, I am not happy doing what I am doing either professionally or personally. Life has just been meandering along all these years. Earlier, I would get all worked up and try to change things that I wouldn't like but off-late it's more of sorta resigning to the facts...I don't even feel like doing anything to change my life and/or its course.

3) Do I know what I want?
Everyone will tell you that they are not getting what they want, the trouble is very few of us are even aware of what we really want. I have no guilt in admitting that I don't know what I want in my life. I can tell for sure what I DON'T want, but I don't know what will make me happy, any longer. It's just that sometimes, I feel like running away; don't know what I want to run away from, perhaps myself.

4) Have I changed over these years?
Yes, I have and quite a bit. I don't feel that strongly about anything. I used to fight for what I felt was right; I don't now. I have no problems in doing what others want me to do cause I don't feel strongly for or against anything. I believe feelings are strongly connected with your emotions and since I spent so many emotions over these years; it looks like my emotions have run out. I just go through the motions now; don't want to change anything or more rightly put; don't have any strength and motivation to change anything. Why shall I change something which doesn't matter to me, anyway?

5) Do I deserve more?
I don't know, anyway it doesn't matter what I think. My life has always been dictated by what others wanted in their life; perhaps I've let people come too close to me and yes, if I get a second chance I would still do the same thing over & over again without event a second thought.

bad programmer, no cookie!

One of things that I'd been thinking of while trying to optimize the website we've been working on is cookies. One of the issue with a non-www site is that it generally is the root domain, so any cookie that is issued by the root domain will result in the browser sending that cookie with all the subsequent requests (even requests to a sub-domain and for static content). So, let's say you have a site hosted at http://example.com and all the static content is served through a sub-domain (say http://cdn.example.com) by a CDN, any cookies set by example.com have to be sent to cdn.example.com, even though the static content hosted at CDN doesn't need the cookies set by root domain. Most of the perf guides that I've read, generally recommend using a cookie-less domain , by hosting the main site on a www subdomain or by using a new domain altogether for serving the static content. Using a www or non-www version is sometimes a corporate choice (which might be influenced by the company's branding; as in our case), and using a different "cookie-less" domain might run you into XSS limitations of the browser. So, wouldn't it be nice if I could provide some kinda hint to the browser as to when not to send the cookies using some meta tag. For instance, if I want to exclude a sub-domain from receiving any parent domain's cookies, I could do:
<meta name="no-cookies" content="cdn.example.com,cdn1.example.com...">
And, in case I want to exclude certain file types on the same parent domain itself from receiving any cookies, I could do:
<meta name="no-cookies-for-files" content="jpg,js,css...">
The second meta tag will ensure that browser doesn't send back the cookies for any (static) content which doesn't need the cookies even though the content is served by the same domain. The no-cookies-for-files has to be file extension based instead of MIME based cause to figure out the MIME type, the browser has to make a request first. We can extend this idea even further; but I guess adding these two meta tag support (call it anything that you wish) would be great!
thoughts?

bloomr: what's blooming?

Very few people know that I love gardening and I love flowers (one of my new found interests while I was on a 8 month job break). One of the challenges for a budding gardener is to find out what all is blooming during this time of the year, and though you can make a dash to a nursery; lazy bums like me prefer the e-way! So, my way of finding the (good & not so common) flowers is by scurrying flickr to find recent blooms in my city. This method has served me well but since I've been completely bored off-late; I decided to automate the entire process.
Enter popfly:I had played with popfly when it was launched; and couple of days back I decided to log in to see if there was any new features/improvements to it; first thing that I figured out was that none of my blocks were working! Fixing them wasn't tough and since I had long ago written a flickr block to retrieve photos from flickr; I decided to re-use it for my flower search. The logic is quite straight-forward; the block expects the city name (actually, a place) as a user input; hits flickr to get the place id for the user entered text and then hits flickr again with a hard-wired query (currently set to: flower+bloom). Since, I would most probably be only interested in finding the recent blooms (instead of flowers blooming last summer), the code also limits the photos to the ones which were taken in last two months (current month-2). Finally, the block wires the output to a display block to display the flowers in some kinda slide show. I ran into couple of issues with the wiring of display block I decided to use (ImageSlideShow): it wouldn't clear the images before starting a new slideshow; this would mean if I search for say Boston first, and in the mid of slideshow; decide to search for Seattle; the seattle flowers are appended to the boston list! Fixing this issue meant, ripping off the ImageSlideShow block; exposing the clearImages method and calling it in the glue code between flickr block and ImageSlideShow block. Once, the mashup was all set; I decided to create a web-page around it in popfly; unfortunately the html generated is not the best (understatement) and I haven't felt like tweaking it (yet). I generally don't like iframes but that's what you get with popfly and I still haven't figured out a way to change the background of my mashup. Anyway, in case you are interested in giving [i]bloomr^tm a twirl; you can give it a shot here: on popfly or here

A thousand times over

Six years ago; on this day i'd asked myself a question, a question which I answered without any hesitation...an answer which changed my life and is more or less responsible for where i am today. So would i now have come up with a different answer, given how life has been all these years? No, i still would have given the same answer, a thousand times over.

Building a profanity filter with Asp.net

One of the disadvantages of a web site which relies heavily on user generated content is unwanted content and profanity. Since, there will always be more users then moderators you will have to rely on community policing to bring down unwanted content. But, rather than only rely on community policing (which might work well for a web 2.0 site), you might also want to build a basic profanity filter for your web site or the blog (where there can't be any other moderator except the blog administrators). On the current .net 2.0 site that we worked on we had to build a basic profanity filter using a custom dictionary; since, the only place where you would want the profanity filter to work will be input text elements and textareas (asp.net textbox), I could think of three approaches:

1. Sanitize the user input every time and on every page i.e. remove the unwanted text on every page and for every textbox on the page by calling a method in class library . This approach is the least scalable of all as it requires every developer to call the required method diligently and unnecessarily adds to the code bloat.
   
2. Extend the textbox control & create your own control which internally calls the sanitize method in the getter of overridden Text property; the developers are only required to use the extended textbox instead of the base textbox on their pages. You can also in this case add additional properties like SanitizeText (bool) which can be set to false; in cases where you don't the text to be sanitized. Also, you might want to check if the textbox is not of Password type before running it through your profanity filter!
   
3. Use tag mapping to substitute the base textbox with the extended textbox; tag mapping works great when you are already in the middle of your development cycle and have to implement such logic after-the-fact.
   

   
   

Given that we had to implement profanity filter after the fact; we went with approach 3 and so far it has worked great for us. By the way, the profanity filter was built in-house with a custom dictionary (since we needed it for multiple languages) by running the user entered text by the custom dictionary and doing a simple Regex.Replace.

learn, learn, learn!

the beauty of spirituality and philosophy is that anything and everything can be attributed to life's lessons that one has to learn in order to grow and evolve. The more painful the physical manifestation of the event, the higher the lesson that you've learned. This model works great for one or two events where you can try to see the brighter side of things but soon you get tired of convincing yourself that everything is for good! the fact is there are some events in life, which no matter how hard we try turn to them around; they always come around to haunt us and remind us that life at times can be hurtful and there is no point in fighting your feelings or tricking your mind into not feeling the pain: it's alright to fall apart, sometimes.

building high performance asp.net site

Recently, I was involved with building a web 2.0 site on ASP.net where the most important criteria was performance! The pages had to load supper fast (Average Response Time <2sec); style="font-weight: bold;">Caching: The biggest bottleneck in any website is database access; so you need to cache data aggressively: also, unless you are building a site which requires real time data you can live with showing stale data to the user (we make sure that the updates always pull the real time data so that you not displaying the stale data on the update page to the user). Caching alone (esp. lookup data) can increase the performance of your site multi-folds and at times; this alone can be enough to get to decent response times. The only caveat with caching in ASP.net is in a distributed environment; unfortunately in ASP.Net 2.0 there is built in way of having distributed cache objects i.e. every node in the cluster has it's own copy of cached data which can be out of sync' from other nodes. One way to avoid this by either using a third-party cache provider like memcached (I haven't personally used it so not sure how it gels with ASP.net) or upgrading to .net 3.0 and using Velocity; or by making your load-balancing sticky i.e. a user always hits the same node on the farm for his session.
Web.config debug attribute: Make sure you set the debug="false" on production web.config; you don't want debug symbols to be loaded on production environment.
Ajax: Use Ajax where appropriate to reduce the perceived response time; but do keep in nmind that one of the biggest issue with using Ajax for ASP.net (aka Atlas) is that you can't use a CDN to serve the ScriptResource.axd which means all the javascripts are served by your servers (and there are quite a few of them around 9!); this means that if your servers are located in the US and the user is accessing your site from China; he will have to make 9 requests just to download the javascript files and this greatly increases byte download time.
Offline Tools: There are lot of things that can be calculated/processed asynchronously; you can easily offload these processes to an offline tool and reduce the load on web servers (for instance calculating the tag cloud can easily be done once in a day or week as part of a offline tool).
Lazy DB Writes: Keep in mind that db writes are the slowest so it might be a good idea to do some db operations in a batch; the batch data can be written to a flat file or a MQ or even to a distributed cache environment where it can be picked up by the offline tool.
Page Compression: Since there is no direct way of g-zipping the pages in IIS; people don't even think of compressing there pages; compression can drastically reduce your page sizes. Here is the link which provides directions to setup page compression in IIS 6.
Optimize Images and JS: Images should be optimized for the web and js files should be minified.

That's all that we have done so far to achieve a pretty decent response times across our site; what do you believe that I missed out on?

IDisposable

C# trivia: what happens if you wrap an object which doesn't implement IDisposable within a using block?
Ans: Nothing, the code compiles alright and runs just fine; the problem occurs if you assumed that only IDisposable objects can be wrapped within a using block and once the object goes out of using block, the Dispose() on it would be automatically called and hence freeing up your resources; just like I assumed when I wrapped a XmlDataReader within the using block; (wrongfully) thinking that the connection associated with it will automagically be closed once xmldr goes out of scope. Unfortunately; everything worked just fine till one day I started getting Connection pool exceptions and realized that any connection used by xmldr is not getting closed and had to explicitly close them within a finally block! Ideally, only objects implementing IDisposable should be allowed to be wrapped within a using block and you should at least get a compile time warning (if not error) in case you try to place a non-Idisposable object.

Aside: I guess you can wrap me within the using{}, cause I-sure-am-Disposable!

my thoughts on solr

Recently, we had a requirement to provide some advanced searching capabilities for a public asp.net web site: one of the most important feature was to support faceted navigation on a set of hierarchical fields. After having done my research on search providers which currently exist in the market: Google search for enterprise, Mercado, Endeca, Omniture etc, we decided to go with solr (yes, the price was one of the major deciding factors: solr is free!) and I have to admit I haven't been disappointed with using it. Since, this is a windows/.net shop I to use solrsharp as the bridge. Installing Jetty+solr was a breeze but I ran into issues with installing Jetty as a service (so that we didn't have to run solr in console mode); also, I read somewhere that Jetty is not great in handling unicode characters (and since ours is a multi-lingual site; this was a big negative): so Jetty gave way to Tomcat; installing Tomcat as a service was easy on Win32 but I figured out that getting it to run on a 64bit Windows as a 64bit application required patching the Tomcat files from svn repo; after patching Tomcat with the required executables it installed just fine on a 64 bit m/c.
Since, solr supports faceted navigation out of the box (along with complex boolean queries), we had absolutely no issues in meeting the requirements; I did run into issues with solrsharp not handing unicode characters (had to patch it) and not supporting NOT searches (had to patch again) but once I patched solrsharp; things have been going on great. Currently, I use the Standard request handler (and it looks like solrsharp doesn't support specifying any different request handler during query time) which works fine for most of the cases but sometimes I've seen where my search results are quite off specially when you are searching on multiple terms for e.g. a search on "Joan of Arc" (w/o the quotes) should ideally return a document where Joan of Arc appear in close proximity first; than other documents; but the resultset returned by solr seem to be more based on words collision (the number of times a word appears in a doc). Also, if you're using the standard request handler; you can't assign different weights to different fields in the document so all fields are treated as same (you might want to assign more weight to Title field than description): the bad news is standard request handler can't handle all this complex stuff; the good news is there's another request handler just for this: Dismax. So, I just need to patch solrsharp so that I can tell it which request handler to use (or it can pick it from some config file) and we should be able to use Dismax as our request handler. All in all, it's been a breeze using solr: it's quite fast, supports clustering, runs just fine on win architecture and above all is free & open source!
Moral of the story: If you are planning to provide search functionality in your next site/application: use solr!

Miserable failure

This stemmed from a talk that I had with someone so; below is what I'd said: if you want to fail, at least fail trying to achieve something that you wanted to achieve that way in hindsight you can always tell yourself that you did your best. So, what's a miserable failure? if you fail trying to achieve what you never wanted anyway, you just end up spending your energy, your times and emotions on something which really doesn't matter and the more you get involved, the more you get sucked in...going by this definition at least I can't call myself a miserable failure; a failure, yes but not one of the miserable kind.

ask a question only if at least one of possible answer is what you want to hear

So many times I have people asking me questions and then show their displeasure (either by being obvious or being subtle) when the answer is not what they wanted to hear; the problem is any other answer wouldn't have satisfied them either; so then why do they even ask such questions? maybe that's their way of finding out what they'd known all the while; or if something goes wrong later they can always claim that they knew it already: it's a win-win situation for them.

Miss Mary's last words

It's been long since I last got a chance to write down something; the "new" job has made me work long hours on the same old sh*t! I guess, it's either my lack of faith or no longer
being in a delusion when people high up in the food chain talk about commitment, DNA (and other 3-4 letter buzzwords) and career growth etc, everything sounds to me like same old crap. I remind myself everyday at work: there is no charity out here; you work for them because they pay you and they pay you because you work for them and they believe they can mint more money from you than they pay you. I guess, the above statement holds true for almost 90% of corporations (& for 60% of people who work for them) out in the market and I don't blame them either; the primary reason they are in the market is to be profitable and make money (look ma! no charity) but should this profitability come at the cost of work ethics and professionalism? I doubt that any corporation would accept that they've been unprofessional, sloppy and perhaps even unethical at times when the fact is that most of them are. So shall I/ really care? nahh, this is not my first job and this will not be my last job: been there, done that!

Another One Bites The Dust

Couple of days back I was looking for a song to download and given how good my esnips' hack(s) have worked in the recent past, I searched for the song on ensips and found out that esnips now uses a flash player rather than the WMP plugin; and for some reasons my bookmarklet didn't work. Well, like any good netizen I searched online for some other way of downloading the audio from esnips and found this greasemonkey script (standard disclaimer: the script is obfuscated so there's no way to tell if it does more than just letting you download the song, so use it at your own discretion); which does the job. By the way, the Process Explorer way of finding the mp3 in your temporary files still works on IE, for some reasons I couldn't find any mp3s in the process monitor list when I used Fx.

It's a beautiful day

sometimes you want to write/share a lot of stuff; you're tired of keeping it all inside your head but then you ask yourself how does it matter? The ones who care will already know somehow; as to how you feel and why and they'll understand...

Gmail crash on Firefox

In case you've been bugged with frequent gmail crashes on fx (9 out of 10 times for me), you can safely assume it to be some extension not gelling well with the big G; or at least that was the case for me. Finding out the real culprit was a bit tricky though: I disabled AdBlock+ on gmail, uninstalled YSlow and Firebug without any luck, in the end, the less pesky HTML Validator turned out to be the problem, disabling HTML Validator for gmail has fixed it for now.