ThinkEzy.com – Blog

I took iPad 2 just a month back. I was aware of the yearly upgrade cycle of Apple and what the new dazzling feature set Apple was bringing every year.

Over the time, I have gone a little insensitive towards the upgrades. The iPad I took has a little quirks. When, in Safari, I press (ouch… ‘touch’) ”Open in a new Tab”, it takes a breather (Apple may call this as animated … just to hide the delay). It disables touch on the mother page so that I must see the new page first. So, I need speed.

Speed

The problem is whether the iPad 3 will open it faster. There is very little speed improvement, when dual core moves to quad core and who knows, iOS5.x supports quad cores fully. Apple must have left something for iOS6 anyway. So, it looks like iPad 3 will have the same delay and our noteworthy bloggers (esp. dear John) will rhyme it as a design genius of Apple.

Display

A retina display is fine, but what is the world are we gonna do if we can not see the difference with our retina at present? The brightness of the iPad 2 is blinding enough. Don’t go with the marketing statement - its ultra-sharp 2048 x 1536 pixel Retina display is enough to set it apart from anyone else …. It does not change anything with your eyes.

Size

The difference does not matter, though it is on a negative side – thicker and heavier. So, iPad 2 is better.

OS

No change. Any change here was welcome.

What else?

Nothing more is noteworthy from Apple stable this time.

What would have been sensational?

NFC

Nobody will point it out here, but Apple own patent for iWallet makes NFC chip’s appearance in iOS devices. Apple must be creating another walled garden around iWallet before it appears in full glow.

Mega pixels

41 mega pixels, anyone? Apple does not seem interested in exceeding competitor offering here for long. But Nokia has already made a big punch for the bloggers, who placate anything on bigger side. It reminds me the American penchant for BIG cars before Toyota defeated them with smaller cars.

I have been an ardent follower of structured languages like C, C# etc. I have also observed the functional languages like Python as it has been in the developer talks and the developer world hails them as fast turnaround. Everything else is treated as boiler code.

I wanted to have some scripting tools for our asp.net / C# based website. It is never a good idea to touch the compiled code and business logic can be safely kept in some text scripts that are interpreted. I have been using IronPython, a Microsoft port for Python as a scripting language or past some time. Meanwhile, the world has changed again and IronPython is not sexy anymore.

Today Morning I was woken up by a call from our deployment site that the code has broken. We have hidden all the system messages and that made things even harder to diagnose the problem. After a brief struggle, we found a problem while the external interface sends 009 (no James Bond ver 2.0) instead of 9 or 90 or 900. Python took 009 as a text value and the math code hat followed resulted in a syntax error. Even converting the value to integer in the python code didn’t serve matters. Finally, we changed the C# code and sent integer values.

We were using perfectly legit code. But we were using a language that offers fast development and fast turnaround. Things fail sometimes.

My suggestion is to use the functional languages more carefully.

It is always heartening to see new start-ups with innovative ideas.

RingAd is one such start-up. it is banking on advertising ringtones. Love it or leave it, but ringtones are best for local distribution of wacky messages. Interesting, new medium for advertisers as well. Interesting, because of no hi-fi speakers that distribute the ringtones. A food for thought, truly.

I talked to Shreekant, who is working on the app. In his words: ”RingAd android application, listen interesting ringtone advertisements and get free mobile recharge and discount coupons every month.”

Best luck Shreekant.

Just uploaded my first web site at GYANY CUSTOMER SOLUTIONS. Take a look at it.

After my brief encounter with writing applications, I moved to some new wish lists. I was clear from the start: Write once execute anywhere. That took me to the web. On the web there were too many choices. I remembered my early days, around 10 years ago, when web was coming out of the crash. Java servlet was mainly the only viable platform to create object oriented applications that would stay on for longer.

Today, I was looking at the same Java. The frenzy over Tomcat, Servlets was ringing in my ears like it was yesterday. I felt stupid to start over. I lost my job over some silly online yellow pages that was to employ Java tech in the old days.

Flash forward to 2011 – end. The same Java, Tomcat, Servlets, JSP. The world has moved nowhere. Sure there was JSF, Spring in pure Java. But they just complicated the affair without adding value. Eclipse is surely one that added some comfort but can not light a dim candle to Visual Studio.

So, where to start? A LO platform. Linux – Oracle, LO. I had tried Linux recently with Ubuntu 10. So, downloaded the latest version 11 it on trusty HP Pavilion. Looks real good. Simple Unity Windows.

Went to Ubuntu Software Centre for Eclipse. It got me only one option, Classic Java. Started Eclipse and went to Web Development Tools (WDT). No WDT. Ouch. Earlier update URLS were not working. Frantic search … 1 day lost … searching … Nobody in any StackExchange or Ash Ubuntu could find this URL for my problem. So, turning on my instinct in Google. Found indigo Software Repository. Aaaahhaaa. Then it was breeze.

One thing about Ubuntu … It is real fast and responsive on my 5-year old laptop. May not need new one very soon.

Launched first JSP page – “Hello Web … from JSP”. Worked great. Eclipse found Tomcat very smoothly. E’thing is well that ends well.

One sure thing – I can stay on Ubuntu longer and ditch Windows 7 forever.

Being thrashed by Google Web store and WordPress for hosting my extension, I was looking at various options. I earlier had SourceForge but that a whole millennium ago. The current hot open source source host is Github.

My natural inclination was to go to Github. But there is a checklist of at least 50 steps and process that exceeds 4 page lengths before I can host any extension. Developers are truly crooked. No doubt about that. They invent something like Github and if that looked too complicated, invent something new and brand it as a 3-minute set up.

Now what? let’s download, install git; install SSH; get keys; export keys to Github and if luck has it, host Hash. What a hack?

I was just writing this – “Please download …”

But it seems, WordPress doesn’t like crx files.

 
I tried Google’s Chrome Web Store at first. But, their e-commerce market is immature and broken. They take $1 to register me as a merchant. But, after taking the payment, their screen just doesn’t notify the purchase anywhere. I had to talk to my bank to confirm the purchase.

So, anyone who like to try, please email me at gattoo at gmail dot com and I would be too happy to share.

After a huge gap of around 8 years (hoops!!!) I have started code development once again.

During all these years I was a manager and code development was not a requirement for me. I am still a manager, but good things come back again.

The first development meets my no.1 need. Keep unique passwords and still remember every password. For years I had only one password and used to use only that everywhere. But constant pestering by all paranoids everywhere, I started to look out for unique passwords. LastPass is a great utility but still required remembering one heck of a password at least and the passwords were still away – at large.

I was looking at something that keeps passwords unique, but very easy to remember. Creating a small rule to keep a common structure was not a problem to me. But the sites do not like either my username or their site name in the password. So, a common naming strategy was ruled out. Or was it? I could still have a naming rule if I could code the password. Sure, SHA1 hashing would help.

But, no. SHA1 codes are devoid of special characters. The sites write “weak password” in cold blood or even worse, reject the password altogether (yes, weak passwords are rejected by my payroll site). What to do? Simple. Encode SHA1.

Now I was coming to a full blown password suggestion that entirely depend on my likes and still has all the virtues of the best password management.

I would obviously look out for a browser extension solution as I would easily replace Lastpass with. Chrome was an easy choice for such an extension. Though I have come to dislike Chrome lately (more about it later), it is still my choice, on one count. The search box at the top.

Please have the extension after the break. I am now looking out for a nice looking logo for my first software for the entire world. Just asked my beautiful, designer wife to carve a simple, stunning and effective logo.

Will I ask you to pay for it? I should. But Chrome does not allow me to sell my extension for money just as yet. I stay in India. So, Chrome has all the rights to take my $5 for hosting the app. Cashing on it would be a future.

Just trying to figure out a nice name. Hashish, perhaps. or, just Hash?