Rocky wallpaper collection

boxing

Sep 29, 2006 - 7 Photos

Here are some of my favorite star (Sly Stallone's) pics from his movie Rocky (which i adore - as i adore boxing sport) and someday in this lifetime i will want to look like the above pic ;) ... and will update this blog post then with my pics by his side. Just kidding! Enjoy this small collection for now.

Preparing for SCBCD 1.3

Sun certified Business Component Developer exam (SCBCD 1.3)
is the exam i am going to take next on the coming monday (30 th Sept, 2006).
This exam covers EJB 2.0 spec (of J2EE 1.3). I am going to prepare for it inthe following way:
1. First refer to my notes from Mastering EJB 3rd Edn book by Ed Roman et al (covers EJB 2.1 and not 2.0 as required by exam).
2. Read Head first EJB book by Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates.
3. Mocks from Enthuware's EJBPlus.

Thats all of it i will do (or rather i can do) with 1 week of preparation.

Update 30th Sept, 2006: I passed this exam with 85% (85.7% in fact ;) ). Read my post on javarach of the customary how-i-prepared-for-it.

H1B Visa Stamping Experience

I got my H1B visa stamped yesterday (8th Sept, 2006) at USA Consulate in Chennai, India. My appointment time was 8am in the morning but i was allowed in at 7am itself. Then i was asked to wait for my turn in a seated queue in the first building where the documents are verified before you are asked to proceed to the next building (where the actual visa interview happens). At about 7.30 i was asked to stand in the queue of the first building when all people who had their appointment at 8am where asked to stand in the queue. Here they verified the documents and matched the barcode on the visa fee receipt with the passport number as mentioned in their system and finally they took one barcode sticker from the yellow receipt and pasted it on the back of my passport. They also put one form which reflected at what stage i was in, in my visa stamping process (ie docs verified, finger printed, visa approved). Once the docs verification was done we were being asked to go to the next building. There again we had a queue outside the building. I waited in the queue for some 10mins and then a security personnel allowed us in based on our visa appointment time. Once in, two ladies were coordinating the seating of ppl asking them to keeping moving in a seated queue. First, one of them asked us to stand in the queue for being finger printed. This counter was in the center of the hall. First the left and then the right index fingers were scanned and this record was stored against our passport details (as the lady on the counter took first the passport and then asked to put the finger on the scanner). OK, hereafter, i was in another queue waiting for my turn for the final visa stamping interview. The guy just before me was from TCS and he got a 221(g). His was an L1 case. I saw a few oft repeated questions to L1/H1B:
1. What is the project on which you will be working in the USA?
2. Whether you will be working at the client site or in your company's USA office? If you said client site, then you may be asked to present the client invitation letter and probably if the client is lesser known name then some photographs of the client and probably its annual revenue etc.
3. Why have you been chosen to go to USA for this project (why not someone else from your company)? Basically i think they want to know how your skills map to the requirements of the project and how confidently can you state them.
4. Your academic qualifications? If you are not a comp. sci. graduate then probably you will be asked to tell where/how you learnt software development skills.

The communication skills matter alot. Some ppl i saw were asked something and they answered something else, and this irritated the VO. Note: The VO has a very short time span to gauge you and so you should give all positive signs about you (especially so by communicating well - ie speak good english). As they say, if you have the right skills then it shows by the way you talk.

My visa interview was brief (lasted 1min or so). The questions asked were the following:
1. Which project was i going to work on in USA?
2. What client?
3. What is my academic qualification?
4. Since i am a non comp. sci grad (a BE in electronics) she then asked me how i learnt software development skills. (any training etc). I said i am working for the past 7yrs in the industry (so most of the skills were acquired on the job plus i had a post graduate diploma from National center for software tech).

Thats all! I hope this post is useful to you. May you have a good experience in your visa interview as i had :).

Book Review: JUnit in Action

Well i dont have anything to add as of now as i just bought this book but as i read some reviews (especially the one on eXtremeComponents site) i decided to benefit by learning how to unit test from this book. Yes the contents are very impressive as it covers mock objects, stubs and in-container testing strategies using JUnit and derivatives of it. The author is also a creator of Jakarta Cactus web-testing framework.

Preparing for SCWCD 1.4

I have decided to take the SCWCD 1.4 (CX-310-081) exam and have booked a slot for taking the exam at the local prometric test center on 18th Sept, 2006. I had already read the book Head First Servlets and JSP by Bryan Basham, Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates before but it was some 10 months back that it did so, and i needed some time to recap on the theory. I am using MZ's WCD Study guide to prepare and practice using the exercises from Head First book. I plan to use Enthuware JWebplus mock exam together with the mock exam with the Head first book and the mock exam at JavaRanch.com.

Update 18th Sept, 2006: I have passed the exam today morning and could complete it 45mins earlier (ie i took 1hr 30mins of time to complete the exam). Refer to my post on javaranch about how i prepared for it and where i went wrong to end up with the low score of 82%.

Some good data grid JSP tag libraries

The best one (also best documented one) is http://extremecomponents.org/. I am yet to try it out though but it seems quite flexible and has recently integrated with DWR (http://getahead.ltd.uk/dwr) to provide AJAX support for the data grid. The data grid can include form components. Another good data grid enabling JSP tag library is the display tag library (http://displaytag.sourceforge.net/). I recently also experimented with the live grid example of openrico but due to its insufficient documentation i found it too time consuming to work with (http://openrico.org/rico/livegrid.page). For my project purposes, i settled with the extremecomponents data grid as it seemed atleast as flexible as others and was better documented.

Learning BPEL

After having passed the SCDJWS certification i was a bit confused as to what next to learn to gain more mileage with Webservices. For sometime i simply kept idlying my time at the javaranch.com webservices forum trying to answer some questions and keeping in touch and testing the depth of my knowledge on webservices. Well that process still continues but in the meanwhile i got to know about BPEL for WS orchestration and it got me interested. I found only one book which addressed only BPEL and not the whole paraphernalia of webservices which i had already learned/read in the course of getting certified. This was the book Business Process Execution Language for Webservices 2nd Edition by Matjaz Juric et al. Also i found this article from Sun quite informative.

I have today got the book and will update this post with a review of how i find it. Java ranch has a review on this book too and my first impression is - it covers exactly as much as i would want to read on BPEL to get my hands dirty. It covers both theory for BPEL 1.1 and practicals of how to develop using a BPEL engine - Oracle Business Process Manager 10.1.2. Though it also addresses the practical aspects of another BPEL engine from Microsoft - the BizTalk Server 2004 in the chapter 7 (the last chapter). Book starts with an overview of SOA and BPEL and an overview of competitors of BPEL. It also introduces the different WS-* standards which BPEL standard builds on. Then it delves into BPEL theory for the next 2 chapters. Then it covers the practicals of developing using Oracle BPM and JDeveloper 10g + Eclipse 3.1 for the next 2 chapters. Lastly it covers Microsoft BizTalk server 2004. There is an appendix of BPEL 1.1 syntax. Its not a big book (only 350 pages).

Editing blogs with Windows Live Writer

Microsoft just launched Windows Live Writer, a new publishing tool for WYSIWYG blog authoring on Windows Live Spaces, Wordpress, Typepad and other blogging services. Found this software via Digg and it looks pretty good so far. The Live Writer is pretty similar to the Word and so I’m not sure how this product will be positioned in the future. With all the blog editing tools in Office 2007, this is an interesting offering but I guess it could be the free tool that doesn’t have all the features of Word 2007.
My initial impressions of this tool are fairly positive. The WYSIWYG blog authoring is really good and allows you to edit in GUI mode or directly edit the HTML being generated. The image tool is pretty cool that will allow you to add images to your post that can uploaded to your blog directly.
Writer supports RSD (Really Simple Discoverability), the Metaweblog API, and theMovable Type API with more blog platforms and API coming in the near future.
Another feature that’s interesting is the ability to insert a Windows Live Local map directly into a post. For now, only Live.com maps is supported but the SDK that is also shipping should allow anyone to create interesting add-ons.

How i find it? Well i must confess that i was not able to figure out how to add a title to my post on the blogspot editors. Also editing in the context of the template in use is not possible when you use blogspot editor. This is one of the most attractive features of using a standalone application client to do the editing rather than editing your posts online in the less-than-mature rich text editors on blogspot and similar sites. In short, i would say, Windows Live Writer from microsoft is a useful contribution (currently being offered for free) and it simply makes the user experience of blogging easier.

Learning Design Patterns

I have recently started reading the Head first design patterns book. I read about 150pages of the book sometime back and now i have to resume my reading of the book from where i left. This time around, i am planning to put the design patterns i learn about from the book in my notes which will make it handy for revision and referring later. From what i recollect now about my experience reading those first few pages from the book, i want to say that i liked the easy presentation style and humor in the book which makes an otherwise dry subject a little more interesting. I will update this post after making some more progress on the book. In short, this book only covers 14 of the 23 design patterns covered by GoF's book.

Updated 25 Oct, 2006: I had missed to be able to complete this book earlier and recently i have experienced a deep sense of grief on being at loss for proper words or ideas when given a design problem. I think after revising SNMP as thoroughly as i possibly could, learning all basic design patterns is the last step i need to take to move on and shake hands with destiny :). Really, it came as surprise for me when i recently interviewed for a company for which i studied the whole day revising my C++ and by 8pm late evening i am only asked some desing problems which completely floor me. Apart from the human factors (that i was tired by the end of day having slept only 4hrs between 2 days and studying the whole day and i was skipping my lunch for those two days too), i realized that i MUST read this book before i set my foot in USA.

Book Review : AJAX in Action

I have today completed the 1st of the 4 parts of this book and i must say that i loved reading it due to my growing interest in the AJAX methodology and the web application development, in general.

Part 1 of the book talks about what and why about AJAX, introduces the framework and toolset and the core technologies you need to know about when working on AJAX. This part is divided into 3 chapters (introducing AJAX, simple example with code and importance of refactoring the AJAX Javascript code).

Part 2 (this is where i am now in my reading) talks about the techniques to employ for coding the client and the server. Comprised of 2 chapters.

Part 3 (which i am yet to read) discusses about enhancing user experince (usability stuff that you should consider while developing AJAX application), security and performance of AJAX application. Comprised of 3 chapters.

Part 4 provides example applications using AJAX methodology like Dynamic double combo, type-ahead suggest, web portal with autosave functionality, live search using XSLT, and building a standalone RSS Feed Reader. Comprised of 5 chapters.

The reason i like this book alot is because i did not know much CSS, HTML DOM or Javascript before and there this book introduces those subject areas in a way that is relevant to the development of AJAX based application. And thats what a J2EE developer like me will require. We dont necessarily need to learn Javascript to develop libraries like Scriptaculous (i mean not like a web front end designer would want to know). All we need to know about CSS, Javascript and HTML DOM is to be able to work comfortably with those while making an AJAX application. The book has pretty good introduction to these topics and hence i have benefitted alot. The Appendix B named Javascript for object-oriented programmers is more than what i think i will need to know about the language. CSS and HTML DOM are introduced in chapter 2 and used throughout the book in the several examples thus giving one alot of room to practice. The coverage of examples using the most common scenarios where one would want to use AJAX methodology is also very nice. It also talks and demonstrates with examples, the use of different frameworks (like Rico, prototype, scriptaculous, etc) and also tell enough about the frameworks based on which you can decide which one will best suit your needs on a certain project. In short, you become educated enough to make a good decision on what framework to use for your project which can help you cut down the timeline for the project. If you are new to AJAX then do check out the book's website for a screencast by the authors on what is ajax. I just checked out on a few frameworks mentioned in the book and following are the ones which interested me most:

• Rico: built over prototype library provides a AjaxEngine Javascript object which you can use to simplify the AJAX request/response and also provides some widgets like accordian for one.
• DWR: Direct web remoting is an application framework which allows Java objects to expose their methods directly for AJAX requests to clients.
• Echo2: is also an application framework which like DWR does not require you to know HTML, CSS and Javascript enabling the user interface to be created in pure Java. It provides a visual designer as an eclipse plugin using which you can layout your web forms easily and the corresponding code will be generated in Java. The SDK is open source but the eclipse plugin is not (a free trial for 30 days is available). Will write more as i read and learn more from this excellent book.

My Studies so far...

I have read the following books in order so far since Nov 2005 when i made a move from embedded systems programming to the J2EE world:

• Head first servlets and JSP by Kathy Sierra & Bert Bates
• Mastering EJB 3rd Edn. by Ed Roman et al
• SCJP 5.0 Study Guide by Kathy Sierra & Bert Bates
• JBoss at Work: A Practical Guide by Tom Marrs & Scott Davis
• Struts: The complete reference by James Holmes (only first 10 chapts).
• Oracle University: Introduction to SQL
• J2EE Webservices by Richard Monson-Haefel
• Designing Webservices with J2EE 1.4 by Inderjeet Singh et al
• Head First EJB by Kathy Sierra & Bert Bates
• SNMP, SNMPv2, SNMPv3 and RMON 1 and 2, 3rd Edition, by William Stallings.
  

My plans are to complete the following books by November 2006:

• Head first design patterns (for sure - started 25 Oct)
• J2EE Design and Development by Rob Jhonson (May be)
• Network Management: Principles and Practice by Subramanian (read 2 chapts.)
  
• Oracle University: Program with PL/SQL (Oracle 9i)
  

Together with the above mentioned readings i have some certifications taken and planned for:

• SCJP 5.0 CX-310-055 : Passed with 90% on May 15 2006
• SCDJWS 1.4 CX-310-220 : Passed with 88% on Aug 10 2006
• SCBCD 1.3 CX-310-090 : Passed with 85% on Sept 30 2006
• SCWCD 1.4 CX-310-081 : Passed with 82% on Sept 18 2006
  

And some trainings:

• Oracle Workforce development program:Introduction to SQL: Completed in May 2006
• Oracle Workforce development program: Program with PL/SQL: Completed in Aug 2006.

Thats all about it till Nov 2006.

Preparing for SCDJWS

SCDJWS 1.4 is Sun Certified Developer for Java Web Services certification exam. I started preparing for this exam after taking the SCJP 5.0 exam earlier in May 2006. This exam covers alot of specifications (XML 1.0, XML Schema 1.0, WS-I BP 1.0a, J2EE 1.4 for WS 1.1, WSDL 1.1, SOAP 1.1, UDDI 2.0, JAX-RPC 1.1 to name a few). You can see the complete list at Valentin Crettaz's site. There isnt any certification guide available as of this writing for this exam so i followed the advices of people who have already taken this certification exam at JavaRanch SCDJWS Forum and following is my approach to prepare for the exam.

Again, as has become a standard practice for me, i started with a word document where i copy pasted the exam objectives and wrote down the reference material (name of the book and chapters) for each topic on the exam. In summary, following are the resources i am referring:

• J2EE WebServices by Richard Monson-Haefel (RMH): all chapters + appendices E, F & G. I did not read the F and G from here but referred to MZ's notes for SwA with SAAJ.
  
• Sun's Blueprint book - Designing Webservices using J2EE 1.4: whole book
  
• Mikalai Zaikin's (MZ) WSD Notes and Quiz You will need to buy the quiz (~95+ questions) from Mikalai. I referred to the Security (chapter 8) and a section on SwA with SAAJ (a section in chapter 2) from MZ's notes. I went through all quiz questions once, a night before the exam.
• XYZWS.COM - provides a free mock exam (in all 200 questions collection).
  
• XSLT and TrAX from Elliot Rusty Harold's (ERH) excellent book Processing XML with Java.
  
• Java Webservices Tutorial (WST) for tutorial on JAXB (chapters 1 & 2)

14th Jul 2006 - I am through with all chapters from the RMH book and am mid-way through the Blueprint book. I have to go back to RMH to cover appendices E, F & G which cover SwA, SAAJ with Attachments and JAX-RPC & SwA. I also have to cover the ERH book's XSLT/TrAX, MZ's notes + WS-Security and WST for JAXB/Security. This might take me another week. I plan to complete the syllabus by 21st Jul 2006. After this i will need another week's time to revise my notes and practice more on the code.

I have created some sample programs from RMH's book (on topics like XSD, XML namespaces, JAX-RPC JSE/EJB Endpoints and clients Generated stubs/Dynamic Proxies/DII, JAXR, JAXP DOM/SAX).

I practiced the JAXB samples (first 5 only) as discussed in the WST. The exam does not require one to know

customizing the JAXB bindings so i did not cover those topics. For security, i did not do any programming but just read the concepts from MZ's notes.

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10th Aug, 2006 - I passed the exam (CX-310-220) with 88%. If you need my study notes (305 pages covering whole syllabus completely) the download it here. You can read my final tips to the ranchers on how to prepare at javaranch.com.

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15th Mar, 2007 - I noticed that a few people (infact just 2, one wrote to me a thank you email and another mentioned of referring to my notes at Javaranch forum ) have used my SCDJWS 1.4 notes while preparing for the certification exam. If i could have posted my notes on a personal web site like MZ then probably more people will have been able to use it. Presently the single 305 pages pdf file might seem daunting to many. So setting up a web site is on my list of to-dos.

Learning Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE)

I started my learning of J2EE 1.4 late November 2005 with the book Head First Servlets and JSP by Kathy Sierra et al. It was a good book and i could understand what a MVC pattern means to the web application development. I took about 2 months to complete this book (in parallel i started developing a small application from my team in my place of work). I used the learnings from this book and by beginning April i could also read up Mastering EJB 3rd Edition by Ed Roman et al. It was excellent but a tome and i needed to revise the concepts from the beginning chapters by the time i could reach the end of the book. So i was not able to understand the sample application initially and did not give much effort to understanding in the first go as i thought i needed to make study notes to burn in the matter in the initial chapters. But reading the whole book in a go gave me some confidence in my approach to learning Java EE based development.

Then i thought of taking the Sun certifications and found that SCJP was a prerequisite so i bought the book SCJP 5.0 study guide by Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates and prepared for the exam. I scored 90% in the exam which i took mid of May. I then resumed with Mastering EJB book and started making my notes. By the end of this learning i strongly felt the need of some good book which explained how a real-world J2EE application is being developed. I had this notion after having read about Hibernate ORM being a preferred choice on the persistence tier and books like J2EE desing and development without EJB by Rod Jhonson which cautioned the developers against unwanted use of EJB in enterprise application development. Fortunately i found the mention of JBoss at work: A practical guide by Tom Marrs and Scott Davis book on jboss.org site. I could also get an Indian edition for that book which was released in October 2005 thus was reassuring enough that what it talked about must be latest practices in the developer community with regard to J2EE based enterprise development. I started reading the book and could cover most of it in 2 days. Yes it was easy cruise considering my sound foundations of Java SE edition and the knowledge i gained from Mastering EJB and HF Servlets & JSP books. Also this book gave me the knowledge of how the XDoclet and Hibernate can be used. This is where i am now in my learning cycle as of this writing.

As for my plans for the coming months, i want to complete my notes from HF Servlets & JSP book (for the sake of completeness and also to accumulate APIs i did not use in my small project work before i move on), then i want to start with the Struts: The complete reference book and finish that in 8 days gathering as much as possible in that time. Then the plan is to read J2EE Webservice book by Richard Monson Haefel. This is all for the month of June. After that in July i plan to read 3 books in order - Head First Design pattern (8 days), Core J2EE Patterns(10 days) and Mastering BEA Weblogic Server 8.1 (12 days). In the following month of August, i want to take SCDJWS certification exam and cover a book - Ajax in action which i bought long back but have not had the time to cover so far. The idea is to understand J2EE development on all tiers (web/presentation, business, persistence). In the month of september, i have not planned for yet, but what seems most logical to me now is that i will want to cover Mastering JSF and Hibernate in Action.

In october this year, i plan to start some open source project work, probably related to my field of expertise (network management systems and SNMP). I have contributed in the past on one open source project http://www.mibble.org in the UI development for SNMP MIB Browser using the mibble parser and westhawk snmp library in Java. I am still not sure what work i will be doing in october but it has to use my learnings on J2EE in some way. The idea is to gain enough expertise on the J2EE development and also to be in touch with the SNMP/NMS domain before i start my job search again.

Preparing for SCJP 5.0 Exam

While preparing for SCJP 5.0 exam, i did the following:

1. Bought a certification guide (SCJP 5.0 Study Guide by Kathy Sierra & Bert Bates)
2. Read the book from cover to cover
3. The guide came with a ebook in pdf format on a CD with the book. I used the pdf document for copy pasting the contents i wanted to revise later into a word document notes i prepared.
4. I first copied the 2 minute drills part (which was like a quick summary of essential parts of the chapter). Then i went to the relevant parts where i needed some examples copied from into my notes.
5. I also copied the exercise examples to the respective sections of my notes. This really helps to see the kind of question on a topic you can get near to the notes on that topic.

I did the above for all chapters and captured my notes in one word document which i took a print out of and then revised and kept adding any special question which i could not answer from one of the several mock exams found on the internet.

As an end result, following the above process for any certification exam, will help one prepare not only a exam cram but a worthy quick reference for work and refreshing your knowledge on the subject for a job interview.

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Well i passed the exam on 15th May, 06 with 90% score (65/72 questions answered correctly). And here's my final words on how i prepared for this exam: Thread on JavaRanch Discussion Form where i declared my pass result

My tryst with AJAX

It all started with a question bank application that i was asked to build for our staffing team's use. Once an interface to add/remove/update questions to a database was created i was asked to build a web form to allow the interviewers to manage the questions they asked in an interview session together with the ratings assigned per question per candidate. Also the interface to be quick enough for the interviewer to find the right question to ask and update on the web form while conducting the telephonic interviews. AJAX seemed to answer some of the questions like not having to reload the pages thus giving a desktop application like usability to the interviewers. And i gathered that it also a hot term in the industry today. So i thought i will make use of the simple web form work as my learning platform for AJAX. I had bought the book AJAX in action sometime back but never got time enough to start reading it. About 600 pages of it can be completed in no less that 10 days. I thought its worth to invest those 10 precisious days into the learning of this interesting concept. Will post back once i have made some head way into the book.