The Crystal Cave...

I attended the concert I mentioned with Paban Das Baul and the Bauls of Bengal today.  It was part of a week of transcendental performances at the Barbican in London.  Today's one was curated and orchestrated by a William Dalrymple as part of promoting is his latest book, Nine Lives.  He talked about his experiences with the transcendental musicians of India--the Bauls, sufis, fakirs, and possessional dancers--as a prelude to each performance.  Paban Das Baul was captivating as usual with his powerful and soothing voice.  His improvisional skills are something to be experienced as it gives insight into the music of the Bauls.  What greatly touched me tonight were the presence and performance of two bauls from Bengal, Kanai Mondol and Dev Das Baul, who through their own tragedies found each other in friendship and became wandering minstrels in their own ways.  Kanai Mondol happens to be blind but it was his voice that made me cry uncontrollably when he sang "Guru amay koro koruna".  He looked so weak and frail but his voice was unbearably melodic.  Dev Das Baul came from a Brahmin family but after being chastised and beaten for mixing with Muslims, others outside his cast, and his love for Baul music, he left his family to become a Baul himself.  He journeyed across India and one point even left all to see if he could reach a state where he could live without food.  Dalrymple described how he succeeded and almost lost all as he felt disconnected from his body and was completely oblivious to a storm that had buried him neck deep in mud while in trance.  His friend, Kanai Mondol, saved him and nourished him back to life and they have since never left each other.   After the Bauls came a group of fakirs from Bitthai in Sindh where they sing every day and night at the shrine of a sufi saint called Shah Abdul Latif.  That was interesting as well as they weaved sitar strumming with both cacophonous (high pitched, sometimes falseto) and harmonious voices (sort of like kawali) singing the works of Shah Abdul Latif.  That was followed by the possessional dancers of Northern Kerala dancing to the beat of 3 drummers of amazing skill.  The two dancers were garbed in elaborate costumes representing the gods as if enticing them to possess them and join the dance.  That was both bizarre and eye-opening to say the least.  I almost felt as though I was sinking into a trance when I closed my eyes and shook my head to the drumbeats.  The final group was Susheela Raman's group performing the Thevaram hymns from Tamil Nadu.  She was rather vibrant and even got a lot of people to stand up and move to the rhythms of her songs and the accompanying drums.  

I'll post pictures and videos on this entry later.

I'd heard about psychological conditioning causing people to behave "out of character" before but I was shocked while reading about experiments such as The Third Wave, The Stanford Prison Experiments, and Jane Elliot's Blue Eye/Brown Eye experiment.  I didn't think behavior could be altered so quickly by applying a minimal amount of rules and restrictions in place.   The basic idea in all these experiments is creating a situation (all pretend) where two opposing groups are created.  In some cases, a myth or a symbol is created to give one group a higher footing than the other  (or disenfanchise one group with respect to the other).  The behaviour that ensues mirrors atrocities, in principle if not in level of intensity, carried out by those of the advantaged group against those of the disadvantaged.  It's quite shocking, to be honest, to find how easily human beings can be suggested into a certain mode of behaviour.

Although not entirely similar, this reminds of me something we do in schools and institutions which probably exists to this day.  Although most civilized institutions will not segregate based on ethnicity or creed anymore, they do (and without much opposition) segregate and give a higher footing based on "intellectual ability".  I put "intellectual ability" in quotes because the basis for this is criteria which can be argued to be dubious.  In my high school, we had what we called "The National Honour Society", an honoured group of students selected each year by a committee (in secret) based on a set of criteria including:

- cumulative GPA of 3.85 and over for 3 consecutive semesters
- exemplary performance in various extracurricular activities in areas of creativity, action, and community.
- an essay explaining the candidate's leadership, character, and ambitions

Although this sounds as though everybody with a 3.85+ for 3 consecutive semesters and some combination of extracurricular activities involving creativity, action and service would get it, that was not the case.  I was refused during the first round despite having 4.0 and a handful of activities.  I got in the second round (in my junior year of high school) and so did a bunch of others with much less on their records to brag about.  There were around 8 out of 70 odd students in our batch that was let into this society.  Upon being accepted into this National Honour Society, we were given golden pins to go on letter jackets (that's another story altogether) as well as a letter explaining that the St. Mary's International School National Honour Society was only one of a worldwide group of National Honour Societies and we should be proud of our achievements.  My parents even got a tacky set of bumber stickers saying "My son's a National Honour Society student".  Luckily they didn't have a car so the sticker stuck on the fridge.  During graduation, in addition to our blue graduation gowns, the National Honour society members were given a golden sache with the words "Honour" embroidered in blue calligraphic script to wear.  It was noticeable in our year as so few of our classmates had it.  Even our graduation diplomas had the golden emblem of the National Honour Society.  Here's a website with the emblem in the top left hand corner.

Question is, what did this all mean?  What privileges did we have with respect to the other non members of the NHS?  Not much, to be honest.  We never held any organized meetings and we never exercised any duties for this organization.  The school, other than awarding us these rather trivial awards, didn't do much else till the next year when students were told to hand in applications for the NHS.  That being said, the EFFECT of this was noticeable.  Before the application, everybody would be asking each other if they were applying or weren't eligible to apply.  This automatically made people aware of their standing (GPA-wise) with respect to others.  This was coupled with a sheet of paper that went up on the bulletin board in the lounge area that listed every student's name above 4.0, 3.5, and 3.0 respectively.  This sheet was titled "The Honour Roll".  Unless you had less than 3.0, your position was pretty much known by first quarter.  And that changed people's behaviour.  Those above 3.5 would take the harder courses, apply to the more prestigious colleges, and take part in the more "academic" activities such as Debate, Speech, Brainbowl, Drama and volunteering activities  Those in the midrange would engage in sports.  Those in the lower category wouldn't bother with either.  You'd be lucky if you saw them volunteering.   The really ironic thing about it all is that when it came to applying for colleges and universities, the school's official stance was that they did not rank their students.  As such, our guidance counsellor explicitly forbade us to put our rank in our applications as well as himself officially replying to colleges that St. Mary's did not rank its students.  Especially noticeable after the Honour Roll and NHS selection events were the behaviors of the "smarter" kids towards the "dumber" kids.  All of a sudden even the mid-range kids who got over 3.5 were feeling superior than those between 3.0. and 3.5.  And these were the same kids who would make fun of "the nerds" (those in the 4.0+ range) during the beginning of the year.  There were certain subjects which were broken up into advanced, standard, and lower level as well and this became even more obvious in the upper years with the IB Diploma where the smartest kids took IB Higher Level Mathematics and IB Higher Level English even though they did not really matter towards their acceptance into college or university.  There was one class, IB Philosophy, where the majority of those choosing it had GPAs of 3.85+ as they assumed you required that sort of "ability" to take that class. 

Something funny happened one year though which makes the system not work.  In the year above my own, the graduating class had everybody except 2 (among the eligible kids that is) be accepted into the National Honour Society.  How this could have happened is beyond my understanding as I could not believe the committee had decided to let so many in that were clearly not as wellrounded enough to warrant being let into the NHS.  As this happened in my junior year when I got in, it sort of took away the thunder of getting in knowing that almost the entire class of 1998 got in.  Naturally, the parents of those two students who were eligible but got cut complained and eventually were let in just before the graduation ceremony in May.  Up on stage on graduation night, more than half the graduating class had golden sashes and I could imagine them either feeling good about "beating the system" or "being a smart class".  

All of this carries on in different places in different ways and this is perfectly acceptable in our society.  Universities are ranked based on the selectivity and this then affects where their graduates end up in industry and how much they're offered.  Why?  We reward merit, that's why!  But come to think of it, at the end of the day all of this doesn't really reflect any measurable value or ability.  Rather we categorize people early on and condition ourselves to give them benefits or sanctions accordingly.  Isn't it arbitrary after a certain point?  It reminds me of the top executives of the banks and financial institutions as well.  They're awarded knighthoods and peerages and given yearly salaries in the millions whereas the average person does not see half that in an entire career.  Recently, some bank execs retired and they went off with 700K pound a year pensions.  But all this is excused because people of these responsibilities and ability merit this sort of compensation.  Isn't it redundant after a certain point?  Aren't we inflating their positions ourselves by accepting the BS fed us by this system under the guise of "meritocracy"?  I've gone off on a tangent but my point is all of this is connected to human psychology and its abuse by rather arbitrary suggestions of difference in class (doesn't matter what the discriminating factor is--social, economic, intellectual classes all make one group take a piss on the class lower than them)

If you had not been born into a religious family, what religion, if any, would you have chosen to embrace? And why?
If you would choose to remain atheist, say so and why.

I keep reading these articles about government proposals to get everybody's dna and fingerprints in a database so as to improve security and all that. The general reaction to this seems to be one of hostility citing privacy issues and the like. Thing is, they've got a lot more stuff already on us that we can't even complain about because we don't know about them. The ones we do about, we can't even do anything about--ccd cameras, listening devices, etc etc. On the flip side of this, crooks do get away. They're either not on record, the ccd images aren't good enough, etc etc. So why not?

On another note, I was thinking how it would be if instead of stuff like credit cards, bus passes, tube passes, we could just swipe our hands on the reader and move on. But of course, that'll let some people store my fingerprints for who knows what, right? So nobody proposes this. Instead they propose stuff like mobile sim cards that can double or triple as credit cards and bus/train/tube passes. You still have to get out the damn thing and swipe it, don't you? It's like they can't think or see 2 steps ahead or something.

I think I read somewhere where instead of being stamped on your hand or whatever at a club, they inject a tiny RFID chip into your skin and then you walk in and out of the club through sensor archs. Good thinking, provided that chip thing is reusable and doesn't cause an infection or some other scary side-effects. If it's meant to "biodegrade", that's cool too although I'm a bit suspicious of that because that means chemicals leaching into my body that I don't exactly know about.

Whatabout other stuff like passports you don't have to have on you with the right visa stamps? Or bank cards? Or keys? The risk of hacking is there but are these currently safe from hackers anyway? I've already seen credit cards or sim cards cloned and used by fraudsters. Does the fact that we have something to carry give us a false sense of assurance? If the technology was perfected to identify you uniquely with it being virtually impossible for anybody to fake, wouldn't that be a better alternative?

I'm still visiting livejournal to read other people's posts or the odd news/comic post. And every time, I think that I should perhaps write something but immediately following that thought is a quick and rather strong hesitation. It's not writer's block. It's more like a barrier of boundaries into my current thoughts and opinions. It's as though I'm becoming more possessive of my thoughts to the point of not even writing them down anywhere (online or hardbound).

Getting depressed about the state of things all over the world. After roughing it three years in Bangladesh, I'm here in a first world country (I don't like this phrase) only to arrive at the time of shit hitting all fans in every direction. I wonder where I can run to to settle down. But nowhere seems to be safe. I mean whatever's happening here and in the US should be happening pretty soon afterwards in all other places. It's natural for a delayed reaction. At the moment, just keeping my head low and staying at my current job. The only silver lining is that I survived the redundancies (at least for the last round) and got a small raise. My ambitious side would say I should be making more but at the moment I can't afford to say stuff like that. Everybody's in the same boat. Also, it seems that things have been generally ok for me. I was interviewing at Goldman Sachs last year. I went through 9 interviews before being told that they were not clear on why I wanted to work for them (whatever that means). Reading about the 600 jobs cut at GS today, I thought about whether that could have been me. It probably could seeing as developers are considered as costs.

We moved to a new office which is an open plan office. Looks quite chaotic and feels even more so. Had a chat with some of the others that moved here from other offices of our company and some of these guys have been at the company almost a decade. They've experienced lots of acquisitions and demergers and it doesn't seem to have fazed them out. Maybe, I should stick around a bit. I recently got invited to invest in company shares (in 3 years). Couldn't be a bad thing if the only way for stocks could be to go up after all the current storms clear.

The iphone is a truly great invention (despite Apple restricting it in many ways). People have done so much around it in such a short time, it's still beating any new contenders in this area (Google Android included). If Apple had employed all these jailbreakers and iphone apps developers to begin with, they would have had a much more awesome and solid product out in the first place. Instead of having to release two half-baked products in two phases. But regardless, the iphone is great because even if Apple put it out half-baked, the community of developers and users have transformed it into multilayer cakes that suit different people's tastes. Some of the Apps I'm enjoying on it now:

1. Email push over wifi 3G (granted I had to have my gmail redirected to an Exchange service)
2. VOIP/Chat using Fring
3. RSS Feeds via Byline
4. File readers for Word/PDF/etc while I'm on the tube and wanting to get some reading done. There are some e-novels and e-books for technical documents that I can read while being stuck in a packed tube
5. Games like Towers of Hanoi and Pool are nice

I want to go to Bangladesh in the winter. But it's not happening till next year I'm afraid. Probably just as well as there's talk of an election this December.

I've managed to move everything to the new place. Needless to say I am exhausted. I think my body is still playing catchup as I am knocked out before 11pm these days. Had lots of bills/paperwork transfers to sort out at the new place. Makes me think I'm never going to move again unless I buy a place. Given the current markets, that'll be a while.

The weather's so unpredictable these days. We've had 4 straight days of hot and humid weather which is very unlike London. Got this tower fan online for 10 quid from Next. I thought it was a steal except I know how much these things cost to make in offshore manufacturing plants so my excitement was short-lived.

My laptop battery just died (it won't charge anymore). I thought I could get a few more years out of this laptop but it seems every few months it's something or another. I've had to replace the charger and the hard-drive (had some major disk fault). I never really liked laptops as I only needed to use the computer at home. So this time I decided to go back to buying a big gigantic desktop that I can actually replace/upgrade parts for cheap. Got me a Dell XPS 420 with 22" screen, blu ray player, and the usual works. I hope this one lasts longer. I can't believe how back in university, I had one computer for 4 years without needing/wanting to upgrade hardware parts until the end of my 4 years. Granted I paid through my nose for getting the best and latest specs back then but now I have the suspicious that computer makers make things cheaper and that last less longer nowadays hence forcing you buy more often.

Is it just me or are there some major world conspiracies going on now to cause a global depression. Oil and gas prices go up but still energy providers are posting big profits. Food shortages are abound, but still vendors are making money. House prices falling, but nobody's getting mortgages. Credit crunch but financial industry bonuses still in the millions? What the hell is the world coming to? And who's responsible? Will there be a reaction to this that will bring those responsible down? Or did we just become too accustomed to thinking that all this won't affect us ? Or is it that we've been led to believe we have no control over any of this?

Watched these animation movies--Vexille, Appleseed adn Appleseed Ex-machina--lately. They give you something to think about as technology advances to the point where we evolve to become something new that's a mix between organic and cybernetic and genetically engineered. The instints people have and the politics that result from it are still primal. Will there ever be a time when we won't have wars and famine and poverty?

As I was walking to work and listening to some old baul song, I had this realization that music/song has a lot in common with DNA and RNA. By nature, all of them have the property of self replication which is the essential trait necessary for their survival. Whereas DNA/RNA get their patterns replicated by the raw materials around them in living bodies or otherwise, music/song is replicated by people with the intent of spreading them to greater audiences. Then there is the property of mutation. Although music and song might have sheets and lyrics, each performer inevitably performs it a little differently from his/her predecessors and that gives it a character that is a both the music and the performer. The implication here is that music passes itself along through time in the same way that dna/rna do--evolution and natural selection. Depending on how sticky a particular performance of a song or music is, it is remembered and listened to continuously by people and then there comes a time when even though the original writer/singer of the song may not be around, the song is still surviving. Take the baul song I was referring to earlier? Despite the mangling of the music through synthesizers and remixes the words and the melody have survived in some form and this can be attributed to how sticky the words and the melody are. I believe that the remixes are only agents of replication although many may disagree with me.

Forgot... Reading The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins. Didn't know about this guy until all the hoopla with "The God Delusion". I like his writing as it is as logical as it is poetic. Reminds me of papers we had to write in Theory of Knowledge classes for IB. The reason I like these two books is that it clears up many misconceptions people have about evolution. A lot of evolution naysayers' arguments need not even be made if they had a better understanding of the mechanisms behind evolution and natural selection instead of automatically responding with "how can it possibly be that such complicated things can arise out of random processes". To be honest, even though I agreed with evolution, it didn't click as it did recently reading the aforementioned two books. Maybe I should read some more.

The other thing I liked was that there are a lot of analogies from Computer Science and Software Engineering in The Blind Watchmaker. Made me smile...

Feeling restless again. I guess people write when that happens. I just realized that I haven't written in a very long time. I read livejournal entries from time to time but even that that has lessened in frequency. Perhaps, I should declutter it and get rid of those who I have no interest in keeping up-to-date about. I hate Facebook with a passion but it seems to be about the only thing that'll soothe my nostalgic angst. What is it that's happening? Am I becoming a more private person than I was? Am I being apathetic? I'm definitely missing past times and people but... what is this angst I'm feeling.

Watched Batman The Dark Knight yesterday. I dozed off a few times so that should say something. Maybe it'll be better when I go to the theatre and watch it. Despite the hype, I have not been moved. What was I expecting in this one? Batman Begins had so much in it that I expected would be in this one. I expected some beginnings, some transformations (well, more than just the emergence of Two Face). What about Joker's becoming the way he is? Is he a tragic character? Or just the regular shallow maniacal villain? What was so great about Heath Ledger's acting here? Somebody tell me. Just because the guy died, his performance is being seen in an overhyped light? Give me a break.

Moving houses this weekend. Not a favorite time whenever I have to do it but I'm doing it for the best. The new place has an extra room for guests/office and lots of space in the lounge. And if we're lucky, we can complete the whole move during the weekend.

Work's moving slowly as well. It feels like a lumbering step for each build/debug step I take. Ah well...

This is a test article.

Sarwar Bhuiyan

After having developed several JSR 168 Portlets that were AJAX enabled, I thought it would be beneficial to look for a combination of tools and frameworks that would minimize the numerous problems that crop up in developing dynamic portlets. The benefit of using AJAX in portlets is obvious in that it allows for the ability to develop highly interactive portlets that do not require the entire page to be refresed for each update. Portal pages can get quite heavy with portlets and each page load (even with some form of caching in the backend) is wasteful when all that needs to be updated is the individual portlet.

The two main problems that I have faced in portlet development with AJAX were:

1. Finding a simple and powerful framework for AJAX to integrate javascript with backend java code.
2. Finding the best way to keep UI code cleanly separated from logic in javascript/java.

The first problem was really a matter of finding a solution to the mismatch Java code and then code required to integrate the client side using XMLHttp or XMLHttpRequest. Luckily, DWR has been in existence for a while and provides a neat solution for exposing backend Java methods as Javascript functions. A DWRServlet has to be bundled with the application that acts as the gateway between javascript and the POJOs on the server by way of configurations in a dwr.xml file or in the spring application context file. The DWRServlet produces the right javascript proxies so that client-side javascript can invoke methods using the same class and method names.
For example, if I have a method in the backend called AjaxHelper.callMethod() in java, an AjaxHelper.callMethod() function can be invoked in javascript with the latest parameter in the function being a javascript callback function to update the UI. Out of the box, different java objects are automatically converted to javascript objects. These include Date, JavaBeans, Lists, etc. Should any custom objects need to be converted, mechanisms exist to define those. As well, Java Exceptions can be converted and handled appropriately on the client side. One thing to note here is that the since the DWRServlet is bundled with the portlet, the portal framework has to allow for resources within the portlet war to be accessed under the /dwr subcontext. There may be a servlet filter that disallows this and as such a custom servlet filter might be required that allows access to this /dwr subcontext.

Now, the second part of any AJAX interactions involves updating the UI with something interesting. Traditionally this is done by manipulating the html elements directly from javascript. While this works for simple use cases such as updating a field or displaying a bit of text, it can get tricky in situations where more complex UI are being rendered such as data grids or dynamically updated forms. I had one portlet that had many views arranged as in a typical wizard in windows and the requirements were to be able to flip between them quickly. Although this is all doable just with javascript, it is rather painful to maintain, not to mention error-prone. A much better approach would be to have html snippets ready that could be updated and slipped in where appropriate. This also has drawbacks in that the data inside the html snippets (the actual values of form elements or data grids) have to be inserted and this again involves recreating the html string in javascript.


In order to solve this problem, I thought there might perhaps be a framework that allowed UI code to be represented just like in JSP or JSTL with an appropriate mechanism to inject the data at runtime and update the view. In my search I came across Trimpath Javascript Templates (JST) that does just that. It consists of functions that can take in templates and inject a javascript object called data into it. An example of this is as follows:

<table> {for flight in flights} <tr> <td>${flight.number}</td> </tr> {/for} </table>

The example above is rather simple in that it is displaying a table with one column outputting all the flight numbers in the flights list. The way to do this is to add our relevant model objects in a javascript object called data and process the template. The resulting HTML can then be inserted into the innerHTML of any div or other html element as appropriate.

The templates can be any strings and can be stored anywhere. The Trimpath people recommend that they be stored in the page inside hidden textarea elements for quick access. However, for portlet that will have many views and we do not want to load all this html on the initial load, we can store these templates in template files in the backend. The trick is to use DWR to retrieve these view templates and process them as required. An additional optimization that can be done here is to keep view templates cached in a javascript object for reuse.

As I've discussed above, these two frameworks can make for a powerful combination when developing highly interactive AJAX portlets that require clean and easy maintenance of UI and logic.

They can be found at:
DWR (link)
Trimpath JST(link)

It's Eid today in the UK apparently. I say apparently because I was under the assumption that it'd be on Saturday and only noticed all these people coming out from prayer on the way to work. Ah well, Eid Mubarak folks!

I normally associated Eid days with sunny weather and festive moods and the aroma of sweets and oily food around the house. It feels a little strange not having that around here now. Although I wouldn't call myself fish out of water in London, I would admit that not having the usual family and friends around can engender that sort of feeling once in a while. The skies are rather dull today and it would have been perfect for a duvet day (except we don't get those where I work). I'd have thought there'd be at least a few areas in London where they'd have Eid related festivities going on but things seem to be quiet on the streets near my place. Apparently, there's some festival called Eid in the Square on the 20th at Trafalgar Square where they have a few things planned including songs, poetry, a bazaar, etc. It's been a while since I've been to one of those. Actually, I quite miss the Carnival day we'd have at our school in Japan. I wonder if they have any here.

And so my time has come to embark on a journey with another ... I cannot say that any amount of preparation would be enough for what lies ahead but for me the uncertainty does not bother me in the least. I had not really prepared. As with challenges and exams of before, I decided to face it as I was ... And although everybody around me asks after my thoughts and feelings at this supposed-to-be momentous occasion, all I can say is I'm ready to face it and that my mind is a blank... Perhaps that is my own doing as I tend to do that as a natural reaction to big things... Where there is no mind, it is easier to adjust to the situation, as water does to its container... And so I am flowing through different waters I've only heard of before and yet I swim through it as though it were second nature. I only hope that the transition is as smooth for my other half. Torrents will appear on the way but I can see them miles away... and with a deep breath I take my first step towards our union.

I think the fates decided at the beginning of the time to taunt a group of people with luck once in a while and then just throwing spitballs at them for the times in between. Today, I walked out my door without my keys and only just realized at the click of the yale lock. Not to worry, I thought, I'm just going to call the manager of the flat and pick up the keys in the evening. Upon missing his cell a few times I called the office and it got forwarded to the landlord's house who reminded me, and not too politely I might add, that David goes away every weekend around noon on Thursdays. That's nice. So I waited for him to say but I'd be happy to come by to the office if and give you keys if you like. Instead he told me "Well what would I do if I left my keys inside? You've got to call a locksmith and it won't come cheap I can tell you that". Turns out, it wasn't. 75 pounds plus VAP and all the guy did was slip this big sheet of plastic between the door and the doorframe. It's called a "slam shot" apparently. I did think of using my credit card but it wasn't bendy enough. I wish I could get a certificate in locksmithery (or whatever the hell it's called). Now my bank balance is at an all time low. It's like I'm going on the fumes now... This always has to happen to me.

The day's dragging on and I have no will to stay and do anything productive. It's raining lightly outside and the cool air's making me sleepy.

It almost reminds me of Bangladesh during the rainy season only it's less intense. I remember how much of a struggle it would be in Bangladesh at this time of year to get home. The rickshaw hoods would provide little protection against the downpours other than keeping you from being washed away. And even then, in some cases that didn't help as the water levels rose to knee levels and stopped all forms of transportation on the streets. It was truly a struggle against the elements. I remember staying in on those dark days and having hot khichuri. The electricity would go frequently and there wouldn't be much to do other than sleep it off. It wouldn't be half bad except for when it was really humid and you could feel everything sticking to your skin. It almost seems like eons and a world apart now. London, dreary as it is when it's grey cannot hold up to how much of a violent place Bangladesh was at different times.

I wonder how the people in Bangladesh are faring now what with all the changes happening under the caretaker government. Are they happy for a change, temporary though it might be? Or are they slowly awakening to the real mechanisms behind the shroud.

I found something neat a few months ago but forgot to post about it.

Go to www.nytimes.com and go to any article.

Highlight any word in the article and double click it.

See what happens.

:) Enjoy

This is a post for all web developers who're on my friends list or passing by my journal.

So I've been playing with Ajax related technologies for a little over a year now and there seems to be so many ways of doing things that it's become this mish mash of things good and crap. The way I like to use Ajax is making use of XmlHttpRequest or the ajax framework of choice to make the calls to the server end, get the appropriate data (or process it if need be on the server end) and then doing some UI rendering on the client end after that. Now, the natural way to do this of course is in a javascript callback function where you'd start modifying elements in your page. Question is, how do you do that? I've come across three (well, I had one sort of literally shoved down my throat that left a bad after taste) and I'll write them out.

1. Get back the response object, and then insert the data appropriately by making the xml dom object methods.

2. Get back the response object, and then create a whole bunch of html in a string and pass that into the innerHTML of some div element. This is still acceptable for me where I might have to consider the implications of browser-specific issues with dom method usage. The classic one I've found is when I have to write setAttribute("class", something) AND setAttribute("className", something) for it to work on IE and Firefox. If I just wrote a string and passed it to innerHTML, I can just write the html in it that would be more browser friendly than the dom methods.

3. Get back the response object which itself has presentation logic that the client just pass to innerHTML of a UI element. Am I being snobbish or elitist to think that this is stupidness? Or maybe it's the object oriented programmer in me squirming to still maintain elements of object oriented programming in a programming domain where you have to use a whole bunch of hacks to do anything that resembles good coding practices (which then nullifies the effort to bring about some order to the way we integrate html with back end systems). It's not that I'm just being a purist in not wanting to receive presentation content directly from a server call that was meant to be a search or an action. It's just that this approach seems to make programming more like taking a whole bunch of darts and flinging them at a dartboard and hoping that somehow they all stick in the right order in the right place. Debugging any problems becomes a nightmare. Not only that, whoever's going to come maintain this code after you leave is going to curse you for being an insensitive git.

So here's my question to all you web developers out there. What's your take on all of this? I think web developments is one arena where programmers with various different backgrounds mingle and can share ideas. I'd like to hear your arguments to sway me to the third option above. (or hear validating arguments to let me know that I'm not insane).

Frustration's setting in as I'm spending more time dealing with stupid oddities like classloader issues with commons-logging than actually doing any of work that I have been assigned. Luckily, the real work didn't take me that long. I just can't get bloody DWR to work where commons logging has already been loaded and used by something else.

Moved into the new flat about two weeks ago and still my stuff is scattered all around the house in various states of unpacking. The kitchen is filling up with utensils and food finally cooking khichuri without the wooden spoon ended up in a minor disaster. Gotta get that this weekend. Got the internet and phone line installed. Now waiting for Sky. Well, I have to get a TV before that. There's a mini tv in the house left by the previous tenants but I'm not sure that works.

I met my neighbors immediately next door (over the fence in my backyard) and they seem to be a very jolly couple. I can't wait till I'm one of a couple. This morning I ran into the lady living in the flat upstairs. She was in a hurry to work but she promised to come knock and introduce herself properly in the evening.

All in all, things are moving along even if it's not smooth a hundred percent of the time.

Something that I'm thinking. I keep getting all these calls and recruiters about software developer positions in London for major companies and it's just skyrocketed after I joined the current place and updated my resume. Trouble is, the current place went to great lengths securing a 5-year work permit for me so it wouldn't be prudent to just leave like that. I'll give it a year or so and see what I can do. I'm thinking I might apply for HSMP and then I won't have the problems with transferring work permits every time I want to work for somebody else.

:D I'm excited.

As agnostic as I am of religion and godly figures throwing dice with our fates, I do submit to the universe unfolding itself in the most wonderful of ways in my life.

Ever since I left Egypt and the friends that I'd grown up with for the better part of a decade, I felt like I was missing a part of me as I traveled throughout the world. My soul yearned to call out to my kindred brothers and sisters and reunite with them one day. And although age caught up with my mind, it defeated not my mind and its desire to find what I consider to be the lost treasure of childhood friendship. Since the advent of Internet use in my house, I searched for those names of old in various places... ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, Names Database, Google, heck even Hi5. I had very little luck and for a while had allowed the quest to be on hold. I found 3 people over the years managed to keep touch with them once in a blue moon.

Just last week however, for some bizarre reason I felt compelled to search out traces of my old school in Egypt. Upon doing that, I found a rather crudely built website upon which were images of nostalgic places. And that led me to test my luck once more. I googled a friend's first name Rathanand. He was one of my best friends from the third grade. After about the third hop, I landed on the a profile page on the Thai Foreign ministry with his picture on it. The hair length was different but there was no mistake the resemblance was uncanny. As luck would have it, his email address was there and I emailed him. He did not reply and I'd given up hope that the email address was a dead one. After three days however, my google main notification popped in front of my eyes with a hailing beacon of good news. It was him and he could not contain his excitement that it was me. He asked what I was doing, if I had gotten married, if I could send him pictures, and to add him on msn ASAP so that we could catch up.

And they say that lightning does not strike twice in the same place. Well I tell you my friends, it does and it has. I've taken this week off as holiday and was sitting at home catching up with different people as they came online. Spoke to Rathanand in Saudi a bit and talked to another one of my childhood friends Rahim in Pakistan for another 3 hours. Just after, perhaps feeling my luck was good, I decided to search the name Yaso on facebook. I could not remember her last name for the life of me but I did remember her one of my earliest female friends from Pakistan International School in Cairo. The search brought back a few many results and I skipped all of those that didn't have Yaso as the first name. When I was about to give up, I noticed one of the pictures was of a girl with an extremely charming smile and who looked our age. As she was not on my list I could not see her details to verify anything. However, something compelled me to email her and ask whether she was indeed the Yaso who'd been to PISC because I was in search of a classmate and friend by that name. Within another 3 hours, my google mail notification once again poppped up with the first few excited lines of her message screaming "OH MY GOD Is it really you?!" at me. My heart leaped and I wanted to reply right away. I replied and asked her if she had MSN. After a few frantic messages shuttled between the both of us, we managed to get on MSN. I then found out she's in the UK!! Called her right away and we talked and laughed till our throats hurt and tears ran down our eyes...

And agnostic though I am, I am thankful to the universe for unfolding... unfolding to me the location of that treasure that is childhood friendship.