YSR's death becomes major Twitter topic

Andhra Pradesh (India) Chief Minister Dr. Y S R Rajashekhar Reddy's unfortunate death in a chopper crash on 3rd September reached up to 3rd rank on the Trending Topics on Twitter for a while before getting back to 4th where it stayed for long.


I would hesitate to attribute this spurt to swelling number of Twitter users in India because there are lot of Telugu people in US as well.

Reliance Energy allies with Google

Reliance Energy is the only Indian company among select few in the world, which have been announced as first allies for Google's PowerMeter project. (source: Engadget)

PowerMeter will help you monitor your power consumption on your home PC. I don't know if they would ship Itron's meters here in India also or any other local manufacturer (Reliance's existing vendor most probably) will be given license to use Google's software.

Whatever happens, this is a news worth watching.

java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Malformed \uxxxx encoding

I was getting this exception during build while running ant. Googling didn't help much and I was flummoxed because the same code was running fine till now.

My code reads a text file and does some operations on the basis of values read. It was only when I saw the text files I understood the error. I had copied the text in wordpad and saved it as .txt file. Wordpad had put lot of formatting information before and after the content. Also there was "\par" after every line, which was giving this error.

So moral of the story: if you get this exception check your properties file (or any other file that your code might be reading.)

Exporting Hyperion Planning artifacts using Shared Services

If you have made a Hyperion Planning application you can migrate the definition of any of the artifacts (dimensions, rules, variables, composite forms) you may have created.

Open the application from the applications' list. This lists all the major categories of artifacts. Click on 'Global Artifacts'. This shows the artifacts I mentioned above and which are of interest to us.

Each of the artifacts further act as subcategories, e.g. under Common Dimensions we have Attribute Dimensions and Standard Dimensions. 'Composite Forms' lists the forms according to their folders.

You can select all the artifacts you want to 'migrate' and click on 'Define Migration button. I selected the Composite Forms.
A popup will ask you if you want to include dependent dimensions. I checked the checkbox and all the dimensions which were used in those composite forms were also migrated. If you don't want the dimensions, don't select it.

Next screen asks you if you want to migrate the artifact to some other application or save the artifact definition in form of XML. I chose to save the file and gave 'exim' as the destination directory. The migrated XMLs were saved in : C:\Hyperion\common\import_export\admin@Native Directory\exim\resource\Global Artifacts

Final screen shows you migration summary. Click on Execute Migration button to start migration. A popup shows you button to launch Migration Status Report.

If the status is active, click on refresh button to get the latest status. If it is success, your migration has succeeded.

Isn't it too simple!

Maintaining session when using DWR

DWR (Direct Web Remoting) provides an amazingly convenient approach to AJAX and the best thing is that it is so easy to implement.

When I was using DWR, I got a little confused about maintaining session, since most of the examples available used POJO/bean to implement java code which was then sent back to javascript.

In my application, an arraylist (formList) was maintained in session. I had to use DWR to show the details about this arraylist on the JSP.

In the java class being used by DWR, I needed to pass the session from calling JSP. DWR gives this in a surprisingly easy way!

JSP snippet:
<button onclick="getProperties(id);">Click! </button>

In the javascript:

function getProperties(id) {
DwrUtility.getDetails(paneId, function(data) {
dwr.util.setValues(data);
}); }

In the Java class:

public String getDetails(String menuId, HttpSession session){
int paneId=Integer.parseInt(menuId);
ArrayList formList=(ArrayList)session.getAttribute("FormsList");
String paneDetails = "Number of forms: "+formList.size();
return paneDetails;
}

Did you notice that we did not pass session parameter from getProperties() function in javascript, but we used that in getDetails() method in java class. This is the magic that DWR does here. If you mention HttpSession as one of the parameters, DWR automatically passes the session from calling JSP to the class.

See I said, that is so simple!

Snipping Tool in Vista

I came across this very nifty utility in Windows Vista today (darn, I own this system since past 1 year!) called 'Snipping Tool' which very nearly renders Print Screen key useless!

What do you do when you have to take a snapshot of any thing on your screen? Do 'Print Screen' and paste the image in the file (like Word or Powerpoint) or in Paint/Photoshop to save the image after doing some editing (mostly cropping) or adding some text.

When you run Snipping Tool, you are asked to select the area on screen whose snapshot you want to take. This takes care of your cropping needs and as soon as you make selection, you can do the basic operations like adding text or highlighting on the saved selection. You can now save/email the image. Done!

It's so convenient, I can't believe I didn't use it till now.This snapshot was taken by Print Screen. The Snipping Tool was used to select the area enclosed by red border from HP website.

Google makes Microsoft look God! Thanks to Chrome.

"The New York Times reports that Microsoft's new Internet browser includes a search box in the upper-right corner that is typically set up to send users to Microsoft's MSN search service. Google contends that this puts Microsoft in a position to unfairly grab Web traffic and advertising dollars from its competitors."

This was what Google was shouting from rooftops when IE7 was launched. And they conveniently made the world forget that Apple's Safari and Mozilla Firefox always had Google as their default search engine. But it seems that someone is celebrating 'Make Microsoft Look God Day' and to commemorate this, they launched a browser!

Unlike IE, FF or Safari you don't have a separate browser in-built search box in Chrome. To search for anything you simply need to type search term in address bar and press enter. This may sound very cool but you can do this in any of above mentioned browsers too! For IE by default this is MSN/Live Search and for FF it is Google. (Try it now, in another tab. Not this one!). And obviously you can reset the defaults.

By removing the search box from Chrome, Google has ensured that nobody is going to bother with changing the search engine. Currently I have many search engines in my search box (see image below) and
I use them as and when needed. So when I want to search a YouTube video I choose YouTube Video Search. Or IMDB when I want to find some movie. Or Yahoo India search when I want a portal like view for information.

But now all that is over. Chrome still gives you option of changing default search (Go to Options->Default search) but it has been made so complicated that nobody will bother to. I am not going to set IMDB/Youtube as default even if I want to search for movie/video. I WILL have to do it on Google!

How convenient isn't it! The instant media blitzkrieg that Google will get is sure to translate in millions of downloads.


I can see Wallstreet smiling already!