Java Pass By Reference or Value and the state of our programming cumminities

I was reading an article by a very frustrated programmer and I have to say I feel the frustration of the author.

The question that irked him was a discussion group posting if java is a pass by value or by reference language.
his posting on the serverside.com

I have to side with the author on the technical aspects of this. Java is indeed pass by value but the outcome of passing an object is indirectly allowing people to see it as pass by reference. In my last few years of working I have come across many such articles that had made me think that most Computer Science Engineers have become mere programmers and dont have end to end understanding of the products they are building.

There were the days back then when an engineer would not be satisfied with just writing a program but to understand how the program gets interpreted by the compiler, then the operating system calls involved that need to be made and then what happens on the driver to eventually print the output on screen.

This thought process has halped us make good choice on design and reducing programmer effort and coding just becomes the last thing that comes to mind.

The days of now are of abstraction :- write one line of code and run a command to build an executable or a package deployable to the Application Server. These abstraction have taken out the deep end to end understanding that engineers needs to have when designing real world applications..

People are more used to using the code completion functionality of IDE's without even reading the documentation. The pressure of producing a working program quickly has led to many engineers become programmers.

I rarely see real engineers anymore and cherish the few real discussions I have with them............................... :-(

Tis a sad but true state of our programming world.


(It seems more likely that a C++ programmer with network programming understands more e2e working of a web-application than a good percentage of web-developers)

Create a kick ass development and reading environment

Almost since a two years now. I have the luxury of having three monitors available to me at work. Being a graphics developer it was essential to have large and beautiful screens and screen space that I could use effectively.


At work I primarily develop web based applications.
This means I often have an application to run, a development environment and a browser or mail client running simultaneously.

I also sometimes was to debug an application or remote into production and watch server logs without interrupting my current development work flow.

I even watched the E3 press conference while developing at work.

I have often struggled to create a similar environment at home due to the following reasons.

• High cost involved in buying a monitor that Rotates to either portrait or landscape mode.
• These "pivot monitors" usually run at around 250$ for 20 inch.
  
• Not enough table space to keep my laptop and tow other monitors on the same desk

After my recent dissection of my Dell e1505, I decided to fix this problem at home. I initially wanted to buy another monitor to partner my existing one. I have an Acer2016W LCD monitor that works fine. After researching a bit I couldn't find any monitor that would pivot for <265$,>

I decided then that I need to use my current monitor and find a way to match it with either an available LCD mount or a compatible spare.


I found one at dell.com that was adequately priced just 45$, I applied a couple of coupons from dell and got another 10$ off. You can find the mount here


I could find similarly priced options at ebay as well.


After ripping the base off my old monitor, it wasnt as straigt forward as i thought, I mounted the NeoFlex mount onto the screen.

Remaining steps involved reconfiguring my desk space and ordering a KVM switch.
I now have two laptops and three desktops all in my room (yea one windows vista, one ubuntu and a power mac G4). I will write about my room in another blog article.


Finally after downloading older ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 Catalyst driver for my Dell e1505, I got the screen rotation or pivot to work.

An now behold I have visual studio configured exactly as per spec my requirements.





There are several advantages of having portrait mode screen.

• I can now see roughly 90 lines of code apart from a solution explorer contains 3 project fully expanded in visual studio
• Reading PDF files beacomes easy as it feels like a page.
• Browsing forums and reading blogs becomes much easier as i can quickly scan most of the page without having to scroll up and down multiple times.
  

Total Cost of the project 45$. Total satisfaction : priceless

How to get a new laptop ...... from the old one for 50$

Continuing on my last post on fixing my old laptop.

I was buying a laptop for a HP pavillion laptop for my friend. I was looking forward to buy myself a laptop once I ordered his.

I found that the industry is moving towards only a two screen resolutions 1366x768 and 1980x1080.
I started looking for a laptop that matched my needs.


To my surprise I found that a laptop that matched my current 3 year old laptop configuration was selling on dell for $600+ taxes + 50 dollars recycling fee in California. That was turning out to $720.

Click here to check it out.



Moreover I was surprised at the screen resolutions they offered, my old dell laptop has resolution of 1440x900 which seems almost perfect 1600xHHHH would be ideal for me. I could not find a laptop that would actually fit my needs


I was using the new hp laptop i just ordred for my friend and the resolution seemed too low at first. 1080p seemed to high on my external monitor, so no hope on a 15 inch laptop screen.

I decided then to see what I could do with my laptop.

If you have read my post many of you might know I have been doing.

Here are a lit of things I needed to make myself happy.

• New system fan
• New battery as my 3 year old battery couldn't keep my laptop running for more than 10 seconds
• A new keyboard as my keyboard was not really soft after 3 years.

I started a search on by ebay desktop application.
you can get it here and I recommend it for all frequent ebay users.

http://desktop.ebay.com/


Anyway here were the three things I found on ebay ....













Total cost of the operation 10 +38 + 5 = 53 dollars.

And also got a 9 cell battery instead of the current 6 cell.


I would encourage every one to look at fixing their old laptop before investing heavily into a new one.

Remember one important information... Almost anything on the laptop can be replaced and even upgraded.

Dell Inspiron E1505 Laptop CPU 100% issues

Around six months ago my laptop started mibehaving so badly that i stopped using it completely.

Symptoms

• After a while of using the laptop, it would show CPU usage at 100%
• Even when there was nothing being run

Today i got time to work on getting my laptop back to a running state.


I initially started suspecting the fan/heatsink issue

I ran Speedfan and noticed the following temperature
You can get Speedfan from here

• On boot the temperature was about 37 C
• After a hour of playing videos it bumped up to 63 C
• After an hour and half it bumped up to 75 C

I finally decided to open the laptop to see if the fan was running at all

Thanks to dell for a great service manual that walked me through the steps
(this wasnt the first time i was opening a laptop but it ain't for a noob)

You can find the service manual for Dell Inspiron E1505/6400 here


After stripping it to bare bones.
I found that the system fan wasn't even moving, noticed that there was dust collected that was stopping the fan from moving.

Used an air duster from fry's to clear the dust out completely.
You can get it here



The motor seems to have got fried on the fan since it was restricted to not move at all.

Now the systems seems to be running fine after replacing the fan with one from an older toshiba laptop..


I couldn't find any help on this and hence wrote one for the community.

Setup Cake PHP ... No Colors or images !!!

It was invetiable that I was going to post something technical on my blog.

I had to setup Cake PHP on my box and although I though I had it setup correctly and the start page showed no errors. Quickly realized that something was wrong.

After realizing that the images and CSS were missing i went on a trail to understand the framework. (Which I should have even before I installed it). Anyways after a long while figured out where the CSS was found a .htaccess file and then the bulb lit that the rewrite module was not correctly enable in LAMP/WAMP/Apache.

I enabled the rewrite module and then simply refreshed the page and then it rendered everything correctly.



This is something that is not clearly mentioned in the documentation for Cake and many developers have faced an issue with this.

I tried google for this but could find the solution.
"No Colors or images on Cake PHP"
and several others but could find none.


I hope to be posting PHP stuff on this blog. Let me know if you guys want something specific to be covered.

An ebook reader that works

This week Amazon announced that the Kindle DX sports a near 10 inch screen.

Me personally have a Sony PRS 505.

I am a geeky person and more often than not I read a lot of tech magazines compared to either a news paper or novels and the like.

PRS has been a pain in this regard the small screen and the click buttons that have been painful to use to zoom and move to the area needed. In this regard the DX scores. I have been able to play with one of these and reading magazines on this has been finally feasible.

It is a little heavy and you can expect your arms to pain while holding it. The easiest mode was to rest it on my lap or table to read. I did have trouble reading in in bed but would still prefer it to anyother reader I have tried before.

The price is around 500$ but the only other alternative is a 13 inch tablet and that is really costly. It seems like a value compared to the amount of money I would save reading PDF's (read as downloaded magazines).

All in all the Kindle DX is on the top of my wish.

Now only if someone would buy me one. ;-)

A critical 6 months for Sony.

Continuing on my previous post.

The next few months, util four weeks of Killzone 2's launch, it is necessary for Sony to reach critical mass. Why is this so important ???

It has be touted as the year of the PS3 but there are several factor's that might actually extend the lead for the 360.( Not the least of which being the price and the looks).


Microsoft has always had really strong holiday sales since launch. It has chosen to invest in more MMO and RPG's than Sony currently. Fable 2 and Last Remnant to name a few. Gears of war is also a huge factor as it has been the poster child for 360 after Halo series.


Sony on the other hand has Little Big Planet and Resistance 2 followed by Motor Storm and .....
Not to forget metal gear solid 4. Truth be told apart from resistance 2 in the action genre nothing else is stellar. It is the genre that drives the hardcore gamers.


The Looks......
If you look at the sales number for the 360 and PS3. The cuter and less glossy 360 can be identified by moms who are planning to buy a console for their kids. This is a majority of the buyers for the holiday season. Not to mention that price also plays a factor in the scenario.

The PS3 with its more sexy appeal and looks wouldnt neccessarily be something that can be identified by moms as something appropriate to buy for kids. The Ps3 looks more or a menacing machine than the 360.

No matter how many cute pictures of the sackboy you put up for marketing the sheer looks of the PS3 bypass the cuteness of Sackboy for a few buyers.


My call for the holiday season.

Xbox will lead the PS3 in sales by about 340 thousand starting october.

The numbers game Sony, Microsoft and Wii

It has been a really tough couple of years for Sony Entertainment and particularly Sony's gaming division. A lot has been said about Sony's wrong strategy, what actually is the cause for concern.....

Being an Sony loyal myself and having spent 3 days and four nights in a store to buy the PS3 at launch...
It really pains to see that a product so great did not catch on as expected.

Many would say that Sony is doing well outside the US.....
Firstly we must acknowledge that it is doing well in Europe

Since I do consider Wii catering to a younger and older generation compared to the PS3 and 360's targeted audience, I would not consider that as competition from a serious gamers perspective.

But that doesn't hold when we are comparing this from a business perspective...

EUROPE -------------------------------------------------------------------------
VGChartz comparing the three consoles in Europe starting from Wii's global launch

Analysis of Europe's Number's :
Despite Sony starting really really late.
I was march 2007 that it launched compared to Wii December 2006 launch and XBOX360 launch way back in November 2005.
Despite having a late start Sony actually beat XBOX 360 as of this day in Europe

PS3 sold 6.4 Million consoles
XBOX 360 sold 6.0 million consoles

JAPAN --------------------------------------------------------------------------
VGChartz comparing the three consoles in Japan starting from Wii's global launch
Analysis of Japan's Number's:
Sony's sales have been mediocre here than what I would expect.
Microsoft lack of brand and awareness and regional attachment towards Sony lets it maintain its numbers well ahead of Microsoft.

PS3 sold 2.4 million consoles
360 sold 0.75 million consoles
Wii sold 6.8 million consoles

AMERICA -----------------------------------------------------------------------
VGChartz comparing the three consoles in Japan starting from Wii's global launch
Analysis of America's Number's:
Sony's sales have been less than mediocre. It is a real cause for worry.
Microsoft's great head start and continuing the momentum of the original XBOX gave it a great start.
Many would say that Microsoft has been ahead by a year and that it is unfair to compare the total numbers...
Microsoft sold 4.3 million consoles more than ps3 before Sony started shipping adequate consoles in Feb 2007.

PS3 sold 6.6 million consoles
360 sold 12 million consoles
Wii sold 14 million consoles

Comparing the numbers from Feb 2007
Microsoft maintained a steady lead until the holiday season came thru and the lead bumped by a million and a half....




WorldWide ----------------------------------------------------------------------
VGChartz comparing the three consoles Worldwide starting from Wii's global launch
PS3 sold 16 million consoles
360 sold 21 million consoles
Wii sold 33 million consoles


Sony has sold almost the same number of consoles as 360 in the time frame from its launch despite microsoft head start and a growing fanbase in 2006.
It is only a matter of time that Ps3 will overtake 360 in worlwide sales.

Does this mean its all good for Sony vs Microsoft.....
There will further analysis of the industry in future posts.. so keep reading

Opening with a bang

This being my first personal blog post an obvious way to start is to talk about myself.

But instead I'd like to talk about what i do.

An avid gamer myself. I spent a lot of my time on reading gaming news, following gaming trends and trying to understand what the future has instore for us...

It's like something inside drives me toward games and being able to play, win, lose and learn and try to get better all the time. It give me a chance to live out different scenario's whenever i want.

Although i have a general passion for games and the game industry, How well do i play games... you ask ???
Well not as well as well some of the people i know... Then again we all have different interests.....

Im not a fan of strategy or MMO's
In fact, i have never ever played a strategy or an mmo.

I do play the action/adventure genre but racing is my zone.
I have a thing for cars and speed.


Here is a pic from my score in Gran Turismo 5 Prologue Spec III on the PS3.
Ranked 55 in my Ferarri F430.

The best rank i could get so far in on the same track with my Acura Integra is 26th.




What you can expect further postins is a view of my worlds and some tech articles you.


Oh did I mention that I am software engineer.