No posts for a long time and future direction

Ahola! After a long time, I am writing a post in this blog. This was more about life musing come a quasi tech blog.
I have something to discuss on the tech aspect of my life. I am 12+ year veteran of the software/programming/technology/computing industry. I like coding and have always kept it as one of my main activities in work life. I am good at stratey and project management and what not but I think coding is something that I am never going to give up on.
Coding world changes drastically fast. From one version to another in a single programming language there are already so many new features and deprecation of so many existing features but change is always for the better most of the time - at least in the tech world. For personal projects though one can use the old tech too.
So anyway the point of this blog is to rant about the people in the tech industry. At the heart of any human endeavour, be it science or its applications, technology or coding or IT or whatever one does, it all boils down to humans. I guess I get indignant when people who work in the IT industry adopt an approach of "No coding" and lets buy a product instead. Especially with vendors such as Oracle where the products are too rigid and non-customizable and people - mostly the salesmen from oracle and their subsequent pushers that you will see in enterprise software world, have this view that somehow everything should be aggressively oracle even at the expense of coding or human programmers. There is talk of "Oracle properties" inside the enterprise. If Oracle is so protective of their property, may be they should just keep it with themselves in their own company. I am a big fan of open source, Java and many such softwares. And kinds growing up in the Linux, anti-microsoft world I am not at all enamoured by the pay money software types such as oracle or msft. Dont get me wrong, maybe they are more preferable compared to other dull softwares stack out there such SAP. But I think software should be free and developers should be hired in more numbers to write good code. Only then after some times of evolving will the industry have what it takes to go to the next level. Over the last 10 years, so many so many, countless, languages and frameworks and platforms have come and gone. Many from google or apple or facebook or whatever is the next big one and each of them is launched with so much fanfare as if they will conquer this world. However that has never ever happened. For any eco system to prosper, it is better to have an open minded open source approach. For all the talk about Apple being closed, they are opening up their Swift language to general public. Who would have thought MSFT doing major parts of their language in open source domain. Of course none of them are really kicking as a Linux flavors or the Python/Perl/Java etc. frameworks of the IT world.
My grouse is there are people up there in the management and IT strategists and in decision making process in various organization who are very indoctrinated and boxed thinking who try to force a solution to a problem rather than let the solution emerge organically for a given problem and then discuss each solution based on merit and long term feasibility.

More Java and Javascript content

This blog will have more Java/Html5/Javascript contents in it .. also included will be some CSS and other web applications technology stack. Often time, and in a way it is good, to see various programmers learn and unlearn various concepts. This helps while you switch between Flex and Java and Javascript and then databases and application servers with relative ease. It is important to be a versatile coder and then finding a niche in specific technical area such as Selenium automation or Java multi threading or Javascript - Angular JS and so on. Not only as a coder, just like an actor, you keep yourself refreshed and simulated while facing new challenges, you would be able to switch contexts and dwelve deeper into various technologies at will. Many of these concepts, one tends to do but over time tend to forget since we do not use each and every API and objects on a daily basis. For instance, multithreading or IO are used typically in the start of your career and once you move up from there you deal with higher abstraction classes. So it is kind of a bummer when in subsequent interviews they keep asking what is the exact method name which does an interrupt while you write buffered data into a file.Oh well, there needs to be some questions that the interviewer and interviewee are going to discuss so I guess there is no avoiding such things. Hence the creation of this blog so that I can simply mindlessly document everything on the fly.
Which also means there is going to be a lot of spelling issues and formatting. But you will get the general gist of what I am trying to say and hopefully find something that I have written that you could use in your own projects too.

Thanks for visiting again!

favorite characters

heman + skeleton etc. thats my fav. heman bank > piggy bank.
spider man but it was ruined by the movies ..
batman .. yeah its good ..
flash - new better presentation .. now its good
captain america. no.
fury and all that. no.
hulk. no
arrow.no.
felicity and all that.no.
iron man. yes..
super man. outgrown that one.

most of the above i have out grown, dont care much + has been done to death by various interpretations .. and are always super powers doing some shit on other super powers .. usual good over evil and then tehre is faulty characters .. overall too much confusions and boring ..they are ok types .. but not always ..

these more than the above ficational ones.

star trek - yes .. sulu, kirk, scott, dr, klingon, spock, vulcan.
no data, nothing other ToS, no new series, only the old ones,

star wars - yes - jabba, r2d2, han solo - eh, humans - eh, darth vader - ok, goodh goodh guy,

so any symbol .. based on the above is not the cartoon characters .. no star wars too for now ..

so it is jut star trek ...so it essentially spock vs vulcan .. now spock is a vulcan and logically speaking there are better vulcans than spock who has been contaminated .. so go to better vulcan.

Disable print option in flexpaper 4.1

Recently I have been working with Flexpaper as a way to display pdf document in the AIR application / Flash Web application. This is a neat library with lots of good features, control on whether to enable print or copy or search features and so on.

The flex SDK we used is 4.1. Flexpaper released a version for Flex SDK 4.1 which was available for download at Google Code before they upgraded it to Flex 4.6 version. Not many code can make a quick jump from 4.1 to 4.5 or 4.6 SDK. They do have a separate release for SDK 3.5

So, when they released the version 4.1 for Flexpaper, they had disabled printEnabled property which allows the applicatoon to control the printing property. We downloaded the commercial version and had the same issue there.

The following is a fix that I had put up to circumvent this issue:


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<flexpaper:FlexPaperViewer xmlns:fx="http://ns.adobe.com/mxml/2009"
                           xmlns:s="library://ns.adobe.com/flex/spark" creationComplete="flexpaperviewer1_creationCompleteHandler(event)"
                           xmlns:mx="library://ns.adobe.com/flex/mx" xmlns:flexpaper="com.devaldi.controls.flexpaper.*" width="400" height="300">
    <fx:Declarations>
        <!-- Place non-visual elements (e.g., services, value objects) here -->
       
    </fx:Declarations>
    <fx:Script>
        <![CDATA[
            import mx.containers.Panel;
            import mx.controls.Alert;
            import mx.events.FlexEvent;

            private var customContextMenu:ContextMenu;
            override public function searchText(text:String):void {
                Alert.show("Not allowed to Search", "", 0,this);
            }
            override public function printPaper(e:Event):void {
                Alert.show("Not allowed to Print", "", 0,this);
                e.stopImmediatePropagation();
                e.stopPropagation();
            }
           
            protected function flexpaperviewer1_creationCompleteHandler(event:FlexEvent):void
            {
                this.customContextMenu = new ContextMenu();
                this.contextMenu = customContextMenu;
            }
           
        ]]>
    </fx:Script>
</flexpaper:FlexPaperViewer>

I was able to catch the print and search control and effectively stop the flow before it processes further and allows the printing of the document.
The context menu changes further disabled another way to copy or print the document.

This is not fool proof and any document on the web or application level can be easily taken screen print but that is out of the scope for this problem. The main aim here was to not allow the users to print or copy whole pdf documents.

Update: The latest release seems to have streamlined many of these features and is performing slightly better than earlier releases. However, the print option that is outlined here still is a useful function to have for printing pdfs using FlexPaperViewer.

why sevpuri?

well sevpuri is an indian dish - with pota/tomatoes and lots of spices and sev(noodles) etc put in a spherical shaped puri - which is made out of flour - it is damn tasty and i like this alongwith bhelpuri .. in essence life is like that - a little bit of this and little bit of that .. one cant really enjoy life without having a variety of it all .. otherwise life wud become a simple blank html - u need to fill some stuff in it and other times sleep a lot...
i also thought about my other fav dishes like idli or vada or addai or more foods which make into the dinner or lunch menu rather than snacks ... but thought sevpuri and co. make a better representation of the extreme junk variety...anyways whats in a name?

stock trading brokers

I did some research about the available stock brokers around fall of 2007. Here i am blogging some info; not too much well laid out but you will nevertheless get the import. If you yahoo search best online stock brokers or top brokerages etc. you pretty much get a good list of stock brokers out there. I have not yet started on options and am primarily interested in being a long term investor. The sites that i went thru during this phase was kiplinger, money and general google search for existing frustrated customers. This you can get by keying "Ameritrade sucks" and you see the plethora of results out there. Nevertheless, I ended up with them. So what are the criteria chosen for selecting brokers? Well obviously cost is one thing in mind. When i started considering other factors like quality of execution and research, I figured out that execution-wise most of the transactions are computerised and being a software guy myself know that there does not exist much difference between this factor. So say you spot citi shares at 30$ and Zecco will execute it in the same nano second as say a Goldman sachs or Merrill Lynch brokerage service software. Research wise, I think Fidelity or TRowe Price are pretty solid. Anways, I am not going to listen too much to any analyst either. Couple of months ago, no analyst worth the salt recommended a sell on citi and then the subprime thing happened. And now the same intelligent "analyst" who read the news from the same source as you did, tells you to sell it. Thats a clean way for banks and brokerages to make money. Anyways, being a long term investor, I would be probably holding it for a good number of years. The main emphasis I had was on the cost factor since I already had retirement accounts with Fidelity and TRP, Vanguard who give me good quality advise about stocks. I also looked at non online discount brokerage firms like mbtrade which run on custom software.
All most all firms charge annual fees if the account is IRA. Otherwise they charge closing fees.Scottrade and firstrade dont. The broker name, commision, ira fees, general review available in that order as follows:
Scottrade, 7, 0, good one
ameritrade, 10, 75, good one - (website is ok)
bankofamerica, 0(provided you have 25k in savings), 75 - not that good, ratings are pretty bad
fideltity,vanguard,trp-high fees
tradeking-5, 50, so-so to good enuf, i think this is good for non-ira
firstrade-7,0,good enuf, good promotions too but is not scottrade a better brand for the same features and has more users? i did not get what differentiates this two - maybe the trading portal.
zecco-0(really, for the first 10 trades if you have 2.5k which is good enuf), 50, good enuf ratings - some say website not that good - I agree it has a bit too much features. Also instead of having RIA on crappy Microsoft they should be having it in more flexible Java based applications. After all if you are doing things for free you need to have a biz model which factors in these costs. Having said that most of allegations that i found about this site in online blogs turned out to be untrue. For eg. opening account is hard and this and that, I just tried opening with nothing to lose and found that it is pretty good. I am quite conservative but found their way of working appropriately californiac. If these guys play the chips well in the coming future, then we have a good game at hand in the broker space. IMHO, there is no fun without disruptors. I have an account with them which is going good till now. overall the service is also good though being a social networking broker they display ads aka myspace or facebook. also it will be good if you have good knowledge about how to browse thru.
etrade-12.99 and overall ok
izone-5, 50, pretty good, parent is ameritrade, so you have a good backup there. and the big plus here - you can transfer out for FREE if it is from ameritrade to izone. Email them and confirm it and then trade free for 45 days with ameritrade(if they have the promo) and then transfer out after an year to izone. now you have pretty low sell commision(5 instead of 10 bucks). This is what I did. Izone site requires you to be really good user of computer since it has nothing other than buy and sell. which is good since i like plain vanilla website, software and ice cream. no frills, no phone - just buy and live in Dakota quietly.
All the transfer outs are 50 bucks from x to y.
Choice trade- same as izone except the transfer out feature
mbtrade - 1$(100 shares),20, so-so to good, custom software and you can trade from your computer. no need of browser and web based security issues. I like this one and might open an account with this guys in future.

So apart from TD/Izone, I opened up zecco too। Both these accounts are doing fine - broker commission wise. Next in line would be MBtrade and maybe tradeking or scottrade or for that matter anybody new which might come with some good pricing structure.
Ssssarrry that I did not organise the above info properly but could not find the table structure to copy paste from my excel onto this pad. But hey this is blog and am lazy. So mail me if you find anything new that can be added to this post. Thanks!

A comparison of online brokers

Searched kiplinger, cnn money and hosts of other blogs and articles from analysts and experts and finally came with the following and so far the going has been good. Hence thought of sharing the info with all so that you dont waste your time enroute your way to becoming the next well known guy at wall street :)

1. ZECCO - pretty good, first 10 stocks per month are free if you have over 2500 and if you dont, first get that amount before trading :)
2. Izone/Choice trade : at 5 dollars is a steal. Izone of course comes from the house of TD Ameritrade and you can see from their cold customer call guys that they dont like izone because of their low prices but seem to like only ameritrade. anways the big PLUS is you can transfer out for free from Ameritrade to izone for ZILCH.
3. MBTrade: 1$ for 100 shares - what more do you want? custom software instead of website... i think this is definitely a good security measure. For a hacker this is going that extra mile, and if a hacker worth the salt does that he will surely go for millions of bucks not for few thousands that normal people trade with.
4. Tradeking: 5 bucks and pretty good site.

Research - Fidelity -way above the rest.
TRP - free info site ....
Vanguard - no unnecessary information.