Are you aware of any date in history when nothing, absolutely nothing happened, literally? Well I was not aware of it and the answer unexpectedly came from Unix. On the Unix prompt if you do a 'cal 9 1752' you get the following calendar.

The missing days owe it to the Gregorian Reformation when the King [...]

There has been a lot of buzz around Antenna, an Ant add-on for J2ME applications. Why! Can’t I use Ant for this? You very well can, but Antenna elevates many Ant tasks that are peculiar to J2ME, for instance: updating the JAD for the correct JAR size, a task that doesn’t matter as long as [...]

One of the J2ME applications I had been involved in emerged with a big problem when tested for boundary conditions. When the client was sending less than 2048 bytes, the server was able to handle it correctly. The content-length header was being set in the client correctly and was available at the server. The J2ME [...]

When I first saw the link to the gruesome video showing American contractor Nicholas Berg being beheaded in Iraq at Jihva's I had expressed my anguish over the internet rage such videos become in a jiffy. I wondered on what makes the Internet fraternity to happily pass on the links to such [...]

If there is one thing that has undisputedly emerged as the winner at Elections 2004, it is the Electronic Voting Machine (EVM). A country where 35% people are still illiterate, yet a country regarded as a super-power in IT manpower, infact a country with all kind of contradictions voted in this elections entirely through EVMs, [...]

Though I am a man with strong prejudices and the 1 GB thing might have blinded me but still here is my 2 paise on the features I liked about GMail:

The scripting that lets the Reply/Forward text areas open almost instantly with an option to open them as new windows.
If you liked the MS-Word spell [...]

Last year I interviewed the CEOs of few prominent IT companies located in my city. Though very cursory, the interviews do provide an insight in to the minds of the top management of these IT companies that are running low-key development centers at cities less prominently visible on the IT map of the country. To [...]

The buzz must be stale by now, but Tiger (JDK 1.5) is out. Gosling excitedly terms Generics, the ability to parameterize a type, as the big one. As everybody knows by now, JDK1.5 is probably the last big change to Java after JDK1.2 which saw the arrival of Swing and new Collections API. I am [...]

Many times the most innocuous aspects of programming create lot of trouble. Take the innocent Properties file. These avatars of Hashtable are collections of key-value pairs, frequently used by applications for their need for external resources and configuration settings. Now pointers such as these tell you that reading the Properties file using java I/O is [...]

Search engine giant Google is all set to open its first offshore R&D facility at Bangalore in 2004. Keeping aside the hype about more and more offshore opportunities does that actually translate to better perks for the Indian techies. Forget it! Apparently the Google Indian initiative is guided by cost-cutting concerns (thought the company denies [...]