Hudson: such a cool build tool

Hudson is a build tool used to build Java project specially J2EE. It is quite a phenomenal tool which has great integration with maven, ant and many other handful tools. Furthermore, it is very easy to deployable and use. So if you want to learn more about hudson and use it. Please visit: Click here/

Life is so easy when you have hudson with you, because it does everything for you. If you are a java programmer and you love web application then hudson is just around the corner to save your time and mood, because it have a nice interface.

facebooking, tweeting, IM, Skype and work

I am just back from a meeting with a lady from german at Java, thamel here in kathmandu, and the first question she asked me was,"What do you do Akash?". I was not so sure about it, I told her I work. Then she was curious to know about my own but I was reluctant so I told her I use facebook and twitter a lot, and that's how I work. However, may be she was from 2000 generation so, she asked me if I use IM, I told her I did and also asked her if she have a skype account. She said she had it, and asked me what do I do on skype. I talked to my girl friend!!! :P that's what I told her, though.

Now I am back hom analysing my conversation with her.. and the truth is all I do these days is the things I mentioned. I work, I use fb, twitter, IM and I talk in Skype... every single day from moment I wake up till I sleep, my activities list is written above. Holy crap!! What a so called exciting life bounded by technology... So I am thinking of buying a smart-phone to encapsulated all these activities and personalize it... how does that sound??? And when I meet her again, I will say her.. I use

PiXar = Cool

When we were growing up every kid talked about Disney, but I was a different kid, because I never watched cartoon when I was a kid. So when I actually had interest on animation, Pixar was one name whose work I have always admired. So today I had about 3 hours of free time and all I did was check some of Pixar best work, specially in short films in youtube. You can click here if you are interested to enjoy yourself.

Pixar is such a cool work force, they produce things which have meaning and at the same time they provide you lot of entertainment. So kids better be watching some cars, incredibles, up rather than micky mouse stuff.. though you must not avoid watching tom and jerry :P

Convert XML file to XML String in java

I needed to convert XML file to XML String to pass it through to web service.

public String convertXMLFileToString(String fileName)
{
try{
DocumentBuilderFactory documentBuilderFactory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
InputStream inputStream = new FileInputStream(new File(fileName));
org.w3c.dom.Document doc = documentBuilderFactory.newDocumentBuilder().parse(inputStream);
StringWriter stw = new StringWriter();
Transformer serializer = TransformerFactory.newInstance().newTransformer();
serializer.transform(new DOMSource(doc), new StreamResult(stw));
return stw.toString();
}
catch (Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
return null;
}

Somebody's gonna hurt real bad

I was trying to find a new life which would exciting, full of fun and most importantly "new". So one day, I saw with my old laptop, sitting in my old couch but with new thought to browse some of newest video in youtube, and all I found was same old video from russel peter. This guys is quite cool and jokes like he is a real punk.. but he is really effective to make people laugh. So then, I started looking for his video and believe me or not I wasted 4 hours watching and downloading each one of them.. if you know russel peter, you must have known his dad's dialogue"Somebody's gonna hurt real bad"

Software Freedom Day 2009

Software Meet 2009

About 10 Engineering College from 4 different University, are participating in a much awaited each "Software Meet". This event is organized annually by the most reputed computer club in Nepal. The event is organized by Kathmandu University Computer Club(KUCC). The sponsors of this event are Javra Software, DASS Enterprises, NITC, ACEN, CCA and they are adding up with event approaching. With its overwhelming success in last years, the competition is even more competitive and exciting this april.

There are two programs in this event, as project competition and paper presentation. Project Competition is Scheduled to be organized on 10 April and Paper presentation on 12 April. Project Competition have a different way round where defending winner IOE have not participated due to internal college reasons, so colleges like KU, KEC, KCM will be fighting to make their way out as a winner. Whereas Paper presentation seems much more competitive with defending winner is coming up with much stronger paper on "Java API for Grid Computing" and second prize winner in Software Meet 2009 from NCIT, is trying to make this his event by his work on "Virtualization". But all eyes are also on Bishwas Bhatt from Kathmandu University with his promising ideas.

This is will be some kinda of event where colleges will battle for ultimate pride of their quality, software project management.

AI: Watching Video Tutorial Day in and Day out

When my professor gave us a lecture about Logical Agent, and later on First Order Logic, A.I. was inspiring me more than anything else. But when I came back to my dorm and try to go through my book "Artificial Intelligence: A modern Approach", I found myself, sleeping in couch or kissing my bed. It not the fault of book though, its a really good book and we must praise its writers, but I don't know what was wrong. Luckily, my commitment for learning A.I. was uplifted when I found a video tutorial from IIT Kharagpur. Now what I do daily is watch one or two video tutorial which is about 1 hour long. And try to read the same book, which makes things more clear to me. May be I found the best way to learn A.I.

You can also find the video tutorials here. I will try to include interesting things that I encounter while I study. So wait for more youtube videos in my blog :).

Presentation on XQuery and RSS

There was a short presentation on XQuery and RSS. I will like to share my slides of presentation.

JDBC

This is a very easy task, but with request from some of my juniors, I am excited to mention it in my blog.

I am taking MySQL as an example here,

You can download a JDBC Connector of MySQL here.

1. Extract the downloaded zip file to C:/ if you are in Windows based OS.
2. Add this classpath to MyComputer>Properties>Environment Variable.
3. Copy mysql...jar file to C:/Program Files/Java/jdk 1.X.X/jre/lb/etx/

Then it will be connected. If you want a sample project, contact me, I will upload it somewhere.

KU Sports Week 2009

One week of holiday for me, and a week of hectic volunteering for my friends. Here I am having a cup of coffee in my room at KUBH, and I have a football match to watch in a while. What a fascinating week it has been, you can watch free football, cricket, basketball and that also from balcony of KUBH. Also there is 24 hrs free internet, and you can also get free Sports update of KU Sports week here.

Thinking Big with FOSS Nepal Community

I know peoples from IOE, ASCOL, Malpi, KEC, KCC, Rato bangala and most of other colleges in Nepal, how?

I got into this small but enthusiastic platform called FOSS Nepal community where everybody has one motive, to promote and advocate FOSS in Nepal. We organize events, we have fun and we disperse.This has been the tradition of FOSS Nepal over the years, but I cannot see the development, how FOSS Nepal Community will grow!!

Organizing three event more than last year won't prove that we are growing.. so then came the role of some donor agencies such as Help Nepal Network. And we started a project called LTSP under the mission "One e-library per school". Then we started seeing we had at least something that we can contribute to society not just philosophy of FOSS. That was quite a achievement, but sustaining and maintain it was much more difficult than establishing it. FOSS Research and Training Center was perfect answer to it this argument.

But my question is, Is this attempt enough to make every user free from proprietary software?? South Asians are regarded as people who can work hard and think!! but we never think big... Even if we go to doorsteps, people are not trying to understand what is good for them.. they are not trying to change.. that is why they have proprietary software in their system, isn't it?

I don't hate people using proprietary system, I use proprietary system. But it binds me, it binds my freedom. It shows me blank screen when I have to finish my project report by morning. It eats my memory, and most importantly sucks my battery power in this energy crisis. You may hate reading all these against your darling proprietary system. But ain't you fond of Compiz fusion in your ubuntu system, don't you like to work on Apache Server than some headache IIS server, there are so much benefits.. but who cares!!

But somebody cared, and they come up with somethings really big like 1 lakh nepalese rupees and showed everyone that FOSS has future in Nepal. "FOSS for enterprises ROCKS!!" Hats Off!! to D2 labs. They gave us Open Source Platform like sourceforge.net for Nepal and they also invited us to work on an open source project competition where the winner will win 1 lakh NRs. Now you tell me!! Ain't you installing FOSS OS in you computer now.. and start using FOSS. If you are reading this, I guess you don't have load sheeding right now, do it now because it wont take you 1 whole hours like some propreitary OS do.. also in no time it install all the software you need.. isn't it cool.. Have dun with FOSS Bye bye!!

Anup sir "It was a gem of presentations I have ever been".

It was during a course -System Analysis and Design- in third year of my bachelor in Engineering. We were trying to prepared a presentation on "Software Project Management". Inspired by Dr. David Wiley's presentation, we went off to give appoxy 5 and half hours presentation talking just about everything in project management. I guess no one in our class would ever forget that presentation, esp. golu because I asked her a question during my presentation and she was like "Ahh!!", haha.. Achyut was confident, Hopax was awesome, I think he set things up then, Aks was terrific esp with Risk management.
I have also uploaded the slides of this presentation. I am sure you wanna have a lot at it. Click here

My Presentation about Solaris 10

I think this was one of my worst presentation ever. I know audience would never understand what the speakers speaks but, it was one of those presentation when I, myself knew nth. But we had some nice demo and it was cool working with my mate prajowal.My presentation is here

Grid Computing and Its prospect in Nepal -- we are responsible for Change

Abstract
This paper visualizes the prospect of highly advanced grid computing technology in Nepal. Using examples such as SETI@HOME, Large Hadron Collider, it explains why Nepal should shift its gear towards such technology and how it can achieve the goals. However, it does not explain the organization and architecture of grids to solve complex computational problems. Lastly, it includes my personal experiences of working in my minor project “Linux Cluster: Prime Number Calculation" and my observations through those experiences.

INTRODUCTION
Visualizing the present scenario of Information and Communication Technology industry in Nepal, dependency on the foreign agencies is extensive. Sustainability, originality and reusability are some of the key aspects of any software engineering principles, but we could always lose everything in air at once. So, the better idea would be to spend our knowledge and credibility on some independent high level
advanced technology, which would revolutionize the way world would think. One of such technologies is Grid Computing.

GRID COMPUTING OVERVIEW
Grid computing is a computing model that provides the ability to perform higher throughput computing by taking advantage of many networked computers to model a virtual computer architecture that is able to distribute process execution across a parallel infrastructure. Therefore, the basic concept of Grid Computing is to make use of the underutilized resources. For example, only one-tenth of processing power is used during normal deployment. If we could merge all the wasted CPU cycles together, this power can be utilized to compute and solve the complex and computationally expensive problems. The term
grid, however, may mean different things to different people. To some users, a grid is any network of machines, including personal or desktop computers within a virtual organization. To others, grids are networks that include computer clusters, clusters of clusters etc. Grids are usually heterogeneous networks.
Grid nodes, generally individual computers, consist of different hardware and use a variety of operating systems, and the networks connecting them vary in bandwidth.

PRACTICAL REALIZATIONS: SETI@HOME
SETI@Home (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence @ Home) is the most popular and successful Grid Computing Project in the world. It was released in May 1999 by Space Science Laboratory in University of California, Berkley and was aimed towards finding extra-terrestrial life outside earth. The objective behind the search was to analyze the Radio Frequency signals in a particular band (band of 2.5MHz centered at 1420MHz) for any abnormality, which might be signs of some terrestrial radio source. The radio signals that received from telescope were converted to binary data and transferred to Berkeley's Laboratory. It is about 35 GB of data each day. This data is then broken down into smaller working unit sets which are functionally independent from each other, and are fed into an algorithm for calculation of anomalies. When processed on a Simple Desktop computer would require about 2.5 trillion mathematical operations and about 10-50 hours per work unit. Physicists at the laboratory were facing a big problem because such huge amount of data generated each day. This would have required many powerful computers to processes and analyze, and even if super-computers were commissioned, it would have meant millions of dollars of
investment. This is where Grid computing became effective. The principle behind the complete solution setup is to utilize millions of CPU cycles which go waste when normal desktop PCs and Laptops are not being used. Thus, SETI@Home developers developed a simple client/server application called BIONC
where client side would receive work units and data sets from the Berkley Laboratory's servers, process them and send them back with the results. All that is required is an application to be installed on the participating nodes which can interact with the server.

PRACTICAL REALIZATIONS: CERN
The other example can be world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator Large Hadron Collider located at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research). This project is expected to be completed on May 2008 and is speculated to provide physicists world with amazing view and information about the way particles behave. But, the biggest technical problem it faced was that it
would produce over 10 Petabytes of data a year. This scale of data would call for a huge amount of supercomputers, and hence a massive incurring technical and inventory costs. Thus, a perfect solution for that would be Grid Computing. What grid computing does is that it uses large number of smaller systems,
spread across a large geographical region and presents a unified picture to the world. It
enables the use and pooling of computer and data resources to solve complex mathematical problems. The technique is the latest development in an evolution that earlier brought forth such advances as distributed computing, the Worldwide Web, and collaborative computing.

GRID COMPUTING APPLICATIONS
Grid computing connects a wide array of machines and other resources to rapidly process and solve problems beyond an organization’s available capacity. Academic and government researchers have used it for several years to solve large-scale problems, and the private sector is increasingly adopting the technology to create innovative products and services, reduce time to market, and enhance business processes. Not only scientists but businesses can also optimize computing and data resources, pool them for large capacity workloads, share them across networks, and enable collaboration. Cancer Research project from United Devices is also using Grid computing technology to analyze the millions
of combinations of chemical data for cancer treatment. Nowadays, many other industries like Automotive and aerospace, for collaborative design and data-intensive testing; financial services, for running long, complex scenarios and arriving at more accurate decisions; life sciences, for analyzing and
decoding strings of biological and chemical information; government, for enabling seamless collaboration and agility in both civil and military departments and agencies; higher education for enabling advanced, data and compute intensive research, are using Grid computing technology.

GRID COMPUTING AND NEPAL
In the developing countries like Nepal, the government cannot afford super computers for researches in physics or mathematics. Therefore, for departments such as Election Commission, National Planning Commission involving large computations, data mining and data storage, grid computing technology can
be a perfect solution. For example in National planning Commission where census are surveyed and analyzed every ten years, data mining technology can be used to study the pattern of education rate and its causes, similarly the pattern of infant mortality rate can be analyzed, but this technology requires lots of storage, computation and processing power, which normal Desktop computer cannot deliver. Thus, grid computing can be used to speed trade transactions, crunch huge volumes of data, and provide a more stable IT environment. Moreover, we can use grids to pool, secure, and integrate vast stockpiles of data. However, considering present circumstances, we may not be able to operate on high budget and complex grid computing projects like SETI@HOME and Large Hadron Collider. But, we can at least implement these technologies for academic and government researches. An example is the project initiated by Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Kathmandu University with my own coordination and support from Assistant professor Pursottam Kharel. The project was an initiation of how we can employ the underutilized computer in the department. During the process, we have built a Linux Cluster with 6 off-the-shelf computers to calculate an array of prime number. Even if the project was not a great success due to technical problems with Openmosix, it was a worthwhile attempt to develop distributed computing. Such projects should be initiated in companies involved in the life sciences, such as
genome research and pharmaceutical development, they can use parallel and grid computing to process, cleanse, cross-tabulate, and compare massive amounts of data. Faster processing means getting to market faster, and in those industries, a slight edge can be the deciding factor. This technology can also be deployed in Nepal Army, Nepal police as Many civilian and military agencies need the capabilities of cross-agency collaboration, data integrity and security, and lightning-fast information access across thousands of data repositories.

CONCLUSION
This paper reports the importance of change in Software Tradition of Nepal. Currently we are dependent on off-the-shore clients. This can be unreliable and unsustainable, so it’s the time ICT professional should find alterantives and initiate projects such as grid computing. This project will certainly benefit in terms of cost, security, computation and storage and with thus provide a sustainable solution for long
term.