Site Designs

1. http://www.peterichter.com/
2. http://www.bittbox.com/
3. http://www.sitepoint.com/
4. http://wufoo.com/gallery/
5. http://www.forwebdesigners.com/
6. http://www.opensourcetemplates.org/templates/1088896899/
7. 
   

Lucene - Solr

Lucene - Solr - Nutch Slide
http://www.danielnaber.de/publications/jazoon07_naber.pdf

BenchMarks
http://zzzoot.blogspot.com/search/label/Lucene

If You’re Open to Growth, You Tend to Grow

WHY do some people reach their creative potential in business while other equally talented peers don’t?

After three decades of painstaking research, the Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck believes that the answer to the puzzle lies in how people think about intelligence and talent. Those who believe they were born with all the smarts and gifts they’re ever going to have approach life with what she calls a “fixed mind-set.” Those who believe that their own abilities can expand over time, however, live with a "growth mind-set."

Read More ..

Web Analytics - A Primer

New to web analytics? Confused about web Analytics? Think it is too hard? Scared of tools and consultants?

This post is for you, its goal: Web Analytics Demystified! Yeah!

Web Analytics is complex. That is what it is. Complex.

Get the nuance? Complex. Mysterious. Inviting. Come in. Sit down. See what’s there. No free rides. You’ll do your part, your efforts will have a rich payback.

Complex holds the promise that you’ll get it. Nay, you can get it. Come in, welcome.

Read More

Your Brain Lies to You

FALSE beliefs are everywhere. Eighteen percent of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth, one poll has found. Thus it seems slightly less egregious that, according to another poll, 10 percent of us think that Senator Barack Obama, a Christian, is instead a Muslim. The Obama campaign has created a Web site to dispel misinformation. But this effort may be more difficult than it seems, thanks to the quirky way in which our brains store memories — and mislead us along the way.

The brain does not simply gather and stockpile information as a computer’s hard drive does. Facts are stored first in the hippocampus, a structure deep in the brain about the size and shape of a fat man’s curled pinkie finger. But the information does not rest there. Every time we recall it, our brain writes it down again, and during this re-storage, it is also reprocessed. In time, the fact is gradually transferred to the cerebral cortex and is separated from the context in which it was originally learned. For example, you know that the capital of California is Sacramento, but you probably don’t remember how you learned it.

Read More

Using Runtime.exec in Java

Here is a Javaworld article explaining how to use
Runtime.exec to execute external commands and batch/shell files etc from java
http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-12-2000/jw-1229-traps.html

The Java Developers Almanac

The Java Developers Almanac 1.4.
All the code examples from the book. Simple examples of how to use the API
http://exampledepot.com/

Name

• ForEnso
  
• PrimeEnso
• GroupEnso
• TwoEnso
• InEnso
• EnsoIn
• MicroEnso
• BeyondEnso
• WalkEnso
• UnoEnso
• NowEnso
• EnsoNow
• CyberEnso
• NorthEnso
• GoEnso
• TriEnso
• TrancEnso
  

Blacklist monitoring and removal procedures

From the blog

http://mailchimp.blogs.com/blog/2007/05/is_your_domain_.html

You probably also know that if your server is in the same "neighborhood" (IP range) as another server that sends spam (like in a shared environment at your ISP), then your server could get blacklisted too.

But not a lot of people know that your domain name can get blacklisted. If that happens, it doesn't matter where you send your email from. If spam filters simply find your domain name in the email's content, the message will get blocked.

The idea is that if you're an evil spammer (or just a really sloppy company), and you pay affiliates to go out and spam on your behalf, your company's name and reputation can get tarnished right along with theirs.

They call it "spamvertising," and you do not want to be labeled as a "spamvertiser." You'll end up on a "URI Blacklist" or "URI Block."

You can check if your company's domain name is blacklisted at:

http://lookup.uribl.com/

More from the blog

The other list is maintained here
http://www.surbl.org/

remove CR and LF

   function escapeVal(data,replaceWith){
   //textarea is reference to that object, replaceWith is string that will replace the encoded return
   data = escape(data) //encode textarea string's carriage returns
   alert(data);   
   for(i=0; i   //loop through string, replacing carriage return encoding with HTML break tag
   
    if(data.indexOf("%0D%0A") > -1){
     //alert("1 ");
    //Windows encodes returns as \r\n hex
     data=data.replace("%0D%0A",replaceWith)
    }
    else if(data.indexOf("%0A") > -1){
          //alert("2 ");
  //   Unix encodes returns as \n hex
     data=data.replace("%0A",replaceWith)
    }
    else if(data.indexOf("%0D") > -1){
     //alert("3 ");     
     //Macintosh encodes returns as \r hex
     data=data.replace("%0D",replaceWith)
    } else if(data.indexOf("%20") > -1) {
     //replace space
     data=data.replace("%20"," ")
    }
   
   }
   
    data=unescape(data) //unescape all other encoded characters
    alert(data);
    return data;
   }

The Humans Behind the Google Money Machine

Snippets from the article

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. " If Google were the United States government, the data that streams onto Nicholas Fox’s laptop every day would be classified as top secret.

Mr. Fox is among a small group of Google employees who keep a watchful eye on the vital signs of one of the most successful and profitable businesses on the Internet. The number of searches and clicks, the rate at which users click on ads, the revenue this generates " everything is tracked hour by hour, compared with the data from a week earlier and charted.

"You can see very, very quickly if anything is amiss," said Mr. Fox, director of business product management at Google.
------------------------

raffic was growing rapidly, as was the average price that advertisers were paying for clicks. But Mr. Fox and others realized that measuring the average cost-per-click was not good enough. Users might be clicking on more high-priced ads and fewer lower-priced ads. That would cause the average cost-per-click to rise, but it would say little about the health of the overall system.

So Mr. Varian and Diane Tang, principal engineer in the ads quality group, helped devise what they call a basket of keywords. Much like the consumer price index, a basket of goods and services that economists use to track inflation, the measure is made up of a broad sample of keywords and is weighted to make it statistically accurate. This internal benchmark helps Google get a clearer picture of its performance.

As measurements improved, Mr. Fox’s team unleashed a stream of experiments meant to optimize the ad system. They evaluated changes to things like the clickable area and background color of ads, and the criteria for placing ads above search results rather than beside them.

------------------

These factors contribute to an ad’s “quality score.” The higher that score, the less the advertiser has to bid to secure top billing. For example, an advertiser who offers to pay $1 per click to attract those searching for “vacation rentals in Colorado” may receive more prominent placement than another who bids $1.50 for the same query but has a lower quality score. An advertiser with a very low quality score may have to bid so much for placement as to make it uneconomical.

Quality scores work as an incentive to advertisers to improve their ads, which benefits users and, in turn, benefits Google, Mr. Fox said.

More

Link to my KEF photo Album

Here is my link to KEF photo Album

CacheFile.Net - Open Source CDN

CacheFile.net is an HTTP web server that contains common Internet resources that are frequently reused on other web sites. It exists to alleviate the need for a common root URL for web resources that are otherwise not directly linkable at their primary URLs.

For example, popular Javascript libraries may have a direct download link for a specific version of their script files, but may discourage the direct linking of these files on their site. People are instead encouraged to download the scripts and manage them on their own servers. But the problem with each web site retaining its own copy of the same resources is that web users must re-download them all over again as they navigate from site to site. Over browsing five different dojo-driven web sites using the same version of dojo, there may be five different copies of the script being seperately downloaded.

If all web sites used a common URI for each frequently used web resource, the user's browser would only download that resource once, until the user's cache is either cleared or expired.

Randy Pausch's Last Lecture

Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch after being diagnosed on Sept 2006 with cancer and with only 3 months to live gave one of this wonderful, uplifting lectures titled "The Last Lecture".



His book titled "The Last Lecture" is a New York Times #1 Best seller.

some snippets from his update page are below

"you can't control the cards you're dealt, just how you play the hand."

April 17 2007: an email I wanted to share...

Through all of this, I've tried very hard to stay positive, but it's very hard to know how one is really doing in situations like these. I received the following email, which gave me hope that - at least during the moment described - I am managing to enjoy life through all this...

... I happened to have been behind you for a few blocks as you were driving from campus last night (Monday). Before I recognized it was you, I found myself thinking, "Gee that guy is really enjoying the moment.....driving down the road on a warm, early spring evening, top down, wind blowing through his hair, with a smile on his face.....probably headed home to a wife and maybe a little one or two......that's the way to live life.". And then you turned left and I recognized it was you. I then found myself thinking, "It's Randy! He looks so happy! And, in this most private of public moments (alone in his car, yet on the road for anyone to observe), I can't imagine anyone who IS living life more. No one is more deserving!". Thanks for sharing your happiness/your life so fully with so many of us.......on campus and in your car. You can never know how that glimpse of you tonight made my day, reminding me of what life really is all about...

March 17, 2007: A note on staying positive

Many things have helped keep me going throughout this process, mostly knowing how many people have been rooting for me. When I was first diagnosed, I was told that the overall odds for surviving for 5 years were only 3%. My immediate reaction was: "I don't believe in the no-win scenario." (Star Trek fans will recognize this quote from the second movie, Wrath of Kahn. In the film, Star Fleet cadets are faced with a simulated training scenario called the Kobayashi Maru where - no matter what they do - their entire crew is killed. When Kirk was a cadet at the academy, he reprogramming the simulation, because "he didn't believe in the no-win scenario."

So imagine how uplifting it was when I received the following while at MD Anderson, just as things were getting rough: if you can't read the handwriting, it says "To Randy -- I don't believe in the no-win scenario -- My best, Bill Shatner"

Our Images

Our Images

• http://optcircle.com/common/images/layout_bg.jpg
• http://optcircle.com/common/images/top_border.jpg
• http://optcircle.com/common/images/top_right_curve.jpg
• http://optcircle.com/common/images/logo.jpg
• http://optcircle.com/common/images/bottom_border.jpg
• http://optcircle.com/common/images/bottom_right.jpg
• http://optcircle.com/common/images/bottom_left.jpg

Client Side RSS Feed Reader tools using JavaScript

Client Side RSS Feed Reader tools using JavaScript

JQUERY Plugin for feed
http://www.malsup.com/jquery/gfeed/

JFeed
http://www.hovinne.com/blog/index.php/2007/07/15/132-jfeed-jquery-rss-atom-feed-parser-plugin

Google AjaxFeed API
http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxfeeds/

Lost Opportunities Haunt Final Days of Bear Stearns

Twelve hours after agreeing to sell Bear Stearns Cos. for $2 a share, Alan Schwartz wearily made his way to the company gym for a much-needed workout.

It was 6:45 a.m., March 17, and Bear Stearns's chief executive had slept little since hammering out the ugly details of his fire-sale deal with J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.

When Mr. Schwartz, already dressed in his business suit, trudged into the locker room, Alan Mintz, still in his sweaty gym clothes, made a beeline for the boss.

"How could this happen to 14,000 employees?" demanded the 46-year-old senior trader, thrusting his face uncomfortably close to Mr. Schwartz's. "Look in my eyes, and tell me how this happened!"

Two and a half months later, Mr. Schwartz still isn't quite sure. To Mr. Mintz and others, he has blamed a market tsunami he didn't see coming. He told a Senate committee last month: "I just simply have not been able to come up with anything, even with the benefit of hindsight, that would have made a difference."

But many who lived through the seven tense months before the deal say Bear Stearns imploded because it was at war with itself. Buffeted by the most treacherous market forces in a generation and hobbled by indecision, the firm's leaders missed opportunities that might have been able to save the 85-year-old brokerage.

More

The Wisdom of the Ages, for Now Anyway

Link to Article

EARLIER this month, Oprah Winfrey looked into a camera and announced to the world that she was about to do the “most exciting thing I’ve ever done.”

Addressing an Internet audience, Ms. Winfrey said: “I am most proud of the fact that all of you have joined us in this global community to talk about what I believe is one of the most important subjects. And presented by one of the most important books of our times.”

Sitting across from her was the book’s author, a peaceful, goateed, somewhat mysterious man in a beige sweater named Eckhart Tolle. And if you haven’t heard of him, you haven’t spent much time in the self-help section of a bookstore in the last decade or so.

Mr. Tolle, 60, is the German-born spiritual speaker and author of “The Power of Now.” With a seemingly limitless pool of middle-class discontent to tap into — and a major push from Ms. Winfrey — he has become the most popular spiritual author in the nation. His books hold the top two spots on the New York Times best-seller list for paperback advice books. Since March 3, he has been host to a weekly online seminar series alongside Ms. Winfrey in support of his 2005 book, “A New Earth,” which is her latest book club selection and No. 1 on the list.

----------------

Mr. Tolle is hardly the first writer to tap into the American longing for meaning and success.

Dale Carnegie made a bundle on “How to Win Friends and Influence People” during the Depression, and in the 1950s came Norman Vincent Peale’s best-selling “Power of Positive Thinking,” which shared Mr. Tolle’s aversion to negativity in life. A generation later, Ram Dass brought Buddhism to the masses, while recent self-help stars like Deepak Chopra have taught very Tollean messages — like embracing silence and living in the moment — on television and on tour.

--------------

Sara Nelson, the editor-in-chief of Publishers Weekly, said that Mr. Tolle was just part of a surging market which includes “The Secret,” by Rhonda Byrne and “Eat, Pray, Love,” by Elizabeth Gilbert, two other spiritually minded, mass-appeal best sellers backed by Ms. Winfrey.

“There’s always sort of an evolution of styles, but the books are really all the same,” Ms. Nelson said. “The message is how to be happier, how to live the life you want, how to be at peace, how to be a more successful human. The genre never goes away, it just slightly changes its form. But it’s doing amazingly well right now.”

Debra Matsumoto, the marketing manager for 10 Speed Press, the publisher in Berkeley, Calif., that prints New Age books under the Celestial Arts imprint, was even more blunt. “We have already published books with very similar messages, to be honest, and we will continue to do so,” she said “We might already have it. We just need to slap a cover on it and get it into Oprah’s hands.”

More

A Superhighway to Bliss

JILL BOLTE TAYLOR was a neuroscientist working at Harvard’s brain research center when she experienced nirvana.
Skip to next paragraph
Related

Dr. Taylor says the right, creative lobe can be used to foster contentment.

But she did it by having a stroke.

On Dec. 10, 1996, Dr. Taylor, then 37, woke up in her apartment near Boston with a piercing pain behind her eye. A blood vessel in her brain had popped. Within minutes, her left lobe the source of ego, analysis, judgment and context began to fail her. Oddly, it felt great.

The incessant chatter that normally filled her mind disappeared. Her everyday worries about a brother with schizophrenia and her high-powered job untethered themselves from her and slid away.
More

Log Analyzer

AWStats is a free powerful and featureful tool that generates advanced web, streaming, ftp or mail server statistics, graphically. This log analyzer works as a CGI or from command line and shows you all possible information your log contains, in few graphical web pages. It uses a partial information file to be able to process large log files, often and quickly. It can analyze log files from all major server tools like Apache log files (NCSA combined/XLF/ELF log format or common/CLF log format), WebStar, IIS (W3C log format) and a lot of other web, proxy, wap, streaming servers, mail servers and some ftp servers.
Take a look at this comparison table for an idea on features and differences between most famous statistics tools (AWStats, Analog, Webalizer,...).
AWStats is a free software distributed under the GNU General Public License. You can have a look at this license chart to know what you can/can't do.
As AWStats works from the command line but also as a CGI, it can work with major web hosting provider which allow Perl, CGI and log access.
More

Kaizen

Kaizen (改善) is Japanese for improvement. It is a Japanese philosophy that focuses on continuous improvement throughout all aspects of life. When applied to the workplace, Kaizen activities continually improve all functions of a business from manufacturing to management and from the CEO to the assembly line workers.[1] By improving the standardized activities and processes, Kaizen aims to eliminate waste (see Lean manufacturing). Kaizen was first implemented in several Japanese businesses during the country's recovery after World War II, including Toyota, and has since spread to businesses throughout the world.

Read More

The Next American Frontier

The entire world seems to be heading toward points of inflection. The developing world is embarking on the digital age. The developed world is entering the Internet era. And the United States, once again at the vanguard, is on the verge of becoming the world's first Entrepreneurial Nation.

At the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner delivered a paper to the American Historical Association – the most famous ever by an American historian. In "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," he noted that, according to the most recent U.S. census, so much of the nation had been settled that there was no longer an identifiable western migration. The very notion of a "frontier" was obsolete.

Read More

First Page

What's OptCircle?

• OptCircle is the marketplace that brings OPT,CPT candidates to the potential employers who are looking for fresh talent.

Why OptCircle?

• An unique place primarily meant to address the needs of OPT,CPT candidates in their quest for job.
• Bridges the gap between OPT,CPT candidates and employers interested in fresh talent
• Provides an effective and efficient platform for OPT,CPT candidates to reach out to a larger audience
• Provides potential employers to find fresh talent and a unique opportunity to attract the right talent

UID in Java

Custom 128 BIT UID Generation

Sample Code
http://www.jguru.com/faq/view.jsp?EID=1030397

Other Option - GUID
Search Wikipedia

Java SE Management And Monitoring Guide

Using JConsole

Quick Notes

To see the java process id in windows

1. Go to task manager, View -> Select Columns -> selet PID
2. or use jps -l to list all process

On the other hand start jconsole and it lists all java process that are running locally.

The JConsole graphical user interface is a monitoring tool that complies to the Java Management Extensions (JMX) specification. JConsole uses the extensive instrumentation of the Java Virtual Machine (Java VM) to provide information about the performance and resource consumption of applications running on the Java platform.

In the Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE platform) 6, JConsole has been updated to present the look and feel of the Windows and GNOME desktops (other platforms will present the standard Java graphical look and feel). The screen captures presented in this document were taken from an instance of the interface running on Windows XP.

Link to the complete Guide

Also Monitoring and managing Java SE 6 Applications

Remove Annoying system beep

Link to the original..

1. Right-click on My Computer
2. On the Hardware tab, click on [Device Manager]
3. On the “View” menu, select “Show hidden devices”
4. Under “Non-Plug and Play Drivers”, right-click “Beep”
5. Click “Disable”
6. Answer [Yes] when asked if you really want to disable it
7. Answer [No] when asked if you want to reboot
8. Right-click “Beep” again.
9. Click “Properties”
10. On the “Driver” tab, set the Startup type to Disabled
11. Click [Stop]
12. Click [OK]
13. Answer [No] when asked if you want to reboot

Can You Become a Creature of New Habits?

NY Times Article

HABITS are a funny thing. We reach for them mindlessly, setting our brains on auto-pilot and relaxing into the unconscious comfort of familiar routine. “Not choice, but habit rules the unreflecting herd,” William Wordsworth said in the 19th century. In the ever-changing 21st century, even the word “habit” carries a negative connotation.

So it seems antithetical to talk about habits in the same context as creativity and innovation. But brain researchers have discovered that when we consciously develop new habits, we create parallel synaptic paths, and even entirely new brain cells, that can jump our trains of thought onto new, innovative tracks.

Rather than dismissing ourselves as unchangeable creatures of habit, we can instead direct our own change by consciously developing new habits. In fact, the more new things we try — the more we step outside our comfort zone — the more inherently creative we become, both in the workplace and in our personal lives.

More

Tomcat - Eclipse debugging

Debugging tomcat webapp with eclipse

The short answer is to add the following options when the JVM is started: -Xdebug -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,address=8000,server=y,suspend=n There are a number of ways you can do this depending on how you normally start Tomcat: * Set environment variables JPDA_ADDRESS=8000 and JPDA_TRANSPORT=dt_socket and then start tomcat using catalina jpda start. * If you run Tomcat using service wrapper, check the documentation for the service to determine how to set the required JVM options. * If you start Tomcat from within an IDE, check the documentation for the IDE to determine how to set the required JVM options.

The port does not need to be set to 8000, it may be any value appropriate for your system.

Whilst this is very useful in development it should not be used in production because of both security and performance implications.

Mem Cache

Mem Cache is a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load.

Starting Up
First, you start up the memcached daemon on as many spare machines as you have. The daemon has no configuration file, just a few command line options, only 3 or 4 of which you'll likely use:

# ./memcached -d -m 2048 -l 10.0.0.40 -p 11211

This starts memcached up as a daemon, using 2GB of memory, and listening on IP 10.0.0.40, port 11211. Because a 32-bit process can only address 4GB of virtual memory (usually significantly less, depending on your operating system), if you have a 32-bit server with 4-64GB of memory using PAE you can just run multiple processes on the machine, each using 2 or 3GB of memory.

New Stack

New Stack
JDK 1.6
Tomcat 6
Commons Logging

Avoiding SQL Injection and XSS Cross Site scripting
A Java.net article

Java Mail

Java mail some basics and example code to send email using Java.
Older articles but still relevant

• jGuru: Fundamentals of the JavaMail API
• Java News Letter : Basic Example
• Java News Letter : Advanced Example

Wall Street Winners Get Billion-Dollar Paydays

Hedge fund managers, those masters of a secretive, sometimes volatile financial universe, are making money on a scale that once seemed unimaginable, even in Wall Street’s rarefied realms.
One manager, John Paulson, made $3.7 billion last year. He reaped that bounty, probably the richest in Wall Street history, by betting against certain mortgages and complex financial products that held them.
More ..

Freebase

Freebase is an open database of the world’s information. It is built by the community and for the community—free for anyone to query, contribute to, built applications on top of, or integrate into their websites.

Already, Freebase covers millions of topics in hundreds of categories. Drawing from large open data sets like Wikipedia, MusicBrainz, and the SEC, it contains structured information on many popular topics, like movies, music, people and locations—all reconciled and freely available via an open API. This information is supplemented by the efforts of a passionate global community of users, who are working together to add structured information on everything from philosophy to European railway stations to the chemical properties of common food ingredients.

Freebase

Danny Hillis

The co founder of Metaweb, the company behind Freebase. Also he is the co founder of Long Now Foundation the organization behind the millennium clock project.

Programming collective Intelligence

Want to tap the power behind search rankings, product recommendations, social bookmarking, and online matchmaking? This fascinating book demonstrates how you can build Web 2.0 applications to mine the enormous amount of data created by people on the Internet. With the sophisticated algorithms in this book, you can write smart programs to access interesting datasets from other web sites, collect data from users of your own applications, and analyze and understand the data once you've found it. Programming Collective Intelligence takes you into the world of machine learning and statistics, and explains how to draw conclusions about user experience, marketing, personal tastes, and human behavior in general -- all from information that you and others collect every day

Link to the book

Link to Author's (Toby Segaran) blog