Akhil's Passion

Are you looking for app engine database designing tutorials in the Internet? Well unfortunately there is very few information about it out there. Most of them are generic in nature, praising the stale common features of cloud computing we've heard over and over again - scalability, fast, non-relational stuffs in general etc. I kept searching for hours to find that most of the results were not useful to make a real world applications in GAE , and finally stumbled on some very valuable sources and techniques from several sources and gathered a final concepts you need to know to model data in Google app engine. I'll share it very comprehensively in this tutorial so that you don't need to gather it from different places as I did. I'm quite experienced in relational database ( Oracle and MySQL) previously. I've been trying to design a product in Google App Engine since they provide free Java hosting. It was then that I got stuck wondering how to design my tables and s

This was the first ever official hackathon conducted by Facebook directly in India. I registred right away when I saw the updated in developer post and it paid off well. The event was an 8 hour hackathon , where we got 2 minutes to present working facebook app we came up at the end of the day. My social application - a matrimonial site for facebook users, won the 1st prize in web application section.  Bear Douglas awarding me the gift prizes My App Presentation

It's been very exciting time for programmers these days with lots new stuffs to play around with. Today I'm going to try out building and android application and with Google App Engine as the backend.Download and install the GPE for Juno .  I've already written the blog entry till this point. Next my aim is to do the steps instructed in the link below. I'll scribble down things to note as and when it happens. http://devthots.blogspot.in/2012/07/building-awesome-android-apps-with.html More than this link. I'll be focusing on this video they did during Google I/O 2012. Here is the secret link to download all the codes of Google I/O 2012 . https://code.google.com/p/google-api-java-client/source/browse?repo=samples 1. I installed mercurial in my Ubuntu to clone the codes I found at the repo link given above.     To install mercurial in Ubuntu just type in " sudo apt-get install mercurial " in the terminal. 2. Google does a wonderful job of gen

Are you searching for the most amazing places to eat at Trivandrum? Well, this article is a collection of places from where I've carried the taste after eating. All of them are located in Trivandrum. There is no specific focus for a single kind or restaurant, I've written about the latest hot-spot cafes to ethnic and traditional places at the heart of the city and people for decades. General Places Azad Hotel Azad Hotel is a hotel-chain all over India and they are one of the best hotels in Trivandrum too. They claim to have introduced the popular dish 'biriyani' in India. However, they provide a good ambience and tasty food. There are all kind of popular non-vegetarian dishes available here. They have a long tradition of serving quality food and that's what makes them the best. There are Zam Zam This is the most sought after destination in city for the best cooked chicken dishes. The 'Shawai' is the all time best seller of Zam Zam. It's very rus

Golden sand beach - Poovar Kerala Even being a native of Thiruvananthapuram, I haven't went to many of the tourist attractions in here. Lately, I've decided to look up at least some of the most popular places and it was by chance that I got an opportunity to visit Poovar Isaland. It was nearly a 50 km ride from my place but we enjoyed all the way till there. Once we reached there, it was nirvana! We were on a beach with sea on one side, where we could see the beautiful sunset, and backwaters a little forward on the the other side. The borders of backwaters followed a random curved path and were surrounded by lush green trees and bushes. The sinking sun's dark-orange rays passed through the clouds and hit the tides and moist land in front of it and made us feel that we were staring at some gold island. Later, the tourist guide Mr. Michel explained to us that this beach is also referred as the Golden Sand beach because of this magnificent effect of the sun. The c

Asus Zenbook is regarded as the one of the most marvelous engineering feat when today's class of Ultrabooks are concerned. All of it's details are designed with beauty in mind and a beast like performance behind. It has overthrown the current position of Acer S5 and became the  'World's new thinnest Ultrabook'. Not only Asus Zenbook, but there is a range of Ultrabooks from manufacturers like Sony, Dell and HP coming up with similar and smaller ultrabooks. The Asus Zenbook comes loaded with elegant features that suit the actual human needs of the perfect technology and style blend. It has a 2-sec boot time and SSD harddisk that makes it stand out. One thing I found was, you could get the same configurations of  an Apple Macbook Air in the Asus Zenbook line for upto $200 cheaper price. If you pay the price of an Macbook Air for Zenbook you'd get a machine with a lot more features extra. With great features and simplicity blend hopes are high that the Ultrabook

Installing Google Plugin for Eclipse Juno in Ubuntu I have been using the Eclipse Indigo in Ubuntu for a long time. Recently, I decided to start with the all new Eclipse Juno. It's faster than the previous Eclipse Indigo and the UI is much much improved. I do most of my developments with Google products like Google App Engine and Android platforms. The following steps could be followed if you want to install the entire Google Plugins for Eclipse Juno in Ubuntu. To avoid the whole mess of downloading and installing together, we'll do all the possible downloading part beforehand and then go ahead with the installation part. Download Eclipse Juno for Linux . Download the Android sdk for Linux  and extract it.  Download the latest archive of Google Plugins of Eclipse . Just download and unzip it, don't proceed to installation. Download the App Engine SDK for Java .  We are done with all the offline downloads possible. Now we move on to the installation part. It'

This tutorial will lays the ground work and help you learn how to generate your corresponding java entity classes from the database tables alone. Generating the java classes form the db schema via hibernate reverse engineering tools could save you tons of time if you're setting up a new project. I haven't rewritten the steps that's already published by someone, but I've organized them in a way that will be 'practically' helpful for any newbie who cannot get it right directly from the tutorials I've mentioned here. This is more of a kind a log of things I actually did while I referred these tutorials. 1. Download hibernate tools, only tools. From this tutorial in mkyong.com to install hibernate tools . 2. Create a java project 'HibernateExample'. 3. Do the steps mentioned in mkyong.com to generate the code from with hibernate . 4. Select the jar file (ojdbc.jar) from lib folder of apache tomcat if required. 5. Click on 'Test

Do you want to become a Google App Engine Java Ninja? I'm so impressed by this revolutionary technology so much that I explored into the most useful resources that will help you understand and code on this gold mine ( Google App Engine ).  I've been experimenting with several applications in GAE over a period of 1 year and have done so much that I could have never even though of doing without setting up a paid java server. I did all that in the free quota provided by Google App Engine. For now, here, I'm going to provide you with some of the most useful resources and websites from which you could learn to code on Google App Engine. The basic concept's would be. 1. Deploying your own sample application in Google App Engine 2. Learning more about the Google datastore 3. Understanding deeper about the JPA and JDO implementation possibilities in Google App Engine 4. Deploying Java applications done in the framework of your preference ( Eg. done in struts) Resources

Wireless Internet have always been troublesome for me from the day I installed the Ubuntu 10.04 first in my Ubuntu. Those days the problem was that Ubuntu 10.04 didn't have the wireless drivers for Dell Mini ( Realtek/Broadcom). But then after a while when the Ubuntu 12.04 was out I upgraded to it and wireless drivers started working. Then later one day, for once, I turned off the wireless connection with the F2 key to connect using my LAN cable. The next thing I know is, I cant roam around with my dell mini because the wireless internet could not be enabled again. I got stuck with the whole LAN connection thing. The Ubuntu 12.04 doesn't support turning back on the wireless internet once its turned off for dell mini.  I lived with it for a few months and lately I searched all over the internet to see if anybody have fixed the issue. Fortunately, I found several solutions scattered out in the internet forums and guess what, one of them works! The forum link with the soluti

Now New Google Power Searcher Certification Google is offering a new free, 13 days, certification program on 'Google Power Searching' .The course is totally free and registration ends on July 16th. The course will sharpen your internet searching skill and help you learn advanced tricks to make internet searches. There are several short activities as a part of the course. Once the course is completed, a printable Google certificate will be emailed to you. You can register for the course in one-step from this link . Share this with your friends and family and help them become more efficient internet searchers. The course would especially benefit : Students for online research People who are not much familiar for using search engine Programmers who frequently use Google for reference Hurry Last Registration Deadline : 16th July 2012!

Now you can buy Samsung Galaxy S3 in India too.The official price of Samsung Galaxy S3 in India is Rs 43,180. But you can get it for a cheaper price from some of the online stores. The lowest prices of Samsung Galaxy S3 is so far Rs 38,900  as offered by infibeam.com. At the time of writing this, Saholic.com (a spice group venture) offers an additional  Rs 1000 money back when you write a reivew for this product after purchase. Sites like zoomin.com, yebhi.com and sulkha.com are also offering it for Rs 38,900. Exclusive features of Samsung Galaxy S3 Samsung Galaxy S3 Price For : Rs 38,900 The smart-phone that rivals iPhone is loaded with tons of features and have the best in class available hardware. Many of the features are not found in most of the other smart phones. The Samsung Galaxy S3 has full HD front camera (supports a range of video playback), Voice recognition as good as the iPhone Siri, amazing features like eye-tracking to keep the screen on, buddy photo share - tha

Asianet Dataline one of the leading Internet Service Providers in Kerala’s is now injecting JavaScript pop-up advertisements to the customer browsers.I directly inquired with their customer service and they've acknowledged the issue. JavaScript ad injection has been happening within all the customers subscribed for the unlimited data plans. I told them that this is a severe privacy breach as ads are being shown even when I’m logged into sites including financial transactions. True, the ads won’t be shown when the connection with another site is HTTPS, but that happens with most of the sites only when you click the ‘Make Payment’ button of most of the site, still the normal logged in session is vulnerable. This un-ethical approach cannot be identified by a normal user as there is no acknowledgement shown from Asianet that ads are shown by them. A normal customer thinks that he's just bugged by some site he visited. Eventually, they offered me (anyone who identify this

I’ve been using the Blackberry Playbook for quite few months now and I should say its an remarkably versatile device for anyone who love multitasking. Getting an external bluetooth keyboard for the Blackberry Playbook just enabled me use it like an amazing laptop with touchscreen. Fortunately, the (pseudo) brand market competition forced Blackberry to bring down the price for Blackberry up to 30% less than its initial price. Now, we’ve got a tablet with HD screen, 7 hours battery backup and an App Store with plenty of HD Games and Apps for cheap price, all with the Blackberry Playbook that cost around $200 now. I did plenty of research about the best keyboards for Blackberry Playbook, most of the keyboard reviews where out-dated. The initial OS of Playbook didn’t support a lot of bluetooth keyboards but from OS 2.0 updates ( which is a mandatory update for all the Playbooks) things changed and a lot more devices were supported. There weren't much reviews about the

Today India is so much focused on IT that almost 80% of the graduates are absorbed right away into IT companies soon after they pass-out. The fun part is, it doesn't even matter what stream they graduated in, but they are working in 'IT'. As a matter of fact, it's horrendous to interpolate about the other core industrial R&D future of India. I really hope the situation change and people start realizing the potential in doing what they love. This scenario led me to explore weather real-passionate programmers exist in Kerala ( myself positioned being just a curious novice coder ). Students who set a part of their life for FOSS, those who love playing with API's found around the Internet, those who code for the fun of it and not for the hefty CTC wating at the MNCs. The search didn't disappoint me. The 'Code Jam 2011' coding contest conducted by mobme.in in Kerala last year (2011) brought some very dedicated programmers to the public. If you are stu

Finally after four years of study and toil, we got our degree certificates few days back.  And now we are all computer engineers ! Although it wasn't such an totally pleasant environment in our college there were several other things that changed us and made us what we are today. Of them,  one thing regarding me was the exciting journey through the world of computer science. Choosing my subject of passion have made me enjoy learning every bit of it. Another thing was that I was fortunate enough to meet some of the best friends I have in this world. They have amazed me in every way of their living and brought out the better human being in me. We forged a lot of life-time relationships on the go, now we know we are not gonna part any time soon.I feel I've learned a lot and gained a lot from there more than I would have from anywhere else.  Of course, Tirunelveli is a hot place, but you've got lot of good places to live and stay at Tirunelveli . Kudos to each of the nice peo

I've experimented developing facebook applications in several newly emerged venues, namely, Goolge App Engine ( Java ) Heroku ( Php ) I got the chance to explore these cloud platforms very deep and learned a lot on the way. For some reason or the other, none of them met my requirements ( they were quite vast :P ) . Now, I've got an account into phpfog.com and done with quite a few testing. So far, I feel it's the best cloud platform ( PaaS ) for facebook applications in php. Good Sides of PhpFog I felt the Git usage from linux is easier in phpfog.com than heroku Allows all Image manipulation functions ( i.e. supports GD library ) It's quite easy to get started with a new facebook application in phpfog. 1. Sign-up at phpfog 2. Create a cloud 3. Create an application  --> Choose Facebook application from the list of presented applications 4. Download it with the Git That was just an overview, detailed steps are described in their documentation very n