pugmarx

What’s with the hashtags? No really, why are people still using them to the point of banally abusing them? I think, and that’s true for so many things… it all started with good intent — in the not-so-savvy-times, maybe several years ago, hashtags had a purpose. You click on one and voila!…depending on the social networking medium that you’re on…you see a filtered list all the posts that share the…

About a month back, I’d done something I was not very proud of — a piece of code that I was not very happy about. My excuse was that there’s a deadline that I’d to meet and I was fairly new to Spark (or Scala, if you please.)

It was a simple piece (not very far from the typical Word Count problem), in which the task required counting words at specific indices, and then print the unified count per…

A ‘Kafka > Storm > Kafka’ Topology gotcha

If you’re trying to make a Kafka <-> Storm topology work, and are going bonkers over your recipient topic not receiving any damn thing, here’s the secret:

The defaultorg.apache.storm.kafka.bolt.KafkaBolt implementation expects only a single key field from the upstream (Bolt/Spout)

If you’re tieing your KafkaBoltto aKafkaSpout, you’ve got to use the internal name:str

However, if you have an…

The glorious ‘threat/reward’ model

We have witnessed this since our childhood. Right from our homes, to our schools, colleges, and finally in our jobs. The glorious ‘threat/reward’ model! As the name suggests, it’s an approach where a certain set of actions lead (or are known to lead) to a certain reward (candy, toys, perks, H1B, and of course “that-irresistible-promotion”). On the flipside, non-compliance to a given, pre-defined…

Alexa + Raspberry Pi = Fun!

So, after a week a of grappling, trying to make Alexa AVS work on a humble Raspberry Pi 2 Model B, I finally had success! Yayyy! Now, thus far, the responses I have received on declaring this little victory of mine have been more or less like “meh!”, but still, I write about it because for me the experience was far more satiating.

So here goes.

I was fascinated by Amazon Echo, and the fact that…

Think!

One of the best mails I received was from a CEO (or to put it mildly — from the head of a startup I was working for) that he had sent to all the ’employees’. It was about a seemingly small fact which I had unconsciously felt on several occasions, but never actively thought about.

It went something like this: Between the time when you’re given a problem, say an issue to troubleshoot, or a feature…

So I was trying out mocking frameworks for the first time a few days ago, and there’s an interesting observation: even though EasyMock, PowerMock, and Mockito and said to be brothers-in-arms, there are a few nuances to take care of. One of them is the following.

There are convenience methods (called matchers) provided by both Mockito and EasyMock to define a message signature that can accept anyv…

We have been recruiting a lot lately. I try to stick to the basics (given that I don’t know a lot of advanced technologies of today), and sometimes get surprised by the responses I receive. A lot of seemingly successful candidates — who can take up any J2EE question you throw at them — fumble when the convenience of their favourite data structures are taken away from them. For example, a simple M…

Adafruit WebIDE

If you’re looking for the best place to start tinkering with a RaspberryPi (RPi) or BeagleBone (BB)…

One of the best things Apple has done with OSX Mavericks is the feature of keeping the extended desktop (external monitor) separate. In the sense that, unlike before, it’s somewhat disconnectedfrom the main desktop. This means that it’s now possible to…

Kindle-ing

I’m highly impressed by Kindle. Not just the device — I don’t have one — but the whole idea around…

How could I not know that such a cool product existed..until yesterday when I read about them being acquired by Google?! I tried out Flutter yesterday, and it definitely, is a remarkable idea put into being. Kudos to the team!

PS: Using Flutter app you…

jar tf is a very useful command if we just want to peek into a jar. For example, I had a recent requirement of scanning several jars to look for Hibernate *.cfg.xmlfiles. Naturally, it would have been tedious had I had to open each jar to check. The…

Terminal within Eclipse

Every now and then I had this urge to have a tool which would save me from switching over to…

Connecting from Amazon AWS EC2 to RDS

While preparing to deploy a Java-based application on Amazon, I encountered a strange error — the…