Tuesday, July 29, 2008

For knowledge, ask Cuil

Well yet another search engine that too from ex-googlers ..interesting. They have claimed that Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft. I think its too early to compare it with google, thought Cuil has come up with some cool features like Drilldown, Tabs and Navigation suggestion etc on the search page.

Their success truly depends on the methods and techniques/algos they use for indexing the web because only good indexing can give you good results.

Another Interesting fact is that search technologies continue to come from Stanford University Comp Science PhDs (Yahoo, Google, Cuil…).

Checkout the feature and the people behind this new search engine at http://www.cuil.com

Monday, March 03, 2008

Sun Tech Days Plus, Bangalore

Sun Tech Days Plus was an exclusive annual event of Sun Microsystems which happened in Bangalore on 27th Feb, 08 at Hotel Grand Ashok. Actually it was an extension to the main event which was happening in Hyderabad. They started with the Keynotes of Rich Green live from Hyderabad. After the speech of Rich green there was a Demo showcase and that was really cool. Guys were showcasing their work using java technologies like Swing, J2me and JavaFX.

After the demo showcase they started with the sessions. The first session was on Java SE 6 Update N. Update N is the new release of java SE 6 that introduces new features and enhancements. It was pretty interesting to know that how Sun is taking quick moves to enhance java features and capabilities.

Another interesting session was on Batch processing with Spring Batch. Spring Batch is a lightweight batch framework designed to enable the development of robust batch applications vital for the daily operations of enterprise systems. This session was from Accenture and they showcased a simple example as well for doing a batch processing using Spring batch.

Apart from other sessions I liked one interesting session on Metro and REST. Project Metro is the new name for the web services stack from Sun. So we can say Metro is nothing but JAX-WS + Project Tango combination. JAX-WS is the standardized web services stack and Project Tango (also known as WSIT) is the interoperability toolkit (interoperability with .Net 3.0). REST (Representational State Transfer) describes an architecture style of networked systems. There’s a debate going on in the industry that says REST is better method for building Web services than SOAP. The whole web services space looks quite interesting and Sun has given good support for web services development in the new release of NetBeans IDE. There were some other sessions as well on JavaFX and Java Persistence API by Sun guys and there was a session on Unit testing J2EE applications using JUnit by Accenture guys. Overall the event was good with the main focus on showcasing Sun’s new technologies and initiatives which will really create some sort of awareness among the techies about the new technologies.

Friday, February 15, 2008

A dozen free & essential apps for Windows

A dozen free & essential apps for Windows by ZDNet's George Ou -- Every time I build a new Windows computer, there are a dozen free and essential applications that I always install for other people. These applications all seem to fill essential functions and they all seem to be well-behaved installers and uninstallers, in other words it won’t crash your computer or drag it down with gunk. [...]

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Small utility program to unlock PDF documents

Ever downloaded a PDF document from internet which doesn’t have print option or its disabled? I hope you must have come across this situation.

Try this small java program to unlock PDF document for printing etc.

I am using iText API for doing it. They have a very rich collection of classes and methods to play with PDF files.

 

You need itext-1.4.6.jar to run this program. You can download this jar from http://www.lowagie.com/iText/download.html . If you are using eclipse IDE then set this jar in your project build path or if you are running this code from command prompt then you need to set this jar in your classpath.

 

So here is the code… just copy it and run it. You can see we are passing PDF file name to unlockPdf() method though command prompt. inputFile name is your original file which you want to unlock and outputFile name can be anything which you like.

 

package my.examples;

 

import java.io.FileNotFoundException;

import java.io.FileOutputStream;

import java.io.IOException;

 

import com.lowagie.text.DocumentException;

import com.lowagie.text.pdf.PdfEncryptor;

import com.lowagie.text.pdf.PdfReader;

import com.lowagie.text.pdf.PdfWriter;

 

public class UnlockPdf

{

  public static void main(String[] args)

  {

    if (args.length < 2)

    {

      System.err.println("usage: java my.examples.UnlockPdf inputfile.pdf outputfile.pdf");

    }

   else

    {

      new UnlockPdf().unlock(args[0], args[1]);

    }

  }

 

  private void unlock(String inputFile, String outputFile)

  {   

 

    try

    {

      PdfReader reader = new PdfReader(inputFile);

      PdfEncryptor.encrypt(reader, new FileOutputStream(outputFile), null, null,

  PdfWriter.AllowAssembly | PdfWriter.AllowCopy

              | PdfWriter.AllowDegradedPrinting | PdfWriter.AllowFillIn

              | PdfWriter.AllowModifyAnnotations | PdfWriter.AllowModifyContents

              | PdfWriter.AllowPrinting | PdfWriter.AllowScreenReaders, false);

    }

    catch (FileNotFoundException e)

    {

      e.printStackTrace();

    }

    catch (IOException e)

    {

      e.printStackTrace();

    }

    catch (DocumentException e)

    {

      e.printStackTrace();

    }

  }

}

 

 

 

 

 

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Here comes DevCamp, Bangalore

Guys DevCamp Bangalore 1 is happening on February 9th 2008. It’s really good news for developer community of Bangalore. It will be like most other unconference camps with main focus on developer’s community. I hope to have some real cool application development demos and sessions. This DevCamp will have focus on all aspects of software development and will be an interesting event for anybody who is part of a software development team.

So what are you waiting for? Register yourself at the wiki (http://www.devcamp.in/wiki/Register) and if you are interested to give any session then do visit session page (http://devcamp.in/wiki/Sessions) and put your session details there.

For any further details do visit the wiki: http://www.devcamp.in .Alternatively you can also sign up on the mailing list to get the latest updates about DevCamp.

Venue detail:

ThoughtWorks Technologies (India) Pvt. Ltd. 2nd Floor, Tower C, Corporate Block ,Diamond District, Airport Road , Bangalore, KA - 560 008

Popular Posts