Free Online SmallTalk Books

Came across a collection of free online smalltalk programming books here.

UN declares 2 October, Gandhi’s birthday, as International Day of Non-Violence

United Nations decides to observe October 2 as International Day of Non-Violence in honor of Mahatma Gandhi, the man who inspired a nation with his idea of non-violence. At last, the world has resolved to accept the greatness of our Mahatma and let us hope it doesn’t become a ritual as it is happening here!!!!!!!!!!!

Thanks to my wife who pointed out this info to me

IAF turns 75

The Indian Air Force celebrated its Platinum Jubilee on 8th Oct. It was on the same day in 1932, well before we got independence, that IAF was formed, then known as the Royal Air Force with a pretty small fleet of 4 wapiti aircrafts with 6 officers and 19 sepoys. As we stand today, IAF is the 4th largest in the world with over 1.7 lakhs personnel and around 1300 aircrafts.

Limit to the maximum cable rental chargeable

TRAI has come up with a ruling which limits the maximum cable rental that can be charged per month. you can get the news here. Hope this brings some sanity to the whole business wherein rentals used to be fixed on an arbitrary basis.

High Lead content in Paints available in india

A recent study by Toxics Link claims that the lead content of paints available in India is dangerously high. Here is the article which came up in The Hindu.

To quote:-

“The tests show alarming levels of lead in enamel paints (with a gloss finish) and this holds true for most of the paints available in the market. Of the 31 enamel paint sample analysed for lead concentration, 83.87 per cent had more than 600 parts per million (PPM) of lead and only 19.1 per cent had less than 600 PPM presence of the heavy metal.”

However it is not a surprising factor in the sense that there is no regulatory framework to ensure that the lead content doesn’t beyond a prescribed limit. The only factor is that Paint Manufacturers are encouraged to conform to the 1000 PPM(Parts Per Million) limit as suggested by BIS(Bureau Of Indian Standards). It is high time that this is converted to a mandatory, rather than a voluntary regulation.

National Do Not Call Registry

Finally some relief for the Indian telephone subscribers as the DNC(Do-Not-Call) Registry takes off. According to the communication issued by TRAI, the whole framework will be actionized in three phases. In phase 1 the telemarketer will have to register with the system, wherein they will have to fill up an application form TM-I and submit it electronically. Subsequently, they will have to submit the same application form to the service providers. More details can be got here

In the second phase, any subscriber(mobile/Landline) can add their names to the registry through their service provider and this will take a maximum of 45 days to get activated.

In the third and final phase, the telemarketers will have to get their calling list scrubbed by the NDC registry( maintained by National Informatics Centre) and calls will be allowed to those numbers which will be cleared by the registry.

According to the news on Hindu

“As on September 7, about 14,750 telemarketers having around 4.5-lakh telephone lines have already applied with various telecom service providers for getting themselves registered with the DoT.”

The Registry can be accessed here

This initiative is a welcome step in providing a dedicated and centralized repository for all those who do not want to get unsolicited marketing calls. Earlier the NDC used to be maintained by the individual telemarketer. For eg:, ICICI Bank had its own database of people who do not want to get promotional calls. But there was the pain of going to each and every such orgn and registering at their website and to add to it, you would still get calls, flauting the rules set up by RBI on this.

Lets now hope for the best and pray that this initiative will really serve its purpose.

That Annoying Prompt in Windows..

It used to be quite irritating when you see the prompt “Updating your computer is almost complete. you must restart your computer for the updates to take effect” after installing the windows patches. I stumbled upon an article which tells how to disable this prompt from coming up. Not a great discovery, but quite useful.

Virus From ICICIDirect

ICICI Bank has been at the top of the charts in terms of customer complaints. There are even blogs dedicated to and this has been quite famous among the icici hate group. So far I didnt have any major problem with ICICI Bank till the day I downloaded the following document from them

http://content.icicidirect.com/mailimages/SpecimenOfFilledUpForm.doc.

Thanks to the corporate antivirus, it immediately warned me that the downloaded file had the HTML/Scoati virus. It was really surprising that you cant even trust the contents from such leading banking institutions. On notifying them about the incident, it was stock reply that I got( maybe it is an automated one, who knows:-)).

And well, i didnt try to see if they had rectified the issue in the file. Here is the reply and that is one heck of a mail

“Dear Mr. Sumesh,

We appreciate your feedback on the functioning of our website. We have forwarded this matter to our technical team for investigation.

ICICI Web Trade’s online trading services through Internet depend inter-alia on various systems, applications, hardware, equipment, network and communication lines, exchange links, satellite links etc. You might even face access problems to our website when your internal networks does not perform adequately.

These would include the browser being used by you, the internet service provider used by you. You might also face access problems through a proxy network.

In a technological environment it is not always possible to predict any sudden malfunctions in processes.

However, to minimize such unforeseen malfunctions we do review and take periodical maintenance activity of our systems, hardware etc. Also, as and when any malfunctions are noticed, we take immediate corrective action and try to restore the services as early as possible to minimize the inconvenience to the customers.

Sincerely,

Accounts Manager
ICICI Bank Limited.
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Dynamic Tooltip with DWR

I have been working on AJAX framework, mainly DWR, for quite sometime. One of the interesting requirements which came through was about a dynamic tooltip. This tooltip is supposed to pull out the attributes of an object from a web-application server and show it to the user in the tooltip and this use case will be triggered from a normal search results page. Sounds cool for the user and in one way, it looks like we can have an optimal solution in terms of retrieving minimal data. Any details the user wants will be pulled out at runtime and shown as a tooltip. The optimal solution is based on how the caching is implemented so that we don’t generate multiple hits for the same object.However, if we dont have built in caching for this, the very implementation can turn out to be a problem in that the user can literally pound the server with calls of repeated nature and returning the same set of data.  Caching on the client side was an option and eventually the whole caching approach had to be abandoned due to the lack of time on the client’s part.

Since the user base is small and we dont anticipate a huge growth in the user base, the decision to abandon the caching mechanism may not be as critical an issue as thought out to be.

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