Religion for me 2

Now when I read about, people fighting eachother for their beliefs, I was surprised. Infact I was depressed. I feared some of my friends and neighbours would be hurt. So I started paying more attention to the differences. The differences were those I never cared for. They were the most superficial ones. I don't know why and how they became so important, so as usual started asking others. The answer, it was told so in the books.

As a student of logic, I found religion unexplicable. The most difficult thing to comprehend was the irrepressible quest to force ones own ideals on others. Then I found that the books actually force certains aspects on individuals. For me, Religion was no longer a way of life, it was a totalitarian structure with helped individuals intrepret things in many ways. It became a abhorence, more like a power structure or political structure. My knowledge of history didn't help here.

My angst was targeted towards the religious symbols. I started to interpret things in a different fashion. Religion was set out as a means of bringing social order to a society. When these isolated societies started to come in contact, they had to fend themselves and religion became a voice and power. God had nothing to do with it. God, wouldn't even care if people worshipped him or not. Religion says that God is the most powerful one and he saves the people. They don't give out compelling reasons why God would do so, what binds God to carry out the obligation and the consequences of not doing so. God wouldn't be hurt by things I do or don't do. Individuals are incapable of causing any harm, are do they? All they are capable of doing is hurt others.

Does God exists? I don't know, frankly I don't even care. I even wonder, what would the believers of respective religions do, if God himself tells them that they need to change their beliefs, they may call it a bluff/fraud and attack. So what do I want to do, I find some aspects of life appealing, like enjoying a nice laugh/conversation. Showing appreciation towards others and caring for others in my own capacity. I wouldnt' want this silly religion thing to interfere in any of these.

Religion for me

I grew up in a family which observed reverence to GOD. I remember the early days when my mom and dad used to take me to holy shrines and asked me to pray, they infact used to prompt me to ask for blessings!! My normal prayer was 'God, give me good conscience, help me with my studies, I will behave myself'. I am not going to spell out the religious order which my family belongs for it defies the purpose of this blog. When I grew up, I used to see people who never had any consideration to the ideals promoted by my family, I also saw people who went throught the strict regimen. As a kid, I once bychance went into a neighbour's house, they belonged to a different religious order, I saw the people over there uttering their prayers and I followed them with my own words - quoted above. I could see the lady of the house smiling in agreement.

One another time, I happened to step into the prayer room of a different neighbours. I used to enjoy the stories told by the elders and asked them if I could have the book of stories. They told me I couldn't and I wouldn't' understand the writing as well. I asked why? They told me it was the holy book and even they wouldn't touch it normally. I didn't feel bad as I remember my mom warning me with the books in our house. (Technically speaking, those were scriptures, but for a 11 year old they are all books!). The best part of all the religions was the festivals we used to have. We could jump of school and enjoy the sweets. My mother never objected! I even used to help our neighbours with the preperations. The same was the case in our school. I used to observe that some of our teachers/students used to take a special eatery. Once I joined the line just to try that. Later my friends asked me when we converted! I said no!! I just wanted to eat what you guys are having.

For me all the stories had the same moral, all my friends and their parents taught the same. Later when I found what others saw as reigion, I was in for a shock. Will continue rest in my next posting...

Global Singletons, Good and Bad

I am just quoting my opinion someone elses article. The actual article can be found at:
singletons-are-pathological-liars


Why is global bad? Yeah, I know what your are thinking, and no, I am not joking. There are certain languages like JS which are quite powerful and yet have limited ability to comeup with walls (modularity).

Global is bad because:
a. It causes namespace conflict
b. It exposes the state in a unwarranted fashion

When it comes to Singletons
a. The explicit OO way of calling them, prevents the conflicts, so point a. is not an issue
b. Singletons without state are (like factories) are not a problem. Singletons with state can again fall in two categories, those which are immutable or write once and read many (config/property files). These are not bad. Mutable Singletons, which are kind of reference holders are the ones which you are speaking of.

Now if they are designed to act as application cache, you may see a lack of adequate cohesion. So what do we do! Using the pathelogical lies analogy, hide the unpleasant details, in private methods or in interfacing Adaptors (IOC). Make sure that these kinds of singletons are restricted to above sections of code and for the rest of application they become person-nongrata. Finally when you test the application, you won’t see the singletons. Not fool proof, but just makes it a wee bit difficult to accidentally modify things.

If we are exposing state of instance to Singletons in any other way, it is a bad OO design.

Quoting Dalai Lama, “Know your rules well, so that you can break them”.

Appreciation and Irony

Today my mail box is bombarded with mails, all showering appreciation for some work I did last week. Am I happy? yes I am guilable. On the other hand, I am still trying to maintain the vulcanistic composure, I have quite a few good reasons too. After the toil of working for 5 years, this is the first time I am put in limelight! The unfortunate part is that, I did quite a few things in the past which would exceed the current 'achievement', if it is the right word. Most often, my peers and superiors would show their admiration, verbally and sincerely. Today it is different. Lets see how.

I am working for a client, who happens to be contractor who manages third party contractor. I am with one of the third party suppliers. There was an issue, which would affect the whole design framework. I wouldn't spell out the issue in the current post, thats not the point anyway. The proposal for that solved the problem without causing any major design changes. So our client and the actual authority were really impressed. This caused a cascade of mails. When you prepare a recipe, or shoot a nice picture, you would like knowledgable people to acknowledge it. People without the intimate understanding of nuances just follow the crowd. When you see someone buying a camera or tv, they go with the brand. These would seldom try new things, no matter how good they are and this has nothing to do with being acquainted with the product.

The cascade caused the senior management of our company, just jumped the bandwagon. Now, I know some really good tasks carried out by some of our team, I personally did some stuff which overshawdows the current task. The chance of not being able to give a solution was alway lurking around. The difference was, in the exposure I recieved this time. Thinking of all those old times, I just wonder at the ways persistance pays, when you least expect it. This political embargo I am carrying with me probably will get some mileage during my review meetings, but the baggage of my team members staring at me like they used to do when you top your class or play that crucial shot in a field game, is unwarranted.

I just get a feeling that things are overdone in real world, and have to remind myself that even olympians are forgotten

Lost world

Typical applications of ANTLR would be in parsing domain. My first interaction with ANTLR was for a data generation application. We had this system which consume huge xml streams. The schema types were defined via xsi and testing the code for all conditions was inhumane! Even coming up with data for functional flows was painful. So the solution was to comeup with a template of the xml (using schema) and another template for possible datatypes. Parse the template, create a inmemory tree and walk the tree several times (using custom java code). We picked up a random domain value for substitution for each walk and ended up having a comprehensive data sets. There were certain correlation problems though and it was a different story.

I am writing this as I became a bit nostalgic seeing http://blog.centuryminds.com/2008/09/antlr-tutorial-dependency-injection-language/. Err when was the last time I learned something new!?

Working with non-semantic elements

Most often, when a web page is putforth for review, the reviewers look for typical 'classitis', 'divitis' problems. Use of pseudo selectors needs more in depth inspection. Use of non-semantic entities are most often frowned upon. Infact the foremost guiding principle for a good html page, is to leverage the page content for styles (and not styles for content). Atleast that was what I thought of till date.

Recently when coding for a tricky piece of java script behaviour. I happened to come up with a simple solution that violated the guiding principles. The exact problem is irrelavent, but just to satisfy the curiosity, it has something to do with footer behaviour which varies with the page content. The crux of the solution was to rely on certain invariants on screen (images in this case) and position/scale/stretch my footer. What appealed the most was the idea of introducing non-obtrusive style invaraints at a template level and use them as guides to setup the behaviour rest of the page.

How about having an 'gif' border around the content or a absolute/fixed positioned images? Most of the time there may be some, if they don't why not introduce an element of transparent gif (not for spacing purpose). The intention is to simplify the javascript part, especially computing offsets and widths becomes a lot more easier. Just to clarify, this idea/pattern suits only code relevant to behavioural aspects. (The presentational aspects should be in CSS alone).

The next time, someone asks me to align textboxes or labels (from a behavioural point), I will definitely consider this approach.

Google Chrome and abberations

Chromes on the face of it looks great! Today while trying out the POC for a problem we ran into, I encountered this wierd fact. Chrome is still in beta phase, and there is a long learning line anyway.

My guess: I can only say that, !important rules are ignored on stylesheets linked using js.(no speculations!)

Without much fuss, some code snippet. Sorry for not being able to host this on a site

The html block

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!-- 
    Document   : longdiv
    Created on : 06-Sep-2008, 09:59:00
    Author     : kanthi swaroop
        
    !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
-->
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
    <head>
        <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"/>
        <title>TODO supply a title</title>        
        <link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="../css/demo.css"/>
        <script src="../js/adjustLayout.js">            
        </script>
    </head>
    <body>
        <div id="header">
            Some space
        </div>
        <div class="outer">
            <div class="left">
                <span id="long">
                    longtext____longtext____longtext____longtext____longtext____longtext____longtext____longtext____longtext____longtext____longtext____
                </span>
                <span id="short">
                    The plain stuff
                </span>
            </div>
            
            <div class="right">                
                DON'T__BLOCH__ME____DON'T__BLOCH__ME____DON'T__BLOCH__ME____DON'T__BLOCH__ME
            </div>
        </div>        
    </body>        
</html>

There are two files, demo.css and override.css, using js we attempt try to include the override.css when necessary. override.css applies only to standard compliant browsers.

demo.css

/* 
Document   : demo
Created on : 06-Sep-2008, 10:06:20
Author     : kanthi swaroop
Description:
This stylesheet is supposed to be overridden in special cases via java script.
*/

* {
    margin : 0;
    padding : 0;    
    color : #000000;
}

/*

#long{
display:none;
}

#short{
display:block;
}

/*
*/
#long{
    display:block;
}

#short{
    display:none;
}

root, div { 
    display: block;
    border : 1px solid #000000;    
}

body {
    font-size: 62.5%;
    font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;    
    height: 100%;
    background-color: #9999ff;        
}

div, span {    
  font-size: 110%;
}

span {
    background-color:orange;
    display: inline;
}

body, .outer{
    margin: 0 auto;
    width: 1024px;
}

.outer {
    position: absolute;
    height:100%;
    overflow:auto;
    background-color: #999999;
}

.left {
    float: left;
}

.right {
    float: right;
}

.left, .right  {    
    /*height: 10em;
    */
    height: auto;
    width: 49%;
}

override.css

/* 
    Document   : override
    Created on : 06-Sep-2008, 11:12:35
    Author     : kanthi swaroop
    Description:
        The following are to be overriden only for standard compliant browsers.
        I know, I am using !important.
*/


.left, .right {
    width:100% !important; 
    clear: both !important;
    
    _width:49%;
    _clear: none;
    
}

Java script

Some java script.

/* 
 The script part
Author: kanthi swaroop
 */
window.onload = function adjust(aEvent){
    aEvent = aEvent || window.event;
    var newLink = document.createElement("link");
    newLink.href = "../css/override.css";
    newLink.rel = "stylesheet";
    newLink.type = "text/css";
    
    var hasChildren = document.body.hasChildNodes();
    if(hasChildren) {
        document.body.insertBefore(newLink, document.body.firstChild);
    }
    else {
        document.body.appendChild(newLink);
    }
    alert("Bye");
};