I have had the experience of desktop development, delivered applications as a JAR to clients, but still one thing that I would love to have is “Installer for Java Desktop Application”. Yes I found lots of them, among them Izpack along with launch4J is a wonderful combination. NSIS, JSmooth, EXEWrapper and all others are wonderful on their own but they all have a high learning curve. For understanding NSIS, one need to understand the NSIS’s style of scripts and for Izpack you need to know it’s XML structure and compilation issues. Despite the availability of the Installers and all being open source I am not comfortable with those installers. Is it because they have a some learning curve or Is it because the installers like things should have been provided by the language itself. Offcourse if I will be needing one, I should design one but question on my mind (Like the one facebook asks me everytime ) is shouldn’t Oracle (previously SUN) have provided these things by default. What I found is beginners are having hell lots of problems with that. There are no good tutorials/blogs and official posts for any Installer related things from the company on it’s own. Why is that? In my opinion, introducing those things and having good articles/tutorials on these things would lure the beginners into Java world. These are the things that are not very convincing and because of these difficulties, many adapt the other. Why would a beginner trouble himself moving into Java if s/he can get easily with Visual Studio  (Though there is Netbeans a java alternative for Visual Studio, I am a big fan of it ever since it’s 4.0 release) for example.

I wonder how Java/JavaSE7 installer itself is created. If you have the answer to this please write it in comments, I would love to see it. In my opinion, in an installer, basically there should be basic things like

• Serial Key Generation technique for unique installation.
• Prevention to the application if it’s copied to another device (it should be done by the application itself).
• Providing Demo version for lets say we can open 50 times the application for Demo purpose, after reaching this, we should ask the serial key and continue with full feature.
• Embedded DB installation, for making commercial application.
• And the validation for the user inputs during installation.

in an installer.

Netbeans Platform a very powerful rich client platform for JavaSE based on swing is a cool thing. I am going through it, but even though, it creates installers, there seems no tutorials/blogs for creating custom installer through Netbeans Platform 7.1.  I would love to see this article if there are any (If you know, please share). Will let you know if I found any special during my research and study by utilizing my free time. Thank you for now.

Links for learning Netbeans Platform
———————————————-

http://mrtextminer.wordpress.com/2011/05/22/crud-netbeans-platform-application-with-embedded-javadb/

http://extremejava.tpk.com.br/2009/03/27/netbeans-platform-jpa-derby-embedded/

http://netbeans.dzone.com/including-jre-in-nbi

http://blogs.oracle.com/geertjan/entry/customizing_the_netbeans_platform_installer

http://platform.netbeans.org/tutorials/nbm-crud.html

http://nb-platform.blogspot.com/

http://blogs.oracle.com/geertjan/entry/debugging_the_netbeans_platform

http://blogs.oracle.com/geertjan/entry/embedded_database_for_netbeans_platform

http://netbeans.dzone.com/10-tips-4-porting-2-netbeans

http://developmentality.wordpress.com/2010/04/01/netbeans-platform-lessons-learnedgotchas-part-1/

http://wiki.netbeans.org/NetBeansDeveloperFAQ

http://blogs.oracle.com/geertjan/entry/how_to_create_an_action

Please feel free to share other links if possible.

Tax rates for resident individuals
Income (Rs.)                 Tax Rate
0 – 160,000                         1%
160,001 – 260,000          15% (+ Rs. 1,600)
Above Rs. 260,000          25% (+ Rs. 16,600)

Tax rates for Married (including widow & widower)
Income (Rs.)                 Tax Rate
0 – 200,000                    1%
200,001 – 300,000          15% (+ Rs. 2,000)
Above Rs. 300,000          25% (+ Rs. 17,000)

Tax rates for Proprietorship Firm – single
Income (Rs.)                 Tax Rate
0 – 160,000                         0%
160,001 – 260,000          15%
Above Rs. 260,000          25% (20% for Export Income and Income from Special Industry) + Rs. 15,000

Tax rates for Proprietorship Firm – married
Income (Rs.)                 Tax Rate
0 – 200,000                          0%
200,001 – 300,000          15%
Above Rs. 300,000          25% (20% for Export Income and Income from Special Industry) + Rs. 15,000

Having only Business Income with Annual Turnover up to Rs 20 Lacs and Annual Income up to Rs. 2 Lacs
- In the Metropolitan or Sub Metropolitan Cities Rs. 5000
- In the Municipalities Rs. 2500
- In the rest of Nepal Rs. 1500

For further details: http://www.taxrates.cc/html/nepal-tax-rates.html

Google plus has minimized the level of distraction so well, we can even comment on the notification area, that’s a wonderful feature for me as I often get distracted easily moving on different page. Google+ has a video chat feature, known as hangouts, in which up to ten people can be included in a video call. With a G+ account, you get unlimited photo storage on Picasa, instead of the 1GB storage you get without a G+ account. Unlike Facebook, there are no advertisements displayed over Google’s social network site, making the load time faster and overall keeping Google+ users from getting confused.

All these features and the entry of Google plus in the social networking area, suddenly makes the feature of facebook looks vulnerable. We all have lots and lots of friends added to facebook already, you may want to remove unwanted friends or just remove the one you have not met. Doing the manual task of removing the friends over a long list is really a waste of time. For this google+ might be a social reboot as well.

In conclusion I have a +1 for google plus, though I will be using facebook in parallel for some definite period of time. For now it’s still under invitation based signup, but it is said that within a month it’s going public without invitation. You may try it out on the direct link https://plus.google.com.

Though i have been handling error/exceptions on JAVA for about 5 years now from the day i started “Hello World!!!”, I never knew that there is a limit in JAVA for size of the method. And I never  got into a situation like “Code too large to compile” which is not a simple message rather its a compilation error in Java when you exceed the size limit of the method. Glad to read the link , it added more on my knowledge in Java.

Java has a 64k limit on the size of methods.

I bet this is the least faced error/exception by any Java programmer. But though we face it or not IMHO this is a good point that Java put limit on the size of the method because if a single method would go beyond 64K limit then there would be minimal difference between a procedural and OO language and hence hard to maintain. Methods need to be very specific and solving only some dedicated tasks and you can imagine when it’s size goes beyond 64K, it goes towards generic concept. It’s my opinion but if you want to add your opinion then you are most welcome.

Silly squeeze ball gifts, a free lunch on a sunny afternoon or allowing someone to leave early on a Friday isn’t going to keep the team motivated. Such gestures create goodwill and are important for maintaining a positive workplace environment. But keeping developers eager and excited about programming takes a little more than that. Here are five things you should think about doing:

1. Give your developers the resources they need.

If you’re paying your developers $100,000 salaries, why let them develop on machines that have 486 microprocessors in them? You can get a quad-core computer with four gigs of RAM in it for about four hundred bucks these days. Every developer complains that their software is slow, but they’ll be much more forgiving of a slow environment if they know their getting supported on the hardware side.

2. Recognize a job well done
Praise works wonders. Ego is an underestimated motivating factor. When milestones are hit and users are happy with the latest increment, recognize the work of the development team and make that recognition public so everyone knows who is responsible for the success.

3. Get rid of dead wood
When someone on the team is not producing, you have to get rid of them. On a long project, the determining factor of how fast a team can produce code is usually dictated by the person that is producing the least. Do not let a slacker determine where the low-water mark is in terms of production.

4. Push for new software releases
Programmers want to be developing in Java 7, not a seven year old version of Java. Knowing that they are using the latest technology is often motivation in itself for developers to stay late, learn something new, and apply new knowledge. Working on old software versions makes developers feel like they are getting rusty. Risk aversion always makes management reluctant to move to the newest release, but at the very least, a development team should know that the project manager is fighting to get the latest and greatest tools and technologies into the mix.

5. Let developers develop
Communicate, but don’t over communicate. Too often project managers who are insecure about their capabilities schedule too many meetings in an effort to “keep on top of things.” Eight developers in a room for an hour talking about nothing in particular is a full man-day of production lost. Communication is important, but over-communicating is wasteful. Schedule those meetings sparingly.

If you want to bring your projects in on time, you need to keep your developers motivated and enthusiastic about what they’re doing. These five tips will help you keep your team engaged, and help you to bring those tough and challenging projects in on time.

Source: http://www.theserverside.com/tip/Five-ways-to-motivate-your-development-team

It’s important to set boundaries, if needed. People will respect your schedule, only if you respect it first.

Chances are that on that very same day, you spent well over an hour browsing eBay, watching TV, looking at Facebook, checking your online bank account, or organizing your medicine cabinet. Busy work doesn’t accomplish anything and won’t recharge your batteries. So take your dog for a hike, take an actual lunch, or do whatever you enjoy. You’ll not only end up being happier, but more productive as well.

Source: http://mashable.com/2011/05/26/work-from-home-productivity/

import java.security.*;

public class MD5
{
public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception
{

String password=  md5("useThisAsASalt" + args[0]);
System.out.println(password);
}

public static String md5(String str) throws Exception
{
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
for (byte b : md5(str.getBytes()))
sb.append(Integer.toHexString(0x100 + (b & 0xff)).substring(1));
return sb.toString();
}

public static byte[] md5(byte[] data) throws Exception
{
//MessageDigest md5 = MessageDigest.getInstance("MD5");
//md5.update(data);
//return md5.digest();
MessageDigest sha = MessageDigest.getInstance("SHA");
sha.update(data);
return sha.digest();

}
}

In the above code, i have also used the concept of salt (i saw it being implemented in spring-security). The concept of salt is to reduce password guessing as we will be having hard-coded string appended with the password, which reduces the chances of password guessing.

Hope this helps you in doing some encoding in Java for passwords.

Keep up the good works!!!!!.

Last week I was meandering around my locality, to the places that I had never been. I was trying to expose myself to the positive randomness and take advantage of it. To my surprise, I found the first day very exciting as I came up with a thought that left me to think and research more on it. I am not sure how many of you might have realized that when we try to solve our problem we get stuck on it. We hardly come up with the solutions that make us feel proud. While on the other hand when someone else has got a problem and asks us for a help we quickly find out solutions and surprisingly those ideas are far better than what we could have imagined. Why is it so?

Is it because we don’t take much concern about ourselves as much as we do to others? OR Is it because we get more freedom to think and find solutions for others comparative to ourselves? OR Is it because we perform better when we try to impress someone else who matters to us? OR Is it just a psychological phenomenon that I was unaware of?
When we are better to solve someone else problem, shouldn’t we think about solving our problem in the same manner? After much thought on it, I came up with these strategies which might be helpful for you too.

1. Share your problem with your tribe rather than wasting your time thinking on it. You will realize that a problem shared is problem half solved. When someone else can come up with better solutions and within a short span of time why waste your time thinking over it? (Think but don’t overdo it).

2. What if your tribe can’t help and you are the only one who is bound to find out the solution within a given deadline? Don’t worry there is a way. Try doing that particular task as if you were doing for your loved ones or someone who matters you a lot. I have realized this many times that when I am doing her assignment my focus is too sharp and the solutions are far better than I could imagine. It won’t be as easy as said. In the beginning you will struggle to set up this mind frame and solve the problem but with practice you will start enjoying it.

Bonus Tips: Personally I think about the problem while taking my shower or while I am cooking or washing my dishes. I quickly jot down those random but helpful ideas on my sticky pad or notepad for the future purposes.

Now it’s your turn. What do you do to get your problem solved? Do you have a different but better approach? Please share so that we could give it a try. Remember: Sharing is caring…..