Planet Search

I have started posting about lucene, solr, minion and other search library on http://planetsearch.wordpress.com. This PlanetSearch blog will give you information. about search libraries and other important information concerned with them Please feel free to send me your inputs about lucene, solr, minion or anything which you feel would improve the blog.
Right now the blog may not contain much of articles or information but I will update it once I get bit free from my office work probably on next Saturday or Sunday.

Call for volunteers by Karnataka Election Watch 2009

The Elections to the 15th Loksabha are right round the corner and politicians have started filing their nominations. We complain about bad roads, corruption and criminalization of politics; Here is your chance to do your bit to fight against crime and money power in politics.

NEW is a nationwide campaign comprising of more than 1200 NGO and other citizen led organizations working on electoral reforms, improving democracy and governance in India.

National Election Watch is active in almost all states of India and has done election watches for all states and Lok Sabha elections since ADR (www.adrindia.org), along with couple other organizations, won the PIL in Supreme Court in 2002 to making disclosure of educational, financial and criminal background of electoral candidates mandatory.

For the upcoming lok sabha elections, NEW at Karnataka needs volunteers for the following activities:

1. Transcribing the affidavits filed by candidates in Karnataka and analyzing the contents of the affidavits.
Skills needed: Kannada reading, Basic Computer Skills for entering the data in English onto our reporting portal.
Timings: 9:00 am to 8:00 pm, in 4 hour slots

2. Preparing and managing press releases in English and Kannada
Skills needed: Writing skills Kannada or English
Timings: 9:00 am to 8:00 pm, in 4 hour slots

3. Answering calls on a help-line. Answer questions coming from various parts of Karnataka on candidates based on the affidavits filed by them.
Skills needed: Spoken Kannada and English
Timings: 9:00 am to 6:00 pm, in 4 hour slots

The Karnataka election watch process will begin on April 2nd and will continue till April 23rd.

Kindly get in touch with Sridhar at 9916298421 or Sindhu at 9900191517 for further details or clarifications .

Our office is located at
Hundredhands
9/2 Madras Bank Road
(Behind India Garage on St. Marks Road)
Bangalore 01
(Directions at the bottom of this mail)

Warm Regards,
Sridhar
For National Election Watch- Karnataka

Directions

From Residency Road: Take a left after Josephs Science College coming up towards St. Marks Road. After you pass Museum Road on the right. You will see Shankar Book Store and soon after that, there is a mud road with lot of sign boards on the outside. Get into that road and look for Small wonder Play School. We are in the same compound on the ground floor.

From M.G Road. Take a left on Museum Road. Come all the way down till you hit a T junction and you have to turn right. Look for Shankar Book Shop and follow same directions as above.

Please call hundred hands land line 25593606 for any more additional directions.

OOPHM with GWT 1.6 Trunk

With the wiki article on the gwt project I thought it is nice time to write what are the advantages and of GWT OOPHM.

Here is experience of any young developer.

1)      The Firefox plugin has some problem on windows. When I started my Hosted mode it threw a dialog box displaying message that OOPHM plugin (blah blah) not found though I have installed the plugin from the location pointed by wiki.

2)      As I had the plugin available I installed the plugin from my built. (I just searched for *.xpi) I installed both the *.xpi file.

3)      I installed IE plugin using the procedure described and it threw the following diaglog.

4) When I started debugging I could see the Hosted mode now supports Jetty. Below is the image of the same.

5) In firefox it worked fine. But in IE I was getting some problem. In short I was not able to get the desired application running in IE.

Good Things about OOPHM

1. It is very light weight and works fantastic.

2. Supports IE, Firefox on windows (I have not checked how install plugin for Safari.

Some Things which we expect soon

1. Compile button enabled

2. Should support Chrome (Fastest Browser), Safari on Windows and Opera.

3. The annoying message in Firefox about plugin not found should be removed.

4. IE plugin and other issues on IE to be fixed.

My wish list for Google IO

Google IO is due in two months. As it is one of the best developer event and Google comes up with latest releases of tools and new tools I am expecting following tool releases this time.

1. Proper Chrome Build for Linux
2. GWT 1.6
3. Out of Process Hosted Mode Debugging (GWT)
4. Google App Engine programming using Java

What would you like to have?

Building GWT OOPHM from Source

Checking out GWT Source code from the SVN

1. Check out OOPHM Code from http://google-web-toolkit.googlecode.com/svn/branches/oophm/ into d:/oophm
(Use SVN http://www.collab.net/downloads/subversion/)
2. Check out GWT tools from http://google-web-toolkit.googlecode.com/svn/tools/ into D:/gwt_tools
3. Download Ant if you don’t have it. http://apache.hoxt.com/ant/binaries/apache-ant-1.7.1-bin.zip and unzip it into d:/ant folder


Note: GWT Tools is a big project. If you already have it because you have built GWT project from SVN then use the same.

Setting Path

1. Create user’s variable and Name as GWT_TOOLS and Variable value as D:/gwt_tools
Optional depending upon if you have already configured the ANT on your machine.

2. Edit Environment Variables. In System Variable append;D:\ant\apache-ant-1.7.1\bin; to your PATH variable.
3. Create user’s variable and Name as ANT_HOME and Variable value as D:\ant\apache-ant-1.7.1

Building GWT OOPHM

1. Change directory to build tools by typing ‘cd d:/oophm’ on Command prompt
2. Type ant on command prompt. (D:\tools\oophm\oophm1\plugins\xpcom\prebuilt)
3. In d:/oophm/build/staging the complete gwt build is available. Please note the plugin folder contains the Firefox and IE plugin. There is plugin in D:/oophm/plugin/xpcom/prebuilt/ oophm-xpcom.xpi.
4. You need to install the appropriate plugins to the browsers.
5. If you are using Firefox as default browser then just drop oophm-xpcom.xpi in it and it will install the plugin for firefox.
6. Include gwt-dev.jar in classpath and remove previous gwt-dev-XXX.jar.
7. Start debugging the project as usually you use to do. You will see different shell which popsup. It will try to open firefox or the default browser with the URL which gets printed in bottom Console. (In my case the firefox could not open by default. So I copied the URL in the browser navigation text bar and it worked).
8. You can now debug your application and get all the advantages.

Advantages of Out of Process Hosted Mode Debugging

1. The Debugging is fast.
2. You can use browser of your choice for example Firefox, IE and the you can choose any version of the browser.

Disadvantages

1. As of now the compilation does not work from Hosted Mode Shell.

Building GWT from Source

Checking out GWT Source code from the SVN

1. Check out GWT Code from http://google-web-toolkit.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ into d:/gwt
   

2. Check out GWT tools from http://google-web-toolkit.googlecode.com/svn/tools/
   into D:/gwt_tools
   


3. Download Ant if you don’t have it. http://apache.hoxt.com/ant/binaries/apache-ant-1.7.1-bin.zip and unzip it into d:/ant folder.
   

Note: GWT Tools is a big project

Setting Path

1. Create user’s variable and Name as GWT_TOOLS and Variable value as D:/gwt_tools
   

Optional depending upon if you have already configured the ANT on your machine.

2. Edit Environment Variables. In System Variable append;D:\ant\apache-ant-1.7.1\bin; to your PATH variable.


3. Create user’s variable and Name as ANT_HOME and Variable value as D:\ant\apache-ant-1.7.1
   

Verify whether ant is set up properly by typing ant on command prompt.

Building GWT

1. Change directory to build tools by
   typing ‘cd d:/gwt/build-tools’
   on Command prompt


2. Type ant on command prompt.
   


1. Three Jar files will be created in d:/gwt/build/lib
   

i. ant-gwt.jar
ii. ant-customchecks.jar
iii. gwt-doctool.jar

3. cd d:/gwt/dev


4. Type ant on command prompt
   
1. gwt-dev-XXX.jar file for respective, linux, mac and windows are
   created in d:/gwt/build/lib

XXX stands for the OS

2. Another jar is created name gwt-dev-oophm.jar. This is the Out of Process Hosted
   Mode debugging.
   

5. Type cd d:/gwt/users and build using ant
   
1. gwt-user.jar
   

6. Type cd d:/gwt/servlet and build using ant
   
1. gwt-servlet.jar is created
   

You can use GWT Latest build and experiment on coolest features of

Google Chrome

Google decision to come up with its own browser was definitely expected but I had not thought it would have been so soon. One of my friend who works in Google had informed me during a conversation in February 2008 that Google is going to come up with its own browser. But I had not taken it so seriously because release of Firefox 3.0 made me think that Google is going to contribute towards improvement of Firefox browser. Firefox is my favorite browser and I still vote for Firefox because it is not trying to dominate the Internet as Microsoft was doing and Google is trying the same.

Having Google Gear integrated with the browser and other cool stuff like history of recent site visited is definitely are added feature of Google Chrome but when you consider this with Mozilla Ubiquity or number of other great plugins, Google Chrome doesn't fit the picture.

Google also disheartened Linux user by not releasing Google Chrome for Linux. Whether Firefox will survive its market share or not is different issue but the greater issue is one more Browser War will start. Microsoft IE 8, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome who will win the battle is a question which is difficult to answer. Definitely IE 8 will be out of picture in few day. The other two big guns probably will have equal market share in near future.