My family

It pretty much sucks to live away from family. Ayman just recently went back home to abu dhabi, to my family. Abu dhabi's changed a lot, people who have lived here, will notice that corniche's changed a lot. The pictures below were taken in corniche. Right here is my tasmia in a red-saree ----->

They removed the volcano-shaped fountain, demolished it completely. And a new huge-ass man made island was built across the fountain, right beside break-water.

It doesnt make sense to me, why these people have been investing so much time and money building, man-made islands. Honestly, lot of the land in abu dhabi is still unoccupied. But its a great engineering feat, what can i say. The island's huge. It spans atleast 4-5 kilometers.

Ayman's chilling these days, i missed out on all that football. He's been setting up a lot of football games lately, and boy i loved playing those football games.

Hyde park, London

Azalia and me set out some time ago to see the sights and sounds of London. We tried taking a few pictures. This ones right outside the Marble arch station. You have the Hyde park on your left, and down to Oxford street on your right.

Sent my pictures out to babsie .. she loves it. Cant figure out why. She has this picture up on her desktop at work.

Had the scariest moment ever, while i was checking out Google Earth. For Google, sky is the limit. Check out Google Earth. Believe it or not, I was actually able to spot my dad's car parked infront of our house in Abu dhabi. The satellite images of abu dhabi came out really clear. This time of the year, there are literally no clouds in the skies of Abu dhabi. Images of London were a bit blurry. We had thunder showers today, so that explains it. I also checked out the University of Toronto at scarborough. Doesnt look like it has changed much from the satellite view.

Distinction in my M.Sc taught part

University of London published all their MSc results today for the taught part (course modules). Prolly one of the happiest day of my life. I was the first to go and get the transcript .. went to the department at 10 in the morning. Carly, the assistant, hadnt even taken the results out from Gill when I asked for them. At the first instance, I thought I landed with just a pass .. only later to find out a small tiny star that meant distinction.

Mata, the greek goddess, got 70.6%, 0.3% less than me. Zhen, the guy frm u. waterloo, got 70.1%. Till now I dont know anyone yet who got more than me .. waiting to find out Marcei's grades. My only good friend, Azalia, passed. But i wish she had done better. We studied together. I was never so much into studying ..and this group studying thing worked out really well. I would spend most of my time trying to explain things to Azalia, and it helped me a lot. That way .. as I explained her things, I understood better.

Got to do good in my dissertation now. Have got really big dreams to fulfil. Dont want to be a mediocre, want to be the best.

How to ease Java web development

Sometimes it can be a tough ride, when you are *starting* to work with java's web development tools - servlets and JSPs. You have to have very good configuration skills, and you must have prior knowledge of XML - two things i felt, helped me configure my JCreator IDE to compile java web apps, and to integrate it with Tomcat.

Web development using JSP/Servlets can be a rewarding experience. Once you are in total control, you will start thanking James Gosling and all those java language architects for coming up with such a beautiful architecture. These days i am reading Head First: Servlets & JSP to write the SCWCD exams. This book uses a very unconventional style in presenting the material. Its like a comic book, I would recommend it to all those people out there who hate reading books, and need to read a book on JSPs and servlets. It will keep you hooked up as long as you can even imagine. I feel like reading it, even when i dont feel like doing anything.

Going back to servlets/JSP, its really important to integrate your IDE with your web-server when you are developing java web applications. It saves you a lot of time. It would be too cumbersome to re-compile, package into a WAR, and redeploy everytime. Thanks to the ANT tool. The ANT tool is an all-purpose java building tool. The Apache ant project maintains the ANT tool, and it can be downloaded freely from their site.

The ANT tool is much like the make tool. However, it claims to be platform-independent, letting you build your application across different platforms. But, lets not get into all that; the good thing about JCreator IDE is that it can be integrated with the ANT tool to help re-compile, package and redeploy a web application all with the click of a button!

The steps in doing the integration are as follows:
- Download Jakarta ANT
- copy the /server/catalina-ant.jar file from your tomcat-home folder, to the /lib folder of your ANT installation
- Bring out the ANT tool window in JCreator using views -> other windows -> ANT tool
- configure the build.xml file to set the correct tomcat manager user/password and URL of the admin page, in order to allow ANT to redeploy. Unable to do this properly, will cause a net connection exception.
- You are all set to compile, install (ANT tool options) your web application

What you didnt have to do:
- Set all the library paths for the servlets to compile, and run (servlet.jar, webserver.jar).
- re-compile, re-package into WAR and redeploy everytime you modify your code. phew!

My grandfather still lives in google

Tofail ahmed, my grandfather and honorary fellow of Bangla academy. He was the greatest collector and writer of Bangla folk art. A few months ago, to my amazement, I tried to search his name on google, and the first search result pointed to his profile's entry in Bangladesh's encyclopedia - banglapedia! Type: tofail ahmed on google.

Heres the banglapedia page: click here

I'm so proud of him. He passed away in 2002, but continues to live in books and google!

God bless C++ newbies

The C++ compiler, especially cl.exe that ships with visual c++ 6.0 can give you errors that are just plain wierd. For example, if you were writing a header file called "bangMyHeadOnWall.h":

class A {
/* class body */
} <----- notice that you have forgotten to put a semi-colon. and then in your .cpp file, or in another .h file, you did this:

#include "bangMyHeadOnWall.h"

You will get the most strangest errors you've ever seen, actually errors on code that the compiler didnt complain about before.

Well even, the language syntax could give you a lot of pain, especially if you have learned your basics in Java - which is the way most CS students are taught these days. Here's some painful coding that you might have to do to dynamically allocate memory for a 2-dimensional array:

In Java: (o boy .. i miss java)
a = new int[3][4];

.. and here goes the c++ syntax:
int a**;
a = new int*[3];
for (int i=0;i<3;i++)
{
a[i] = new int[4];
}

However, C++ becomes more like Java when you want to allocate memory for a 2-dimensional array at compile time (You can get away with the subscript operators [][]) . But sadly, how often do powerful programs use statically allocated arrays!