You may be confused as why I am posting about the feature which is covered by so many posts/articles/documentation. Though there are many sites which does this job, I found one or the other configuration aspect is missing from either of the site. I personally followed many articles and could never able to get the context help worked. I had to visit many sites and understand what are all combined configuration aspects are required to get it done. This provoked a thought to put all those things together. Here we go
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I am lost
Long time, no see. Nothing came from my side, for a long time. Hmm, thats bit scary and even made me think, as what I am doing? I am bit lost these days, lost in the plethora of information, reading lot of books on topics ranging from Javasript, Java, .Net, performance, coding best practices etc. (list will not end and the backlog is still increasing). The sad part is I am not able to use my knowledge at my workplace and mostly it is fact that I must accept I am working in a country where management is more of value than hard-core technical skills (hmm god knows, I can tell you from my experience).
Hmm, anyways thats the long boring story and I will keep aside daily nuisance. A piece of advice never accept every task assigned to you, specially if its people management and you are hardcore techie (by the word hardcore, I mean different level of knowledge. Just being able to code bunch of classes doesn’t mean…), it sucks your energy for wrong stuffs. Working on every non-technical (i think thats more formal word than using something hardcore) stuffs and busy in solving kindergarten problems. May be it’s my own inability that I didn’t put enough efforts to come out of comfort zone and search for a good opportunity which will give me an option to exploit the real skill in me.
Additionaly, over last few months, I have seen a trend of people telling me pridely in an interview that they know Dependency injection and inversion of control and blah blah. and I was mostly zapped to see, that they dont even understand why to design abstract classes and interfaces (guys dont give me bookish answers). And being able to declare getters/setters with bunch of XML configuration can give someone crazy laugh, so please at least stop using these words as if you know some magic. The engineers coming out of software factory (definately not all, but majority of them yes) are too diluted and I think it is the major reason why we dont have quality softwares (I will not comment more on that – already burning my hands, goto para 1 and you will find answer). Most of the people, I see/interact on daily basis, dont even know what is usability. I am bit confused, are they really serious or is it really their incompetency? In real world when there are so many softwares we interact on daily basis, why cant we take ideas from that. I can understand that the right part of the brain may not be activated for everyone to create something new, but why can’t use the ideas and creation, one has already made open. Eclipse, Microsoft products, android, Windows mobile os, editors and so many open source/freeware softwares that we use on daily basis, why cant we learn something from it and apply it in the work that we do? Hmm, its a riddle I am trying to solve, but sorry no answer.
It might sound there is too much of rage coming out of my words (and may be like I am thinking myself as expert or something – definately I am not, as I am still learner), but thats the fact after spending hours in reading and improving knowledge (sometimes even ignoring the people who matter most), if one asks you to be a ring master and tame someone. And finally that someone is not lion, but a crazy person coming up always with excuses as how they are busy more than a president, that they can’t spend time on improving knowledge but quite happy to interrupt someone many times a day for their inabilities.
Well, on a positive note, there are lot of good things (not because of my daily job) I came across ranging from Free PDF books on technical side, lot of good articles that helped me to think what should be my next topic to explore. Here goes my treasure for you
www.infoq.com – Fantastic site to follow whats happenning in technology world, plenty of videos from expert gurus, healty discussion on various articles. Must must must for daily dose, spend at least 15 mins and you will get energized.
www.readwriteweb.com – If technology is not the only thing which drives you crazy but want to understand how stakeholders also get affected, what strategy is being planned for new product, how people react to new launches and other stuff. Get on this site.
www.theregister.co.uk – I will leave this to you, an interesting one. This site gets instantly updated and reveals lot of things.
www.dzone.com – Subscribe to refcards, they are like cheatsheets for quick reference.
Stackoverflow and its sibling sites – Fantastic to discuss on range technical/sci-fi and lots of other stuffs.
And here goes the final rasen shuriken (oops that the word from naruto shippuden, sorry aliens if you dont understand) – http://www.noop.nl/2013/08/top-100-agile-books-edition-2013.html (Search for 2012, 2011 series) – Lot of books on agile and fantastic collection – I am yet to explore all of them.
www.highscalability.com – Real life architectures and how it matters
Well thats not everything, I am getting crazy about embedded stuffs and playing with hardware [I am close to frying up my pc soon - thats right overclocking with liquid cooling 
]. I must find stuffs that can keep me going, at least till I don’t find … you know what I mean. 
Nodejs and custom modules on windows
It has been a long time, I was planning to hit on Node.js, but I got stuck with other topics and somehow it slipped my mind. Few days back, I thought to give it a try and check what Node.js offers. I like the idea of using JavaScript to write code for Node.js (After all thats my first programming language and the most fav. language ).
The first baby step with “Hello World” and writing your own web server, made me comfortable and I realised its so much of fun to write code for nodejs as you have to just learn the APIs and start modularizing them. As soon as I started making the progress, I found an example making use of Node.js’s custom module “connect”.
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Books that help to write better code
I have been reading lot of books on various frameworks and technologies from my college days. I am always fascinated by new technologies and frameworks that help to ease developer’s life by writing less and manageable code. While all these years, I was spending too much time on reading syntaxes and APIs exposed by various languages and frameworks, from last 2 months, things have taken different turn. I put too much emphasis on using design patterns, but I was introduced to quite a few good books by my seniors and I was really surprised, the way these books have changed my thoughtprocess. No, I dont mean stop using design patterns or blah blah… but before start using all those geeky words like scalability, design patterns and other stuffs, you need to first learn to write clean code. Yes! here are some of the best books, I have been reading.
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Firefox 22 Installer – usability
It was just like a regular day and I was going through few sites, suddenly I felt to checkout if there is any new version of Firefox has came up (I check bi-weekly). And yeah, there was new version available. As usual, I tried to upgrade using the Help > About firefox menu and it showed that there is new version is availble. While usually it updates the firefox without doing much and just by opening About box, but this time it failed. So to get the latest version, I tried to download it manually. Hmm… and then I was bit shocked by the installer.
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Is it wise to use unsafe – Hidden secret of Java
I have been visiting quite a few sites and going through few forums, when I stumbled upon an article talking about the hidden weapon of Java, not made publicly known due to some reasons. But it is claimed that many of the Java internals and third party softwares do use this API to gain monstrous power.
While we have learned from academic days that heap space is home for Java objects, it is a place where the objects come to life and die. JVM with its GC algorithm makes the kill and creates space for new objects. While in the process of moving objects from various places (eden, young generator etc), it sometimes may bring down the application performance to its knees and can prove costly affair.
Whlie GC has been seen as life savior for people who dont want to worry about memory management, it also imposed restriction in terms of no control over deciding fate of the object as when it will get garbage collected. While this may not sound so serious problem as people end up allocating higher heap space for JVM (without realising the fact that it is actually hampering performance), some felt it bit uncomfortable (geeks from C, C++ playing with memory functions).
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Unusual Graphs with JavaScript – Infovis Toolkit
I was looking for a tree based graph displaying library possibly in JavaScript. The purpose of this library was to purely demonstrate pure technical things but instead of just collapse and expand functionality, I needed something more which will catch user attention. While going through nearly 70-80 libraries, I found an interesting library which almost hit the bulls-eye.
This library provides quite an interesting implementation of tree, graph based implementations which can be used at various places in an application. I will be using this library in one of the implementation I am assigned to, but I would suggest you to have a look at it. It is worth giving a shot.
Apache Forrest – Document Generation
I have been working on document generation utility and decided to explore what options are already available. The features I was looking into the framework were
1. Less learning curve
2. Extendable
3. Various Output Formats
4. Pluggable with Java
5. Open Source and Freeware
6. Should have popular community
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Spring XML extension
Few days back came across fantastic feature of Spring framework – Extensible XML authoring. I was in a need of introducing my own custom tags in Spring bean configuration file and found Spring provides a very easy mechanism to handle this requirement. I wont get into the details of how to do this as the Spring site does it pretty well.
http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/2.0.x/reference/extensible-xml.html
Quick Fix : QTP Debugger is disabled
I was facing this problem for a long time and thanks to my laziness, I didn’t spent much time on finding out the answer until it pinched me badly. The debug options in QTP installation was disabled and I was not able to set the breakpoints. The problem is not with QTP installation neither with OS settings and in my case, I didn’t install Microsoft Script Debugger. 
Thanks to google and I could find links, pointing to exact root cause. Just installed the Script debugger from Microsoft’s site and restarted QTP. It worked like charm!!! 