April 2007 Archives

It was a great shock and deeply saddening news to hear about the massacre at the Virginia Tech Campus. My heart felt condolences to all the family and friends of the victims. I know how it feels to lose a family member, if only words would make it all better. One of the victims of the Virginia Tech shootings was Minal Panchal. Like many of U.S. residing indians, she too had an account on Orkut, a popular social networking website. As the news of the shooting spread and people learned that Minal Panchal was one of the victims, people started scrapping there condolences on her profile page. The turnout was mind boggling. I personally saw the phenomenon. The count scarps on her profile was on a continues increase, it reached 25000 in just 2-3 days. And was going on. I too wrote my condolences. I was surprised to see in matter of seconds (~30 seconds), my scrap entry was pushed back to 4th page of her scrap book. I tried to reload the page, every time i did a refresh, i could see 4-5 new entries. It was quite touching to see such a support and how people all around felt so bad about the whole thing. Now just two days, I discovered her profile is now deleted. This is probably because of some spamming algorithm running on orkut. This post of mine is to raise a concern against this. As much as I understand the need for such a algorithm, I would want to bring to notice of people orkut that this is not a case of spamming and her profile should be reactivated. By not doing so, orkut is denying people from showing there support for this sad event. It is not about just this one person, I feel this profile was providing a place for people to pour there feeling out and show there support for all affected by this mad massacre. I am very sure there is no technical reason as to why they should not be able to reactivate her profile. Worst would be if orkut is concerned with the increased traffic load on the website. I really hope thats not the case. Orkut is owned by Google. I would expect more from google than this.

• Mark Pilgrim talks on Expertise, burnout, and the future of the web

Let me start by saying..JAXP 1.3 rocks..why?

• It supports XPath (duh !!)
• Dom level 3
• And other stuff i am still to discover.

I don't get, is it just me or XPath in jaxp is really really late. But good that its here and good news is can be used with JDK 1.4 and probably JDK 1.3 (haven't tested it). So the installation process.

1. go to jaxp.dev.java.net
2. download jaxp installation class file which has been compiled for JDK 1.4
3. java -cp . JAXPR******
4. this gives u 5 jar files (dom.jar,sax.jar,xercesImpl.jar,xalan.jar(*sigh*),jaxp-api.jar)
5. copy all jars in <java_home>/jre/lib/endorsed folder.
6. tada !!

The updating process documented on the JAXP website suggests that jaxp-api.jar should not be put in endorsed folder and should be put some where on the CLASSPATH. But as the JAXP 1.2 classes packaged with JDK 1.4 are part of rt.jar, these classes will take precedence when loading classes over any classes on the CLASSPATH. In order to avoid this, you need to have jaxp-api.jar also in the endorsed directory. As per the Endorsed Standards Override Mechanism classes specified in the endorsed directory are loaded before any internal class. so there you have it..you are off you using jaxp 1.3. I look forward to exploring more of this release.