Around one year ago, I had started experimenting with concepts of creating programming languages. I first started with building few DSLs (Domain Specific Languages) using Ruby and Boo. It was quite interesting to work on development of DSLs. While doing this, I learnt a lot about how the programming languages are developed. Eventually, I thought [...]

In Ruby on rails, methods that generate urls from named routes are not globally accessible. For example, you can’t access them from console (script/console). If you want to use these methods from such places, then the rails documentation for ActionController::UrlWriter suggests two ways of doing it. According to this documentation, you can: Include ActionController::UrlWriter in [...]

While testing methods that return boolean values in ruby (the ones that end in ‘?’), try to avoid following matchers: method_returning_true?.should be_true or method_returning_false?should be_false This is because, ‘be_true’ and ‘be_false’ matchers considers ‘nil’ to be false and anything other than ‘nil’ to be true. When we write methods in ruby which end with question [...]

Few days ago I came across a story here. In this story, an assembly line worker suggests a simple, low-cost but highly effective solution to the problem for which engineers had developed a complex and expensive solution. Why am I referring to this story today? Because, I notice lot of people having a misconception that [...]

If we want to share a file or photos while chatting with our friends on internet using IM tools like GTalk, we use file sharing services available online. These services allow us to upload a file to their servers and give us a link which we can share with our friends. But what if you [...]

Today, I managed to install Mono 2.4 in Ubuntu 9.04 without affecting Ubuntu’s default mono installation. Thanks to the instructions here (Building Mono 2.4 from source on Ubuntu 8.10), I was able to install latest mono/monodevelop in a parallel environment. Now I can work on C# 3.5 code in Linux as well. Here is the [...]

For last few days, I was trying to use lambda feature of C# to implement Y-Combinator. After few trial and errors, I was able to implement it in C# 3.5. I’m currently posting the code here and in my next blog, I’ll explain how I derived it. In this code, Y-Combinator function, is used to [...]

It is really embarrassing to send an email with an attachment and actually forgetting to attach the file you were supposed to mail along, isn’t it? In my case, I often forget to attach files to emails if I’m typing it in hurry. Sometimes, I even end up receiving replies from recipients of those emails [...]

We had an application written in C# .Net, which used to communicate with Alfresco Enterprise Document/Content Management System. The application was using Alfresco’s NTLM component for authenticating users against their AD (Active Directory) user account. The application worked perfectly while we were testing it on Windows XP system. However, on Windows 2003 64 Bit system, [...]

In my current project, we are using Alfresco for the content repository and all the extra functionalities required are developed using Webscripts. While working on one functionality, I had to serialize javascript objects to JSON and also deserialize it. For doing this, there is a nice javascript code on Alfresco Wiki for converting the object [...]