Nirav Mehta on life, technology and future

Chaos is the answer. Chaos is the master plan of the universe.

Not equilibrium.

What you experience today, is just part of the master plan! Chill!

(Inspired while listening to Kaos by DJ Aligator from Summer Jam 2008!)

Kaos on YouTube

Have you ever generated graphics with Flex? Flex comes with a lot of powerful graphics tools, but it can get pretty hard to do interesting stuff with it. But you need not worry anymore!

Degrafa is a project dedicated to the development of a Declarative Graphics Framework for Flex.

Their intro paragraph says:

The focus behind the Declarative Graphics Framework (Degrafa) is to bring the graphics classes up a level to provide a common ground between developer and designer within Flex, and enable the graphics classes to become first class citizens within the Flex framework.

In simple language, Degrafa allows you to achieve complex graphics using simple tag based syntax. It’s easy to learn and is very fast. I was amazed to see the samples!

Degrafa Samples

The next time we need some low level graphics work, I am going with Degrafa!

I have been playing around with a lot of Java tools these days! I was trying out XPlanner and when I ran the startup shell script, it spit out the infamous error!

The JAVA_HOME environment variable is not defined correctly
This environment variable is needed to run this program
NB: JAVA_HOME should point to a JDK not a JRE

I tried a couple of things, but they did not work. A bit of Google, and found an easy way.

Here are the steps!

• Open Terminal.
• First confirm you have JDK by typing “which java”. It should show something like /usr/bin/java.
• Check you have the needed version of Java, by typing “java -version”. My setup shows java version “1.5.0_13″
• JAVA_HOME is essentially the full path of the directory that contains a sub-directory named bin which in turn contains the java.
• For Mac OSX - it is /Library/Java/Home (There are other directories too, but this is the simplest!)
• Set JAVA_HOME using this command in Terminal: export JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/Home
• echo $JAVA_HOME on Terminal to confirm the path
• You should now be able to run your application

This sets JAVA_HOME only for this session. If you want it to persist, you will have to add the command to your ~/.profile file.

For more details on this, refer to Sean Brown’s blog post.

Albert sent me a YouTube video - Hug A Developer Today.

The video demonstrates the plight of every developer. And the pain they are in today.

I was surprised to see that the video was made by devShop - a project management system I am evaluating for my needs. Craig Fitzpatrick is the CEO. I was communicating with him last week about our needs, but did not check out the video links in his signature! Good job Craig!

Here are the original videos from Criag:

• Developers in Pain (the same as this Hug A Developer Today)
• For Passionate Developers

Go hug a developer today!

Stumbled upon Dapper today! Their claim is “Get any content from the Web”. That got me interested!

And I explored around and found it to be very useful actually! Dapper lets you scrap any site and convert its content into an RSS feed / Email / Or any other format. I like the ease of defining the scraping logic and the neatness of the application.

Convert any website content into a feed

Make feed from Dapper, then take it to Yahoo! pipes (or anything else) for some more magic! This gets interesting!