onZoob.com

Beach Shots

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 12:45:13 +0000

Using a single strobe on light stand with the 14-54mm f2.8

Shirin Headshots

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 12:58:02 +0000

Candy Girl

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 12:58:08 +0000

14-54mm Zuiko Digital and 105mm Sigma EX-DG Macro lens, 2 flashes with wireless triggers and one colourful lolly ;D

Chingay Parade 2008

Wed, 20 Feb 2008 12:00:00 +0000

From the 2008 Chingay Parade. Pardon the noise on the photos. I had to bump up the ISO a fair bit.

Some photos:

And not-so photos:

Syazana+Shahira Glamour Shots

Fri, 25 Jan 2008 12:00:00 +0000

The wife and sis-in-laws thought we'd have some fun doing some glamour shots on Shahira's birthday, so here's both my sis-in-laws posing for some.. Before we knew it, its 3am in the morning! :D

Macros+Street+IR

Sun, 20 Jan 2008 12:00:00 +0000

Couple of Macro, Infrared and Street photography.

Joyous Mergers for Java!

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Sun acquires MySQL and Oracle acquires BEA. Its a brilliant move on Sun's part to acquire MySQL, arguably the most popular open source db in the world, after having invested in Glassfish and having open-sourced Java.

The Spring community will also benefit greatly from the BEA-Oracle merger with the latest release of WebLogic using Spring at its core.

I look forward to what these mergers will bring!

Hiring a Juggler

Mon, 24 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Circus Manager: How long have you been juggling?
Candidate: Oh, about six years.

Manager: Can you handle three balls, four balls, and five balls?
Candidate: Yes, yes, and yes.

Manager: Do you work with flaming objects?
Candidate: Sure.

Manager: .. . knives, axes, open cigar boxes, floppy hats?
Candidate: I can juggle anything.

Manager: Do you have a line of funny patter that goes with your juggling?
Candidate: It's hilarious.

Manager: Well, that sounds fine. I guess you're hired.
Candidate: Umm ... Don't you want to see me juggle?

Manager: Gee, I never thought of that.

DeMarco, Tom & Lister, Timothy - Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams
Dorset House Publishing, 1999

Troubleshooting C3P0 Connection Pool

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

While using C3P0 as your connection pool (either with Spring or otherwise), sometimes you might get an exception like this:

** BEGIN NESTED EXCEPTION **
com.mysql.jdbc.CommunicationsException
MESSAGE: Communications link failure due to underlying exception:

** BEGIN NESTED EXCEPTION **
java.io.EOFException

STACKTRACE:
java.io.EOFException at com.mysql.jdbc.MysqlIO.readFully(MysqlIO.java:1956)

This is quite a common problem which shows up when C3P0 is configured incorrectly or by using the default settings. The problem occurs when C3P0 is trying to use a connection already established by the pool but was closed by the database server. When C3P0 tries to use this already-closed connection, the error is thrown.
In c3p0.properties, try experimenting with the following values:

c3p0.preferredTestQuery=SELECT 1 
c3p0.testConnectionOnCheckout=true

This will force C3P0 to test each connection before passing it to the application.
If you are configuring using spring/hibernate, do note that *only* these properties are configurable in the applicationContext.xml file:

hibernate.c3p0.acquire_increment
hibernate.c3p0.idle_test_period
hibernate.c3p0.timeout
hibernate.c3p0.max_size
hibernate.c3p0.max_statements
hibernate.c3p0.min_size
hibernate.c3p0.validate

The other properties should go to the c3p0.properties file located in the webapp class root folder.

If you get an exception such as:

java.sql.SQLException: com.mchange.v2.resourcepool.ResourcePoolException: Attempted to use a closed or broken resource pool

Ensure that the timeout value configured for c3p0 does not not exceed the database server's wait timeout.

Let's try agile!

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

History of Programming Languages in 39" x 17"

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

This is a pretty cool PDF poster outlining the 'History of Programming Languages' consisting of 50 languages over a span of 50 years.

Now all you need is be nerd enough to print it and hang it on your bedroom wall...

MasterCard CDF3 Library+Source

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The MasterCardCDF3Lib is a library to assist with developing with MasterCard's Smart Data CDF XML Files in Java.

I've included source codes, Castor XML Marshaller/Unmarshaller and Ant build as well as a pre-built jar as well.

To use:

// Unmarshall XML to JavaBean
CDF3Util cdf3Util = new CDF3Util ();
CDFTransmissionFile file = cdf3Util.unmarshall (inputXml);

// Marshall JavaBean to XML
String outputXml = cdf3Util.marshall (file);

Download: [mastercard-cdf3-lib.zip @ ~4.5MB]

Eclipse performance tweaks

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Eclipse is a pretty powerful IDE. It has been in use in Java, Ruby on Rails, Python and even C++. It can, however, be quite the RAM hog. This does not mean that Eclipse needs to be slow, however. There are ways make your development life with Eclipse just that bit more bearable at the cost of some minor conveniences.

Here's a couple of tips on how to squeeze that extra speed out of Eclipse. (Do note that for some of these tips you might need to restart Eclipse in order to effect the changes.)

Close unused projects
Close those projects which you don't need to work on. If I have projects which I don't need to work on more than a few days, I'd close them, keeping opened projects to the basic minimum. Fewer open projects mean fewer files Eclipse need to manage.
Disable folding
Disable Automatic Folding in Windows > Preferences > Java > Editor > Folding. Untick the 'Enable Folding' check box.
Disable Content Assist
Those cool widgets which pop up and assist your coding can be real nice, but they can slow Eclipse down by magnitudes. To disable Content Assist, go to Windows > Preferences > Java > Editor > Content Assist > Untick the "Enable Auto Activation" check box.

I know this tip will disable the uber cool Content Assist by not popping up automatically while you type or dot a method invokation, but you can still access this manually by hitting CTRL+SPACE whenever you need help. Try it! Before you know it, it'll be second nature.
Remove/undeploy unused contexts and applications.
This is not really an Eclipse tip per-se but often when developing Web apps, you'll be running a servlet container or application server (Apache Tomcat, BEA Weblogic, IBM Websphere etc) at the same time. Remove unused contexts and applications from your app server. Sample and pre-installed applications would be guilty of this. Less contexts/applications used, less RAM used by your server. You can always redeploy anything you need again. Simple, no?
Change Heap memory used by Eclipse.
By default, Eclipse gets allocated a pitiful amount of memory by the Java VM. The result is the ever-frustrating OutOfMemoryException. You can change this amount by modifying certain configuration parameters when launching Eclipse.

On Windows:
If you're launching Eclipse from command line, include the -Xms and -Xmx parameters with values larger than 64MB for Xms and 128MB for Xmx.
e.g: -Xms128m -Xmx256m

On Mac OSX:
Edit the /Eclipse.app/Contents/Info.plist file and modify the Xms and Xmx settings.

Sometimes, increasing the above setting to huge amounts would still yeild errors such as PermGen errors. This PermGen error comes when the VM runs out of PermSpace, which is an area where the VM stores java class definitions and structures of data. To combat this, you can add the switch -XX:MaxPermSize=128m.

Having said this, sometimes, with framework such as Spring with Hibernate, you can still get errors. I've had success switching Java Runtimes Environments instead. BEA JRockit seem to work well where Sun's JRE fail with PermGen in these instances.

Do take care to be aware of your computer's limitations. What memory you allocate to Eclipse would mean less memory for your computer overall. This could mean making things worse instead. I'd recommend running Eclipse on no less than 1GB of RAM if you intend to tweak Eclipse's memory settings. YMMV.
MyEclipse Tip: Disable validators
MyEclipse is a full-featured IDE based on Eclipse and has a powerful runtime validators to validate everything from JSP files to DTD to even JavaScript. These comes with a cost of performance however.

Disable by:
Windows > Preferences > MyEclipse > Validation;
Tick on the 'Suspend all validators' check box.

Digital Art - From the Deep and IR Shots

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Yup after over a year I finally come up with something new...and it has tentacles :D

I've a few more unfinished ones, so expect more. And also a couple of Infrared photography, trying to improve my technique.

Oh and if you haven't noticed yet I added a JS lightbox, so you'll be able to click the images and have it show up as a popup.

Singapore Rugby 7s 2007

Sun, 28 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Between the testosterone-driven huffing and puffing and the cute little yellow clad kids, I sure had fun.

Here are a few shots...

Olympus E-3 is here!

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Well its finally here, after four years since their last pro model! Judging from the specs, its probably comparable to the Nikon D300 & Canon 40D range of DSLRs. The more interesting features of the E3 include the multi-angled Live View (which will be a god-sent for macros), a much brighter viewfinder and the higher ISO. I would expect the weather sealed body to be at least as good as the E1, if not better.
The E3 will be available around November 07 end.
It'll be interesting to see how truly fast the AF will be with the E3/SWD lenses.

Few links around the net on the E-3:

Photo Gallery Additions - 10/10/2007

Wed, 10 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Macros of weaver ants devouring an insect and jumper spiders, Navarathri - the Nine Nights Festival, Few street shots of Little India..

Artwork on Movie Magic Screenwriter

Mon, 08 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Few months ago, Write Brothers, a company which develops software to format screenplays, teleplays and novels used one of my artworks, No Surrender, No Retreat on the cover of the latest iteration of their software, Movie Magic Screenwriter. It is supposedly considered one of two industry standards for screenwriting.

So I finally got around to unpacking the courier parcel containing Movie Magic Screenwriter which they kindly sent over.

There right down there in the bottom right corner is No Surrender, No Retreat with the words "EXT.OCEAN-DAY" or something. Doubt if I'll ever have time to actually unpack and install the software though, but the software looks pretty interesting.

Some films/shows which have used Screenwriter:

All of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies
Million Dollar Baby
Crash
Shrek
Babel
Road to Perdition
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
The Queen
The Lookout
House
Heroes
24
Grey's Anatomy
All of the CSI shows
Ugly Betty
South Park

Which reminds me, I've got to get cracking on some new artwork sometime soon. Its been too long..

Joe Walker with file upload tip using DWR.Next

Sat, 06 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

This is a pretty awesome video tip from Joe Walker of DWR fame showing how to upload files using DWR.Next.

Photo Gallery Additions - 05/10/2007

Fri, 05 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

KSOAP - Cookie Support

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

We had a requirement to add mobile support to one of our projects. The requirement was to allow managers to access approval data via Java-enabled devices such as Blackberrys. We decided to, however go with the safe route of supporting MIDP 2 midlets instead of targetting specifically the BBs.

The midlet would be required to communicate to a JEE server via Web Services and should support WS security (We used XFire and ACEGI). For communicating, we settled on the KSOAP library, which worked pretty okay..but we hit a roadblock when we needed cookie support as well to KSOAP.

After a frustrating and fruitless Googling for a solution (mailing lists were not much help since KSOAP seems to be rather dead these days) , I decided to d/l the whole KSOAP libs and dependancies and got my hands dirty on the CVS copy of KSOAP and attempted adding cookie support.

So here's a modified version of the libs with cookie support for anyone who is facing the same problem. I also added a way to allow you to customize your SOAP headers so as to be able to send web services security headers etc. Just run the ANT build and deploy the .jars to your midp project. Cookies work by being stored into the device's local RecordStore.

ksoap.zip [5.4 MB]

Photo Gallery Additions - 30/09/2007

Sun, 30 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Japanese Photographer Killed in Myanmar

Fri, 28 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

An AP freelance photographer Kenji Nagai, 50, was shot dead on a Yangon street on Thursday. Pictures smuggled out of the country showed him taking photos with a small camera even as he lay dying.

Reminded me of James Nachtwey's War Photographer and how dangerous it is for these men who brave the frontlines to bring us the news. Condolences to his family and loved ones. Hopefully something good will come out of his sacrifice.
Read more:

Photo Gallery Additions - 28/09/2007

Fri, 28 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Photo Gallery Additions - 27/09/2007

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Photo Gallery Additions - 22/09/2007

Sat, 22 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Olympus E-1 Successor Release

Fri, 21 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Olympus E-1 Successor release.
No I can't read Korean but the date there makes me tingly all over :D.

Photo Gallery Additions - 17/09/2007

Mon, 17 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Photo Gallery Additions - 15/09/2007

Sat, 15 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Photo Gallery Additions - 07/09/2007

Fri, 07 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Flexible Rails - Marrying Flex with Rails

Wed, 05 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I picked up the e-book version of this book few days back. Flexible Rails is a book on the topic of Rails with Flex by Peter Armstrong. The book does not cover either subject indepth but covers the marriage of both technologies.

I've yet to go through the whole book but I really like what I'm reading so far. It covers a pretty impressive amount of what it takes to integrate flex with rails.

Some chapters include:

Setting up Flex with Rails
Adding login functionality
Flex ready-ing your rails controllers
Validation
Using REST with Flex and Rails
Converting your code for AIR support

At the time of reading, the book is still in beta. Peter is offering the book with a 50% discount on all subsequent editions of Flexible Rails (starting from the 2nd) and he also promises to give away the PDF copy of Rails on AIR (a book he plans to write in the future). A pretty good deal I say.

If you want a book on learning flex or ruby/rails, get another book. If you want a book on integrating them, there's no better book out there!

You can buy or download a preview pdf chapter from his site. Flexible Rails

Photo Gallery Additions - 03/09/2007

Mon, 03 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Zuiko Digital ED 70-300mm 1:4.0-5.6

Mon, 03 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

With magnification muscle extending to 300mm (600mm in 35mm equivalent terms), the ZUIKO DIGITAL ED 70-300mm 1:4.0-5.6 is remarkably powerful yet remains astoundingly portable: The lens measures a mere 127mm and weighs just 620g. Naturally, being based on the Four Thirds Standard, image quality is never compromised.

Three ED lens elements are integrated to ensure razor-sharp results across the entire zoom range by minimising chromatic aberration that can otherwise occur at long focal lengths. Furthermore, multicoated lenses have also been incorporated to reduce ghosting and flaring against backlight, while a circular iris helps to achieve smooth, soft background defocusing.

Telephoto macro shots from a minimum distance of 96cm in manual mode and 1.2m in autofocus are possible across the entire breadth of the focal range, giving the photographer plenty of working space for close-ups of difficult subjects. Moreover, full-on macro shooting with maximum magnification of 0.5x (equivalent to 1x on a conventional 35mm camera system) is possible, while the zoom range gives the photographer control over framing and composition without the need to change position.

Its going to be pretty reasonably priced (SGD$600+), considering the pro range 300mm Zuiko Digital lenses costs thousands!
On a 4/3 system, this will be focal length of 140-600mm, which will be pretty sweet for sports and wildlife photography.
If Olympus maintains the tradition of delivering quality like the 40-150mm ZD, this one will sell like crazy.

Main features:

Extreme telephoto capabilities from 70-300mm (140-600mm on 35mm equivalent)
Ultra-compact dimensions (127mm) and low weight (620g)
Based on the Four Thirds Standard
3 ED lens elements
Excellent telephoto macro performance
Compatible with all Four Thirds Standard cameras including Olympus’ recently introduced E-510 and E-410

Photo Gallery Additions - 27/08/2007

Mon, 27 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Photo Gallery Additions - 20/08/2007

Mon, 20 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Wedding Videos

Tue, 14 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000

For those of you interested, I've here are the videos to our wedding. The vids are encoded from the DVD by our videographer (Fatimah Hameed Studios).

They're in DivX format, so you'll need a player with the proper codecs, or just download VLC Player.

Part 1 Part 2

Wedding bells-a-ringing..

Mon, 09 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000

So we're finally married. Shirin and I thought things went rather well. We're rather exhausted now, and my faces are cramped from all that smiling...Outdoor shoots next few days. And followed by a 12 day honeymoon to Turkey! Oh well..no rest for the wicked (or the married)!

Our wedding website

Sat, 05 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

So here's the site for my upcoming wedding. After many cliché-d domain name choices, I settled on 7thjuly07.com

No Surrender No Retreat for Software Cover

Tue, 27 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

So a software company contacted me with regards to one of my artworks (No Surrender, No Retreat). They're interested in using it as cover artwork for their software called Movie Magic Screenwriter. According to this wikipedia article, the software has been used in:

All of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies
Million Dollar Baby
Crash
Shrek
Babel
Road to Perdition
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
The Queen
The Lookout
House
Heroes
24
Grey's Anatomy
All of the CSI shows
Ugly Betty

Nice to know Heroes is involved in there somewhere :D

DWR with Hibernate

Mon, 05 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

So I was testing out a huge portion of code involving DWR and hibernate and I encountered massive slowdowns. Log files generated massive amounts of LazyInitializationException errors. Turned out that DWR attempted to convert hibernate objects, invoking all the lazy-loaded child objects along the way. The solution? Specify the converter in WEB-INF/dwr.xml as "hibernate".

This will tell DWR to skip all lazy-loaded children for hibernate. Of course you'll have to explicitly join children you need but its way easier to manage, IMO.

Custom Handlers with Castor XML

Fri, 02 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I had an instance once where we were supporting a GDS's XML format for communicating hotel and airlines data. To make parsing the extensive amount of XML, we used castor to marshal and unmarshal the XML to our Java models. Castor, as an XML marshalling library, is great! But sometimes there are instances where you want more control over your XML marshalling and unmarshalling.

The format of the XML (which will remain unnamed) was in such a way where the order of the elements mattered. The XML format felt like it was rushed by the vendor but there was nothing we could do to change that. Fortunately castor supports marshaling listeners.

For example, to unmarshal, castor has the UnmarshalListener interface which you can implement and apply whenever you wish to have more control over the marshaling process or keep track whenever marshaling takes place.

Four methods need to be implemented using this interface.

	public void initialized(Object arg0) 
	public void attributesProcessed(Object arg0) 
	public void fieldAdded(String arg0, Object parent, Object child) 
	public void unmarshalled(Object object)

Like I said above, I had a problem where items had to be dealt with sequentially.

For example:
A item which holds description of a hotel room might follow up immediately with a element which holds the elements. To complicate it further, some might not come with a etc.

So the solution was to use the UnmarshalListener to keep track whenever a Rate or Description item is being processed and then, in our Parent object, keep track of the index of the XML being processed and manually insert the descriptions/rates.

Example:

public void fieldAdded(String arg0, Object parent, Object child) 
{
	if (arg0.equals("XMLHotelItem"))
	{
		GwsHotelAvailabilityResponse hotelAvailability = (GwsHotelAvailabilityResponse) parent;
		hotelAvailability.incrementErrorIndex();
			
		GwsHotelInsideShopRate insideShopRate = new GwsHotelInsideShopRate ();
		insideShopRate.setErrorIndex(hotelAvailability.getCurrentErrorIndex());
			
		hotelAvailability.insertHotelInsideShopRate (insideShopRate);
	}
		
	// Hotel Description Handling
	if (arg0.equals("hotelRates"))
		{			
			GwsHotelCompleteAvailabilityResponse parentResponse = (GwsHotelCompleteAvailabilityResponse) parent;
			
			parentResponse.incrementIndex();			
		} else 
		if (arg0.equals("descriptions"))
		{
			GwsHotelCompleteAvailabilityResponse parentResponse = (GwsHotelCompleteAvailabilityResponse) parent;
			parentResponse.insertDescriptionString((String) child);			
		}
	}

	public void unmarshalled(Object object) 
	{
		if (object instanceof GwsHotelCompleteAvailabilityResponse)
		{			
			GwsHotelCompleteAvailabilityResponse response = (GwsHotelCompleteAvailabilityResponse) object;
			
			// Set room master responses
			if (response.getHotelTypeIndicator().equals("R"))
			{
				Iterator it = response.getHotelRates().iterator();
				
				while (it.hasNext())
				{
					GwsHotelRate rate = (GwsHotelRate) it.next();
					RoomMasterCodeTranslator trans = new RoomMasterCodeTranslator (rate.getBicCode());
					
					rate.insertRoomTypeDescription(trans.getRoomQuality() + " room.");
					rate.insertRoomTypeDescription(trans.getNumberOfBedsAsString() + " bed(s).");
					rate.insertRoomTypeDescription(trans.getBedType() + " bed(s).");					
				}
			}
		}
	}
}

To make use of the UnmarshalListener:

Mapping unmapping = new Mapping ();
unmapping.loadMapping(getClass().getResource(PATH_TO_CASTOR_MAPPING_FILE));		
Unmarshaller un = new Unmarshaller (XmlResponse.class);

un.setUnmarshalListener(new CustomXmlUnmarshalListener());
un.setIgnoreExtraElements(true);
un.setMapping(unmapping);
		
StringReader sr = new StringReader (xml);
return (XmlResponse) un.unmarshal(sr);

Yeah..well

Fri, 22 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

A US-based gaming company expressed interests in using some of my art for their in-game scenes. Haven't a clue which ones they want yet tho..

dAmnJam source codes

Sat, 21 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Here are the sources to dAmnJam. I don't have much time to maintain it so anyone who wants to continue, feel free. Its written in C++ and the wxWidgets cross-platform framework. It compiles fine on Windows and Linux but I haven't tried it on OSX. Should work since I didn't do anything platform-specific.

Added:

Web proxy support for thumbnails
Basic RSS/Journals Reader
Contacts Manager
Skinning/Theme options
All the dA commands

damnjam-src-bin.zip

dAmnServer Emu sources up on CVS

Sat, 05 Nov 2005 12:00:00 +0000

What's dAmnServer EMU? It's a very basic server written in Python to emulate the deviantArt Messaging Network server. It uses MySQL as the backend database and the Twisted framework for client connectivity.

I created this primarily to learn Twisted. In the works is to use ORM (Object Relations Mapping) with the python code to provide persistent objects handling. Lots of work to go but you should be able to connect to the server via a dAmn browser and execute basic commands.

damnServerEMU.zip

New Artwork: Serenity in Black

Wed, 12 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

New artwork added Serenity in Black

pyBot for dAmn

Tue, 11 Oct 2005 04:00:00 +0000

Uploaded sources and docs for pyBot. A bot script written in python. Some of the features include:

Event-based plugin system
Per-trigger/Event multithreading
Group-based user security
Configurations via XML
SQL database with SQLite
100% Python

:: read ::

New Artwork: Eve

Sat, 08 Oct 2005 12:00:00 +0000

New artwork added Eve

Google Reader

Fri, 07 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Google just released an RSS aggregator (As announced at the Web 2.0 at San Francisco). Very neat service albeit a bit slow and buggy at the moment.

:: read ::

New Artwork: Isolation

Mon, 19 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

New artwork added Isolation

New Artwork: Aestival

Mon, 19 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

New artwork added Aestival