Monday, February 11, 2013

Ruminating on Visualization Techniques

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The following link contains a good illustration of the various kinds of visualization techniques one can use to communicate ideas or clarif...

Anscombe's Quartet

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We often use statistical properties such as "average", "mean", "variance", "std. deviation" during...

Useful Command Line Tools for Windows 7

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Jotting down some Win 7 commands that I often use for quick access to information. One can directly type these commands in the 'Run...

Ruminating on Big Data

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Came across an interesting infodeck on Big Data by Martin Fowler. There is a lot of hype around Big Data and there are tens of pundits defi...
Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Generating Alphanumeric Random Strings

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In one of my previous blog post , I had mentioned about the excellent Apache Commons RandomNumberGenerator utility class that is very handy...
Monday, December 03, 2012

Ruminating on Schematron and XML Validation

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Schematron is a rule-based XML validation language. It can be used for making assertions on patterns in XML nodes. For e.g. if a person (el...

Difference between XSL, XSL-FO and XSLT

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The XSL (Extensible StyleSheet Language) specification has a long history and has gone through multiple revisions. Many folks are confused ...
Sunday, November 25, 2012

Free Data Modeling tools

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There are a plethora of free and opensource UML modeling tools available in the market. But there is very little awareness regarding free d...
Friday, November 02, 2012

UI Framework Classification

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Today there are a plethora of frameworks and technologies available for create RIAs. Our customers often ask us to advice them on the best ...
Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Ruminating on Transaction Logs

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Understanding the working of transaction logs for any RDBMS is very important for any application design. Found the following good articles...
Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Peformance impact of TDE at database level

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I was always under the opinion that column-level encryption is better and more performant than database or tablespace level encryption. But...
Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Column Level Encryption in SQLServer

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We were exploring the option of using cell-level or column-level encryption in SQL Server. The option of using TDE (Transaparent Data Encry...
Monday, October 15, 2012

Where is the private key of a Digital Cert stored?

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Today, one of my team members asked an innocuous question that whether the private key is stored in a digital certificate? The answer is ...
Monday, October 08, 2012

Random Number Generator Code

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We were writing a common utility to help the development team is generating random numbers. The utility would allow the developer to choose...

UUID vs SecureRandom in Java

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Recently, one of my team members was delibrating on using the java.util.UUID class or the java.util.SecureRandom class for a use-case to ...

Ruminating on random-ness

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Anyone who has dabbled at cryptograpy would know the difference between a PRNG and a TRNG :) PRNG - Psuedo Random Number Generator TRNG -...
Wednesday, October 03, 2012

Troubleshooting XML namespaces binding in SOAP request using JAXB

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Recently helped a team resolve an issue regarding namespace handling in JAX-WS / CXF. Jotting down the solution as it might help other folk...
Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Ruminating on Hibernate Entities and DTO

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Today we had a lengthy debate on the hot topic of Hibernate entities vs DTO to be used across layers of a n-tiered application. Summarizin...

Annotations are used at compile-time or runtime?

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There is a lot of confusion among folks on the scope of annotations - whether annotations are used only at compile-time or also at runtime?...

Serializing JPA or Hibernate entities over the wire

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In my previous post , we discussed about the need to map properties between Hibernate entities and DTOs. This is required, because Hibernat...
Friday, September 21, 2012

How RSA Protected Configuration Provider works behind the scenes?

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We were using the " RSA Protected Configuration provider " to encrypt sensitive information in our config files. I was suprised t...

How does DPAPI work behind the scenes?

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In my previous post , we saw how DPAPI can be used on Windows platforms to encrypt sensitive information without having to worry about key ...
Thursday, September 20, 2012

Can we use DPAPI from Java?

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In my previous post, we discussed on how DPAPI makes it simple to encrypt sensitive information without worrying about key generation and m...

Ecrypting sensitive information in database

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Recently for PCI complaince, we needed to encrypt credit card information (PAN) before storing it in the database. We decided to use AES 25...

Why do we need Base64 encoding?

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We often use Base64 encoding when we need to embed an image (or any binary data) within a HTML or XML file. But why do we need to encode i...

Beware of using Hibernate 'increment' id generator

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While reviewing one of the development projects using Hibernate as the ORM tool, I noticed that they were using the " increment "...
Thursday, September 13, 2012

Delegated Authentication through a Login Provider

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Nowadays it is common to see many internet sites delegating the authentication process to some third-party providers such as Google, Facebo...
Wednesday, September 12, 2012

How does Oracle RAC manage locks?

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Typically databases store locks in-memory and hence it is challenging to load-balance or cluster 'write' operations to a shared dat...
Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Ruminating on SQLServer HA and DR strategy

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Recently for one of our customers, we were evaluating the options for configuring SQLServer 2008 for High Availability and Disaster Recover...

Spring Security SecurityContextHolder

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We have been happily using the static methods of " SecurityContextHolder " in our application. But as architects, it is important...