Rishabh Joshi, a product engineer, a friend and a once in a blue-moon blogger, encountered a requirement to create clones of database objects such that even if their relationships get modified the cloning process remains unaffected. Here is his article and the code he wrote for de-proxying hibernate objects and visiting the entire object tree.
The Requirement:
The business requirement was to get an object from the database, create its copy (or clone it), modify the required fields (through-out the object tree), and save as a new row. An, added requirement was, to be able to specify the fields one wants to clone (again, through-out the object tree) and ignore the rest.
Problems faced:
Simple bean copy would not work for us, because, if the object changed (i.e. a relationship is added or removed), it would require us to modify/re-write the code again, else, the flow would break. So, we needed a system that would be unaffected by the changes in the relationship.
Solution:
I used annotations to mark the fields in various classes that I need to clone and used the following code to achieve the requirement. Read more…
Guest writer Heenaput together an article for us a while ago where she redefines TechnoTicles from [Technology + Articles] to TechnoTickles[Technology as a result of a Tickle] (mind you the ‘c’ has been replaced by ‘ck’). Here she presents her views on creativity and innovation in the technology space.
A tickle makes me laugh when it catches me unaware. It’s a funny feeling I don’t completely understand. But tickles, the funny sensations, are not just related to my external being as I often find myself being tickled in my brain. The unwanted tickle causes an itch, which makes me take action involuntarily.
Tickles inside our mind can force us to think, to imagine and cause enough irritation to make us take actions that we otherwise won’t dare to do.
Popularly, creativity has been associated with the people from the art world, painters, dancers or musicians. The common trait among them being their thought process that is adapted to boundary less imagination. But creativity is not really limited to the domain of these few fields. Browsing through the history of technology and computing, there are innumerable incidents representing technologists becoming leaders when they married their technological depth to their peripheral understanding of some distant fields. Some of the innovative products and services are presented below in order to elicit this fact.
Creativity happens when we allow ourselves to make mistakes. The ideal way for an organization to be creative is to not just look to the experts, but allow explorers (people who have a passion to explore and those who are not afraid of making mistakes) to make decisions once in a while.
This notion led the Interaction design Guru Alan Cooper to reverse the trend of programming of interactions. Earlier interactions between software and humans were designed by programmers. Read more…
A few months ago, I attended a panel discussion on Immersive Design where the panelists delved into the philosophy of consciousness of technology: when and how do we realize that something (particularly Artificial Intelligence) has gained consciousness. And what would be the form that would gain awareness first (if it hasn’t already gained it). Would it be man made robots, or would it be the self organizing cities or the internet.
These are fascinating topics of discussion, but this particular post is dedicated to some of the coolest robots of the past decade. Some time ago GoRobotics.net put together a list of the top 10 robots of the past decade.
Keepon
It features the very cute (and not necessarily as advanced) KeepOn, designed to allow a broad range of interactions with children (particularly the ones with Autism) which otherwise are impossible to have. Also on the list is the advanced Predator Drone, used in many military strikes by the US recently.
Dance is a powerful medium of expression, and when fused with images and artwork, the result is a remarkable dance theatre that has elements of absolute delight.
The following video presents one of the works of Motionhouse Dance Theatre, a touring dance group that creates remarkable dance theatre, fusing images, action and dynamism to surprise, challenge and delight.
The piece presented here is called Scattered.
Quoting Motionhouse: We are creating a startling interaction between film and live performance, where dancers glide in the air or rapidly move around the space using aerial silks and harnesses. Performed on a huge curved floor (think of a half pipe), which disappears skywards upstage, Scattered uses projection technology to create a world in which the dancers move in, on and through the image.
Scattered delves into the majesty and savagery of water, a fundamental force in our lives as seven dancers plunge into an ocean, tumble down a waterfall, gasp with thirst under a scorching sun and slide on an avalanche to a frozen landscape of arctic beauty.
Such works keep reminding that the space where art and technology merges is a unique and fascinating space, that we need to nurture and appreciate
Thinking about the future of display and image projection has always been a fascinating exercise.
Just a day ago, we had written about the Gestural Interfaces from Minority Report which talked about the concepts of real world pixels and recombinant networks. Now Wired magazine published a article about another interesting research which is trying to use swarms of micro-helicopters to create a giant 3-D display. This project called Fly Fire is part of an ongoing project at the MIT SENSEable city lab.
This is exciting, personally for me, as I was discussing this concept with a friend a few days ago, only that we were thinking about nano-bots (which meant we had to wait for nano technology to reach that level) instead of the micro helicopters.
Ultimately this project is a step towards making smart dust, the idea of extremely small computing devices that are self contained and ubiquitous.
Artist Lee Jang Sub (www.leejangsub.com) tries to find harmony in the complexity of Seoul city map. He argues that a tree, though complex, has a harmony when seen from an overall perspective. Similar is the case with cities.
Patterns exist everywhere, in space and in time. Some can be easily explained mathematically while others are too chaotic to make sense of.
Fractal geometry is the branch of study that tries to find sense in this chaos.
But what could possibly be the relation between fractal geometry and self organization? Well, it seems that self organization follows fractals laws and results in systems with a fractal pattern.
The aim of any system is, generally, to continuously be in a state of stability.
The movie Minority Report (starring Tom Cruise) presented new methods of interactions with information. Looked very sci-fi back then, but not any more. Oblong Industries is working towards making the concept a reality.
John Underkoffler (co-founder of the company and lead of the team that created the Minority Report interfaces) recently demonstrated the interface at a TED conference.
The product is called the g-speak spatial operating environment.
As the name suggest its an Operating System that handles interactions in space. It is a combination of gestural i/o, recombinant networking, and real-world pixels. I have tried to put some brief explanation about these 3 concepts below the video.
Disruptive Innovations as the name suggests is about innovations that disrupt the market. A disruptive innovation makes a product (which was earlier accessible only to richer or more skillful consumers) accessible to a whole new population of consumers.
The term disruptive technology was coined by Clayton M. Christensen in an article in 1995.
RecentlyArs Technica published a good article about Google being awarded a Software Patent (by USPTO) that covers the principle of distributed MapReduce.
The importance of this event lies in the fact that many of todays leading software companies use MapReduce based projects. It is slightly scary for these players especially the users of the Hadoop and the CouchDb projects Read more…
