Here are a few pictures from my vacation to Oman. I only wish I had longer that two weeks! I traveled with my wife, my best friend Michael, as well as my sister and her husband. We visited Nizwa, Muttrah, the Grand Mosque, as well as friends and family. The following pictures were taken with…
Implementing pinch-zoom and pan/drag in an Android view on the canvas
I was trying to get pinch-zoom and panning working on an Android view today. Basically I was trying to implement the same behavior you see when you use Google Maps (for example). You can zoom in and pan around until the edge of the image, but no further. Also, if the image is fully zoomed…
Akṣi: Handwritten-digit-recognizing neural-network
I’ve always been interested in Neural Networks (ever since I first found out about them around 10 years ago). However, I never got a chance to learn about them or write one of my own; this is something I’ve wanted to do for some time. I got the opportunity this semester when my professor in…
Rare pictures of Trivandrum
Some of these pictures are from an album titled “Album of South Indian Views”. The pictures were taken by the Government photographer Zacharias D’Cruz. For some of these pictures, the photographer is unknown. Most of these pictures were taken in the late 1800’s and 1900’s. I originally got these pictures from Manu Prasad Revindran’s Facebook…
Setting the content type to text/plain for a JSON response from a Spring controller
I was using a jQuery plugin called a ajaxfileupload to upload a file through AJAX. Technically what the plugin does isn’t AJAX. It creates a hidden form and an iframe, and then submits the form using the iframe as the target. The iframe will then end up with the response from the server. This response…
Popularity Contest WordPress plugin breaks RSS feed
I’m using a somewhat old plugin (it hasn’t been updated since ’09) called Popularity Contest to show the popularity of my posts. However, I noticed that it was breaking my RSS feed. This is due to the fact that the plugin doesn’t properly escape the ampersand character inside an image URL. Instead of & it…
A new look
I decided to change the theme on my blog. I went for a wider theme this time because on my older theme the real estate for post content was rather narrow. This made the posts excessively long. This new theme has a lot more room for posts and so it doesn’t look like I’m posting…
vivin.net is back… mostly
So I’m sure you’ve noticed that this website was down for a while. It went down about three weeks ago when one of the (two) hard-drives on my server died due to bad sectors; it was eight years old. I didn’t panic (too much), because my WordPress database was on the main drive, which is…
Fixing Maven 3.0.3’s dependency-resolution performance-regression
TL; DR; version: Maven 3.0.3 has a performance-regression while resolving dependencies. This is because it uses version 1.11 of aether. The problem has been fixed in version 1.12 of aether, but a version of maven with this library is not available. I built maven from source with the 1.12 version of aether, so use maven-3.0.3-with-aether-1.12.zip…
Generating API Documentation from XML using XSLT
I work at Infusionsoft, and we offer our customers API access. Visibility and access to the various tables and their fields is controlled by an XML file on our end. Naturally, our customers require user-friendly documentation that tells them what tables and fields they can access and in what manner. Previously, a former developer had…