Last week at work

The last week at work has been pretty exciting, I managed to get my hands dirty in:

• Oracle Databases: made me realize that I had forgotten most of SQL. But thanks to Google and Pero it all came back soon .

• J2EE bug fixes: I am starting off with some simple bugs to get comfortable with the system and slowly but surely work on more critical issues.

• Xml parsing: This was interesting as I used two different approaches for solving similar problems. First task was to add custom setting tags to an existing xml file. Because it didn’t involve modifying any existing tags I just wrote a custom xml parser to add tags at a specific location and a flag indicating that the file has already been processed. Second task involved reading from existing tags in a xml file, I could’ve just used readLine and string compare but that would make the parser dependent on newlines and their location, so I used the SAX parser to parse the xml.

• MS Virtual PC & Linux command line: Now this is something I did when I had nothing else on my plate. I have been spoiled by the nice GUI of uBuntu as I had mentioned in my earlier posts, therefore my knowledge of linux bash shell a.k.a. command line is very limited. I didnt want to install Linux at work so instead I installed the MS Virtual PC and downloaded a uBuntu 6.06 ISO. Running uBuntu on the Virtual PC is very easy and is described here. So if anyone wants to try Linux without having to install it and risk screwing up your partitions, this is it !