Travel guide to Istanbul, Turkey

Recently I was able to visit Istanbul, Turkey to participate TAD Summit to represent hSenid Mobile Solutions with our API Management platform.

During the stay, I was able to visit couple of historical places around Istanbul city in 2 days. I would like to share the details of each in brief where you can use these info as your travel guide to Istanbul, Turkey.

1. Bosphorus - is a strait that forms part of the boundary between Europe and Asia. The world's narrowest strait used for international navigation, the Bosporus connects the Black Sea with the Sea of Marmara. Between the limits, the strait is 31 km long, with a width of 3,329 m

2. Hagia Sophia -  is a former Greek Orthodox patriarchal basilica (church), later an imperial mosque, and now a museum

3. Prince Islands -  is in the Sea of Marmara and consists of 7 islands. As there is no traffic on the Islands, the only transport being horse and cart, they are incredibly peaceful compared with the city of Istanbul. Princes and other royalty were exiled on the islands, and later members of the Ottoman sultans family were exiled there too.

4. The Blue Mosque - This consists of blue tiles adorning the walls of its interior. The Sultan Ahmed Mosque is still popularly used as a mosque. It also comprises a tomb of the founder, a madrasa and a hospice

5. Galata Tower - is a medieval stone tower. The nine-story tower is 66.90 meters tall.

6. Topkapi Palace - residence of the Ottoman sultans. As well as a royal residence, the palace was a setting for state occasions and royal entertainments. It is now a museum.  It also contains important holy relics of the Muslim world, including Muhammed's cloak and sword

7. Streets of Grand Bazaar - is one of the largest and oldest covered markets in the world with lots of shops.

8. Obelisk of Theodosius - is the Ancient Egyptian obelisk of Pharaoh Thutmose III re-erected in the Hippodrome of Constantinople. Originally 30m tall, like the Lateran obelisk

9. Ottoman Empire - the Turkish Empire or Turkey, was a Sunni Islamic sultanate and later a caliphate founded by Oghuz Turks under Osman Bey in northwestern Anatolia in 1299.

10. Church of St. Anthony of Padua - is a basilica and the largest church of the Roman Catholic Church in Istanbul, Turkey.

11. Taksim square - situated in the European part of Istanbul, Turkey. The monument commemorates the 5th anniversary of the foundation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, following the Turkish War of Independence.

Interesting use cases of NFC (Near Field Communication)

NFC is opening up new possibilities for mobile applications. Applications using this short-range radio technology can greatly simplify how a user gathers data from and interacts with their environment. When a phone touches, or is held near an NFC tag or another NFC capable device, the phone can exchange data with the tag or device. This data could be a link to the download of the menu from a favourite restaurant, the specifications for an electronic gizmo, or paring information from a Bluetooth headset or another phone that can be used to exchange objects: the possibilities are endless.

Good video tutorial for BIRT Reporting platform

Good video tutorial for BIRT Reporting platform.

BIRT Demo

BIRT is a open source reporting platform and its consists of Report designer and a Runtime component that you can add to your app server. It also provide a charting engine that lets you add charts to your own application.

Some of the important features provided by BIRT

Charting
Drill Down Support
Connection Pooling
Multiple Master Pages
Enhanced Cascaded Parameters
Joined Data Set
Internationalization
Export to PDF/Excel/CSV formats

Hadoop the high-performance parallel data processing and reliable data storage technique

"I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians" - Google’s Chief Economist Hal Varian

If you want a framework that allows for the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers using a simple programming model, then Hadoop will be the best option.

Technically, Hadoop consists of two key services: reliable data storage using the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and high-performance parallel data processing using a technique called MapReduce.

Hadoop Architecture

View more presentations from Philippe Julio

Open Source chart libraries

Good Open Source chart libraries.

JfreeChart - http://www.jfree.org/jfreechart/
FusionChartsFree - http://www.fusioncharts.com/free/
JCCKit project (LGPL)
QN Plot project (BSD)
OpenChart2 project (LGPL)
PtPlot project (UC Berkeley copyright)
JRobin project (LGPL)
Java Chart Construction Kit (LGPL, works with JDK 1.1.8)
JOpenChart project (LGPL)
jCharts project (BSD-style)
JChart2D project (LGPL)
Chart2D project (LGPL)
ThunderGraph project (LGPL)
E-Gantt project (Q Public License)
MagPlot project (GPL)


I'm going to demonstrate code samples for bar chats and pie charts with JFreeChart

Note: jfreechart-1.0.13.jar and jcommon-1.0.16.jar should be available within your classpath.

1)  PieChart example....


package sample;

import org.jfree.chart.ChartFactory;
import org.jfree.chart.ChartFrame;
import org.jfree.chart.JFreeChart;
import org.jfree.data.general.DefaultPieDataset;

public class PieChart {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        // create a dataset...
        DefaultPieDataset data = new DefaultPieDataset();
        data.setValue("Category 1", 43.2);
        data.setValue("Category 2", 27.9);
        data.setValue("Category 3", 79.5);
        // create a chart...
        JFreeChart chart = ChartFactory.createPieChart(
                "Sample Pie Chart",
                data,
                true,    // legend?
                true,    // tooltips?
                false    // URLs?
        );
        // create and display a frame...
        ChartFrame frame = new ChartFrame("First", chart);
        frame.pack();
        frame.setVisible(true);
    }
}


2) BarChart example...

package sample;

import org.jfree.chart.ChartFactory;
import org.jfree.chart.ChartFrame;
import org.jfree.chart.JFreeChart;
import org.jfree.chart.plot.PlotOrientation;
import org.jfree.data.category.CategoryDataset;
import org.jfree.data.category.DefaultIntervalCategoryDataset;

public class BarChart {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        // create a dataset...
        double start[][] = new double[2][3];
        start[0][0] = 3;
        start[0][1] = 4;
        start[0][2] = 2;

        start[0][0] = 4;
        start[1][0] = 6;
       
        double end[][] = new double[2][3];

        end[0][0] = 2;
        end[0][1] = 5;
        end[0][2] = 1;

        end[0][0] = 5;
        end[1][0] = 2;

        CategoryDataset data = new DefaultIntervalCategoryDataset(start, end);

        JFreeChart chart = ChartFactory.createBarChart("title",
                "x axis", "y axis",
                data,
                PlotOrientation.VERTICAL,
                true,    // legend?
                true,    // tooltips?
                false    // URLs?
        );
        // create and display a frame...
        ChartFrame frame = new ChartFrame("Second", chart);
        frame.pack();
        frame.setVisible(true);
    }

}

MongoDb In Action

MongoDB is a scalable, high-performance, open source, document-oriented database. MongoDB bridges the gap between key-value stores (which are fast and highly scalable) and traditional RDBMS systems (which provide rich queries and deep functionality).

MongoDb In Action

View more presentations from fuchaoqun.

Correct Dinner table settings

Planning a dinner and need a reminder of how to set a table and where the cutlery should be placed around the tableware? It's easy to forget how to set a table and the proper place setting of tableware and cutlery. So here's a quick refresher to help you learn how to set a table for that 'perfect' dinner setting.