Ashik’s IT Thoughts

How To Unescape HTML in Java

ashikuzzaman — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 03:46:17 +0000

I was writing an Html unescape algorithm in Java today. What I came out with is the one below. There is a problem in the algorithm below that eats up some space or characters for some corner cases. Can you figure out what the problem is?

I wrote the class in a way so that you can compile and run it in command prompt and can see the output right away. You can do some trial and error and figure out the issue in the algorithm below.

package com.salesforce.test;


import java.util.*;
/**

 * To compiple: javac -d . StringUtils.java

 * To run: java com.salesforce.test.StringUtils

 *

 * @authot ashik

 */

public class StringUtils {
  private StringUtils() {}
  /**

   * the characters to unescape

   */

  public static HashMap htmlEntities = new HashMap();

  static {

    htmlEntities.put("<","<"); htmlEntities.put("<",""); htmlEntities.put(">",">");

    htmlEntities.put("'","\'"); htmlEntities.put("'","\'");

    htmlEntities.put(""","\""); htmlEntities.put(""","\"");

    htmlEntities.put("&","&"); htmlEntities.put("&","&");

    htmlEntities.put(" "," "); htmlEntities.put(" "," ");

  }
  public static final String unescapeHTML(String source, int start){

     int i,j;
     i = source.indexOf("&", start);

     if (i > -1) {

        j = source.indexOf(";" ,i);

        if (j > i) {

           String entityToLookFor = source.substring(i , j + 1);

           System.out.println("source = " + source + ", entityToLookFor = " + entityToLookFor + ", i = " + i + " and j = " + j);

           if(entityToLookFor.lastIndexOf("&") > entityToLookFor.indexOf("&")) {

	           i = entityToLookFor.lastIndexOf("&") + 1;

	           System.out.println("Before source = " + source + ", entityToLookFor = " + entityToLookFor + ", i = " + i + " and j = " + j);

	           entityToLookFor = entityToLookFor.substring(entityToLookFor.lastIndexOf("&"));

	           System.out.println("After  source = " + source + ", entityToLookFor = " + entityToLookFor + ", i = " + i + " and j = " + j);

           }

           String value = (String)htmlEntities.get(entityToLookFor);

           if (value != null) {

             source = new StringBuffer().append(source.substring(0 , i)).append(value).append(source.substring(j + 1)).toString();

             return unescapeHTML(source, i + 1); // recursive call

           }

         }

     }

     return source;

  }
  public static void main(String args[]) throws Exception {

      // to see accented character to the console

      java.io.PrintStream ps = new java.io.PrintStream(System.out, true, "Cp850");
      ps.println("Finally: Ashik's Quote 
      ps.println("-----------");

      ps.println("Finally: M& M > 5 = " + unescapeHTML("M& M > 5", 0));

      ps.println("-----------");

      ps.println("Finally: M & M > 5 = " + unescapeHTML("M & M > 5", 0));

      ps.println("-----------");

      ps.println("Finally: M &M > 5 = " + unescapeHTML("M &M > 5", 0));

      ps.println("-----------");

      ps.println("Finally: M& M> 5 = " + unescapeHTML("M& M> 5", 0));

      ps.println("-----------");

      ps.println("Also: \n-->" + unescapeHTML("Apos\'trophie & "quote" is ", 0));

      ps.println("-----------");

      ps.println("Also: \n-->" + unescapeHTML("Please check for empty space in Order Review tab.", 0));

      ps.println("-----------");

      ps.println("Also: \n-->" + unescapeHTML("Also check for Billing Information & Subscription Information & Order Review tabs.", 0));

      ps.println("-----------");

      ps.println("Also: \n-->" + unescapeHTML("It's difficult to check today's capitalization strategy for all tabs.", 0));

      ps.println("-----------");

      ps.println("Also: \n-->" + unescapeHTML("Remember that 12 is > 9 is > 4", 0));

      ps.println("-----------");

      ps.println("Also: \n-->" + unescapeHTML("Similarly 8 is < 10 is < 15", 0));

      ps.println("-----------");

      ps.println("Also: \n-->" + unescapeHTML("Shakespeare said,"To be or not to be that is the question."", 0));

      ps.println("-----------");

      ps.println("Also: \n-->" + unescapeHTML("Think & think about New York's  as the \"ultimate\" pizza!", 0));

      ps.println("-----------");

      ps.println("Also: \n-->" + unescapeHTML("Apos'trophie & "quote" is ", 0));

      ps.println("-----------");

  }

}

Behind The Cloud by CEO Marc Benioff

ashikuzzaman — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 06:41:26 +0000

Morning today when I walked into my cube in office, I found a copy of our CEO Marc Beniof’s new book Behind The Cloud at my desk.

I liked the chapter headings and the forward by Michael Dell. Just 2 days earlier a friend of mine forwarded me the article on some top paying fortune companies – http://finance.yahoo.com/career-work/article/107916/how-10-top-paying-companies-stack-up?mod=career-salary_negotiation where salesforce.com is in a pretty good position at number seven!

In this book Marc talks about how in 10 years this company has evolved from a startup to a billion dollar player in the industry.

My Thoughts On SCJP Java 6 Exam

ashikuzzaman — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 14:07:32 +0000

Recently I have been thinking about the industry standard technology certifications, particularly around Java/JEE technologies. I am not exactly sure how valuable the technology certifications are when you are already an experienced veteran in the industry. But I can guess that it will give an impression to your upper management to accommodate you for the next level (higher level than where you are) or while switching jobs will justify you to apply for a higher title than you are in now.

Once I am successfully done with my hiking in Half Dome of Yosemite a few weeks later, I will be focusing on the Sun Certified Java Programmer (SCJP) exam on Java 6 platform. Although in my current project we use Java 5, we will be moving to Java 6 sooner or later as some other teams as well as the core platform team in Salesforce uses Java 6. Also it makes sense to get certified on the latest version of Java so that it can around your neck for a longer period of time in your career. I already talked to my manager and he was convinced that it’s relevant to my work and career development plan.

While looking for the best resources, I always refer to my favorite site JavaRanch. Even without looking much into all the books it was evidently clear that there are 2 outstanding study guides for this exam – Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates SCJP 6 Study Guide and Khalid Mughal and Rolf Rusmussen’s A Programmer’s Guide to Java Certification. Kathy&Bert book is targeted very much at making you pass the certification. But the strong points of Khalid&Rolf books is that it’s more thorough, details and explained subjects outside of the exam objectives if that should be useful to a programmer. So Khalid’s book should be better at teaching you Java. But I would recommend the K&B if you are already an experienced java programmer and just want to squeeze through the exam. I am thinking of reading the K&B first and then, time permitting, go through Khalid Mughal.

One place that every SCJP aspirants should frequently visit is the SCJP forum of JavaRanch. Try using only a text editor, even if Notepad and command prompt. Don’t copy paste codes, just type it yourself to see how you are introducing the compile and runtime errors. Here are the exam details and objectives. While looking for free mock exams for SCJP 6, I found the followings good at initial look.

If you plan to buy a commercial mock exam, JQPlus from Enthuware is best amongst them – although I think you won’t need to spend $28 for this as K&B book already has some mock exams.

Last 2 weeks were one of my most extensive work hours spent in office. I was going early in the morning and coming back at midnight. Good that Shusmita was understanding enough towards my deadline in office and didn’t complain much. For this I had to skip hiking last week so that I can help her in preparation for the iftari and dinner invitations at our house.

One good news, Pearl Law Group applied for my PERM process on behalf of Salesforce.com in EB-2 Category, the day before yesterday. I hope all the paper processing happens very smoothly and fast for me.

Title Revision from Software Engineer to Senior Member of Technical Staff

ashikuzzaman — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 02:42:26 +0000

Recently I got a title revision in Salesforce.com as a Senior Member of Technical Staff (SMTS) although without any salary hike. When I joined Salesforce at November 5, 2007 I was assigned the title of Software Engineer. My grade was already high within the Software Engineer title holders at that time falling a little short of the next title Senior Software Engineer. In IT we had the hierarchy like – Associate Software Engineer > Software Engineer > Senior Software Engineer > Lead Software Engineer > Principal Engineer. But in R&D which is a bigger team in Salesforce, the similar titles were Associate Member of Technical Staff (AMTS), Member of Technical Staff (MTS), Senior Member of Technical Staff (SMTS), Lead Member of Technical Staff (LMTS) and Principle Member of Technical Staff (PMTS). So in a recent alignment initiative between R&D and IT team, management decided to follow the conventions of R&D team for both of these groups. This resulted in converting out Software Engineers to MTS. Only for my case in AppStore team, I was levelled as SMTS although my earlier title was Software Engineer. This means I am still eligible for my next level promotion to Lead Member of Technical Staff as per our Merit Increase Process. Let’s see how things go.

Quillpad Made Bangla Typing Easier

ashikuzzaman — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 20:57:19 +0000

Quillpad is a free online typing tool for 10 south asial languages. Yesterday I was having time free time in office so thought of searching for an API that helps writing bengali. And I landed in http://www.quillpad.in/bengali which is more than what I was looking for.

It’s very easy to type in Bengali in Quillpad. For example, type ‘apni kemon achen’ in the Quillpad editor. Quillpad will convert it directly into Bengali script. If you write a word like ‘bishesh‘, first sh should become ‘শ’ and the second sh should become ‘ষ’. Quillpad will intelligently do that for you. No need to use shift keys or to memorize any key mappings. So ‘রাষ্ট্রপতি’ can be written by typing ‘rashtrapati’ or ‘raashtrapathi’. Quillpad can also predict if multiple words are possible for your input. You can click on the word to select from those options. In addition Quillpad allows you to type English words freely in between Bengali words. It intelligently transliterates them into Bengali. Here is one example -

বাংলা টাইপ করা সহজ

As a quick test of using the WYSIWYG editor of Quillpad, I created to a blog in wordpress http://probasheamardingulo.wordpress.com and a blog in blogger http://probasheamardingulo.blogspot.com/. It looks so easy and convenient to me. I think I will continue writing in the blogger because it allows me to increase the font size of the content while to increase font in WordPress I have to upgrade to premium.

Here is a New York Times article that you might find interseting and relevant.

Amazon Kindle: A Great Gadget

ashikuzzaman — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 20:49:50 +0000

Amazon Kindle DX

This June 2009 is a special month for gadget lovers. Yesterday Amazon’s Kindle DX was released and 18th of this month Apple’s iPhone 3G S will be released. While I and my wife Shusmita already have our iPhone 3G, I am particularly in favor of Kindle to consider as the best gadget I can ever have.

Amazon’s Kindle DX is an electronic book reader, the third of it’s kind after it’s successful debut in late 2007 with the first generation followed by early this year with second generation also known as Kindle 2. Like I waited for iPhone to mature a little bit before I bought that, I also waited for Kindle platform to mature before I made up my mind to buy the latest generation Kindle (DX).

I love reading books, both in English and in my mother language Bengali. My decision behind buying the new larger size Kindle DX is primarily because it has a native PDF reader and hence I will be able to read Bengali PDF books which I won’t be in the case of Kindle 1 or 2. My only concern is the bigger size of DX makes it less portable. Before coming into this decision I have roamed around the Amazon Kindle discussion forum for a while along with some other online resources. If you look at my facebook news feed or my recent delicious bookmarks (http://delicious.com/ashikuzzaman/Kindle) you can easily guess that I am in Kindle fever. I am expecting a reading habit and experience change once I get my Kindle DX in my hand. I am going to order it 15th of this month and hence I should recieve it in my hand sometime early July. But whatever I have read so far about it, I can’t just wait to recieve it.

I have read (I think pretty extensively) on Sony Reader, Kindle 2 and Kindle DX and decided to go for Kindle DX. Here are my rationale behind my choice -

First, I love Amazon (and also Google) and want to be around them. When it comes to books and reading I consider Amazon the primary authority and expect creative innovations from them(one small example is the idea they came up with accessing the notes and highlights of the books online). I like the vision that Amazon has – to kindlize each and every book ever printed in any language. This pretty much removes Sony or any other non-Amazon platform (despite Google Books efforts) from my choice.

Second, I like the idea of bigger screen size.

Third, I want to read PDF books and documents. I have a good collection of non-english books in PDF formats. The ones I am more interested about are in Bengali language which I am sure Amazon’s PDF conversion program won’t support. So I will need a native PDF reader. This pretty much restricts me to Kindle DX instead of Kindle 2 despite the less portability of DX compared to K2 and Sony Reader.

Fourth, the larger memory 3.3 GB is not a must-have but a good incentive to me as I want to carry a huge library around without ever thinking of removing any of this.

Fifth, the accelerometer in DX is a plus for me.

But if I buy a second copy of Kindle for my wife or my father or brothers, I will buy Kindle 2 for them because of the portability issue.

One more thing I would like to add with interest here. I have published this blog a little earlier as a Kindle Blog available for subscription via Kindle. Amazon has made it so easy and trivial. I will post an entry or two every week to keep myself recorded in words here.

Bowling with Friends

ashikuzzaman — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 10:05:13 +0000

Last week I went to bowling with my friends in Fremont and we enjoyed it a lot. I paid on behalf of them for the game so that everyone else pay me back later. Despite their repeated query to know how much they should pay me, I was too busy the whole last week to calculate that. Right now, having a little relax time, so I downloaded JDK 6 in my new laptop from office and wrote the small java program to calculate it. Compile and run the program to know how much I owe to each of them.
/** * To compile: javac -d . BowlingCost.java * To run: java BowlingCost */

import java.util.Map; import java.util.HashMap; import java.util.Iterator; public class BowlingCost { public static final double shoeRent = 4.0; public static final double perGame = 4.25; private static int male = 5; private static int female = 4; private static Map payersMaritalStatus = new HashMap(); public BowlingCost() { payersMaritalStatus.put("Shahriar", Boolean.TRUE); payersMaritalStatus.put("Ezaz", Boolean.TRUE); payersMaritalStatus.put("Hasinur", Boolean.TRUE); payersMaritalStatus.put("Nitol", Boolean.FALSE); payersMaritalStatus.put("Ashik", Boolean.TRUE); } public static void main(String []args) { BowlingCost cost = new BowlingCost(); System.out.println("Total Cost of Bowling = " + calculateTotal() + " dollars.\n"); displayPaymentAmounts(); System.out.println("\nThank you! It was a pleasure playing bowling with you guys!!"); } private static double calculateTotal() { return perGame * (male * 3 + female * 1) + shoeRent * (male + female); } private static void displayPaymentAmounts() { Iterator it = payersMaritalStatus.keySet().iterator(); String payerName = null; boolean isMarried = false; while(it.hasNext()) { payerName = (String) it.next(); isMarried = ((Boolean) payersMaritalStatus.get(payerName)).booleanValue(); if(isMarried) { System.out.println(payerName + " should pay " + (perGame * (3 + 1) + shoeRent * (1 + 1)) + " dollars."); } else { System.out.println(payerName + " should pay " + (perGame * 3 + shoeRent * 1) + " dollars."); } } } }

If you don’t want to run the program in command line or opening your favorite IDE, then you can use the following online java compiler to copy paste the code there (select Java SE 1.4 class from the drop down box at the bottom).

http://www.zamples.com/JspExplorer/index.jsp?format=jdk16cl

Here is the output if you run the program:

Total Cost of Bowling = 116.75 dollars.

Ezaz should pay 25.0 dollars.
Ashik should pay 25.0 dollars.
Hasinur should pay 25.0 dollars.
Shahriar should pay 25.0 dollars.
Nitol should pay 16.75 dollars.

Thank you! It was a pleasure playing bowling with you guys!!

Spectrum and 5 Other Bangladeshi IT Companies are now CMMI Level 3 Certified

ashikuzzaman — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 18:58:36 +0000

I got an email morning today that Spectrum Engineering Consortium Ltd. (SECL) has been awarded CMMI Level 3 certification recently. I was so happy to read it because I was part of the initial team in SECL that started this effort. It took long, hard 8 years but now they are here. It’s a great achievement for Bangladeshi Software Industry.

I also got to know that DataSoft, Leads, Southtect and IBCS-Primax have also been awarded CMMI Level 3 certificate. Bangladesh Internet Press Limited (BIPL) was the pioneer in Bangladesh Software Industry when they recieved it back in 2007.

All these are so wonderful for Bangladesh Software Industry! This is in recognition of implementing international best practices and process approach in software development process. The more companies join this race, the more overseas clients will gain confidence over Software Industry of Bangladesh. Congratulations to all these IT companies for the giant step forward to showcase their overall capability in a positive manner.

Last November (2008) I worked with Zeeshan Bhai and AABEA to organize a round table session and Cisco Telepresence Demonstration in San Jose with Khandakar Asif Hasan, Director & CTO and Mushfiqur Rahman, Deputy Managing Director of Spectrum Engineering Consortium Ltd. There they mentioned that Spectrum and some other companies are already at the last stage for fulfilling all the necessary requirements for CMMI Level 3 certifications. It’s great to see that it worked well with them.

Reference: http://aabeat.com/forum/index.php?topic=28.0

Attended DreamForce 2008

ashikuzzaman — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 12:27:11 +0000

As a Salesforce.com employee I got free pass to attend DreamForce 2008 which started today. I rushed into the BART to reach San Francisco Moscone Center early in the morning so that I don’t miss Marc Benioff’s keynote speech. Indeed he did an amazing speech in front of approx 10000 attendees in the huge Moscone Center Expo. I liked the dramatic way the LincVolt car entered into the stage and how Marc introduced Neil Young’s dream of a newer generation of cars and the way it forecasts it’s battery usage, location, angles through Salesforce.com sites. Salesforce.com’s parntership with Facebook and Amazon Web Services clouds were really encouraging. The theme of this year was Cloud. Marc is so good presented and he made quite a nice humors on some MS technologies including their newest announcement in the Cloud computing platform Windows Azure which Marc titled as Vapourware.

I wont a iPOD docking station with radio in a booth through wheel of fortune. My colleague Shishir won a iPod nano in another booth. The whole day went quite busy and by the time I was returning home in the evening, I had to walk in the rain a little to reach the Powell BART station.

Google’s Web Browser Chrome

ashikuzzaman — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 20:20:35 +0000

I started using Google’s new Web Browser Chrome since morning. It looks so good to me so far although I am not going to move away from Firefox pretty soon. First 2 things I noticed are that it doesn’t have a toolbar other than the address bar (nothing like File, Edit etc) and the tabs look very good/clearly distinguishable. Also the browser is so far neutral about Google’s services or adding the Google toolbar by default on it. It’s beta, so it will change a lot in near future…still exploring what’s inside…