While trying to implement Solr indexer, I came across problem on how to actually normalize the date format according to Solr format. Surprisingly, this question was asked quite often in Stackoverflow. So, I decided to write a Solr plugin with the hope to solve this problem. However, at the end of the day, it turned out that going this approach does not actually solve my problem due to some Solr's peculiarity. Nonetheless, I hope this writing will help anyone who is trying to develop any Solr plugin as most examples are outdated. I will also explain the reason why it doesn't work (in my case).

A non-technical post to share my experience in making a career shift from banking to software engineering industry. This is just the beginning and I am so excited to what future might hold. After almost two years in previous position, I no longer feel excited about the job and had a strong urge to follow my dream. So, I quit.

I was playing around with AngularJs recently and decided to integrate it with Rails. The goal is to have total separation between front-end and back-end. Back-end will act as a RESTful service that spits JSON. Both front-end and back-end will be served from different server and will have different domain, so there are few options to achieve this. Whenever you are doing cross domain request, you will be subjected to same-origin policy.

As part of my objective to up my skills, I decided to check out all the hypes with Ruby on Rails. But... I'm running Windows and if you're not writing anything other than .Net languages, running Windows seems fine. For other thing it sucks a bit except for Node.js and PHP (as far as my testing goes). I've tried installing OS X Mountain Lion on VM Ware but I don't like running a full GUI to do dev work if necessary, so I installed Ubuntu 13.04 in Hyper-V so I can run it headless.

Recently, I get a chance working with Pagodabox while helping a friend with a client project. If you do not know about Pagodabox, you can go to their website to checkout. In short it is a cloud solution to deployment of web application. One of the nice feature of Pagodabox is you can actually connect directly to the Sql Server. Most of traditional hostings involve using some sort of web interface (e.g PhpMyAdmin) to interact with db. If you're using Mac OSX, then you should be fine but anything on Windows is a pain. I'm going to show you how this can be done on Windows (sort of!) and backed by Ubuntu VM running in the guest.

This time around, I had a little project with a friend which involved cryptography. So we decided to implement an AES-256 encryption/decryption. That is way above top secret (lol). I googled around looking for information and reading more on cryptography and found this http://www.chapleau.info/blog/2011/01/06/usingsimplestringkeywithaes256encryptioninc.html. There is couple of thing which I don't like regarding the implementation but it is a good start for now.

While learning the new asynchrony feature in C# 5.0, I was experimenting the difference between the previous method of achieving asynchrony using callback against the latest feature provided by C# by utilizing the async and await keyword. So what's the difference?

I was playing around with Google Code Jam practice question and was thinking of a smarter way to solve this question. The particular challenge I'm doing is Hedgemony problem. I ended up solving it with two solutions and I did performance benchmark for fun.

I am currently working to finish up Pocket Api wrapper for C#/.Net. In turned out that the Api returned list of articles/items in Json and the list is not in array form. It is actually a list of object. We will see how we can deserialize this using Json.net

Windows Phone 8 has this new feature of opening an app (in this case my own app) by assigning Uri. It is useful when you are doing Oauth and need to supply the redirection uri. If you are using this new feature, then your app can be automatically opened after oauth is done.