sajida kal

hi Tintin
Actually i was born in Shillong. have been extremely curious to visit it as my parents say its a beautiful place. You are the first Indian I have come across apart from my family who has actually stayed there.
I will be leaving shortly for my vacation to india and I was planning to go there with my parents. My sisters did their schooling in Shillong in a KV, but I don't remember the name.
nice meeting you here! enjoy ur stay in london.
cheers
sajida

my roots go back to Tirur Kerala, India.have only vacationed there though.
Currently in singapore.
places I have lived in include-
Shillong,Pune,Bombay,Dehradun, Bangalore, Jamnagar, Pilani, Delhi.
btw,Tintin, nice to know u've been in Shillong..you from a defence background too ?

glad to know that this is a common problem incidentally a few minutes after my post I found myself loaded with work. took some 'valuable' time off to review the helpful suggestions.
toothpicks are little too attention drawing otherwise it sounds good. I also try pinching myself discreetly but it doesnt help.
a pretty horrifying time i had was when some clients had arranged a requirement analysis session for their new system in the afternoon at 3 pm. I had just switched jobs and was getting up earlier as the commute to work had increased significantly. was also in between shifting houses. all of this coupled with the late nites at office found me in a horrendous situation. I literally nodded off in a closed door meeting comprising of 5 folks sitting around a round table. i couldnt even hide like people do when a seminar is going on in a big huge hall!
It wasnt even a case of disinterest; I really liked the work in the new job and felt upset about falling asleep. I remember desperately pinching myself under the table and shifting around. it was baaaaad.
nowadays if there is any important meeting in the afternoon,
i did strong coffee an hour before and keep my fingers crossed.

there is not much work to do at the moment. It is just after lunchtime and I am staring hard at my screen trying to be 'productive' in my spare time and learn something new.
Guru Eckels' words from 'Thinking in C++' blur into nothingness. Try various remedies including using my thumb and forefinger to keep my eyes open, but no luck. coffee doesnt help either.
then I log onto javaranch and view the posts. i am wide awake in 5 mins! thanks everyone.
any other tried and tested remedies out there ?
Sajida

George,
I agree the issue of the two British kids is not directly linked to the original topic of discussion. Previous posts in the same thread have touched on topics such as reform and rehabilitation-which ultimately bank on psychological evaluation for success.
Going forward on that, I was putting across the thought that given how subjective and error prone a psychological evaluation can be, it is a difficult task to decide to imprison/execute/release a criminal when the nature of the crime is particularly violent and gruesome.
By any standards, expecting the kids to be locked up forever is very harsh. Yet to consider releasing them (or as you have pointed out releasing one of them and assessing the other) at this stage seems a little hurried. If they are evalauated over a longer period of time(which could be over a couple of years or more), then the risk of a faulty evaluation would be less.
btw, when I said 'we' I was referring to modern society as such and not to any particular country. fyi I am an Indian living in Singapore.
Sajida

Very often perpetuators of such crimes get away on mitigating circumstances. I am referring to cases where extreme psychological problems are established.
I just heard about this lady who drowned her kids, apparently as a result of suffering from post natal depression. Determining whether it was cold-blooded murder or temporary insanity is certainly going to be very tricky.
Sentencing someone to life imprisonment or to death boils down to answering what was the motive. At lot of times, establishing that motive requires us to delve into the working of another human mind and we all know how difficult and subjective this can be. With Mc Veigh there is no doubt that he deserved to go.
But what about the two British kids who killed a toddler ? They were released and will live under assumed names now. I am not arguing for the death penalty for them. Yet, how can one be certain that they are fit enough to get back to mainstream society? It feels like we are bending over backwards to rehabilitate criminals who have been accused of extreme crimes.

Hi,
The explanation for yield has to be modified a bit. Calling yield on a thread can make the thread give up its locks. If there are other threads in ready to run state, then the JVM might give them a chance to execute, but if there are no such threads, then almost immediately the thread that yielded, will go back to running state and reacquire its locks.
Whether some other thread should be given a chance to execute would depend on the JVM implementation. For example, it might be dictated by the thread priority for some implementations of the JVM.
So calling yield does not guarantee that the thread will always give up its locks. This is different from the behaviour of wait().
Cheers,
Sajida

Hi,
When u use the final modifier, it becomes a compile time constant. Since 100 is within the range of a byte,
it allows the assignment without an explicit cast.
If u remove the final modifier, the value of i cannot be guaranteed to fit into a byte, so the compiler will complain.
Also try compiling the code with i as final with value as 500.
Regards,
Sajida

Hi,
It is only if you say s = s.concat("Somestring");
or s = s.replace('r','t') that you are actually changing the reference of s. Try this in your program
public static void main(String args[]) { String s = "Hi"; s.concat("Somestring"); System.out.println(s); }
So unless you explicitly assign the new String back to the reference, you are not changing the reference of s.
The point that you have illustrated about toUpperCase returning the reference to the same string in some cases is also correct.
The question seems vague to me.
Cheers,
Sajida

Thanks folks, couldnt have done it without you all!
Cheers
Sajida

Hi Deepak
Go thru Velumurugan's notes. They are good. Concentrate on writing some small snippets of code especially for language fundamentals. I was worried about awt and scored 100% but didnt give as much attention to language fundamentals as I should have.

I am quite sure there are some questions on the exam for which no correct answer is available. towards the end, I was flustered enough to mark an answer even though I was sure it wasnt correct,
(thats what is called momentary insanity, I guess ). I lost out becos of that. So if you are 100% sure that there is no right answer, dont mark anything.
All the best,
Regards,
Sajida

passed with 86%.!!
I was aiming higher, but I am happy nevertheless considering that there were all kinds of breaks in my preparation in the last two months, which is ever since i started preparing seriously.
A big thanks to javaranch, Special thanks to Jane for her patient explanations.
I had started learning java last year, but couldn't continue due to heavy work pressure. Kind of stumbled onto this site three months back, and discovered that there were a lot of things to be learn about this language and that there are wonderful folks who help u learn it!
after a month of participating in the forum and reading posts in the certification results forum, I decided that I wanted to write the exam. I come from a C background, so I had to unlearn some things. and pick up lot of new stuff.
Gave most of the mocks as listed on this site..one which is probably not mentioned here, but is on nityananda's site is a list of 13 questions. Those were excellent.
I used jqplus towards the last three weeks. It is a good tool. It has its share of typos and errors, but overall it is good and the support team is very helpful.
All the best to everyone preparing for SCJP. If you are a novice, relax and apply yourself, you can do it. Take your own time to assess where you stand, and you will know when you are ready.
Thanks everyone !
Cheers,
Sajida

Question ID :988390217171
Which of the following calls will not stop a thread from executing ? Assume that the thread is already started.
1. start
2.notify
3.wait
4.interrupt
5.t.join//here t is some other thread
the three correct choices acc to JQPLUS are 1,2 and 4.
Why is 5 incorrect ? Jqplus says that this may cause the thread to stop. Could someone elaborate how that happens ?
My understanding is that t.join implies that thread t will wait for the all other threads to die, but it will not prevent those threads from executing would it ? Can someone explain where I am going wrong here?
Thanks a ton!

Question ID :958267742300
Which of the following statements regarding java.io.File are true?
1.You can delete a File or Dir represented by the File Object by just using that object.
2.You cannot create a File Object if a file/dir of that name do not exist.
3.You can create files in any directory using its API
4.Once created there is no way of changing the file/dir the File obj represents.
5.You can traverse between directories.
Correct options 1,3 and 4. I got it right, but feel the options can be rephrased a bit.
For options 1 and 3, both the methods providing the described functionality throw SecurityException if the SecurityManager does not allow the appropriate access to delete/create a file. Perhaps these options can be modified to say something like File class provides for methods to delete or create files or that one can delete/create a file by using a File object provided relevant permissions exist.
Regards,
Sajida

Hi Scott,
Thanks for pointing that out. 'Polite' threads use some flags to indicate that other threads can access objects which are accessed through synchronized methods. But its not a must. This concept is now clear , thanks a lot,
Cheers,
Sajida