What is Collection API?

Difference between array and vector

1. The size of array is static, while a vector is a dynamically resizable.
2. Vector can store only object reference not any primitive data type. Unlike arrays, vector can contain any combination of object data type.
3. Array is accessed directly through its integer index. The method elementAt(index)  of vector is used to retrieve a given reference at specified index.

/* example of vector class */
import java.util.*;
class VectorClass
{
	public static void main(String arg[])
	{
		Vector V=new Vector();
		V.addElement(new Integer(10));
		V.addElement(new Integer(20));
		V.addElement(new Integer(30));
		System.out.println(V);
		V.addElement(new Double(55.45);
		System.out.println(V);
		V.removeElement(new Integer(30));
		System.out.println(V);
			if(V.contains(new Integer(20)))
		System.out.println("20 is present " +V.indexOf(new Integer(20)));
			else
		System.out.println("20 is not present");
	}
}

Introduction to ArrayList

It is similar to vector, a dynamic resizable array. Both classes inheritance from AbstractList, and implement the interface list.
Array List is compared with vector both are dynamically resizable, both have some common method but it does not have legacy method that Vector has, like elementAt( ), addElement( ).

// example of ArrayList
import java.util.*;
class Alist
{
	public static void main(String arg[])
	{
		ArrayList a=new ArrayList(2);
		a.add(new Integer(10));
		a.add(new Integer(20));
		a.add(new Float(30.4));
		a.add(new Integer(45));
		System.out.println("contents of a:"+a);
		a.add(2,new Integer(5)); // it is insert into the 2nd position
		System.out.println("contents of a:"+a);
		a.remove(2);
		System.out.println("contents of a:"+a);
	}
}

Guide to LinkedList

It adds new functionality that vector did not have previously. It has method like addList( ), addlast( ) to add elements to start or end of the list. It has method like getList( ), getLast( ), removeFirst( ), removeLast( ). So, using the Link list we can handle more perfectly the data elements.

// Demonstrate LinkedList.
import java.util.*;
class LinkedListDemo
{
	public static void main(String args[])
	{
		// create a linked list
		LinkedList ll = new LinkedList();
		// add elements to the linked list
		ll.add("F");
		ll.add("B");
		ll.add("D");
		ll.add("E");
		ll.add("C");
		ll.addLast("Z");
		ll.addFirst("A");
		ll.add(1, "A2");
		System.out.println("Original contents of ll: " + ll);
		// remove elements from the linked list
		ll.remove("F");
		ll.remove(2);
		System.out.println("Contents of ll after deletion: " + ll);
		// remove first and last elements
		ll.removeFirst();
		ll.removeLast();
		System.out.println("ll after deleting first and last: " + ll);
		// get and set a value
		Object val = ll.get(2);
		ll.set(2, (String) val + " Changed");
		System.out.println("ll after change: " + ll);
	}
}

Hash Table

A hash table is not as array or vector.It allows developer a more specific means of accessing data other than index value. Keys and value can be made up or any non-null object. This class extends from the class dictionary and implements the interfaces. The creation of use of Hash Table is similar to Vector, instantiation of its result in an empty Hash Table, where elements are add using put with key and value arguments of type object. To retrieve object from a Hash Table, the object used as keys must implements method hashCode( ) and equals( ).

//Testting Hashtable behavior when objects representating the same
//entity are used as hastable keys
class Program
{
	static void Main(string[] args)
		{
			Hashtable col = new Hashtable();
			col["key1"] = "Value1";
			col["key2"] = "Value2";
			DisplayResults(col);
			col["key2"] = "Value2Updated";
			DisplayResults(col);
			System.Console.Read();
		}
	static void DisplayResults (Hashtable col)
		{
			Console.WriteLine();
			Console.WriteLine("Total Items: {0}",col.Count);
			foreach (DictionaryEntry entry in col)
				{
					Console.WriteLine(
						"Key[{0}], Hash[{1}], Value[{2}]",
						entry.Key,
						entry.Key.GetHashCode().ToString(),
						entry.Value);
				}
		}
}

Conclusion

Overview:

If you are a googler then you must know about the Google advertising program. Google has two types of advertising program AdWords and AdSense accordingly. With this article we will go through the overview of this advertising program explain some of the advertising term like Web Traffic, CTR, eCPM etc. and give you some tips and tricks to earn the maximize revenue from Google AdSense. First we should know what this AdSense and AdWords means.

1. AdWords:

   AdWords let advertisers to promote their product or website through Google or other AdSense integrated website. When you search in Google with a keyword you may find some links highlighted under the search box and the sidebar and a text ‘sponsored Links’ will be found under the box. This links are sent through AdWords. That means some of the advertiser paid Google to show the links in its site. AdWords are most preferable for advertisers as they have option for geo-targeting, Contextual ads and show the ads on the most relevant content.

2. AdSense:

   AdSense is an opportunity for the publishers to earn money from the Google Advertising program. Your web portal will be advertised with relevant ads through AdSense and the ads will come from the advertisers on AdWords. AdSense is preferred by both publishers and users as they are less disturbing and annoying compared to loud and flashy banners. After you make a registration, a Mediabot will crawl through your website and find some appropriate keywords so that your website can host the most relevant advertisement.

Requirements:

Before we can start through AdSense program, we should know the minimum requirements to earn.

1. Your own website ( you have to access the source code of your website to incorporate the AdSense code into your website, so the website must be your own as anybody will not let you to place AdSense code into his website).
2. A computer with internet access.
3. Basic web-design knowledge to make a good website.

Relate yourself with some advertising terms:

• Web Traffic:

  Web Traffic determined by the number of visitors visits your site.

• Backlinking:

  Determined by number of website linking back to your website. More backlink is the more opportunity to gain more traffic.

• CPC:

  Acronym of Cost-Per-Click. As the name suggest, you will be paid from AdSense only when anyone click the hosted ad in your web portal.

• CPM:

  Acronym of Cost-Per-Mille. This advertisement will pay you when it gets thousand impressions from your site, impression means how many time the ads has been shown up in your website.

• CTR:

  Acronym of Click-Through-Rate. This measure what percentage of your website-visitor had click on your ads. As an example you got 100 visitors in a day and 5 of them clicked on ads after visiting your site. So your Click-Through-Rate will be 5%.

Getting Started:

You may relate yourself with basic advertising terms now. Getting started with AdSense program is very easy. After you apply your website for Google AdSense program a mediabot will crawl through your site and find the relevant keyword from your site. Before you apply your site in AdSense program you have to ensure that you are generating good web traffic in your web portal. You will get a notification from AdSense to let you know whether your site has been approved in AdSense networking or not. Google AdSense has a strict guideline on how the Ads should be displayed in your site. If mediabot will unable to crawl through your site, it will not display sponsored advertisement in your site. Please check if your website meets the requirement of Google Program policy and Terms & Condition before applying. If you site has been approved you have to create an ad campaign to select the size, look and feel of your adslot. A JavaScript code will be sent to you. You need to incorporate that code into the source code of your website to start host ads.

Types of AdSense:

• AdSense for content:

  This is the general and mostly used AdSense type. You can place ad box on your web page with this program.

• AdSense for feeds:

  If you have an atom RSS feeds for your blog that can be advertised through this program.

• AdSense for Mobile:

  It will show ads if somebody navigates to your site through mobile or PDA devices.

• AdSense for search:

  A companion to the regular AdSense program, AdSense for search, allows website owners to place Google search boxes on their websites. When a user searches the Internet or the website with the search box, Google shares any advertising revenue it makes from those searches with the website owner.

Optimizing your site to earn maximize revenue:

The principal of having a good CTR in your site is to attract more people to your ad slot. You can reach this goal in many ways by optimizing ad placement, dimension of ad box, choosing the best color pallets to fit your site etc. We will go through all this optimizing tips now. A good CTR for your website is 5%, below 3% means mediocre and below 2% indicated you that you have to do more with your ad placement and colors.

• Optimizing Placement:

  Optimizing the best placement for your AdSense ad box is very easy. You have to determinate where the people attract most in your website. That may be in a important article in your website or that can be determined by the way a visitor will browse his eyes in your website.

Google has produces a heat map based on with ad placement had earned more revenue. The Color had fade from dark orange (Strongest performance) from light yellow (Weakest performance).

Google AdSense Heatmap

But if you are maintain a blog then the image below would be the map for the best placement for your ads.

Google AdSense Heatmap for Blogger

The image below is the image for forum ad optimization…

Google AdSense Heatmap for Forum

The image below is a reference from EyeTrack III. This image shows how a man browse his eyes on the homepage of a website.

Eye Track III

This is a heat map image produces by EyeTrack III.

Eye Track III HeatMap

According to Google’s research, if positioned well then a 336x280px large rectangle, 300x250px medium rectangle, 160x600px Wide Skyscraper medium rectangle will help you to earn most revenue from Google AdSense.

• Optimizing Ad Color Palettes:

  There are three types of color palettes available for optimizing your AdSense AdSlot. They are Blend, Complement, and Contrast.

  • Blend:

    This type’s color palettes should designed with the same border and background color with the background where you are placing ads. This types of color palettes should be used where the background color is very light.

  • Complement:

    Use the color already used in your site but should not be same as the background color. You can use this types of palettes both in light and dark background.

  • Contrast:

    Choose a color that strictly against your background. Use it only in dark background.

Below is the reference of three types of color palettes from Google.

Blend Color Palette

Complement Color Palette

Contrast Color Palettes

• Optimizing revenue from ad review center: Go to your AdSense account > AdSense Setup Tab > Ad Review Center. You will find ‘Category Filters’ there. This will help you to block specific category of ads from showing on your website. Just block the categories which are against your website. That will help you to earn more revenue from AdSense.

Google AdSense Category Filtering

Video Screenplay:

Still under confusion? Then watch this video below. This is a official video from Google demonstrating the optimiztion of AdSense through a screenplay. I am sure that this video will help you as a beginner level AdSense optimization. So Happy earning!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpPX4A78jqg

Use right typeface for your documents

When you make conversation with somebody, your body languages, and words plays a big role in your mood and makes the conversation richer. Like that the typeface you used in your document irrespective in printing media or online publishing, construct the mood of reader. So when you are writing your next document doesn’t ignore this stuff. Only choosing the right font is not the only way to construct the mood of reader. Size, color, underline, style have a strong impact on reader. Now go through this article to know how to use the right typography for your document.

Understanding the difference: Typeface and Fonts

I have experienced that most of the people take this two term typeface and typography as same. But technically they don’t carry the same meaning. Font is just a font-family of a character. i.e. Verdana or Arial is determined as typography whereas typeface is the font-family is the details about font-family. i.e.  “Verdana, Italic, 15pt” is constitute as font-face. So a font face describes the state of your font. Most of the people choose the font from two major font-families namely Serif, Sans-serif. You can use Decorative font in your design.

Understanding the difference: Serif & Sans-Serif fonts

Serif fonts have a short stroke at the start and end of every letter. These strokes are called serif. Serif fonts are broadly used in legal documents, letter, newsletter and all other printing documents as it has the better readability.

‘Sans’ is a French word that means ’without’. That means sans-serif font don’t have the decorative strokes at the start and end of a letter. This font-family has a very smooth and eye catching font that mostly used in web (online) publishing and in the header of an article.

Serif fonts have a short decorative strokes at the begining and end of every letter

Decorative strokes are missing in Sans-Serif fonts

Some Popular fonts of Serif families listed below:

• Book Antiqua: Popularly used in the body text of multi-page report as it has a very great readability even in small font size.
• Courier New: This font falls under moonscape font-family. It’s widely used in technological writing, scripting, examples and illustrations.
• Garamond: This font is mostly used in email communication, notice and circulars.
• Times: Times and Times New Roman has a little kerning difference. The character come closer in the Times font.
• Times New Roman: This was the default font for the old Microsoft products. Since the printing media has offered a higher resolution print, this font doesn’t appear hazy or blur.

Some Popular of Sans-serif families listed below:

• Arial: It’s the most classic Sans-serif font. Used in most of web design and this is the default font for most of the browsers.
• Arial Black: You can say it’s the bolder version of Arial font. It’s mostly used in web heading but not in body text.
• Calibri: This is the default font for Windows 7, Windows Vista, Office 2007 and 2010. This is a very smooth font can be read online. But it need some negative kerning for better readability.
• Helvetica: Very Clear, Ideal for numbers. It’s an alternative to Arial.
• Microsoft Sans Serif: Excellent for body text of a web page.
• Verdana: Mostly Used in email communication. It’s a great font that can be used anywhere irrespective body or heading text of a web page.

Font Viewer:

fontviewer screenshot

To choose the right font you need to type some text and check that with every font available in your system. But this process is very a time wasting. But you can do the same thing with font viewing software. Font viewing software makes it easy to choose the right font for your occasion. Now we are taking a look on the FONT VIEWER software. You can download this software from http://www.fontviewer.net . And in the ‘text to display box’ type the text that you want to check with every available font. Change the foreground, background color and the size to exactly see how the text will look in your document. Click on the go button and you will see the text is displaying in a table with every available font in your system with Bold, Italic, Bold & Italic view.

Tips for using the right font:

• Don’t use more than three fonts in your document.
• Don’t use larger than 18pt size in heading.
• Use smaller than 12pt size for body text.
• Use Sans-Serif fonts for body text and Serif fonts for Heading.
• Try To use contrast color in heading to attract reader.
• Use Italic style for some word that shouldn’t be overlooked, Use Bold for mediocre important words and use bold and words for high sensitive words in your document.
• Adjust the kerning option for better readability.

create your own free blog in jiffy with vox.com

Trends for creating blogs are growing rapidly. Mostly user prefers Word press and other Content Management System (CMS) for their blog hosting. Installing any CMS in a server needs a minimum knowledge on hosting, server and scripting. Some people who doesn’t want to invest any buck for blog or doesn’t know anything about hosting, vox.com is for them. This week we have reviewed vox.com. You can create blog easily, free of cost and with no coding experience with this site. Your blog will be created as the sub-domain of vox.com (e.g. your-blog-name.vox.com). So let’s go through how to create a blog with vox.com in jiffy!

Step 1: Setup Your Blog

1. Open up your browser. Go to http://vox.com .
2. Click on ‘Join Vox’ on top and you will be redirected to the registration page.

Tip: You can also click on ‘Take a Tour’ for a small tutorial on using the site and at the same time you will be aware of all the features of the site.

Joining Vox

1. Fill up your original details and a valid email address.
2. Enter the text ‘captcha’ and click ‘Sign Up’.

Info: It is free to create your account. Unfortunately there have no option to host your vox blog with top level domain.

Registering at vox

1. You will get a validation mail containing a confirmation link.
2. Either go through the link or copy the confirmation number and paste in vox account verification page and click ‘Confirm Account’.
3. Fill your profile details (optional) if you like.

Confirm account in vox

Step 2: Creating Your Post

1. click on the ‘create’ on the top from the control panel.

Start Blogging

1. You will get a text editor on the screen.
2. Give a relevant title that would attract your post viewer.
3. Enter some relevant keyword. Your blog will appear in the search result when anybody searches those keywords.

Editing a Blog

1. Click on ‘Photos’ if you like to insert image in your post.
2. This site supports photo uploading from your computer, Flickr, iStockphoto, photobucket and your Vox library.
3. Click on ‘Choose’ and target your image path.
4. Add some relevant keyword for your photo.
5. You can change the permission of viewing your photo from bottom line.
6. Click on ‘ok’ if you’re done.

Uploading photo in vox

1. You can change the size and position of your image which you have uploaded.

Resizing an image

1. You can add music in the same way you have insert the image.
2. Vox support MP3, MP4, M4A, AMR, Ogg, Vorbis and WAV music format.
3. You can upload your music from your computer, Vox library, Amazon.

Uploading Media

1. Click on ‘save’ when you think your page is done.
2. Once you have saved your post, you can send notification about it to your friends or bookmark it to social bookmarking sites.

Sharing your blog

Step 3: Styling Your Blog with Themes

1. Click on ‘you’ from the top menu and select design from the sub menu.
2. Select your layout at first.
3. Point your mouse over the theme and click ‘apply to blog’.
4. You can change the theme category from the sidebar to fit your blog.

Here is what you get at last

Final Image

Hope you have enjoyed this tutorial. So create your first Vox blog as soon as possible.

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