My Pensieve

nohup - Keeping Background Processes Around

2010-05-29T22:26:00.003+05:30

I know this is a very basic Unix command, but ironically I've gotten to use it very recently only.

You can prevent a background process from terminating, which is the default action, when you sign off or are disconnected. The nohup command prevents your process from getting the HUP (Hang UP) signal and enables it to continue processing.

The nohup command is simple to use--just add it before the command you actually want to run. Because nohup is designed to run when there is no terminal attached, it wants you to redirect output to a file. If you do not, nohup redirects it automatically to a file known as nohup.out.

Running a process in the background with nohup looks like the following:

$ nohup ls &
[1] 6695
$ Sending output to nohup.out

Because I do not redirect the output from nohup, it does it for me. If I redirect the output ( nohup ls > results &), I do not see the second message.

Forward Proxy Vs Reverse Proxy

2010-05-29T16:05:00.003+05:30

A forward proxy is usually for Out-bound traffic. It's analogous to an ISP using a proxy to forward all HTTP traffic from its clients to external web servers on the Internet.

However, a reverse proxy is usually for In-bound traffic. It's analogous to having a proxy receiving all user requests and redirecting, internally, from one server to a set of servers(Server Farm) for processing, akin to load-balancing.

Just making the concepts clear

Avatar

2010-01-01T22:43:00.001+05:30

Firstly, I wish everybody, a very Happy and Prosperous new year!

Today I took the 7 hour sojourn to (and back from) IMAX, Wadala, Mumbai, theatre to watch James Cameron’s “Avatar” in all of it’s 3D glory. I must say, I am not disappointed. The movie, to say the least, was spectacular and very entertaining.

Of course, you would have to turn off your brain, regarding, some elements. For eg, ~~Where did those Nav’i (the indigenous humanoid population of the the film’s fictional planet, Pandora) folks learn to speak such good English, noting that that they have their own language ?~~ Apparently, Grace(Scientist played by Sigourney waever) had setup a school to teach the Nav'i some english . The depths to which Cameron went to define, describe the alien world is astonishing. The magnificent animals, bioluminescent plants and the Nav’i people, themselves, are very well made.

Definitely a 4 star (say, out of 5) for this one. And mind you the IMAX experience is worth all the effort I’ve put in to watching this movie (Good 3 Hrs in travelling alone). But, here, the tickets are a tad expensive. Rs.500, Phew!!. But since I’ve never watched a proper movie in IMAX, i thought I’ll spend it anyway.

The movie is already making loads of money at the box office and i bet it would end up with a bunch of Oscars too (I expect, at least 2). So, go head and the enjoy the experience called ‘Avatar’ yourself (If possible in an IMAX theatre).

Adios’

Lazy Initialization Holder Class Idiom

2009-11-13T06:37:00.000+05:30

Often when dealing with Singleton pattern, if the object in question is a costly one to make, developers try to use lazy creation. For example


class MySingleton {
 
  private static MySingleton instance;
 
  private MySingleton() { }

  public static MySingleton getInstance() {
    if(instance == null) {
      instance = new MySingleton();
    }
    return instance;
  } 
}

The above implementation works fine for single-threaded systems, but for concurrent ones, if two callers invoke MySingleton.getInstance() at the same time, the system might end up with 2 different instances of MySingleton, which is undesirable.

Well, there are ways to deal with it. A popular way, is to use Double-Checking synchronization mechanism. However even that's not guaranteed to work flawlessly across all JVM implementations.

I've come across one another approach to this, i.e, to use Holder Class to perform lazy initialization. The above example may be refactored to follow this idiom as,


class MySingleton {

  private MySingleton() { }

  private static class MySingletonHolder {
    
    private static final MySingleton instance = new MySingleton();
  } 

  public static MySingleton getInstance() {
    return MySingletonHolder.instance;
  }
}

When the class MySingleton is loaded by the JVM, the class goes through initialization. Since the class does not have any static variables to initialize, the initialization completes trivially. The static class definition MySingletonHolder within it is not initialized until the JVM determines that MySingletonHolder must be executed.

The static class MySingletonHolder is only executed when the static method getInstance is invoked on the class MySingleton, and the first time this happens the JVM will load and initialize the MySingletonHolder class. The initialization of the MySingletonHolder class results in static variable instance being initialized by executing the (private) constructor for the outer class MySingleton. Since the class initialization phase is guaranteed by the JLS to be serial, i.e., non-concurrent, no further synchronization is required in the static getInstance method during loading and initialization. And since the initialization phase writes the static variable instance in a serial operation, all subsequent concurrent invocations of the getInstance will return the same correctly initialized instance without incurring any additional synchronization overhead.

Definitely, Maybe

2009-08-13T13:02:00.000+05:30

When you propose to someone and this is what you hear in reply, doesn't it confuse you ?(not to mention that it pisses you off). Anyway, this movie I've just completed watching, is titled as above. I liked it very much, though some people mightn't because of it's slower narration.

All the actors were convincing and did their part well. The girl, who plays the male lead's daughter was fantastic. Except, to hear words like penis, thrust, vagina from her sounded a bit gross, especially, considering her age. However it's a soft and refreshing movie. The one you would typically want to watch on a lazy Sunday afternoon (Though it's nearly mid-night now).

Romantic movies are evergreen, Way to go.

Movie Mania

2009-08-03T10:23:00.000+05:30

Off late, I've been to loads of movies. Thought i'll offload my ratings on them here,

Terminator Salvation - 3 star
Ice Age - Dawn of Dinosaurs - 3.5 star
HP & Half blood prince - 3 star
The Hangover - 4 star
Magadheera - 2.5 stars

In the pipeline, Transformers - Revenge of the fallen, Love Aaj kal, Kaminey....

The Holiday

2009-07-06T15:57:00.000+05:30

I've just finished watching "The Holiday" . It's romance all the way, spilled with bits of humor here and there.

Well, the main theme being how each of the characters end up finding true love, after being snubbed by the false ones. There are moments with butt-cracking comedy, as well as, heart-wrenching emotion. And i think all the actors, especially the main ones - Diaz & Winslet, did a wonderful job. I didn't have a single boring moment.

I'd definitely recommend this to anyone, well, anyone who enjoy romantic comedy's actually.

Underdog wins the Oscar

2009-02-25T03:24:00.000+05:30

Stayed up until 1 am yesterday, to watch the re-telecast of the oscar awards prensentation ceremony. This is the first time ever i have seen oscar presentations. As has been widely predicted, 'Slumdog millionaire' has won 8 awards of the 10 nominations it received, including the one for best picture. What's more thrilling is that 3 of them were won by indians (AR Rahman 2 & Resul Pookutty 1).

Steve Martin/Tina Fey episode was very funny, so was the overall presentation by Hugh Jackman.

The most touching moments for me were the ones regarding 'Best Supporting Actor' and 'Best Lead Actress'. Heath Ledger won the former( posthumous ) and Kate Winslet the later. Heath has delivered a breath-taking performance as the 'Joker' in 'The Dark Knight'. I didn't quite like the movie when i saw it first, but when i saw it for the second & third times, it became evident that heath's exhilarating performance has overtaken all other characters in that movie. He was simply superb, the movie was worth watching for heath's performance alone and he deservedly won an Oscar. The moment when his family came onstage to accept the award on his behalf, it was heart touching. I really wished the real heath was here today to receive it himself.

Another touching moment involved 'Kate Winslet', she has previously got 5 nominations only to be snubbed at the last moment. She finally won the oscar for her scintillating performance in 'The Reader'. I haven't seen the movie myself, but heard it's a world war II based drama. will try to see it in near future.

Lots of exciting movies are lined up for 2009,
1) Angels & Demons
2) Terminator Salvation
3) Kungfu Panda 2
4) Harry Potter & The HBP ......

can't wait to catch them........

Keep your fingers crossed!!

2008-10-09T13:30:00.000+05:30

9th October, 2008......ban on short-selling lifted......12:52 AM (US 3:22PM).....Stock's 20.65% down....holding my breath

Secure Your Wireless Network

2008-10-03T13:44:00.000+05:30

Recent bomb-blasts in New Delhi have sent tremors across the nation. The national capital hasn't yet recovered fully from the terrible blasts that occurred earlier in the month that these fresh blasts created chaos. Fortunately (though not much), there wasn't too much loss of life this time. Nevertheless the security of common man is becoming more of an illusion day-by-day.

One interesting aspect that has come out of this, is that, the terror emails that were sent just after/before the blasts goading the government to try stop the blasts have come from IP addresses that belong to innocent citizens like you and me. The mistake of these people is that they left their wireless networks unsecured. And this allowed those anti-social elements to hack in to these networks and send those emails. My wireless network too was unsecured until last week. But after hearing this news, I fully understood the hazards of leaving your wireless network unsecured.

Here am outlining the measures one need to take in order to secure one's wireless network,

1) Firstly change the default 'admin' password for your wireless router.

2) Assign a private 'SSID' for your router and disable SSID broadcast feature, which helps other wireless devices to detect your network

3) Then enable MAC filtering and explicitly list the MAC addresses of the computers that you intend to connect to your wireless network via your router, in it's allowed MAC addresses list

4) Enable wireless security like WEP or WPA and specify a secret key of sufficient complexity and reveal it only to people you really trust.

One more precaution could be to position your router in such a way that it's not near the edges of the house(balcony etc) thus reducing it's range outside the house.

Taking these measure would ensure that no stranger can hack in to your wireless network and do any malicious things.

Life's Back To Normal

2008-08-04T13:51:00.000+05:30

Sigh.....it's over at last...i got my laptop back from the service center. Even though that @*$*H*L* didn't fix my dvd-drive....am still relieved to get it back....was missing it terribly.

Now that i have it back.....am gonna use it more responsibly now on.I mean the usual entertainment stuff would keep happening, but need to do some useful stuff too.

BTW, recently i've purchased a S-Video cable, so now am able to watch all movies from my laptop on the big screen( for me that would be my 21" Samsung CTV).

Cheers

Why "Kill"ing can be a bad idea.....

2008-07-31T00:12:00.000+05:30

Well...not all means of killing. Hey...hey....don't jump to any assumptions, am talking about killing processes on a Unix machine.
I typically (and in a rather careless way) use kill -9 to kill any webserver/tomcat processes that are not terminating in a proper way and holding up the ports. One of my friends told me, how bad a practice that it is.

To be more specific, Sending a process a SIGKILL (viz. kill -9) is always a bad idea and should only be used as the very last resort.
A SIGKILL cannot be caught by any program's signal handler and thus leaves this process no chance whatsoever to do any cleanup (e.g. like flushing buffers, releasing locks, or file handles etc).

Therefore I would doubt that the port becomes available as soon as you were expecting, coz the program holding it might not have done the necessary cleanup, but could maybe rather lead to a half closed connection.

You should always start with a SIGTERM (i.e. kill without any signal No.). Then you could try a SIGHUP (viz. kill -1). I've read that many daemons (processes/programs) are programmed to catch a SIGHUP to reinitialize themselves.

Well, how to find out the pid to kill(not kill :-)), lsof will tell you that

e.g.
lsof -i tcp:$PORT -Fp|tr -d p

Number and size limits of a cookie in Internet Explorer

2008-06-12T02:00:00.000+05:30

Well....anybody who thinks of cookies as free money and uses them indiscriminately to store stuff on the client side, should know this.
These are the minimum limitations for the cookie implementation in IE browser,

It allows at least 300 cookies
at least 4096 bytes per cookie (as measured by the size of the characters that comprise the cookie non-terminal in the syntax description of the Set-Cookie header)
at least 20 cookies per unique host or domain name

Don't be fooled by the word 'at least', it means, according to IE, that I only do this much! (however it means something else in general english). So, IE allows no more than 20 unique cookies per domain. So think twice, before you dish out some stinking code that does some messy cookie stuff. When the limit exceeds, the cookie is not truncated...hold your breath...it's discarded. But then it makes sense, isn't it. No use of an incomplete cookie, better to be informed that it's lost.

Applications should use as few cookies as possible and as small a cookie as possible. Additionally, applications should be able to handle the loss of a cookie.

To store more than 20 name-value pairs for a domain, you can create a cookie dictionary by concatenating several name-value pairs for each cookie up to the 4,096-byte limit for that cookie. Currently, to retrieve these values from client-side scripting, you must parse the cookies manually.

If you use the document.cookie property to retrieve the cookie on the client side, the document.cookie property can retrieve only 4,096 bytes. This byte total can be one name-value pair of 4 KB, or it can be up to 20 name-value pairs that have a total size of 4 KB

Alternative to 'final'

2008-06-11T02:55:00.000+05:30

We all know that preceding a class declaration with the keyword 'final' makes it un-inheritable. However there's one more way to do it, albeit, less recommended way.

By making the constructor 'private', you can make a class un-inheritable. This is becuase a sub-class constructor must invoke an accessible super class constructor either explicitly or implicitly and it wouldn't find any in this case.

This is less recommended, because, it is not apparent from the first glance at the class whether it is available for inheritance or not (since 'final' is placed in the header, it's much more recognizable), need to look at the constructor definition to find it out. Simple saying, it's less readable.

Gone...all gone !

2008-06-07T07:34:00.000+05:30

It's just 3 months after the warranty period.....and now it's screwed up. They say it can cost up to 20k to get it repaired. One of my friend's suggested me sell off what's remaining and invest that amount in a new one, instead of getting the old one repaired.

I feel paralyzed, dejected and lost. It had been a very integral part of my life for the past one year. I don't know what's gonna happen....

After all, it's the first computer i ever owned....bought with my own hard earned money....my honey..... huh

My Home

2008-05-30T00:16:00.001+05:30

Now this is where i live, that semi-circular shaped building is my home

Open-Closed Principle

2008-05-29T15:14:00.000+05:30

This is one more Object Oriented Programming fundaa....

Basically, it tells us that, 'Entities' (classes, modules, packages etc.) should be open for 'Extension' (by means of Inheritance). But should be closed for 'Modification' (i.e there shouldn't be way in which the original source could be changed by the client).

This principle promotes the idea that once implemented, a class, shouldn't change at all (Except to correct the errors though). Any improvements and new features should only be put in to a new class which inherits from the original one.

Introduction to ExtJs

2008-05-19T14:53:00.000+05:30

Ok...now since i've got in to this, i thought it would be nice to put in a simple example.
Here's what you have to do, to create a simple combobox.Firstly you need get certain resources in to your page.

This piece of extjs code constructs a simple array store to hold the data and then creates an extjs combobox, fills it with data and displays it on-behalf of a regular html input control (see after the javascript part to understand completely),



// All extjs action happens inside this
Ext.onReady(function() {

 // simple array store ('The Model')
 var store = new Ext.data.SimpleStore({
   fields : ['abbr', 'state'],
   data : [['AP','Andhra Pradesh'],
           ['MP','Madhya Pradesh'],
           ['UP','Uttar Pradesh'],
           ['HP','Himachal Pradesh']]
 });

 // A Combobox ('The View')
 var combo = new Ext.form.ComboBox({
   store: store,         // Bind the data model
   applyTo: 'states',    // Which component to render on to
   displayField:'state', // Which among the data fields to be visible
   typeAhead: true,      // To enable kind of fill-as-you-type
   mode: 'local',        // No need to fetch data from any remote service
   triggerAction: 'all', // Whether to show the selection alone or all data,
   emptyText:'Select a state...', // Pretty much obvious
   selectOnFocus:true    // Again obvious
 });

});

Associate the above created extjs control to a html control (give the same id as we used above)

< input id="states" type="text" >

Here's the output

Mobile blogging....

2008-05-15T02:33:00.001+05:30

Location : office
This is my first mobile blog post. Sounds exciting, isn'nt it ?

--
Sent from Gmail for mobile | mobile.google.com

Finally a 'NAME' !!

2008-05-13T05:01:00.000+05:30

I've had an online identity since a long time....at least as early as 2001. However it never occurred to me that i should make my identity more representative of myself . Yeah...we all have our e-mail addresses. But they, as I've said, doesn't really provide a total representation of oneself . Well, one way to do that is by having my own domain name and web site. I wasn't in a position to afford it until recently. But now i can , so I've got a domain name for my self.

But then the problem of naming my online representation (domain) came up . I could have simply named it after my name, but then i thought it would be too boring . So i started looking out for names. Recently I've been deep in to reading the Harry Potter books, not reading actually, am listening to the audio books.

Harry Potter universe is a fantasy with all the elements that an exciting franchise should have. Great story line and characters. Deep plots, surprises and gripping narration. More than anything else, the cornerstones of the Harry Potter novels are these human attributes, friendship, bravery and loyalty. This definitely appeases the readers. In HP universe, magical world co-exists with the ordinary world, albeit in secrecy. Witches & Wizards use a magical device called a 'Pensieve', to store their memories....hmm i see it, doesn't it sound apt as the title of my blog. So I've choosen it as the name for my online identity (domain name), at least for now.

I got it registered, www.mypensieve.in (.com is already taken ) at www.bagful.net for RS.650. It's mine for 1 year and then i have to renew it again.

Now....you are coz...that URL is mapped to this blog address.

Starting with ExtJs

2008-05-07T03:02:00.000+05:30

We are completely revamping the UI for the next version of the product am working on (don't ask any details about the product, company regulations prohibit me from giving out any ).

And the technology we chose to do it in is, ExtJs. So started learning it. Hope it would be an interesting journey. Oh...BTW ExtJs is a pure javascript clientside UI component library. Well....one of the so called, Ajaaxxeee thing...

For more on ExtJs, go to their official page, http://www.extjs.com

Happy Learning

The Marathon begins.....

2008-05-01T13:49:00.001+05:30

So here I am, drained completely from the journey i did last weekend.

This is what my itinerary looked like,

25-4-08
5:15 pm	Started from home, took an auto rickshaw
5:30 pm	Reached Malad station
5:45 pm	Started to Kalyan station, took a local train
6:30 pm	Reached Kalyan station
6:30 pm - 9.00 pm	Waited for the train (delayed by 2 hours)
9:10 pm	Started towards Secunderabad, Rajkot-Secunderabad Holiday special
26-4-08
12:00 pm	Reached Secunderabad
12:45 pm	Started to my friend's house, friend picked me up
1:30 pm	Reached his house
6:50 pm	Started to Hi-Tech city station, took a local train
7:15 pm	Reached Hi-Tech city station
7:30 pm	Started to Secunderabad station, took an auto rickshaw
8:00 pm	Had to get down at Tank band station (actually got in to wrong train)
8:15 pm	caught an auto to Secunderabad station
8:30 pm	reached secunderabad station
9:15 pm	started towards kakinada
27-4-08
7:30 am	reached kakinada
8:00 am	finally reached my parents place
8:45 pm	started towards samalkot
9:20 pm	reached samalkot
10:10 pm	started towards secunderabad (train delayed by 15 min)
28-4-08
10:30 am	reached secunderabad
1:30 pm	started towards mumbai
29-4-08
7:30 am	reached mumbai (dadar)
8:00 am	started towards malad station
8:30 am	reached malad station
8:45 am	started towards home
9:00 am	finally reached home

Well, all this was worth it for, one of my best friend’s marriage, Shyam’s marriage. Marriage went on well and the dinner server was good too. Caught up with some old friends (Ram, Sachin, Rajesh, Madhav, Chandru etc). Had very little time to spend with my family (my mom was particularly furious about it), but can’t help it, need to get back to Mumbai to take care of my pending work @ office.

All in, this was something I’ve never done before, in the 96 hrs that my tour spanned, I was on the move for at least 62 hours. Hmm…experience…different….difficult….but an experience

Dependency Inversion Principle (DIP)

2008-04-17T17:09:00.000+05:30

There is a principle of object-oriented design known as the Dependency Inversion Principle (DIP). This principle tells us that we should try to avoid depending on things that are concrete. For example, given the choice between holding a reference to a List or its derivative LinkedList, we should choose the base class List.

In other words, rather than writing:

LinkedList balls = new LinkedList();

We should write:

List balls = new LinkedList();

The reason for this should be obvious. We can pass balls around as a List to any function or object that takes a List argument. Later, if we decide to change the definition of balls to an ArrayList, we need only change one line of code.

The DIP says: "Depend on abstractions, not on concretions." This is just another way of expressing the old maxim of information hiding. In this case we are hiding the true type of an object from all of its users

After an year

2007-12-21T23:35:00.000+05:30

Finally after working my a** off for one year......the comp day has arrived.....and i went in to the conf room, where its happening. The person handing out the comp letter (our ED) told me that they usally give either bonus or promotion....oh really!!....GIVE ME THE MONEY ..i wanted to scream aloud....then with a smile he relieved my tension by saying that ...he was just kidding.

I got my comp letter and at first was unable to comprehend the numbers....u know our company's comp letters are like sudoku puzzles.....but then after some time everthing settled and i realized that i got promoted to the next level in the long ladder of corporate hierarchy AND yes i got an ok hike & decent bonus as well.....all well that ends well.

Now exploring ways to spend it off (ofcourse my bonus money)....you know its not safe to keep money with oneself....

N73 with Symbian OS 9.1 vS60 3rd Edition

2007-08-15T03:13:00.001+05:30

Recently (well some 4 months ago), i purchased a Nokia N73 Music Edition phone for a staggering price. But then i am more than satisfied with what it's offering me. So i thought i would show it off here.

For detailed technical specs, click here

N73 ME is powered by Symbian OS 9.1 vS60 3rd Edition.....yeah yeah....the versioning is weird, but that is it with symbian.

Here is what the main screen looks like (in different themes)

Here goes the list of capabilities (ofcourse after installing a number of third party software)

E-Mail	Calendar	Internet
Radio	Video Player	Music Player
Personal Finance	File Explorer	Mobile Search

Well pictures speak for themselves, it's really a jam packed one.

Apart from these i use google maps, yahoo Go, Live messenger & plethora of other software.

It's no wonder Nokia chose this sentence for their N-Series ad campaign, "This is what computers have become"

I am backkkkkk

2007-08-09T01:40:00.001+05:30

After almost an year, am back to blogging. Can't wait to get started again. The reasons that were stopping me from getting to this for the past year can be partially attributed to the things that were happening in my life, but mainly to the astonishing, unrelenting and never diminishing virtue of mine, namely my LAZINESS.

However, now am planning to blog regularly coz' lots of things have happened in my life, that, now I have loads of content to put in. Successfully completed an important & vital milestone in my life and graduated from bread eater to bread winner. Did internship at world's 3rd largest ISV for that sake and finally joined one of the worlds largest investment banks or rather a financial powerhouse as I should call it. Moved to India's largest city for living and started altogether a new life. Enough of the superlatives, I would say that my life took a big turn in the past one year (ofcourse a good one).

Of late I've been learning a lot of new things, so watch out this space for exciting stuff from me. Adieu......

Retrieving the currently visible text from a JTextField

2006-06-22T16:28:00.000+05:30

       One of my friends asked me if it is possible to retrieve the text that is currently visible in a JTextField, well it is very much possible and here is how it is done.

       Here by saying currently visible text i mean the text that can be seen on the screen and not the text that is hidden or can be seen only by scrolling. The textfield may contain text more than what that is currently visible and which can be viewed only upon scrolling. We are not interested in such text, we want to retrive exactly that part of the text held by the JTextField that is currently visible on the screen

      In this JTextField, the currently visible text is , String A , "retive the currently visible text from a JTextField. Its not a trivial task howeve".
And here is the complete text held by that textfield, String B , "Here iam going to explain you all how to retive the currently visible text from a JTextField. Its not a trivial task however it can be acheived."

Here String A, is the text we want to retrieve and String B represents the entire contents of the textfield.
This program does this task,




import javax.swing.*;
import java.awt.*;
import java.awt.event.*;
public class RetrieveVisibleText extends JFrame implements ActionListener
{
      JTextArea jt;
      JScrollPane jsp;
      JButton jb;
   RetrieveVisibleText()
   {
        jb = new JButton("Get Visible Text");
         jb.addActionListener(this);
         jt = new JTextArea(4,30);
         jsp = new JScrollPane(jt);
         JPanel p = new JPanel();
         p.add(jsp);
         this.getContentPane().add(p,"South");
         this.getContentPane().add(jb,"North");
         this.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
         this.setSize(700,600);
         this.setVisible(true);
   }
   public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent ae)
   {
     try{
         Rectangle r = jt.getVisibleRect();
         Point topLeft = new Point(r.x,r.y);
         Point bottomRight = new     Point(r.x+r.width,r.y+r.height);
         int start = jt.viewToModel(topLeft);
         int end = jt.viewToModel(bottomRight);
         System.out.println(jt.getText(start,end-start));
     }catch(Exception e)
     {
           e.printStackTrace();
     }
  }
  public static void main(String a[])
  {
         new RetrieveVisibleText();
  }
}

Office 2007 Beta 2 installation

2006-05-24T17:50:00.000+05:30

Hip Hip Hurray…got my download link for Office 2007 Beta2

2006-05-24T17:05:00.000+05:30

Today I got mail from Microsoft TechNet regarding the download of Office 2007 Beta2 Community Technology Preview

Windows Live Messenger Beta

2006-05-10T14:22:00.000+05:30

Yahoo!....oops i mean Microsoft.....today i got my Windows Live Messenger Beta download, here is how it looks...cute haaa....

SQL to select one or more Random rows from the Database table

2006-05-02T11:54:00.000+05:30

There are lots of ways to select a random record or row from a database table. Here are some example SQL statements that don't require additional application logic, but each database server requires different SQL syntax.

Select a random row with MySQL:
SELECT column FROM table ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 1

Select a random row with PostgreSQL:
SELECT column FROM table ORDER BY RANDOM() LIMIT 1

Select a random row with Microsoft SQL Server:
SELECT TOP 1 column FROM table ORDER BY NEWID()

Select a random row with IBM DB2:
SELECT column FROM table ORDER BY RAND() FETCH FIRST 1 ROWS ONLY

Select a random row with Oracle:

SELECT column FROM ( SELECT column FROM table ORDER BY dbms_random.value )
WHERE rownum <= 5 -- this query returns any 5 rows of the table randomly.
SELECT column FROM table SAMPLE(10).
SELECT * FROM table where ORA_HASH(column,8) = 1 -- this query requires Oracle 10g.

Microsoft & Google woo colleges to outsource the student e-mail systems

2006-04-28T12:42:00.000+05:30

studentno@somecollege.edu.... well this e-mail id of yours may no longer needs to be hosted on your college server, this is becuase the software giant Microsoft Corp & the internet Juggernaut google Inc. have come up with new plans for the college campuses.

Microsoft, in order to promote its Windows Live Platform, an advertising-funded one-stop shop for Micrsoft's Web services which range from e-mail, blogs, instant messaging to personal web pages and custom domains, has started the Windows Live@edu project.Using this service a particular educational institution can outsource its student e-mail systems to microsoft and stay assured of the security & features needed for such a system. This Microsoft's college offering enables students to send/receive e-mails, maintain contact lists, instant messaging and even start a blog ...all under the same profile.

And as we all know microsoft does nothing for free....first of all i wondered why do cash rich microsoft needs to look at student campuses at all....finally it boils out to be something like this....microsoft promises that there will be no advertisements as long the students use their microsoft hosted accounts during their years at the campuses...however once they graduate and come out of the college the advertisements start appearing .....ofcourse the benefit for the students being that they can stay on their college domains studentno&somecollege.edu, even after they pass outof thier colleages...simply saying they can have their ids for life long and the benefit for the microsoft being that.....the more services that the students use, the more likely they will remain heavily Windows Live users once they graduate, especially if they can continue to receive e-mails at the same address for years to come....thus creating a pool of young educated and potentially wealthy consumers for advertisers to target.

However the Microsoft Coprs internet rival Google Inc....is not lagging behind...infact earlier this year google announced it began offering student gamil accounts at san jose city college, the first school to sign up for the Google e-mail service.

It's all about the potential $15 Billion being generated anually by the Web Advertising media....so watch out may be tomorrow even your college may use the microsoft/google service....thus making you a part of this big advertising gamble.

The Sideny Sheldon collection.....

2006-04-27T18:06:00.000+05:30

Here iam ........ searching for the sidney sheldon collection ...or say atleast for one single novel of his..started a great search operation for finding them on the net, with the blind belief that everything one can ever want , ever perceive can be found on the net.

And the so called "net" didn't disappoint me..ofcourse i had to go through a series of web sites to get the juice squeezed (google -> orkut -> esnips)...finally i ended up here...http://esnips.com

more specifically saying http://esnips.com/web/Sidney-Sheldon

and that started my feasting on those wonderful novels........

"Error : 5001" when accessing Microsoft Project Server 2003

2006-04-27T17:10:00.000+05:30

Today i was given the task to configure the Microsoft Project Server 2003 for testing the PDS Extender code (Pl/Sql) written by me....however i encountered "Error:5001"...a simple search on google gave me the solution.

Symptoms

When you try to log on to Microsoft Office Project Server 2003 by using Microsoft Office Project Professional 2003 or by using Microsoft Project Web Access, you may receive the following error message:

Microsoft Project was unable to log you on at this time because the Microsoft Project Server database cannot be accessed. Please try again later or check with your Microsoft Project Server administrator. (5001)

Cause

This issue may occur if one or more of the following conditions are true:

The passwords for the MSProjectUser account and the MSProjectServerUser SQL Server account (or the accounts that perform those roles) do not match the accounts that Project Server 2003 has stored in the registry.

The Security Identifier (SID) for the MSProjectUser account and the MSProjectServerUser account (or the accounts that perform those roles) may not match the SID in the Project Server 2003 database. The SIDs may not match if you restore a Project Server 2003 database from one SQL Server to another SQL Server.

The program server that runs Microsoft Windows 2000 (any service pack) may not be able to successfully initiate a connection to the database server that runs Microsoft Windows Server 2003. Because Windows Server 2003 includes Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC) 2.8, for the program server to successfully initiate a connection to the server, it may require matching MDAC components.

To obtain the latest version of MDAC and for other information about MDAC, visit the following Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) Web site:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/data/mdac/default.aspx

Note The version of the MDAC on the server is likely MDAC 2.7 Service Pack 1 (SP1) or earlier.

The SQL Server or the client computer is configured to have only named pipes.

The Pds.dll file and the Pjsvrsecurity.dll file are missing from the %programfiles%\Microsoft Office Project Server 2003\BIN directory.

Some Project Server files are corrupted.

The DSN that is used to communicate between the Project client and Project Server is damaged.

RESOLUTION

Methods

Change passwords on accounts

Replace the Project Server 2003 accounts

Run Cliconfg.exe

Copy the missing .dll files

Reinstall Project Server

Build a new DSN

Here's My Piece of Info

2006-04-21T12:09:00.001+05:30

gimme some time to fill this up....