Bringing life to richness

Daddy! coin pleez

sxm20 — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 19:22:08 +0000

Most of us haven’t seen ambulance from inside. God forbid if we ever have to. For educational purpose, we took Aryan to Discovery Museum where he got very excited seeing the ambulance and instantaneously jumped into it. And the next thing was a big shout came, Daddy, Coin please (or in his lingo, coin peez).

Those who haven't dealt with toddlers or have forgotten the old times, toddlers are very attracted towards these coin operated rocking toys which can be found in every family gathering place (e.g. mall etc). Aryan is no exception. When he sat in the ambulance, he thought it was very big size rocking toy and hence innocently came "Coin peez".

Ghajini, Should you watch?

sxm20 — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 17:17:04 +0000

I didn’t write it when I had my eyes wet by the screams of that poor child of Black and when I was pulling my hairs out for 170 minutes of Kisna and when optimism flowed thro’ my veins seeing Gandhigiri in Lago Raho Munna Bhai, there was something so compelling about this movie that after watching it for over three hours, first thing I want to do is to write about it. In one word, it was Flawless. It has the right balance between action and drama, between love and hate, between suspense and revelation, between humor and serious and the perfectionism to take everything to the extreme but stop right before it becomes too much to handle.

Movie starts with violence and takes you to flashback at times and keep you bound to the seat for the entire show. Amir did an excellent justice with both negative and positive images. He brings back the memories of the angry young man in some scenes. Armada of shiny black BMWs and Mercedese Benz and private jet was pleasing. Asin, probably the only indian actress who blogs in french, looked very fresh and was able to inject good humor into the movie by her innocence. There are some minor gaps but it would be mean on my part to nit pick those and in bigger scheme of things could/should be ignored. All in all, good value for money and a must watch. One thing to keep in mind, if you have toddlers, you may want to leave them home as violence gets little overboard for the young brains.

And what still remains debatable is that in a society which is struggling to inculcate values in our teenager and morals in our youth, where its “OK” to take shortcuts for quick convenience, will it help or hurt, to show that the cost of doing something “right” could be so catastrophic.

And I delivered twins

sxm20 — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 09:09:01 +0000

Two days in severe pain, so severe that I couldn’t keep track of the gap between contractions. It was suffering, utter suffering, something that a man can never imagine. Saturday morning it became unbearable but I was brave and to display the ultimate bravery, I drove myself to the doctors office. There was saliva all around as if the water bag busted and the tongue was trying to touch it to calm it down but the excruciating pain took over all the soothing endeavors. Doctor quickly took some X-Rays and examined the situation. “You have two options”,she said, “either start all over or get it out right now”. First option didn’t make sense, after all who would want to start all over after so much of suffering. I opted for option2.

She called her team. Everyone was staring at me. Situation seemed to be a bit more tricky then normal. Although they were all very experienced but still very cautious and worried and were discussing it over and over. After sometime, the technical details were discussed with me. The issue was that it was stuck in a curved position and pulling out would cause enormous pain. Also, because of severe infection in the roots, anesthesia might not work. After understanding the details, I still decided to go ahead. They made me sign the consent form. Operation lasted for over two hours. The team got so exhausted that they had to take a break to catch their breath. After break, they decided to divide it in two and pull one by one out. There was blood all over the place. They had to cut the passage to make the removal easy which they had to stitch afterward. It was very painful even after plenty of anesthesia.

Finally my wisdom tooth was out in two pieces. This is the closest I will ever get to delivering a baby.

Photos: coming soon

Gaput

sxm20 — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 15:29:55 +0000

Aryan has been learning new vocabulary and picking up words faster then we can find out where he picked it up from. He is totally becoming bilingual and seems to understand both languages (English and Hindi) well. Sometimes we feel that he picks up Hindi faster then English but often times he proves us wrong. There is a post on his blog about his Hinglish duet words. Its amazing to notice how his initial pronounciation of new words changes over time. He loves icecream since the day he was introduced to it. It was eykimme which became ikkeem and finally settled with ifeceem (god knows how he managed to replace c with f).

Aryan has a bug bunny in big car which he considers very lazy and is always sleepy. So as soon as he gets into the car, he tries to wake him up saying “bunny, utho utho”. I used to wake Aryan up saying “getup Aryan”. One day I noticed he was waking up bunny “Gaput bunny”.

Using your Nokia E61 to access internet from your mac

sxm20 — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 23:18:54 +0000

There are a few blogs that explain this topic but I found them a little geeky.

http://www.nokme.com/connecting-mac-with-nokia-e61-to-t-mobile-usa-internet-146.html

http://www.nokme.com/connect-to-gprs-internet-using-nokia-e61-on-mac-29.html

http://forums.mobiledia.com/topic11233.html

I tried bunch of things, and here is a very simplified version
1. Download 3G scripts from taniwha.org.uk
2. extract the scripts to /Library/Model Scripts (all three files)
3. Open Network Prefences. Add Nokia phone (as shown below). New location and new configuration is optional.

Configure your phone in Network Preference

4. Click on Advanced button

Select modem Script

Select the right script and hit ok.
5. Input APN in place of Telephone Number. Input acc Number and password. Hit apply and press connect. If everything is correct, things would work else try with diff scripts (CD2 or CD3)

Why did I switch to Safari and then back to Mozilla

sxm20 — Thu, 15 May 2008 18:41:11 +0000

Few months ago, when Apple released the Safari 3.1, I decided to switch to safari, “The world’s best browser”, as my primary browser for following reason.

1. Performance: Apple’s claimed that the new version is way better then its predecessors

2. UI: I still love Safari’s HTML rendering.
3. Re sizable Textarea: Very useful in editing wiki and basecamp
4. Low memory footprint.
5. Afterall its from Apple

After trying for over six weeks, I am finally coming back to Mozilla
1. Crashes frequently in debug sessions
2. Dies pretty badly (Hangs for a while, needs a force quit).
3. No log of previously open tabs even on crash.
4. Poor plugin support
5. A large number of sites still dont support Safari

Browser switching turned out to be a bigger deal then I imagined. It impacted my productivity and satisfaction levels. I wanted to try Camino but I guess I will wait for some time till this pain heals up. Feel free to share your experiences.

Zephyr TV

sxm20 — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 15:49:21 +0000

Jack Rabbit upgrade from 1.3 to 1.4, NO DEAL

sxm20 — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 18:16:12 +0000

I attempted to upgrade from current version 1.3 to 1.4. Upgrade was smooth and looked ok prima facie but soon we discovered our document uploads and downloads were failing miserably with all kinds of exceptions.

How to roll back (back to 1.3)

1. Rollback your jars (if you use maven, just change the version in POM)
2. If you can afford to recreate the repository, easiest and cleanest way
3. Try to restore the backup. If you dont have one, then 1 is your only option.

Exception:
java.lang.NullPointerException
at java.io.FileInputStream.(FileInputStream.java:103)
at org.apache.jackrabbit.core.value.BLOBInTempFile.getStream(BLOBInTempFile.java:145)
at org.apache.jackrabbit.core.value.InternalValue.toJCRValue(InternalValue.java:366)
at org.apache.jackrabbit.core.PropertyImpl.getValue(PropertyImpl.java:466)
at org.apache.jackrabbit.core.PropertyImpl.getStream(PropertyImpl.java:479)
at com.thed.repository.RepositoryManagerImpl.getCurrentRepositoryObject(RepositoryManagerImpl.java:348)
at com.thed.server.servlet.DocumentDownloadServlet.doPost(DocumentDownloadServlet.java:115)
at com.thed.server.servlet.DocumentDownloadServlet.doGet(DocumentDownloadServlet.java:65)
at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:690)
at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:803)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:269)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.doFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:188)
at org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.support.OpenSessionInViewFilter.doFilterInternal(OpenSessionInViewFilter.java:173)
at org.springframework.web.filter.OncePerRequestFilter.doFilter(OncePerRequestFilter.java:77)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:215)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.doFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:188)
at org.springframework.web.filter.CharacterEncodingFilter.doFilterInternal(CharacterEncodingFilter.java:78)
at org.springframework.web.filter.OncePerRequestFilter.doFilter(OncePerRequestFilter.java:77)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:215)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.doFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:188)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardWrapperValve.invoke(StandardWrapperValve.java:210)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContextValve.invoke(StandardContextValve.java:174)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHostValve.invoke(StandardHostValve.java:127)
at org.apache.catalina.valves.ErrorReportValve.invoke(ErrorReportValve.java:117)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardEngineValve.invoke(StandardEngineValve.java:108)
at org.apache.catalina.connector.CoyoteAdapter.service(CoyoteAdapter.java:151)
at org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11Processor.process(Http11Processor.java:870)
at org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11BaseProtocol$Http11ConnectionHandler.processConnection(Http11BaseProtocol.java:665)
at org.apache.tomcat.util.net.PoolTcpEndpoint.processSocket(PoolTcpEndpoint.java:528)
at org.apache.tomcat.util.net.LeaderFollowerWorkerThread.runIt(LeaderFollowerWorkerThread.java:81)
at org.apache.tomcat.util.threads.ThreadPool$ControlRunnable.run(ThreadPool.java:685)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:613)

Zephyr in initRIA

sxm20 — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 07:17:02 +0000

We came to know about initria quite late but still Ravi managed to fly to Banglore and attend the event. Event was full and no seats were left. Luckily Ravi got a seat when Mrinal added 15 more seats and finally managed to attend. As we were too late, we didnt have lot of time for planning. We didnt have any printed material or banners etc. We essentially had Saturday to prepare for it. We printed some pamphlet and got few tshirts done.

The attendance turned out to be less then expected but all in all it was a great show. Certainly great for its being the first in India. Apart from Zephyr, some of the companies to show their products were liveDocuments by InstaColl. Although, we couldn’t get pre-confirmation for speaking, Ravi managed to steal a session 20 min towards the end of conference and showed everyone a quick little demo. Here is what Abdul captured in the conference.

BlazeDS: What is Adobe really giving for free

sxm20 — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 15:12:47 +0000

Yesterday’s announcement from Adobe of releasing a community version of LiveCycleDataService (popularly known as LCDS), under code name of BlazeDS (currently in labs, will be released early next year) got tonnes of press. So what does this really offer to the community of java and flash/flex developers.

AMF protocol specifications
Java remoting (being able to marshal java object into ActionScript and vice versa)
Http based publish and subscribe.

Last point is what I really want to emphasize on. Its not the true server push technology (which is the unique offering of LCDS [amf over RTMP]) that Adobe is giving for free. Its really the channel which RTMP and RTMP tunnling falls back on in case client is not able to connect over RTMP protocol and also popularly know as reverse AJAX or comet.