Advika’s Day out on Black Friday 2014

Making faces with fun pancakes

Outlook 2011, Gmail and 2-step verification

Ever since I switched to 2-step verification for my gmail, my outlook problems suddenly exacerbated. By the way, if you are unfamiliar with 2-step verification or haven’t taken time to set it up, please do so ASAP. One issue in particular that was very annoying, was that outlook without any rhyme or reason ask for gmail password. Users of 2-step verification would agree that its not the easiest to generate such passwords and doing so when u have < 30 sec to send an important email before you have to absolutely head out to pickup your kids without paying overtime penalty, is out of question.

Any case, long story short, what I figured was that in my smtp authentication setting, I was using user name without domain name (@gmail.com) and once I added it, things seems to have been working much better, 3 days and haven’t been prompted for  password (knock on the wood).

Daddy! coin pleez

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?

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

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

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

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

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




Jack Rabbit upgrade from 1.3 to 1.4, NO DEAL

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.<init>(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)