Shital Mehta - My well organized thoughts!

Get RSS feeds delivered to your email box

2011-11-10T10:15:00.003+05:30

If you are old school like me and prefer feeds to be delivered to email rather than use RSS readers then you can use great service provided by feedmyinbox.com. They allow 5 feeds in their free service. If you want to more then check out my post about adding email aliases in GMail account :-)

Email aliases in GMail

2011-11-10T10:12:00.001+05:30

If you need multiple email addresses for any reason and don't want to bother creating multiple accounts then GMail has a great aliasing service.
You can receive messages sent to your.username+any.alias@gmail.com. For example, messages sent to jane.doe+notes@gmail.com are delivered to jane.doe@gmail.com.

Check out: https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=12096

Dec 2010 - Year end trip

2011-01-02T12:41:00.004+05:30

Chennakesava temple at Belur

Jog Falls

Tyavarekoppa wildlife sanctury

Yahoo! microblogging site me.me

2010-07-07T12:39:00.002+05:30

Great idea. I created my own meme at Bleeding Purple

Find visually similar images - www.tineye.com

2010-07-07T12:19:00.003+05:30

I had a visually stunning image of some water body and didn't know what was it. I went to http://www.tineye.com/ and uploaded the image. Saw similar images at other places and figured out it was a salt marsh. This is a very interesting service. Google and other search engines offer to find similar images but only from what they display and you can't upload your own. tineye has done a great job.

Renaming the internet - http://dot.tk

2010-06-15T14:13:00.004+05:30

Guys at dot.tk have hit upon a very nice idea. They have bought over the tld .tk and are allowing people to use short domain names with .tk tld instead of large existing web addresses that you might have. I also registered shital.tk to point to my blog here.

Try it out.

Mac OX X irritants

2009-12-08T09:41:00.003+05:30

I just started working on Mac OS X 1.5 and hit some major irritants which needed work-around:

Mac OS X (at-least 1.5.x) has no easy way to display date and time in the menu bar. Followed instructions at MacInstruct website to copy the date format and paste it in time format. Note: I had to change all the time formats (short, long, medium, all) before making it work. I also had to go back to clock menu and remove "Show day of the week". Can't figure out how Mac hasn't solved such a big usability problem so far.
By default you can't use tab in firefox to focus on drop down menus. This is easy to fix. Just need to go to Mac Preferences->Keyboard & Mouse->Keyboard Shortcuts and check "All controls" at the bottom under "Full keyboard access" topic.

Firefox: HOW TO REMOVE: "This Website Does Not Supply Identity Information"

2009-06-03T11:28:00.003+05:30

This is a major irritant while adding bookmarks.

See Mozilla Support Forum for original post.

1. open the preferences page with the link about:config( i.e. type about:config in the location bar)

if the browser complains, click on the button to calm it :)

2. write: tips

3. in the list of prefs, find: browser.chrome.toolbar_tips

4. double click on it to change to false

5. tips disabled!

Ignoring loading external DTD while reading/parsing XML files

2009-03-11T11:15:00.003+05:30

I encountered this problem while using xalan-J for XPath queries. We were using default xerces xml parser implementation. Our XML files referred to a DTD which we didn't have access to.

There are a number of workarounds for this. Choose the best that fits your situation.

Remove the DTD declaration from XML file.
Create an empty DTD file and turn off DTD validation.

Turn off downloading of external DTDs and validation if the XML reader/parser implementation supports it. To do this for xerces, we did following:


  DocumentBuilderFactory dfactory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
 // Ignore loading external DTD
 dfactory.setFeature("http://apache.org/xml/features/nonvalidating/load-external-dtd", false);
 // turn-off validation which will require DTD to be present
 dfactory.setFeature(”http://xml.org/sax/features/validation”, false);

Somehow above code fragment does not wrap-around nicely when viewed in FF3. If anybody knows how to fix, let me know.

Thanks to Denish for the 3rd workaround.

JBoss 4.2 class loading problems

2009-02-23T18:43:00.003+05:30

By default Jboss 4.2 does non-scoped class loading i.e. all EARs share the same class loader. This is non-J2EE but default way of doing things in JBoss. If you want an EAR to have its own class-loader (you wan different versions of the same library in different EARs), you need to include jboss-app.xml with following configuration:

<jboss-app>
<loader-repository>
${package-name}:archive=${unique-name}
</loader-repository>
</jboss-app>

An example:
<jboss-app>
<loader-repository>
com.shital:archive=test1
</loader-repository>
</jboss-app>

This needs to be done for each EJB which needs a scoped class loader. Make sure that unique-name in above example is unique for each EAR!

This file should be packaged in the same dir as application.xml.

For rent: 3 BR +Servant's quarter Off Bannerghata Road, Opp IIM-B

2008-12-14T14:55:00.004+05:30

Adarsh Palm Retreat 3 Br Apartment with servant's quarter for rent. Excellent Evershine Modular Kitchen and designer wardrobes. 3 bed/3bath - 2 BRs with attached bath. Servant's quarter with toilet. Rent Rs 30K/month. (negotiable). Brokers excuse.

Available: Immediately.

Location: Off Bannerghata Road, Behind Wockhardt Hospital, Opp IIM-B. Close to HSBC, HoneyWell and Accenture.

Apartment has common facilities like Club house, Swimming pool, Kids Play area, Sun deck, Barbeque plaza, Landscape garden, Squash court, Health club, Badminton court. etc. Facilities to be ready in 2 months.

Contact: smblr75@gmail.com (M) 9845438441

Checkout the interiors.

Resizeable Textarea - A great firefox plugin

2008-08-06T11:55:00.001+05:30

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3818

Allows you to adjust the size of the textarea in Firefox. Absolutely mandatory if you are into social blogging or working on twiki.

GMail conversation view in Outlook

2008-07-08T11:26:00.003+05:30

Guess this must be old news by now but finally I set-up my outlook to show conversation view which is such a great feature in GMail. Of-course Outlook natively supports conversation view on a per folder basis but that's not useful as you will loose out on your replies which are in a different folder e.g. "Sent Items". I found a great article which shows how to mimic GMail's functionality (more or less) in Outlook.
See Dan's post on coversation view in Outlook.

Thanks Dan!

GPL vs LGPL

2008-05-21T11:35:00.002+05:30

Developers always have question about legality of using an open source library in a commercial product. This particular article very clearly settles that question at-least for GPL and LGPL licenses.

Some tips regarding Mutual Fund investments (Specifically for India)

2008-05-07T11:01:00.004+05:30

I recently answered an internal mail in Yahoo! asking for tips to invest in Mutual funds for a first time investor. I thought to share it with a wider audience (oh yeah!)

First the legal disclaimer: Pursue this at your own risk.

There are two broad types: Equity and Debt. Experts recommend mixing up the two for lower volatility. If you can stomach high risk, go all equity route.
Don't invest in sector specific funds. Go for diversified funds (for equity funds). Again for lower risk.
There are three types based on market caps of the invested companies: Large cap, mid cap, small cap. Large caps, of-course, are considered safer but generate lower returns (generally). Small caps are exactly reversed in their behavior.
Never invest in one go. This is the most important tip. If you had invested all you money in mid Jan of this year, you would have lost 30-40% in 2 months time. There are Systematic investment plans or SIPs(all MFs have it). They allow you to invest a fixed amount (through cheques or ECS) on a regular basis (weekly, monthly, quarterly). If you a chunk of money to invest, divide it up and invest at-least over a year.
Don't invest in NFO (new fund offerings). Rather invest in established and proven funds. Sites like Value Research and Moneycontrol will let you compare returns of all MFs over varying periods of time. Do spend some time doing that. Remember if you invest through brokers (like your bank), they will always recommend NFOs as that has more commission.
Look at the star ratings given by these MF sites. They are helpful to give you a head start.
Don't invest in too many funds. Restrict yourself to a few good ones. If a fund makes up a very small part of your portfolio, it does not make any difference even if it performs phenomenally. On the other hand more than a certain number of funds don't lower your risk any further.
You can save upto 1 Lac in ELSS funds. Read about them.
If you can spare some time and money, browse through magazines like Outlook money or Mutual fund insight.
Never compare NAVs. NAV of 10 is not better or worse than NAV of 100. There is no equivalent of IPO in MF. NFOs don't offer any advantage over established funds.
Don't churn your portfolio frequently. There are entry and exit costs associated.
Long term capital gain tax in equity funds is zero. So try staying invested in equity funds for at-least a year.
No short term gains. Enter with a long term approach.
Use brokers which allow you to buy/sell online. This will save a lot of hassles for you. Check the online coverage of the broker. Most of them will allow you to buy any MF through paper forms but cover only limited MFs in their online service. If you do some investing through online and some offline, you will end-up with lots of hassles.
Use online portfolio tools provided by MF review sites (Value Reserach, Money Control etc). They are very useful.

Yahoo!

2008-04-14T15:34:00.002+05:30

Well, my timing couldn't much more perfect :-) I joined Yahoo just as Microsoft announced the bid for Yahoo! Will they, won't they ... it's a million dollar question. Reminds me of the Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times".

Lost in translation

2008-02-16T10:30:00.004+05:30

We all know about multitude of translation engines out there like altavista's BabelFish, Google translate etc. But if you don't know the translated language, how do you figuer out the quality of your translation. One simple way is to translate back again to original language :-)

I tried out following statement from English to Spanish on babelfish:

"I love to stand on one leg with my arms raised."

It resulted in following in Spanish phrase:

Amo estar parado en una pierna con mis brazos levantados.

Now I have no clue what the hack this means. So decided to translate this Spanish phrase back to English. It resulted in following English translation:

"Master to be unemployed in a leg with my raised arms."

Wow! All I can say is be careful, very careful if you are trying to use any of this translation engines.

Problem in sending secured email using outlook express

2008-02-12T12:12:00.000+05:30

Scenario:
1) You have setup outlook express (OE) to use secure connection (SSL) while sending messages (SMTP)
2) Your email server is other than Microsoft Exchange
3) You are using a non-standard SMTP port
4) You get following exception:

Your server has unexpectedly terminated the connection. Possible causes for this include server problems, network problems, or a long period of inactivity. Account: a.b.c.d', Server: x.y.z.p', Protocol: SMTP, Port: 2025, Secure(SSL): Yes, Error Number: 0x800CCC0F

This happens because outlook express when doing SMTP over a non standard port tries to establish TLS session before starting SMTP session. The standard behaviour is first to start SMTP session and then negotiate opening of TLS session.

Please note that Outlook does not have this problem. It can successfully send secured emails on standard as well as non-standard SMTP ports.

We encountered this while using Postfix SMTP server listening at a non standard SMTP port.

Changing the SMTP port to 25 on email server will fix the problem.

Other way to fix this is to check whether your email server supports this non-standard (TLS first followed by SMTP) behavior. In case of Postfix this is supported by configuring another port which will just work for this non-standard behavior. All you subscribers using OE will have to use a port which is different from subscribers using non-OE clients.

Fun activities at Mahableswar

2008-02-08T13:45:00.000+05:30

Riding a dancing horse

Para-gliding

Website registration headaches?

2008-01-30T16:22:00.000+05:30

Now-a-days every website wants you to register with them using your email address. One solution is to create an email account just for this purpose so that your real email account is not bombarded with Spam and web site announcements.

Another neat trick is to use temporary email services. They allow you to create a temporary email id that you can use while registration and also allow you to check confirmation emails that get sent to these emails ids.

Check out the this list which gives 20 websites providing this service.

Find distance between any two cities in the world

2008-01-30T15:10:00.000+05:30

Lots of websites help you in finding distance between two cities. Some of them listed below:
GeoBytes
Indo

Its cool. Check it out.

jar hell

2007-11-16T15:54:00.000+05:30

Those who work with multiple open source stack need to be pitied. With your different open source stacks coming bundled with different versions of same jar files (e.g. xerces.jar which is a common occurrence in so many stacks), unexpected problems can crop up which hard to debug by just looking at the exception trace.
I had one such problem and it was very difficult for me to find the solution(solution method I am referring to is of-course googling) and hence the post for others who get stuck on this one.
If you see following exceptions:
org.jboss.xb.binding.JBossXBRuntimeException: Failed to create a new SAX parser
and
SAXNotRecognizedException: Feature >>'http://apache.org/xml/features/xinclude' is not recognized.

Most probably you have multiple incompatible versions of xerces.jar in your classpath.

My particular problem was xerces-2.6.2.jar which was there as part of hibernate 3.2 dependency was conflicting with newer version required by jboss which is 2.7.1 (xercesImpl.jar) and is present in JBOSS_HOME/lib/endorsed dir.
Removing xerces-2.6.2 from classpath solved this probelm.

Hope this helps some other unfortunate programmer who gets stuck!

Where is Indian Amazon?

2007-06-27T20:04:00.000+05:30

Where is the Indian version of Amazon.com? Why can't I buy any book/movie/CD/clothes/gifts/electronic gadgets/flowers/magazines etc from a single website? And don't suggest sites like rediff.com, indiatimes, indiaplaza etc. They don't even come close.

I think India has huge supply chain issues to overcome and a brick and mortar company has a better chance of doign it then a software company.

Imagine doing these day-to-day things from a single website owned by a brick and mortar company. A company who delivers right from milk, cereals, grocery, petrol, landline phone connection, wireless phone connection, broadband, financial products, clothes, electricity, software and list goes on and on. You name it and they do it. Imagine all these things being available from a single website. All that company has to do is get their act together and decide to become Indian version of Amazon. You might have guessed it, I am referring to Reliance. If they overcome trivial issues (like tiff between two brothers!) they can own this space (that's the only space I think that's not owned by them right now).

So wake up Reliance (ADAG and MDAG both), Indian net space is for yours to rule.

Having problems on your first WAP website?

2007-06-26T10:18:00.000+05:30

So you put a lot of effort and created a WML based version of your website and have tested it thoroughly with all the great WAP tools and simulators. Now you take your tentative first step and try to access it using a WAP browser on your GPRS phone and you get "Invalid content type"!
Hmmmm. So what went wrong?
Two possibilities:
1) Content-Type set in HTTP response is actually incorrect. It should be:
Content-Type: text/vnd.wap.wml
Note: Above content-type is only for wml pages. Now-a-days many phone browsers support direct HTTP and html pages in which case content-type would be text/html

How to find what Content-Type is being received by the browser? Use a tool like Openwave phone simulator which also display complete dump of http protocol between client and server. It's available at Openwave Phone Simulator
Advantage over some of the other tools is that it can directly handle http and does not require a WAP gateway (simulator) to function.

2) But problem may not be that simple. Second thing to check is actual WML page generated. You would wonder how could that be a problem since I tested with my great XYZ wap phone simulator. But here's the rub, most WAP phone simulators are very lax in wml parsing. They allow you to get away with murder while real WAP browsers on phone and WAP gateways are very strict in content parsing. On top of that error you get on a phone browser would not be very illuminating. You might get "Invalid content type" for both incorrect setting of Content-Type header in HTTP response and also when for some syntax error in the wml page.
The best way to catch these type of errors is to validate your WML and that's very easy to do. Just head to W3C Validator and enter your web site's URL.

Hope this helps some newbies out there who are facing the same problem as I did.

Thanks Thyaga for starting me on!