Dec 2010 - Year end trip

Chennakesava temple at Belur

Jog Falls

 

Tyavarekoppa wildlife sanctury

Yahoo! microblogging site me.me

Great idea. I created my own meme at Bleeding Purple

Find visually similar images - www.tineye.com

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

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

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

1. 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.
2. 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"

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

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.

1. Remove the DTD declaration from XML file.
2. Create an empty DTD file and turn off DTD validation.
3. 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.