Cycle to Bath

I drove to Emersens green to a friends house and from their we started off in bikes. It was a lovely day. (http://www.paulspages.co.uk/bbcycle/) When we started off, it was misty and the weather improved much better later on. Initially I was tired, but once the body warmed up, we kept going. It was a wonderful countryside. The old railway line between Bristol and Bath is now converted to a cycle path. We saw lot of old railway stations along the path. Halfway through, we went to a pub and had a shandy. The pub is situated on the banks of River Avon and it is a beautiful place. I cant express the beauty in words. There was a sailing club there and many were trying out their yacht/sailing skills. When we settled down with a shandy, I was seeing lot of rafts trying to pass the current flowing inwards. It was nice. From there, we started off towards Bath once again, crossed many bridges and reached the canal in bath very near to city centre. We started off back, took rest in couple of places. There is the somerset steam railway running along a couple of miles along the path. It is run via donation and by volunteers. When I reached back Bristol, I was dead hungry and cramp in thigh muscles which joins knee. It was a wonderful experience and I decided to use by cycle more often.

Talk like a pirate

Got a pirate name arrr r

My pirate name is:

Dirty Harry Rackham

You're the pirate everyone else wants to throw in the ocean -- not to get rid of you, you understand; just to get rid of the smell. You have the good fortune of having a good name, since Rackham (pronounced RACKem, not rack-ham) is one of the coolest sounding surnames for a pirate. Arr!

Get your own pirate name from piratequiz.com.
part of the fidius.org network

Birstol ballon fiesta.

Bristol is famous for ballons and it is a known worldwide exporter of ballons. All custom made ballons are manufactured in bristol. To celebrate this every year there is one ballon fiesta with a night glow.

Another addiction

Age of Empires, a game from Ensemble Studios, Microsoft. A wonderful strategy game, that takes us to the old ages of kings and conquerors. I play this game on all my weekends and some times during the weekday. Compared to what is now I was addicted more that game. I have to come out, but I love this game and dont see any need for disturbing my entertainment.

vi key bindings and Firefox 1.5

This is shamelessly copied from http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=292404&highlight=keybindings These guys were there before me. I am adding some more details to this page.

I am a vi addict. I use vim everywhere including windows, unix, linux. I have learnt typing and type very fast. I hate to move my fingers for navigation keys or mouse from the asdf position. I open vim where everybody opens a notepad, wordpad or any advanced editor. I use inbuilt ftp client to pullout files from servers and edit directly. It saves me lot of time.
The beauty with firefox is I can customize it to my taste. Now for a long time I felt I am missing some kind of vi/vim navigation in firefox browser.

1. Get a jar package. If you are like me (an illiterate) in java, get java development installed on your system. I use cygwin and I downloaded gcj package to get the jar. Otherwise, the standard Sun JDK will have jar bundled.

2. Copy toolkit.jar to a tmp dir found under Mozilla Firefox\chrome. This dir will be usually under c:\Program Files or wherever you installed Firefox 1.5.

3. Open, unjar (untar) the jar file. jar -xvf toolkit.jar. The contents will be stored under content/ dir. Open the file content\global\platformHTMLBindings.xml in your favourite editor (in this case vi) and add the following to the browser section.

<handler event="keypress" key="h" command="cmd_scrollLeft" />

<handler event="keypress" key="j" command="cmd_scrollLineDown" />

<handler event="keypress" key="k" command="cmd_scrollLineUp" />

<handler event="keypress" key="l" command="cmd_scrollRight" />

<handler event="keypress" key="u" command="cmd_scrollPageUp" />

You can add other bindings as well and it depends on your preference.

4. tar... sorry jar is back again using jar -0cvf toolkit.jar content/ . Note the zero which allows jar to tar the contents rather than compress.

5. Take a backup copy of toolkit.jar found in firefox chrome dir and copy the modifed file into that location. Restart Firefox and you got it.

Long weekend, holidays and Firefox

Another bank holiday and long weekend. Planned for a trek/walk but cancelled at the last minute because of a friends bachelor party. It was fun with all the guys drinking and cracking jokes and believe me there was never a mention of girls or any thing related to that. All centered around sports, movies, old college/hostel days and of couse sayari(s). Its been a long time since I went to a party like this.

Coming to the topic, I am still trying to get vi key bindings to work in firefox 1.5. Have tried everything including installing keybind xpi, prefs.js. prefs.js is used mostly pre-1.0 but I want no holes left to be turned. The platformHTMLBindings.xml holds the key but it hasnt worked for me till now. I reliase my mistake now, so bent upon trying to fix that one. I was editing the toolkit.jar with winzip and when I zip back, it is very small. winzip is really compressing the file rather than tarring. Since I don't know java neither use it, I need to find and download jar tools first. Once successful, I plan to write a short tutorial on it.
Nowadays, everbody is talking about ubuntu and I think even the whole slashdot crowd is behind ubuntu. Planning to give dapper a try and find out what is so wonderful about this distribution. I love my OpenSuse 10 which is rock solid and almost on the fly breezy installation including my Broadcom wireless NICs. Meanwhile, my ITIL foundation exam preparation is going very sluggish.

WMQ Monitoring

My monitoring page lists the queues and on clicking an entry, displays the details of the queues in a new browser window. But opening a new window is proving costly in terms of performance and so I set out to reimplement the thing in a styled div. Its works really good and the effect I wanted just shows up with tweaked border-width and table formats.

Real nice piece of code I am happy with.

London Trip and Hotel Saravana Bhavan

Finally I managed to go to London with a few close friends and visit Lords, the birthplace of cricket. It was a wonderful tour around the club (it is not a public stadium but a private club). Founded by Thomas Lord and made popular by W G Grace, the cricket is almost a religion in India. Our tour party inside MCC (Marylebone Cricket Club) was mostly of Indians and it was happy to be among fellow lovers of Indian Cricket. Sadly all of the cricket information in the museum relates to English and Australian cricket and there was little mention of other cricket playing nations which I can't complain since it is supposed to be the birthplace of English cricket too. As an interesting side note, I came to know that MCC chalked out the rules of lawn tennis also.

After this trip, I had a hearty meal in Hotel Saravana Bhavan, a south indian hotel food after a long long time. We enjoyed the trip very much and naturally tired also. The train trip from Bristol to London was also enjoyable.

Easter holidays, Fedora Core 5 and Fedora-apache setup

Its holiday time and the long weekend of easter has come. Planning to install Fedora core 5 from the dvd version. I was toying with apache to get it work for new files and dirs instead the root directory but it is getting tough and testing my patience. It is because of the SELinux enabled. The following steps will help to enable apache out of SELinux security grip, but beware and weigh your decision before attempting to free up httpd.

Go to your specific dir and run

ls -Z -d my_support/
chcon -R -t httpd_user_content_t my_support/

This will fix the SELinux httpd security config and allow the files to be served by the webserver.

Movie Time
Went to see Rang De Basanti yesterday. It was a nice movie and fun filled. Nostalgia of my attempt to join defence forces also came to me.
Reading python now.

More Javascript
More on javascript and investigating on opening new window with customized content. Initial research is done and now I have to generate the necessary html content.
Was searching and reading on bots. I have a plan for a long time to write a bot that will collect the NAV of various mutual funds and help me to track my fund growth and decide on investing new funds. In design terms, it is in the conceptual stage. Hope to finish that by feb end.
I am feeling sleepy....

Flirting with AJAX
Finally I have conquered ajax. It is an architecture or sort of design pattern. I knew little javascript before and that helped me in. I am building a site for MQSeries monitoring. The backend model is driven by php and the front end view powered by javascript. The application response is better than old load/refresh type of pages. Had tough time in making it work in IE6 since the support for CSS standards is poor.
Drop me a mail if you want/need details on how I had done it.
Meanwhile my new year resolution of fitness regimen is going on well.
I have to make a habit of updating my blog regularly.