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.

Tweaking SUSE

I am still tweaking Suse to my tastes. Exteneded my logical volume since I see Suse occupies more /opt space than Redhat/Fedora. Downloaded and installed azureus with latest JRE. Set up the wireless lan on my laptop and reading more about wireless networks and sniffers.

Switched over to SUSE linux 10.0 OSS

Yesterday I downloaded SUSE and installed on my laptop. It was a breeze and it works quite nicely. I had to do this since it has become a pain to keep Fedora Core 4 working. To finalize, I screwed up the rpm db but unable to restore to any state. SUSE is good and I am a first time user. Really impressed.
I installed gnucash and now trying to sort out my Dell Truemobile 1300 WLAN. As I am writing this, I am installing gcc, ndiswrapper to make it work. Broadcom 4306 is setup successfully.
I am trying to understand and use Gnucash, which is quite complex.

Enabling GD in windows for php

There was no clear cut document for the issues I faced today. So, I am writing this for my own reference also. This document is intended for php version 4.3.x and above running on Apache2 and the gd bundled with php itself.

Make sure after installing/untarring the php in a location other than server root/document root. Create a directory called php under c:/ and copy the following files to php4apache2.dll, php4ts.dll, php.exe and php.ini (php.inst-dist from the php installation dir).

Enable php in apache. Open the httpd.conf in your favourite editor (vim) and add index.php to DirectoryIndex directive.
DirectoryIndex index.html index.html.var index.php

Add another line to addType directive in httpd.conf
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php

Load the php SAPI as a module by adding this in httpd.conf
LoadModule php4_module “c:/php/php4apache2.dll”

Edit the php.ini file accordingly. The following should be updated. extensions should point to the extensions dir inside the php installation dir. If temp is not present, create temp folder.
doc_root = c:\apache\apache2\htdocs
extension_dir = c:\php\extensions
session.save_path = c:/temp

Uncomment the following line in php.ini.
extension=php_gd.dll

Finally copy the php.ini file to c:/windows dir.

Write a php file with the contents as below to check.
var_dump(gd_info());

MQ and php and perl

Finally I managed to write monitoring scripts for MQ. The architecture is a simple client-server architecture. Since the commands need to run as mq, there is a socket based server program which runs on the boxes where queue manager is hosted. I wrote this in perl since I dont have a standalone php installed in my middleware boxes. The web client is written in php, which will query the perl socket server for the details and get back the results in xml format. The xml format is parsed through and displayed as a simple table. The background colour of a row in a table indicates the health of queue/channel. It is a poorly written dirty script with all necessary blocks for security but still unfit to put in internet due to poor comments and unelegant style. If anybody wants a copy send me a mail nsupathy at gmail dot com.

Support Vs Development
After working in support for more than 2 years, I am of the view that each developer should go through a support phase in his/her career. The support point of view of the application is not given the importance as the maintenance of code base is given. The support personnel toil to know the inner workings of the application and sometimes resort to round about methods to do their work. Sometimes the errors are vague and misleading. The error messages thrown should be clear and legible for the support to find out the issues. If a developer has got enough experience in support, then they will know what the support people need.
I am not talking about product maintenance here. It is the support of custom built applications with a company. These applications never help the support people enough to do their job effectively.
I am not putting enought points or evidence here and leave it as a seperate article.

php bug
php bug has bitten me. Learning php and trying to write some scripts to automate my support work. perl is also getting mixed. It is a nice work and keeping me busy. Also planning to write a php interface to MQ. This will enable to administer MQ from the php enabled web front. It is in very nascent stage and the learning, implemetation curve is steep. This is currrently stopping me from reading my favourite books. Davinci Code is lying there in my table followed closly by Digital Fortress and yet to be read.

DCE becomes free
DCE is now released under Open Source licensing. The news is here http://www.opengroup.org/comm/press/05-01-12.htm. It is good for the old enterprise proprietary market. If someone ports dce to linux, then linux can truly break into enterprise middleware. Eventhough most of the companies switched from DCE to other latest technologies, it still lives in the back yard of many fortune 500 companies. Let us wait and see.
When I am writing this, it is snowing in Bristol.

Boxing day nightmares
I dont know, when I actually wrote I was feeling peaceful about the Christmas day passing good. The next day huge waves struck south east asia and India and took away many lives. My home state (Tamil Nadu) was the worst affected and I remained glued to television, called up friends to check whether they are safe. It was really a nightmare. Not finding suitable words to explain the situation.