Today (1/18/2012) has been designated as “Protest SOPA/PIPA day” by the technology world. I believe in the old adage, put your money where your mouth is .. so I checked on the top 25 US sites (according to Alexa) to see how many of them are supporting this protest in a visible manner. Only 4 out of the 25 sites, put visible content on their websites regarding the protest. I think Google’s message was the most effective, where they did not reduce the functionality of the website, but provided a lot of visibility to the protest. I know which companies I am going to support/use moving forward . I was very happy to see that three of the sites that I use on a regular basis (google, amazon and wikipedia) are supporting this protest. Here are screenshots of the protest from the the  4 sites that are in the top 25 visited sites in the US

Google.com

Amazon.com

Wikipedia.Org

WordPress.com

Screenshots of some other sites that I visit on a regular basis and are supporting the protest

Boingboing.net

Wired.com

Arstechnica.com

Reddit.com

DuckDuckGo.com

And I have finally decided that it is time to complete the post and publish it.

I change laptops every 6 months or so and a lot of my friends ask me how I manage to swap them so quickly and yet stay productive. I am sure a lot of you can relate to this. It usually take a month or so to get your workstation to a “state” that you feel comfortable with and are productive. Here are the tricks/tools I use to make the switching of a laptop/desktop to be a no-brainer activity. And I utilize the “cloud” heavily for this.

I adhere to a couple of simple rules to make sure I can be productive anywhere, even in situations, where I don’t have my workstation with me.

• Everything I produce should be searchable
• Everything I produce should be available on the web
• Everything I produce should be easy to share

With these principles in mind, here are the services I use..

PHOTOS :

• SERVICE : I use flickr to store all my pictures. I have taken ~40 thousand pictures since 2003 and everyone of them is online at http://www.flickr.com/photos/kudithipudi. I wish, flickr was around when I was a kid, so that I had a place to store all the pictures from my childhood instead of rotting away in some old cardboard box. I like Flickr for it’s simplicity and ease of use. There are other sites that offer a lot more features, but the features offered by Flickr are are more than enough for me.
• COST : $24.95/year to upload/store unlimited number of pictures
• OTHER CHOICES : There are plenty of photo storing/sharing sites. Some of the popular ones are picasa, photobucket, facebook

ON-LINE STORAGE :

• SERVICE : I use dropbox to store any digital content I create. This overlaps a bit with the service I use to store documents I create. Dropbox is a service that allows you to synchronize files between different computers you have the agent installed on and at the same time stores them online for you. They offer 2GB of free space by default and you can earn more space by referring people to the service. (note : the links to dropbox are my referral links. If you sign up for the service, I get 250Mb of free space. If you don’t want to use the referral links, you can sign up for the service directly at www.dropbox.com).You would think 2GB is not a lot of space. But once you remove the music, movies and photos, you really don’t need a lot of space . For example, I haven’t crossed 1.8 GB, even though I have an electronic record of all my important files all the way from 2006. All I do, when I switch to a new laptop is install the dropbox agent and voila all my files are downloaded and synced with the latest copies.
• COST : free. If you need more space, dropbox offers it for a cost.
• OTHER CHOICES : There’s plenty of competition for dropbox, but I don’t think anyone of them have come close to making the sharing/storage work as seamless as dropbox. Some of the popular ones are box.net, SugarSync,wuala, Amazon Cloud Drive

DOCUMENTS :

• SERVICE : I use Google Docs to create and store documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Since it’s inception in 2006 as a simple online editor and spreadsheets service, Google Docs has come a long way. There are few things you cannot do in Google Docs, that you can do in a full fledged productivity suite like Microsoft Office. Plus it gives you the capability to collaborate with other people when creating documents.
• COST : free.
• OTHER CHOICES : The only other service that comes close to Google Docs is Zoho Suites. Microsoft has a competing product, Office Live, but I think they are confused on how to market it because it will eat into their most profitable franchise (Microsoft Office)

EMAIL :

• SERVICE : I use Gmail for my email. Although there is a standalone version,  I use it as part of the services provided by Google Apps for my domain (kudithipudi.org). It offers free spam protection, 7GB of space and super fast search. What else can one ask for?
• COST : free
• OTHER CHOICES : There are several free email hosting providers. Some of the popular ones are hotmail, yahoo, aol

ONLINE PRESENCE :

• SERVICE : I strongly believe that all of us have to manage our online presence. And I don’t mean just for the folks that work in technology, but everyone that uses the Internet. And that is pretty much most of the people living on planet earth . There are several ways to do this (and I think that is for a another blog post), but the simplest way is to ensure you have a place where you can broadcast your presence. I use this blog as a way to document my thoughts, share ideas and in general manage  my on-line presence. I host this blog on a virtual server that I lease from Rackspace.
• COST : $11/month
• OTHER CHOICES : I would not recommend what I am doing for most people. There are several free platforms that you can host your blog on. I just do it this way, because I like to tinker with technology. Some of the popular blogging platforms are tumblr, blogspot, wordpress, squarespace.

1. Download the latest version of the JDBC driver from Oracle at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/features/jdbc/index-091264.html . You can also get to this link by searching for “download ojdbc jar” in Google. In fact, I would recommend that, given that Oracle might change the link for future editions. You will need an Oracle account to download the driver file.
2. Copy the driver file to $JBOSS_HOME/server/$JBOSSS_PROFILE/lib
3. Disable the default hsqldb datasource provided by Jboss. This is good for development purposes, but for any application server you want to deploy into a production environment, you need to replace it with a more robust DBMS. It will have a major impact on performance. There are two places hsqldb is referred to in the default install
• $JBOSS_HOME/server/$JBOSSS_PROFILE/deploy/hsqldb-ds.xml
• $JBOSS_HOME/server/$JBOSSS_PROFILE/deploy/messaging/hsqldb-persistence-service.xml
• I usually rename these files with a DO_NOT_USE prefix. You can delete them too, but I leave them around just in case.
4. Configure the Oracle data source by copying from the sample files and configuring them
• $JBOSS_HOME/server/$JBOSSS_PROFILE/deploy/oracle-ds.xml (you can find the sample file at $JBOSS_HOME/docs/examples/oracle-ds.xml)
• $JBOSS_HOME/server/$JBOSSS_PROFILE/deploy/messaging/oracle-persistence-service.xml (you can find the sample file at $JBOSS_HOME/docs/examples/oracle-persistence-service.xml)
• Comment out the following line in the file if you are not using clustering in the application server

   <attribute name="ChannelFactoryName">jboss.jgroups:service=ChannelFactory</attribute> 

I believe the warning is due to the fact that I linked to some video provided by twit on this post (http://kudithipudi.org/2011/11/04/overheard-comment-about-start-upentrepreneurship) .

I pinged Leo on Google + about it and hopefully he will have his team take care of it. Wait.. let me say that again.. I pinged Leo!!! . Isn’t technology amazing. With the click of a button, I was able to send a personal message to one of the most famous tech personalities.

 curl https://URL_TO_TEST --insecure --trace-ascii debug.txt 

Comments on options :
–insecure is used if you are testing web services served over SSL using self signed certs
–trace-ascii dumps all traffic between the client (curl in this case) and the server in human readable format

Proof :

If you ever run into errors like this

<pre>Starting httpd: Warning: DocumentRoot [/var/www/html/static] does not exist
Warning: DocumentRoot [/var/www/html/static] does not exist
Warning: DocumentRoot [/var/www/html/static] does not exist
Warning: DocumentRoot [/var/www/html/static] does not exist
(13)Permission denied: httpd: could not open error log file /etc/httpd/logs/error_log.
Unable to open logs
                                                           [FAILED]

And you are scratching your head why Apache is throwing these errors, even when the said directory and files exist. And you have the right permissions!! Check if you have SELinux running and being enforced.
On RHEL, you can check if SELinux is running by

cat /selinux/enforce 

The two values are 0 and 1. 0 means, SELinux is not being enforced and 1 means it is.
You can quickly disable SELinux temporarily by

echo 0 >/selinux/enforce 

If you want to disable it permanently (i.e. survive reboots), you have to edit the file /etc/selinux/config and change the SELINUX line from enabled to disabled. ]]> http://kudithipudi.org/2011/08/22/how-to-apache-and-selinux/feed/ 2 http://kudithipudi.org/2011/08/19/overheard-random-comments-about-technology/ http://kudithipudi.org/2011/08/19/overheard-random-comments-about-technology/#comments Fri, 19 Aug 2011 13:04:59 +0000 Vinay http://kudithipudi.org/?p=1009 Here are some interesting titbits from a executive summary event hosted by Redhat/Intel that I attended yesterday.

We decreased the execution times for our orders from 1.5 seconds to 5 milliseconds

This from an executive managing the technology organization for a large trading company. Imagine the geekiness in accomplishing this .

For every 450 smartphones that get activated a server is added to support them

This from an Intel executive. So if there are 500000 android phones being activated every day.. that’s around 1111 servers being added just to serve the android fans .

1 in 4 servers currently runs Linux

This from a Redhat executive. If anyone doubts that Linux is mainstream.. they are living under a rock