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George Carlin : Philosopher, Comedian and a Genius

George Carlin, probably one of the most intelligent comedians around, passed away on Sunday due to a heart attack. If you don’t know who he is, check out his page on WikiPedia and his website.

In addition to being a great comedian, George had a “thing” for languages.. Here is a snippet from his website

Some favorite oxymorons:

assistant supervisor
new tradition
original copy
plastic glass
uninvited guest

Some favorite redundancies:

added bonus
total abstinance
young children
exactly right
subject matter
revert back
true fact
honest truth
sum total
join together
ferryboat
free gift
general public
bare naked
unique individual
new initiative
end result

RIP George..You will be missed.

Rooting for the Mozilla team..

I downloaded multiple instances of Firefox 3.0 to support Mozilla’s attempt to set a world record for the most number of downloads in a day!!. Their servers had some problems dealing with the flood of download requests but seem to have stabilized now..Help set the record, but downloading a copy of Firefox 3.0. I have only used it for a hour now, but it is faster when I use Gmail. And it has a ton of new features that I haven’t even started playing with…

June 18, 2008 by admin Technology Uncategorized Web 0

Become part of a Guinness World Record

Have you always wanted to play a part in setting a Guinness World Record? You have the chance now by helping Mozilla Firefox in their attempt to become the most downloaded software in a day. Head over toÂ http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/ and help create the world record!!

June 15, 2008 by admin Fun Technology Uncategorized Web 1

Literacy in India : Some stats

The official meaning of a literate person per UNESCO is

A literate person is one who can with understanding both read and write a short simple statement relevant to his everyday life.

Such a simple sentence, but think what it means to be an illiterate person and how much impact an illiterate person has on the progress (or lack of progress) of a country and the world in general.

Here are some stats about the literacy rates in India

Only 61.3% percent of the adult population are literate. That means more than 296 million people!!! are illiterate. For comparison, China has a literacy rate of 90.9%.
India is the 12th largest economy in the world and growing at a blistering pace of 9% a year (for the last few years). Imagine what would have happened if there were more literate people in the country?
The largest number of illiterates in the world are in India

As you know, I am running this years Chicago Marathon with a mission. I am raising money for the Asha Foundation, a non-profit helping to educate the underprivileged in India. Please take a moment to donate some money to the cause by clicking on the button below.

June 15, 2008 by admin Rantings Uncategorized 0

HOW TO : Create dynamic pages in WordPress

I have decided to run the Chicago Marathon again this year. But this time, I am running it for a cause. I am raising money for the ASHA foundation, a non profit entity helping to educate the poor and needy in India. As part of the fundraising process, I wanted to share my training information with the folks that are donating for this cause and hence the need for this post.

I was looking into creating a dynamic page in wordpress (the software that powers this blog) that would list all the posts related to my training for the marathon. Google came to the rescue as usual and pointed me to the “InLine Posts” plugin by Aral Balkan.

You can do create a dynamic page by

1) Download the “InLine Posts” plugin from here : http://aralbalkan.com/wordpress

2) Unzip the file and upload the contents to the plugins folder in your wordpress install. It is located in the wp-content folder.

3) Activate the plugin by logging into the admin interface of your wordpress install.

4) Create a new page and add the number of the post you want displayed in the page by listing the post ID in the following format : [[POST_ID]]

June 14, 2008 by admin HOWTO Technology Uncategorized Web 0

Tools of the trade : IBM Page Detailer

I discovered IBM Page Detailer, a tool to analyze web traffic between a client and a server in a graphical format, while listening to the brilliant Steve Sounder’s lecture on “Even Faster Web Sites” from the Google I/O 2008 conference. And credit goes to Ray for posting the list of videos from the Google I/O conference.

Am still playing around with this tool, but it looks like there is a lot of potential here. Rather than acting as a proxy, like most of the HTTP analyzers do, this tool actually places a probe in the clients network stack. And not to mention that it is free to use :).

June 14, 2008 by admin Networking Technology Uncategorized Web 1

Tools of the trade : Java application management

We recently launched a new product at work and had to optimize a Java web application hosted in a JBoss application server for performance. The following tools came in rather handy to troubleshoot and analyze the application.

Java core dump memory analyzer from SAP. This tool is better than the standard run of the mill heap analyzers since it can handle larger core dumps. The tool is available here.
Messadmin : Session information tool by Cedrik Lime. This tool helps you to analyze the sessions on the application server in real time. We were able to install it on the application server without making any changes in our application, other than adding a couple of listners.. In essence, we copied the jar/war files to the application server and edited our application web.xml file to add the following listners

<context-param>
	<param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
	<param-value>/WEB-INF/applicationContext*.xml,classpath:applicationContext*.xml</param-value>
</context-param>
<filter>
	<!-- MessAdmin Servlet Filter -->
	<filter-name>MessAdminFilter</filter-name>
	<filter-class>clime.messadmin.filter.MessAdminFilter</filter-class>
</filter>
	<filter-mapping>
	<filter-name>MessAdminFilter</filter-name>
	<url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>
<listener>
	<!-- MessAdmin listener -->
	<listener-class>clime.messadmin.core.MessAdminListener</listener-class>
</listener>

June 5, 2008 by admin Linux Programming Technology Uncategorized Web 2

HOW TO : Repair corrupted MYSQL Table

I recently came across a corrupted table in MySQL and was getting the following error, when I was trying to access a table.

“mysql ERROR 145 (HY000): Table ‘xxxxxxx’ is marked as crashed and should be repaired”

I repaired the table by

Log into the mysql client using “mysql”
Change to the required database by using “use DATABASE_NAME”
Repair the table by using “repair table TABLE_NAME”

Love the simplicity of MySQL :).

June 2, 2008 by admin HOWTO Linux Technology Uncategorized 0

Trip to Michigan

Over the memorial day weekend, I and some of my friends from IIT along with their better half’s and parents, went on a trip to Lake Charlevoix in Michigan. The weather and company was great and it turned into a perfect weekend. Here are some pictures..

Place we stayed at. Frost Castle. Would highly recommend staying at this place if you travel to this region. The owner, Al Frost, is friendly and has done a great job with building the whole log cabin by himself. BTW, I don’t know if I would call this monster a log cabin :). It has 7 bedrooms and 4 baths.