Showing posts with label Issues. Show all posts

It was decided on a phone call on Tuesday that we are going to Goa on the coming long weekend (Oct 2 – Oct 4). Some of us will go from Bangalore and others will join us there from Pune.
I booked the Bangalore-Goa bus tickets (return too) through Sea-Bird (which was a pathetic service in itself).
Scheduled departure from Bangalore: 8:15 PM
Scheduled arrival at Goa: 9:15AM
While I was booking tickets, Pranali cross-checked multiple times to make sure it is an AC bus. Though I was not so much in favor of taking an AC bus thinking that the weather anyways is cool and the night would be cooler.

Thursday evening, the bus started 15 minutes late. We didn’t get time to have dinner. AC, DVD-coach, semi-sleeper, partial luxury bus. The bus keepers (2 drivers for the night driving + 1 helper boy) had only one DVD, with only one movie – Shaadi No. 1 (horrible movie, because we were fearing they might put some Kannada movie, so the only relief was the movie being Hindi).

The bus stopped at a road-side restaurant at 12 midnight where I and Shambhu ordered for 2 plates Chhole Masala. Never did we know that it is a “Chhole Masala” prepared out of putting (not even properly mixed) Chhole into the curry of Egg-curry. Disgusting that was! And how much did it cost? 45 Rs. What a waste of money? Feared of having a stomach upset after eating the rubbish, I had a glass of juice and a 500 ml bottle of Slice. Thankfully, now I can sleep with a good taste in mouth.

The road was such a mess; the bus was swinging left-right-left because it was a narrow road and the ditches were making it shut-up-and-bounce because it was a broken road too. It was not easy to sleep (rather stick inside your seat), and scarier were the thoughts of coming back on the same route when our seat numbers were 34, 35, 36 (the last row of seats).

Savita calls me at around 7 in the morning (Pune group has already reached), “Where have you reached?”
Me (unaware of what lies ahead): I think we are a bit late but we should be there by 10 or 10:30.

After facing some traffic-jams on the way, we knew that we are at least 1.5 hour behind the schedule; the bus reached Ankola at 9 AM and stopped at Kamat Hotel. It had started raining by then. After some time we were told that the road to Goa is blocked due to rain. There is plenty of water on the connecting bridge and the news coming in was that the water level is still rising.

After waiting for around 1.5 hour, the passengers of the bus decided to take the train route. Because we were just 120 km from Goa, no one wanted to turn back. The bus took us to Ankola Railway Station. We got to know that there is a train Ankola-Madgaon at 11:30. Hardly had we started believing that we’ll reach Goa, it was announced that the 11:30 train is cancelled because of heavy rains. Damn! So, when is the next train? 5:30 PM. We were still deciding within ourselves whether we should wait for another 6 hrs at the platform, is it worth a wait; comes the next announcement: 5:30 train to Madgaon stands cancelled too because of the submerged railway track. Great! So this news put an end to all the discussions leaving us with no other option than to wait for the rain to stop and the roads to clear.

Though we tried for other options like taking interstate buses, buses through Hubli, attempts to book cabs (even at higher proces) but all in vain. Everyone was just too scared to go that way.

Finally the bus took us back to Kamat (where all buses for that route were halted) and we waited there till 4 PM when we heard that the Sea-bird buses have started leaving for Goa. We felt a sense of excitement again. The buses had really started and we had hardly moved 5 km when the bus was stopped by some cops. They were turning all the heavy vehicles back saying that the road is still not open.

Back to Kamat and it is still raining. The only option left now is to head back to Bangalore. We didn’t have time to waste. The day was setting (there was no sun by the way) and it was getting darker. The later we go, the lesser were the chances of getting a bus to Bangalore.

6:15 PM – Hired an auto from Kamat to Ankola bus stand only to realize that we have just missed one bus to Bangalore and the other buses left are full. No Vacant Seats! We were advised by some local people to catch a bus from Ankola to Kumta and from there we would be able to get buses to Bangalore. Did we an option not to believe them and think of our own?

Boarded a bus to Kumta – 40 km. Luckily got a seat in the otherwise packed bus and unluckily got the worst possible seat in that bus. Of the two windows by my side, one window pane was broken (read missing) and the other was so loosely fit that it was roaring into my ears. So cacophonous it was that I felt like breaking that one too. We got down at Kumta in even heavier rain at 7:30 PM. Rushed straight to the ticket counter and I was the happiest person on earth to know that a KSRTC bus will leave for Bangalore at 8 PM.

The rain was just not stopping and mind you, it was not drizzling, it was pouring; but who cares, we have a bus now. We loaded ourselves into the bus and parked ourselves into the best possible coordinates as if we are the owners of the bus. Yeah, the bus was more or less empty. I teased Pranali, “Won’t you like to board an AC bus?” We were hungry, we were drenched and we were tired, but this bus took all our worries at once.

I recalled the “Jab We Met” Kareena Kapoor dialog, “बस भगवान् जी, अब और excitement नहीं चाहिए बोरिंग बना दो जी अब इस रात को ”.
The bus started. We were now on our way back to Bangalore after converting a supposed-to-be-exciting Bangalore-Goa-Bangalore trip into a more-adventurous Bangalore-Ankola-Kumta-Bangalore trip.

But, I pictured: “पिक्चर अभी बाकी है मेरे दोस्त” when our loving bus had a flat tyre at NT Road, Shimoga. 2 AM in the morning. Could I ask for a better night-out for myself? I walked out of the bus till the driver-conductor duo replaces it with the spare tyre they had. Sometime later, I observed that the driver-conductor duo is not doing anything and just waiting for something and discussing. Out of curiosity, I just asked them, “अंकल जी, अब क्या हुआ?” And to my amusement, they replied, “सर, ये जो स्टेपनी है, ये फिट नहीं हो रही ये टायर इसके साइज़ का नहीं है ”

I mean, how is that possible? It was like “carrying a cycle tyre as a stepny to your scooter”.

“तो अब क्या करोगे?”
“कुछ नहीं सर, वेट करते हैं, KSRTC का कोई और बस आएगा, तो passengers को उसमे बैठा देंगे ”
“^%%^$&%*%!#” अब क्या बोलूँ मैं?
The other passengers were also out by now.
Even after a wait of around half an hour, no sign of any KSRTC bus. A bus came in the opposite direction. They lent the spare tyre. The tyre was replaced and we were on wheels again. Anything else is in store for us?

The bus stopped at another Kamat restaurant, but we were relaxed that we are very near to Bangalore now. So, we freshened ourselves and had good breakfast. We had a mini photo shoot inside the bus only to save as a witness to our miseries. Finally! We reached Majestic at 11 AM.

But to take things again to the negative side, cancelling the Sea-bird return tickets was another nightmare that we faced. We had to spend almost 3 hrs in and around Sea-Bird office to get it done and I reached home at 4 PM completely drained, no energy left.

That was the end of our pain but I must admit that the 2 girls: Priyanka and Pranali, were too calm all this time. Girls generally are expected to cry/crib in such a chain of failures. But these two were way too energetic to walk all along without giving any negative vibes. But I must say, the long weekend was completely utilized :P

Next morning I got up with the newspapers filled with the news of floods rightly mentioning some of the areas where we had been just a night back.

OK! I am signing off for the day leaving this template here.
As decided in the morning, I spent the whole day searching for the templates only.


During the day, one of the templates that I found good enough is the "Aspire" theme. Take a look below:

But I again found some issues with this template. E.g. the date of the post is not appearing, the images of the theme hide the key links (New Post, Customize, Sign In) that are otherwise visible at the top right corner of every blog.
Though I am not very much satisfied with the currently theme, but I am finding suitable enough to leave it like this over the weekend.

I'll try to revive my lost widgets next week and come up with a better template if possible.

Till then! Happy Weekend! :)

Abhishek - boy, you spoiled me...

Looking at the new look of Abhishek's blog (which is cool enough), I too thought of giving it a try. Though I had this idea at the back of my head for quite sometime, but thinking it's a high time now, I jumped into it.
I am struggling to find a decent theme for this blog. And I got to know one thing about myself in the past few hours - I am too choosy :D

I have scrolled through hundreds of themes by now and none of them caught my eye. I saw their live demos and in each and every theme, I found some limitations. So, thought of listing down the characteristics of the ideal (Where will I find it?) theme I am looking for. Here they are in decreasing order of priority:

--> Wide span. I just don't want to see the background. Only the contents of the blog.
--> Not more than two columns. Multiple columns will shrink the post area.
--> Not very broad [vertical length :)] header. It should be wide enough to house the Blog name and the Subtitle placed at a beautiful position and angle with proper spacing.
--> Colors: I can't list the colors I want to see (In fact, I am not so good at it!). Any combination will work for me provided it is simple and sober. No hard colors please!
--> I don't mind if there is no footer at all. Mostly people read the recent posts (at max top 2-3 posts) only. Who cares to scroll to the bottom of the page?

Now, with all these restrictions at hand, I started searching for the themes. And, I haven't find any yet which satisfies all the above criteria.
Still, when I finally settled with a theme (though not the ideal one, but thought of giving it a try just to see how it works), I uploaded the XML and got a similar error as Abhishek's. Thought of following the same path as him, I tried to submit the error with "Blogger Support". But the BOFA (Bank of America) network didn't allow me to cross it. Categorized the page under "Personal Homepages" and access denied.

The result is in front of you: I reverted back to my old template but without the widgets.

I have told my teammates at Bangalore that I have lots of work today and am very busy (in searching themes). So, no project work today! But, anyway I am not even getting success here.
:(

I am a bit confused about how Microsoft Office Powerpoint 2003 manages the size of the PPT. You can try this out. Follow these steps:
>> ... Create a fresh new PPT. Don't write anything into it.
>> ... Just save it on to your disk.
>> ... Check the size of the PPT file. For my case it is 8 KB.
>> ... Now save the file again (Ctrl+S). And now check the file size. It has changed. I got it as 13 KB.
>> ... Now keep saving this file again and again without writing anything into it (No change). You'll find the file size changing with every save you do. For me, it kept on increasing by 1 KB with every save.

Discovery: No change to the file, nor to its contents (absolutely untouched). Why is its size increasing with every save? Any answers?

Note: I tried doing the same with Powerpoint 2007. Everything is fine there. The size of the new PPTX file is 29.3 KB and the file size is not changing with subsequent saves. Looks like Microsoft has fixed the bug in this release.

TOAD is one of the most widely used editors to interact with the databases like Oracle, SQL Server etc. No prizes for guessing why is it the most popular editor - It provides so many fancy things to play around with the queries. The look and feel is really cool. There are utilities like Formatter Plus (to format your ugly looking queries), Code Xpert (to do a complete post-mortem of your PL/SQL code), SQL Optimizer (to guide you through your heavy weight queries) , then there are ready made code snippets to boost up your coding speed, fancy looking explain plans (perfectly readable) which can be seen animating.ER Diagram, Code Road Map, FTP, File comparison are other some of the very useful utilities.
I think, enough of praise. Now the bug!

I ran a very simple statement and tried to count the number of rows in the result set. The size of the result set can be seen at two different places. Marked in red in the image below:


Oracle is returning 798 rows. But, when I did a "Record Count" from the right-click menu of the "Data Grid", I got 804 as the count.

To further check this, I directly ran a SELECT COUNT ... query, and I got the count as 798. This clearly indicates that TOAD is being erroneous while counting the records.Inspite of being one of the finest SQL editors in the business, TOAD has its own set of limitations. Who doesn't have them by the way?

As told in my previous post, we are curerntly in the process of migrating some of our applications from Oracle 9i to 10g. And to my surprise, we have found so many issues with the Oracle 10g itself. Oracle 10g SQL optimizer has a lot of bugs in itself. We got back to Oracle Support team with our pain points. They admitted the issues and are working on it. For the time being they suggested us a work-around:

ALTER SESSION SET "OPTIMIZER_FEATURES_ENABLE" = "9.2.0";

Yes, as said by my manager, this is really ironical that we will be using 9i optimizer in 10g but it is what it is. :)

I was laughing out loud at this. Oracle has its 11i release set to launch and they have bugs with 10g optimizer. But never mind, that's the life of us - software engineers. So just chill !

We are currently in the process of migrating some of our applications from Oracle 9i to Oracle 10g. One of the problems that we faced while migrating the application code is the order in which the result is returned for a particular set of queries.
We have some dropdown boxes (e.g Country Name) in our application which are populated dynamically by a query like this:

SELECT DISTINCT country_name FROM countries WHERE current_rec_ind = 'Y';

The DISTINCT and "GROUP BY" are two clauses that inherently force the sorting of data set in case of Oracle 9i. So, when you have a DISTINCT or "GROUP BY" in your SELECT query, you are most likely to get the data set sorted by the columns in the SELECT list. This happens because the SQL Optimizer (Cost based) in Oracle 9i is implemented in such a way that it gets the lowest cost for a query when it first sorts the data and then removes the duplicates.
So, for the dropdown, we always used to get the country names sorted alphabetically.

But this is not the case with Oracle 10g. The SQL optimizer in 10g does not sort the data in order to remove duplicates. So, we were not getting the country names in proper order. Here are the explain plans of the same query in the two Oracle versions to make it clearer:



The second step in the plan makes it all clear.

This is one of the potential risks that should be considered for your application code while migrating from 9i to 10g. So, its always better to have an "ORDER BY" in your queries if you need sorted data to avoid backward compatibility problems.

I tried to change my language Preference for Google. Just wanted to search in Hindi :) Have a look what I went through.

I saved my "Preferences" after changing the language to Hindi. This is what I got:

Ok, I enjoyed the Hindi Look of Google Pages, though its not actually "Hindi Search". The search still goes English. You can't type Hindi in the search text box. Though you can paste हिन्दी after transleterating it through Google Transliterator, and carry on proper हिन्दी search. Now usually when I want to search something again, my first lookup is the drop-down of google search box. But, I was again disappointed when for my Hindi searches, I found this:

Alphabet blocks? Grrrr... What I do now?

After this, I thought to switch back to English Google (I was fed up of this Copy-Paste thingie). So, I again changed my वरियताएं (Preferences) to get my original Google Page. As I clicked on the "वरियताएं सहेजें" (Save Preferences) button; oops, what is the pop-up saying? Again Alphabet blocks...

Alright, we all know that Google is a wonderful organisation, but lately did I realize that there are a lot of issues with the Google applications. Look at the following links to see what issues my friends have found till now. I have an intelligent set of friends, I must say ;)

1. Picasa Private Albums (By Ankur)

2. Some more (By Vaibhav)

3. One more issue that I have experienced is: You have several Google applications opened on your system- Blogspot, Picasa, Google Search etc... You log out of any one of these, you are thrown out of all other applications as well. Irritating, isn't it?

But, needless to say, Google is no innovation deficient. It has always been developing new, fancy innovative apps. One of them I got to know from Priyanshu is the unofficial google shell, which I just loved. This is the command line search engine of Google : Goosh.org

So, UNIX lovers, LINUX likers can enjoy this big time. There are some good features in this new application which are not there in the original Google search. One of them, as I have already pointed out: Search in Hindi. When you change the language to HINDI in Goosh (Google Shell), you get the transliterator at the command line itself, so the real हिन्दी search is available.

Though I found some problems with this application:

1. No Copying of text avilable. Usually shells in "Quick Edit Mode" give this option.

2. If you migrate form the Google search page using "go" command and then hit the "Back" button, you won't find the results that you had on the earlier page.

3. It displays 4 search results at a time. You can see the next result set using the command "more", but you never come to know how many results were returned actually by the search. There should be a display like: "25-28 of 1800 search results", what we see on the top right corner of the actual google search results page.

4. Surely, there must be more which I couldn't catch for now. I leave it to my genius friends :)

Inspite of these problems, the application is good to go rolling. Afterall its GOOOOOGLE :)