Those were the best days of my Life

Applies to: Indian :-)

Some of the Old Memories... (atleast very true with a Mumbai born person)

Any of us could relate with it....

When???

When gulli-danda and kanche (marbles) were more popular than cricket...

When we always had friends to play aais-paais (I Spy),

chhepan-chhepai and pitthoo and aabaa doobee anytime ...

When we desperately waited for 'yeh jo hai jindagi'...

When chitrahaar, vikram-baitaal, dada daadi ki kahaniyaan were so
fulfilling ...

When there was just one tv in every five houses and

When bisleris were not sold in the trains and we were worrying if
papas will get back into the train in time or not when they were
getting down at stations to fill up the water bottle...

When we were going to bed by 9.00pm sharp except for the 'yeh jo hai
jindagi' day...

When Holis & Diwalis meant mostly hand-made pakwaans and sweets and
moms seeking our help while preparing them.

When Maths teachers were not worried of our mummys and papas while
slapping/beating us...

When we were exchanging comics and stamps and chacha-chaudaris and
billus were our heroes...

When we were in nanihaals every summer and loved flying patang (kites) and plucking and eating unripe mangoes and leechis ...

When one movie every Sunday evening on television was more than asked
for and 'ek do teen chaar' and 'Rajni' inspired us...

When aath-aana (50 paisa) meant at least 10 toffees...

When left over pages of the last years notebooks were used for rough work or even fair work...

When "samrat" bread / newspaper were used for Noteboook and textbook covers...

When 'chelpark' and 'natraaj' were encouraged against 'reynolds and
family'...

When the first rain meant getting drenched and playing in water and
mud and making 'kaagaj ki kishtis'...

When there were no phones to tell friends that we will be at their
homes at six in the evening...

When our parents always had 15 paise blue colored 'antardesis' and 5
paise machli wale stamps at home...

When we remembered tens of jokes and were not finding 'ice-cream and
papa' type jokes foolish enough to stop us from laughing...

When we were not seeing patakhes on Diwalis and gulaals on Holis as
air and noise polluting or allergic agents...

The list can be endless...

On the serious note - to summarise with...

When we were using our hearts more than our brains,

even for scientifically brainy activities like 'thinking' and 'deciding' ...

When we were crying and laughing more often, more openly and more sincerily...

When we were enjoying our present more than worrying about our future...

When being emotional was not synonymous to being weak...

When sharing worries and happinesses didnt mean getting vulnerable to the listener...

When blacks and whites were the favourite colors instead of greys...

When journeys also were important and not just the destinations...

When life was a passenger's sleeper giving enough time and opportunity to enjoy the sceneries from its open and transparent glass windows instead of some superfast's second ac with its curtained, closed and dark windows ...

VMWare goes FREE

Experience Server Virtualization -- Free!

Begin enjoying the benefits of server virtualization with the free VMware Server. VMware Server installs on any existing server hardware and partitions a physical server into multiple virtual machines by abstracting processor, memory, storage and networking resources, giving you greater hardware utilization and flexibility. Streamline software development and testing and simplify server provisioning as you utilize the ability to "build once, deploy many times."

After Microsoft announced its Virual Server free, VMWare also has made hits VMWare server free. Click here for details.

XLS - Using angled text and borders

Applies to : Microsoft Excel 2002 and 2003.

Very usefull if you want to show the Heading of both Row and Column together in one cell.

Thanks to $under who asked me this question and also provided me the answer with this link. It gives detailed information about his requirement.

Business Intelligence Architecture and Design Guide (MS Platform)

This guide gives you prescriptive guidance on how to overcome architectural challenges and design issues when building Business Intelligence solutions using Microsoft platform.

Blog websites are blocked in India

Following the Mumbai blasts on 11-Jun-2006, access to all blogs and websites hosted on the following servers is currently blocked in India.

• xxx.blogspot.com/
• xxx.typepad.com/
• xxx.blogs.com/
• www.geocities.com/xxx

For strange reasons, blogs hosted on Wordpress, Livejournal, MSN Spaces, Rediffblogs, IndiaTimes and Yahoo 360° are spared by the Indian censors and they are still accessible in India.

The best part is that I am writing this blog now from India :)
This is possible because the www.blogger.com website, which is the Administration Website, is not blocked. So still we can post our blogs from India for outside world.

A great security implementation by Indian Govt!!! I am not sure whom to report this security hole!

Mumbai - 7/11

Seven blasts rocked suburban trains in Mumbai on Tuesday evening, Police Commissioner A N Roy has said. The blasts took place in a span of 30 minutes in first class compartments of suburban trains.

Bloggers from various location are providing online help. Following are the list of sites I have collected:

Rediff Blog | Blogspot | IBN Blog


Light a candle at IBN Live. For every candle you light, the IBNLive site will donate a rupee towards relief.

Microsoft Adds "My Private Folder" To Windows

Microsoft has released an add-on to Windows XP that creates a password-protected "My Private Folder" for storing private documents and files. Some enterprise administrators immediately objected.

Microsoft Private Folder 1.0, which can be downloaded from the Redmond, Wash. developer's Web site -- users must prove that their copy of Windows is legitimate by running the controversial Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) tool -- places the new folder on the desktop.

"It's a useful tool for you to protect your private data when your friends, colleagues, kids or other people share your PC or account," Microsoft said on the page dedicated to the new tool.

Commentators to the MSBlog site, however, quickly blasted the add-on.

"Have they even thought about the impact this could have on enterprises?" wrote someone identified as Stuart Graham on Thursday. "I'm already trying to frantically find information on this product so that a) I can block to all our desktops and b) figure out how we then support it when users inevitably lose files.

"I can see the benefit in this product for home users but it's a bit of a sloppy release by Microsoft (no documentation from what I can see and no enterprise management facilities)," Graham continued.

Private Folder 1.0 runs on Windows XP SP2.

Identify Sun Solaris Version

Determining the version of Solaris that you are running is important, especially when installing software packages, operating system patches and any other applications.

I had to get this information before installing the Cognos software. After a quick search on Google, I found the information below:

UNAME command - The uname command can be used to retrieve the OS version. It has following options:

uname -a = returns Basic Information
uname -i = returns Hardware Implementation
uname -m = returns Machine Hardware Name
uname -n = returns Nodename/Hostname
uname -v = returns OS Version
uname -r = returns OS Release Level

Solaris is the new marketing name of the Sun OS. Hence, both of these have different version numbers. Solaris 9 is also known as Sun OS 5.9.

A very good detailed information (including the Solaris and SunOS Version number mapping) can be found at Wikipedia link.

Why wedding ring should put on the fourth finger?

Pls follow the below step, really god make this a miracle( this is from a Chinese excerpt)

1. Firstly, show your palm, centre finger bend and put together back to back
2. Secondly, the rest 4 fingers tips to tips
3. Games begin, follow the below arrangement, 5 finger but only 1 pair can split
4. Try to open your thumb, the thumb represent parents, it can be open cause all human does go thru sick and dead. Which is our parents will leave us one day
5. Pls close up your thumb, then open your second finger, the finger represent brothers and sisters, they do have their own family which is too they will leave us too
6. Now close up your second finger, open up your little finer, this represent your children. Sooner or later they too will leave us for they got they own living to live
7. Nevertheless, close up your little finer, try to open your fourth finger which we put our wedding ring, you will be surprise to find that it cannot be open at all. Because it represent husband and wife, this whole life you will be attach to each other.

Real love will stick together ever and forever

Thumb represent parents
Second finger represent brothers & sisters
Centre finger represent own self
Fourth finger represent your partner
Last finger represent your children

Quick Hands-on Oracle

After a long time, I got change to setup Oracle 10g on Windows. The task was to setup Cognos8 with Oracle connectivity. Thanks to my ex-colleague (Riaz Ahmed), who helped me to recollect the basic commands in Oracle:

1) Creating a Database:
- Used Database Configuration Assistant (dbca)

2) Creating new users for Database:

Using SQL*Plus, login as SYSTEM user to the DB Instance and use the command
SQL> CREATE USER crn8 IDENTIFIED BY crn8;
SQL> GRANT CONNECT, RESOURCE, DBA to crn8;

3) Restore a Oracle Dump File that comes as Cognos Samples:
From Command Prompt, use the command

imp fromuser=crn8 touser=crn8
file=filepath.dmp
commit=y
log=filename.log

The tnsnames.ora needs to be configured at the Client PC to communicate with the Oracle Database Server. This file is usually found at ORACLE_HOME\network\admin folder.

Some more additional command to verify the Oracle Server/Instance status:

- lsnrctl status
- lsnrctl status DB_NAME
- tnsping DB_NAME

Ins and Outs of Virtual Server 2005 Administration and IIS

Found this post of David Wang very informative.

Virtual Server 2005 ships with a native code EXE program named VSWebApp.exe which calls the native COM based API. VSWebApp.exe implements CGI/1.1 to read/parse input and provide HTML as output, so it naturally runs as a CGI executable on IIS to provide a web-based administration interface.

HTTP 401.3 - Access denied by ACL on resource

I am getting the above error at my work place for a simple HTML page. This is happening for Images. The image is shown as broken link and when I try to access the image with complete URL (http://localhost/links/images/web-mail.gif), it gives me the error:

You are not authorized to view this page
You do not have permission to view this directory or page using the credentials you supplied.

HTTP 401.3 - Access denied by ACL on resource
Internet Information Services

My Environment is: Windows XP Professional Service Pack-2. And I believe that this comes with IIS-5.1.

Finally I got this fixed with help of David Wang's blog post. FileMon is a wonderfull tool. Thanks to David Wang's blog.

Please leave your comments, if you have encountered this problem before.

ETL solutions for IBM DB2 Universal Database

This article focuses on Extraction, Transformation, and Loading (ETL) of data for IBM®DB2® Universal Database™ (UDB) (implementations for UNIX®, Linux™, and Windows®) and describes the major options, technologies, and products available from IBM and from other vendors. Author Dan Simchuk gives you details on options useful for obtaining data for large repositories--warehouses, marts, and operational data stores running on single and multiple partition systems. Also, find out about the future of ETL and some approaches to implementing ETL in new ways.

DB2 Business Intelligence: The Big Picture

This article gives you a basic understanding of the DB2 business intelligence story, including information about strategy, technology, and products, such as DB2 Cube Views and DB2 Intelligent Miner.

Here's a good collection of articles for getting started with DB2 Business Intelligence.