Education System - At its worst ( in my opinion )

Recently, my five year old niece went for some entrance exams for getting an admission to two schools. In one school, the time management is so bad that they called kids at 11:30 or 12 and made them to wait for hours and finally my niece came out at 3:30pm!! Come on guys, they are kids. Can't you have some time sense at least for them?

And, there is this another school called New Horizon in Bangalore. And, just see the kind of questions they are asking for Class-I entrance exam. Kids have been asked to copy an English para and also asked to copy a Hindi para (!!!, they are still learning A,B,C s of Hindi and these people are asking for copying Hindi paragraphs). I don't understand what are they going to teach in 1st class now? Also, I heard that they had some questions on English grammar. I don't know. I feel these kind of entrance exams should be banned and the school administration should be punished for it. Come on, it is such an young age for kids. Why the hell you need an entrance exam!!! Wish Govt take these kind of thing seriously. This is not right way of education.

My Saga of cooking

Ok. my current work environment has provided(or forced :D) me to sharpen my cooking skill. One day, I fedup with the canteen food (yeah. haven't seen this pathetic food earlier) and feel I can prepare better than this. Sometimes, I succeeds and that gives me motivation and sometimes, I fail (Yeah, it actually happened oneday that I beat my canteen food :(, can't imagine but happened in reality ). Then, I feel, why to torture my husband too with this food and give up cooking. But one day, I again feel that I can prepare better and start cooking and the story continues in infinite loop. :)

My Random dreams these days

Got a dream that I am singing "Janaganamana" and I sang the whole national Anthem in dream.
Got a dream about my work and started designing it
Got a dream that I wrote a class for Steve Balmer with public and private function which he can use for public and personal communication
Got a dream that I started calling a function via a pointer (Run time overriding, you see ) to move left and right while sleeping

Moral of the story: Need a break!!!!

Destiny!

We had a plan to visit Bangalore last weekend and had prepared for it since long. However, God had some other plans for us. We had to cancel our trip for various reasons and after cancelling the trip, I got a call that my uncle is not well and admitted in a hospital in Hyd. We went to meet him on Saturday and by the time we reached, the doctor has informed them to take him to a hospital in their place itself as the same injections can be taken there. My uncle have a kid who just finished his +2. I consoled the kid as well my uncle and aunt saying everything will be ok. Little I knew that would be my last visit to him. They have taken my uncle to a hospital in their place and the journey went fine and he was feeling ok. After I got this information, after few minutes, I got a call saying he is no more.:-(

I guess, I am in the second phase of life.

In the first phase, you are a kid and you don't hear/see the news of the people you have seen while growing up are no more.

Second phase of life, you get to hear the news of elder people you have seen when you are kid are no more.
Third phase of life, you get to hear the news of your age people are no more and ball will be in our court during that time and couting for days

Happy Moments :P

Yesterday, we were shifting home and door bell was rang and I opened the door. A person asked me "Could you call your mom please?". He takes home delivery order for fruits and vegetables and so wanted to talk to some elder people at home. :))

Later in the evening, a lady rang the bell. Again, I opened the door. She said "Could you call madam please?". I said "Yeah, tell me". She stared at me again and started talking. :)
I guess, all the credit goes to my t-shirt. Earlier, the same t-shirt made a security person in Bangalore Metro to inform me that "Under-18 are not allowed". :)

DOS equivalent of linux commands

unix Command =>Dos Command
Grep -r => findstr /S
ps aux => tasklist /v
kill -9 => taskkill /f /im imagename
cp => copy
find . -name =>dir filename /S
Currently looking for locate or find . -name available in linux
Got the answer for above one. Thanks to Satish. Updated the list accordingly.

Stop the process of emotionally attacking

One of our relative is not feeling well since recently and the family are going in very bad trauma as recently, two people from the family are passed away during different incidents. Now, one can see how emotionally weak they might be during this situation, given they have kids who are still young and one of the main person of the family is ill. So, one religion have taken this as an advantage and gave some speech that they will do prayers for them and their God (are there different Gods who can do better than other!!!, I was assuming it is only one :-/) will save them. So, the couple converted into different religion and stopped celebrating the festivals of their religion. I am not against any religion and I do believe one should respect other religions and I don't differentiate as their God or my God. But, I didn't like this way of attacking people emotionally and try to convert them into one religion and put a hard and fast rule of not celebrating their own festivals!
My request to those fellows who choose to convert people's religion in this way: Please stop this nonsense advertising/promotion what ever you call. This is not the right way.

install chrome in fedora 12

Installing Google Chrome from the rpm file specified in google chrome site didn't work for me. So, below are the steps which worked for me.


Step-1: Create a chromium.repo file in your /etc/yum.repos.d directory
Step-2: add below contents to chromium.repo file
[chromium]
name=Chromium Test Packages
baseurl=http://spot.fedorapeople.org/chromium/F$releasever/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0
Step-3: yum install chromium

Reference

Taking a backup of a folder in Fedora Linux

Normal "cp" command will exclude files/folders starting with ".". Below steps are needed to make sure everything is copied (essentially a backup) of a given folder.

1. Set shopt dotglob option to enable.
shopt -s dotglob

2. Copy hidden files and folder.
cp -pr sourceDir destDir

3. Set shopt dotglob option to disable.
shopt -u dotglob

Reference

How true but we ignore :(

Tomato Pickle

Ingredients:
1KG tomatoes, 1 big spoon tamarind, methi powder, 1 cup salt, 1 cup mirch powder, oil, mustard seeds, cumin seeds

Preparation:
Clean 1 kg of tomatoes and dry it under fan/under Sun so that water will go away. Take it in a pan and cook it properly till the water in tomatoes almost go away. Once done, take the tamarind (after having only pulp, removing all seeds and other small stick type of things) and put it in the pan where tomatoes pulp is there and cook them together till the moist goes away. once done, add mirch powder, salt and methi powder. Take this mixture add lasoon and grind it in mixer. Keep this stuff in fridge.

Take oil in pan and heat it well. Add mustard seeds and cumin seeds and cool it down. Add part of above mixture (upto few weeks of use) and serve it as pickle.

Exporting mysql query output to xml

I know there are ways to do this. But wasn't aware that it is very simple.
Exporting mysql query output to xml is:
mysql -u --xml -e''

Simple, isn't it?

Reference:http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/xml-in-mysql5.1-6.0.html#xml-5.1-in-and-out

This article also talks about importing data from xml to mysql.

My struggle with Maven plugin for eclipse and mahout building

Somehow, my maven plugin stopped working in my eclipse (again!!!). I have already posted on maven plugin installation and everything earlier. However, this doesn't seem to work now. :-(. no idea though. So, I had to restart my "mission mvn". Finally after a lot of struggle on making the current mvn plugin to work, I looked for a new plugin and got this link
. I installed this plugin and I could see "mvn commands" populated in "Run as.. " section. My happiness couldn't last for long as I couldn't successfully build mahout codebase using this plugin.

mvn install is giving build error however mvn compile is successfully compiling. Should be able to resolve soon. Stay Tuned...

Finally, I figure out a way to avoid build errors in eclipse using maven. Following checks need to be made to see if everything is configured properly

Right click on Project -> select Properties -> Make sure under Java Build Path and libraries tab, whether Maven ClassPath container and maven dependancies are present
Right click on Project -> select Properties ->Make sure under builder, you have maven project builder and maven incremental builder and default Java builder are available

Right click on project - select properties - select maven at left hand side - check include modules.

Once all above are configured properly, right click on project and select build project. This should build without any issues.

Sound issue in Mozilla firefox in Fedora

There was a sound issue in Mozilla firefox in Fedora and to fix the same, one need to install libflashsupport. It worked for me.

Reference:http://www.derekhildreth.com/blog/guides-to-help-with-fedora-8-install/

Disabling Work Offline in Firefox

I have been facing this issue in my firefox that when I start it, "Work Offline" box is checked by default and I have to manually uncheck to start browsing internet. And, here is the solution to turn it off permanently.

1. type about:config in address field of browser
This gives a warning saying you are changing advanced settings. Once you press the button that "I'll be careful, I promise!"

2. type "networkmanager" in filter tab and toggle the parameter(toolkit.networkmanager.disable) that you get when you type the above value in filter tab.

Reference is:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=851542

The reason given in above link is- The network manager is not well informed , especially in dial-up situations and so, lets the firefox assuming that no connection exists and there by forcing "Work Offline". However, in my case, I had some network issues while booting up and so a manual restart of network was needed. However, even after fixing that issue, I was facing the above problem and there is no other option for me other than disabling network manager.

Destiny

I thought of starting this year blog with something different. But couldn't control after seeing such a sad video in news channel and couldn't control expressing my emotions.

Insane People

While watching TV, I came across this news (http://www.dailychilli.com/news/1721-two-ministers-watch-as-cop-bleeds-to-death) where two ministers watch while cop dies.
I am not pressing at ministers but the whole group of people standing there and watching his death. Crows cry when other fellow crow is hurt. How can we being human beings watch other person dying?. The ugliest reasons they give are "We were waiting for Ambulance", "We thought the minister's convoy is attacked. So, we were thinking whether the attacked people still there and might attack if we reach near to the person". All I can say, they are insane. I don't treat them as human beings. Would you do the same thing if your family member is in that position?

Poor police office, who got double promotions for doing bravery tasks. He was part of "Operation Veerappan". Even, if he is not, he deserves help from the people around. And the way people were pouring drinking water over him, it looked like he is untouchable and they can't touch him. I felt sad and I couldn't do anything. :-(