Friday, November 19, 2010

passportindia site using weak public key?

I got this error in chrome but it happily went through in IE.

Server has a weak ephemeral Diffie-Hellman public key

This error can occur when connecting to a secure (HTTPS) server. It means that the server is trying to setup a secure connection but, due to a disastrous misconfiguration, the connection wouldn’t be secure at all!
In this case the server needs to be fixed. Chrome won’t use insecure connections in order to protect your privacy.

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Printing Wikipedia articles

Typically we copy contents from wikipedia articles – paste it into word documents or other wysiwyg editors. Then format it and print. However after posting the question on facebook questions (http://www.facebook.com/q/Is-there-a-easy-way-to-print-wikipedia-articles-without-the-sidebars-and-see-also-references-etc/10150286691460015?t=1&keep_objects=1), I found that there is an option right there in the sidebar to get printable version or even download it as pdf.

http://techcrunch.com/2009/02/27/print-you-favorite-wikis-as-books-courtesy-of-wikipedia-and-pediapress/ has some more details on new initiatives. We can add multiple chapters into http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Book and print out combined articles too.

Thursday, October 14, 2010

BarCamp Bangalore 9th edition

BarCamp Bangalore 9th edition was held in our Intuit Campus (Bellandur, Bangalore). There was a good crowd of around 250 people. Intuit, OrangeScape and FusionCharts were the official sponsors.

Attended the sessions :

Also helped Saurabh in presenting the session: Android Programming for Desktop Programmers

Had very informative and entertaining sessions.... Got lots of ideas and web links to check.... Eager to attend the next one :)

Saturday, October 9, 2010

Subscribing to Perforce depot changes

Command line mechanism is mentioned here:

ftp://ftp.perforce.com/perforce/r97.3/doc/cmdguide/html/changere.htm

Details about this are in:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/588264/perforce-getting-email-on-every-checkin

 

In Perforce p4v –> Click on Connection –> Edit Current User. In reviews enter the perforce depot directory ending with /… You should be getting emails for the current user email.

Monday, September 20, 2010

Technical sites that I Like

Original post: @ 7/22/2010 03:45:00 PM

I typically start office time with browsing my office mails followed by gmail and live mails. This is now invariably followed by 30 mins of browsing technical sites and I have kind of grown addictive to these:

Regularly visit:

Few other sites I visit occasionally:

Few more which I rarely visit:

Trying to avoid mention of FaceBook, Orkut and Twitter where I spend considerable time too :)

Different Personal and Professional news streams for Facebook?

Original post: @ 7/16/2010 04:08:00 PM

In FaceBook

  • You share a lot of technical stuff …. links relating to the work you do, company info, competitors products info etc etc….
  • Then there is the personal front – snaps. ..outings.. .your philosophical notes, ramblings etc etc ….

Two different streams or a classification of the news stream would be a good way to get the relevant information displayed to the correct audience of your co-workers/family/friends :).. Hope FaceBook implements it soon!

Win 7 – Few useful tricks

Original post : @ 6/18/2010 03:45:00 PM

  1. Right most spot on the taskbar is the equivalent of “Show desktop shortcut in quick launch”
  2. Win + 1 to 9 can be used to open the application ordered by the entry in the taskbar. Multiple windows of the same application? Then the hover gets displayed.
  3. Shift + Right Click on folder gives “open with command prompt” option.
  4. press the shift key and the icon in task bar to launch one more instance of the application.
  5. Alternatives for Alt-Tab; most of us are familiar with the WIN+ tab – This displays 3D tab feature. You can also use WIN + T to display the hover windows in the taskbar.

Other links:

Simplified version from: http://clubhouse.microsoft.com/public/post/261c40ef-ed74-4113-a8a7-5d26c9792228

Another good one: http://lifehacker.com/5390086/the-master-list-of-new-windows-7-shortcuts

Technology Shift – My career change

Original post : @ 6/16/2010 10:18:00 AM

After nearly 9 years of being involved in desktop software development, am finally thinking of shifting to the online/mobile space. Attended a 2 week JavaEE course and planning to start learning developing on Android platform. Hopefully can shift to that domain soon.

Java EE course was good but felt I learnt the syntax and “how to do” part but not the why part. Am looking for some suggestions on learning projects for JavaEE, so if you have some cool suggestions, drop it in :)

Office worker Ribbons for computer users

Original post: @ 2/25/2010 12:08:00 PM
Surprised with the number of people fascinated by the ribbons they get on online social games on FaceBook like Farmville, zoowold, cafe world, etc., I was wondering why we couldn’t use the same and give ribbons for most effective users of the pc/laptop.

For a software engineering team, we could decide ribbons for people who spend more time on visual studio or eclipse or any other development tool they work on {Ribbon: Workaholic}. They get bonus ribbons for surfing websites like msdn/stackoverflow.com {You are a technical help seeker}, if they contribute articles on web {Techno sharer ribbon} etc.

Wouldn’t this be interesting to share not only colleagues but also to all your friends on the social networking site?

Business Idea: Outsourcing Farmville, café world e.t.c.,

Original post : @ 2/02/2010 10:08:00 AM

Read that the FaceBook app Farmville has more users than the “in-thing” twitter. It’s a good time-pass activity but I think it’s the competitive spirit that drives it rather than the interest on the art of farming – plowing/ buying seeds/harvesting.


Even with the vehicles like Tractor, Seeder and Harvester, it’s really tedious to harvest plants, plow the land and again put seeds. There are lot of cheat sites, tricks for Farmville which suggest plant different kind of plants with different harvest times so that you won’t get bored :)… Same applies for the different dishes in cafĂ© world.


Well, one easy solution is to outsource it! I am sure there are tons of people who would be willing to pay a small amount for their farms to be harvested before they get withered, when they are having a good sound sleep. Read that one of my senior colleague was doing the farming as her son had to go on a school trip and he didn’t want his crops to be withered out. I am sure she or for that matter anyone who is going out on trip or busy for few days won’t mind shelling out bucks for this :)


What do you guys think?

My new domain – www.cmohan.info

Original post: My new domain – www.cmohan.info @ 1/18/2010 11:32:00 PM

 

Registered domain – www.cmohan.info from godaddy.com. Got a offer right now for 1.07$.. Actual is 9.99$ per year. But it means next year onwards I have to pay 9.99$ if I have to keep it :(

Just redirecting my blog (http://bschandramohan.blogspot.com) to this for now… Blogger allows custom domain. Details on how to do that can be found here. If you are stuck, just leave a comment and I can guide you :-)

Patents - how do I find out how it works! or what is patentable?

Original post @ 1/13/2009 12:38:00 PM

Nope... I am not talking about "How patents works?"  google search or in HowStuffWorks.com.

Some people tend to not like software patents as it kind of restricts the features being used widespread. Mostly OpenSource minds tend to believe nothing should be patentable and any new idea/tech should be reusable. Though makes sense, in this cut-throat competition world, don't see that as a possibility.

Now coming to the actual questions - I am still figuring how things work in the patent world. I see some cool ideas not getting patented or then some "not-so-cool" ideas getting patented and lying with no-one using them. Should all patents be productizable? Not definitely. Swype as a product - not sure if it will definitely catch on, but atleast with the patent, it knows there cannot be 100s of imitations of that in the market or a larger organisation adding it into their product and not paying any royalty to the actual idea generators.

Some companies just file patents to get richer by filing lawsuits against larger corporates who might be using the some rudimentary ideas which have now been granted to them.

There are both pros and cons... but given a chance, I believe people should get their ideas patented if applicable.. ..

Swype - real cool innovation?

Original post @ 1/13/2009 12:27:00 PM

Looking at the great comments - fast, hypnotical, magical, blindingly fast, love this... thought it's worth checking it out.

Link: http://www.swypeinc.com/

It's a cool invention and using it might help in quick typing, but it does have it's nemesis'. It's not 100% accurate as typing (if you type correctly) as it uses some kind of data matching with it's dictionary to find the words as you swipe across the panel. Not sure you can enter Abbreviations and some code names using this mechanism. A great invention but with not that impressive dependency.

Google Trends - new popularity analysis tool?

Original post @ 7/10/2008 12:35:00 PM

Happened to come across couple of posts that talked about Google Trends and how they can be utilized to check the popularity of few things:

On the Web, If You're Not Growing, You're DyingBollywood Actresses: Who's Google Hot and Who's Google Not?

Interesting to see how the popularity of actresses on the web really indicates the career graph... movie hits.. some big gossips about them.... some changes in their personal life has really kicked a new interest in finding about their profile :)

I did the same with Intuit and surprisingly found Canada providing more web traffic to intuit searches than US. Popularity seems to have decreased but time to get back to the old ways :).. Also happy to find India being a great traffic provider :-)

http://www.google.com/trends?q=Intuit

Quicken, QuickBooks, TurboTax are interesting to check too... Check all together in this link!

Timed Shutdown...

Original post @ 3/20/2008 11:52:00 AM

Do you listen to music before dozing off in ur bed? Do u leave Laptops On and realize u failed to switch it off before dozing off?

Here is a simple dos command to set off the shutdown/log/restart of your PCs.

Run Cmd. To shutdown after an hour (60 * 60 = 3600 secs), use Shutdown -s -t 3600.

To abort/change a shutdown at any time, do a shutdown -a

Tips to go about debugging huge products

Original post @ http://bschandramohan.blogspot.com/2008/02/tips-to-go-about-debugging-huge.html @ 2/15/2008 05:25:00 PM

So it's been around 3 yrs since I worked on a maintenance product trying to understand the existing codebase, layers, architecture etc. It's always easy to start on V1 products I had worked for in MT or the "Prototype" projects in MS.

And now to work on a product with millions of lines of code with as little documentation available as possible & to complete it in next 3 months, it's going to be a tough task

Here are some tips to go about it -

  • Understand the usage of the product. Typical way is to behave as a customer and use the product without caring about the testcases.
  • Learn the technology (Guys.. can u point me to a good & quick COM tutorial :-))
  • If you can figure out the high level modules, try to understand the gist of the modules.
  • If you can debug the product source code, put in breakpoints, view the stacktrace (big thanks to the guy who thought about adding that to debuggers).. and walkthrough the layers.
  • Rational Rose and various tools available to Reverse Engineer the code. It helps in atleast figuring out the high level structure of the code.

Perl script to find unique file extensions in directory and all its subdirectories

original post @ http://bschandramohan.blogspot.com/2007/10/perl-script-to-find-unique-file_30.html @ 10/30/2007 12:46:00 PM

I am totally new to Perl.. so this was fun writing:

Invoke it with the directory you want to search for.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

#Finds all the unique extensions in the current directory and its subdirectory(recursive).
#author: Chandra Mohan
use File::Basename;

sub recurse($) {
  my($path) = @_;

  ## append a trailing / if it's not there
  $path .= '/' if($path !~ /\/$/);

  ## loop through the files contained in the directory
  for my $eachFile (glob($path.'*')) {

    ## if the file is a directory
    if( -d $eachFile) {
      ## pass the directory to the routine ( recursion )
      recurse($eachFile);
    } else {
      ## Find file's extension
   my(undef, undef, $ftype) = fileparse($eachFile,qr"\.[^.]*");
   ## Add extension to the global array.
   $filetypes[$i++] = toLower($ftype);
    }
  }
}

# &toLower(string); --- convert string into lower case
sub toLower($) {
   local($string) = $_[0];
   $string =~ tr/A-Z/a-z/;
   $string;
}

#define Global variables
our @filetypes = ("");
our $i = 0;

## initial call ... $ARGV[0] is the first command line argument
recurse($ARGV[0]);

system "cls";

undef %saw;
@out = sort grep(!$saw{$_}++, @filetypes);
print "@out\n";

Simple C# function to find an executable being run in the path

original post @ http://bschandramohan.blogspot.com/2007/10/perl-script-to-find-unique-file.html

public string FindInPath(string filenameToFind)

{

string Path = System.Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("PATH");

string[] folders = Path.Split(new char[] {';'});

foreach (string folder in folders)

{

DirectoryInfo dirInfo = new DirectoryInfo(folder);

if (dirInfo != null)

{

FileInfo[] files = dirInfo.GetFiles();

foreach (FileInfo file in files)

if (file.Name.ToLower().Contains(filenameToFind))

    return dirInfo.ToString();

}

}

return string.Empty;

}

Welcome to my blog!

http://techieconnect.blogspot.com/

A place to share all my technical learnings – code snippets, cool hacks and technical links I found useful.

I will start with importing old blogs from my personal blog and the new Droid Blog.