Mind Mapping

Mind maps are a great way to store, organize your ideas.  With many commercial tools scattered around in the Web, I gave FreeMind a try and it satisfied most of the basic needs in Mind Mapping.  Mind Mapping software come with a multitude of features and one of the important feature that I love is the Calender.  They give you the ability to attach dates and reminders to any node in the Mind map tree.  I have stumbled upon on a few web based Mind mapping tools and seeking a way to attach Project Management features/tools that would help many folks out there.

Tony Buzan developed Mind Maps with the following key features in mind:
Key features are:
- Organization
- Key Words
- Association
- Clustering
- Visual Memory - Print the key words, use color, symbols, icons, 3D-effects,arrows and outlining groups of words
- Outstandingness - every Mind Map needs a unique center
- Conscious involvement

Following are some great useful resources to start with:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_Mapping
http://members.optusnet.com.au/~charles57/Creative/Mindmap/

Some of the interesting tools out there:
http://www.mindman.com/
http://www.mindomo.com/
http://www.mindmeister.com/
http://www.comapping.com/

Second Business Trip

In continuation to my first trip, I made my second business trip that was perfectly planned and executed.  The requirement was to scale out a financial database that is fairly large.  After a two day research and Proof of concepting, we decided to go with SQL Server 2005 Mirroring feature.  While in the way, we overcame a few challenges such as SQL Server 2005 mirroring and permission issues. Later a day, we successfully started implementing Mirroring for one of the databases and continued with the others.  A snapshot was created for each of the mirrored databases so as to provide read-only access.  Its a great solution for anyone who owns a reporting application that only needs read-only access to OLTP databases.  A scheduler application was also developed in C# to take snapshots of the database at specific intervals, in order to keep the snapshots up to date to the principal database.

The entire project was completed in just 6 days.  We setup the scheduler and moved into production on last Saturday.  The team worked hard throughout the entire week.  Kudos!

On my way back to the airport, I had a chance to do a quick shopping on LandMark, bought myself a book and got myself a couple of lovely books gifted from the department head for Systems and Applications.  One of them is the International bestseller from Paulo Coelho titled The Alchemist.

Mumbai inspired me so much that I have also planned on a personal trip in the summer.  Good day ALL!

To the home city of Bollywood

Last Thursday, I was busy preparing for a two day business trip to the Home city of Bollywood.  Contrary to many’s assumptions, it was my first flight and a great experience travelling to the most populous city in India.  I spent 2 days and a night dedicating a day for each of the projects in my client site.  The entire plan was just perfect!

The sun was bright and shiny in the days and chilly breeze seemed to flow all through the city in the nights.  I was a given a nice suite and I enjoyed Bombay food, especially the ones the client kindly ordered for lunch from one of the restaurants near their building.  Site seeing was not included in the plan, so I’m hoping to allocate a day in my next trip to the city.

On the first day, I completed most of the important tasks for them including application deployment, training for the first project and initial requirements gathering on the second project.  I worked on a few requested changes at the start of the second day.  The rest of the second day was dedicated for doing a quick pilot.

I documented the requirements I gathered from both the projects and started to travel back home on Saturday night.  The city’s Domestic airport was so great that it made me wonder about the International one.  It was midnight by the time I reached here and I thought, ‘Hopefully, I will do more trips’.

Contact

Skype: sheriffhm
US Number: +1-703-650-0373
India Number: +91-996-220-0567
Email: sheriff*at*netrcs

Google took over the INTRANET world too?

As I was working on one of the local copies of my client’s site, suddenly all of the links start to respond very slowly.  Well, for a microsecond, I thought there was some problem with my Apache server, but apparently Google servers have been so busy to respond (at least, the server mirrors in India) that I couldn’t test even my local site.  Since my local site has a tweeny little code to contact google-analytics (which, of course, is being used by almost all public websites), my page waits, waits and waits so long, until finally when there’s no response from google it continues to load the rest of my content.  At this rate, I will have to wait 12-25 seconds just for a small spacing adjustment or a color change to a text in my site.

Like somone might comment: Google has taken over the INTRANET world too? What an Irony!  As I’m writing, Google hasn’t recovered still yet (from the past 40 minutes) and the only option I’m now left with is to pull off my LAN cable and work on completely isolated local site (so it no longer waits on google-analytics.com), until Google God is done with HIS nap!

Ruby, Rails, Cygwin, MySQL

There are many teams and individuals that run Ruby on Rails under Cygwin although it is a little slower than the native Windows or the much faster Linux installations.  One of the problems those folks come across is with talking to mysql.  After starting ./script/server and trying to connect, Rails throws out an error looking for a unix socket:  Can’t connect to local MySQL server through socket ‘/tmp/mysql.sock’ ‘/tmp/mysql.sock’.  But as most guess, mysql would have been already been running as a Windows Service.

The solution is to simply replace all ‘localhost’ occurences to ‘127.0.0.1’ because then, Rails will be forced to use Windows TCP/IP sockets instead of a unix socket.  And remember to restart your Rails server (WEBRick/Apache/Lighttp).

The simplest order of installing Rails under Cygwin on an all new Windows box would be:

- Make sure you have uninstalled all copies of RubyOneClick Installer.
- Install Cygwin and a shell such as bash (or xterm if you like Cygwin-X)
- Install Ruby from the cygwin setup under ‘Devel’ Category.
- Have MySQL installed as a Windows Service (or make one from mysql source packages)
- Download RubyGems, extract it to a temporary directory (c:/cygwin/tmp/ or c:/temp/ if you like)
- Open bash and navigate to that directory using “cd” commands, and type: ruby setup.rb
- When done, type: gem install rails --include-dependencies
- Then, type: gem install mysql and in the prompt, pick latest mswin32 if you installed mysql as a service or latest ruby version if you built it from the source.
- Create a sample rails application at /tmp/railstest/ by typing: rails /tmp/railstest

- and finally edit ./config/database.yml file to use 127.0.0.1 rather than localhost

The entire process along with the time taken to gather necessary knowledge etc (if you wish to) would take 2 hours but if you follow these instructions blindly it shouldn’t take more than 30-45 minutes on a quite fast machine.

As for an editor, download PSPad and turn on Ruby On Rails highlighter under Settings-->Highlighters Settings and pick “Ruby on Rails” and “Ruby” for any two unassigned slots.

Multiple Project URLs in Windows/Apache

Ever wanted to have your dev WAMP / XAMPP server to run multiple web projects on its own dummy hostnames?  Want your http://localhost/ point to the same document root but still need multiple dummy hostnames such as http://www.project1.local/ or http://www.project1.com.dev/ pointing to different project folders?

Well, the answer is to take advantage of Apache’s VirtualHosts feature and place dummy URLs in your hosts file.  In WinXP, your hosts file is located at the directory path: C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\

Note that the ‘hosts’ file has not extension so if you get a Open with dialog choose an appropriate text editor or simply notepad.

Once you have the file opened add a new line in the end like as show below:

        127.0.0.1      http://www.project1.local
        127.0.0.1      project1.local

So, now the first half of it is over.  To check the progress, open a cmd prompt and type “ping project1.local” you should see the ping going to 127.0.0.1.  Also, if you open your browser and point to where apache is running (http://localhost/ or http://localhost:81/ depending upon your setup) you would see the original document root files as expected and as it was working—you could also do: http://www.project1.local or http://project1.local

At this point, both http://localhost/ and http://www.project1.local/ point to the same directory location.  Now, here comes the VirtualHosts trick:

Open your httpd.conf file (C:\wamp\Apache2\conf\httpd.conf on a default WAMP installation) and append the following lines near the end

NameVirtualHost *

<VirtualHost *>
  ServerName localhost
  DocumentRoot "C:/Wamp/www"
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *>
  ServerName project1.local
  DocumentRoot "C:/Wamp/project1"  # Change here
</VirtualHost>

Restart your apache server and thats it.. http://localhost/ will point to your default C:/wamp/www directory files and http://project1.local/ will point to the other different set of project files!

Target Audience: Beginner Apache Administrators, Beginner to Intermediate PHP Developers.
Difficulty level: Easy
Time: 10-15 minutes

Expression Engine Password Lockout

If you ever get your passwords locked out or wanted to reset your password, being the domain/db owner yourself, then there is a way to solve this.  Connect to your ExpressionEngine database and browse to the table exp_members.  This will list rows corresponding to the the number of members registered in the system.  Now edit the corresponding row that has your username.  You will note that the password is encrypted and is 40 characters long.  ExpressionEngine uses SHA1 encryption, so you will need a tool to generate SHA1 hash.  If you don’t know (or don’t want to know) what those are, use this 40 character value:

8b60e9d739b5a5bfd87cbfe67501ab4fa6e41504

The above is the SHA1 hash for the word “recovery”.  Replace this in the password field in your database row (pay attention to the field name, there is a similar field named unique_id just next to it) and Save your row (hit Go in phpMyAdmin).  You have now successfully reset your password to “recovery”.  Now, go quickly login to your system and change your password the normal way.

Questions?

Do this only when you have no other choice of recovering your password.  If you have doubts that someone else reading this post, might try the same out to hack into your own system, then actually they can’t.  Well, they can’t as long as they don’t have access to your database This tells you two lessons:  Number 1) Always keep very secured passwords to your hosting and database accounts and Number 2) Do not forget any of your passwords

By and large, ExpressionEngine is more secured enforcing password lockouts and the folks have done necessary precautions to prevent hacker attacks—Kudos to them.  Honestly speaking, I haven’t seen a little security hole in EE myself as far.

Cheers and Happy ethical Hacking!

About

I am an innovator with a 6+ year track record of advanced enterprise-level applications. I enjoy a good challenge, and can think outside the box to reach workable solutions that others might not see. My experience in the I.T. industry, knowledge, high quality output, and ability to meet deadlines enable me to deliver an excellent service. My broad cross-platform expert knowledge has been beneficial to many companies and organizations.

TECHNICAL SKILLS SUMMARY
Program Languages, APIs, and Doc Formats:
Python, GAE, C, C++, PureBasic, Java, C#, VB.NET 2.0/3.0/3.5, PHP4/5, JavaScript, SOAP, AJAX, Hand-coded HTML, Assorted template formats, XML, JSON, DHTML, XHTML, CSS, PDF, Sockets/Networking Web 2.0/3.0, W3C AAA and Section 508 Compliance

Databases:
Data integration/ migration, SqlLite3, PostgreSQL, MySQL, InnoDB, MS-SQL, Access, Excel, DBase, FileMaker Pro, Oracle 8 SQL, flat-file

OS Installed and Used:
Linux, Fedora/RedHat/CentOS, Mac-OSX, Suse/Novell, Debian/Ubuntu, Mandriva, FreeBSD, Windows and many others.

Web Software Solutions:
Created many custom web softwares.
Custom enhanced/ compiled/ configured/ optimized software source code.
Customized/ installed many web and Intranet software, including:
Servlets, JSP, Tomcat, Apache OFBiz, Zend Framework, CodeIgniter, Symphony, Prototype, jQuery, ExtJS, Joomla, Mambo, phpBB, Drupal, Typo3, vBulletin, Wordpress, phpMyAdmin, SquirrelMail, OSCommerce, ZenCart, Interchange, X-Cart, phpCart, Apache, Lighttpd, Sendmail, Subversion, Git, etc...

Assorted Other Experience:
OOP/ OOD, Internationalization, Custom e-commerce solutions, Payment gateways, Currency conversion, Social networking/Facebook Login,Twitter API, Online memberships, Database Abstraction Layer, Database speed optimization, Web interfaces, GUI, Web graphics, SVN, Server maintenance, Network maintenance, Shell scripting, Open SSL, Data mining, Website administration, Technical support, Crontab, Batch files, SSH, SCP, SSH-tunnels, Log file analysis, Email, SMTP, TCP-IP, Application security, Firewall, FTP, Encryption, Unit Testing, TDD.

This is my Personal weblog. I started this blog site in order to share my knowledge, thoughts, and other experiences in the Real world and the IT world. You may find some of my deep thoughts, advices and rants that are expressions of purely my own.

As of 2009, I own a startup: TakeMyScreen.Com, a remote desktop sharing product that uses cutting-edge technologies (including Facebook Login/Connect) - still under development. If you are interested in knowing more details on this project, like to fund, or join in the development, feel free to contact me at: sheriff -a,t- netrcs (d.o.t) com

Personal History

I started off with Basic and VB6 as a hobby, moved onto the VC++ platform and COM/ActiveX staying there for a while and actually got into the IT field by freelancing to clients abroad using ASP. In the due course, I started learning many different platforms and languages and by a year and a half after that moved completely to Web technologies such as PHP and JavaScript.

As a Solutions Delivery Associate, I talked to clients understanding their web-based business needs and suggesting them with paths to solutions that improves their business, productivity, technology and technical dependence, and other strategies to satisfy their requirements on technology and IT support. As a Technical lead, I did framework/codebase level programming in C#, Webforms/MonoRail, JavaScript/JQuery/ActiveWidgets, and use Wordpress, ExpressiongEngine, Typolight for CMS. I delivered a Web2.0 based Java/J2EE project that uses GWT/Hibernate. I've also delivered projects using jQuery/.NET. Currently I am interested in working on: Google App Engine/Python, MonoRail/NHibernate, JQuery. For Development, I use Windows, Visual Studio Express/PSPad and Mercurial/Git.