Date: 06/01/07     Keywords: no keywords

I am unable to login to PayPal this morning (evening my time). On proper login it gives the message: We are unable to complete your request at this time. Please click Retry or try again later. We apologize for the inconvenience. Message 3004 Have you seen this? Any idea what can cause this?

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/paypal-site-down/

Date: 05/31/07     Keywords: spam

Doug Karr, product manager for a “permission-based email service provider” (permission spam?) lays down three interesting rules for understanding differences of race, religion, politics, sex and bigotry: 1. He will never understand others; so he tries to respect things that he doesn’t understand. 2. Everyone is different and unique. and 3. Double standards are part [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/understanding-race-religion-politics-sex-bigotry/

Date: 05/30/07     Keywords: programming

We are currently processing huge amount of sensitive corporate data for a Fortune 500 company as the first phase of a project. You have to be very careful in data processing, much more than any standard programming effort. Here are few tips you may find useful when programming to process sensitive data in bulk. Get [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/5-tips-for-bulk-data-processing-programming/

Date: 05/28/07     Keywords: no keywords

BCCI (Board of Chaos for Cricket in India) cricket team lead by an w%$^ (only words I can think of are non-parliamentary) won over cricket minions Bangladesh and are back to thumping their pathetic little chests. What is interesting is that these ant-killers wimped out when playing a man’s game in West Indies. Will someone [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/skeptically-yoursindia-2007/

Date: 05/27/07     Keywords: browser

WordPress has the nasty habit, thanks to numerous filters, of converting two consecutive - to different ascii characters. This causes big problem for code fragments where people often tend to cut and paste the displayed code from browsers. Here is how you can display two consecutive dash (minus sign) in WordPress posts and pages, like --, [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/how-to-add-double-dash-to-wordpress-posts/

Date: 05/27/07     Keywords: google

Google GMail increased the attachment limit of individual emails to 20MB. On the other hand the total space inches closer to 3 GB; it is currently at 2857 MB of which I am using only 3%. I had other bloggers waxing eloquent about the convenience of GMail. While I occassionally use GMail, I cannot ever imagine [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/gmail-increases-attachment-limit/

Date: 05/27/07     Keywords: no keywords

Cartoon Network, stupidly as before, plans to stop DragonBall Z before Goku goes Super-Saiyan! As a commenter on my blog pointed out DragonBall Z isn’t on display on June 30th (Saturday). In short this is plain stupid and ridiculous. There goes my hope of viewing DragonBall GT, in a wisp of smoke (or is that [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/dragonball-z-stops-on-29th-june-2007-in-cartoon-network-india/

Date: 05/27/07     Keywords: no keywords

Most of us know that exercise is good for us. It boosts circulation and tones the cardiovascular system. It builds strength, burns calories and reduces depression. It improves insulin sensitivity in people with diabetes. It may even help delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. But can you even imagine that it can partially reverse aging [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/study-exercise-reduces-age-at-cellular-level-in-seniors/

Date: 05/27/07     Keywords: rss, software

RPM based systems like RedHat, Fedora or CentOS often have the system configured for automatic updates. This ensures that your software is always upto date. However sometimes there are software you don’t want to update via yum update like for example RSSOwl. RSSOwl, for example, currently has a broken rpm distribution in extras repository. Standard [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/linux-fedora-how-to-freeze-packages-from-yum-update-in-3-steps/

Date: 05/27/07     Keywords: no keywords

One of the main challenges with Translator plugin is not related to the plugin itself but with the delivery mechanism. We rely on email to deliver the plugin to our customers. Unfortunately sometimes the plugin fails to reach or gets delayed because of emails filters or some routing issues. These are beyond our control and [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/translator-plugin-web-download-capability/

Date: 05/27/07     Keywords: linux

rdiff-backup is a popular, free, open source mirroring and incremental backup system for posix based operating systems like linux & Mac OS X. It uses rysnc algorithm through librsync but it doesn’t use rsync. The documentation of rdiff-backup focuses on push model for backup where client machines pushes their backup data to backup server. This [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/linux-fedora-core-how-to-use-rdiff-backup-to-pull-backups/

Date: 05/27/07     Keywords: google

After the recent yum update, named failed to load. I tried searching Google without much help. The permissions were all correct and yet named failed to load. And then I found the simple solution. I manually modified /etc/init.d/named script. I changed the line daemon /usr/sbin/$named; to daemon /usr/sbin/$named -u named;. This ensured that the nameserver was actually [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/solving-namedconf-error-change-directory-to-varnamedchrootvarnamed-failed-file-not-found/

Date: 05/26/07     Keywords: database, sql

Sometimes you need to have database column names with space or other non-standard characters. The standard procedure is to escape them with backtick (`) character. HSQLDB doesn’t accept either backtick or single quote as escape character. Instead you have to use escaped double quotes as shown in the example below: st.execute("CREATE TABLE sheet (tg_meta_id int identity [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/how-to-escape-column-names-in-hsqldb-rdbms/

Date: 05/24/07     Keywords: java, microsoft

Overview There are two good choices for reading & writing Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet files from Java, in a platform independent way, - jexcelapi and Jakarta POI (HSSF). Both of them provide nice interface to access Excel data structure and even generate new spreadsheet. I have done extensive tests with both of them for a high-profile project [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/how-to-read-write-excel-spreadsheet-from-java/

Date: 05/24/07     Keywords: html, google

Machine translation is widely used to provide translation of any text / html content to another language. Wide ranging techniques starting from dictionary translation to artificial intelligence and statistical analysis is used for translating. Companies like Google and Altavista provide machine translation services on [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/understanding-automatic-machine-translation/

Date: 05/23/07     Keywords: no keywords

US is standing on the cusp of the single most important event since the abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage. In the coming Presidential election democrats are generally being considered as having a greater chance to win. Two of the prominent democrat candidates are Senator Mrs. Hillary Rodham Clinton, wife of ex-President Bill Clinton, and [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/thoughts-on-us-presidential-election-candidates/

Date: 05/22/07     Keywords: spam

In very rare cases I have had complaints when our clients haven’t received their plugin within one business day. In all of them the problem was because my email containing the plugin was being flagged as spam by their email filters. So if you haven’t received your plugin in time please take the following steps: 1. [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/when-you-dont-receive-your-translator-plugin-in-time/

Date: 05/21/07     Keywords: linux, microsoft

Microsoft’s True Type fonts can also be used on Linux. Not only can they improve visibility, they are essential for proper look and layout if you are using Internet Explorer on Linux for testing etc. The installation is very simple… well almost: wget http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/msttcorefonts-2.0-1.spec rpmbuild -bb msttcorefonts-2.0-1.spec Note the path where the rpm is written and use it [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/how-to-install-ms-true-type-fonts-in-linux-fedora-core/

Date: 05/20/07     Keywords: no keywords

Often you need to remotely run utilities on other machines through unattended batch process or cron job. ssh allows you to execute code on remote machine. However in normal usage it prompts you for password which makes it hard to use in unattended processes. Here is a simple way to eliminate the need for specifying [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/linux-how-to-how-to-ssh-without-password-authentication/

Date: 05/19/07     Keywords: google

The latest Google search Trends (picture below) shows WordPress ahead of Blogger. Typepad and Movable Type are far behind and in decline. Sometime around mid-February WordPress has beaten blogger in terms of search volume in Google. The rapidly rising graph of WordPress is in sharp contrast with nearly flat graph of Blogger since 2005. WordPress [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/wordpress-beats-blogger-in-google-search-news/