mihirg

[mihirg]

KTM 2014...

[mihirg]

Ubuntu update cheat sheet

Ubuntu forces you to update almost every 1 year. In the process of doing these updates, I have finally hit upon doing the updates with good success... here is my cheat's guide

At the login screen press Alt+F2. This will take you to console login

Login at the console and then type do-release-upgrade

This will start the release upgrade script. Just follow the script and the update is seamless.

Ubuntu does tend to change things in the UI every release which will annoy you. But this process ensures the update goes thru every time with no hassles.

Previously, I used to try and run the update from my KDE or GNOME shell and that upgrade would invariably go wrong. 

[mihirg]

View from Sinhagad Fort

View from the top of Sinhagad (सिंहगड) Fort near Pune.

[mihirg]

Leopard @ Bandipur

We followed this this Leopard for almost 45 mins. It was more than happy to keep us company!

[mihirg]

Attention to detail

I recently bought a Samsung Galaxy Grand Duos. I inserted the headphones to listen to some music. After listening, when I removed the headphones, the icon in the status bar at the top would not go away!

I had to restart the phone for that icon to vanish! See screen shot below!

I am quite sure these kind of thing do not happen on the iPhone.

Attention to detail, that's where Apple scores over most of its competitors.

[mihirg]

Temple carvings at Belur-Halebeedu

Man embracing a lady with the face of a donkey. As explained by our guide, Mr. Nagraj,

"When seen through the eyes of love, even the ugly becomes beautiful,"

[mihirg]

At the finishing line at KTM 2013 (Half Marathon)

[mihirg]

Tyranny of bad error messages

My Nokia phone (C7) comes pre-installed a software called JoikuSpot. This converts the phone into a wifi hotspot. I have the phone with me for a few years now, I had never used this functionality.

The other day I enabled a temporary data plan on my phone. I decided to give the software  a try. After multiple attempts, I kept getting the error:

Unable to start JoikuSpot

I tried different settings, when to the FAQ page on JoikuSpot's website. It had a list of applications on the phone which interfere with JoikuSpot. I uninstalled all of them, but the error remained.

After spending almost an hour on this, I realized, the wifi on my phone was turned off! Could this be the reason? I enabled it and started JoikuSpot .... and it worked!!

This made me wonder, I am sure there is an API on the Nokia Symbian S60 platform which lets you check if wifi is enabled or not. If only the error message had indciated that! 

[mihirg]

Reliance World SIM - Avoid

I have been a customer of Reliance World SIM for little over one year. The initial experience was good. They provided a single sim, pre-paid and active for life. All I had to start the phone and enter the pin. It worked. In US you got a local number.

As I said, it worked till recently. I land in US and turn on the SIM and the SIM  registers but I am not able to make calls. Generally I get a US number, but this time nothing happened. The service center call did not go thru. 

I had to ask my friend in US to ask my sales rep for what went wrong!!  The reply came, the policy has changed, I was never notified. I was asked to request US number via customer support. Still waiting.

When you land in a foreign country you want the phone to work. I have seen Matrix have better customer support.

[mihirg]

RPC vs Document Literal Style

Recently I have been reading Martin Kalin's Java Web Services Up and Running. The book does an excellent job explaining how to use Jax-WS/Metro to create web services clients and/or servers. 

However the book does end up to be a bit confusing when explaining the difference between Document/Literal Wrapped vs Document Literal Unwrapped style. Initially I thought it was a problem with my understanding, but it turn's out I am not the only one, see the conversation here.

Page 44, gives examples of requests that are generated for unwrapped and wrapped styles. However on page 54 when taking about wrapped vs unwrapped styles, it says, 

What may be surprising is that the structure of the underlying SOAP messages, both the request and response remains unchanged.

So why does page 44 conflict with page 55?

I believe the confusion is arising because the book is talking about two different concepts,

WSDL Bindings

Jax-WS  Client Code Generation 

WSDL Bindings

From pages 38-46, the discussion is on WSDL bindings. This is a generic discussions on different types of bindings possible. IBM developerWorks  also has an excellent article on this here.

Basically there are 4 different combinations of style and use possible

document/literal

rpc/literal

document/encoded

rpc/encoded

All are valid styles for a WSDL. We now need to bring in a specification referred to as WS-I. This specification

attempts to define a standard that allows web services to be interoperable and is supported by Jax-WS, .Net and axis frameworks.

allows for only document/literal and rpc/literal based services.

enforces that the <soap:body> element can have only one child. This restriction creates problems for document/literal based services.

This means that the unwrapped soap request like the one on page 44 is not WS-I standard compliant. The parameters have to be wrapped.

Jax-WS Client Code Generation

Starting page 54, the book explains client code generation. The point here is that the wrapped/unwrapped in this section refers to the code generated. It should not be confused with style/use of WSDL bindings.

If you see the WSDL, you will find that the the WSDL follows document/literal wrapped style/use. So irrespective of how the code generated (wrapped or unwrapped) it should generate the same soap request.