Live to drive !

Work away from work

Did not want the accumulated leaves to lapse at the year end. Hence took few days off from work. Staying at home whole day on a week day means- I will have to spend time in the garage :). Just finished servicing the bike today. Overhauled the gear box and primary drive and also the front forks. It rides like new now. Pleased with the effort and saved about 600/- rupees that is about 12 beers :P

Back to cricket ground

Played a cricket match after three years today. We defeated Hitachi by six wickets in a local IT cup played at Khadki Cantt ground. I took to the ground like duck takes to water :D and affected one run-out, one caught behind and quite a few close stumping calls. The affect of keeping behind the stumps for 25 overs will be known only by night... need to stock ample Paracetamol at home .

Eclipse, Ant and java.lang.OutOfMemoryError

Launching Ant builds from Eclipse sometimes gives following error

[javac] Compiling 941 source files to C:\xxx
[javac] The system is out of resources.
[javac] Consult the following stack trace for details.
[javac] java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space
...

After a bit of Google and experimentation, this is what works for me. Basically changed the JRE settings to use a bigger chunk of memory (Go to Window ->Preferences ->Installed JREs -> Default JRE -> Edit) for heap and stack like

-Xms256m -Xmx512m -Xss1m -XX:MaxPermSize=128m

Happy Diwali

 

I have voted

Maharashtra Assembly Election 2009

Bullet-eering

Fitted a retro style glass bowl fuel filter.


My mechanic inspecting the tappets.

ICICI Net Banking Error

Tried to log in to my bank account and this is what I got !

How to clean the car's roof

Airtel prepaid mobile service fraud

This one is a rant about pathetic service that I am getting from my mobile service provider.

For last several months, i.e. June to be precise, Airtel is sending unsolicited SMS disguised as a VAS (value added service) to my mobile and debiting my account Rs 3/- for each such SMS. The SMS comes from 290603 with such enchanting subjects like Tip Of the Day and Love Tip of The Day.

By now they have emptied all my prepaid balance and it has turned negative Rs (-) 30/- . I am denied to make any outside call or send sms due to this!! As per the law of the land no service provider can charge for VAS unless customer has explicitly subscribed it.

Apparently, I am not the first or last victim. There are many like me here, here and here. Just google airtel 290603 sms, there are hundreds of other hapless customers getting robbed like this. This is clearly helping them to swell the revenue at the cost of customers' hard earned money.

Their customer service helpline (121) is always busy. If you are fortunate enough to go beyond the call queue, you will find no menu to reach their phone officers to complain about this while countless emails to 121@airtel are auto acknowledged back with a standard reply- we are looking into this.

While I am taking this matter to the appropriate authorities, wanted this post to alert the users (and prospective customers) of Airtel's service about their fraudulent ways of fleecing money.
Check your (dwindling) prepaid balance- is it vanishing mysteriously?

Weekend at Golden Swan Resort - Murud

From GoldenSwan-Aug2009

Just signed up on twitter.

http://twitter.com/bimaleshjha.

Getting to know how it works.

How to compute MD-5 and SHA-1 hash of files from Eclipse

Often I need to calculate MD-5 and/or SHA-1 hash of files in my workspace. I find it annoying to leave Eclipse and run command line tool every time I have to know these hashes.

Here is a trick I devised to get this done quickly without leaving the IDE. This is for Eclipse running on Windows XP but, can be applied for other operating systems too.

1. Download any free command line tool (or roll your own) to compute hashes. I chose Microsoft's free utility called FCIV (File Checksum Integrity Verifier).

2. Extract FCIV tool at a convenient location e.g. c:\fciv\fciv.exe

3. Configure "External Tools" in Eclipse (go to Menu -> Run ->External tools -> Open External tools Dialogue) for FCIV as shown in the diagram below. You can organize the tool in your "favorites" for easy access.




4. Configure a shortcut key to launch FCIV tool.
Go to Menu -> Window -> Prefrences -> General -> Keys and filter for "external". Create a shortcut key combination (e.g. Alt+L) for "Run Last Launched External Tool". Use this dialogue to configure a shortcut for "External tool..." too, e.g. Alt+R.



This is all that is needed to configure the FCIV tool.

5. Now, select a resource in your workspace and press "Alt+R". This will bring up the "External Tools" dialogue.

6. Select the FCIV tool from the dialogue.

7. This will print both MD5 and SHA-1 of the selected file in the console window at the bottom of Eclipse IDE.

8. For computing hashes of next file, just press shortcut "Alt+L".

Tip:
To compute hashes of all the files in a directory, select at directory and use the shortcut "Alt+L".

Hope it helps.

Layover at Hong Kong

More pictures.

Reclaiming at Bhandardara

Maiden drive in the Safari to the countryside surrounded by hills and a huge lake formed by a dam built about a century ago.



Pictures here: ReclaimingAtBhandardara

Door rattle fixed

The rear left door on my seven year old Wagon-R had been rattling for a very long time now. Had reported this to the mechanics at every service ever since it surfaced, but, somehow they never got it right. Probably their ears are not as sensitive as mine or they just don't care.

Even during last servicing which was done in early December I had reported this- but it was not fixed. Hence, I had planned a DIY session for this. However, never got enough idle hours to execute it. Finally the long weekend due to republic day on Monday presented a good opportunity on last Sunday. I did not have any important domestic commitments hence, decided to do this DIY project.

Removed door handle, circlip and window knob and opened up the door panel. Issue was simple. The sponge cushion around the lock release wire had eroded. This allowed the wire to hit the tin when door was slammed back. A bandage made out of soft tissue paper glued to the door with a dab of "Fevikwik" seemed to do the trick. It has muted the rattle. Good enough for the time being, however, will probably need to source the original sponge or something more durable as tissue paper will melt away in rains,if water seeps in.

Buffalo 320GB MiniStation

Got this portable disk yesterday. As expected, it worked fine straight out of the box, on my IBM T42 running WinXP sp3. However, it did not "plug-n-play" when hooked into the USB port on my home PC . The PC is pretty old (circa 2002) and has a Intel 865GBF board. It is running windows 2000 sp4 and RedHat Linux 9 in dual boot mode.

LED was blinking, but, the disk did not seem to spin. Googling around did not help much. Connected the extra USB power supply cable too and lo, it started working!

What is the issue? My old PC can not power a 5v USB device?

Anyways, all seems to be fine now (yet to test on Linux though). I am enjoying this new toy and using it to carry stuffs around.