Kempfort Shiva Temple – May’16

On my visit to Bangalore, have visited Kempfort Shiva temple be it was an unpleasant experience. 

As soon we reached temple parking, they have directed us to go to special entry (not darshan). I think it was 120/- per person but there was no free darshan as per them.

Once we entered inside, there was a line towards Lord Ganapathi. Just after that, we walked towards the next step. They have asked to pay 30/- per each person to go in to the cave and there is NO option to avoid the same. We have paid the same and after that we got to go in to the open area. 

After this, we walked over to Lord Shiva statue to get blessings and take photos.

There is one more to go in to another line of Shiva lingas, which we didn’t go in, however there is a separate fee for the same.
OVERALL, it has become a complete commercial temple and you need minimum 200/- per person to visit the temple.

Devotee must need a peaceful time while visiting any temples but not just the money. In this scenario, devotee must be thinking of money rather peacefulness.

Hope the commercial process will change to attract devotees towards God.

ISKON temple Bangalore – May ’16

On 28th, I have visited the great ISKON temple in   Bangalore. Understood that there is general queue and paid queues to have Lord Sri Krishna darshan.
I made to a 300/- ticket  for darshan and it was a happy path to see Lord Krishna and after Darshan, learnt that we can only get 70/- discount on the books purchased with this ticket. With this ticket 6 people can visit Lord Krishna.

Interestingly, there are no books with the less price. So, devotees have to either loose the opportunity of using 70/- or buy if any books with lesser price.

Bust I missed performing a 108 hare Krishna chanting due to the special ticket.

After Darshan, every devotee will be connected to the same exit line.

As usual, the Prasadam is so nice and any shopping inside is expensive.

Put a period to 16 hours work days AND spend more personal time ..!!

Finally, there is some role (not expected definitely) given/assigned in an account. This role is definitely needed by the account (client) management team.

However, with the recent incidents happened in the organization, decided to put a period to the below, which would save the personal time as there is no point in performing the below in the organization where there is no value/recognition to the work you are performing.

1. Spend NO additional time beyond 8 hours work a day UNLESS being paid for that (in other words given due recognition).
2. No off-shore calls beyond the work hours (neither in the early not late hours on a business or non-business day).

Restrict yourself to 8 work hours a day would give you a much relief on your personal end. Do not concern about what happens to the project/work if you are not working more than 8 hours, think what is BEING PAID to you as (Business) Organizations will ONLY need money but NOT wellness of an employee.

This is being told by MANY leaders in the world but we give them a chance as need basis which is making them as the habit to ask again and again.

Personal time is quite equivalent and important with Work/Business time. Lead the personal life with no absolute degrades..!!

Happy realization by changing the work culture ..!!

Management Behavior – Threatening to Lay off

I’m a Development Manager, working in US for a big MNC (core management is from Japan) for more than a ‘decade‘ with an experience of executing close to million dollar projects (all together) and was coming out of a Project due to billing concerns from the Delivery team and informed my manager (Indian) about the same.

Couple days later, my manager approached me mentioning that ‘you need to take up a developer role’. My question to him was ‘Why developer role ?’, he mentioned me that it is better instead ‘laying you off‘. I told him to proceed if he is wishing to do like that so I can take it to next level management about the threatening behavior from middle level management.

He also mentioned that he will put ‘Under performer‘ tagged while laying me off so he (organization) doesn’t need to pay off the severance package, simply escaping the benefits.

I responded him to proceed in whatever he wishes to do, I know I can put a fix to all if that becomes a reality.

Think of the cruel behavior/mentality of management in an Organization.

If the above becomes a reality, will definitely reach the senior leadership team out to detail the situation and doesn’t need to worry about the result but have them understand what kind of things happening in the Organization. This would definitely expose the similarities happened to others.

All this happened around two weeks ago and over a telephonic conversation.

After the incident, I’m in no mood to perform as expected by the management as the whole of my department management knows how was my work over the decade. Let’s see how it will turn to be in the coming days.

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Here’s an excerpt:

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How to add .snk file to Project from Common folder

In the current application, I have nearly 200 projects and needs to be strong named all of them to ensure the best to the project.

I have used the below steps to ensure that the team needs to use only one .snk file across the application projects. In general, if you strong name the appliation in a single project, the copy of the .snk file will be created in each project.

With the below, you don’t need to have multiple copies and multiple public key tokens for the same version of the project.

Assumption: You already have the .snk file created

1. Create a project in Visual Studio.
2. Right click on the project name and select existing item.
3. 
4. Add an existing .snk file to the project as a link.
5. 
6. Refer the added .snk file from the signing tab.
7. 
8. Build the project.
9. You need to repeat the same steps for all the projects in your application.

You are good to go..!!

Hope this helps. Happy coding.. 🙂

~ Gangadhar Kotu

How to clear Page file in Windows Server

I was running a dev server which has got 60 GB HDD and couple months later observed that there is no free space. I was looking at the space why it has occupied fully and after sometime understood that the PageFile.sys is having 6.5 GB and wondered how to clear this with simple steps as pagefile.sys is managed by Windows.

 

Finally found the way.

 

1. Start Registry Editor (Regedt32.exe).
2. Change the data value of the ClearPageFileAtShutdown value in the following registry key to a value of 1:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management

   If the value does not exist, add the following value:

   Value Name: ClearPageFileAtShutdown
   Value Type: REG_DWORD
   Value: 1

Note: This change does not take effect until you restart the computer. 

This has given me more space and had cleared other unwanted files to ensure the server runs without space issues.

~ Gangadhar Kotu

How to make the web pages load faster in IE8

Do you experience poor response/load time of your web pages in IE8. Here is what you can do to make your web page load faster in Internet Explorer 8.

This post suggest you to make the changes to the registry. Hence cautions in making the changes to registry. Before making changes to the registry, you should back up any valued data on the computer.

1. Open Registry Editor by typing REGEDIT into the Run dialog in the start menu
2. Browse to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings.
3. Right click and create a new DWORD key and name it “MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server”
4. Double click the key to set a value. The number 12 should be good.
5. Right click and create a another new DWORD key and name it “MaxConnectionsPerServer”
6. Double click on the key and set the value. The number 12 should be good.
7. Close the Registry Editor
8. Restart your your Internet Browser.

Hope you will see difference while browsing majority of sites on internet.

– Gangadhar Kotu

Arithmetic Operation Resulted In An Overflow

When I was executing the Stored Procs in Oracle from C# (using Oracle.DataAccess.dll – v 10.2.0.100 or 11gR2 client as well), I’m receiving the below error.

“Arithmetic Operation Resulted In An Overflow.”

Couldn’t figure it out why it is happening all of sudden.Verified all the code and nothing has been changed but observed that the data in the Database has got updated.

Tried to figure it out why the data is introducing new errors and understood that the OracleClient is using Int32 as it’s parameter to convert the data from Cursor to DataTable.

Possible Solutions:

1. Data in the column coming more than Int32 value.
2. Length of the number Data in the column is more than 28 digits (excluding the decimal point), means 99999.999 is 8 digits.
3. Length of the decimal values are more than 16 digits. (eg., 123.12345678901234567)

FYI, stack trace:

at Oracle.DataAccess.Types.DecimalConv.GetDecimal(IntPtr numCtx)
at Oracle.DataAccess.Client.OracleDataReader.GetDecimal(Int32 i)
at Oracle.DataAccess.Client.OracleDataReader.GetValue(Int32 i)
at Oracle.DataAccess.Client.OracleDataReader.GetValues(Object[] values)
at System.Data.ProviderBase.DataReaderContainer.CommonLanguageSubsetDataReader.GetValues(Object[] values)
at System.Data.ProviderBase.SchemaMapping.LoadDataRow()
at System.Data.Common.DataAdapter.FillLoadDataRow(SchemaMapping mapping)
at System.Data.Common.DataAdapter.FillFromReader(DataSet dataset, DataTable datatable, String srcTable, DataReaderContainer dataReader, Int32 startRecord, Int32 maxRecords, DataColumn parentChapterColumn, Object parentChapterValue)
at System.Data.Common.DataAdapter.Fill(DataTable[] dataTables, IDataReader dataReader, Int32 startRecord, Int32 maxRecords)
at System.Data.Common.LoadAdapter.FillFromReader(DataTable[] dataTables, IDataReader dataReader, Int32 startRecord, Int32 maxRecords)
at System.Data.DataTable.Load(IDataReader reader, LoadOption loadOption, FillErrorEventHandler errorHandler)
at System.Data.DataTable.Load(IDataReader reader)
at DataHelper.RetrieveOutputCursor(OracleCommand cmd, Hashtable htResults) in C:\DataHelper.cs:line 294
at DataHelper.ExecuteProcedureReturnDataSet(String procName, Hashtable spParams) in C:\DataHelper.cs:line 208


Check it out for this possibility as well. 🙂

– Gangadhar Kotu

Unable to query host name with ipconfig and no internet

I was browsing multiple sites over Internet and clicked on miserably known links. I would have clicked on some unknown links in between. After a while, the browser got closed automatically. It had given me some message clearly. But thinking of nothing happened.

Next day morning, I had opened the system but it is running pretty slowly and could scan my system using McAfee. This had thrown a bigger message to me that your system is infected by Virus.

You could guess what would have happened and how much bigger damage would it be. 😦  VIRUS, VIRUS and the Dangerous…. http://www.microsoft.com/security/portal/Threat/Encyclopedia/Entry.aspx?name=Backdoor%3aWin32%2fSmadow.gen!B&threatid=2147646431

The result is my system (Windows XP) got infected with virus (Backdoor:Win32/Smadow.gen!B, Trojan:Win32/FakeSysdef) and the damage is huge. Also Microsoft had stopped support on Windows XP couple of months ago.

Tension, tension, tension as this system has got lots of data and applications.

The damage is summarized below:

1. Removed McAfee specific dll (OC****.dll), hence can’t scan my system.
2. System is pretty slow.
3. Am sure it would have impacted some system dlls but not sure what are they?
4. Don’t even know what other damage it had done.

What did I do to recover the damage?

1. Uninstalled McAfee Enterprise (all features) but McAfee Agent. It is not uninstalling with an error message that there are applications running by using Agent. This doesn’t impact anything to move forward to install another Anti-Virus Software.
2.  Installed McAfee again to see whether it can proceed anyways. I’m failed get McAfee working on my machine with multiple tries. – Spent 5-6 hours on this to understand why it is not installing again.
3. Lost hopes on McAfee and started thinking of get another anti-virus software.
4. After an hour or two, I remembered the suggestion from my office TSS guy. The suggestion is ‘Install Microsoft Security Essentials’ and that too it is free for use by Microsoft.
5. I have downloaded Security Essentials from Microsoft site from another laptop. Once it is installed and ran that for FULL scan, it took around 4-5 hours.
6. There were couple of Blackdoors/trojans on the system and the recommendation is to remove those files as they are badly impact the system.
7. Backdoor:Win32/Smadow.gen!B – This has infected to Windows\System32\drivers\ipsec.dll (would have impacted to tcpip.sys also) and couple of .sys files from System Volume Information folder. With this, network connectivity would never happen. But no way to avoid that as it is infected file.
8. The entries (ipsec and tcpip) would have been deleted from the registry HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\.
9. When you do ‘ipconfig’ from command prompt.
   An Internal error occurred:The request is not supported.
   Please contact Microsoft Product Support Services
   Additional Information: Unable to query host name
10. Trojan:Win32/FakeSysdef – It has deleted couple of files from Application data folder.
11. I need to reinstall Windows XP SP3 as well once again.

After this, lots of trails to get the system up but not happened. I did lot many workarounds suggested by lot many folks over Internet.

1. Uninstalled Ethernet drivers. Restarted the machine, no luck.
2. Reinstalled Windows XP SP3. Restarted the machine, no luck.
3. Compared with other XP laptop and understood that it has also removed tcpip.sys from Windows\System32\drivers folder. tcpip.sys is very important protocol and impacts the network in the system.
   To Correct this:-
   1. Option1 – Tried installing Microsoft Fixit from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/299357. This didn’t help. Then went to the below steps.
   2. Go to Control Panel
   3. Open Network connections
   4. Select ‘Internet protocol (TCP/IP)’ and uninstall. By the way, you cannot unstall as the uninstall button would be disabled here. Use the Windows Enabler tool (either from http://windows-enabler.softpedia.com/ or http://www.freewarefiles.com/Windows-Enabler_program_980.html). Usage document would be available along with the tool.
   5. Quick brief on that, you just need to run Windows Enabler.exe, the icon sits in the System tray.
   6. After opening the network properties dialog and select the ‘Internet protocol (TCP/IP).
   7. Click on the icon from system tray and then click on ‘Uninstall’ disabled button, the tool enables button.
   8. Clik on Uninstall button. This would ask for restart of the system. After restart, it had brought back all the keys in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\tcpip\
   9. Now, you are good that the network connectivity happens.
   10. Connect your ethernet cable to the system and could observe that the lights were blinking.
4. To get the ipsec.sys file..
   To Correct this:-
   1. Copy ipsec.sys file from a virus-free windows XP machine. The file would be available in Windows\System32\drivers\ folder.
   2. Restart the machine.
   3. After restart, it had brought back all the keys in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\IPSec.
   4. Now, run ipconfig and HURRAY, the IP details has come back.

Huh, tried to connect to the internet, yes, the system is getting the IP address and also connecting to Internet.

I re-ran the Anti-virus and the system is cleaned up as per the Security Essentials anti-virus. The whole process took me 3 days to get my system back to previous known status and immediately posting this for the persons like you if have an issue like this.

Now, I can happily have a nice nap. Have a good time.

~ Gangadhar Kotu