This is the book that I finished reading this week. It was a cute little book on inspiring kids and adults to do gardening. I love gardens and my idea of a house was not complete without a garden. I always dreamt of this little cottage with a big garden as my ideal home. And my husband always dreamt of a big house I suppose. So we ended up buying a big house with a bit lot with nicely landscaped yard.
And when I bought my house I assumed that I would fill my garden with all the things that a garden can and should have. But I have to admit that I failed miserably at that. I didn’t know where to start in my huge lot. I planted some tomatoes and egg plants last spring but before I got the harvest it became too cold and all I got was a huge numbers of small green tomatoes. I enjoyed what ever little I got but I think that was shame for the mere size of my garden(say lot). So this year I plan to make a better effort and in those I efforts came across this beautiful book “Roots, Shoots, Buckets and Boots”. It has beautiful ideas on how to plant with little kids and explore the nature with your little ones. I am sure I am going to refer to this book in the future as I am really a kid starting on my gardening journey.
It has nice pictures of the ideas of pizza patches and moon light blooms and little mazes. I never new we could do so much in our gardens. It has a few instructions on how to have a compost bin and prepare the soil before panting. It has nice detailed instructions on how to plant the various plants without sounding too boring or rigorous. The list of the 20 plants to have in a garden is a must in every Californian garden I suppose. What I like more about this book is that the author is from California and so the plants she mentioned in her book are mostly suitable for our weather. I am glad I stumbled on this book and I hope I implement at least one tenth of what I read.
My first to do after reading this is to get a compost bin and list of all the 20 must have plants in my garden. Its February now and I am sure I am going to have more fun in my garden. This books did inspire me.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Songs of Blood and Sword -- A Review
It was on twitter that I got to know first about this person called Fatima Butto. The late Benazir’s daughter, Bhaktawar described her as the best fiction writer in Pakistan in one of her tweets. That was not meant to be praise for sure. Over one of my week end youtube video browsing sessions I stumbled on an interview of Fatima. It was given to one of the Indian news channels while promoting her book. She was a beauty with brains and I was hooked. I think that night I saw almost all the videos of her on youtube. My husband was visibly annoyed with me.
A few days later I searched on my local library’s site if the book “The songs of blood and sword” was available. Bingo it was! It was one of the times when I really have no regrets about immigrating to the US. The libraries here just justify it. I got the almost new looking book from the library. It was big book for a novel with four hundred odd pages. I started reading it and I could not stop. The story was such a one.
Until I read her book I never really knew much about Pakistani politics. All I knew was that one of their prime ministers was hanged and his daughter became the prime minister later. This book gave me a good incite into Pakistani politics. It starts off with the history of Bhuttos. Supposedly they were Rajput warriors who amassed large amounts of lands in the Sindh region and during the British Raj they were helping out the Brits in administration of the region. I was nearly stumped to know that Pakistan has 27 rich(or say feudal) families even to this day and the remaining country dwells in poverty.
The book tells the story of Fathima’s Dad Mir Murtaza Bhutto from the time he was born till he was murdered brutally by the Pakistani police during his sister Benazi’s regimen. It talks about his girl friends and the relationships he had in the past. It has many pages dedicated to the first love of Murtaza, Della a Greek lady whose husband was jailed by the Greek government, but Fathima has very little to say of her own mother Fawzia and the relationship her dad had with her before they were married or for that matter after marriage. May be she felt too uncomfortable to get her biological mom’s side of the story on print. Her love for her mother, Ginwa who raised her was very evident and I somehow got some new reverence for this lady who had to go through so many odds.
As much as I hate Indian politicians, after reading this book I feel that they haven’t screwed up our nation as much as our neighbors have done. She is clearly very critical about US involvement in Pakistani politics. In fact she considers Chinese better friends to Pakistan than the US. From her opinion it is the Pakistani elite or the so called feudal lords in the Pakistani government say PPP (Pakistani People’s Party) that wants to be friends with the US and it is in not helping the general public of Pakistan. In her opinion Pakistan’s very low standing in the Arab world was because of its ties with the US.
Her descriptions of all the events that follow her dad’s death are very gruesome and anyone with a heart tends to feel sympathetic towards her family. I really feel for her and hope that there won’t be anymore Bhutto deaths in the future. This is my first book on Pakistan and I am longing to learn more about this neighbor of my land which has for many centuries been our land. Even now except for the political differences people are almost the same.
A few days later I searched on my local library’s site if the book “The songs of blood and sword” was available. Bingo it was! It was one of the times when I really have no regrets about immigrating to the US. The libraries here just justify it. I got the almost new looking book from the library. It was big book for a novel with four hundred odd pages. I started reading it and I could not stop. The story was such a one.
Until I read her book I never really knew much about Pakistani politics. All I knew was that one of their prime ministers was hanged and his daughter became the prime minister later. This book gave me a good incite into Pakistani politics. It starts off with the history of Bhuttos. Supposedly they were Rajput warriors who amassed large amounts of lands in the Sindh region and during the British Raj they were helping out the Brits in administration of the region. I was nearly stumped to know that Pakistan has 27 rich(or say feudal) families even to this day and the remaining country dwells in poverty.
The book tells the story of Fathima’s Dad Mir Murtaza Bhutto from the time he was born till he was murdered brutally by the Pakistani police during his sister Benazi’s regimen. It talks about his girl friends and the relationships he had in the past. It has many pages dedicated to the first love of Murtaza, Della a Greek lady whose husband was jailed by the Greek government, but Fathima has very little to say of her own mother Fawzia and the relationship her dad had with her before they were married or for that matter after marriage. May be she felt too uncomfortable to get her biological mom’s side of the story on print. Her love for her mother, Ginwa who raised her was very evident and I somehow got some new reverence for this lady who had to go through so many odds.
As much as I hate Indian politicians, after reading this book I feel that they haven’t screwed up our nation as much as our neighbors have done. She is clearly very critical about US involvement in Pakistani politics. In fact she considers Chinese better friends to Pakistan than the US. From her opinion it is the Pakistani elite or the so called feudal lords in the Pakistani government say PPP (Pakistani People’s Party) that wants to be friends with the US and it is in not helping the general public of Pakistan. In her opinion Pakistan’s very low standing in the Arab world was because of its ties with the US.
Her descriptions of all the events that follow her dad’s death are very gruesome and anyone with a heart tends to feel sympathetic towards her family. I really feel for her and hope that there won’t be anymore Bhutto deaths in the future. This is my first book on Pakistan and I am longing to learn more about this neighbor of my land which has for many centuries been our land. Even now except for the political differences people are almost the same.
Database Startup Problem
Last week the database on my local machine went down. I don’t use it much apart from trying out my pl\sql challenge questions. So I didn’t bother about looking into the problem later until today. So today I set out to see what the problem could be. I restarted the oracle service from services. I connected using the sys to the idle instance and tried to open the database. The database seems to have been mounted. But when I ran the below command I got the below error.
Alter database open;
ORA-38760: This database instance failed to turn on flashback database
This is clearly because the flashback log has been filled up. In the init.ora file the parameter db_recovery_file_dest_size was set to a value of 2147483648. When I checked the location of the db_recovery_file_dest the size was about 2GB. So I guess since the memory exceeded the value in the init.ora file the database could no longer write flashback data into the destination location. I tried to delete the files from the flashback destination directory but things did not work out. I shut the database down. Mounted the database, turned off flashback and restarted my database without any issues.
> Shutdown
> Startup no mount
> Alter database mount;
> Alter database flashback off;
> Alter database open;
With the above commands executed successfully, database seems to working like a jiffy.
Alter database open;
ORA-38760: This database instance failed to turn on flashback database
This is clearly because the flashback log has been filled up. In the init.ora file the parameter db_recovery_file_dest_size was set to a value of 2147483648. When I checked the location of the db_recovery_file_dest the size was about 2GB. So I guess since the memory exceeded the value in the init.ora file the database could no longer write flashback data into the destination location. I tried to delete the files from the flashback destination directory but things did not work out. I shut the database down. Mounted the database, turned off flashback and restarted my database without any issues.
> Shutdown
> Startup no mount
> Alter database mount;
> Alter database flashback off;
> Alter database open;
With the above commands executed successfully, database seems to working like a jiffy.
Friday, February 18, 2011
HTML, XHTML, and CSS: Your Visual Blueprint for Designing Effective Web Pages - Book Review
I picked up this book as it was available in my library and I wanted to brush up my html/css skills because the last time I read about html was way back in 2000 when I first created a web site for a college competition. My professional life so far has been mostly involved in databases so I never really got to do much on web applications. But now I work on a web app which uses html/css and Javascript extensively. This book was perfect for me since it was very easy to follow and each page has an exercise which really helps in better understanding the concepts. And for the kind of learner that I am that was perfect.
It gives a good description of html and css and ways to make your site usable for disabled users as well. It also explains the best practices, standards of XHTML and workarounds for cross browser compatibilities. A brief introduction to Javascript is also given at the end of the book which is pretty good for a learner. It also gave some explanation on how to use google maps etc. On the whole this was a really good book to brush up on html/css and written in such a way that you can finish this book in less than a week.
It gives a good description of html and css and ways to make your site usable for disabled users as well. It also explains the best practices, standards of XHTML and workarounds for cross browser compatibilities. A brief introduction to Javascript is also given at the end of the book which is pretty good for a learner. It also gave some explanation on how to use google maps etc. On the whole this was a really good book to brush up on html/css and written in such a way that you can finish this book in less than a week.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)