lepidopterists

lepidopterology : the branch of zoology dealing with butterflies and moths.

sentients : having the power of perception by the senses; conscious.

Wiccan

wiccan: One who practices witch craft.

I came across this word in the euology written by Mona Simpson at her brother Steve Jobs funeral.

Wiccan

wiccan: One who practices witch craft.

I came across this word in the article written by Mona Simpson on her brother Steve Jobs.

metonymy

metonymy : change of name

Farce

farce
: a light, humorous play in which the plot depends upon a skillfully exploited situation rather than upon the development of character.
: humor of the type displayed in such works.
: foolish show; mockery; a ridiculous sham.

Tim uses this word while talking about Steve Jobs death here.

A Promise for Steve

Steve Jobs passed away yesterday! That was the first thing my husband told me when he came home. I was surprised I was unaware of it till then(it was almost 5 hrs by then). I don't know why but it felt like I lost a loved one. Like someone in the family has passed away. I have'nt known much about him and still dont know much about him. But the kind of products he made had a lot of impact on me.

I read this post from Seth Godin to pay an Euology of action to Steve. I would like to make this as my Euology to Steve. By the end of this year I would like to publish one app on iTunes and would like to become a life long iOS user, learner and developer.

Rest in Peace Steve. You are an inspiration to so many people and your legacy lives on forever.

dogfooding :

When a developer uses their own code for their own daily needs. Being a user as well as a developer creates the user empathy that is the hallmark of good software.
The term seems to have originated at Microsoft. (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2004/04/16.html)

I came across this word while reading Joel's blog on their new product Trello.

Pride and Prejudice

Finally I finished my first novel on Kindle. Yes its Pride and Prejudice, one of the preloaded books that come with the Kindle. My husband says that I was reading high school books. I never got to read it fully in my high school so I very much enjoyed reading it.
I guess the story is no different from any romantic novel but the way Jane Austin fill the pages with her artistic style of language and the ways she attracts her readers is amazing. I could not put down the book once I started reading it. It took me a full week to complete it though. I think this is one book every person should read it before they finish their high school. I feel too good reading this one even if it’s a decade or two later. With this I can check one book down in my list of books to read before I die.

Books to read before I die

War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy -- Reading

The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

Complete Works of Shakespeare

Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

Middlemarch - George Eliot

Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

Emma -Jane Austen

Persuasion - Jane Austen

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne

Animal Farm - George Orwell

The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

Lord of the Flies - William Golding

Atonement - Ian McEwan

Life of Pi - Yann Martel

Dune - Frank Herbert

Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

The Secret History - Donna Tartt

The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

On The Road - Jack Kerouac

Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

Moby Dick - Herman Melville

Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

Dracula - Bram Stoker

The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

Ulysses - James Joyce

The Inferno - Dante

Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

Germinal - Emile Zola

Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

Possession - AS Byatt

A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

The Color Purple - Alice Walker

The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White

The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

Watership Down - Richard Adams

A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

Hamlet - William Shakespeare

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl


On being Certain.
http://www.rburton.com/_i_on_being_certain_i___believing_you_are_right_even_when_you_re_not_63166.htm

Command to delete files from a UNIX box.

find . -mtime +7 -exec rm{} ';'

The above command deletes files created before a week from the present day from the current directory.
I can put this command in a shell script and run it in chrontab to remove the log files on a daily basis.

Is Corruption India's biggest problem?

This was a question in one of the NDTV's forums and I typed in my view on it. Somehow the did not accept my post. So I am posting it here.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

No I don't think corruption is the No1 problem for India. It is just a way to blame someone else for our bad state. If we want to talk about real problems we need to address issues like
1) Primary Education
2) Drinking Water
3) Sanitation
4) Nutrition.....
I can go on. These are the real problems of India. If you really think of it how many times did you bribe a person in your life to get something done? Of my 23 years in India the only time that I had bribed a person was to a ticket collector in trains to get a berth. I don’t know if that were earth shattering. I know it would have reduced a miniscule amount for the Railways but I don’t think it is a bigger problem than any one of the ones that I stated above. Corruption is more of a intangible problem and it is going to exist in one form or the other. I think we should focus more on tangible problems than say that "India is not developing fast because of our corrupt politicians". Even the politician is one amongst us.

ORA-00214: Control file Version Inconsistent on Startup or Shutdown

Early in the morning to do my daily plsqlchallenge question I tried logging into my local database and bam I hit the ORA-00214 error. Well actually I hit this error when I try to start up my database. I guess the error was because I shut my machine down forcefully by plugging off my machine. I guess this was what caused the inconsistencies in the control files. The possible causes for this issue in the documentation were the following:
1) You have restored the control file from backup, but forgot to copy it onto all of the mirrored copies of the control file as listed in the "CONTROL_FILES" parameter in the initialization parameter
2) You have moved one or more copies of the control file to a different location while the database was up and running.
3) You accidentally overwrote one of the copies of the control file with an old copy.
4) The database or the system crashed while the mirrored copies of the control file were being updated, causing them to be out of sync.
5) You are restoring a database backup that was improperly taken with the database up and running ("fuzzy" backup).

In my case it was the error 4 which caused the error.


The solution was easy compared to what it could be. Below are the steps that I took to start up the database.
1) Shutdown the database
a. Shutdown immediate
2) Start up the database with nomount
a. startup nomount
3) Alter the control files to one of the control fiels.
a. ALTER SYSTEM SET CONTROL_FILES=file_name
4) Open the database.
a. Alter database open

With these commands my database was up and running and I am done for the day’s learning. I should definitely link this site for helping me out in fixing my issue.

Roots Shoots Buckets and Boots

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.

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.

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.

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.

Query to find the program which does sequential log file read

select
ses.program
from
v$session_event sev,
V$session ses
where
sev.event = 'log file sequential read'
and ses.sid = sev.sid
;

Go here for more detail.

Recovering a dropped User.

Jonathan Lewis provided a link on how to recover a dropped user and I went to that link to find out how that was done. This is the link to that site.

I tried it out on the database on my laptop and it works like jiffy. Below is what I did.



create user flashtest identified by flashtest ;

grant connect,resource,dba to flashtest;

conn flashtest/flashtest;

create table emp(ename varchar2(20),city varchar2(20));

insert into emp values('azar','riyadh');

insert into emp values('kareem','dubai');

insert into emp values('azmi','chennai');

insert into emp values('idress','riyadh');

insert into emp values('ajmal','chennai');

commit;

select current_timestamp from dual;

conn / as sysdba

drop user flashtest cascade;

shutdown immediate

startup mount

flashback database to timestamp to_date('22-DEC-10 09.25.30','DD-MM-YY HH24:MI:SS');

alter database open read only;

conn flashtest/flashtest;

select * from emp;

host exp flashtest/flashtest file=emp.dmp log=emp.log direct=y consistent=y statistics='none';

conn / as sysdba

shutdown immediate

startup mount

recover database;

alter database open;

conn sys as sysdba

create user flashtest identified by flashtest;

grant connect,resource,dba to flashtest;

host imp flashtest/flashtest file=emp.dmp log=emp.log full=y



This seem to be perfect if we can shutdown and startup the data base so easily. How do we recover if the database can not be shutdown and still the user need to be recovered. I know if it is asking for too much. But since I am a developer and not a DBA down time is still a taboo for me. I am eager to know how this is done traditionally.

Alert Log

We can obtain the location of the alert log using the below query.

select VALUE from v$parameter where upper(name) ='BACKGROUND_DUMP_DEST';

Nocopy

In today's plsqlchallenge I learned another new thing. It is the NOCOPY option for the parameters in a procedure or a function. I was under the impression that when we pass a variable with the nocopy option the variables changes in the procedures will not be passed over. But that doesn't seem to be correct. When we pass a parameter with the NOCOPY option, no seperate copy of the variable is made in the memory and the passed variable is used to modify. This makes more sense while using collection variables. If for example we pass a VARRAY as in out parameter without the NOCOPY option then the variable is copied to a temporary variable and then the changes are made. In the case of NOCOPY the changes are made to the original variable itself. In case an exception occurs then in the case of NOCOPY the original variable would have changed but in the case where NOCOPY is not specified the orginal value remains intact. Below is the sample code from todays sample quiz.



create or replace package plch_pkg
is
type number_nt is table of number;

procedure pass_nums1 (nums in out number_nt);

procedure pass_nums2 (nums in out nocopy number_nt);

procedure show_nums (nums in number_nt);

end;
/

create or replace package body plch_pkg
is
procedure pass_nums1(nums in out number_nt) is
begin
for indx in nums.first..nums.last
loop
nums(indx):=nums(indx)*2;
raise value_error;
end loop;
end pass_nums1;

procedure pass_nums2(nums in out nocopy number_nt) is
begin
for indx in nums.first..nums.last
loop
nums(indx):=nums(indx)*2;
raise value_error;
end loop;
end pass_nums2;

procedure show_nums(nums in number_nt) is
l_return pls_integer :=0;
begin
for indx in nums.first..nums.last
loop
l_return := l_return+nums(indx);
end loop;
dbms_output.put_line(l_return);
end show_nums;
end plch_pkg;
/

show err


declare
nums1 plch_pkg.number_nt :=plch_pkg.number_nt(1,2,3);
nums2 plch_pkg.number_nt :=plch_pkg.number_nt(1,2,3);
begin
begin
plch_pkg.pass_nums1(nums1);
exception when others then
plch_pkg.show_nums(nums1);
end;
begin
plch_pkg.pass_nums2(nums2);
exception when others then
plch_pkg.show_nums(nums2);
end;
end;
/