KSpace

According to RBI guidelines, it is mandatory to have additional level of security for all online transaction using credit cards which is “Verified by Visa”. Credit card holder is suppose to verify each and all online transaction using a personal password. If the password does not match, transaction does not gets approved. Simple!

Today while I was making an online transaction and provided my password to complete the transaction, card provider site lead me to the following page

Err!! What’s that? Did you notice the error message? It does not say anything about the browser which I should be using for this card provider. A plain error message like this is ridiculous! What information does it give actually? Why there is no recovery steps? Why can’t the message include the supported browser list?

BTW, I did notice a link for “Terms and condition for verified by visa program” for this card provider and yes, the terms and condition also does not say anything about the browser/system requirement!

Searching the website of the card provider, I found FAQ for verified by visa program which mentions the browser requirement as “Microsoft Internet Explorer version 5.5 or above, or Netscape Navigator 4.7x.”. Awesome! Is netscape exists anymore? who is using it ?
( must be the developer who wrote the program )

No prize for guessing that I was using Firefox and I had to launch Internet explorer to complete my transaction.

Debugging shell script is a bit difficult. You will always find yourself putting lots of “echo” or “print” statement throughout the script to find where it is going wrong. The drawback of such effort are

1) Spending lots of time in finding issue in those echo output.
2) If you miss printing values for certain variable, you will need to write echo statement which will print the values and re-execute the program.
3) Tapping conditional statement would be difficult to trace with print statement alone.

One way of debugging shell script to enable options while executing script and tracing down the output statement for errors. For example, consider the following script ( lets call this script as test.ksh )

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#!/bin/ksh
x="testValue";
while [[ "$x" != "" ]]; do
   echo "X is : $x ";
   x="";
done

Executing the following script would give you the result

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X is : testValue

However if you execute the script with -x option as follows, you will notice every line from script getting printed on standard output which will have variable replaced with the values.

ksh -x test.ksh
2 x=testValue
3 [[ testValue !=  ]]
4 echo X is : testValue
X is : testValue
5 x=
5 [[  !=  ]]

You would easily know by looking into such output how the variable x in script is changing the values and if there is any issue in script, you can track it down. This shell feature definitely helps in finding issue faster ( atleast as compared to putting lots of “echo” statement ).

The other option which can help in shell script debugging would be “-n”. From kornshell doc,

“You should always run ksh -n on each script you write.  The -n option will check for syntax errors on paths that might not even be checked when you run the script.  It also produces a number of warning messages.”

Other way of debugging korn shell script is to use kshdb ( korn shell debugger ). I have not used it enough till date. See kshdb manual for more information on how to enable and debug script.

I was trying to reorganize my unix environment for different work. For example, I do not need oracle environment configuration in a machine where I’ll be using informix database and hence I would need informix related configuration only.  For that purpose, I was modifying script to prompt a menu whenever I login with available configuration. I could input my choice as a character and corresponding environment will be loaded.

For example, If my input is “1″,  config variables in file 1 will be loaded in shell.

While doing so, I realized, I  may need related multiple environment configuration in one shell and hence I should be able to input multiple characters as string and corresponding environment variables will be loaded.  My assumption was to read all characters in string and split them in array.  Finally loop through the array and load all required variable in shell.

For example, the following shell script splits the string variable strValue using whitespace as delimiter and store them into charArray.

$ export IFS=" ";
$ strValue="1 2 3 4 5";
$ set -A charArray $strValue
$ echo "First Element: ${charArray[0]}"
First Element: 1

My idea was to make IFS make empty string and perform the same thing to split string into character array and hence the code for the same would be

$ export IFS="";
$ strValue="12345";
$ set -A charArray $strValue

But when I tried to iterate through the array as

$ echo "First Element: ${charArray[0]}"
First Element: 12345

I was so wrong! Making IFS empty string does not split the string as character wise into array. But why ? I tried to find an answer but !

I hope you are not using IE6 anymore and hence you do not have to read on. Skip this post please!

Oh! You are still reading. Well for my work, I had to test our webapp in IE6 as well. While doing so, I noticed that IE6 was extremely slow ( Okay! I am not comparing with firefox/safari. only with IE7 ). I started to wonder about it until I came across MS hotfix for IE6 ( http://support.microsoft.com/kb/942840 ). After updating IE6 with this hotfix, IE6 was comparable to IE7 ( and infact I found it faster. Again, not comparing with firefox ).

So if you still using IE6, you may consider this hotfix for faster IE6!

Infact why are using IE6? Go on, upgrade! get IE8 or firefox…

Yesterday when I tried to run Apache web server in my system, it failed to stop. All I could get was an alert message from Apache Monitor was “Requested operation has failed”. No description, No error code, absolutely vague error message.

I tried running apache directly from the installation location and it threw quite descriptive error.

Duh! Looks like apache server failed to get ownership for port 80.  But I had not installed any other web server, so which application is using port 80 ? Here is what I did to find out

1) Execute netstat -na -o command ( netstat  guide )and search for port 80.  The last column in result would indicate the process id for the application which is blocking the port

2) Execute tasklist with find command and see which application is that

Oh! As you can figure out from screenshots, skype was using port 80. So if you are facing similar kind of problem, you need to configure skype first .

Launch Skype. Click on Tools -> Options -> Advanced -> Connection. You would notice a checkbox for using port 80 and 443 as alternatives for incoming connections. Uncheck it, save and restart skype.

Apache did start after configuring skype for me. This is just one of the case why apache throws up such error which I faced.

There could be scenario where your firewall configuration is blocking apache or you configuration file is corrupted.

Alternatively, you could configure apache to listen to other port instead of port80. Search for Listen in httpd.conf and replace port ( do not use standard ports though! ).

Now that’s something sensible. Everyone knows that turnouts in election is really poor and what we get later, no secret either. Hope this ad will have some effect. Jaago re!

Jaago Re

Recently I stumbled at my own profile at mybloglog and noticed something weird. The public profile has option for vCard/hCard  which was added recently in mybloglog. Going good so far until I noticed my email id in vCard.

I realized that I hadn’t logged in to Yahoo! account and viewing my own public profile as other user would. I wondered why it is showing my email id to everyone? Normally I never set my email id to be visible by other users apart from my contacts.

I did a quick check ( login to mybloglog -> My Accounts -> Email ) and yeah, it was set to be visible only for my contacts. Still, It was appearing in public profile. Looks like welcoming the spammers

I decided to contact support team ( well, I had no other options! ). Submitted my concern on 6th July at 11.18 EST and waited for the support team to contact back.
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Update ( 8th July, 9.15 PM IST) : IT Dept. Website is no longer marked with warning in google results.  Things looks good now!

Today I googled for I.T Dept URL ( Well, It’s july and almost every one is rushing to submit final tax assessment to Income Tax Department. So, am I ) and my search query gave me the result I wanted. But to my horror, with warning from Google.

“This site may harm your computer”.

If you don’t trust me, Here’s the screenshot,

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I just downloaded firefox 3 ( If you have not downloaded it yet, go, download it first ) and installed it. The upgradation task from firefox 2 to firefox 3 went smoothly.  However, the installer did disabled all my extensions for not being compatible with Firefox 3 release and firebug 1.5 is one among them.  Well, some of the nice feature you can find are as,

1) Smart Address locater:

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