new year, top 10

My Top 10 things of 2008

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Today I got stuck in a barber shop for more than an hour – the last hair cut of 2008 eh – and ended up reading India Today’s top 10 things of 2008. I got this brain wave for a list of my own top 10 events of 2008. 

10. Stealing my nephew (Achu’s) cycle. I turned green this year ( partly inspired by my wife, partly by oil prices ) and thought now I will cycle my way around AECS Layout. Well cycle is here but the back wheel does not hold air. Have to fix it first thing in 2009 so we can use it.
9. Learnt how to change nappies, sterilize bottles, hold a baby, put him to sleep, feed him, entertain him – I can write a book !!
8. Worked on my first .NET project on Vista. No comments.
7. Got the shock of my life on the new modified 81 seaters in Sleeper class and a never ending journey from Bangalore to Calcutta and back with a demanding never-tiring-keep-entertaining-me 10 month old.
6. Watched Obama create history.
5. and my heart brimmed with pride seeing Chandrayaan take India to new levels.
4. Discovering 335E – the red volvo  bus for my daily commute and which in turn led me to Ulysses, War and peace, Anna Karenina, Big Bang, FountainHead, Atlas Shrugged, Alchemist, Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, Kaffka on the shore…
3. The horror of bomb blasts, terror attacks culminating in Mumbai attack. I am getting my voter Id registered. I feel I should do more. 
2. Launching our start up – Apartment Adda, the first few nights when I could not sleep, the adrenaline rush when Apartment Adda went live, seeing unknown ip addresses on apache’s logs – the last 3 months have been long tiring and worth every minute of it in richness of experience. 
1. The privilege to witness and hear my son’s first cry and the wide open eyes looking into me. An unforgettable day when  we were bonded like never before by this little bundle of joy.
What an year it has been for me.
IE

IE gotcha – does not render row colors

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My dynamic table rendered by an AJAX call had alternating row colors – which as expected rendered beautifully in all the major browsers ( except IE of course ). 

The row looked like this tr bgcolor=”#EFEFEF”

I had to push the bgcolor into an inline style and then IE started showing the row color.
tr style=”background-color:#EFEFEF”
Hope my IE posts get over, because to find every IE gotcha I spend quite a fair amount of my time. 
cricket

Should I eat my humble pie now?

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Ahem..Dravid has now scored a century. Perhaps he read my blog and got angry and wanted to prove a point. Anyway hats off to you Mr.Dravid. May India win.

But here is some statistics I painstakingly gathered  – The total runs scored by Dravid in the last 10 matches – in both the innings.
47 – V South Africa
24 – V Sri LAnka
46 – V Sri Lanka
78 – V Sri Lanka
56 – V Australia
39 – V Australia ( he did not bat the second innings though)
22 – V Australia
03 – V Australia
07 – V England
136 – V England ( only the 1st innings score )
I rest my case. 
It is time to retire – when you have scored a century. You have contributed immensely to Indian cricket. Scoring 10,000 runs is a major feat. You have delighted the world and us with your stroke play. But the time has come – let us see more Dravids emerging out – give them a chance.
IE

IE will not render my dynamic table

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And today I wasted an entire afternoon trying to figure out why IE will not render my dynamic table got from an AJAX call. And as usual all the other browsers were rendering the table without skipping a beat.

I stripped out everything till nothing was remaining in the table and still IE will not render the table. 

Finally I found out the culprit. I did not have a tbody tag. UGhhhh. 
Should I send a bill to Bill for all the wasted hours because of this inconsistent browser?
IE

IE 7 does not show the table header – THEAD on AJAX call

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I would have spent more than an hour breaking my head with IE. 

Problem : I have a table which is fetched using AJAX. Now this table has a thead with header contents and rendered fine in all the browsers except IE. 
My code looked something like this 
<table>
<thead>
<th>Name</th>
<th>Age</th>
</thead>
<tbody>
Solution :  There should be a TR within the THEAD. Now the header started showing fine after the ajax call. The funny thing is – IE rendered it fine when this table was part of the page. When I moved it to be rendered from an AJAXy call this problem surfaced. 
Now the code looks like this.
<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Name</th>
<th>Age</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>

eapps, hosting

Server issues but I am sticking with my hosting provider.

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It was a harrowing time yesterday. My virtual hosting provider had network issues and so ApartmentAdda was down for 1 hour 44 minutes. First time in it’s short history that it has been unreachable. I discovered it after an hour and quickly changed the dns settings to point to a page that had please be patient – we are facing network issues message.

It seems they had a hardware fault in one of their main switches and the  hazaar virtual hosts became unaccessible. Wondering who the service provider is – it is eapps.com.
I always wanted to write about them – but let me do it now. Perhaps they are getting a bad rap everywhere because of the downtime they had and their 9999 something went for a toss because of yesterday’s down time. But I will stick to them. They are good. 
Here is why : They are prompt and whoever I talked to is knowledgeable. Either they can call you ( yes I am in India and they use skype or something ), or you can chat with them – and they answer  you any time of the day. Also the eapps support forum is pretty exhaustive and well written. Most of the set up issues can be resolved by going through their forums. 
So if you are wondering whether to go with eapps – do try them out. They have not paid me anything for this post btw 🙂

cricket

and I give Dravid Man of the Match award

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The man-of-the-match award committee did not give Dravid the man of the match award – they are a bunch of fools anyway. But I confer the man of the match award to Rahul Dravid. 

Why?
No one deserves the award better than Dravid. He faced 19 balls and scored 4 runs ( see my earlier post about 5 opt repeated cliches – point no. 5 – I still have some cricket left ). After 19 balls he sacrificed his wicket so India can go and win the match.  He could have easily wasted 113 balls to score 5 runs – and then get out – so that the asking rate is impossible to achieve, and also the other batsman would have lost all interest in playing cricket. But he did not do such a thing. The noble soul sacrificed his wicket for a just cause. He deserves to be honoured.
Also he pleasantly surprised the poor crowd who had come to see a defeat or a draw. Man of the match always should be given to the ad model who is instrumental in shaping the victory – who else is responsible for paving the way for an India win other than Dravid. 
You think I should be voted the man-of-the-match award committee chairman? Thanks. I am flattered !!

Here is the life story of a speck

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