- Posted by karthik on November 13, 2009
What a journey, for arguably the best in the game, over a span of 2 decades! 20 years and counting......
Today, I was reading through Sachin Tendulkar's thoughts on the last 20 years of his life that he has devoted to cricket. It's not surprising that he says cricket is his life! But there was a picture that captured my imagination (This one pictures Sachin on his debut) The very first thing that came to my mind was the fact that his posture has not changed at all from his first day on the job till today; the same follow-through, the same backlift posture, the same footwork, and the same hand-eye coordination! This piece from Harsha Bhogle speaks volumes of where Sachin came from and how he got to where he is today; A truly classical piece of story-writing.
To be that consistent, time and again without a loss in focus, a snap in concentration and without a shred of self-indulgence is truly a hallmark of greatness, even surpassing genius. The only other person I would like to emulate apart from Federer, Sachin is what every child aspires to be, every cricketer dreams of being, every fan loves to watch and everybody loves to love! (kinda corny I know, but its Sachin!)
- Posted by karthik on October 9, 2009
It has been a while since I had a chance to post about anything at all and even though I'd love to say that it was due to a sabbatical or something relaxing, the truth is, I have been busy!
And I mean, BUSY! I started on a new project late July with WCM and some fancy Design/Architecture stuff for a regular client that has kept my grey cells humming. To top it off, on the home front, the wife and I are expecting a new arrival soon here! It's our first and it has been an INTERESTING experience so far. More on that later, though...
Right now, I am getting ready to set up a list of things to do, people to meet and questions to ask for SPC 2009. I am very excited to be going to one of the biggest MS events of the year and certainly THE BIGGEST SharePoint Conference ever!
Here are some of the things running through my mind as I write this:
I am sure there will be additions as the week goes by.
In the meantime, I am also looking forward to SharePoint Saturday KC in December. The event is gathering a life of its own and I hope it is as fun (if not more) as last year. I am volunteering for the event in any capacity as needed and want to see more folks there this year.
On a sidenote, I have been gathering tips and tricks on all the interesting and wierd things that SharePoint WCM has thrown at me the past two months. A blog post series will shortly follow detailing some of my adventures on that...!
Till then, stay tuned............!
- Posted by karthik on June 7, 2009
I have to admit that I was wrong. Like many of the doubters, I was led to think that maybe it was the beginning of the end for Roger Federer, the greatest tennis player in the modern open era.
However, this is one time I am GLAD I was wrong. It cannot get any better than this for Roger! Until, of course, he wins the next Wimbledon, the next U.S open and goes on to surpass Pete's record! What a record that would be. I cannot wait to watch those finals.
In the meantime, here are some of the first, live-breaking pictures of the star in (e)motion!
{Picture Credits - NBC}
- Posted by karthik on April 14, 2009
Why is it that service pack installs for Visual Studio 200X are ALMOST never, ever pain-free?
It's tempting to say it is a Microsoft Trademark that they make you go through a process that 15 minutes into an install, prompts you to CONFIRM that you REALLY, REALLY want to do this... As if you did not know what you were doing while going through the 15 steps on the install wizard before that prompt came up.
And when you say YES dammit, it then runs for another 20 minutes only to find out:
- that the space on the hard drive it needs to install is not enough OR..
- that there is a dependency check on an unrelated set of dll's, service packs or whatever that stops the installation and prompts you to go get that OR...
- that the current windows installer does not like the setup files that came from the media OR....
- anything else that drives you nuts waiting in front of the screen...
Sounds familiar? Well thats how my SQL Server 2008 install went last weekend...
For those who are trying to do this, a word of advice: make sure you have VS 2008 SP1 installed FIRST, then make sure you have ALL the right framework patches installed BEFORE you get to SQL!
- Posted by karthik on March 27, 2009
Last night, I had an interesting problem tossed my way. 
Background: For some reason, an application built in ASP with FCKEditor instances running on some pages was mangling special characters on display and update. The ASP page that was causing this issue had an include of the FCKEditor.asp on it. Removal of that include file from the ASP page did not cause the mangling. However, just including the file (even if the FCKEditor instance itself was not created) seemed to mangle any special characters put on the page.
For e.g: special characters like (Alt-0233 etc) "é" was getting converted into é as shown in the picture to your left.
This was peculiar because of data that was stored in the database for working conditions did not seem to be mangled. For some reason, the request and the response data seemed to be mangling it. (That should have tipped me off right then and there ;)
Anyways, I started looking into FCKEditor.asp to see if there was any rewrites going on and sure enough, there was this function call that seemed to be iterating through the DOM elements in the response and rewrite portions of it. At first glance, it seemed as though that was it. However, the FCKEditor instance was NOT getting created on that page! Only the include was a part of the page structure. So, what gives?
After spending a couple hours trying to further troubleshoot it, I called it a day and went home. It was still bugging me in the back of my mind that I had come across something similar before, but just could not remember what the fix was. Came back in the morning, fired up the app and started testing it from scratch and then it struck me. Maybe it was not FCK. Maybe there was some encoding issues with either the files themselves or the server looking at character encoding sets and making some adjustments.
I ruled the server out (as in most cases) it only does what it is told. If it was mangling the response then something was telling it. (BTW, I used Charles Debugging Proxy last night to determine if the request headers and response headers were doing anything. A neat and handy tool except for the annoying shareware feature that turns the tool off every 30 minutes)
Armed with that information, I looked at the files themselves and bingo! The application ASP files were encoded in ANSI format while the FCKEditor.asp was encoded in UTF-8.
Changed the type on the FCKEditor file to match the encoding for the rest of the app files and it started working! So, moral of the story, LOOK before you LEAP!
Cheers!