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It's been a really long time since I've been receiving spam from African sounding dudes who want to stuff millions of dollars into my account. Lately, the Bayesian filter of my mail client has become exceedingly efficient (sounds like the Architect) at marking them as "Junk" and stashing them away in a dark folder.

Today I again got this kind of a mail and since the number of useful mails was unusually low, I decided to take a look at what these guys really have to say (I never read beyond the first line before). Well, this one was pretty interesting :) Here's the executive summary:

Zack Shibarow, an official from the City Express Bank Plc writes in to say that there's a sum of US$ 18.5M lying in an unclaimed fixed deposit since the Arab account holder died in an air crash and no next-of-kin has turned up to claim it. If I do not act fast, the bank would have to donate the money to some war machinery (this part is a bit fuzzy), which is a Bad Thing (TM). In order to stop this from happening, Shibarow will arrange for the money to be transferred to my a/c and then I should keep 30% of it with me and the dude's party gets to keep the rest.

The bank which Zack claimed to work for was real and the air crash in which the Arab was supposed to have died was real too! The letter even contained a veiled threat stating that the bank had previously been defrauded by people who ran away with all the money and this time they're "...TAKING ALL PRECAUTIONARY MEASURES TO GUARD AGAINST RE-OCCURENCE OF SUCH ACT..." (the letter was in all caps). A little googlizing on the name "Zack Shibarow" took me to this page and from there to the Nigerian 4-1-9 Scam.

You've gotta read a description of this scam! Here's an excerpt:

If in response to one of these letters, you are simply so dumb that you wire-transfer or mail money to the Nigerians, then you're probably just lucky to have been this stupid -- because as will be shown you are quite a bit worse off if you try to investigate so as to protect your investment.

Persons who have traveled overseas to investigate or consummate this scam have made a tragic mistake.

Just like in the movies!

In the endless list of things that Microsoft is bitched about is their error messages. What I'm writing about is perhaps the most ridiculous error message I've ever seen.

Last Wednesday, I was working (nay, committing a sin, as one of my friends says) on Visual Studio .Net. In the middle of editing an ASP.Net DataGrid, I got an error message that left me aghast. The first thing I did was hit Print Screen. Take a look at this screenshot (800x600, 40kB) to see what was so... whatever, about it.

After seeing the dialog I was expecting some really nasty thing to happen, though I didn't think much about the possible outcomes. I just hit OK to see what was to come. The page I was editing was still there. I continued from the point of interruption till I reached the stage of rebuilding the solution. The build went fine too. In short, nothing happened. Nothing!

The next morning I told my flatmate about it. Here's how it went:

Me: Hey, this really funny thing happened yesterday... blah blah... and I took a screen dump!

Mate: You saw that error message all you could think of was taking a screenshot?

Me: Well, one's gotta keep his sense of humour in a crisis situation :D

Mate: Hah! When you face a real crisis, all the humour goes flying out of the window. Didn't you think of switching to another window and backing up your files before dismissing the dialog?

Me: (with an oops!-ish expression) Umm, no.

Mate: See? It's better to keep a level head in a crisis situation.

Some other wonderful error messages I've come across from assorted Microsoft software (recollected from human memory, not verbatim):

Unknown could not be found -- Windows Explorer

A fatal error has occured. Save all your files and restart Visual Studio .Net

Service could not be started due to some errors. The following action will be taken in (0) miliseconds: no action taken -- Windows 2000 EventViewer

Today is the last day of a very interesting two month... what do I call it... adventure?!

At my workplace we had the requirement of a Linux (RedHat 8.0) box with jBoss 3.0.0 running on it and support for 60 real users through 12 user accounts. There was supposed to be a complete EJB application developed and deployed by users of each of the 12 accounts.

What would a decent hardware configuration for such a setup be? I'd say -- Athlon XP 1500 or above, 512 MB DDR RAM and a 7200 RPM UDMA enabled IDE Hard Disk. What we had available was a Compaq Deskpro with a 5400 RPM 9 GB IDE Hard Disk, 256 MB of PC100 SDRAM and a Celeron 500 MHz CPU!

Keeping the "server" up and running itself was an ordeal and an adventure. I had anticipated some of the issues that could've cropped up during the two months of usage. So I set the limits on RSS mem usage and max number of user processes in limits.conf. This helped to keep the server responding quickly to user actions.

However, troubles started cropping up rather soon. Two weeks into active development and I got a call informing me that the server wasn't allowing any ops, complaining about too many open files. A little googlizing saw me bump up the file-max limit in /proc/sys/fs/file-max from 8192 to 65536 and a set hard limit of 32768 open files for jBoss in limits.conf. Phew! Problem solved. Out of curiosity, I did lsof | wc -l on jBoss's processes. That thing had over 19000 files open!

As the deadline approached (it was the same for everyone) the load on the machine started increasing and jBoss started acting up. It would refuse to deploy or undeploy people's stuff for extended periods of time, unless restarted. This made me write a cron job to restart jBoss daily at 03:00 hrs. This quickly proved to be too little and the cron entry was modified to restart jBoss every two hours!

Though regularly restarting jBoss did seem to help the situation, sometimes things came to a point where the swap usage exceeded physical RAM and things began to crawl. I had to restart the whole system three times -- twice on the day of the demo itself.

The greatest PITA for the users, and for me too, was the fact that there was only one server log file for all the accounts. Poor guys had to continuously run tail -F and still it was a nightmare trying to locate their own messages in the barrage of output that scrolled past. Betcha, even The Matrix code never scrolled as fast! One group of smart ladies had put tail -F server.log | grep groupname in a shell script and they took care to include the word groupname in thier messages, so they managed to save themselves from a lot of trouble.

At the end of it all, everyone was cursing jBoss for the crap that it was -- I guess not many of them realized what hardware they were using!

Heya!

I got my own domain name today -- codemartial.org

I tried first and last names but they were, not unexpectedly, reserved. I had initially decided on htahir.org but I there was this feeling somewhere that people won't be able to remember that extra h. So I decided to go for my alias, on a friend's suggestion.

Hope you like the name, as well as the website :)

Last night, Sun CEO Scott McNealy appeared for the Corporate Dossier Superachievers' Forum (by The Economic Times) in Oberoi Hotel Mumbai.

He appeared on to the stage flanked by a bevy of Indian Models, including Fleur Xavier and Dipanita Sharma. Guess who introduced him to the audience - Reliance CEO Mukesh Ambani!

During the course of the event McNealy did a lot of overt and discreet marketing for Sun and Java, comparing computing to utilities like electricity and water. He compared having PCs every where to having wells in the houses. When asked about his MS bashing, he said that's just "theatrics" to keep things interesting. Mm-hmm.

Why did I write this entry? Well, I'm not a Sun follower but this was one of the most interesting corporate events I've read about since the entry of BEA CEO on a red MV Agusta sometime last year.

A piece from his theatrics - "It's OK if your children are not Microsoft Certified"