I am a newbie to Hadoop programming and in order to play around with it, I set up Hortonworks, and what better way than trying out the examples given in the Hortonworks website? Easy as it seems…

But,

To be honest, the (few) tutorials on the examples are a huge pain in the ***. Somehow trying high and low, I was able to get data into HCatalog (Don’t ask me how! I may write another article on it sometime soon though, before I forget!). But getting the data to visualize in Excel, as the tutorial stated seemed to be a problematic task.

So here it is guys, how I fixed problems with getting the Hortonworks ODBC driver to work on Windows. This is based on top of this tutorial titled “How To Refine and Visualize Sentiment Data”.

My specs are :

• Hortonworks 2.1 
• Windows 8 64 bit

Steps:
ERROR [HY000] [Microsoft][HiveODBC] (35) Error from Hive: error code: '40000' error message: 'Error while compiling statement: FAILED: HiveAccessControlException Permission denied. Principal [name=hue, type=USER] does not have following privileges on Object [type=TABLE_OR_VIEW, name=default.tweetsbi] : [SELECT]'. (Microsoft Hive ODBC Driver)

hive

grant SELECT on table tweetsbi to user hue;

Cold and numb the winds have turned
With no mercy, my life just spurned
People passing by
With not a look of concern
This life of mine has had nothing,
Nothing but hurt.

The wounds of time unopened and old
But you cut it open 

I don’t usually share my feelings with people. It suffocates you a great deal, yet I still keep away.

Why?

Because, in most cases, it’s every man for himself. Most of them will call you up, when there’s a slightly diverse status update or a tweet or some form of feeling unleashed, just to know if you botched things up.

When you approach someone you want to talk to, usually, they devalue your problems(and by problems I do not mean those silly "First World" problems you find people complaining and crying about). That is what I have come to understand of people. “Is that so? This is nothing compared to what I went through.”, “It’s such a small thing. Why do you even have to think about it?”

Hello? Why do I have to think about it?

Because I am clearly hurt.

Because I am not leading your life and I am not born into your circumstances. We are all very different entities and we all have to undergo pain, but your hitches are different from mine and I think you have to accept it.

Unfortunately I will not have the courage to say it out aloud. Because I am in a state of confusion and I am just going to take your word for it. That MY problems aren’t significant enough and there is something wrong with me for thinking about it.

What happens ultimately is that, you shell in. You don’t talk to anyone about your problems, thinking yours is not substantial enough to tell another. You become moody and you become silent. You eventually don’t talk. And you know what the real problem here is? You will never talk about what you feel like to anyone, later onwards, becoming numb to it.

Have you ever thought about how you treat children? When a child, someone entering their teens, tell you about a problem he/she is facing, how have you responded to it as a sibling? You brush them away while typing into your smartphone saying, “You talk like no one else has any problems. Get away now, I have more important work.”


It hurts them. Just because you are not their age, doesn’t mean they aren’t suffering. Infact chances are that you went through something similar in your preteens. You know it well, yet you just want to deliberately ignore it. But why? Because you are not in their circumstance or situation right now, and its just trivial to you.

Dear reader, you cannot weigh your problems. Whether its small or big, I don’t know how to classify them. For me, as far as I am in a mental trauma, I am having a problem.

And that is exactly I want to tell you as well. Stop contemplating about how big or small others’ problems are. You don’t have a right to do that. Even if you do, please reserve your comments to yourself. Nobody wishes to hear what they are undergoing is nothing and they shouldn’t feel anything.

In fact, they do and they are bothered by it that they decided to finally approach you. But if you are being the hypocrite here making their problems redundant, I don’t know what to call you.

Be a shoulder to cry on. If someone chose you to confide in, it means they value you and your words. The moment you choose your words wrong, they may still believe in you, but it will never help them.

I ran into the blue screen of death a couple of times on my machine for no apparent reason. I don’t even recall installing any new software or drivers. And all of a sudden running into the bsod made me panic because of the important files I was having on my machine. 

The stop error code/message(s) that I got was :

"driver_irql_not_less_or_equal" error 
stop: 0x000000d1(0x00000038,0x00000002,0x00000000,0xF7673DFA) 
iaStorA.sys - address f7673dfa base at f7665000, datestamp 40608c73

Machine I was using:

HP ENVY 4 - Windows 7 OS 64 bit

Solutions I tried (that didn't work :/ )

These were some of the solutions I tried to recover from the bsod.But I wasn't very successful

Safe Mode Boot

I tired booting up my laptop on Safe Mode so that I could

a. … go find what this iastor.sys driver was and maybe update it or reinstall it. I failed.
b. …do a system restore if a). fails 

Hard Disk Issue Check

In order to check if there was a problem with my hard disk, I ran Ubuntu, just to check if I can access my files. I found out that even this step worked fine. I was able to view my files (and backup some of the data to my pendrive).

You dont necessarily have to install Ubuntu on your partition. Just run it (boot your pen and then go along with the wizard to just try it rather than install it.).

Create your ubuntu bootable usb using this tool : http://www.pendrivelinux.com/universal-usb-installer-easy-as-1-2-3/

 

The hard way – Is Formatting the only option?

When all failed, I thought I had only one choice , and that was to format the machine. 

"Do you have to format your machine then?"

HELL NO!!!

I am going to show you how you can recover from your bsod without re-installing Windows, with just a usb bootable pendrive with some OS installed and an internet connection to download some drivers and your mother's machine:D

Solution that actually worked

The problem:

If you can see your hard disk and be able to transfer files and all that nonsense, then it is not actually a Hard disk fault. 

My guess is that there is some problem making your drives not show up. Some kind of a driver that was actually missing or faulty.

Solution: 

On your mom's machine,

1. Create a bootable pen drive with whatever OS you have (I tried with Windows 8). Use the “Windows 7 USB DVD Download tool” to make a bootable pen for you. For this step, I think you can try your recovery CD if you have one (but I am not sure). Or if your computer is UEFI based, read this article : http://tipsandtricksforum.com/thread-245.html.

2. Go to the HP support site and download a storage driver for your lap model. (Doesn’t even have to match the same machine type, but atleast somewhat close).

Detailed steps:

• Go to http://www8.hp.com/us/en/support.html
• Search for your Laptop model. If you don’t find the exact model, try a related one.
• Select the OS.
• Then you will see a list of available drivers for your model (scroll down).
• Go to Driver - Storage
• Download Intel Rapid Storage Technology Driver
• Run the .exe file.

3. Once you run the .exe file, a folder called SWSETUP would be created in your C drive. Follow the breadcrumbs in the image below and copy this x64 file holding all the files. Now you know that your iaStorA.sys file was missing and thats why your bsod was coming up. 





4. Paste this folder into the new bootable usb that you created. 

 
On your faulty machine...

5. Now run the Windows installation on the lap and when you reach the tab that asks you where you want to install your OS (which will be empty and there will be an error like “Windows couldn’t find any drives. To get a storage driver, click Load driver.”). 





6. Click on “Load Driver” and go to the folder that we just pasted onto the bootable usb (x64 folder from step 4)

7. Now you will be able to see the drives. 



8. Don’t worry. You don’t have to install Windows. You can now skip the installation.

9. Reboot your laptop. Don’t forget to remove the pen drive. Now your laptop is back to normal.

So, this is what helped me from the bsod without having to reinstall windows again. There maybe many more solutions out there. But this is a pen-down of my own way of recovering from this particular blue screen. I don't know if it will help. If it does, then I am glad. :)

I came across this article where my friend had written about me, and honestly, I had totally forgotten that it was just two years ago. It was when the new Rotaract Club was formed for the year 2012 at my University, Informatics Institute of Technology. I just felt like sharing it here, on my own blog, because something like that, I feel, should be treasured.

The write-up is here:

Rtr. Krishnakripa Jayakumar

Editor (2012-2013)

Compiled by Sai Ma Devakumaran

The empress of the Seventh Soul Mountain a short beautiful lady with truly innocent eyes that targets the unbelievably unexpected (haha) is none other than Kripa Jayakumar who is most lovingly known as ‘Gundoos’, The Lady Genius in IT who passes all her exams with flying colors recently revealed the secret of her success which ultimately turned out to be a drink that increases memory power and concentration (lol) She is a wise soft spoken girl who is very thoughtful about others. What I truly admire about her is that she is someone who never comments on anyone at any circumstance. She is someone who speaks less but a glimpse of food makes her open her mouth very easily. If she ever loves something, they are books as you can always find her with a book or a laptop in hand. Last but not the least I will never forget to mention about her writing skills! She is a really good writer, owning a blog with her little beautiful writings. I’m sure she will have a bright future ahead. I wish her all the very best from the bottom of my heart..

You can read the complete article here:
http://rciit.blogspot.com/2012/09/an-insight-into-lives-of-our-very-own.html

In commemoration of the all new Firefox Australis launch that was globally awaited by all on the 29th of April 2014, the Mozilla Sri Lankan Community also hosted the celebration of this aforementioned launch on 10th of May this year. In addition to it, the launch party also marked the re-establishment of the Mozilla Sri Lankan Community.

I was also part of the crowd, apart from different enthusiasts from different Universities across the country, who gathered at the event to see what all the hype about the new Firefox was and was pretty thrilled to see a whole new change in Firefox. I was also here because my friends were speaking too (was thrilled :D).


The event proceedings started off with a history to Mozilla Foundation and all the work carried about to this day. Milestones achieved and the success stories were shared with the audience. Of all the milestones, I remember one very well. Quoting the speaker, "Mozilla named 'Most Trusted Internet Company privacy in 2013'". Apart from one of the safest browsers, Firefox also is very keen on the speediness of the browser.

What is a launch without a cake? ;) Yes, we had a cake, two to be precise, and finally everyone had a sugar overdose (just kidding :P).  I also tottered along with the rest of the audience to sing "Happy Birthday" and sneak out with a cake piece.

So it wasn't totally only the Firefox Australis, on the agenda. There also was a session on FirefoxOS, the mobile operating System and how to create apps that can easily be uploaded to the Marketplace. Local apps created by developers here were showcased and the audience were given Firefox mobiles to experience the feel. And the good news (or not so good news) would be that these apps are simply web apps and you can easily create one using HTML, CSS and Javascript. And what about Frameoworks? Yeah, yeah them too. Porting the apps to different platforms too is really easy. PhoneGap? Yes, you can use it.

Some of the hardcore Twitterholics grabbed some cool gifts at the end of the event, while the rest of us got hold of some merchandise too ;) . The event was a success I should hope so, and the Social Media was streaming with #MozillaLK hashtags and photos and #Panchali (:P), while the online magazine partners, ReadMe and dIGIT.lk did a good job too on covering the event.




And to wrap it all up a good group photograph as well :)

I am a free bird,

Okay, so I came across a situation where I needed to migrate my wordpress site from local to server (in my case which was running on Ubuntu). Everything was working fine until I came across many issues after setting up the site on the server. I had made some changes to the permalinks and now , suddenly, everything just turned into a mess.

Hence I decided to pen down this article in the hope that it may help some of you because I had searched up and down and suffered a lot trying to understand why it was causing issues.

This is the message I got:




Before we proceed on fixing the issues, lets try to put the pieces together now, shall we?

What Really Happened before the 404

2. You save the changes.

3. Depending on certain scenarios, you may or may not get this message at the very bottom of your screen.





4. In this case, you would manually have to change the contents. And hence you have to copy the contents listed there and paste it into the .htaccess file.




5. Now the reason you may wonder you don’t see the .htaccess file (along with some others) is because it’s a hidden file.

You may have to make the hidden files visible. (Ctrl+H or google it up to find the way). If its still not visible, you could just create a .htaccess file and paste the contents in. Like given below:




From the above code, <IfModule checks within apache whether the mod_rewrite.c module is included within itself. If it is, the code block runs. Else it does not. (which is the problem I and most of you out there is facing).

Somehow the damage is done. How do I fix the permalink issues?

If you had tried changing permalinks, your .htaccess file will get updated using new rewrite rules. This is generally what should happen, but the reason the 404 error comes is simply because none of the rewrite rules of your .htaccess file gets executed.

Why doesn't the rewrite rules get executed?

Note: throughout the tutorial i am assuming that you have permissions to carry out commands and also you have permissions to edit files. You may come across situations where you would have to do it, so if you get an error stating you do not have permission for carrying out a task, make sure you get access rights.

Enabling mod_rewrite.c module on Apache

1. To do that, simply open up terminal and type in this command :

sudo a2enmod rewrite

This will simply enable the rewrite module in apache.

2. If this was successful, then you could simply restart apache using the below command.

service apache2 restart

or

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

3. Now refresh your browser and check if your 404 error has vanished. If it has, congratulations.

It still does not work. What do I do now?

Scenario 1: 

If you are still stuck maybe there is one thing you would have forgotten.You should do the following:

1. Give .htaccess files permission to override previous directives

You would generally have to open up httpd.conf file. (I have tried high and low trying to figure out where this file was, but if you don’t find this file, apache2.conf is the file you need to be looking at (in my case)).

If you don't find this file, don't worry According to their documentation, find one of these: 

On Ed/X/Ubuntu 6.06 and Ubuntu Edgy Eft, the "main server configuration file" is /etc/apache2/apache2.conf . 

in the LAMP download about a week ago with Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) the default configuration file was /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default

So feel free to trotter around these folders within apache2 to find the file.

On my server, this is where it resides.




2. Open up the file and locate a section that looks like (fully, partially or almost close) to this:

<Directory /var/www/>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
allow from all
# Uncomment this directive is you want to see apache2's
# default start page (in /apache2-default) when you go to /
#RedirectMatch ^/$ /apache2-default/
</Directory>

3. Replace the “AllowOverride None” with “AllowOverride All. This tells Apache that it's okay to allow.htaccess files to over-ride previous directives.

After the change the piece of code looks like this:



4. You might need to reload or restart (step given above) Apache before this change will have an effect:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

Now your .htaccess files in your wordpress root directory will be able to make a difference. Your permalink issues should be sorted by now.

Scenario 2: 

If you got an error message as such after you tried to enable the rewrite module, like this…



... it is probably because your userdir is not enabled in apache. In the apache documentation it says that by default, access to these directories is not enabled.

Lets enable it now.

1. Type into the console the following as you can see in the image:




2. Open your mods-enabled folder under the apache2 folder. You can now see the rewrite.load file has appeared in it.

3. Refresh your browser and now you can see the site running fine.

Scenario 3: 

Maybe your rewrite rules are not included within your .htaccess file or something along that line. Idk. Read the first heading given above to check around a bit.

If none of them also work, I am sorry I don’t think I can find any other way. You may just have to search for more ways.

Eventually you shall come up with a solution like I did.

Tell me one person who hasn't watched or heard of Godfather. I'll persuade him to do so (not strictly speaking, so...don't redirect anyone to me). WHY? Because Al-Pacino is one hell of an actor and his acting has moved me so much so, that he is one of my favorite actors of all time! But this blog post isn't about Al Pacino, but rather one of my favorite moments in his movie, The Godfather.

There are a lot of scenes to be named when it comes to this particular movie, but let me pick out my favorite from it all.

I remember the excitement and the awe-struck expression I had when I saw that scene for the first time. The acting so natural and the expected revenge that lead to an unexpected scenario.

*Spoiler ahead*

Jack Waltz turns down a request from Don Corleone and since he is someone who is not accustomed to getting his requests turned down, punishes him by presenting him with the head of his favorite racehorse on his bed.
That scene was perfectly natural because Jack Waltz never expected a real Horse Head in his bed (yes, that horse head was freaking real) and he is as dumbfounded as the rest of us are.

Many a time, when trying to enable USB Debugging, our devices may not actually get discovered whatever you try to do.

So here is how I was able to fix the issues I faced with USB Debugging.

How to enable USB Debugging option on your device

This is how you do it. 

    1. Go to Settings -> About Device 

 

2. Now, click on the "Build Number" seven times and you get a message saying "Developer options has been enabled

3. And now, your "Developer Options" has appeared back again

On Windows

Now for your device to get detected in order to run the app on it, you will need appropriate drivers. Sometimes, as you plug your device to the machine, the drivers automatically update themselves. But in other cases, you might have to manually do that and you may not always have the drivers. 

This is the driver I used for Galaxy Grand DUOS. This will also work for other phones. (But first make sure your device is connected to the machine through a USB cable)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/c5nv47vx8sxcz42/Samsung_USB_Driver_for_Mobile_Phones_v1.5.14.0.exe

If the above doesn't work, you can alternatively try this too. 

http://developer.samsung.com/android/tools-sdks/Samsung-Andorid-USB-Driver-for-Windows

On Mac

On MAC machines, you don't need a driver. Follow the link below and download this application. Run it once after connecting your device to your machine through a usb cable. 

http://www.android.com/filetransfer/

Starting Android development might mean taking a new leap into a new area for many. But Android can be very interesting to work on. Only at the end of completing an app, would someone wish that they knew about some essential android information at the very start!

These are a few tips can help you on your first Android venture. So here goes:

Running and Debugging applications

I would always recommend using a device rather than an Emulator. One of the reasons being:

Running an application on an Emulator is very slow and it takes minutes to just deploy the app onto the emulator. On the other hand, deploying it on the real device is fast, efficient and , HEY!, the end product is going to be on a real device. Why waste time on an emulator (unless of course you don’t own one).

If you want to know how to do this procedure or you have issues with detecting your devices to debug your app, follow this link:
http://seventhsoulmountain.blogspot.com/2014/01/usb-debugging-for-android-applications.html

Know how your application looks on different phones

In case you overlook this feature, I just want to remind you that there is a cool feature on ADT where you can find how your app looks on different densities of screens.



You can choose any of these different devices to check how your app looks like on these devices.

Alternatively, you can click on “Preview All Screens” to see all the screens fitted to your screen.

Note: If you get an error as such





…then simply click on the green android image on top and select an API Level lower than 19 (API 18 or below).

Source Files missing

Sometimes when you are debugging and you are faced with the scenario below. You don’t even have to get into the debugging, just jump into an Android class and you may find this.

All you’re Android source files are missing. So what should you do?





This basically means that the classes haven’t been attached to its source. Clearly, Eclipse does not know where the source code for the dependent jars are.

To overcome this problem, this solution can work. Click on the “Attach Source” button. Direct the folder path to wherever the Android SDK’s sources folder is, and select the specified API level folder (android-15) (You can also just only give the path to the sources folder without specifying the api level).

Eclipse crashes and you lose data. What next?

Be prepared to run into this circumstance at any time! Eclipse is very unreliable because it loses your code that you spent time and energy on. It can happen when your power goes, when your computer heats up, when there’s less memory on your machine etc.


You see something similar to the one below



So what can you do to prevent this?

1. You should always create backups. 
2. Use a version control system (SVN, Git etc)

…BUT you haven’t, and now you are helpless. What can you do to RECOVER them at this point?


There is one thing you can do. Though at times you may not be able to recover your files or you may not get ALL of your code, it is still worth the try!

   1. On the file, right click and click on “Replace with” and click on “Local History”


   2. Select the last that has been in the history and click on “Replace"

Do not lose your Keystore!

Don’t forget to save your Keystore file! This is what you will need to sign your application if it has to go on Google Play. If you have misplaced your keyfile, you cannot upload an updated version of your app. You will have to upload it again! 

Google doesn’t store your private key because it doesn’t have any use with it. So there is absolutely no reason and no way Google can restore something they don’t own.

So... Create as many backups as you can.


I have basically not been in need to use a third party library in an app that I was developing. But there are plenty and some of them are given below. I have heard alot about these libraries and I'm sure it can help you.