Roy's musings

When I wanted to submit my blog for Google AdSense, I had to first confirm the ownership to my blog. It can be proved in two ways: either by adding a META tag in the HEAD section or by adding a HTML file in the site. Since I have my blog in the blogger.com, the easiest way for me to confirm my ownership is to add a META tag in my blog layout. It is very easy to add this tag. Follow these steps. Login to your blogger account Click on Layout and then Edit HTML Search for the following phrase: all-head-content . This is the line that tells the blogger engine as to what needs to be included in the HEAD tag. Just before this line, not just before all-head-content, but before the line , include your meta tag. Most likely you will be including a META tag that looks like: meta name = 'verify-v1' content= "Some base64 encoded string" / > Save your changes and view your blog and confirm that your new META tag appears on the header. Remember that though you specify name and...

Recently one of the applications that I developed started throwing exceptions, that had the following message: SQL state [72000]; error code [1013]; ORA-03111: break received on communication channel When I googled around, I couldn't come across anything useful. Sadly enough most of the sites just showed the documentation for that error, without any explanation from anyone experiencing that issues. So here you go, with the best possible explanation that I could come up with. My application sets two things on the connection that is throwing this exception: It sets the fetchSize to be 2500 rows It sets the query timeout to be 10 seconds The database server and the application are separated over a long latency network (actually there is a NetEm box that emulates the long latency between these two boxes) which has a latency characteristic of 50+/-5 milliseconds. This is the whole setup. It is important to understand how the timeout is handled by the Oracle client (in my case JDBC clien...

I wanted to understand how the availability is calculated for systems. I came across an excellent article and found it very useful. You can read it from here .

But this one is useful. The title of the blog entry is "Top 10 Firefox plugins for web developers & designers".

It is very important to pay special attention to the timeouts and set them with proper values for any blocking operation. Any good library API must provide a way to set the timeout for any blocking operation. Recently we identified one of the issues in production network because one of the programs that we deployed in production had set right timeout value. I just thought I must reiterate the fact that its critical to set the timeout values to optimum level so that we can fail fast and catch issues.