Technology Notes

The best Finder enhancement!

Finder replacements are a common hunt especially for people who convert from Windows to Mac. Compared to Windows Explorer, Finder misses some real basic features. The biggest grouse is of course searching for that elusive Finder window to copy the document to. And where is Cut/Paste? Its hidden under copy and paste with Alt modifier!
But this can all be a thing of the past with Total Finder, a Finder plugin. The best part of TF is of course that it does not “replace” finder but “enhances” it. Notable additions are:

1. Tabbed (No need to search for that window again :)
2. Folders appear first in sort (bless you)
3. Straight forward Cut/Copy/Paste options.
4. System Wide Visor hot key to open a Finder window from wherever you are.

Best of all its FAST wihtou adding any appreciable overhead to Finder. And since its part of Finder all “Show in finder” menu clicks from any app will still give you access to the enhanced Finder.

 In my view enhancing Finder with TF is way better then paying for a Finder replacement. Don’t know why Apple can’t just integrate TF into Finder.

Head out to http://totalfinder.binaryage.com/ to get your copy now.

How to include a network folder into a Windows 8 Library (not indexed)

When you try to include a network folder into a Windows 8 library, the system fails with the error that a Network folder which is not indexed cannot be added.

Here is a simple workaround:

1. Create a dummy folder to share (for eg. c:\documents\share)

2. Create a library Share and include the folder above

3. Now open an elevated command prompt and switch to the c:\documents folder

4. rmdir share (remember share is an empty folder)

5. Now create a symlink to the network folder and call it the same name. For eg:

mklink /d c:\documents\share \psf\Home\Documents\SharedFiles

6. Now open Explorer and click on the library called Share and your network folder will be shown!

PS: I use the above to access my folders on the Mac in a Parallels Windows 8 VM to keep the files used by the VM also on the Mac to make it easier to backup.

Mountain Lion complains about missing Java although Java 7 is installed

Mountain Lion does not have Java installed. You can download and install it from the Oracle site: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html

After installing the Java runtime, open a terminal window and type java -version. In all probability you will see the following:

=============================================

java version “1.7.0_10”

Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0_10-b18)

Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 23.6-b04, mixed mode)

=============================================

Try running some Java programs like Eclipse and you may find a message popping up “To open “Program Name,” you need a Java SE 6 runtime. Would you like to install one now?”. This is strange since Java was just successfully installed.

This is due to the fact that Mountain Lion still “thinks” Java is not installed as it looks for 1.6. Its easy to “trick” the system: Depending on the update of Java installed a Symlink for that folder needs to be created. Execute the following command:

sudo mkdir /System/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines

Now:

sudo ln -s /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.7.0_10.jdk /System/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.6.0.jdk

This establishes a symlink from 1.6 to 1.7 and tricks the OS into thinking that Java is installed. All java programs should now execute.

Note: The problem I had was specifically to do with SAP GUI for Mac OS not running after installation.

iTools - Remote display your iPad on your laptop for sharing

iTools is a real nifty tool to display the live screen of your iPad (and other iOS devices) on to your Windows PC/Laptop or your Mac. This will set you free in displaying the iPad screen on projectors, Web meetings etc.

Download here: http://itools.hk/cms/webpage30.htm

Version for both Windows and Mac available. No installation required, just download and run! Additionally the application also allows to browse application storage, retrieve crash logs etc.

Real neat tool!

This post is for you if after install, your Windows 8 tiles do nothing

As described in a different post my Windows 8 upgrade itself was flawless. After spending quite some time in the desktop to make sure all my programs worked, I got down to customizing the Tiles.

Unfortunately every click on a tile just opened it up and after a few seconds the tile just closed. Googling got me the answer that I was looking for!

Avast (in mine and many other cases) was the problem. Unfortunately neither the Windows 8 upgrade checker nor the actual upgrade reported any incompatibility between Avast 2012 and Windows 8.

I uninstalled Avast and the tiles started doing their magic! Sweet.

Windows 8 upgrade from Windows 7 flawless

With great skepticism I started the upgrade of a spare HP laptop running Windows 7.

1. The initial start took a few minutes and I was asked for a product key followed by a lengthy “Making sure you are ready to install” step.

2. I was then asked if I wanted to keep my settings and apps to which I answered Yes.

3. For a fairly long time the installer ran (within Windows 7) and finally restarted the laptop.

4. Then multiple restarts happened with different status messages. Each step lasted 10 to 15 minutes.

5. Finally there was a moving settings step that ran for a few minutes again.

6. I was then asked to select a color for Windows 8 and a couple of other customization’s was then logged in.

Believe it or not all my programs and data was intact and I was in Windows 8!!!

The upgrade was smooth and unattended. Towards the end minimal questions and the system was smooth. Well done MS!

Scalr running out of disk space if sendmail not running!

Recently had another quirky issue with Scalr.

Scalr generates a lot of email notifications via the Cron jobs. On my instance I have sendmail turned off so that these email notifications don’t go out.

After running continuously for about 4 months, the Scalr instance started failing with an “Out of diskspace” error. This was very strange since there was still about 25GB free on the disk.

After checking all kinds of configurations and permissions, a google search yielded lack of inodes as a possible error!

A quick “df -i” confirmed the error, IUse% was 99 and there were a handful of inodes free! Tracing this back to find out where all the inodes had been consumed took longer. After a lot of hunting I ended up with the /var/spool/clientmqueue directory. An “ls” in this folder ended up with my terminal “hanging” as there were so many files created in that folder. Even an “rm -rf *” at the clientmqueue folder will not work and you will see the “Argument list too long” after some time.

Instead use the “find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 rm” command in the /var/spool/clientmqueue folder. On my instance this command ran for a few hours due to the large number of files. (You may want to execute the command in the background in a screen command).

Once done the inode utilization fell to 7% and the system is again fine. In order to avoid future issues, I added a cron job to delete the files in the clientmqueue folder periodically.

Note: Scalr is a fantastic software that works great. This blog post only addresses one of the issues faced in running Scalr and has nothing to do with the Scalr software itself.

Scalr cron daemon tasks lose MySQL database connections over time

We use Scalr to manage some of our cloud infrastructure. Scalr is a great Open Source alternative to more pricey solutions and has a fantastic feature set that is just about enough.

Using Scalr in a self hosted mode does have some challenges. One of the most important components in the Scalr setup is the running of Cron jobs to handle all the batch jobs. Cron is an extremely significant part of Scalr as the messaging is dependent on the running of tasks repetitively. Most tasks run on demand and terminate.

However 2 tasks run as daemons indefinitely. The first is SzrMessaging and the second DBQueueEvent.

I had a strange issue on my setup where after running for a day or thereabouts the messages from the EC2 instances would never reach the Scalr site and vice versa. Restarts of apache/httpd, cron etc didn’t help. Finally figured out that restarts of mysqld along with killing the daemon threads was setting it right.

Digging deeper into the code of class.SzrMessagingProcess.php found that the DB connection obtained is held for as long as the daemon is alive. The daemon is killed only if the memory usage goes beyond a preset limit.

Now this solution seems to obviously work for all but unfortunately not for me. I modified the code after the memory limit checking to also kill the daemon thread if the thread has been running for a few hours.

Restarted cron and the tasks now run smoothly and the problem has gone away! Don’t know why this happened on my setup but this could be a gotcha for others as well.

Top 5 Lessons from Mobilizing SAP on the cloud

Working with SAP customers on the cloud has been a rich learning and myth busting experience in many ways. Contrary to popular belief, a number of SAP customers do have a strong affinity for deploying solutions via the cloud. So what are the insights from our first set of cloud customers on the Unvired Mobile Cloud?

1. Cloud is relevant and top of the mind for SAP customers
Many of them already use other solutions such as Salesforce, Workday, Successfactors, etc. and integrate these SAAS / cloud solutions to their SAP systems in a number of ways. A cloud based delivery of the Unvired Mobile platform struck a chord with many of the CIO/CTO and IT heads that we spoke to. It is also a known fact that on-premise or hosted data centers running the dedicated SAP instances need to co-exist with the cloud based platforms / solutions. A flexible approach to cloud deployment without disrupting existing landscapes is what customers want.

2. Security
Data security is of paramount importance to all customers SAP or otherwise. Business data is being unlocked and the safe guarding of that data while it is put to innovative usages needs to be the bedrock of any cloud platform. The heads of IT recognize that email on mobile is already putting sensitive data on the device and data from business systems like SAP is not new but only enhancing the amount of data on the device. Also MDM solutions complement the security needs of the Mobile platforms.

Security in the mobile context can be: Data on the cloud, data in transit and data on the device. The Unvired Mobile Cloud platform does not replicate the data from customer systems to the cloud. Data is held on the cloud in encrypted form only for as long as it is required to be delivered safely to the device. Data in transit is secured via standard HTTPS/SSL and data on the device is stored in encrypted databases.

3. Time to deploy, rapid change
Companies want to deploy mobile solutions rapidly and don’t want to wait. Reasons are many but the primary one is that deployments on mobile are in response (or to preempt) to business demands (like approvals on the Go, sales order creation etc) and are time sensitive. In many cases, deploying the solution a few months later means reduced business relevance. So solutions need to be rapidly deployed and be adaptable to rapid changes requested by business users.

4. ROI matters, no more POCs
Good old fashioned ROI still matters. Customers are hesitant to make huge investments into POCs with limited production relevance. Customers want quick and free trials with their own SAP systems and mobile devices eliminating the POCs. After the trial, customers are more interested in iterative roll out of mobile processes and investing in shorter bursts as and when required. Customers want to see bang for the buck quickly as unlike investments in SAP and other systems wherein the investment is depreciated over 10 to 15 years, mobile investments are for much shorter periods of 2 to 3 years. BYOD phenomenon, short device life and mobile manufacturer / telco driven periodic device refresh have driven the shorter shelf life in the mobile investments.

5. Pay as you go / scale as you go
This was by far a must have that many customers pointed out. Rarely do customers go for a big bang deployment of mobile users. Additional deployments requiring purchasing of (expensive) additional users are a dampener for larger mobile adoption. Also significant churn in employees’ headcount due to challenging business circumstances means customers want to not just buy additional users but also return users. This new trend / requirement of return of users can be satisfied in a fair manner only by a true cloud solution with transparent pricing.

Note: This blog also appeared on The Unvired Blog.

Source: unvired.com