Category: Tech

I wanted to limit the content at this website to software development related stuff, but it was difficut to not share the latest developments at the big brother Google. As we know, Google has this plethora of products which are listed here. Whether its the modest ‘Translate’ or ‘Youtube’ or ‘Picasa’, the offerings are really very rich. While most of the industry is looking at cost cutting, Google with its vast cash chest was seen as someone who would and can sustain for a long time. Well, it seems the finally Google Juggernaut is feeling the pinch.

Here’s a story from the official blog which talks about a reduction of 100 positions from the recruiting organization. Mind you, almost all the external contractors who help Google in recruiting have already been asked to discontinue their services. Read more here.

Reduction in force (RIF) is not a uncommon thing with US based companies but the other news was a bigger one where Google has identified a set of tools/products which would be closed down. This includes ones like stopping uploads to Google Video, Google Catalog Search and more.
Continue reading “Google Labs Juggernaut feels the economic pinch”

Its been a while I had this travel blog site called www.ghumakkar.com and for some reason or the other, I was not able to post a story in Hindi. I looked around but found no help. While hunting around, I could see numerous blogs in Hindi and a lot of them were on Word Press and that made the life more difficult. I asked around and somehow it worked for everyone except me.

Then one day, after a ghumakkar asked me this question again, I hunted again and could finally fix the issue. I found the answer here. So I thought that I would probably write a small post detailing the solution since the above forum post can be a little cryptic.

Problem – I am able to get Hindi Text and when I paste it in Word Press Post, it appears fine, but when I save the post it becomes ‘?????’.

Solution – The relevant property of the SQL fields which decide the encoding for the post body doesn’t have the right ‘collation’ property.

Solution in Detail
If your problem is exactly what I have described about then you can do following. This actually means tinkering with your Word Press database so I would advise against getting adventurous.

Do Following.
1. Find a tool which gives access to your database. In my case its phpMyadmin since I am on www.hostmonster.com.

2. Once you are inside phpMyadmin, click on the relevant database of the wordpress installation. If you have just one site and only one WP then just choose the one which you see. The typical name in the default installation is something like ‘_wrdp1’.

3. Once you click the database, you would see a list of tables.

4. One by one, Choose the following tables
– wp_option
– wp_comments
– wp_posts

and click ‘Edit’.

In Editing mode change “Collation” setting to “utf8_unicode_ci” of following
1. in wp_option -> option_value
2. in wp_comments -> comment_content
3. in wp_posts -> post_content and post_title

Hope this works for you. Happy Blogging.

Its a different fun and as well as a challenge to write on something as basic as SDLC. SDLC stands for ‘Software Development Life Cycle’ and is the term which contains the different stages which happen when we develop a software.

I am sure that if you are in software development then this term wont be new for you but I am not sure whether we understand this in simpler terms. So I would explain this in brief with the help of a case-study.

Imagine that we have to develop a website for a ‘Taxi booking’ website. This taxi-booking site would offer its users the services of booking a taxi right from anywhere through internet. A user can just visit the site, fill the necessary information like source, destination, kind of taxi and be done with it. If you have to develop this website, you might get tempted to think that you can do it in jiffy since you know the requirements. Its a very simple problem to solve. Well, not really and that is why the first step in SDLC is the most critical and people who have been around would vouch that if we could do this first step really really well, rest of it is more of execution.
Continue reading “What is SDLC ?”

For a while I was looking at a way to change the photos on my travel experience site with least effort. Not that I finally found a good answer but I did find a WP Plug-In which seemed to be doing the job. This plug-in is called “Header Image Rotator plugin for WordPress!” and here’s the website of the author.

So I quickly downloaded and set it all up but it didn’t work. Then I put a post at the forum but unfortunately I didn’t hear back. I searched around and I could not find any answer.

At the same time my brother-in-law and myself were thinking about it, not the plug-in but about the fact that we should write the necessary code to change header-photos on its own. So recently both of us sat together and thought that before we write a new piece of code,lets see if we can fix this wp image rotator plug-in. We were doing everything as per manual but somehow it was not working.

Let me give a brief of how this plug-in works.

1. Normally any WP template, worth its salt, would have a style-sheet.
2. Typically they would have a header-image.
3. Header-image will have its own div or its own descriptor in the .css file.
4. Normally, header.php file would be using this div to set the header-image.
5. When we use this plugin we copy certain photos at a location and then tell the plugin the div which the header.php is using.
6. Ideally, the plug-in would replace the div with its own code.

After not making any headway, we though about looking at the executed code which the browser was getting. So we loaded the home page on a browser and did ‘View Source’. What we found was that the plug-in was indeed setting the right div to a random image but after that statement, the original template was again setting the same div to what it usually sets, so what was indeed happening was
1. Plugin sets a random image from your collection as header-image
2. Then, the original template sets the default or what-so-ever header-image to that div.

End result is that for a user, the world is all same.

Here’s how we fixed it
1. We copied the style-sheet div section of the header-image in the .css file and created another one with a different name. In my case the header-image css was . I created another called .
2. In plug-in settings, I mentioned as my css id for header-image.
3. In header-php, we used instead of

And Voila it worked.

If you are having some problems here, you can try your luck by doing above.