Hat-trick hits

A hat-trick or hat trick in sport is the achievement of a positive feat three times during a game, or other achievements based on threes. The term was first used in 1858 in cricket to describe HH Stephenson's feat of taking three wickets in three balls.

Month of March 2012 is suitable for number '3' in my life.

Here are few interesting professional facts:

• Blogged the first 3 technical hits in IIS 7 for last 3 weeks, based on work experience
• Earned 3rd position for the first time in CodeProject's Top Experts this month
• Chief Guest for the national conferences 3 in a row in this month
• Positioned 3rd in CodeProject Top Expert in last 24hrs
• 3rd year, since the loss of dream team 'RUFUS'

On the lighter side, March is 3rd month of the year and Today popular 3 movie (kolai veri) release. Interesting magic number '3'.

Fun apart, will be back with the technical contents to clarify the black box of 'Architecture', as the foot steps of industry legends like Martin Fowler.

Third Hit IIS7

Here is the hat trick (3rd hit) problem on upgrading the internal/tool application from IIS 6 to IIS 7 version. In the classic ASP pool, when we run the ASP page, IIS 7 throws the below error:

Error 500 :There is a problem with the resource you are looking for, and it cannot be displayed.

It made me to try a lot of permutation as the error in the tool code. However, it doesn’t tell me the line number the error was found on. After searching the web, it has been found out how to turn on the more detailed error reporting for classic ASP in IIS 7; but you have to do it on the webserver.

We need to turn the below changes in the web.config file. I know this can be turn on for ASP.NET in the web.config file but as far as I know, not classic asp.

configuration
  system.webserver
    httperrors errormode="Detailed"
    asp scripterrorsenttobrowser="true"
  system.webserver
configuration

Hat trick wickets on opening spell of IIS 7. At the same time, itz happy learning!

SecondHit in IIS7

As the continuation of first hit IIS 7 experience, learnt another interesting lesson on second hit of IIS 7.0

After the successful fix of the first issue (as mentioned in last blog), started browsing my service. Another hit! This time, got the error as:

Could not load file or assembly 'XXXXX' or one of its dependencies. An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format

Guess what! The error is due to the upgrade in development environment from 32-bit to 64 bit system. On opening the particular project, it has been discovered that the project configured to target x 86 platforms. As the application is running on 64-bit platform, it will have such ‘incorrect format’ error.

To fix it, perform the below steps:

· open project properties window.
· select Build tab
· Change it to ‘Any CPU’
· Save your changes.
· Compile your project and run :)

Another tip. Let us say you have a VS project that has the build configuration set to Any CPU but still getting the same error for an assembly. In that case, please make sure you have did so for all dependencies your website uses. You can also enable 32-bit mode on IIS and adjust your website and its dependencies to target x86 platform. Interesting technology hits on migrating to IIS 7.0

First Hit IIS7

On developing one of the internal firm’s application, got an opportunity to host the application in IIS 7.0. Guess what? It is interesting experience on first hit in IIS 7.0

If you are using IIS 7 then you probably might face this error. It’s a little frustrating when such errors occur and simple IIS 6 users when it was really simple to configure and run a website, those users feel really hooked up.

As the simple steps, Virtual Directory and Web services are created like earlier versions of IIS. After the hosting our application, the first launch hits the attached error.

Error Summary: HTTP Error 403.14 - Forbidden The Web server is configured to not list the contents of this directory.

Most likely causes: A default document is not configured for the requested URL, and directory browsing is not enabled on the server.

On root cause analysis, it has been found that directory browsing is not allowed. As far as this issue is concerned in the earlier versions of IIS we used to just set the directory browsing checkbox to be selected and so no issues.

In IIS 7, you just click the directory browsing option in the configuration section and on the right side of the directory browsing view you will find enable by default directory browsing is disabled. It will be more clear from the attached image. As the solution, you enable the option for directory browsing and all set.


First hit to learn about the interesting default setting in IIS 7

Salute to Master

This week, I'm honored as Chief Guest in National Conference on Computer Science & Applications 2012 (NCCSA'12). This national event was run on Mar 7, 2012 at MEPCO Schlenk Engineering College.

The Conference aims to provide an energetic environment by bringing together Researchers, Academicians and Scientists from Computer Applications and related Engineering fields for presenting their innovative original work. Delegates of
students, research scholars, professors, etc. from various organization presented 24 research papers in latest computing and technology.

As the chief guest, the committee put me in the dias center of the huge auditorium. The function started with traditional prayer and lightning activities. Souvenir was released by me and the first copy was received by Principal. I shared the topic on technology trends, covered 2011 trend, 2012 promising open sources, 2012 top technology, etc. Got the high positive feedback on the session. Great experience as Institute and Industry synergy!

Pause; Roll back the moments 20+ years. Our beloved master motivated us to (at least) participate the science program in the same institute. In fact, our master had tough time to push for that event. Finally, 7 of our friends attended in late 80, where in district collector as chief guest. We were so curious to take snap with chief guest. Guess what! One of our master's product is Chief Guest for this national conference on Mar 7 2012. Hats off to her grooming, nurturing, motivating, etc.. dedications. Itz all because of you, master!

PS: Met the master in person after the function and got the valuable blessing!

Mahout Hadoop

Apache Mahout is a new open source project by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) with the primary goal of creating scalable machine-learning algorithms that are free to use under the Apache license. Mahout contains implementations for clustering, categorization, CF, and evolutionary programming. Furthermore, where prudent, it uses the Apache Hadoop library to enable Mahout to scale effectively in the cloud

A mahout is a person who keeps and drives an elephant. The name Mahout comes from the project's use of Apache Hadoop — which has a yellow elephant as its logo — for scalability and fault tolerance

Once the exclusive domain of academics and corporations with large research budgets, intelligent applications that learn from data and user input are becoming more common. The need for machine-learning techniques like clustering, collaborative filtering, and categorization has never been greater, be it for finding commonalities among large groups of people or automatically tagging large volumes of Web content. The Apache Mahout project aims to make building intelligent applications easier and faster. Mahout co-founder Grant Ingersoll introduces the basic concepts of machine learning and then demonstrates how to use Mahout to cluster documents, make recommendations, and organize content.

The Mahout project was started by several people involved in the Apache Lucene (open source search) community with an active interest in machine learning and a desire for robust, well-documented, scalable implementations of common machine-learning algorithms for clustering and categorization. The community was initially driven by Ng et al.'s paper "Map-Reduce for Machine Learning on Multicore" but has since evolved to cover much broader machine-learning approaches.