BarCamp Bangalore 4e

If you are a geek, you already know what i am talking about. Mentioning here for completeness, the 4th edition will be held on 28th and 29th July 07 in IIM, Bangalore campus. Visit the site for more details.

If you still haven’t heard about it, then you might first consider reading this to understand the concept behind a bar camp. And then i urge, you must visit the venue and join the camp. It promises a geeky and techy weekend extravaganza. You will get to know a lot of latest and greatest techno trends and the geeks thoughts about them, not to mention the opportunity to network with the best of the Bangalore techies.

You can visit the site and register yourself in collectives of your interest. It costs you nothing but promises a technical value-add.

 

Bangalore restaurant driving directions

I have have mapped a few good dine-in restaurants in Bangalore and shared using a public Google map.  The link to it is posted in my other blog here. You can now use the map to find the driving directions to a restaurant. The map now only has a few restaurants because i have only put the ones that i have visited and liked. If you feel any other restaurant should be added here, please name it. We will collect reviews on it and add.

Management Portlet problem on JBoss portal

I get the following problem when i go to the admin page of a fresh Jboss portal 2.4 installation and try to access the Management Portlet.

/WEB-INF/jsp/management/index.xhtml @41,58 rendered="#{!empty node.children}": Exception getting value of property children of base of type : org.jboss.portal.core.portlet.management.LazyPortalObjectTreeNode

The problem has been reported already in Jboss forums. See the link. But no response as usual.

Aparently its an issue with the jre version used to start the Jboss instance. You must use jre 1.4.x or 1.5 to see everything working correctly in portal 2.4. I was on jsk 6.0 and hence the problem. Now wondering, what about backword compatibility? Is it the problem with JRE or JBoss?

Running JBoss Portal on Windows

Installation of JBoss on Windows is as simple as unzipping the download bundle into a folder. And to run the JBoss server, you just need to goto the bin folder and execute run.bat. It should run fine as long as you have appropriate JRE installed on your machine.

However it didn’t work fine for me and i could see the JBoss server console scrolling endless with error messages logged in it. They were JVM_BIND error messages for a specific port. (1098 to be specific).


java.rmi.server.ExportException: Port already in use: 1098; nested exception is:
java.net.BindException: Address already in use: JVM_Bind
at sun.rmi.transport.tcp.TCPTransport.listen(TCPTransport.java:310)

Solution:

Obviously some process on my machine is occupying that port. How do i know? Use the following command,

netstat -o

It should list down all the processes and port numbers currently being used by them. You can pick up the process id, go to task manager and kill the process. Now restart the server and it wouldn’t complain.

But killing processes on Windows is not advisable unless you are absolutely sure about the utility of the process, which i guess nobody other than M$ guys know. So whats the solution?

The other way to solve it would be to reconfigure JBoss to use the ports numbers which are free in your system. Find out all the config files where port 1098 (in my example) is configured and replace it with a port number which is free. The above netstat command will help identify free port numbers.

Who provides good Petrol?

For a couple of months now i have been collecting data about all the gasoline / petrol vendors in Bangalore, so that i could make an informed decision on whom to choose next time my car needs fuel. The results i found were surprising.

The below data is about the mileage i got from each vendor on purchase of INR 1000/- worth of normal unleaded petrol. Going by the current petrol prices you get around 19.5x to 19.8x liters in that amount. Just see the variance even when its recorded on the same car, during the same period, by the same driver (and driving style), on almost the same route and under same tyre pressure.

Petrol Vendor	Mileage (km)
BP	230
HP	210
Indian Oil	265
IBP	not recorded
Shell	270

I am yet to collect data about a couple of them mentioned above. Will update the post later. Hope this will be useful to others.