Blog by Padmanaban Anandan

Close all tabs in Chrome, Samsung Galaxy Android

2022-08-01T06:48:00.003-04:00

Tap and Hold x on any tab to reveal the close all tabs command.

Fairfax area to Airport

2014-08-09T13:29:00.002-04:00

The Washington flyer bus from West falls has moved to Reston station (silver line). It's only ironic that the closer you get to airport, the lesser you pay and it sure is translated with the move.

Fairfax area fireworks

2014-08-09T13:26:00.001-04:00

The best fireworks for July 4 is undoubtedly DC area. Falls Church has impressive fireworks and should top the ones in Fairfax county.

Fairfax Outdoor movies

2014-08-09T13:22:00.002-04:00

Summer outdoor movies are always good. This summer has been particularly mild. Mosaic center is the place to go on Fridays to catch some good flicks.

Fairfax county Silver line

2014-08-09T13:20:00.002-04:00

Finally it has arrived. Took a ride recently, pretty cool to see Fairax County McLean area transforming to a nice public commuter friendly place.

Powershell

2013-11-09T05:41:00.000-05:00

At first, skeptical about using Windows Powershell. Later it was a good tool to live with for Keyboard pros than fiddle around with UI.

Sure, windows 7 has improved vastly compared to XP. At the end of the day, does the work get done is all that matters. Linux, Mac OS or anything for that matter should let users discover features with minimal learning to fulfill their work.

Mosaic District, Falls Church, Fairfax County, Northern Virginia

2013-11-09T05:35:00.003-05:00

The good - Nice film center with free movies during summer. New restaurants, Target store with ample parking. Target is high end here, so doesn't have some regular lower priced stuff seen in other target stores.

The bad - There is no such thing. It's a good place to spend an entire evening and feel good about the experience while slimming down the wallet.

Thanksgiving 2013

2013-11-09T05:31:00.002-05:00

Considering it's densely populated, Fairfax county Northern Virginia does have it's charm. Anytime traffic on weekends just becomes magnanimous during holiday season. The fun of shopping on Thanksgiving night is good too. It was funny last year to see every school kid lining up at Urban outfitters or some store which pretty much sells graphic tees, which does appeal to that demographic.

One thing for sure. It's no good to do door busters shopping when such deals are available all year long. Just that it needs some patience or time for research.

Weather predictions...

2013-11-09T05:26:00.002-05:00

It's 2013 winter season. Living in Northern VA Fairfax county, I've seen winter patterns for the past 7 seasons. Snow fall generally happens end of the year or early next year. But the cold weather does catch up right at the tail end of fall. It's chilly, windy and reminds that seasons change for a reason. It's pleasant to have summer all year or just spring all year. I guess there is an age for that which yearns for it. At this time, I'm still good with whatever Mother Nature spins up from it's Kitchen.

Multitasking...

2013-11-09T05:21:00.003-05:00

At best, it's better to do one thing at a time then do everything simultaneously compared to carrying no good memories of work just done.

Metro development...

2013-10-16T06:50:00.001-04:00

Washington metro extending connectivity in Northern VA Fairfax county looks pretty much done. The landscape has changed, stations and trains flying over than being subway. The traffic situation might improve, but it might very well make the new places face entry/exit traffic during peak work hours.

Housing Market Fairfax County

2013-04-17T07:50:00.002-04:00

The housing market is recovering very nicely in Fairfax, Northern Virginia.

Median Sales price have increased by 8% and Units Sold down by 2%.

What does this mean? More people are preferring to keep their homes from selling and are looking to sell on the uptrend, maybe at the peak.

Is this a good sign of Housing Market Recovery?

Does Sequestration and Budget Cuts have a bearing on Sales? We won't know until a year from now. This state has been immune to nation-wide economic downturn, as Federal spending weren't impacted. It might be different this year as the region and workers braces budget & spending cuts for 2013.

Let's catch up a year from now on this Post.

Fairfax county Parkway renumbered?

2013-04-02T21:24:00.001-04:00

Reasoning behind naming Route 7100 (Fairfax county parkway) to 286, converts it from secondary to primary road, meaning it may be eligible for new funding and maintenance priorities. The route can get federal funding for paving, guardrail and bridge improvements, along with other projects. The feds typically cover 80 percent of the cost to maintain interstates and primary roads. The state generally pays the remaining 20 percent.

Best buy Fairfax or Vienna...

2013-03-31T07:32:00.001-04:00

Apple fans can get another fix for their appetite. Great deals on best buy clearance when you buy 3rd generation which is as good ad 4th except for a different port connector. Get them for $320 while it lasts.

Winter season at Fairfax, VA

2013-02-23T08:56:00.001-05:00

2013 winter in Fairfax County Virginia has been completely contrary to 2012 winter season. The usual pattern of cold and freezing temperature during Dec to Mar seems unusual thanks to warm winter that made us feel it this time. The blessing is, or so far, we've dodged hurricane Sandy, and recent battering that Connecticut and upper North Eastern states took sparing our region. It's Feb, most tail end and this month which has been notorious for blizzards of 2009/2010 has some more days left to a suspense ending.

Living in Fairfax County, Virginia

2012-06-29T19:51:00.002-04:00

Fairfax county is located about 10 miles south of Washington DC. It has the reputation of being one of the top populous county in Virginia (VA) but ranks in the top 3 wealthily places to live. It is home to Tysons Corner which is the sixth largest mall in the Nation and second in the east. It also has parks and recreation which is top-notch, few to mention are Burke Lake and Occoquan Regional park.

-Padmanaban Anandan

Dell Inspiron 600m - Windows 7 Upgrade - Step by Step Instructions

2010-09-06T19:27:00.000-04:00

If you love your Dell Inspiron 600m laptop, you will love it even further after installing Windows 7.

Most of the web sites and search engine results will not give proper guidance. Since Dell is also wanting you to buy their latest hardware, they may not tell that Inspiron 600m that debuted in 2004 may not be good.
Don't feel left down.

Here are the easy and simple steps to upgrade to Windows 7.

1. Take backup of only important files such as documents and photos and Outlook email personal folder files etc. by burning them to a DVD. You may even upload to Windows Live SkyDrive that may give up to 25GB of storage depending on whether you live in US. Other places get a minimum 2 GB.

2.Do not bother about existing software that came when you bought your Dell in 2004. Chances are that they just lie in your PC dormant or if you have used them sparingly.
Any Productivity software such as Microsoft office have better versions now. So just disregard your love for Dell OEM software.

3. If you have downloaded Microsoft Windows 7 ISO image, I recommend that your burn it on to a DVD.

4. While booting up your Dell, make sure boot from CD / DVD is right on top by changing in the BIOS screen.

5. Now , with Windows 7 disc inserted, boot up your Dell and press any key to boot from CD when prompted.

6. Windows 7 Setup prompt.

7. Chances are you have a 40 GB hard disk, there may be some GB assigned to OEM such as Dell for automatic recovery. Go ahead, delete OEM partitions. Trust me, you will not need windows XP anymore.

8. Create a new partition, allocate full space to it. windows 7 may ask for 100 MB for System Reserve. Choose that. Very Important!!! Your Dell has now gotten a new OS almost and your old Hard disk has been wiped of its data when you do this step. Just say farewell and move on.

9. Follow onscreen instructions...............and now ........Windows 7 has been setup on your PC.
Congratulations!!!!!

10.Okay, now wireless does not work for you, isn't it? Well, visit Intel.com and choose its Driver update tool. You will be scared by Intel folks that they discontinued support for Intel Wireless 2000 BG adapter and not have a windows 7 update.Microsoft has a workaround for you.....Read on....

11. Windows 7 is not completely re-written. Just Vista revamped and marketed well by Microsoft folks...and the good part is Intel had a driver update for Windows Vista, which works just fine with Windows 7. So go ahead, download the driver, run the setup and then restart your PC.
Your wireless network is now active.

12. One more final step. Visit Dell.com support website. Enter your service tag for Inspiron 600m. It may provide you drivers selectively. Again, since Microsoft has built upon XP to Vista to Windows 7, you can download all XP drivers from Dell site. you may not need all of them except for the SigmaTel Audio.

13. Your Inspiron 600m continues to amaze with its new found mate Windows 7......Let the love continue for you too....

Actionspane or simple pane for Excel 2003

2010-04-14T09:40:00.000-04:00

Actions pane are not available for programming in Excel 2003 using VSTO for VS 2008.
However, there is a workaround.
Create an office commandbar, Add a user control to it of type activeX.
Make your C# class com visible, create a new GUID and assign the attribute.
make your project COM Visible and also strong named.
The User control in .net containing windows forms controls will be available enabling you to create application level pane similar to actions pane.

The following piece of code is undocumented in MSDN but is a key thing.

objPane = (Office._CommandBarActiveX)actionsPane.Controls.Add(Microsoft.Office.Core.MsoControlType.msoControlActiveX, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, Missing.Value, true);
objPane.ControlCLSID = "";
objPane.Width = 900;
objPane.Height = 337;
objPane.Visible = true;

The key is set CLSID to the object GUID .

SQL Server Management Studio 2005

2010-03-09T17:45:00.000-05:00

If you are like me, who got used to modifying stored procedures by right-clicking and clicking modify and if you had tinkered around the scripting options, then you will find it confusing that suddenly sp_executesql seems to appear in the script and not the normal one.
Wonder why?
This will happen if you make IF NOT EXISTS option to be true.
This will cause management studio to display the script on modify or script new to be using sp_executesql syntax.
Turn IF NOT EXISTS option to false, and you will be fine.

Connect to Oracle from Visual Studio 2008 Server Explorer

2010-02-12T15:09:00.000-05:00

If you want to connect to Oracle from Visual Studio 2008 Server Explorer, follow the below steps.

Install ODP.Net from Oracle (latest version)
While installing, make sure client bits are installed
After installation, add the following Enviroment variable
TNS_ADMIN pointing to the folder containing TNSNAMES.ORA

If there is no existing Oracle home, then copy TNSNAMES.ORA sample from Network/Admin/Samples folder and modify to your needs.
That's it.
Happy Programming....

Crystal Reports Version 10 with .Net 1.1 / Visual Studio 2003

2010-01-07T15:28:00.000-05:00

Recently, I faced a strange problem.
One of my crystal reports had a sub report.
The sub report was displaying data partially though the entire data was made available to it.
This is a push method where Dataset gets formed and assigned as datasource to the crystal reports using SetDataSource method.
After hours of digging, I finally found out that, if you have sub reports, always set the datasource of the subreport and then set the datasource to the main report.
Hope it helps.

Windows XP Explorer Right click menu does not popup or slow

2009-07-02T14:17:00.000-04:00

I had this strange problem with right click on any file other than .cmd, .exe causing windows explorer to hang for like 45 seconds. After much searching on the web, came across this solution.
I used Reg Scan utility from Nirsoft, searched for registry values beginnning with \\ which denotes network path. Most the registry keys tied to these values where Shell, Open command for some registered file types and classes. When I pinged the IP address or network path, it was not going , so deleted all these entries. Bingo!!! Right click is now faster.

Also, the New menu under the right click context menu was taking some time. Some newly installed programs were causing this issue. If you don't recognize an entry in it, it is better to delete it. You can do this by using Nirsoft's Reg scan utility or shellexview from Nirsoft.

Unspecfied Error OledbException

2009-06-04T11:07:00.000-04:00

System.Data.OleDb.OleDbException: Unspecified error at System.Data.OleDb.OleDbConnection.ProcessResults(Int32 hr) at System.Data.OleDb.OleDbConnection.InitializeProvider() at System.Data.OleDb.OleDbConnection.Open() at

Cause:
You use Microsoft.JET OleDB Provider to open connection to Excel file or Access using windows forms or console application in .net/C# and you get this error.You most probably use a windows service account for running the application that uses above code.

Solution:
The Microsoft JET writes temporary files to the folder identified by TEMP user environment variable.For service accounts, due to server policies, this folder may be removed periodically.
The solution is to progammatically create this folder first if it doesn't exist so that this dreaded error doesn't come.

System.Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("temp") will get you the variable identified by temp. Create this folder using this code piece.

if(!System.IO.Directory.Exists(System.Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("temp")))
{
System.IO.Directory.CreateDirectory(System.Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("temp"));
}

Hope this helps.

SVN - Unable to retrieve folder information from the server

2009-04-01T16:45:00.000-04:00

If you have SVN installed, Web projects on VS.Net 2003 may not open correctly.
This is because SVN maintains source control information in a hidden folder called .svn.

This problem can be resolved.
Go to SVN settings and choose _svn instead of .svn directories.
Tortoise SVN may scare you saying you may lose working copies of existing projects.It will also require a system restart.There is a work around for not losing exising source control information.Here is what you should do.You can search for existing .svn directories using windows search and rename them manually to _svn. SVN will automatically reflect uncommited files by changing its image.

Once this is done, go to System Root\ Document and Settings \ User Name. Remove the folder called VSWebCache.This is a temporary folder which Visual studio creates for faster loading of web projects. Nothing will be lost on deleting this folder.

Now, if you open the web project, it will open correctly.