A Journey that was not!!! - Mumbai

Mumbai is a place where common people face uncommon things and still manage to survive. It is also a place where people come to fulfil their dreams. I also have a special attachment with this place. You see, my wife is from mumbai while I am located in pune.

Every once in a while, we come here to spend some time with her parents (who are now my parents as well ;)). At the time of writing this blog, am on one of those visits.

We came here last week and spent good time with family. We made visits to temples, watched movies, visited places. In all, had a really good time.

Yesterday was our return journey to Pune.We started from kanjurmarg at around 2:15 pm and our plan was to reach thane before 3 to be able to catch the Singhad Express.We were completely clueless of what was in store for us and many others like us.

We reached kanjurmarg station in few minutes. While on the platform we heard the announcement that the kurla and sion station railway lines were submerged in several feets of water.And hence the local trains were cancelled for indefinite time.

We then tried ola, uber but were disapponited with extra high rates. The ubiquitous auto came to our resque. We took an auto to thane and were charged 200 bucks. Still a better deal compared to the exhorbitant rates offered by the cabs.

By the time we reached thane, it had started to rain very heavily. And the downpour continued for over 3 hours from the time we reached the station. In this time, we checked the status of our train and got to know that it has not even started from its origin i.e. CST.

After waiting for over an hour, we decided that it would be better to head back to kanjurmarg as there was no update on our train. And the locals were also cancelled. We then started checking with auto drivers to take us back home.

Our problem was compounded by the fact that we were not carrying any umbrella and that our son was growing restless with each passing second. Checking with autos did not yield any positive response as no one was ready to take the risk due to uncertain situation.

Finally, god showed some mercy. While waiting on the platform, we had befriended a lady. She informed us that she was waiting for her husband who was coming to pick her. And offered to drop us till kanjurmarg skywalk. We couldn't have asked for more.

By the time her husband arrived, we had enquired with several auto and taxi drivers. And tried hiring cab as well. But to no avail. Then we boarded the zylo brought by the lady's husband. They also allowed two other people to board their car.

It was on this journey back to kanjurmarg that we saw how bad the situation really was. Multiple times , we had to pass through several feets of muddy water. We saw many vehicles faltering and eventually coming to a halt right in the pool of water. And had to be moved manually to cross the pool.

Fortunately, we were in zylo which has a very sturdy build. And hence were able to cross these pools without any risk. All the while, one of the other passenger kept sharing his experiences of the entire day and that how his house was flooded with water and that his mother was alone at home and hence needed to reach home quickly.

After dropping these two people on the way, the zylo finally reached the kanjurmarg skywalk. We got down there while the good Samaritans went on their way towards vikhroli. In this hustle bustle, we forgot to ask their name as well. However, they will forever remain in our memory as true angels, who converted our terrible day into a memorable one with their kindness.

May God bless them!!

Adding Compare Plugin in Notepad++ 64-bit

Greetings!!

As you might be aware, Plugin-Manager is presently  not available in Notepad++ 64-bit version. As the name suggests, it allows to manage the plug-ins in Notepad++ such as Compare, Converter, MIME Tools etc. 

Good thing is that the absence of Plugin-Manager does not prevent us from adding plug-ins manually.

Recently, i felt the need and hence added the Compare plug-in manually in Notepad++ 64-bit

Below is what i did:

1. I downloaded the Compare plug-in from this location:

• https://github.com/pnedev/compare-plugin/releases/tag/v2.0.0

2. Name of this plug-in is ComparePlugin_v2.0.0_X64.zip

3. Unzipped the contents of this folder and found the below files inside:

• Folder called ComparePlugin
• And a file called ComparePlugin.dll

4. Copied these two inside the plugin folder of Notepad++ located here:

• C:\Program Files\Notepad++\plugins

5. The plugins folder looked something like this:

6. Restart the Notepad++

7. Compare plug-in should now be available, as seen below:

8. Cheers!!

Unable to find a java virtual machine in Oracle SQL Developer

Greetings!!

I do believe that some of you must have encountered the below error in your IT career:

You did a fresh installation of Oracle SQL Developer on your Windows machine, say, Windows 7 or Windows Server 2012 etc. Or it might be the case that its already installed on the machine and this is the first time that you have started it. It will pop-up the below dialogue box:

You might end up pointing it to the wrong java.exe path, something like:

• C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.8.0_121\bin\java.exe

Now what happens is that it will write this entry in the sqldeveloper.conf available at path like this:

• C:\app\elib\product\11.2.0\client_1\sqldeveloper\sqldeveloper\bin

It will look like this:

As you can, this is the same wrong path that you entered the first time. And because of this, every time you try to launch the Sql Developer, it will give the message like below:

Right?? :)

Be rest assured, there are two ways to resolve this:

Option 1. Delete this entry from the .conf file mentioned above. This will then cause the prompt to appear again. You can then give the correct path. It should be something like this (might be slightly different on your machine depending on your oracle version etc.): 

• C:\app\elib\product\11.2.0\client_1\jdk\bin\java.exe

The Sql Developer will then start as expected!

Option 2. Replace this wrong path with the correct path, something like :

• C:\app\elib\product\11.2.0\client_1\jdk\bin\java.exe

And then try to start the Sql Developer and it should start as expected!

Cheers!!

How to resolve "api-ms-win-crt-runtime-l1-1-0.dll" file missing error

You might be aware of the media player software application called Kodi. I have been using it for almost a year now on my mobile phone. I tried installing it on my laptop as well but failed due to the above error (mentioned in the post title ;)). Since i was getting the job done on my mobile anyways, i allowed this error to prevent me from installing it on the lappy.

Being a performance testing professional, am not really used to giving up on issues. Hence, decided to give one more try. Below is what i did to resolve the issue (hope it proves useful to you as well):

1. Install all the pending windows updates

2. Go to Control Panel\System and Security\Windows Update and click Check for updates

3. Install all pending updates and restart the computer.After the restart, repeat the above steps till no more updates are found.

4. Download the Visual C++ Redistributable 2015.

• For Windows 64-bit
• Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015 (64-bit)
• For Windows 32-bit
• Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015 (32-bit)

5. Run the vcredist_x64.exe (64-bit) or vcredist_x86.exe (32-bit) and select Uninstall, if already installed.

6. Run the .exe again and select Install and restart the computer.

This is what really worked for me and i have Kodi working on my laptop :)

Using more emoticons on Office Communicator

Using more emoticons on Office Communicator

It must have happened that at some point of time you might have felt the limitations of the emoticons available on the office communicator. I myself have felt the same lot many times.For ex : lot of times, i have felt the need to use the thumbs up icon. But could not do anything about it as this is how the MS wishes it to.

However, recently i found a novel way of overcoming this, at least to some extent. 

Please follow the below steps:-

1. We will make use of the Windows Character Map

2. Go to Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Character Map

3. It looks like this (please select the Font as Windings):-

4. Now, choose the image as shown and click copy:-

5. Now, you can paste this image in the communicator:-

6. You may go ahead and do the same for any other image available, as well.. :). Hope it helped !!!

LR : How to create web_custom_request in LoadRunner

While working on the Flight Booking Application, 

I came across a scenario wherein there were multiple flights needed to be cancelled. The catch was that the count of flights to be cancelled was not fixed. Sometime, it could be 3, sometime 7 etc.

The cancellation request recorded via LoadRunner (in HTML mode) looked like below:

The solution to be above problem was to convert this request into a custom request to dynamically handle the number of flights.

Below is what I did,

I changed the recording options as below:

Then I regenerated the script via below option:

The cancellation request, after regeneration looked like below:

After close observation I understood that there is a repetition of below code, for every flight to be cancelled:

flightID=225259643-798-jB&

flightID=43296680-1568-jB&

flightID=163444829-2337-jB& and so on..

Additionally, there was a repetition of below as well,

.cgifields=33&

.cgifields=32&

.cgifields=90& and so on..

1.       I need to handle these in such a way as to capture each of these for every flight, concatenate them and then substitute in the request in step 3 above.

1.       Below is the code for the same:

a.       Correlations to be captured:-

b.       Code Logic:-

c.      Substitution in Cancellation Request:-

1.       Execution successful!!

Please note: There is a possibility that you might get the below error message during the script re-run:-

To resolve the above, all you need to do is to replace the failing request with its regenerated script counterpart. For ex: I got this error at sign off. So I replaced the Sign Off request as below, i.e. with its custom request:-

And the issue was resolved.

Cheers!!

LR : How to create a correlation rule in LoadRunner

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Steps:-

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• Set the Recording Options under Correlations section as below:-

• Then start the recording (mercury tours application is used here for demo purpose):

• Book the Flight. Then check the itinerary by clicking on the Itinerary button:-

•  Sign Off and stop the recording

• Following dialogue box is displayed once the recording completes:-

• Click on the Details down arrow to display the recording section from where the correlation left and right boundaries can be captured:

Mentioned here for reference (Line 17 – marked in yellow above):

<input type="hidden" name="userSession" value="118948.659133252zVVitcVpzftVzzzHDzHVApfcQQcf"/>

• Close the Design Studio as we will be coming back to it in a short while. Reason for not using the “Add as Rule…” option right away is that the Application name will have to be selected from the existing list (shown below) whereas the rules that we want to create doesn't specifically belong to any of the listed applications. 
  

•       So, First we will create an application as shown in below step and then come back to the design studio to create the rule against our newly created application. Launch the recording options and create the application with user defined name, say, mercury

• Select Mercury application and click on New Rule button on the right. Then enter the below details:-

• Please note that the second dialogue box (Advanced Correlation Properties) in the above snapshot comes upon clicking the Advanced… button. Click on Test… button once the rule has been created and validate the created rule as shown below:

• Now, Launch Design Studio available under Design menu option (this is the same screen that gets generated once the script is freshly recorded)

• Click on Replay&Scan button. The rule(s) that we created in the above steps will now be visible in the Design Studio, as shown below:-

•  Select the Rule and Click on Correlate. The Status column should now show status as applied.

•  Kudos!! You have created a correlation rule and applied it successfully. In a similar fashion, remaining rules can be created.

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