Two Heads in a Saloon

[This is just a time pass story/experience. NOM to any race, country or type of work they do.]

It is a Sunday and a nice summer morning in the city of San Antonio, United States of America. Krishna recently has come to this city on a project work for a big client of his IT services company. It has been a month since he is here and he is planning to have haircut this weekend. Time is 9 AM and as a bachelor after marriage (staying away from his family), he is currently sharing his apartment with another colleague and friend, Ram. Ram is staying in US from past 1 year.

Krishna: Ram, can you tell me where the nearest saloon is located at? I don’t mind if it is a bit expensive but they should complete the haircut decently.

Ram: The nearest one takes 10 min to walk, right beside the grocery store and they charge you $10. There are saloons where they charge less than that but they are far away from here.

Krishna: That’s cool! Is there anything to remember before going to the saloon? I am going to the saloon for the first time in US and I am a bit excited.

[Krishna is excited because he had few bad experiences from his childhood related to haircut. So he is enquiring more than needed and is a bit scared too. He generally does need based talk.]

Ram (very casually): Nothing much, just tell them how you want to get it done, Clipper or scissors? If you are not used to clipper, I suggest you to take the option of scissors.

Krishna: Thanks man, I will have my haircut done today. See you!

While walking to the saloon, he has various things running in his mind. Actually, his head started ‘fissioning’ into 2 heads, one is the head that the world could see and the other is the imaginary head that talks only to the first head. The eyes of the first head are seeing the path towards the saloon while the eyes of his second head are imagining a typical US saloon environment. However his imagination is a ‘fusion’ of typical Indian saloon with American guys doing the haircut. Finally he reached the saloon.

The Lady: Hello Sir, Good Morning. How are you doing today?

Krishna (Head 1) HH.. Hi … I am doing well. How are you?

Krishna (Head 2): What! A lady in a saloon? Got it, this saloon is for both gents and ladies. I hope this will be my last surprise today.

The Lady: Doing Well! How can I help you today?

Krishna (Head 1) I am looking for a haircut today.

The Lady: Sure, please come over. You are our first customer today. Please have a seat in that chair, I will be right back.

Krishna (Head 1) Thanks!

Krishna (Head 2): Hmm, looks like the guy who does the haircut for gents is inside. She went to call him.

[The lady came back after couple of minutes and started to prepare Krishna for the haircut by covering him with a cloth from neck to toe.]

The Lady: Ok sir, what size you want to have the haircut?

Krishna (Head 1) Please make it near to short length.

The Lady: Do you have a number?

Krishna (Head 1) Number? I do not know any number. What is that?

The Lady: Ok, so you might be new to this. Let us say 1 stands for a very mild haircut and 5 stands for completely tonsured head, what is your preference?

Krishna (Head 1) Aaa..aa…aa…

Krishna (Head 2): Unexpected man! Ram didn’t tell about this before. Whatever, let us do not take risk. Anyway, this lady doesn’t understand the gent’s preference of haircut; just tell her 3 which will be medium and the safest option. When will the other guy come to do my haircut?

Krishna (Head 1) Let us make it 3.

The Lady: OK sir, that suits you as you look like an office going professional. Let me start.

Krishna (Head 1) Are you going to do the hair cut?

The Lady: Yes sir, any problem?

Krishna (Head 2): Whaaatt!!

Krishna (Head 1) O..O…Ok, is it possible for you to use scissors?

The Lady: Sure sir, I should have asked your preference. There is no major difference though, the scissors take much more time but I will take your option.

Krishna (Head 1) Thank you!!

Krishna (Head 2): Unreal maaannn!! For the first time, you hair is being cut by a lady!!

[The Scissors started making noise and the hair started to appear the blanket cloth covered on the rest of the body]

The Lady: Are you married?

Krishna (Head 1) Yes

The Lady: How many kids do you have?

Krishna (Head 1) I have a daughter who is 1 year old.

The Lady: I have a daughter who just crossed 18 years of age.

Krishna (Head 2): Why are you telling this to me?

Krishna (Head 1) Ahaa..ok…

The Lady: You know we have to be very careful with these kids at this age. I know you have lot of time but I am telling you. You should be a very strict father and your wife should be a strict mother. Otherwise they will never listen to us….

[The Lady started to tell her experiences and opinions.]

[After 5 min]

Krishna (Head 2): Am I still in the real world? An Indian having a haircut done by a Chinese or Vietnamese lady in America. Wow, this is globalisation.

[After 5 min]

The Lady: And you should never say yes to them at the first time. They are shouting in the car. And I stopped the car in the middle of highway and asked them to leave the car if they shout......

Krishna (Head 2): God! Why is she telling all this to me? Is she actually doing what she is supposed to do? Is she doing size 3 or 5? When will she stop tell me all her stories?

Krishna (Head 1) Ok, what happened next?

[After 5 min]

The Lady: And I said no. I asked them not to power off the cooler and switch to the heater and vice versa on their will. They should take my permission to do it. After all, I am paying the current bill….

Krishna (Head 2): Hey Head1, just sleep man. You don’t have to listen to her. Or at least acknowledge her every one minute. Don’t just sit silent.

[After 5 min, she goes on]

The Lady: Especially, University going girls should be very careful. It is different in this part of the country. We don’t just leave them to dating and other things in our side of the earth. Here they don’t care and you should not let your grown up fall into that…….

Krishna (Head 2): Will my haircut be done today? When? When? When? The stories are getting over but not the actual work. Come on, for how long your ears can bear this? Looks like this saloon has some offers. Come for haircut and get ears bleed for free. We have to have exceptions for people like this in every country, every state, every city, and every family.

[After 10 min]

The Lady: Sir..Sir..

Krishna (Head 1) Yeah

The Lady: we are done. You can pay at the counter.

Krishna (Head 2): Hurray!! You know what, only I know that you had a quick nap in past 5 minutes.

Krishna (Head 1) Y..Ye..Yeah…sure lets go.

The first saloon experience in a different country has left memories in Krishna’s brain. Although the second head disappeared later, it is such a different experience for him. He changed the saloon the next time he did his haircut and the problems continued. 

Deleting customised web applications in SharePoint 2010 – HTTP 404 Error

General Introduction

Deleting SharePoint 2010 applications is always an easy task. At least for the web applications with site collections having no major customisations and features activated on them, it is moderately easy to go to Central administration -> Manage Web Applications -> select the required Web application and click delete button from the ribbon. It immediately prompts to select the 2 major components to be deleted which are the content database and the IIS container sites. You can select either one of them or both and click OK to delete the required web applications. Alternatively, Windows PowerShell can be leveraged to remove the web application by using the Remove-SPWebapplication cmdlet with -DeleteIISSite and/or –RemoveContentDatabases option(s) as required.

Problem Description

However, if your farm is heavily customised with many farm level solutions used by various web applications, it is not easy to delete a web application. This is what I have learnt from my experience. When I tried to a web application which is heavily customised and is also extended to a different zone with a different type of authentication, the application is not getting deleted although I tried to delete the web application in various ways mentioned above. The error I was getting is a typical SharePoint error page with a correlation ID and a message “404: File not found”. At the first second, I thought “What! A 404 error?” Then I checked the IIS container sites which are removed from the server. But the web application continued to appear in the web application management page in the central administration.

Troubleshooting & Resolution

I tried to troubleshoot further to check if there was timer job still running or hung by any chance. I browsed to Timer job definitions in the Monitoring section of central administration. However, this page started to show the same error. It was at this point that I realised there was something else going on. Time for ULS logs!! I checked the correlation ID in the ULS log and found that there were few custom application DLLs missing in the registry. These DLLs were part of the solutions (wsps) that were deployed to the web application to be deleted. I had no idea why the DLLs got knocked out of registry since I was not removing the WSPs. The WSPs which were deployed only to the web application, that I was removing, changed their status to “Not Deployed” state but the DLLs were never knocked out. I could not find a clue for why they got knocked out. I had manually placed those missing DLLs listed in ULS logs back in the registry in all the servers of the farm and did an IISReset. Then the timer job definitions page started working. And, we were able to successfully delete the web application too. The manage web applications page did not display the web application this time.

Looking back into what has happened, when we have a farm with highly customised applications, I think it is always recommended to deploy the DLLs (WSPs) to the bin directory of the application’s virtual directory rather than the system’s assembly.

I hope this post helps in resolving this type of issues that you might be facing.

A trip to Florida

Recently my wife, my daughter and I went on a 5 day trip to Florida State in the United States. Unlike my earlier travel related posts, I decided not write about this trip in multiple posts because there is less to explain and more to experience when we visit this state. Florida is all about enjoying God’s nature and man’s creation. Here are the top tourist places that we visited in Florida. Although there are many other places to visit (list can be found in the internet), these are the must see places that a visitor should keep in mind before planning the visit. 

• Florida Keys and Key West
• Miami – city and the beach
•  Orlando – Various entertainment parks (Disney World, Universal Studios and Sea World)
• Kennedy space centre
• Ft. Lauderdale, Tampa
• Islands around Florida
• Everglades National Park

Can we cover all these in 5 days? NO. You have to spend at least 15 days to cover each and every aspect in detail. However, my visit didn’t include few places in the above list. I will explain them below.

Day 0, we travelled from Houston to Ft. Lauderdale the previous day and reached our cousin’s place; who stay near to Ft. Lauderdale city. The city of Ft. Lauderdale had some road extension constructions going on and luckily, they did not stop us anywhere in the travel. We, along with my cousin’s family travelled together and visited various places.

Day 1, we went on a guided ferry trip in Ft. Lauderdale city. It was a 45 min trip in the back waters of Ft. Lauderdale sea side city. By the way, Ft. Lauderdale is called Venice of the America because of these back waters, just like Alleppey in India. The guide on the ferry explained various places on the trip and mostly, we had seen various costliest houses of the United States that were constructed on banks of back waters. The average prices were in multiples of millions of dollars. Also we happened to see the ‘Oasis Of The Seas’ cruise which is largest cruise ship in the world. After the ferry trip, we went to the city of Miami. Miami is around 40 minutes away from Ft. Lauderdale. We went straight to the Miami Beach which is one of the most famous beaches around the world. There are a many places of interest around the Miami Beach and the beach is famous for various reasons. As a family, there are few places to exclude in that beach but in general, the beach is sandy and water is clear. The water in the beach gives an introduction to how the water is going to be in rest of beaches and Florida Keys. Especially after seeing the beach in Houston, TX (Galveston) and other places, it was a very pleasant experience. The shore looks greenish blue and the water was so clear that we could see our feet when we stood waist depth in the water. We drove back home, had dinner and it was a nice day.

Day 2, we started little late in the morning on the Sunday to Key West. When we saw the map initially, it was given that we have to travel straight on US 1 highway which starts in Key West. That makes sense because Key West is the southernmost point of the country of United States. The sad part is US 1 is not like other highways at least from Miami. It has lot of traffic signals and later is a single lane road. This made driving a little boring for us. After travelling around miles from Ft. Lauderdale, we started crossing the keys, which were basically islands in the form of a chain, Key West being the last island in that chain. There are bridges connecting each key and one of the most important of such bridges is the seven mile bridge which connects Key West to its previous island and is constructed on the sea. Travelling on it is a wonderful experience with blue-greenish water around and white colour sandy shores. Key West is

famous for sunset ride, water sports, parties and liquor. We reached around 2 PM in Key West. We initially planned to do parasailing and snorkelling in our trip. I was very interested in snorkelling and my wife was interested in parasailing. Out of 3 trips that happen every day for snorkelling in Key West, we had reserved for the last trip at 5 PM. Meanwhile, we visited the Key West beach which was again a wonderful beach. That reminded of all the songs of Indian movies that were made in foreign beaches. Then we went on to see the southernmost point buoy in Key West, took some pics. We were left with very less time to reach the point to board the cruise for snorkelling trip. And when I reached the point that we thought we should take the cruise, we came to know that the cruise should be boarded from a different point that is 10 min away. We searched a lot and reached that place finally but were already late as the cruise left. That was how I missed the snorkelling adventure. However,

there was a glass bottomed boat trip to see the corral reeves of the sea. These corral reeves are the second biggest in the world. The tour also included sunset watch which was an awesome experience too. We drove back to home and it was midnight when we reached home.

Day 3 & 4, we travelled to Orlando from Ft. Lauderdale. It was a 3 hour drive on toll way. We went straight to Universal Studios, Orlando. There were 2 parks in Universal Studios; the first one was actual Universal Studios and the second one was ‘The Island of Adventures’. The first one is full of shows/rides and the second one full of rides. We are not physically capable enough to enjoy the rides, so we confined only to park 1. This park had various shows and rides with various movies as their themes. To mention the important ones, the Shrek 4D

show, the Mummy ride, the E.T ride and the Men in Black show were attractive. I did wall climbing as well in Universal Studios. We covered Universal Studio Park pretty much in day because of less rush as we went there on Monday. We left to Hotel and had dinner in the evening. It was a tiring day. The next day we left to Disney World in Orlando. As the name goes, it is a world of its own. It has in total 6 parks with various themes and each park can take a minimum of 1 day to cover. So the Disney world can take up to 6 days if you are interested. We went to the main park, the Magical Kingdom, which was a big park with lot of shows and activities for Kids. There was a castle which the main logo of Disney animations and productions and it was an attraction by itself. Initially, I was bored from morning till evening and we were completely drained out walking in the park. But the

last 3 events in the night: the electrical parade, the projections show on the castle and the fireworks on the castle were the top events one should never miss. Kids might enjoy a lot all throughout the day though. When these 3 shows were over, every visitor leaves this park at the same time. Believe me, you would be under the impression that the entire world was in front of you in the crowd. Disney management had made pretty good arrangements to handle the crowd and made sure they leave the palace with in decent amount of time and less pain. We had come back to Ft. Lauderdale the same night and it was almost 3 AM when we reached home.

Day 5, we had the small disappointment that we couldn’t complete snorkelling and parasailing. So

we did parasailing in Ft. Lauderdale that day. It was an experience that cannot be explained in words. One should feel it when you are tied with belts to a parachute which in turned was tied to a boat going at a regulated speed in the sea. We would be sent slowly from the running boat (sea level) to the parachute (400ft from sea level). Those few minutes make an exciting journey when we the corrals from that height beneath the ocean and birds would be flying under your feet catching the fish. That was a wonderful experience and completely safe to do. This was the same day we returned back to Houston and the trip ended. Overall, it was a nice experience. The one line that came into my mind, when we went to see the sea shores, was from a keerthana by Shree Annamayya.

                చిత్తములో భావమెల్లా శ్రీవేంకటేశుడే హత్తినప్రకృతి యెల్లా నాతనిమాయే

Which means All the feelings in the mind is the Lord Venkateswara and the entire nature that attracts your mind is His magic.

I know I could not cover much but we had a list of to-cover items and we managed to cover them all in 5 days.