Prasanth's blog

Recently it was in the news that ‘Chronic Dev hacker team’ created an app for intercepting error messages sent from iPhone and send it to their team so that they can dig into them to find some bug. This bug can be utilized to create an efficient Jail break for the iPhone. It is reported that the users response had been overwhelming that "In the first couple of days after CDevreporter   is released   they received about twelve million crash reports”. Does this mean a good number of iPhone users are willing to have a Jail break iPhone? Let us try to dig deeper into this.

We used to export data in the form of .csv file that is one of the easiest formats available. A .csv file can be opened in even Notepad and if it is opened in Microsoft Excel, you can perform calculation with the numbers also. When you open a certain .csv file, Microsoft Excel may show an error that the file is a SYLK file and confirm to open it. Once you confirm it will show error that 'SYLK: File format is not valid'. If you try to open the same file in Notepad or Wordpad you will not see any issue with the data. The problem actually lies with Microsoft Excel. If the first two characters of the file are the uppercase letters "I" and "D", then MS Excel will consider the file as SYLK file and if you try to open it with MS Excel it will show error as the file is not actually an SYLK file. Solution: Open the file in notepad and change the first two characters of the file to lower case, if they are I and D. So, 'ID' will change to 'id'. ...

I had created a demo for integrating Open Search to web pages. Here is the link to the working demo for Open Search. http://www.prasanthkumars.com/demo/searchdemo.asp

I am working with a lot of data import modules in ColdFusion and there are a lot of issues to handle while doing the import process. The data uploaded will be of different format, different delimiters, empty or null values etc. etc. Here, I am describing a problem where the delimiter is tab and the first element is null. I had to check whether the first element is null. I tried using ListGetAt(stringVariable,1,Chr(9)). Now, what this returned was the first non-empty element and not possible to check whether the first element was null.

***UPDATE*** I was informed by my cousin that it is a native of Kerala, but itz camouflage is too good that it seldom catches our eye. I happened to see a chameleon that I have seen only in TV, near my office. Didn't know this existed in Kerala.

As a developer you will be experienced with SVN for source control in collaborative development environment. One of the popular clients for SVN in Windows is Tortoise SVN. You can right click in the SVN folder and update the contents of the folder from SVN. But, when you have a number of SVN folder, will it be a good idea to automate the SVN so that your files are in sync always. You will need to create a batch (.bat) file for this process. It is very simple.

I am blogging this for my reference. I had spend almost a day to find this. In newer versions of IIS you do not need the help of this command, you can right-click a website on the IIS and create a new website. If you are using IIS 5, you will find this command helpful to clone a website. Steps