University Transcript from Calcutta University – Feb 2016

One might require University transcripts for a number of reasons. Transcripts are required for visa process (Canada/ Australia etc.), applying to US universities etc. The usual process is to contact the University and they should be able to help with the exact steps.

The process below is for CU (Calcutta University) alumni as of Feb 2016. This also assumes that you are available and have enough time to visit the Transcript department in-person on 2 separate days.

For people who do not/can not visit in-person, you’ll be required to authorize someone to submit the application and collect the Transcripts on your behalf.

Prerequisites:

1. Make sure you have at least 30 days in hand.
2. Go through the following document: CU Transcript Instructions [Don’t waste your time by calling the listed phone numbers (numbers are either dysfunctional or there’s no one to pick up) or emailing ( emails are non-deliverable to both the addresses ).
3. Download the form, print and fill it up (preferably with blue ink to make your entries more visible).
4. Photocopies of Registration Certificate, All Marksheets (all semesters/years).
5. Registration Certificate and All Marksheets (Original).
6. Cash ( INR 200 per transcript ).
7. A pen.
8. Willingness to be present in-person to apply on one day (1 – 1.30 hrs depending on how busy the department is on that particular day) AND on a second day to collect the transcripts. (Sorry, they don’t have an online system even in 2016)

Location:

Transcript department is located on the 4th Floor of Darbhanga Building (inside Calcutta University Main Campus ). The nearest Metro station is Central – a 5-minute walk.

Hours:

The Transcript department is open from 11 am to 1.30 pm on weekdays.

Special Note:

1. Even though the form asks for a Demand Draft (DD) to be submitted along with the application, it’s NOT required.

Yeah! I learned it the hard way. I wasted about an hour at a bank getting the DD prepared and when I arrived at the CU Transcript department, they said CASH is preferred.

2. You need not fill up the section that requires University names and locations to which the transcripts are to be sent (assuming you will be collecting it yourself).

Application Process

1. Ensure that you are carrying the items mentioned in the Prerequisites section.
2. Head straight for the CASH section (ask anyone for directions) once you enter the CU Main Campus on College Street. Get a CHALLAN for INR 1/- (One rupee).
3. Darbhanga building is bang opposite the building that has the CASH section/department. Proceed to the 4th Floor (there are elevators available – although they are located in a very non-descript area of the ground floor. Ask someone if you are not able to find them).
4. Follow the directions to the ‘Transcript section’ – as of today, it has been relocated to the back side of the 4th Floor.
5. Once you reach the Transcript section, you’ll be asked (usually) for the purpose of your visit. If not, state politely the purpose of your visit.
6. You’ll then be asked to submit the documents. You may be asked for the originals (I wasn’t – but it’s better to carry them in any case).
7. You’ll be asked to fill up the CHALLAN (In case you forgot step 2 / didn’t bring the CHALLAN, you will usually be provided one and asked to provide a blank one once you have submitted the cash at the CASH section).
8. Next, if the documents are sufficient, the person will sign and state “Please accept” on the CHALLAN which you’ll be required to take to the CASH section and pay the required amount.
9. Visit the CASH section and pay the amount. (Remember to take a Blank CHALLAN if you missed step 2 ). If you are paying in denominations of INR 500 or more, be prepared to enter denomination, note number, your phone number in a separate register which will be provided at the CASH counter.
10. The Cashier will hand you 2 pieces of paper with the particulars of payment.
11. Head back to the Transcript department and hand back one part of the particulars and Blank CHALLAN (if you missed step 2). Keep the other part for your reference which will be required on the day of collecting the transcripts.
12. You will be asked to return at a later date (usually 3 weeks from date of submission) to collect the Transcripts.

 

That’s it – you’re done! Pretty hassle free if you ask me.

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Laravel Homestead installation on Mac

Larval Homestead(0.33)  installation on Mac El Capitan.

Assuming that the latest Virtual Box is already installed, the following are the basic steps required to get the Laravel Homestead box up and running without any errors. Might save a bit of headache for others or for myself in the future.

1. The command as given in Laravel Official Installation docs

vagrant box add laravel/homestead

did not work for me. I downloaded the box from https://atlas.hashicorp.com/laravel/boxes/homestead/versions/0.3.3/providers/virtualbox.box

2. Run:

vagrant box add laravel/homestead <virtualbox zip file>

3. Make an entry in /etc/hosts file as

192.168.10.10  homestead.app

4. Do a vagrant up.

5. If step 3 fails with SSH timeout error, Create new ssh key-pair in a new    location : ssh-keygen -t rsa -C “you@homestead”

6. Set the SSH file locations in ~/.homestead/Homestead.yml

7. Do vagrant up – this time it should succeed.

8. Do a vagrant ssh (This should login the user to the vagrant VM)

9. Create folder structure to reflect the ‘sites’ to the section of the ~/.homestead/Homestead.yml file, typically /home/vagrant/Code/Laravel/public ( Initially, the Laravel/public folder is missing)

10. Ensure the ‘folders’ map section of the ~/.homestead/Homestead.yml file points to a legitimate directory. This will be synched with the vagrant box folder. This is the folder in the host OS( in this case Mac OS El Capitan).

11. Put a info.php with the content <?php phpinfo(); ?> inside the folder created in step 8.

Now, opening http://homestead.app/info.php should open up the php information page indicating that the setup is now complete.

Ahoy Sailor on your Laravel journey!

Installing and using Laravel 4.2 on CentOS 6.5

There have been rave reviews about Laravel and how its supposedly cooler than CodeIgniter etc. I’m new to the PHP world – and I got severely stuck while getting to the ‘You have arrived Laravel homepage’. I spent a couple of days figuring out a ‘sane’ process – and here are the overall steps:

Environment: CentOS 6.5 running on VirtualBox 4.3 (running on Mac OS X Yosemite). [I didn’t want to spend too much time fighting OS X and setting up MAMP etc.).

Firstly, stop and remove Apache HTTPD if present: [ You might need to be root in order to execute this command]

$  service httpd stop

$ yum remove httpd

Re-install HTTPD:

$ yum install httpd

For Laravel 4.2, PHP > 5.4 is required. So, remove any older PHP installations by using:

$ yum remove php-*

[This removes php and its dependencies]

Install PHP 5.6 and Laravel’s hard dependency PHP-MCrypt, PHP-MySQL (if using MySQL):

$ rpm -Uvh https://mirror.webtatic.com/yum/el6/latest.rpm
$ yum install php56w php56w-opcache php56w-mcrypt php56w-mysql

Check PHP version by using : php -v (It should now report version > = 5.6).

Next, download the Laravel master repo, from : https://github.com/laravel/laravel/archive/master.zip, Unzip  and copy extracted folder  to /var/www/<appName> folder.

Add VirtualHost entry to Apache http config file at : /etc/http.d/conf/httpd.conf

<VirtualHost *:80>
     DocumentRoot /var/www/<appName>/public
<Directory /var/www/<appName>/public > 
    AllowOverride all
  </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Find out the Owner and Group of your Apache installation by using:

# egrep -i '^user|^group' /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf 
User apache
Group apache

Change the permission of  app/storage folder and allow the above user to write to it (This avoids the cryptic Exception in error handler and blank page issue after installing Laravel and trying to access http://localhost)

chown -R apache:apache app/storage

You might also need to do:

echo "0" > /selinux/enforce

Now, run the following in the folder /var/www/<appName> folder:

composer install

If PHP version is correct and everything else goes well, the folder should now contain a ‘vendor’ folder that contains all the required dependencies as described in the file composer.json.

Now, restart HTTPD server:

service httpd restart

Point your browser to localhost:80/ and this should bring up the ‘You have arrived ‘ page indicating that Laravel framework is setup properly.

Feel free to ask if you have any issues – I’ll try and help.

Cheers !!

Setting up WordPress locally on Mac OS X

This is specifically for installing WordPress 4.0 and serving it locally using MacOS X built-in Apache.

My recent fascination with WordPress started with me heading to www.wordpress.org and downloading the zipped version. Once downloaded you have to unzip it using tar -xvf command (if unzipping from command line) – or just double click the file in Finder.

To setup WordPress, basically the following are required:

PHP ~ 5.4

MySQL

Apache HTTP server (NOT Tomcat – which is a Webserver)

These should already be available and can be easily checked.

Ensure PHP module is enabled

Go to /etc/apache2 and do a ‘vi httpd.conf’

This folder maybe write protected – so use a sudo if the it complains that the file is in read-only mode.

Uncomment the line:

#LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

and ‘press Esc -> :wq’

That’s it. Now restart apache using ‘sudo apachectl restart’ and you’re good to go.

Just to check if PHP was enabled properly, create a file called info.php at /Library/WebServer/Documents folder and put the following in the file:

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

If you open a browser, and hit the URL : http://localhost/info.php, it should now spit out the entire PHP environment details thereby confirming that the PHP enablement in Apache had gone fine.

Prepare MacOS Apache to server the wordpress content.

The default location of the files being served is /Library/WebServer/Documents. If you can’t find the folder in Finder, Press Cmd + Shift + G, and then enter the location manually.

Next, either copy the unzipped WordPress folder in this directory OR make a new folder inside the above folder (say xyz) and paste the unzipped WordPress folder contents into this.

Now, head over to http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress and follow the steps. Just make sure the DB connection details are correct.

WordPress is installed successfully. Enjoy !

Standalone client to send JMS messages to a JBOSS queue via JNDI

Pretty trivial exercise. But needs a few steps and unless you know exactly what you are doing, it might cause a lot of pain.

Firstly, you’d need the JMS connection factory and queues configured in the local JBoss. This is pretty easy to do.

A client jar is required for the InitialContext located at <JBOSS-HOME>\bin\client\jboss-client.jar

Secondly, you’d need something of the following:

import java.io.File;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.util.Collection;
import java.util.Hashtable;

import javax.jms.Connection;
import javax.jms.ConnectionFactory;
import javax.jms.JMSException;
import javax.jms.MessageProducer;
import javax.jms.Queue;
import javax.jms.Session;
import javax.jms.TextMessage;
import javax.naming.InitialContext;
import javax.naming.NamingException;

import org.apache.commons.io.FileUtils;
import org.apache.commons.io.filefilter.DirectoryFileFilter;
import org.apache.commons.io.filefilter.WildcardFileFilter;

public class LocalJBOssMQSender {

    /**
     * @param args
     */
    public static void main(String[] args) {

        try {

            Hashtable< String, String > envProps = new Hashtable();
            envProps.put("java.naming.factory.initial", "org.jboss.naming.remote.client.InitialContextFactory");
            envProps.put("java.naming.provider.url", "remote://127.0.0.1:4447");
            envProps.put("java.naming.security.principal", "xxxx");
            envProps.put("java.naming.security.credentials", "xxxxxx");

            InitialContext ic = new InitialContext( envProps );

            ConnectionFactory cf = (ConnectionFactory)ic.lookup("jms/<connection factory name>");
            Queue inboundQueue= (Queue)ic.lookup("jms/queue/<QueueName>");

            Connection connection = cf.createConnection();

            Session session = connection.createSession(false, Session.AUTO_ACKNOWLEDGE);
            MessageProducer producer = session.createProducer(inboundQueue);

            //pick up all .xml files in a given directory and send them as messages to the queue.
             Collection<File> files = FileUtils.listFiles(new File("C:\\temp\\test"), 
                        new WildcardFileFilter("*.xml"), DirectoryFileFilter.DIRECTORY);

                for(File file : files){

                    System.out.println(file.getName());

                    String messageStr = FileUtils.readFileToString(file);
                    TextMessage message = session.createTextMessage(messageStr);

                    //message.setStringProperty("messageType", "Presentation");
                    // Start the connection
                    connection.start();

                    producer.send(message);
                    System.out.println("Sent message:\\n" + message);
            }

                producer.close();
                session.close();
                connection.close();

        } catch (NamingException e) {
            // TODO Auto-generated catch block
            e.printStackTrace();
        } catch (JMSException e) {
            // TODO Auto-generated catch block
            e.printStackTrace();
        } catch (IOException e) {
            // TODO Auto-generated catch block
            e.printStackTrace();
        }

    }

}

Entrust issue on IBM WAS 8.0.5

My most recent challenge:

A perfectly working piece of code running on JBoss 7 that uses encryption using Entrust , fails with the following on IBM WAS 8.0.5 –

Caused by: com.entrust.toolkit.exceptions.PKCS7Exception: internal error at com.entrust.toolkit.b.run(Unknown Source)at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:772) Caused by: java.lang.RuntimeException: Error from EncodeListener: Unable to calculate encrypted digest: RSA signature failed to initialize for signing: Caught an attempt to access key material in a confined key. at iaik.asn1.DerCoder.encode(Unknown Source) at iaik.asn1.DerCoder.encodeTo(Unknown Source) at iaik.asn1.DerCoder.encodeTo(Unknown Source) at iaik.pkcs.pkcs7.ContentInfoStream.writeTo(Unknown Source)

So, I started out by trying to go through the usual route. Googling didn’t help – nor could I understand what the exception was trying to say.

We built a standalone servlet , deployed on a local WAS trial version and it worked. The local WAS was version 8.5. Deployed the servlet on WAS 8.0.5 – same error.  The only difference was that the cert files were bundled in a JAR file instead of being in the app’s WEB-INF\classes folder.

Changed that in the app, and it began to work !

Or so i thought. The actual issue was finally found to be a completely different. It had to do with how our apps were packaged. In the actual environment we had 2 web apps having the same common utility jar being bundled individually with the web apps. However, this common piece of encryption util was @Autowired – Spring’s way of telling that the component will be ready to use as soon as the apps were deployed. Now, this auto-wiring was happening for the other web app and once loaded by the classloader, this wasn’t available for loading again when it was actually required by the other app. Hence the issue. We changed the bean definition to load laziy in the context file with lazy-load=”true” and that finally solved the issue.

Sidenote: we raised this issue with IBM’s EMR – and the response was that we were using a third party library not supported by IBM ! Take that IBM – you don’t even know what works in your app server and what doesn’t !!

Centos 6.4 in VirtualBox VM on Mac OS Lion + Windows + SSH

Mac OS Lion handles VirtualBox VMs much better than Windows does on a dual core AMD laptop. Everything runs faster and there’s no visible lag in running stuff inside the VM and the host. Its amazing !

Anyway, I decided to fiddle around with installing CentOS 6.4 as a guest OS on Oracle VirtualBox. The installation is a breeze. Here’s a good guide: http://opensourcedbms.com/dbms/installing-cent-os-6-3-linux-in-oracle-virtual-box-ssh-access/.

I skipped the port forwarding thing as its not required.

Next up, was enabling SSH between Mac OS and the guest OS. Here’s what saved me a lot of trouble: http://wiredrevolution.com/virtualbox/setup-ssh-access-between-virtualbox-host-and-guest-vms

However, the only thing that gave me issues was that I wasn’t able to add a ‘Host Only adapter’ from the settings of the individual VM. Firstly it complained that ‘Incorrect configuration detected’. Puzzling. Then I read somewhere that I needed to ‘add’ a Host only network adapter from VirtualBox -> Preferences ->Network and click the green button that adds ‘vboxnet0’ as an adapter. After this I followed the above guide and I was able to SSH into the machine from Mac OS.

Could I push it further and access this CentOS guest from another Windows guest running on VirtualBox? (Yes, I could finally run multiple guest OSes and yet nothing slowed down). I installed Putty on my Windows guest and there it was – as easy as pie to access CentOS via SSH. Cool.

This meant I could share files via SCP between my guest and host VMs. Awesome !

Installing Chrome on Fedora 18

Installed Fedora 18 on a VirtualBox VM on my Mac and it works great. I installed the KDE spin. Although am liking the interface, I don’t like Konquerer much. Chrome is insanely fast even inside a VM. So, I decided to install Chrome.

Note: I installed a Fedora 64 bit, so the steps here are for 64 bit Chrome

It’s really easy.

1. Add Google YUM repository details (used for checksum etc.)

Create or edit the file /etc/yum.repos.d/google-chrome.repo and add the following lines:

[google-chrome]
name=google-chrome
baseurl=http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/rpm/stable/x86_64
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1

2. Execute the following command as root

yum install google-chrome-stable

You should now have Chrome as an option in Applications -> Internet.

But, here comes a surprise – Chrome cannot be run as root by default. So it won’t work unless you do the following.

1- open Konsole Terminal
2- type

cd /opt/google/chrome/
hexedit chrome

(if you dont have hexedit or  it says hexedit command not found, just do a

yum install hexedit

)

3- you will see hex editor program press Tab to switch to ascii
4-press ctrl+s to search for “geteuid” and modify it to “getppid”
5- ctrl+X to exit then press y for saving changes

Original solution at: http://www.backtrack-linux.org/forums/showthread.php?t=43560

Thats it ! You should now be able to run your favorite Chrome as root 🙂

Revisiting Hibernate with Spring on Mac OS X – Part I

I was getting bored and wanted to revisit Spring and Hibernate on my new found love machine – my Macbook Pro. The Mac OS gets a little getting used to, especially if you one is new to the way Mac works. Things are a little difficult to find – unlike the right click world. Rest assured, you can do much more, but as I said earlier – it gets a little getting used to 🙂

Anyways, back to the problem. If I have to try something, I usually follow the steps:

a. Google about what I am doing (here I started by saying spring + hibernate + maven sample).

b. I found a few links and decided to Download Spring STS, Maven 3.0.4 and MySQL ( The JDBC connectors etc. could be outsourced to Maven).

I setup everything well. Keep in mind to install MySQL from the .dmg file. If you are like me, you might try to do it from the .tar.gz file initially, but trust me, it introduces a lot more troubles on the Mac OS. Just get it installed by using the .dmg file available by following instructions at: http://www.simonwhatley.co.uk/installing-mysql-on-mac-osx-10-6-snow-leopard.

Now, I also downloaded the MySQL Workbench for Mac OS at : http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/workbench/

I started working out a sample from : http://singgihpraditya.wordpress.com/2009/03/19/simple-maven2-spring-25-jpa-and-hibernate-integration/ but I ran into trouble when I ran the POM file – I wanted to see if the project would build properly. You can run the POM file without writing a single line of code and check if the required libraries will be downloaded properly.

It started failing by saying something like :

Downloading: ->
    http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/javax/transaction ->
      /jta/1.0.1B/jta-1.0.1B.jar
[WARNING] Unable to get resource from repository central ->
    (http://repo1.maven.org/maven2)
...
[INFO] Failed to resolve artifact.

required artifacts missing:
 javax.transaction:jta:jar:1.0.1B

Now, this essentially means that the Maven runtime is not able to find the required JAR file in the repository it is searching. The key factors are : which Maven and which repository.

On a Mac OS, the default Maven is usually /usr/bin/mvn. So, to change that in Spring STS, one has to ‘Add’ a  Maven runtime by pointing to the correct Maven installation of your choice instead of using the embedded one.

Secondly, the default repository is ~/.m2/repo. To change that in Spring STS, go to Preferences -> Maven -> User settings and point to the correct user settings file (which is <Maven directory>/conf/settings.xml). and update user settings.

Make sure that you have a local repository like this:

<localRepository>/Users/trishulmukherjee/.m2/repository/</localRepository

>

Now, in order to install the JTA jars, remember to explicitly go to the Maven installation directory as configured above, download the JTA jar files from

http://java.sun.com/products/jta/

and run:

mvn install:install-file \
  -Dfile=./jta-1_0_1B-classes.zip \
  -DgroupId=javax.transaction \
  -DartifactId=jta -Dversion=1.0.1B \
  -Dpackaging=jar

and run the ./mvn <….> command since otherwise, the JAR file will get installed in the wrong repository and Maven runtime will again fail to detect the JTA jar files. Also, make sure that the path to the zip file is correct because Maven is dumb and it won’t even warn if the file is in a different location. It really pissed me off when I found out my mistake.

So thats it! Run the pom file and it should download all the required files without errors.

Ubuntu 12.10 networking fails after installing on one Oracle VM

This is more of a note to self. I had a Ubuntu 12.10 running on an Oracle VirtualBox VM (4.16). Now, this was running to too slow and it said an update had been released for VirtualBox(4.18). I uninstalled the previous version of VirtualBox while keeping the Ubuntu VM disk intact.

Now, after installing VirtualBox 4.18, when I used the Ubuntu VDI, I could no longer access the internet. Something must have gone horribly wrong. Then, I came across the following (excerpt from http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1032790):

1. In the Ubuntu guest, open a command prompt. For more information, see Opening a command or shell prompt (1003892).
2. As root, open the file /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules in a text editor:

   sudo vim /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

3. The file consists of a line for each udev rule, associating MAC addresses with ethN interface names. For example:

   SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="00:0c:29:fb:d5:1e", ATTR{dev_id}=="0x0", ATTR{type}=="1", KERNEL=="eth*", NAME="eth1"
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="00:0c:29:fb:d5:1c", ATTR{dev_id}=="0x0", ATTR{type}=="1", KERNEL=="eth*", NAME="eth0"

4. Identify the old and new interfaces by their MAC address in the ATTR{address}=="" field. For example:

   ATTR{address}=="00:0c:29:fb:d5:1c" ... NAME="eth0"  # old
ATTR{address}=="00:0c:29:fb:d5:1e" ... NAME="eth1"  # new

5. Copy the ethN name from the old interface to the new interface line. For example:

   ATTR{address}=="00:0c:29:fb:d5:1c" ... NAME="eth0"  # old
ATTR{address}=="00:0c:29:fb:d5:1e" ... NAME="eth0"  # new


6. Delete the line for the old ethN interface. For example:

   ATTR{address}=="00:0c:29:fb:d5:1e" ... NAME="eth0"  # new


7. Save the udev configuration file.
8. Reboot the Ubuntu virtual machine.

When the system is rebooted, the network configuration for the previous network interface is applied to the new interface.

Note: If you are unable to reboot the virtual machine, you can manually restart the networking service using this command:

service networking restart

If this command fails with an unknown instance error, run this command:

/etc/init.d/networking restart

It is proof that this works ’cause am putting up this post from within the VM 🙂