Recently I applied for passport for my one year old daughter. I could not get online appointment (http://passportindia.gov.in) at the passport seva kendras (PSK) for the next two weeks so I decided to goto the center directly as I needed the passport urgently. There are two PSKs in Bangalore – one at outer ring road, opposite to Intel and another at lalbagh road.
I called the passport helpline 1800-258-1800 and inquired about the procedure for tatkal application. They asked me to goto the PSK at 9am with the relevant documents.
I thought I would go early and reached PSK at 8am. When I reached there the security guard told me that they had already issued the tokens for that day. He said they generally issued 200 tokens per day but because of some software problems they were issuing only 30 tokens then. He said that tokens would be issued at 7:30AM for the first 30 people in the queue and people come and stand in line as early as 5AM.
On the next day I went to the PSK in the morning 5:30AM! And guess what? When I reached PSK I was surprised to see at least 50 people there standing in line!!! I waited in the line till 7:30AM and then they started issuing the tokens. Only the first 30 people got the tokens and rest were asked to come on the next day. I asked a couple of people (who were standing in the front) what time they reached. Some of them said they were standing in line since 4AM and few of them since 12AM !!!
So I decided to go again next day as early as possible. Next morning I reached there at 4 AM only to see around 30 people already standing in line! Few of them had come at 10 PM last night and they were sleeping there! However I waited till they started issuing the tokens. The person in front of me got the 30th token & they stopped issuing tickets. By this time I was really frustrated with this new PSK. How can they issue just 30 tokens a day?
My wife also joined me at 7:30 AM. Then she went and met one of the persons (PSK employee) and explained him that this was the 3rd time we were going there for our baby’s passport and it was urgent. He considered the request and asked us to go inside after an hour. Finally we went inside and submitted the form.
That was not the end. Tatkal applications are supposed to take maximum of 3 days (web site says 1 day). But we received the passport after 11 days!!!
When you open a web page in internet explorer, you may see a message – “When you send information to internet it might be possible for others to see that information, do you want to continue?”
This message will appear whenever you enter some information in a web page and submit or whenever you click on a link on a web page.
To disable this annoying message do the following:
Go to Internet Explorer–>Tools–>Internet Options–>Security–>Custom Level–>Submit non-encrypted form data–>Enable
Other security warnings that you may see are:
“This page contains both secure and non secure items. Do you want to display the nonsecure items?“.
OR
“You are about to leave a secure internet connection it’ll be possible for others to view information you send. Do you want to continue?”
If you want to disable these warnings follow the same procedure and Enable “Display Mixed Content“.
Prerequisites
You should have the following softwares installed
- SAP instance (refer to next section for supported versions)
- BizTalk Server 2006 R2
- Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1
- Visual Studio 2005
- SQL Server 2005 with SP2
BizTalk Adapter Pack 2.0 installation
BizTalk Adapter Pack 2.0 contains a collection of key Line-of-Business (LOB) application adapters for enabling any Windows application to integrate with LOB applications using the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) programming model. These adapters are written using WCF LOB Adapter SDK.
BizTalk Adapter Pack 2.0 contains the SAP adapter which will be used to communicate with SAP BAPIs and RFCs.
This SAP adapter supports the following versions of SAP server:
- SAP ECC 6.0 Non-Unicode
- SAP ECC 6.0 Unicode
- SAP ECC 5.0 Non-Unicode
- SAP ECC 5.0 Unicode
- SAP R/3 4.7 Non-Unicode
- SAP R/3 4.7 Unicode
- SAP R/3 4.6c Non-Unicode
Adapter Pack 2.0 requires installing WCF LOB Adapter SDK SP2.
Installing WCF LOB Adapter SDK SP2
Refer to the installation guide available for download here
Installing of BizTalk Adapter Pack 2.0
Refer to the installation guide available for download here
Important:
Installation of Adapter Pack 2.0 requires some drivers to be downloaded from SAP Service Marketplace. Please refer to the section “Required drivers” under “Supported Enterprise Application Versions” in the installation guide.
After installing the Adapter Pack 2.0, you will see the WCF adapters in the BizTalk Admin Console
*** If these adapters do not appear under Adapters, right click on Adapters, click on NewàAdapter and add the required WCF adapters.
Using the WCF SAP Adapter to call BAPIs from BizTalk Orchestration
WCF SAP adapter should be configured to communicate with SAP BAPIs.
Right click on BizTalk project–>Add–>Add Generated Items
A dialog box will appear as shown below
Choose Consume Adapter Service and click Ok.
Click on Configure
Enter user name and password to connect to SAP
On URI Properties tab enter Application Server (SAP Application server host name, Gateway host name, Gateway service name, System Number), Login Info (Client Number) and RFC Server (Gateway host name, Gateway service name and Program ID [should be created in SAP]) details.
Important:
On the Binding Properties tab, set EnableSafeTyping = True
Setting this to true will expose SAP DATS, TIMS, and NUMC fields as strings (as opposed to their correlating .NET types) in the client proxy and the adapter will not validate the values you pass in or get back.
Once you click on Connect, you should be able to see all the BAPIs, RFCs, IDOCs, etc.
After selecting the BAPI you want to connect to, the adapter metadata will be added to the BizTalk project. Now we can use a two way port to connect to SAP using the WCF SAP adapter.
After completing the orchestration, while adding the port in BizTalk Admin Console, select the WCF-SAP and complete the configuration similar to how we did above.
Important:
Add the SOAP Action Header under configuration section
Example:
<BtsActionMapping xmlns:xsi=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance” xmlns:xsd=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema”>
<Operationmso-bidi-font-weight: normal”>Opn_SendRecv_BAPI_PO_GETDETAIL” Action=”http://Microsoft.LobServices.Sap/2007/03/Rfc/BAPI_PO_GETDETAIL” />
</BtsActionMapping>
Operation name should be the same as the name of the operation that calls the BAPI in the Orchestration.
Recently when I was browsing one of the web sites I saw an alert – “You have an old version of flash media player, please click here to upgrade”. I clicked on it and downloaded a file “flash_player.45243.exe”. Without suspecting it to be a virus, I double clicked on it thinking that it would install the latest player. However nothing came up after double clicking on this file (I was expecting a wizard showing the installation path, progress, etc).
After a few minutes my browser stopped working! When I type url in the browser and hit nothing would happen!
So I checked windows task manager (press ctrl+shift+escape) and I saw a new process called qn1.exe (I had not seen this before). I googled for it and could not find much information. Then I selected qn1.exe and clicked on “End Process”. Then the browser started working normally. However the next day when I turned on the laptop the system was too slow. So I checked the task manager again and to my surprise I could see qn1.exe there!
So this exe was added to the start up! I check the windows start up programs (Programs–>Run–>msconfig–>Startups) and I could see a stary up item named “toy5knq8oc” with the command pointing to qn1.exe in temp folder and also location pointing to a registry path. The virus had added itself as a windows startup program!. So I deleted the qn1.exe from the temp folder and deleted all the entries with qn1.exe from registry (there were few entries in the registry too).
I have Microsoft Antivirus and Avast both running on my system but both of them did not alert me about this! After this I downloaded antivirus software PrevX and scanned the system. It showed me three more files as threats – “sshnas21.dll”, “atapi.sys” and “msa.exe”. I checked the windows start up programs again and I could see these files being added as start ups. I deleted these files from both the start up location and the registry.
PrevX has more information about this virus here.
According to CNET News, this virus is called Koobface virus and it works by sending Facebook users a message announcing, “You look funny in this new video” or something similar and invites recipient to click on a provided link. Once on the video site, a message says an update of Flash is needed before the video can be displayed. The viewer is prompted to open a file called flash_player.exe.
Now I have installed Avast antivirus after reading lot of reviews about it and seems to be working fine.
Yesterday one of my friends told me about a very interesting web site.
Suppose you are at work and you want to open your personal email or web page. And you do not want others to see this. You know that other people sitting around you can see your monitor. How can you prevent others from peeping at your screen?
Go to the site Variably Safe For Work and paste the URL of the web page you want to open and click on “Preview” button. The entire screen becomes black and you can see a slider bar at the top with a button “Proceed” below that. Drag the slider bar to the right and the screen starts becoming visible. Stop the slider when the web page becomes slightly visible so others seeing your monitor from far will not be able to make out what it is. Clicking on “Proceed” button will open the site normally.
