Broken Links in Paypal

Broken Pages.

[24/01/2016] Paypal is a site I would least expect to have broken links.

Not just one broken link. I found 4, from the page,

"Add money from your bank to your PayPal account"

• Privacy
• Fees
• Legal Agreements
• Contact Us

 The links lead to funny pages with the page content.

Pointer to the broken links.

Not Found

The requested URL /cgi-bin/webscr was not found on this server.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

All of these pages were leading to a 403 Forbidden Site https://www.paypalobjects.com

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access / on this server.

It is interesting how these crucial links such as Privacy, Fees, Legal Agreements, and Contact Us form are left broken in such a critical web site involving money.

Lisbon - Week n

[10/01/2016] There was a time when I used to blog my week in Lisbon. I have written blog posts till the Week 43. However, following my return to Sri Lanka in the 2013 summer, I stopped the weekly posts. I tried again in Stockholm. But it did not go quite well. Eventually I also started to believe that this is mostly because now I am used to this city and life style that there is nothing new to blog about any more. Another point is the busy life of the PhD student. However, it is fascinating to note that even in our most familiar environments there are some places that we have failed to visit or activities that we have failed to do.

Today we visited Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, which is a museum on my way to the university from my home, right along the bus route, close to Praça da Espanha. It is free for visitors on Sundays. It however opens on every day except Tuesdays. It was refreshing to see there are still some places left to be explored even after a 3+ years of stay in this city.

[15/01/2016] For some unknown reasons, the city buses in the evening are getting delayed these early days of the year. When I got into the bus this evening, I had a feeling of getting into a bus from the hell. For some reason, many of the passengers were shouting at the driver, and he was shouting back at them even louder. I understood nothing, because the conversation was loud and clear; but in Portuguese. I guessed it must be something regarding the delayed bus arrival times. Something is wrong. But I have no clue yet.

OpenDaylight Research from INESC-ID Lisboa

As a PhD student focusing on SDN, I have been researching on OpenDaylight. I have also created OpenDaylight Lisboa User Group and coordinated multiple meetups in Lisboa. As an OpenDaylight developer, I am featured in today's OpenDaylight Developer Spotlight. Have a look. :)

JikesRVM: Internal Mechanisms Study and Garbage Collection with MMTk

"JikesRVM: Internal Mechanisms Study and Garbage Collection with MMTk" is a research paper we wrote in 2013 after studying and doing some minor research implementations on Jikes RVM, the research JVM. This was part of our Virtual Execution Module (AVExe) course requirements. The paper was quite good to satisfy our course requirements, offering us a grade of 19/20. Today we published it, to ArXiv. I know it is pretty late, considering it was written 2.5+ years ago. However, better late than never. Also we will upload revised versions to ArXiv when the requirement arises.

Abstract — High Level Language Virtual Machines is a core topic of interest for the researchers who are into virtual execution environments. As an open source virtual machine released to 16 universities, as early as 2001, Jikes RVM has been a major drive for many researches. While working on this project, we studied the JIT compilation of Jikes RVM as well as the Garbage Collection (GC) which is handled by the Memory Management Toolkit (MMTk), a part of the Jikes RVM. We also studied the Compressor Mark-Compact Collector algorithm and implemented it for MMTk. We have also implemented a micro-benchmark for the GC algorithms in Java, named “XPDBench”, for benchmarking the implementations.

You may find the full paper here.

Creating .ps from tex

I did not know that creating a postscript file from the latex sources can be time consuming. The commonest option is to convert tex -> dvi using latex, and then dvi -> ps using a comment such as,

$ dvips -y 1200 -o main.ps -p 5 -n 3 main.dvi

In fact, traditionally it has always been tex -> dvi -> pdf.  However, latex command often gives errors and issues in including the images, such as the below:

! LaTeX Error: Cannot determine size of graphic in deployments.png (no Bounding
Box).

See here.

Using pdflatex package avoids the issue with the images in tex to PDF conversion. However, I could not find a way yet to create a dvi or ps using pdflatex.

So for now, I am left with the option of tex -> pdf -> ps, using pdflatex and pdftops (I know it does not sound smart).

$  pdftops -level3 main.pdf main.ps

produced 18.2 MB of ps for a pdf of 863.6 kB.

For the same pdf,

$ pdftops -binary -level3 main.pdf main.ps

produced a ps output of 14.6 MB.

This was the smallest size I was able to go, without making the ps unreadable. The output ps is still not perfect, and the other packages and options provided an even worse ps.

ShareLatex - Life of a PhD Researcher..

Seriously. I am addicted to sharelatex.com. YouTube comes second (overtaking Facebook, since my deactivate last year). I even noticed when the ShareLatex servers went down for maintenance, which is not something that happens frequently.

Emergency Maintenance at ShareLatex

LinkedIn 0 Notification

Notification for "0 Messages"

Found something interesting. A LinkedIn notification indicating that I have received 0 messages. :P