Some good news today, according to the CNN the Ivory billed woodpecker is not extinct. The second largest woodpecker with a 3 foot wingspan has been sighted in 8 independent sightings between the 2004 and 2005 since the last confirmed evidence in the 1940’s.

At last I managed to work around the "Invalid direct reference to form login page" problem I had in my web applications using Apache Tomcat 4.x running from within JBoss. Whenever you use form based authentication with the <login-config> defined in the web.xml deployment descriptor tomcat has an obscure bug which triggers if a user tries to access the system through the login page directly eg. http://www.mysite.com/login.jsp. After the user logs in through the login page the error "Invalid direct reference to form login page" message is displayed. This problem gets very irritating because users tend to bookmark the web application through their login page making the error crop up each time they try to enter the system. With the level of computer literate user's we've got in the company changing the favourite link in their browser could easily be the most difficult chore they have to do in a month.

The solution that worked for me was to include this JSP code snippet in the login page of the web application. You need to replace the roleSelection.jsp with the first page in the web application that requires authorisation.

if (session.isNew()) {
response.sendRedirect("roleSelection.jsp");
return;
}

There were some programmers who didn't solve the problem with this code so it might be wise to check the following references for more information.
Bugzilla Bug Nr. 3839
Bugzilla Bug Nr. 8976
Java Thread at java.sun.com

Guess the google

Another google oriented game where you get to guess which keywords were used to show the picture displayed

Green Zap

At last a paypal competitor that does not discriminate against ¾ of the world and gives you $25 on signup. Still in preorder though.

Rands in response (Mechanical vs Organical)

Anybody who ever had a boss should read this. Rands is too good.

God is great …

When everybody is fussing about the new pope some maths on the size of God make a funny interlude. Jesus weighs 20 million times more than you.

I tried to post this comment on Eric Lunt’s blog in response to this post, but for some strange reason it was deemed to have questionable content.

Microfeeds can solve the problem of many users who cannot keep track of their replies to different posts on the web. Their full potential in this respect will materialise itself if they are adopted by discussion/bulletin board and blogging systems. When discussion groups serve individual posts using microfeeds we can go back to the good old newsgroup reader days, where you can keep track of all the interesting discussions in different discussion through a single program.

Tomorrow I'm back to work since last Tuesday, even though I'm still not in tip top condition after this tedious flu. At least I've managed to work on the holiday video editing in the morning which is much easier after 11pm. When working on larger sequences of video at the once give the end result a much better flow and identity. Additionally this left my nights free to get gobbled up by blogshares maniawhich has replaced the very brief chess phase I've been through in the last weeks.

Blogshares is getting me paranoid to the extent that I decided to buy a premium membership. After hesitating for about a week I was completely determined to buy the membership until I saw the damn paypal graphic. Our country is still not supported so all my plans burnt up in flames leaving a very nasty e-mail residue to paypal.

The best thing about blogshares is that apart from being a bomb to play making millions of virtual blog cash, it is a huge manual blog directory with more than 2200 categories. You get to categorize any blog in the system to earn chips depending on the detail and accuracy of your categorisation. In fact something rather funny happened when Kitty from Traces of time categorized mindspill in the love life category which I found rather amusing and quite strange. It turned out that my references to my girlfriend led to this intuition.

As expected a number of blogs are featuring posts about our new pope, Benedict XVI. As I'm not one to formulate predictions based on total ignorance I thought it would be more worthwhile to point to a couple of articles that seem to be more familiar with the new boss.

• Pope Benedict XVI: The History Behind His Name
• A new pope

Cabbage Salad

Ingredients
2 cups thinly shredded red cabbage
2 cups shredded carrot
1/2 cup crushed roasted peanuts
1/4 cup Thai salad dressing (instead of 1/4 cup peanut oil)
Tabasco sauce
Lemon juice and salt to taste.

Notes:
From the original recipe we replaced 1/4 cup peanut oil with the Thai salad dressing and the tabasco sauce for the hot green chilli. The Thai salad dressing was rather sweet and I think the peanut oil would have worked better. We omitted 1/2 cup chopped cilantro and 1/2 tsp sugar.

Spicy Potatoes

Ingredients
Potatoes
Onion
Sunflower oil
Chilli powder
Cumin seeds
Tumeric
Garam Masla

Directions
Heat oil, onions, chilli powder, cumin seeds and tumeric, amounts depend on potatoes. Cook until onions translucent but not brown. Add potatoes and cook until the potatoes are crunchy on the outside. Add garam masala before serving.

Prince Charles was reversing his Land Rover out of the garage when he ran over the Queen's favorite corgi. He got out and found the corgi dead, squashed to a pulp. Just then a Genie popped up and said "Your highness I can give you one wish. What would you like?"

The Prince said "This is mummy's favorite dog. Can you bring it back to life?".

So the Genie said "Let's have a look at the dog." "Oh no, nothing can be done with this dog, you ran over it with the Land Rover there is too much damage to the dog ... nothing can be done".

"But you must," says the Prince, "It's mummy's favorite!".

"I'm sorry" said the Genie, "there's no way I can bring it back to life".

"OK" said the prince, "But do I still have a wish?".

"Yes", said the Genie.

"Well", said the Prince, "I'm marrying Camilla in a few days, could you make her as beautiful as Diana was?".

The Genie thought for a while then said "Let's have another look at the dog".

When we were in Costa Rica we found a huge moth in the room one night and my queen got pretty agitated because of it's erratic flight, imagine what would have happened if this owl were to visit us in a hotel room. Courtesy of Wild Madagascar

The car ride from the Impala Hotel to Sunny Safari's served as a safe tour around Arusha without attracting the swarm of locals that you'll inevitably encounter when walking alone in the streets. Although Arusha is the main safari tour operator hub of the Northern Circuit we saw very few white people walking around so the car ride got the closest to a tour of Arusha.

Arusha is home to 800,000 people so by itself it has got twice the population of my country making it a big city by our standards. All the roads that we passed through were full of people bustling with activity selling goods or working in their shops which usually double as their homes. The feeling of poverty is immediately apparent, but in spite of this people seem to try their best to gain a decent living where everyone in the family plays a role, no matter the age and gender. If wealth is only for the privileged few, colour isn't, and nobody fears wearing red out of season. In fact one of the most interesting observations is that people here dress whatever they find with no penchant for the current season's fashion. The only exception are the Maasai who are so fashion conscious that their dress code defines their state in their society.

At Sunny Safari's headquarters we met with the face behind all our e-mail correspondence, Ally and after a small brief about the safari and payment of $855 we left on our adventure. Our guide and driver was Pius (alias Papa) who had such an imposing presence makes you at ease under his protection. The driver, Anton, was exceptionally thin especially when standing near papa and his red Nike t-shirt made him easy to spot from anywhere in one's field of vision.

On our way to Lake Manyara we passed by a snake farm and gladly stopped for a visit. The $10 entrance fee was proved its worth as soon as we saw an adult full grown black mamba. The fastest snake in the world isn't actually black but more of a greenish brown colour and it was longer then I expected, measuring about 3m. Amongst other members of the deadly variety we saw a puff adder, spitting cobra, Egyptian cobra, green mamba, rhino viper and the best camouflaged snake of them all, the gibbon viper. The rest of the trip to Lake Manyara was very comfortable and completely uncharacteristic of my previous impression of African roads. The main road which continues till the Ngorongoro Crater could have been a highway in the US as far as the road condition was concerned.

We arrived at Twiga Campsite in Lake Manyara in time for lunch which consisted of tomato salad, cucumbers, green peppers and some carrots covered with mayo. There must have been a development craze in this area because Twiga Campsite is a very modern campsite even compared to European Standards. The camping area is covered with grass, there is a fence enclosing the site, normal ceramic toilets, decent showers with hot water and even a bar. Nah, we were out of Africa once again.

After lunch we went for our first game drive in Lake Manyara. The first thing that attracts your attention is the reddish soil colour that tinges the background with a reddish brown unlike all the other safari locations we've been to. We didn't have to wait for a long time to start experiencing the wonder of the park because after a few minutes we met with a group of baboons lead by a dominant male. The rest of the animals were equally impressive and amazing. Here we saw Zebras, Giraffes, Elephants, Black Monkeys, Vervet Monkeys, Dik Diks, Hippos, Impalas, Wartogs and Mongooses.

The first animals are always the most significant because it's the first time you're seeing them. We were amazed how close we could approach them and they seemed totally undisturbed by our presence. Naturally we stopped at each single animal we saw and we must have nauseated our guide with the constant "Oh how cute, oh how nice" phrases. Both the video and the camera had a hard time keeping up with our clicking.

  

The peaceful atmosphere of Lake Manyara as well as the variety of birds are what distinguished this park from the others. Birds are plentiful and this was the best bird watching opportunity we had throughout the whole safari. The birds worth mentioning were cranes, pelicans, storks, rollers, bee eaters, hornbills, guinea foul and even the African fish eagle and Goliath heron.

Upon our return we had a shower and a three course dinner with soup, grilled chicken legs, pancakes for dessert, and coffee. Before retiring to sleep we had a drink at the bar until the video camera batteries charged behind the bar counter.

As a symptom of my Blogshares addiction I completed a task I had been meaning to do for ages, install Squid and blast the web open. The series of experiments started out by installing lynx and testing out some websites with the text only browser, but they all failed miserably. Next I tried to install VNC server on Linux and access it with my windows workstation, but after 5 failed attempts I opted for another solution which lead me to the Holy Grail – Squid. Considering that I knew absolutely nothing about the application domain it was very easy to get started and get everything to work. It took roughly 2 hours to install everything successfully.

Last day I was ranting about creating something original and today I found a blog of an orange. A very creative funny blog that deserves a click.

Last time I watched a movie of his he was a pirate and today he was a pitiful divorced loner whose beautiful wife shared her bed with another man. The Secret Window (Review) will not become a cult movie but I didn't sleep either, even though at times it dragged a bit and lacked ideas. The story is about Mort (Johnny Depp) who's just divorced and consequently run into a writers block that turned him into a sloth, the only thing you'd wish upon yourself in the movie. Ok sorry I forgot his wife (Maria Bello). Once upon a time a heavily accented a stranger appears at Mort door and accuses him of plagiarizing a story of his called the secret window. From then onwards a sequence of uncreative accidents start to happen to Mort ending in a pretty predictable ending. The only thing that saves the movie is Depp's performance which highlights the versatility and passion he transmits in his characters. 2.5 / 5 stars.

Today I was asked what are the ten things I would like to do before I die. They're quite a humble bunch of todos but they will do.

1. Visit all the continents + travel around the world and go to Japan , Madagascar and New York
2. Watch one of my videos on TV
3. Get a masters and possibly PhD
4. Create an addictive game
5. Write a book
6. Discover something
7. Own a pug
8. Create something truly original
9. Collaborate in a large software project
10. Go paragliding and white water rafting

I’ve got three Tanzania posts waiting to be edited and blogged but today I spent a whole day reading and browsing blogs. These are some of the better findings.

Silverberry

Found this blog while looking for Tanzania blogs at globe of blogs but even though it owner is from another hemisphere I got hooked to it

The Neurotic Fishbowl That Is My Life...

The title should be enough

Barry's African Adventure Weblog :: Latest Entries

How can i not note a blog from such a wonderful country

8 Ways to Sunday

Pretty much interested in the same things.

FREDRIK ÖDMAN - PHOTOGRAPHY

Sick exceptional photography. Godly.

If you stretched your lips towards a hint of a smile in the trailer of Hitch (Reviews) then you defiantly must go and watch this movie. Expect everything and more from Will Smith and Kevin James in this hilarious romantic comedy that almost made me kick with laughter.

The story is about Hitch a date doctor who helps less confident people get an 'equal opportunity' for a date. The comedy lies both in the amusing original tricks Hitch conjures to attract attention as well as the comic situations that unfold throughout the story. The story folds off predictably as a romantic comedy goes but believe me this is good.

A nice thought to keep in mind was expressed by hitch while convincing a client about the importance of body language, '60% of communication happens through body language, 30% through voice tonality and 10% by what you say'. For a comedy that manages to retain a phrase in my mind this movie deserves 4.5 stars.

This is a very easy to prepare recipe for two and it’s just simply delicious.

Ingredients (for 3)

400g Chicken Breast
1/2 cup sour cream
2 packets thin salted potato crisps
3 tablespoons melted butter

Directions

1. Cut the chicken breast into slices and crumble the potato crisps as finely as possible.
2. Cover the breast with sour cream and coat in the crushed crisps.
3. Place the coated chicken strips in a dish and cover with melted butter.
4. Bake in an oven on gas mark 5/6 for 45 minutes, or until the chicken is tender and golden.

Things to try for next time

1. Add some garlic powder to the melted butter for taste. (Actually this tip was in the original recipe but I decide to omit it).

As if I planned it all along, a year ago I started using conversant and today I’ve just finished redesigning the blog. After trashing about half a dozen designs thanks to the invaluable insight of my much more artistic better one I feel satisfied with the new design and added functionality.

I must also congratulate myself because this is the first time I kept my word to pay for a service after a trial run. In fact I’ve subscribed with Free Conversant to be able to host the site because the product is so good I think it’s worth it. The best thing about the product is that it is extremely flexible and customizable so you can do anything you like with it, even write complete websites and use the product as a content management system which is what it really boils up to. The service also offers certain finer features like apache log files, IP Security and other fine tuning features that aren’t normally bundled with a blogging service. By subscribing I could now also start using and marketing the new domain name mindspill.org.

Today we had a gentle introduction to the black continent at a distance with a bus trip from Nairobi to Arusha. The bus took roughly 5 hours, half the time it takes to go from Dar Es Salam to Arusha, and strangely enough 5 hours didn’t seem like a long time. I usually like to read on such long trips but the scenery outside was even more appealing then the best book I’ve read in a long time. The morning’s skyscraper view from the hotel seemed very far away from the poor state of villages leading to Arusha. At last the place started to look like Africa.

The central attractions of the journey were the Maasai, the most renowned tribe in East Africa. You'd have to be completely blind to miss them because the colourful dress that wraps their thin body stands out in stark contrast to the soiled background. Surprisingly, the Maasai were quite common not only in the barren land they are usually associated with, but also in the several villages we passed through.

During the journey we stopped at a large Souvenir (curio) shop so we went in search for our Kenya souvenir. The most reasonable souvenir so early in the holiday was a small colourful plate with jumping impalas, but for such a small thing we were asked $15. At that time $15 seemed very expensive so I tried to haggle down to $10 but reached no compromise. My better half wanted the plate so badly that I had to agree to pay $15 but since I didn’t have exact change I handed the attendant a $20 bill. This confused the youngster because he didn’t have change, so I took added a larger plate for a total of $20. Not knowing what else to do the attendant agreed and called me to a corner out of the way and asked me to hide away the plates in my backpack. This curious action didn’t quite feel proper but at least I got a good deal.

Before arriving at Arusha we had to cross the border from Kenya to Tanzania, so we had to pass through customs. At the immigration office everybody was issuing a VISA for Tanzania however we were privileged enough not to require a VISA. The list of countries that required no VISA consisted mainly of African countries and other remote countries like Fiji. The only three European countries in the list were Cyprus, Romania and Malta. It seems that this was such a rare event that the bus driver was very enthusiastic about us and he jokingly advised us not to leave our mother country because we didn’t need a VISA for Tanzania.

Thanks to the advert on our bus we decided to stay at the Impala Hotel in Arusha and it turned out to be a culinary delightful place. The rooms were spacious and clean and the service was good, but nothing matched the food they served here. Today four weeks after that day I’m still salivating at the thought of that delicacy. At the Indian restaurant I had Lamb Tandorri which was served in a brass dinner set that added just the perfect tot of atmosphere to accompany a perfect dinner.

Once we arrived in Arusha we had to solve the holiday's biggest dilemma – choosing a tour operator for the safari. Thanks to pre holiday research we limited our choice between Sunny Safaris and Bobby Tours, but choosing between them was still a difficult choice. Both operators were very helpful in replying to our probing e-mails before the holiday and both had excellent customer relationships. The advantage of Bobby Tours was that he was cheaper than Sunny, but on the other hand some posts by customers on The thorn tree didn’t seem very satisfied with their tour operator. On the other hand all those who went on safari with Sunny Tours all were very satisfied, and I personally knew somebody who went on three safaris with Sunny Tours, so that tipped the balance in favour of Sunny. After a long discussion with Sunny tours boss we struck a deal at $855 but with a day less then the tour with Bobby Tours. Read on to check whether it was the right choice or not…

At last I've started working on the site upgrade. I'm obviously now very busy to I'll spend the rest of the time working on the site rather than ranting.

The pope must have had pity on me and talked to somebody up there to improve my luck. Yesterday my insane cat flicks (now also known as Mudder) had a litter of three all black kittens. I’'ve been praying for at least one black cat from when my other black cat Ganis never returned home. In the evening then, we also had the presentation of the photography assignment and both our assignments were very good. Today was not bad either because at work I managed to come up with a new blog design, after having discarded the previous three designs done in these last weeks. As an additional bonus, Milan also managed to win against Inter 2-0 in the Champions League. Keep it up good luck!

Yesterday while swearing at my misfortune because of a windows failure and reinstallation, the long expected by never awaited news hit all TV channels - the pope died at 21.37 on the 2nd of April. This event will probably be the global event of the year and one that no matter how deep underground is your faith buried, you can’t help being unaffected.

Throughout my 25 years the pope has always been one, a single icon and head of our church. There is not another public figure of such importance that I can remember in command for such a long time, and his death crumbles the my mental empire I had of the Vatican. Replacing such an icon will not be easy, but I hope that somebody with an excess of melanin will take his place. It’s about time to start seeing racial equality being practiced at these levels.

I'm not a papal guru but one thing that always struck me about John Paul Second is the way he set an example by practicing his preaches and ideals. He got his hands dirty and visited innumerable places meeting some of the most powerful leaders no matter how contorted their ideals. This great man respected and loved everyone even though he wasn’t always loved to the point of receiving a near fatal gun wound.

The best quote I heard from the pope lately as "Non avate paura" which means "Do not be afraid". Hoping that his soul will rest in peace, I will try to apply this teaching for a more fulfilling life.

Hide and Seek (Review) stands out as one of the best thriller/horror movies in a theatres flooded with competition. It’s only on very rare occasions that a movie creates so much tension that it starts bordering actual fear and ‘Hide and Seek’ managed to do just that. The story takes us to Manhattan were the mother of Emily (Dakota Fanning), is found dead by her own hands in her own bathroom. David, Emily’s protective father (Robert De Niro) and psychologist decides to move house. In the new country house Emily makes an imaginary friend Charlie, who starts playing somewhat roughly with people.

The photography is brilliantly executed as it just leads you on to the point were your mind can continue imagining the worst possible situation. The cast also couldn’t have been better, as Dakota Fanning’s with her only 10 years vividly matched a veteran, none less than De Niro. The versatility of the latter is highlighted once again by this movie since a few months ago he starred in a completely different situation in “Meet the Fockers". 4.5 stars.