Shawarma Factory, Mumbai

If you're in Mumbai and have some craving for Mediterranean cuisine, a quick fix is the Shawarma Factory located in the Andheri neighborhood. Just a few days back, it was getting late at night and I was damn hungry. So I quickly ordered a delivery parcel for the vegetarian Combo platter.

The platter came in a nicely packed compartmentalized box. It had the following food items:

• Paneer Shawarma
• Veg Biryani
• Fattoush Salad
• Arabic styled pickles
• 2 Falafel balls with hummus
• Pita breads
• A small piece of the semi-sweet pastry 'Baklava'

Take a look :

The Biryani (rice preparation) was decent and had a few paneer cubes (Indian cottage cheese) in it.

For the Paneer shawarma, you can see the Paneer pieces (top middle compartment) which we are supposed to put in the pita bread alongwith other veggies to form a roll.

The falafel balls were nicely cooked with a crunchy texture. Oh and the small piece of Baklava pastry was way too small. I suggest they increase the size of it by atleast an inch.

All in all, a quite decent platter package for a competitive price of ₹ 199. They do have a chicken shawarma platter for about ₹ 250 bucks

Check out the listing and reviews of this establishment here.

Unix - Remove range of lines from a file

In Unix, we have the ability to remove certain lines from a file by using sed. Sed as you may be aware, is a short for stream editor. Using Sed, we can specify the range of lines which we want to delete.

Usage :

sed -i <beginning line no> <ending line no> <file-name>

Eg:

For deleting lines from 3 to 9 of a file Test.txt, use the following command

sed -i '3,9 d' Test.txt

Mason Dixon - New York City

This post is dedicated to the once famous popular Manhattan hotspot - the Mason Dixon.
It was one of the most frequented bars in the Lower Eastside neighborhood since it featured a mechanical bull. Most young folks would drop by in groups, just to test each other's mettle riding the bull :) I must admit the bull must have resulted in tremendous liquor sales.

Unfortunately the bar was closed in fall 2011 for good. Probably due to the envy of other establishments.

Here are a few snaps in it's glory days

Northeast Blizzard 2010 - Part 2

Oh the memories! How wonderful!

Checkout this pic from a Manhattan LES apartment on the day of the blizzard. I believe it was Dec 26.

Northeast Blizzard 2010

Merry Christmas folks! It's already mid-December this year and its time to say 2013 a goodbye. But before welcoming 2014, I just remembered the cruel unforgiving Northeast blizzard of 2010 which happened around 25-26-27 Dec.

While sifting through my pictures, I found out some great snaps of the next day after the blizzard. On the day of snowstorm though, I remember how the transportation came to grinding halt. NJ Transit trains connecting NJ to NY were totally stopped. A state of emergency was officially declared. Everyone were sitting indoors and no one was seen outside. However I did venture out on that night and managed to grab some videos. I'll post them once I find them (They are hidden somewhere within the huge repository of memories :)

Oh and in the meantime, here are some post-blizzard pictures in and around Central New Jersey.

Clearcase Scenario - Reserved Checkouts

While using the Clearcase tool, one might come across a scenario where you are unable to checkout a certain file/folder because some other user has performed a reserved checkout on it.

In a simple scenario, one can ask the other user to either undo the checkout or perform a check-in.

However in a slightly tricky scenario, what if the other user has left the company and his user id is no longer active / functional.

Then in that case check with the administrator. He usually has the rights to remove the views associated with the reserved checkout.

He would most likely identify the view name by finding checkouts. Once the view name is found, he would try to find the view's UUID

Eg : cleartool lsview -long viewname

The UUID is usually of the form dfaa0744.56c611d4.b0da.00:b0:d0:20:d5:9d

Once the UUID is found, one can completely remove the defunct view from the system using rmview.

Eg : cleartool rmview -r -uuid dfaa0744.56c611d4.b0da.00:b0:d0:20:d5:9d

Now since the view associated with the reserved checkout gets deleted, the issue gets solved and the user can smoothly checkout. Hurray!

Rename file in Unix

People new to Unix or linux environment often wonder how to rename a file from the command line.

Just remember, the command to rename is mv

Usage:

mv old_filename new_filename

Eg:

mv file1.txt file1_new.txt