I was moving my svn projects to git repository. I needed to get rid of all the .svn folders recursively. Following is the script that I used:
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If you have been following the Chelsea First team then you would have become frustrated with lack of quality that we display on match days. There are days when we can beat an in-form Manchester City, and then there are days when we have to toil and sweat against an easy Fulham. Lack of consistency is killing our campaign. We no longer have faith in our players. Some might say it’s just downhill from here to a team that won the Double just 2 years ago. But I argue otherwise.
Let me start from Jose Mourinho. If you were to trace his football career you’ll observe a trend. He came to Chelsea, a young exciting coach. He was given complete freedom to shape his team. He put his faith in the bullish Drogba, defensively solid Terry, the Bison Essien, the reliable Frank and the amazing Cech. He moulded these players in the 4-3-3 formation. They learnt to defend in his reign. Even today, when Chelsea decide to sit back and defend it’s very tough for opponents to score against us. Terry and Cech are just too damn good in that.
But along the years as these people aged no one was drafted in to replace them. Mourinho builds a short-term result focused team as evident by Inter Milan’s decline after Jose parted ways with them (it’s only at Real Madrid that he’s had the courage to alter his philosophy a little and build a younger team). Managers one after another were brought in at Chelsea to try and do what Jose did but none succeeded. None really had the courage to alter the core of the team and none could extract the same performances that Jose did. Decline was a natural result. Although Ancelotti managed to win the Double, it was more like the star burning at its brightest before the death. Since then we have really struggled. Our strength has turned into weakness and people call us The Pensioners.
For the first time in years has Roman decided to finally change the team. Drafting Jose Mourinho’s protege Andre Villas-Boas was a big gamble. The move was a declaration of a new era – one where a new core team would be found to help Chelsea be more successful. Also there has been a shift in the buying policy. People at the club are trying to bring in players from the youth team. And this is exactly what pleases and excites me.
Josh McEachren is the first name that springs up. He’s an emerging talent that’ll eventually replace Frank Lampard in the English team. Everyone believes that Wilshere and McEachren will become the next Gerrard and Lampard couple. Josh has been sent out on loan to Swansea where I expect him to discover his true potential and come back just as strong as Sturridge did after his spell at Bolton. Realistically speaking, with lots of players leaving Chelsea this summer, I expect Josh to become a regular first team player the next season.
Another talent that we have bought this summer is Romelu Lukaku. He’s an ardent Chelsea fan whose role model is Drogba. With Drogba set to leave us this summer I am certain Lukaku will start lot more matches the next season. If he’s half as good as Fifa 2012 makes him he’ll be amazing to watch. Mind you the only direct competition he’s got is a misfiring Torres and a developing Sturridge. In Lukaku we have a striker who has already set the Belgian league on fire. Sturridge might find it tough to hold out against this guy a couple of years down the line.
Josh and Lukaku are almost certainties to feature in the first team next season. Apart from them I also value Lucas Piazon highly. I have only read about him and seen youtube clips. I hold this guy in high regards. Being a typical tricky-dribbler Brazilian he’ll add a hint of class that has been missing from Chelsea recently. But at only 18 he needs to develop a lot to adapt himself to the rigors of Premiere League. He himself admitted that the grounds here are smaller than those in Brazil and thus it becomes difficult to showcase dribbling talent here. He can play on the wing or behind the striker. Mata and Piazon can then in rotation take on different roles which’ll make marking them all the more difficult.
Sam Hutchinson and Ryan Bertrand are the other players who excite me. They are Chelsea academy products and I really hope they make it into the first team sooner than later. We definitely need a cover for Ashley Cole who plays day-in and day-out. Also Terry needs to be phased out slowly and Hutchinson can be that man. Luiz, Cahill starting with Hutchinson as the backup is an ideal solution.
Oh, and not to forget Curtois.
So you see, Chelsea have a lot of amazing talent waiting for the opportunity to express themselves. Instead buying costly people in a fit of panic, we must be a little patient and make the best use of our youngsters. We have a striker, a midfielder, a winger and two defenders waiting to take the Stamford Bridge by storm. We do not really need to buy for these positions. The only position I think we might need to spend will be the right back. we’ve never had a good player in that position.
I am almost certain that the above 6 players will come good for Chelsea. They are the future of Chelsea and will definitely win us a lot of trophies.
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Interesting thing I did not know about Java – PermGen. Apparently other than just the stack (local variables and methods) and the heap (everything else), java uses this extra storage which can also cause OOMs.
PermGen is where a few very long-lived types of objects are persisted in Java, such as class definitions and ‘intern’ed Strings. It uses separate storage from the heap and the stack. If you run out of PermGen you will get out of memory errors. If you run very low you will get a JVM that spends all its time garbage collecting.
Few things I came about when I googled around:
- Never call System.gc(). It does not know the best time to garbage collect, only the JVM really does. (http://bit.ly/zIfp0B)
- Common causes of OOM in PermGen is ClassLoader. Whenever a class is loaded into JVM, all its meta data, along with Classloader, is kept on PermGen are and they will be garbage collected when the Classloader which loaded them is ready for garbage collection. In case Classloader has a memory leak then all classes loaded by it will remain in the memory and cause PermGen OOM once you repeat it a couple of times.
- http://blogs.oracle.com/fkieviet/entry/classloader_leaks_the_dreaded_java [definitely read this!]
- http://www.integratingstuff.com/2011/07/24/understanding-and-avoiding-the-java-permgen-space-error/ [also this one]
Luckily I’ve never had to deal with PermGen OOM before. Apparently it’s hell-of-a-job debugging this issue.
From The SDE Tip – Amazon
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Of late Google has been busy trimming the list of products and services it owns. Most of the acquired ones have been integrated into some core Google product and thus makes sense to drop them. For example, Pikniks features have been integrated into Picasa and is thus being shut down in April.
Another such product is Urchin. Having acquired the web analytics company, Google went into overdrive to create the Google Analytic service. Needless to say Google Analytics is way better than Urchin. The modified urchin.js (now called ga.js) does much more – it can track events and client side activities better than urchin.js. Thus the announcement to sunset Urchin. However, this might not be very well received by every one out there.
Google Analytics requires one to feed their logs to Google servers. Yeah you could un-check the tiny box to stress that the data should not be shared with Google, but still a lot of people will be uncomfortable with storing their data on servers not owned by them. With Urchin one had the benefit of locally installing the service. The UTM logs would be collected on boxes owned by the companies and also the log processor would run inside their firewall. Every company needs this sense of security. The moment log collection and parsing are pulled out of a company’s firewall eyebrows are raised. This is the reason why I believe that there will not be many takers for their Google Analytics Premium service. A person who is willing to pay 150000 USD per year have privacy and data security concerns no matter what the contract says.
For quite a while the Urchin software had not been updated. Google could have let the situation be as is. But by announcing that no new licenses will be sold from March onwards, they have challenged everybody – give us the logs or get lost. This kind of goes against their Google Is Not Evil policy. Not a good move in my opinion.
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The Disk Utility app of Mac allows one to create a password protected folder. An encrypted disk image is created. To mount the disk one has to enter the password set at the time of creation. The steps to create one is very easy.
Open up the Disk Utility app. Goto File -> New -> Blank Disk Image. Enter a name for the image. Choose the location. Disk name will be the name of the mounted image. Set a size that you want. Importantly enable encryption from the drop down. And for the image format drop down, select the Sparse Disk Image option. Click on create.
A new window comes up to set a password. Remember to uncheck the “Remember password in Keychain” option. Set the password and you are done.
Double clicking on the image file will bring up a window to enter the password. Authenticate yourself and you’ll see that the image has been mounted. Add files, remove files, etc and do whatever you want to. Remember to eject the image after your work is done.
There you go. A password protected image is all setup.
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It was only a week ago that I switched to Mac from Windows and my 10.7 Lion has already impressed me with its battery life. With battery level down to some 60%, I was able to play audio songs on my iTunes through out the night.
I started iTunes at 11 in the night and queued 132 songs for playing. No more activity. I left the lid as is, switched off the lights and went to bed. I woke up at 5 in the morning and the songs were still playing. Happily I dozed off again. The music had stopped when I next got up at 7:30.
But being able to play music for 6 hours with only 60% battery is an amazing battery performance. Really impressed!
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Villas Boas
My reaction after the substitutions – WTF is going on in AVB’s mind?
Bringing on Kalou in place of Romeu made technical sense. A 0-0 scoreline against a weaker opponent suggests the introduction of a more attacking player. The choice of player in this case wasn’t something that pleased me though. Whenever I see Kalou, I am reminded of the handball and subsequent penalty given by him to Valencia in the dying moments. This guy doesn’t inspire confidence.
AVB’s next move is more baffling. He brings on Mikel for Mata! Dude. Just 1 up against a team fighting the relegation threat, one must always be on the offensive. Sacrificing your most creative piece for a player who doesn’t deserve a place in any of the top teams makes no sense at all. With this move, Chelsea went into a 4-2-1-3 formation. The only motive at this point was to desperately hang to the lead. And that’s something you do against a better opponent and not Wigan!
The third substitution was absolutely scandalous. Pray tell us the name of the Oracle that told you removing your goal scorer for a lame runner will benefit your side. At this point Wigan were already pouring forward trying to get the equalizer. AVB’s move – let me pick up someone randomly from the field and the bench and swap them. Gosh! That’s terrible.
All this while when Chelsea were in trouble I have defended AVB. But today I am forced to ask what his plans actually were? What was he really expecting his substitutes to accomplish? How can he publicly state that he’ll help Torres find his best form and never give him a chance to play?
I think AVB has totally lost his plot. The pressure’s gotten to him. He has finally bowed down and abolished his attacking principles. The complete 90 minutes Chelsea were playing a purposeless game. There was no real passion or determination to win the game. They just sat back to defend and hoped they get a goal as a gift. It was a drab, dull and boring match. A waste of 90 minutes. Nightmarish. This was just as terrible as the 5-3 drubbing by Arsenal. They could have just bent over and saved themselves the humiliation of almost getting beat by an 18th placed team.
I don’t know what else to say. There was not a single minute in the game when Chelsea looked confident or a title challenger. Easily one of the worst games of the season so far.
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Fernando Torres
It’s been an year of disappointment for our new number 9 – Fernando Torres. Having sealed a big money transfer from Liverpool on the January deadline day, he has failed to match the expectations. Yes he was completely out of form when he joined us, but he’s had an year to improve on that. An year is no little time.
With AVB and his new philosophy Torres looked like getting some of his charisma and form back for good. He was good against Manchester United -discount the missed chance – played well in the next match before getting red carded and also scored in the next Champions League game. More importantly, his movement was good and he was willing to run and create opportunities for himself. And then somehow all the hard work was undone and Torres became the same lonely sad figure he was earlier. He has now lost his position in the Chelsea first team. Even for Spain he starts on the bench!
But then yesterday such events unfolded that could revitalize his campaign. There were rumors that he had been put on the market. AVB quashed the rumor insisting that there were no plans to offload the striker – not now nor in summer – a morale boost? Then Drogba will be leaving for the African Cup of Nations in January. We will be left with Torres, Sturridge and Lukaku as the only strikers. Sturridge will start on the wings till we get a new winger. Lukaku still needs to adapt to the English football. This could mean that Torres start each match in January as the central striker – golden opportunity. And then David Villa got himself injured and is expected to face some 6 months on the side lines. Torres does well for Chelsea and he’ll be an automatic selection for the Spain national team – does one need a bigger motivation than this?
The next 50 – 60 days could make or break Torres’s career at Stamford Bridge. I hope he shines. I am desperate for him to score goals for us.
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Lampard converts a penalty to hand Manchester City their first loss of the season
Did you just see how Lampard celebrated his penalty conversion? Did you notice his passion for the club? Well one thing is certain, he won’t be leaving the club any time soon. And if any manager dares to put him on the transfer list he’ll receive a lot of stick for such an action.
But the writing on the wall is a sure sign that we are moving away from the era dominated by Terry, Cech, Lampard and Drogba. In the past it was mostly Lampard who would take the free kicks. 99% of the penalties were also taken by him. But that role has now passed on to Mata as AVB explained after the match. Slowly but surely a new team is being built with Malouda and Anelka already relegated to the bench in favour of Sturridge and Mata. Also Mikel finds no place for himself as the more technical and quick Romeu has proven to be more than adept at that position. And with Drogba leaving for the African Cup of Nations in January, who knows how much good will it do to Torres and Sturridge. Perhaps when Drogba returns we’ll already have 3 top central strikers – Lukaku being the third.
The game began just as I had expected. Chelsea started with the same attacking philosophy and the high defensive line and were immediately penalized by a marvelous Aguero setting up Balotelli’s goal. Another 10 minutes of misery and our defenders decided to abolish the high line and defend deeper. The impact was immediate. Manchester City were no longer able to find space to trouble Cech and our quick midfield counter attacked whenever given the chance. And then with a moment of Sturridge’s brilliance Meirless found the net to equalize.
Second half started on a better note for Chelsea. Now that we were defending deeper, the confidence cascaded across the team and we got forward a lot more. Clichy’s wretched night saw him earn a second yellow. In all fairness he was no match for Sturridge on that day. With Manchester City down to 10 men, their game plan was to defend and hold out for a draw. This spurred us on. And once again Sturridge was the man of the moment. His shot was blocked by Lescott’s hand and a penalty awarded to Chelsea. Lampard converted the penalty with ease. From that moment on, there was no looking back. A deserved victory saw us cut down the difference to the top of the table to 7 points now. With any luck, if Manchester City were to lose to Arsenal and Chelsea win against Spurs, we will have a great shot at the title.
Romeu seems to have made the DM position his own. He is so calm at the ball, it’s as if he has a while minute to decide whom to pass the ball. That was something missing with Mikel. Ramires and his bursts of energy has seen Chelsea attack a lot more through the right wing this year. Earlier it was the combination of Cole and Malouda on the left that did the trick for Chelsea.
But once again we had to rely completely on Drogba for the central position. This is something that continues to worry me. Lampard is already being phased out and we need to do the same with Drogba. Torres needs to play more. We need to have faith in him for the long term.
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Chelsea vs Manchester City
It’s the big one today. We face the table toppers at our home. It’s the clash of a fearsome attack against a shaky defense. And I’m afraid. Already AVB has declared that if we lose this game our title race is all but over. A win is vital today and nothing else will do.
Manchester City has set the premier league alight with an amazing display of attack. Having scored 48 goals in the first 14 matches they’ll beat Premier League’s record of highest number of goals – 103 by Chelsea in 2009 – 2010 season – by a big margin. It’s their latest acquisition – Sergio Aguero – who has been the most devastating. He is a potent goal scoring machine. And what makes it worse is that Chelsea had kept tabs on this guy and he could have been in our team had things turned out differently (we put our faith in Torres).
Not to forget David Silva. The guy picked up from where he left the previous season. He’s arguably among the best midfielders in the league, if not the best. He is their main architect.
I’m afraid that these two could rip apart the Chelsea defense just the way they did it with Manchester United, more so if AVB decides to revert back to the high defensive line that our back four are so uncomfortable with. That brings us to the main question – what is going to be AVB’s strategy today? Will he defend deep like he did against Valencia in a do-or-die game? Seems likely because he cannot risk losing this game and slipping 13 points off the top. In fact, he might just play the same team that defeated Valencia by counter attacking which means that Torres will spend another game watching from the bench. Mancini would suspect the same. So will AVB surprise everyone by doing just the opposite and play like Chelsea played against Manchester United – remember had our strikers been more accurate we could have won that day.
For this game I do not want to voice my opinion. I just want us to win this one – hook or by crook. We cannot afford any more losses. And AVB needs a few victories for all the unpleasant rumors to die down. Only by winning a few matches can he gain the confidence of fans and experiment.
I’ll be watching the game with my fingers crossed.
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