Mitanshu

11000

2011-01-18T02:49:00.000+05:00

On the 18th day of 2011, I turned 24

Cheers!!! :)

Going Green is truly rewarding !!!

2010-06-06T19:07:00.003+06:00

I had another of my "Go Green" moment today. I was buying myself some groceries and at checkout, I gave my clubcard and told that I am carrying my own bag - I don't need yours.

The cashier gave me an extra clubcard point - Green point and Eureka! I reached yet another 100 points milestone!!!

Reward points aside, it gives a feel-good factor when you re-use your shopping bag - a small contribution to the environment - but hey! every little helps.

To know more about green-living, go to www.commonfloor.com/green-living

Incredible India - II

2010-01-19T09:00:00.000+05:00

My flight from Moscow got delayed by 7 hours because of thick/heavy fog at New Delhi Airport. Its quite surprising to me that the country which has technical institutes like 7+[x] IITs cannot up with a solution to fog problem.

If there is a problem get engineering involved and solve it. If there is no technical solution available, then come up with a winter time-table for flights (Here, I make an assumption that India has good enough weather technology to predict clear skies and visibility conditions). At-least, commuters will be mentally prepared and plan their vacations/meetings/schedule accordingly.

From the point of view of Airport Authorities at New Delhi, it is just another delay in another flight. But generally, people have a lot of things planned and arranged after the flight which gets totally disrupted because of the looooooong delays.

I wish, concerned people understand the value of time and take some constructive steps instead of just reporting delay statistics and using just-in-time approach to re-schedule flights.

Personally, I didn't lose much except for 7 hours of my limited vacation days, paying ~50$ for a taxi which I did not use, being late on reaching home on my birthday. Given the mobility involved in my job, I am OK with waiting for flight for 8-9 hours at any civilized airport at any time of day/year, but it really helps a lot if you know it well in advance.

Related Reading:

Incredible India - I
ATC Systems crashed at Delhi Airport, flights delayed
[Jan 2010] Fog delays over 100 flights at IGI
[Jan 2008] Fog delays over 100 flights
[Jan 2007] Fog, flight delays greet Delhi on New Year
[Cricket] Second cricket pitch fiasco for India, Sri Lanka
[2009] Angry over Games preparations, CGF chief wants PM to step in

10111

2010-01-18T02:30:00.001+05:00

On the 18th day of 2010, I turned 23

Cheers!!! :)

With more readers, comes false sense of power?

2010-01-07T11:05:00.001+05:00

I recently came across a blog post which made me think about misuse of popularity of your blog and online community.

Author claims that he accidentally pressed a few buttons when he was ringing his friend and that caused a deduction of [x] rs. from his account balance and a "crappy" caller tune is activated.

- He called them, got a negative reply.

- He tweeted about it, his social network said, they had same problem in past and did not get their money back.

- Emailed them to a have a written record (for -? consumer court -?)

- He gets a refund of 0.9[x] and suggests that their should be an additional layer of verification through SMS.

I might be wrong, but having an additional verification channel of SMS would consume extra resources of the company.

I think, people at the mobile company returned the money only as a goodwill gesture or like some random holiday gift. As per my understanding (which might be insufficient), I don't think the company was legally obliged to pay the money back!

Also, the mobile operator has very clearly advertised in their campaigns, that to copy a caller-tune from your friend, dial his number and then press certain combination of keys. If you "accidentally" do that very sequence, pay for it.

Next day, someone might dial a number accidentally from their speed-dial and claim money back because he did not talk.

So, personally I dont think this was an ethical step from the author to try to defame the mobile operator as bullying the customers OR unfairly charging for services.

You have got a great blog, a good readership, use it for more constructive reasons - with great powers, comes great responsibility!

P.S.:

1. I am not giving link of blog post here to respect the annonymity of the author. Although, I am fully aware that with the information given above, a small google search will land you on his blog.

2. I am one of the regular reader of his blog.

What else I want in Google Wave

2009-12-01T08:13:00.003+05:00

Over the last 3-4 days, I have been spending a lot of time on Google Wave and I have a wish-list of ideas which I would like Google to implement.

# Integration with Gmail, Google Docs.

# I should have control over which wave I want to be a participant in. For example, I don't want anybody in my contact list adding me to a certain wave [X] and then I have to unfollow it. I should get an email/wavelet where I can see all waves pending my approval for being a participant in there.

# When adding a new participant to the wave, I should decide whether he can see playback from creation of the wave, or from the moment he was added in.

# Smiley / Emoticons in waves.

# If I, as a creator of wave, add someone (by mistake), then I should be able to remove him/her before/after his approval to join.

# Export participants of a wave and import them in another wave. [view]

# Enable typing in draft mode.

# Right-click menus.

# Nick-names for my contacts - visible only to me.

# Pages. When a wave becomes loooong, then, viewer should have option to view it in a single page, or in multiple pages.

# Skins / Themes like in Gmail.

How wave will change the nature of chain emails

2009-11-30T22:12:00.002+05:00

Disclaimer: Any views expressed in this post are entirely of the USB keyboard I have borrowed from my friend.

Today, I received yet another chain mail regarding Microsoft paying me money!!!

Microsoft pays you $245 for every person that you sent it to that forwards it on, Microsoft will pay you $243 and for every third person that receives it, you will be paid $241.

Within two weeks, Microsoft will contact you for your address and then send you a cheque.

So, I was thinking what will happen in a wave scenario ? How will Microsoft / AOL track you and credit your account.

Because, in case of emails, it works like a chain reaction. A forwards to B, C and D and they forward to {B1, B2, B3 ... }; {C1, C2, C3} .. etc. This way, there are lot of different emails floating around - you get lot of different "legs" in which you can earn $241.

But, when we talk about wave in case of chain mails, it will be a single document in which you can add different participants. To make sure you make quick money, or help a 3 old girl who got raped, you can make your wave public and ask people to follow it.

So, in near future, you can expect emails like:

Microsoft pays you $245 for every person that follows this wave. It pays you $242 for every next follower and $241 for the next one. Within two weeks, Microsoft will contact you for your address and then send you a cheque.

Green and Safe Diwali

2009-10-10T14:02:00.003+06:00

Diwali is one of the most widely celebrated festivals in India (and abroad). It falls on the darkest night of the year. The tradition of lighting lamps on this night may have come from the need for light on this intensely dark night.

However, every year, the festival of lights fill our cities and environment with dark smoke. Air pollution more than doubles and big cities like Delhi become gas chambers. The toxic substances used in the firecrackers release toxic gases that are harmful to the health of all living beings.

Children and animals are the biggest victims of Noise Pollution as their defence mechanisms are not fully developed to withstand the increased intensity of noise and air pollution.

Bursting of crackers is now a means of "showing off " and is another opportunity to display ones wealth. With so many people living in poverty, burning money on crackers is a shame.

How to celebrate eco-sensitive Diwali?

- Make Rangoli with natural ingredients like wheat or rice flour or mix with haldi, mehendi and sindur for colour. Rangoli made of wheat, rice flour provide food for ants and look more ethnic.
- Instead of individual celebration prefer community celebration in a open ground.
- Instead of electric illumination for long hours go for traditional lightening of earthen lamps or diyas.
- Donate for relief operations in Karnataka.
- Share food, sweets and clothes with the lesser privileged.
- All gift wrapping paper should be made out of recycled paper and not glitter paper which is not recyclable.
- Send out e-cards or text messages. No fancy Diwali cards.

Go Green this Diwali. Wishing you all a very happy, safe, green and prosperous Diwali

Diet Assesment

2009-09-16T20:47:00.003+06:00

I was looking today for nutrient content in various food stuff and how much should be consumed by an individual. I came across the following values and thought of sharing:

Required Daily Allowance for an average Indian male + a moderate worker + weighing around 60 kg. The reference Indian being defined as "one between 20-39 yrs of age, weighing 60 kg, free from disease and physically fit for active work. On each working day he is employed for 8 hours in occupation that usually involves medium work. While not at work he spends 8 hours in bed, 4-6 hours sitting n moving around, and 2 hrs on walking and in active recreation or household duties".

Energy (kCal): 2875
Proteins (gms): 60
Fats (gms): 20
Calcium (mg): 400
Iron (mg): 28
Misc: Not included in this post.

I am on to my own diet assessment now. I wish I am not getting any deficit in my diet while in Western Siberia.

Facebook Ramayan

2009-09-08T18:13:00.003+06:00

Check out this must read Facebook version of Ramayana written by Kokonad Sinha on his blog - If the Ramayan were on Facebook

Although, all entries are very funny, my favourite one is:

Ravana super-poked Kumbhkarna

Very Creative and funny!

Square Root of Three

2009-08-09T11:17:00.001+06:00

I fear that I will always be.....
A lonely number like root three...
A three is all that's good and right...
Why must my three keep out of sight...
Beneath a vicious square-root sign?...
I wish instead I were a nine...
For nine could thwart this evil trick...
With just some quick arithmetic...
I know I'll never see the sun...
As 1.7321...
Such is my reality...
A sad irrationality...
When, hark, just what is this I see?...

Another square root of a three...
Has quietly come waltzing by...
Together now we multiply...
To form a number we prefer...
Rejoicing as an integer...
We break free from our mortal bonds...
And with a wave of magic wands...
Our square-root signs become unglued...
And love for me has been renewed..

[Thanks: Devesh]

Bing Summer Travel Photo Contest

2009-07-03T03:06:00.000+06:00

The Bing Summer Travel Photo Contest is asking Facebook users to submit their best summer vacation photos. The community will then vote on them, and the winner will get its day in the sun, so to speak, on Monday, August 3 — appearing to the millions who visit Bing on that day.

There are some rules for these photos as well. Obviously, no alcohol, smoking, guns, violence or nudity will be allowed.

Here's what they are looking for:

* The image should make you want to find out more about it.
* The image should draw you in and be a starting place for exploring Bing
* The subject of the photo must provide enough interest to program all the content that we use to support that exploration.
* Strive for subtlety and poetry. You shouldn’t have to know that it’s Halloween, Columbus Day, or Boss’s Day to enjoy the photo.

On Bing Blog: The images are chosen from a variety of licensed photos with the goal of inspiring a sense of exploration and delight while piquing your interest to learn more

Why is it good to be a vegetarian?

2009-06-23T19:35:00.002+06:00

Environmental issues
- Vegetarianism helps conserve fossil fuel in a major way. Studies have shown that it takes 35 calories of fossil fuel to produce 1 calorie of mutton; 22 calories of fossil fuel for 1 calorie of poultry; but just 1 calorie of fossil fuel for 1 calorie of vegetables. By eating plant food we can help conserve our non-renewable sources of energy.
- It has been observed that it takes about 3 to 15 times as much water to produce animal food, as it does to produce plant food. Thus by becoming vegetarian we can conserve our water resources.
- It is seen that it takes about 5-10 kilogram of plant matter and grains to produce one kilogram of animal protein. By eating this vegetarian food directly (and not through the animals) we can save a lot of this food material to feed all the hungry people in this world.
- Plant foods have a longer shelf life than animal foods. One needs to spend more energy in preserving animal food products, thus exacerbating the energy crisis.

Health issues
- The plant food takes care of all the nutrient needs. If we eat enough fruits and vegetables we will not suffer from any nutrient deficiency. On the other hand animal foods are largely deficient in vitamins, except for vitamin B complex.
- Everyone knows that the animal foods are higher in fat and cholesterol than the plant foods. Animal foods are also high in protein content. This causes excess nitrogen in the blood; leading to many health problems. By eating vegetarian food, we can say goodbye to many bothersome diseases, such as heart diseases, osteoporosis, kidney stones, gall stones, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, arthritis, gum disease, obesity and acne.
- Animal food is totally deficient in carbohydrates, which are essential for good health.
- Animal foods contain far higher concentrations of agricultural chemicals than plant foods.
- Most of the animals are given drugs such as steroids, antibiotics, and growth hormones. These drugs are consumed by us humans when we consume meat.
- There are many bacteria and viruses that thrive on animal foods, when we eat these foods we end up eating these organisms as well. It is not as if the plant foods do not have any micro-organisms, but their number is nowhere near as much as in meat products.
- Animal products take rather long to digest. They keep putrefying in the colon, creating intestinal toxemia. It is a well known fact that the condition of the intestinal flora is critical to overall health of the body. Vegetarian food travels quickly through the gastro-intestinal tract.
- Plant foods are high in fibre content. Fibre absorbs unwanted, excess fats; cleans the intestines; provides bulk and helps in peristaltic movement; ensuring regular bowel movements. Meat, poultry, and dairy products are deficient in fibre content.
- Animal foods contain the body wastes of the animals such as adrenaline, uric acid, and lactic acid.
- When we consume plant foods we consume a chlorophyll module which is very similar to our hemoglobin.
- Plant foods contain trace elements that not only nurture our cells, but are precursors of all our genetic material.
- Animal food is primarily acidic in nature. It leaves behind an acidic residue after digestion. This acid upsets the delicate pH balance of our body. A chronically over-acidic pH ratio begins to corrode body tissues, produces neuro-toxins, interrupts all cellular functions and generally creates havoc with our health. However, some of the plant foods are also acidic in nature, and should be avoided e.g. alcohol, coffee, white bread, oatmeal, sugar, tobacco, chillies, and all packaged and processed foods.
- Raw plant foods such as fruits detoxify our bodies, increase immunity, and improve our skin and hair.

Economic issues
- Vegetarian foods cost much less than non-vegetarian foods. So being vegetarian makes a lot of economic sense.
- When we eat vegetarian foods, we stay healthier; thus saving on health care expenses.

Ethical issues
- If we love animals, we have no desire to kill them for food.
- Our body has been designed in a way to make us natural herbivores. Our hands, teeth, feet, intestinal tract…all are different from those of carnivorous species.
- Mahatma Gandhi promoted the spirit of non-violence, but this spirit can't be fostered if we indulge in killing animals.
- There can be no peace in the world, if we declare war on other species for food.
- There are many substitutes available in the vegetable kingdom to satisfy all taste buds.

Spiritual issues
- Plant foods carry an inner light; both philosophically and biologically, as natural sunlight is a vital ingredient of plant foods. This light nourishes our physical body, mind, and spirit.
- Plant foods keep us healthy. These healthy cells have a harmonic frequency that raises our overall energy vibration.
- Plant food is rich in natural energy, vital for self-transformation.
- Ellen G. White the famous writer of early twentieth century said, "Whatever affects the body has a corresponding effect on the mind and soul." In other words, what we eat affects our consciousness.

Related reading:
Why is it good for you to be a vegetarian?
49 Good Reasons For Being A Vegetarian

404 message

2009-06-08T10:19:00.005+06:00

Sometimes, 404 messages can be a good read. I was browsing through istartedsomething.com and got this 404 error message:
-----------------------------------------
Error 404 - Not Found
Hello. You've encountered an error. How unlucky of you.

The whatever you were looking for is not here. The page you are looking for may have been wiped from the face of this earth, or just this server. This is unrecoverable, and no matter how many times you click F5 or Refresh, it just won't work.

You probably broke it even, but I wouldn't blame you, you're so clumsy to even encounter this error in the first place.

Oh well, since you're already here, you're going to have to live with it.

What can you do?
I can't read your brain, so you're going to have to figure this one out on your own.

# You can try to search for related topic you were looking for on the left sidebar.
# You can look through all of the archive looking for it, whilst enjoying my great literature.
# You can even go back to the site you came from, send the webmaster of that website a few hundred emails asking him why he has broken links.
-----------------------------------------

Google Squared is Live!

2009-06-04T09:37:00.005+06:00

Google Squared is a search tool that helps you quickly build a collection of facts from the Web for any topic you specify. It's kinda fun. You can add columns (attributes) real-time and save it (after logging in), share the URL.

Check Google Sqaure for IIT or for Indian States or for Indian Movies.

However, the results are sometimes quite funny. Check the screen-shot below for my query "Harry Potter" and look particularly at the image of Lord Voldemort.

Microsoft Bing Goes Live

2009-06-02T09:36:00.006+06:00

Microsoft has again re-branded and this time improved their existing search engine(s). Some of the interesting features of the new search engine:

Web-Slice
If you search for a company stock (e.g. GOOG or MSFT), Bing will automatically create a web slice for that company which you may then add to IE 8 and track the performance directly from the favorites bar. You need Internet Explorer 8 to try this feature.

411
Microsoft's new search engine, has also launched Bing-411 as a direct swipe at GOOG-411. Both are free and both use speech-to-text technology and voice recognition to completely automate directory assistance calls. Bing 411 (1-800-246-4411) gives you local business listings, as well as local traffic, weather, and movie listings. The voice is a little more obviously computer-generated than Google’s, but it also can get you a phone number, address, or directions.

RSS
Unlike Google or Yahoo, Bing offers RSS feeds for their web search results that you can subscribe to inside any feed reader. Your browser should be able to auto-detect the RSS feed of Bing pages or you can append &format=rss to any Bing search URL and convert it into a feed.

Infinite Image Scrolling
You never have to click to another page when you're searching for photos and graphics. The more you scroll, the more Bing keeps loading images related to your search.

Autoplay
Videos start playing when you move your mouse over them. However, this gives users of all age an easy access to p0rn.

contains
Bing (and Live Search) supports a unique "contains" search operator that lets you find web pages that contain links to particular file types.

And yes, Bing has the answer to life the universe and everything

However, results are not as fresh as Google. I did a search for "lost plane" on both Bing and Google and was expecting to see something about French plane lost in Atlantic.

I also checked Internet Wayback Machine, and found that Bing.com is live from July 26,2003. Although, it wasn't a search engine then!

Indian Cooking Knol-edge Contest

2009-05-04T13:19:00.002+06:00

Sanjeev Kapoor is a household name when it comes to Indian cooking. Google Knol has launched a contest to find the best recipes in five Indian languages (Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam). Master Chef Sanjeev Kapoor will pick one winner in each language. Winners will get Sanjeev Kapoor’s cookbooks and grand prizes worth 150 USD each. Google goodies will be awarded to the next 40 shortlisted entrants.

Ther is no limit to the number of entries per user. Contest period is from April 20 to June 20, 2009. Winners will be announced on August 5.

Submit your receipes!

Green Summers

2009-04-24T15:39:00.002+06:00

Participate and get others involved in Green Summers - organized by Green1.0

Incredible India - I

2009-04-24T15:29:00.005+06:00

On my flight back to India (April 10, 2009), I saw the glimpse of true india - real India, bhukka India. The flight crew was serving free alcoholic beverages on board and the I felt very ashamed at the desperation of the people for the drinks.

Unfortunately, the person sitting next to me, drank a little too much - both from the whiskey bottle he purchased from duty free AND from the free drinks served by the cabin crew.

I had to leave my seat because he started speaking "shit". I spent some time with the crew people and later the crew was generous enough to give me a seat in the Business class!

I filed a complaint while on board. I hope some strict action must have been taken against the person.

The flight was Etihad Airways 7602 operated by Jet Airways from Abu Dhabi Intl. Airport to Indira Gandhi Intl. Airport, Delhi.

I will update this post with the pic of the drunken man - just in case someone wants to run a story or follow-up on the same!

Update:

Google Ads - In your face, all over the place

2009-03-15T00:17:00.002+05:00

To improve its financial position, Google has started showing ads in the services that were not being monetized yet - News, Image Search, Finance and Picasa Web Albums.

Also, they have started behavioral targeted ads.

Google in their post admits "This kind of tailored advertising does raise questions about user choice and privacy" but opines that these are "questions the whole online ad industry has a responsibility to answer."

Thus, if behavioral targeting learns that you like [X], you get to see ads about [X] everywhere you go on the web.

Now you get, Google Ads - In your face, all over the place!

Energy Saved => Energy Got

2009-03-07T11:34:00.004+05:00

Climate Savers Computing Initiative (CSCI) has launched the Power Down for the Planet video contest, a challenge to develop original and creative videos that educate, entertain, and inform about the importance of energy efficient computing.

Did you know?
The annual CO2 savings from using power management is greater than the CO2 savings achieved by lowering your home thermostat 2 deg. Fahrenheit in the winter, washing your clothes only in cold water, or giving up your car two days out of every month.*

*(Based on U.S. Census Bureau estimate of the number of college students, Harris Interactive estimate of the percentage of students that own desktop computers, U.S. Department of Energy estimate of average CO2 per KW/hr, U.S. EPA estimate of average tons of CO2 produced per car, and an average energy cost of $0.0885/KW.)

Sri Lanka's Pakistan tour "cleared"

2009-03-03T10:47:00.003+05:00

After Sri Lanka's president Mahinda Rajapakse cleared the national team's tour of Pakistan, Javed Miandad, director general PCB said, "Not only the cricket fraternity but the whole of Pakistan is thankful to the Sri Lankan president for clearing their tour to Pakistan. I hope more and more people come to watch Sri Lanka play in Pakistan because we want to prove to the world that Pakistan is safe and secure for cricket"

Today, a masked gunmen attacked the bus carrying the Sri Lankan cricket team to the Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore. Five cricketers, including Mahela Jayawardene, the Sri Lankan captain, and his deputy Kumar Sangakkara, received minor injuries.

Miles to go ...

2009-02-25T17:17:00.003+05:00

Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening

~ By Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Oscar Awards

2009-02-23T09:08:00.005+05:00

The Oscar Award for best original score goes to ... A.R. Rahman

This was the most awaited Oscar Ceremony for any Indian, for where else do you see an Indian being nominated for three awards in the most talked about award Ceremony in the world?

Jai Ho!

Update: AR Rehman has won his second Oscar Award!

The Pink Pigeon Campaign

2009-02-13T23:04:00.006+05:00

Over the last few days, I have been seeing in my gtalk status messages and in Facebook updates, "Pink Chaddi" and "Pink Condom" Campaigns.

The organizers and facilitators of these 2 groups have generated a lot of following. I think it would have been wise and constructive have these 2 groups used their intellect of creating a buzz by spreading the message of peace and unity throughout the country and also across the political borders.

I think these 2 groups should endorse the "pink pigeon" campaign (a satire post from fakingNews) and spread the message of peace and unity among all loose, tight, forward, backward men and women.

Incredible India!

P.S.: I wish all girls a very green Valentine Day.

Traveling => No Blogging

2009-02-05T17:31:00.006+05:00

I will be traveling on Friday (6th Feb) from Noyabrsk (West Siberia) to Moscow and on Saturday (7th Feb) to Abu Dhabi for training School.

So, I will not be able to blog in this period.

I came to Russia on 5th November and had a great time here - lots of friends, lots of high-tech knowledge, rig experience, Russian lessons, cold weather (I have seen a minimum of -43 C in Siberia in January), dinner on 22nd birthday, and lots of other stuff.

The only thing which I could not appreciate here was the very limited options of vegetarian food available here. But, thanks to Anshul who came on 23rd January and got for me some Indian sweets. I really owe that to him.

Create your own IM Bot

2009-02-05T10:15:00.003+05:00

In my last post, I mentioned about providing web services through Internet Messengers.

I searched online for a service which could provide a API or some other tool to create a bot. The one that I recommend is www.imfied.com.

How to make a IM Bot:

Step1: Go to imfied.com and register for a account.

Step2: You will get a validation key in your email address. Validate your account.

Step3: Login to your account and create a bot under applications tab. You will have to give URL of your script which will be hosted on your hosting space.

I used post by Amit to go through the steps required for creating the bot. Although, people at imfied.com have done some minor changes to the steps mentioned by him.

Because of traffic and infrastructure reasons, your bot may take a couple of days to get live.

Also, the bot id will be @bot.im. It would have been great if it could have been @yourdomainname.com

Web Service from chat

2009-02-03T14:13:00.002+05:00

There are many people on the internet, who live and breath web-messengers and emails, especially Gmail.

Recently, I have come across some web-services which actually depict the true meaning of WWW - Whatever, Wherever, and Whenever!

Carpool

2009-01-31T15:36:00.001+05:00

Carpooling is a private agreement between several people to go regularly to a similar destination. A typical example would be that several workers from the same company who live in the same suburb take turns in driving to work.

The major challenge of carpooling actually is that there has to be a very strong geographic and time overlap. In my opinion, only a web service with a large local user community will be able to achieve success because poor results due to fewer users can de-motivate potential users very quickly.

It is quite surprising to me that Google India, having a very big user base through its social networking application - orkut; is not taking any initiative in this context.

what to do with gtalk status messages

2009-01-23T14:34:00.003+05:00

What can be done:

Show current music track
Write a funny quote as a status message
Promote your product / company / website / event in your campus.
Say something about your future plan
Tell how difficult or wonderful is your life
Share link to your personal album, favourite song or a youTube video
Write a review about a movie
Say something about your latest crush
Request for some book, medicine, movie, etc.
Crib about the system
Post your opinion, sympathy for a latest event.
Write a religious verse.
etc.

What you want to do:

Show countdown for your birthday, new year, christmas, or any other upcoming event.
Display real time cricket scores.
Real time quotes for stocks.
Automatic daily quote (funny, inspirational, etc.).
Show different status message to different people.

What else you do with your gtalk status message ?

What else do you want to do with it ?

How Green Is My Orange?

2009-01-22T15:05:00.001+05:00

How much does your morning glass of orange juice contribute to global warming?

PepsiCo, which owns the Tropicana brand, decided to try to answer that question. It figured that as public concern grows about the fate of the planet, companies will find themselves under pressure to perform such calculations. Orange juice seemed like a good case study.

PepsiCo hired experts to do the math, measuring the emissions from such energy-intensive tasks as running a factory and transporting heavy juice cartons. But it turned out that the biggest single source of emissions was simply growing oranges. Citrus groves use a lot of nitrogen fertilizer, which requires natural gas to make and can turn into a potent greenhouse gas when it is spread on fields.

PepsiCo finally came up with a number: the equivalent of 3.75 pounds of carbon dioxide are emitted to the atmosphere for each half-gallon carton of orange juice.

PepsiCo is among the first that will provide consumers with an absolute number for a product’s carbon footprint, which many expect to be a trend. The information will be posted on Tropicana’s Web site. The company has not yet decided if it will eventually put it on the package.

While carbon reduction efforts are generally welcomed by environmentalists, some complain that the marketing claims are backed by fuzzy numbers and dubious assumptions.

Bryan Lembke, a PepsiCo manager on the project said, "If you don’t measure it, you can’t improve it."

Read the complete story here.

Caught 22

2009-01-18T10:38:00.001+05:00

On the 18th day of 2009, I turned 22 :)

Social NOTworking

2009-01-13T00:30:00.001+05:00

...Besides the economic downturn, the trend in social networking has also been recognized, with the word 'social notworking'-the practice of spending time unproductively on social networking websites, especially when one should be working...

Read here.

Satyam Scam

2009-01-08T18:52:00.004+05:00

I read the letter from Raju to Satyam and following questions came to my mind:

(1) What were Auditors doing? Should PWC be punished ?
Update: Price Waterhouse says audit of Satyam in accordance with auditing standards

(2) Is it possible for a single person do perform fraud of this magnitude?

(3) If he is seriously feeling guilty, (as he tried to show through his letter), why he did not name his partners in the crime ?

(4) If he has left the country, then Immigration people must be knowing about his whereabouts. Why is SEBI trying to delay his arrest by not consulting Immigration people?

(5) Satyam is listed on overseas Stock exchanges. Does this invite fraud case on Satyam Management and Auditors from overseas lawyers and share holders ?

(6) What is the future of existing Satyam employees and those who were hired recently?

(7) Where is Raju's family now?

(8) Can we call this Economic Terrorism?

Disclaimer: I have no financial background.

Ponting repeats history at SCG

2009-01-07T14:56:00.007+05:00

I think ICC should add some new rules to cricket after this:

McDonald to Kallis, OUT, oh well held, McDonald .. or not? Pitches it up down the stumps, Kallis goes back and starts to turn it to the on side, but the ball takes a leading edge and balloons back up in the air towards the bowler, who flings himself to his right in his follow through and looks like he's taken a stunner ... his team-mates converge but Kallis asks for confirmation, and McDonald admits he's not sure. To the naked eye it looked like he took it, Ponting sticks up a finger even before the umpires are consulted, and after numerous analysis Kallis is adjudged out. Thats a very, very tough call. One angle indicates he took it, the straight view says something else. I'm not convinced he took it.
(Source: Cricinfo)

Last year, during 2nd Test match between India and Australia, Ganguly was given OUT by Ponting:

Lee to Ganguly, OUT, huge appeals as Clarke is adamant he caught the ball low in front of him at second slip. Ganguly stands his ground, disgusted, and finally walks off. Replays suggest there is some doubt about whether it carried or not. The zoom in replays have showed that the ball may have bounced before Clarke took it. Close call but there was doubt. Benson seemed to ask someone and then gave it out, replays show Ponting indicating that the catch was taken. Ganguly, after he nicked that stood long and hard, not convinced that Clarke had caught it, the Australians had no doubt it was out. Replays showing that Clarke may have grounded the ball as he rolled over after taking the catch.

Year 2008 and me!

2008-12-24T09:24:00.014+05:00

Year 2008 has turned out to be a good year for me. Some of the major events:

- I turned 21 years old on January 18 (ie legally eligible for "many" things in India)

- Organized Srishti 2008 and conducted the first ever SEO Contest by an Asian organization.

- Visited the holy mountain of Vaishno Devi (in March) after almost 3 years.

- Installed and configured a enterprise application (developed completely by me) for a Delhi based company.

- Completed my Undergraduation from IIT Roorkee (in May).

- Joined CommonFloor.com - a startup in Bangalore and worked on the product alongwith some SEO, SEM for the website (worked from mid-June to September end).

- Took an initiative to fight against global warming and pledged to provide a clean, green energy future to the upcoming generation.

- Joined Schlumberger and got relocated to Russia - Made my 1st International trip on 5th Nov.

- Went to the gym for the 1st time in December.

- Lost my 1st match in (Russian) Billiards.

Places I have been in this year:

(Hisar, Delhi, Bangalore, Roorkee, Haridwar, Vaishno Devi, Moscow, Noyabrsk)

This probably is the last post of the year. Will continue blogging in 2009.

Happy Holidays :)

JAF: Just Another Forward!

2008-12-15T10:36:00.003+05:00

These days my inbox is getting flooded with forwards. Here's and old but a good one!

New Commandments:

1) Live to relax!
2) Love your bed, its your temple
3) Relax in the day, so that you can sleep at night
4) Work is holy, so don't touch it
5) Don't do something tomorrow, that you can do the day after
6) Work as little as possible, let others do what needs to be done
7) Don't worry, nobody died doing nothing. But you could get hurt at work.
8) If you feel like doing work, sit down and wait till that feeling goes away.
9) Don't forget that working is healthy, so leave it to the sick people.

I really want to put # 3 on my gTalk status message, but I don't want "some" people to see it. May be someday, there will be a feature of showing different status messages to different people from the same Google account!
Update: Added a screenshot of my Task List from Gmail

chat, frustration and dot com

2008-12-06T21:07:00.003+05:00

Today I was talking to one of my junior and he was asking about some website to download e-Books. I have told him many times that for anything on net.. Juz Google it.

So, I told him IdontknowGooglekar.com

Here is an excerpt from our chat (sorry non-hindi folks):

c: aapke paas herbert schildt padi hai
soft copy ?
me: download from net
c: site batao
me: IdontknowGooglekar.com
c: hehe
kholke dekhu isse
google karne se nahi mili tabhi to aapse pocha
me: bhaadmeijao.com
c: :D
me: ab se tu saari baate .. .com ke saath bol kar
jaise .. hi.com
kaiseho.com
samjha.com ?
c: hehe.com
me: sabkosikhade.com
c: sabko.com
asin.com ?
me: stdandtabletshouldtalklikethis.com
c: haha.com
me: willudoit.com
c: haha.com
bilkul.com

I know its not funny .. but when you "actually" work of 7 days a week and you know you have to do it for atleast 7 weeks, then such things do look funny.

If you are not convinced, come over to Siberia!

P.S.: No reward for guessing the nicknames.com

Value of 500 bucks!

2008-11-21T20:14:00.001+05:00

If some one gives you 500 bucks, what will you do with it?

Think before you spend!

Gmail get Themes

2008-11-20T11:22:00.006+05:00

I have my own list of most wanted Gmail Lab features:

1) Send Time
- Setting at what time the email should go. For instance, you want to send birthday wishes at midnight, but you are not sure if you will be online at that time. Compose a birthday-wish email and tell Gmail at what time the mail should go.
2) Custom Themes
- Just like iGoogle or Google Groups.
3) Rich HTMLText in Signatures
- Setting colorful signatures with emoticons
4) Different status messages to different people.
5) Choosing default font color while composing emails.
Finally, Gmail has heard my demand # 2 and Gmail has announced that around 30 themes will be rolled out to users. To customize your inbox, go to the Themes tab under Settings.

I will be using nature / green themes and will make my Gmail Green !

Welcome Moscow!

2008-11-14T13:07:00.009+05:00

I boarded the flight (SU-536) to Moscow, Russia on Nov.5th at 5am Indian Time. This was my first international flight and I was obviously very excited about it. I was about to join the most coveted company in my campus for non-CS guys.

Last few weeks were quite dramatic (regarding the VISA and other document related process).

Starting with delay in Letter of Invitation by a couple of weeks followed by mismatch in Russian translation of my first name. In Letter of Invitation my first name was translated as: митаншю. However, the consulate in India, translated it as: митаншу on my VISA. This meant that I have to go a little early to Moscow to get correction in MFA in Russia. After another week, there was a problem in Date of Birth on my Insurance Letter (1978 instead of 1987). Fortunately, that was corrected quickly!

After all the above problems, and a few more, I finally managed to get a ticket and fly to Russia.

Welcome Moscow!

I got accommodation from my employer in Holiday Inn for my entire stay in Moscow.

Moscow is a nice city if you leave out a very high population density and high costs for foreigners. Also, "Russia is for Russians". You will find almost all sign boards in Russian only!

I went to Red Square and Kremlin on Saturday, 8th November with 2 other newbies in my company - Rachel from Northern Ireland and Tonette from Norway.

Just an email address ?

2008-09-27T22:01:00.002+06:00

I got the following message from Google Groups when I tried posting on a group with a different email-address.

From: noreply@googlegroups.com
Date: Sat, 27 Sep 2008 15:30:11 +0000
Subject: Posting error:
To: mitanshu dot garg at
gmail dot com
Hello mitanshu dot garg at gmail
dot com,
We're writing to let you know that the group that you tried
to contact
.
.
.
.
Thanks, and we hope you'll continue to
enjoy Google Groups.
The Google Groups Team

The strange thing is that although Google knows almost everything about my identity, yet it chose to address me with my email-address. Are internet users just an email address ?

Boking a ticket "via" internet - Think again !!!

2008-09-20T08:14:00.008+06:00

I was trying to book ticket for one of my friend this morning from VIA and I chose not to do so because of security reasons.

I have always been told that while booking tickets online; look for a website with an encryption facility, as this is now standard for website payment security. The website address should always appear 'https://' – with the added "s" for secure – when you are entering in any personal or payment details.

Are these guys at VIA using some very advanced technology to secure our data without using https:// ? If that is the case, then kudos to these people!

They mention under the payment header: "VIA ensures that every transaction, including your credit card information, you conduct is safe and secure. To achieve this, the site is protected by leading Secured Socket Layer (SSL) encryption technology."

Anywayz, whatever the case might be, I just did "Ctrl+w" :)

P.S.: Title is Boking and not Booking just to save an extra key-stroke!

Update: Ashish from pluggd.in pointed me out that VIA website also works over https://

gtalk status messages and Gmail Labs

2008-09-18T18:41:00.002+06:00

gTalk status messages have become a mini twitter. (In my friend list), people keep status messages mentioning their relationships / achievements / future plans / their geo-Locations / funny jokes / motivational quotes / recent events in their life etc etc ...

Sometimes its fun to read (and follow) what's going on in our friend circle. This recent trend has made facebook, linkedin, and orkut network updates almost useless. I have seen many people keeping status messages like, "Orkut Album updated with photos of my trip to ..."

I was just wondering that in the recent flow of Gmail Labs feature (right side labels and chat, {non-functional} forgotten attachment detector, colored markers etc.), wouldn't it be great to have something like "segmented status message" i.e to display different status message to different set of people.

In case someone is reading this, please pass on my message to Gmail team to implement this feature. :)

WWW

2008-09-10T21:12:00.003+06:00

In a recent conference, I got to hear a new definition of WWW - Whatever, Wherever, and Whenever!

For nerds: WWW means - World Wide Web

Big Bang Experiment

2008-09-08T14:27:00.003+06:00

On Wednesday, September 10, Dr Evans will fire up the Large Hadron Collider, a 17-mile-long doughnut-shaped tunnel that will smash sub-atomic particles together at nearly the speed of light.

Built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the collider lies beneath the French-Swiss border, near the institution’s headquarters in Geneva, at depths ranging from 170ft to 600ft.

Built at a cost of £5bn, the world's largest test tube should help solve other problems that have been taxing scientists for years such as "dark matter".

It will track the spray of particles thrown out by collisions in a search for the elusive Higgs Boson, a theoretical entity that supposedly lends weight, or mass, to the elementary particles. So important is this mysterious substance that it has been called the 'God Particle'.

The claims fearing that the experiment may create quasars – a mass of energy fuelled by black holes have been dismissed by the courts, reassured by Cern that the LHC is perfectly safe.

[Video] Art of the Start

2008-09-07T15:52:00.001+06:00

I found this awesome video by Guy Kawasaki on "Art of the Start".

The top 10 things he mentions are:
1. Make meaning.
Increase the quality of life.
Right a wrong
Prevent the end of something good

2. Make mantra (mission statement) for your organization
Ex: FedEx: Peace of Mind
Nike: Authentic Athletic Performance
Target: Democratize Design
Wendy's: Healthy Fast Food

3. Get Going
Think Different
Don't be afraid of polarizing people
Find a few soul mates

4. Define a Business Model
Be Specific
Keep it Simple
Ask women about your business model

5. Weave a MAT (milestones, assumptions, tasks)

6. Niche Thyself
Ability to provide unique product or service
Value to Customer

7. Follow the 10/20/30 rule
You should have 10 slides in your powerpoint presentation
20 minutes
30 point font

8. Hire Infected People
Work Experience
Educational background
Love your product

Ignore the irrelevant
Hire better than yourself
Apply the shopping center test

9. Lower the barriers to adoption
Flatten the learning curve
Don't ask people to do something that you wouldn't
Embrace your evangelists

10. Seed the clouds
Let a hundred flowers blossom
Enable test drives
Find the influencers.

11. (Bonus point): Don't let the bozos grind you down.

What I learnt from this video: How many Macintosh guys does it take to screw in a light bulb? The answer is 1 - the Macintosh division employee who holds up the light bulb and expects the universe to revolve around him!

Name tagging in Picasa Web

2008-09-06T20:20:00.002+06:00

In the recent update on Picasa Web Albums and launching a new version of Picasa Desktop Client (Picasa 3.0), Picasa (Web Albums) has launched Name Tags feature. Instead of tagging your photos individually, you can quickly identify and label many photos with one click.

This feature is great for creating customized albums and slideshows. But "I" am facing a small problem:

I love to keep customized display names in my gTalk list for almost everybody so as to identify them easily and uniquely (there are 5 Arun's in my chat list). Now, for using this nameTag feature, either I have to change nicknames/ display name of these people OR I have to make these nameTags as private.

Picasa Settings says:

Your name tags are private by default, and if you display them publicly, people viewing your albums will only see the "display name" you specify. You can also hide name tags by person or album.

Let me check if there is some workaround ...

Honey, I crashed the Chrome!

2008-09-05T16:59:00.007+06:00

The "extremely" fast and innovative tabbed browser Chrome finally crashed! (It wasn't intentional on my part). I tried to open a 2.4 MB pdf on it while I was simultaneously running 3 other tabs (2 were Google products - maps and Gmail).

Also, after restart, I did too much movement in Google Map and saw a bit violent nature of Google Chrome:

Update: It seems Chrome does not like alert boxes too!

Update:

1.Type :% in address bar! This will crash your browser and there is no "restore session" option in Chrome.

2. To feel a virtual crash, type about:crash in your address bar.

3. You cannot browse Facebook and Google Docs under incognito mode.

Firefox Vs. Chrome

2008-09-03T15:33:00.005+06:00

What I miss from Firefox-

- News Headlines from BBC accessible through toolbar (I haven't tried finding a way in Chrome. It was by default in Firefox)

- PageRank and Alexa Traffic Rank of websites I am visitig

- ~~Firebug to debug some code~~ Right clicking on the page and selecting the last option: "Inspect Element" opens Firebug for Chrome

What I love in Chrome

- Speed and clean interface.

- No more crashing on Google (Reader, Docs and Maps)

- Larger viewing space

- Easy Bookmarking of webpages. I am lovin' this

- The publicized feature: Crash Control. Although, nothing has crashed as yet.

- Spell Checking feature.

- Task manager for browser. Shortcut Key: Shift+Esc. Somehow, this shortcut doesn't works when I am on Gmail tab.

What I hate in Chrome

- Privacy concerns. Any Google product now comes with privacy concerns. A related post at

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10030522-2.html. I think Google's new motto should be Don't be too evil.

- ~~www.pvrcinemas.com redirects to www.pvrcinemas.com/site/ErrorPage.aspx?strMessage=BWNC~~ Working as on Feb 4, 2009

- And things that I mentioned under "what I miss from Firefox" above.

discomgoogolation

2008-09-02T22:53:00.004+06:00

discomgoogolation is a feeling of distress or anxiety when unable to gain immediate e-access to information.

Source: Post titled: "Internet addicts suffer from 'discomgoogolation'" on Economic Times.

Did you notice Goog(le) in discomgoogolation ... ?

discomgoogolation = discomfort caused due to isolation from Google.

So, next time you feel stressed if you can't get online, then immediately Google for a doctor (you will get a doctor nearest to you on Google Maps / Local Search) and make sure you update your profile on Google Health :)

gBrowser - Google Chrome

2008-09-02T11:32:00.004+06:00

Google is now trying not only to dominate the internet, but how they use the internet. Google is launching an open source gBrowser called Google Chrome. The website is http://www.google.com/chrome which is not working as of now.

Screenshots of Chrome are available on http://gears.google.com/chrome/ and http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-09-02-n72.html

Also, Google has released a (long) comic book available at http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome.

Update:
I posted a question on Matt's Blog here. The question is: "How does Chrome fit in Google’s mission 'to organize the world’s information'"?

Google will host a webcast press briefing and demo of Google Chrome at 11 a.m. Pacific time today.

Dhoni's Banana on eBay

2008-08-27T17:51:00.002+06:00

Following is a piece of online commentary from cricinfo.com during the 1st innings (36th over) of India Vs. Sri Lanka (4th ODI):

A tired Dhoni is down on the ground and is eating a banana. He hands over the banana skin to Ojha who might or might not sell it on ebay.

35.6 Muralitharan to Raina, SIX, There comes the big hit. Almost expected. He cleared the front foot and slog-swept Murali over deep midwicket boundary. The runs are flowing here for the Indians. What can Mahela do?

Good (geeky -?) sense of humor .. :)

Russia Georgia Conflict and energy markets

2008-08-20T01:03:00.002+06:00

How does the conflict between Georgia and Russia affect energy markets?

The conflict is now phasing from military to diplomatic stage. The conflict broke out on 7 August when Georgia launched an assault to wrest back control of the Moscow-backed breakaway region of South Ossetia, triggering a counter-offensive by Russian troops who advanced beyond South Ossetia into Georgia's heartland.

Following crisis talks in Brussels, Nato's 26 foreign ministers said in a joint statement that they could not have normal relations with Russia as long as Moscow had troops in Georgia.

"The Alliance is considering seriously the implications of Russia's actions for the Nato-Russia relationship," the statement said, read out by Nato Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer. "We have determined that we cannot continue with business as usual."

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused Nato of bias and of trying to save the "criminal regime" in Tbilisi. Russia has dismissed a warning by Nato that normal relations are impossible while its troops remain inside Georgia.

How will it affect the prospects of Central Asian energy producing countries for independent export strategies? Europe will have to pay attention to Russia for the foreseeable future. They are highly dependent on energy pipelines for oil and natural gas. It will be interesting to see if these current problems make a difference in the energy sphere.

"Recent escalation in military engagement between Russia and Georgia poses a threat to certain key oil and gas pipelines which transit Georgia," the International Energy Agency said.

Is Russia's incursion into Georgia an initiation of what will become the slow process of reclaiming the former Soviet Union?

Welcome to the Stock Market!

2008-08-19T18:00:00.002+06:00

This is one of the nice forward I have ever received:

Once upon a time in a village, a man appeared and announced to the villagers that he would buy monkeys for Rs10. The villagers seeing that there were many monkeys around, went out to the forest and started catching them.

The man bought thousands at Rs10 and as supply started to diminish, the villagers stopped their effort. He further announced that he would now buy at Rs20. This renewed the efforts of the villagers and they started catching monkeys again.Soon the supply diminished even further and people started going back to their farms. The offer rate increased to Rs25 and the supply of monkeys became so little that it was an effort to even see a monkey, let alone catch it!

The man now announced that he would buy monkeys at Rs50! However, since he had to go to the city on some business, his assistant would now buy on behalf of him.In the absence of the man, the assistant told the villagers. Look at all these monkeys in the big cage that the man has collected. I will sell them to you at Rs35 and when the man returns from the city, you can sell it to him for Rs50." The villagers squeezed
up with all their savings and bought all the monkeys.

Then they never saw the man nor his assistant, only monkeys everywhere!!!

Welcome to the "Stock" Market!!

-----
Learn how to invest and make profits from investing in stock market. Play for free in Virtual Stock Market.

Yahoo! is Buzzing!

2008-08-19T12:24:00.002+06:00

Buzz, Yahoo’s Digg-like effort to utilize User Generated Content and determine most popular news and other stories is open for everyone (with a Yahoo! account). There is no more need of invitation and anyone (with a Yahoo! account) can submit his/her story.

The buzz can be about anything - a great story on a major news site, an extraordinary bit from an obscure site, an intriguing video, or a fantastic blog that shouldn't be missed.

The most attractive catch in Yahoo!'s Digg (read:Buzz) is that Yahoo! promotes most buzzed headline stories on the home page of Yahoo! gives them a huge traffic boost.

Stories with most Buzz may be published on the Yahoo! home page - you can impact what millions will see on Yahoo!.

Google AdSense Account Disabled

2008-08-17T06:06:00.003+06:00

So, my AdSense account got disabled after this email:

from: Google AdSense
date: Sat, Aug 16, 2008 at 11:01 PM
Hello MITANSHU GARG,

While going through our records recently, we found that your AdSense account has posed a significant risk to our AdWords advertisers. Since keeping your account in our publisher network may financially damage our advertisers in the future, we've decided to disable your account.

Please understand that we consider this a necessary step to protect the interests of both our advertisers and our other AdSense publishers. We realize the inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you in advance for your understanding and cooperation.

If you have any questions about your account or the actions we've taken, please do not reply to this email. You can find more information by visiting
https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=57153&hl=en_US.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

This mail is a mixed mail. On one side, I will not get "any"thing from AdSense, but I will be relieved of checking AdSense statistics, and optimizing website for AdSense. But, a big pain is to remove all AdSense codes from the websites including this blog. Since, +ve aspects are much more than the loss of that revenue, I chose not to appeal for the re-instating my account.

(Google) AdSense is currently giving blank space everywhere. It would have been very good on its part had it just collapsed the blank space. In that case, I wouldn't have to edit everywhere I have kept the code.

I don't know whether I will ever sign up for AdSense again in my life, but as of now, GoodBye AdSense!

Cuil - is it ?

2008-08-01T19:54:00.005+06:00

Cuil has failed to meet its expectations of a "Google-killer". May be you have indexed 121,617,892,992 web pages, but you need to search them too and provide relevant results to your user.

Although, the hype has helped Cuil in climbing alexa traffic ranks and Google PageRank. Currently, Cuil has a Google PageRank 4.

Some statistics from http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/cuil.com :

Traffic Rank:
1 Week Average: 646

Traffic Rank in some countries:

Germany: 1156
Turkey: 1659
UK: 1803
Australia: 1825
US: 1888
India: 3540
Pakistan: 4790

Although, the website does not have a meta-description, no meta-keywords, no entry in Yahoo! Directory or DMOZ directory, still a PageRank of 4 is a nice thing.

Cuil is learning very slowly. Now Cuil can search for Cuil. However, most of the problems as reported on TechCrunch still exists.

Paul Buchheit posted this message on FriendFeed:

“Maybe Cuil isn’t supposed to be good. They must know that the results are bad, but they launched anyway. Maybe they aren’t trying to build a full search engine, but just want to demo their crawling+indexing technology with the expectation that someone will buy the company and plug in better ranking.”
. . .
—Where “someone” = MSFT, who has already shown that they are willing to pay a lot for non-functional search engines. - Paul Buchheit

Update (Aug 06): Cuil now has an alexa traffic rank of 5456

No more sign-ups for Google Page Creator

2008-08-01T13:35:00.001+06:00

Google Page Creator has stopped accepting new users.

We are no longer accepting new sign-ups for Page Creator because we have shifted our focus to developing Google Sites, which offers many of the capabilities of Page Creator along with new features like site-level navigation, site-level headers, control over who can see and edit your site, and rich embeddings like calendars, videos, and Google docs.

If you are currently a Page Creator user, you can continue to use Page Creator and your pages will automatically be transitioned to Google Sites later this year.

Pappu, coding and Google Search

2008-07-18T21:33:00.003+06:00

Few days back, I received a forwarded mail - "Pappu can't code saala" from one of my geek friend. Today, another friend, (non-geek) sent that same mail to me. I just thought of searching pharse, "pappu can't code".

Here are some result count searching "pappu can't code":

Google.co.in - 624 results
Blogsearch.google.com - 22 results
Yahaoo! - 19 results
MSN =- 74 results

For those, who haven't received this email yet, here is the funny-parody of the song:

[Kit kit kat kat, kat kit kat kat, Kit kit kat kat, Let's code] 2

Hai bachelor (hai bachelor), Has lotsa dollar (lotsa dollar)...

Hai bachelor, has lotsa dollar...

Spectacular! He's a developer (he's a developer, he's a developer)...

Pappu ka dimaag tez hai, Pappu ko breaks ka craze hai...

Pappu ka chashma thick black, Pappu dikhta ekdum geek hai (geek hai)...

Titan ki ghadi hathon mein, Gale mein tag company wala hai...

[Par Pappu can't code saala] 2

Han Pappu code likh nahi sakta!

Paida Pappu hua to outsourcing aa thamki...

Angrezon ke muh se nikhli gandhe gaaliyon ki dhamki...

(hey array array) Pappu karta hey cut copy paste...

(hey array array) Tester logon ka time karta hey waste...

(hey array array) Pappu manager logon ka yaar hai...

(hey array array) Pappu beer peene mein toh star hai...

[But Pappu can't code saala] 2

Haan Pappu code likh nahi sakta!

Papa kehte the bada kaam karega...

Nahi patha tha Pappu bus maska marega...

(hey array array) Pappu ke paas hai B-Tech...

(hey array array) Manata hai onsite jaise ho holiday...

(hey array array) Pappu keyboard bajata hai...

(hey array array) Jahaan bhi jata hai, wapus aa jata hai...

[Cos Pappu can't code saala] 2

Haan Pappu code likh nahi sakta...

Yeah...Pappu can't code saala...!!!

Hold on to your dreams!

2008-07-08T12:38:00.000+06:00

Dreams need people like, people need dreams,
vision needs somebody to make it real it seems.
The world is a canvas and you have the power,
to paint your kind of picture,
when it comes to be your hour.

Hold on to your dreams,
just believe that you can.
Nothings going to stop you,
thats the story of man.

If you should ever lose your faith,
and stumble in your stride,
remember that the dream you hold,
is your purpose is your pride.

Never think of losing,
your place is in the sun.
To have the courage, to have a dream,
is to have already won.

Hold on to your dreams,
just believe that you can.
Nothings going to stop you,
thats the story of man.

youTube Viacom lawsuit

2008-07-05T14:33:00.005+06:00

Viacom has asked for an astonishing array of information: the source code for the search functions that power Google and YouTube, the source code for YouTube's new "Video ID" program, a complete set of every video ever removed from the site, databases containing information on every video ever hosted at YouTube, and a copy of every private video.

Logging database is 12TB containing logging information on every video ever watched at YouTube. The data set is large, but the judge noted that it could be slapped on three "over-the-shelf" 4TB drives.

The judge wrote in his ruling that Google’s "database contains, for each instance a video is watched, the unique user who watched it, the time when the user started to watch the video, the internet protocol address other devices connected to the internet use to identify the user’s computer ("IP address"), and the identifier for the video … that database (which is stored on live computer hard drives) is the only existing record of how often each video has been viewed during various time periods."

The Globe and Mail has reported that “the judge set no specific geographic limitations on the data Google must produce, meaning user names and Internet protocol (IP) addresses of millions of Canadians and other YouTube users outside the U.S. could also be at risk.”

From the youTube blog:

Of course, we have to follow legal process. But since IP addresses and usernames aren't necessary to determine general viewing practices, our lawyers have asked their lawyers to let us remove that information before we hand over the data they're seeking. (You should know, IP addresses identify a computer, not the person using it. It's not possible to determine your identity solely based on your IP address. Rather, an IP address can reveal what geographic area you're connecting from, or which Internet service provider you're using.)

Yahoo! Mail suffered from XSS vulnerability

2008-06-26T21:05:00.001+06:00

CIA [Cenzic Intelligent Analysis] Research Lab notified Yahoo on May 23 that Yahoo Mail is facing serious risk from online attackers due to a Cross Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability.

The good thing is, Yahoo quickly fixed the XSS vulnerability reported by Cenzic last June 13. It also said that Yahoo did not receive any complaints from Yahoo Mail and Messenger users who were affected negatively by the XSS vulnerability.

Read more here

India celebrates 1983 World Cup Win!

2008-06-25T22:44:00.002+06:00

It was the 25th anniversary of the India's World Cup triumph, and Mahendra Singh Dhoni and his team marked the day with an emphatic 256-run win over Hong Kong in Karachi. This win was surely insignificant compared to the one in 1983, but nonetheless India would be pleased to begin their Asia Cup campaign on a high note.

India while batting first scored 374/4 in 50 overs and won by bowling out Hong Kong on 118 in 36.5 overs.

Suresh Raina (101 runs in 68 balls) got Man of the Match award!

CommonFloor.com: Meet your neighbors

2008-06-25T21:41:00.002+06:00

While social networking websites (like orkut, facebook, myspace) allows you to find and connect with your friends, make new friends who share common interests, but will people use social networks to socialize with their neighbors?

CommonFloor.com provides a local social network for residents in apartments. The website creates password-protected Web portals for apartment buildings and housing developments, allowing residents to create profiles of themselves, share information and reviews about favorite local service providers and hangouts and discuss about the problems in their apartment buildings.

Living in the same apartment means residents share the same socioeconomic background, and giving neighbors information on things like where to eat and where to shop makes it very convenient for residents.

The residents at CommonFloor.com can

Create their profile to introduce themselves to their neighbors.
Get locality information through neighborhood guide.
Create and learn about neighborhood events.
See what others have to say about local service providers and add their own opinions.
Get opinion on important issues from your neighbors through polls.
Share documents of interest to your neighborhood.
Buy / Sell items through marketPlace.

To get your apartment a common floor, visit CommonFloor.com

Google releases Map Maker

2008-06-25T18:26:00.001+06:00

Google has released Map Maker, an application that makes certain odd regions around the world – like Jamaica, Iceland, Bahamas, Grenada and more – editable by everyone with a Google account. "Map Maker allows you and your peers to add, edit and moderate most features you see on maps including roads, lakes, parks, points of interest, businesses, cities and localities."

Grassroot movement to elect President

2008-06-25T18:17:00.000+06:00

What began as a colorful Internet fluke has blossomed into a full-fledged political movement - one that Republicans and Democrats alike are reluctantly having to acknowledge.

Ok! This is fake

Google shares private information with police

2008-05-21T13:20:00.003+06:00

An Indian man was arrested over the weekend for allegedly posting derogatory and vulgar content about Indian politician Sonia Gandhi on Google's social networking site, Orkut. 22-year-old Rahul Krishnakumar Vaid had posted his comments in an Orkut community called "I hate Sonia Gandhi" through an Orkut account associated with his Gmail account. With Google's help, local authorities were able to verify Vaid's identity and make the arrest.

Google admitted today that it had forked over Vaid's information after it was requested by Indian law enforcement. A spokesperson for Google told IDG News Service that, while the company is committed to protecting user privacy, it must obey local laws and legal processes.

With the IP address of a person who had allegedly posted vulgar content about Sonia Gandhi, one of India's top political leaders, on Orkut, police in Pune were able to arrest a suspect. The Pune police have arrested an IT professional from Gurgaon near Delhi, called Rahul Krishnakumar Vaid, according to media reports from the Western Indian city.

Vaid has been charged under Section 67 of the country's Information Technology Act 2000, which relates to publication of obscene information in electronic content.

While a section of users oppose sharing this information as a violation of privacy, a number of people believe that Internet companies should cooperate with the police and other law enforcement agencies when the modesty and the reputation of a person may have been damaged, or when such information could lead to solving a crime or preventing a terrorist attack.

Project Virgle: Open Source Planet

2008-04-01T13:14:00.000+06:00

The human race has spread out across the Earth, scaling mountains and plying the oceans, planting crops and building highways, raising skyscrapers and atmospheric CO₂ levels, and observing, with tremendous and unflagging enthusiasm, the Biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply across our world's every last nook, cranny and subdivision.

Read more about the project at http://www.google.com/virgle/index.html

Also, Gmail has introduced Gmail Custom Time^TM to mark its 4th birthday! A very useful feature indeed!!

10 Who Affected Energy Most in 2007

2008-01-01T12:27:00.000+05:00

Time Magazine has its Person of the Year, a mantle it recently bestowed on Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Fool.com has list of 10 people who most affected energy and energy investments -- for better and for worse -- in 2007.

Orkut OneBox for People Search

2007-12-22T10:46:00.000+05:00

Google now intends to index the information from user profiles and show it in search results as an OneBox.

From orkut's help center:

Some orkut profiles will appear in Google search results as an orkut OneBox. A OneBox is a summary of your orkut profile, including key details like your name, photo and location. A OneBox appears only when someone who is logged in to orkut performs a search on Google.com for another orkut user. Keep in mind that this project is still in its experimental stage, so for now, only a small percentage of orkut users will see the OneBox in their search results.

Under the privacy tab on orkut.com, users can chose show/hide information for:

"show my orkut information when my orkut friends search for me on Google.com "

However, in orkut's help center, a Note says:

We and the search team both don't have a way to change whose profiles will appear in Google search results as a OneBox.

Gmail could not scan this file for viruses.

2007-11-05T21:14:00.000+05:00

I was able to

View as HTML
View as slideshow
Download

the ppt file as usual.

Any idea what happened ?!?

Gmail storgae, IMAP, 2.0 and more

2007-10-31T12:10:00.000+05:00

After rolling out many cool features in orkut, Google is improving Gmail. Here is a list of new stuff that has appeared in the recent days:

1) More free storage: Gmail Team announced on October 12, 2007 that they are speeding up their counter and giving out more free storage to all.
I was using 1841 MB (62%) of 2948 MB before this announcement.
I am currently using 1902 MB (42%) of 4519 MB.

2) Free IMAP Support: Gmail Team announced on October 24 about the free IMAP feature that they are slowly rolling out in Gmail accounts. Gmail has been offering free POP access, which is similar to IMAP but lacks one critical feature: your changes made on other devices aren't seen in Gmail when you log back in.

3) Gmail 2.0^New!!: A newer version of Gmail is now available in some accounts. Some of the new features in Gmail 2.0 are mail prefetching (which might make the initial loading of inbox slower, but later it becomes super-fast), updated contact manager, create filters based on the current message and other small updates.

I am still waiting for IMAP and Gmail 2.0 to get enabled in my account!

Conversational Marketing

2007-10-20T17:38:00.000+06:00

Conversational marketing is a commonly used term in the Web 2.0 / social media world. Michael Brito discusses on blog, how important it is for marketers to use the practice of having conversations.

Conversational marketing is really about participating in conversations that are going on about your product in various channels such as blogs, forums, review sites and wikis. It’s also about taking the conversations offline in the form of roundtable discussions and/or townhall events; where you invite a group of users/consumers to a location and have real-life, authentic conversations with them.

However, conversational marketing has nothing to do with social-media marketing. Definitely, using social-networking and other Web 2.0 platforms to increase traffic to your website is becoming a common practice these days, but this has nothing to do with conversations at all.

Read the complete article here.

More Gmail storage coming for all

2007-10-13T20:16:00.000+06:00

Gmail Team announced on its official blog that they are speeding up their counter and giving out more free storage to all.

Gmail didn't abandon the paid storage option, but you'll get around 50% more storage for the same price: 10 GB for $20/year, 40 GB for $75/year, 150 GB for $250/year and 400 GB for $500/year. The paid storage will probably become more attractive when Google adds more services, like Google Docs, JotSpot or GDrive.

Meanwhile, Yahoo and Microsoft also increased the storage (Yahoo even claims to offer "infinite" storage) and Gmail became the top webmail service with the least amount of free storage.

Googlesystem Blog has a deatiled analysis on the way the storage space will increase.

P.S.: I am currently using 1841 MB (62%) of 2948 MB !!!

India Vs. Pakistan -- A Dream Final

2007-09-24T15:10:00.000+06:00

Any India Pakistan match is special - add to it that it is a final of a World Cup just makes it special indeed. Both the teams performed very badly in the ICC World Cup earlier this year and now they have reached the final! It is very surprising to see the performance of Indian cricket team without a coach.

From the match perspective, I just hope that the match lives up to the hype of a final and that ICC gets some "umpires" who know rules of cricket. Nobody is interested in seeing blunders from umpires like in 7th ODI against England.

Here is some famous quotes:

Yuvraj Singh: "India-Pakistan is always a huge competition. It's just like a dream for us."

Malik: "In Pakistan we have lots of talent which, Inshallah, we are going to utilise and, Inshallah, the Pakistan team will be number one very soon."

Dhoni: "The pressure will be immense, not on us though because I don't believe in taking pressure and none of my team do either".

आज हर हिन्दुस्तानी को याद आएगा की वो एक हिन्दुस्तानी है
आज सबके मन में अपने देश के लिए प्यार जागेगा
आज हर हिन्दुस्तानी भारत की जीत के लिए अपने भगवान् से दुआ और अल्लाह से प्रार्थना करेगा

एक आम हिन्दुस्तानी दो बातें सहें नहीं कर सकता :
१) अपने देश पर वार
२) क्रिकेट में हार

Chak de India!

Chak de India!

2007-09-08T11:10:00.000+06:00

India approached the previous two games with nothing to lose, going out there and expressing themselves freely. Now they are faced with a situation where victory is nearby. Dravid warned against complacency but admitted that the team had come some distance since the shattering scenes at Old Trafford. "I knew we really had to fight hard. We had our backs to the wall," said Dravid. "We had to script a really good comeback."

Wednesday was the second time India successfully chased over 300 in England. The first such feat was, in fact, at Lord's in the 2002 NatWest Series final. The target then was 326.

India have not lost to England at Lord's since 1975

Flintoff returns to tackle India openers

England (likely): 1 Alastair Cook, 2 Matt Prior (wk), 3 Ian Bell, 4 Kevin Pietersen, 5 Paul Collingwood (capt), 6 Owais Shah, 7 Andrew Flintoff, 8 Luke Wright, 9 Stuart Broad, 10 James Anderson, 11 Monty Panesar.

India (likely): 1 Sourav Ganguly, 2 Sachin Tendulkar, 3 Gautam Gambhir, 4 Yuvraj Singh, 5 Rahul Dravid (capt), 6 Mahendra Singh Dhoni (wk), 7 Robin Uthappa, 8 Ajit Agarkar, 9 Piyush Chawla, 10 Ramesh Powar, 11 Zaheer Khan.

Hoo Ha India, Aaya India!

Yahoo Mail Out of Beta

2007-08-27T21:00:00.000+06:00

The new Yahoo Mail went in public-beta in September 2006, though Yahoo was testing it long before it. Now, Yahoo takes the “beta” label off of the product and makes it the default interface for all new Yahoo mail accounts.

I am not a Yahoo Mail user, so I don't know about all features, but here is list of most prominent ones:

Integrated RSS Reader
Instant Messaging
Unlimited Storage
Intelligent shortcuts
SMS/Text Messaging
Paid POP access

The last one is a major limitation but I think that making it free will stop that revenue stream for Yahoo!

Orkut feels fresher !!!

2007-08-27T12:05:00.000+06:00

orkut announced on August 23 that they will be rolling out a new look for their social network Orkut. Today, my account has been upgraded to the new design !!!

Firstly, I would say that the new proposed look of orkut looks very neat and fresh.
The blue and cyan color tones got a little bit more fresh and lighter
In the new design, many of the edges have been rounded off for a smoother look.
The custom, more playful first letter in Orkut style has been removed.
The top bar wraps up some of the main functionality and integrates a search box.
The three tabs social, professional, and personal moved a little bit lower, and look more traditionally tab-like than before.
There’s some additional shades and gradients throughout the page as well.

5S Principles

2007-08-25T15:55:00.000+06:00

5S is a reference to a list of five Japanese words which 'start' with S. This list is a mnemonic for a methodology that is often incorrectly characterized as "standardized cleanup", however it is much more than cleanup. 5S is a philosophy and a way of organizing and managing the workspace. The key impacts of 5S is upon workplace morale and efficiency. By ensuring everything has a place and everything is in its place then time is not wasted looking for things and it can be made immediately obvious when something is missing.

Sort (Seiri) : (tidiness, organisation, arrangement) eliminate all unnecessary items in the work area. This includes ensuring you have the correct tools for the job which means adding equipment that is required. The problem of sharing a tool creates the "search and retrieve" waste of time. Refers to the practice of sorting through all the tools, materials, etc., in the work area and keeping only essential items. Everything else is stored or discarded. This leads to fewer hazards and less clutter to interfere with productive work.

Straighten (Seiton) : (orderliness) Focuses on the need for an orderly workplace. "Orderly" in this sense means arranging the tools and equipment in an order that promotes work flow. Tools and equipment should be kept where they will be used, and the process should be ordered in a manner that eliminates extra motion. Everything has a place, and everything is in it's place.

Shine (Seiso) : systemized cleanliness. Indicates the need to keep the workplace clean as well as neat. Cleaning in Japanese companies is a daily activity. At the end of each shift, the work area is cleaned up and everything is restored to its place. The key point is that maintaining cleanliness should be part of the daily work - not on occasional activity initiated when things get too messy.

Standards (Seiketsu) : This refers to standardized work practices. It refers to more than standardized cleanliness (otherwise this would mean essentially the same as "systemized cleanliness"). This means operating in a consistent and standardized fashion. Everyone knows exactly what his or her responsibilities are.

Sustain (Shitsuke) : sustaining discipline. Refers to maintaining standards. Once the previous 4S's have been established they become the new way to operate. Maintain the focus on this new way of operating, and do not allow a gradual decline back to the old ways of operating.

Implemented By: Boeing, Boise Cascade, Hewlett Packard

60th Independence Day

2007-08-14T10:58:00.000+06:00

Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long supressed, finds utterance. It is fitting that at this solemn moment we take the pledge of dedication to the service of Inida and her people and to the still larger cause of humanity.

Team India celebrated Independence Day in England by winning the test series against England !!! (1-0)

JAI HIND.

Orkut Celebrates India's 60th Independence Day

2007-08-13T16:56:00.000+06:00

Day after tomorrow on August 15th we celebrate our 60th Independence day full of hope,enthusiasm and excitement.

The Major Social Community website Orkut.com, had been changed its logo specially for India.

Orkut is running a few polls in popular communities on orkut about India's past and future to coincide with the India's 60th year of independence. So they are finally realizing the future competition on their hands, trying now itself to establish the emotional bond with the Indian customers (orkut is currently having 18.73% users from India).

Click on the questions to vote and join the discussion in the orkut communities:

Update: Just below the logo, orkut is displaying, "make google.co.in your homepage".

Google starts charging for storage!

2007-08-11T12:06:00.000+06:00

Normally you would have 2.82 GB available for your GMail account, and 1 GB for PicasaWeb. Google is now offering the possibility to check out storage statistics for your online programs and and even upgrade your storage if you want; for now only GMail and PicasaWeb are included in this feature, but more are to come. Click here to see your stats. Here are the prices:

6 GB ($20.00 per year)
25 GB ($75.00 per year)
100 GB ($250.00 per year)
250 GB ($500.00 per year)

When you reach the limit of free storage (i.e., 1GB for Picasa Web Albums, 2.8GB for Gmail), consider this your overflow solution. Plans start at $20/year for 6GB (yes, $5 cheaper than before), with larger plans ranging up to 250GB. If only testing everything were this easy.

This new offer merges the storage of different Google products into a single storage back-end. At this time, the Picasa Web Albums photo application as well as GMail are part of the mix. But we can expect more services to be added to this program in the future. Google Documents (containing word processing documents, spreadsheets, and likely presentations soon, too) is a likely contender. Separate premium accounts, like the one PicasaWeb offered before, are being removed in the meantime.

I remember, on their 1st aniversary, GMail announced infinity+1 plan:

Storage is an important part of email, but that doesn't mean you should have to worry about it. To celebrate our one-year birthday, we're giving everyone one more gigabyte. But why stop the party there? Our plan is to continue growing your storage beyond 2GBs by giving you more space as we are able. We know that email will only become more important in people's lives, and we want Gmail to keep up with our users and their needs. From Gmail, you can expect more.

But it seems that this infinty+1 plan is fixed upto 2.82GB only! What happened to “never delete another email”?

There’s currently no way to use your free storage space from one product to house content from another.

It seems odd to me that Google would charge such prices when Yahoo Mail offers unlimited storage for free!

Currently I am using, 1624 MB (56%) of my GMail space and 0.16 GB (16%) of my PicasaWeb Album.

Rich orkut features!

2007-08-09T11:13:00.000+06:00

1) "Crop" your orkut profile picture.
Now you don't need any fancy photo-editing skills to get the picture you want. You'll see this new option pop up if you go to edit your profile and click "change photo."

2) Happy Scrapping
You can now add HTML to your scraps to friends. You can use this to embed images, videos, internet polls, Google Gadgets, and more!

Note! We're rolling this feature out a few profiles at a time. It may take a few days for you to see the new scrap options in your profile, even though you may have friends who send you rich-content scraps. We can't add this on a per-profile basis, so we appreciate your patience as we debut this new feature.

For those lucky orkuteers, who have got this feature;

If you're trying to add images, videos or audio files to a scrap, simply click on the "scrap tips" button to get started.
Before uploading or embedding content, please be sure that you have all the necessary legal rights to distribute it, including the rights to any images, voices or music being used. You are responsible for compliance with all applicable laws and regulations that govern your use of the content.
Scraps containing questionable content or third-party ads may be removed by the orkut team without advanced warning.
If your scrap containing a Flash embed isn't appearing, the site you're trying to insert content from is blocked by orkut. You'll see the error message: "This rich-content scrap was not posted."
If only part of a scrap is showing, the content you're trying to add has been blocked by orkut. You might also be using a tag or code that isn't allowed. The rest of the scrap will appear normally.
You must be friends with someone to send them a rich-content scrap. The "scrap tips" box lists the options still available for scraps to people who aren't on your friends list.
orkut accepts the following file formats for images: .jpeg, .gif, .png or .bmp
orkut converts new line characters into HTML "br" tags, which can break the look of pasted HTML.
orkut doesn't allow link text to differ from the URL of a link.
If your scrap contains an embed, link, or image, you may need to fill in the word verification box after you click "post scrap."

Google Custom Search Blog Hacked!!!

2007-08-08T11:29:00.000+06:00

The official Google Custom Search blog had a very strange post up :

Google Custom Search, is the wonderful product from Google which many webmasters have been looking and dream for. It allows webmasters to create their own custom search engines to search only the sites he/she wants.

Also Google Custom Search is integrated with Ad-sense, which means make money while keeping users on your site for longer time with custom search engine.

I’ll cover up more on this powerful tool very soon in my next blog.

Good Luck for all the Custom Search customers(??).

Cheers,
Srikanth

Apart from grammar problems and misspellings of Google Products (like “Ad-sense”), all the posts from this blog were deleted.

It wouldn’t be the first time an official Google Blog was hacked, or kidnapped due to a misconfiguration by a Google employee.

Google replied with a statement to Phillip:

Whoops! We accidentally classified ourselves as spam, and our ever-perceptive Blogger settings caught us. The Custom Search Blog has since been restored, and we’re taking steps to ensure this doesn’t happen with other Google blogs in the future. Other Blogger users can make sure this doesn’t happen to them by reporting any problems to the Blogger support team via the Blogger Help Center at http://www.blogger.com/problem.g. We can then investigate.

Does this mean, a blog that’s marked as spam gets all its content deleted ?!?

Ban Karo! Social Spam Filtering

2007-08-06T21:00:00.000+06:00

BanKaro.com is a social spam filtering platform, powered by community participation to ban un-solicited and intrusive telemarketing calls. Started by 2 Computer Engineering students from IIT Roorkee and 1 from IIT Kharagpur.

Telemarketing spam is a menace which is only likely to grow by leaps and bounds in India. Now users have the power of deciding whether to pick up the call.

Ban Karo is designed as a special-purpose social network. Every user receives a set of new telemarketing spam numbers on a periodic basis, via SMS, the website, or browser extensions. These numbers are passed through the user's circle of trust [connections that (s)he's built up in the network]. The circle of trust, in turn, acts as a social filtering mechanism which ensures that only those numbers which are most likely to call up the user and irritate him/her are on the list.

This is an invite only service so steal, beg or borrow an invite and join the BanKaro! revolution

Orkut Security Tip

2007-08-03T11:37:00.000+06:00

orkut is displaying a security tip (see screenshot) randomly when you post some scrap or delete your scrap.

Security Tip:
Don't click on links in emails that claim to be from orkut or Gmail.
Never Check "remember me" when you're on a shared computer.
Keep your username, password and personal information secret.
Change your password regularly.
Never enter your Google Account login and password on sites other than orkut.com and other Google properties.
Never paste a URL or script into your browser while logged into orkut.com, no matter what it claims to do.
Scan your computer regularly for viruses, spyware, and adware

It is very disappointing to see that orkut has not yet learned how to count (see screenshot above)

Related Reading:

"We Hate" Communities on orkut

2007-08-02T15:40:00.000+06:00

Finally, we have an official note from orkut team, that "I hate...(fill in country here)" type of communities does not violate any orkut policies. They do NOT promote any hatred or violent content.

Just to see orkut stand on "I/We hate..." communities, I reported We Hate India community as abuse on orkut and also posted on google group here on July 27. Today (Aug 2), orkut guide came up with his explanation as why such communities are still left up on the site:

While it's certainly not nice to be say mean things about a country, sweeping generalizations against an entire country aren't considered hatred or violent. Remember that part of what makes orkut great is that it allows everyone to express their opinion, even if it's not the same as your own.

I think this does not violate orkut.com community standards:

A community should not display material, or be used for activity, that is hateful or offensive based on race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, gender, or sexual orientation.

So I think that now we must NOT take seriously all those messages which ask you to report a community bogus so that it is deleted!

About Spam Blog

2007-07-30T15:19:00.000+06:00

As with many powerful tools, blogging services can be both used and abused. The ease of creating and updating webpages with Blogger has made it particularly prone to a form of behavior known as link spamming. Blogs engaged in this behavior are called spam blogs, and can be recognized by their irrelevant, repetitive, or nonsensical text, along with a large number of links, usually all pointing to a single site.

Spam blogs cause various problems, beyond simply wasting a few seconds of your time when you happen to come across one. They can clog up search engines, making it difficult to find real content on the subjects that interest you. They may scrape content from other sites on the web, using other people's writing to make it look as though they have useful information of their own. And if an automated system is creating spam posts at an extremely high rate, it can impact the speed and quality of the service for other, legitimate users.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

2007-07-13T18:53:00.000+06:00

Finally, I got the chance to see the much awaited movie - Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I saw the 1st show(wow!!!) at 10.00 am in PVR at Forums (a mall) in Bangalore.

I was too excited since last night and so I woke up at 7 in the morning (I slept for just 250 minutes!). The show was at 10 and there was no use of going there before 9.40 but still, I could not stop the quidditch inside my stomach and I reached there at 8.45. At that time, lots of muggles started pouring in for the movie. There were some fantastic witches too in the crowd!!!

David Yates has tried his best to include as many parts of the movie as possible but this has made it move very fast. It seems like the best moments from Book 5 minus Quidditch. They have tried to make the movie darker and have removed Quidditch matches. But anyways, Weasley is still our king!

Evanna Lynch is a perfect cast for Luna Lovegood. She is so sweet, cute and depicts the real Luna - the way "I" wanted Luna to be! Even her voice sounds a little looney, which is totally appropriate for the part. I hope you all will agree that as each actor has blossomed physically, their acting skills have also blossomed especially Daniel and Emma Watson.

Somethings that I didn't liked about this approx. 131 minutes movie is :

Very less part of Snape.
The not so emotional kiss between Harry and Cho
Hairstyle of Emma Watson just before and after the kiss between Harry and Cho.
The absence of letter from Dumbledore to Dursleys - Remember my last!
Unjustice to Cho - it was NOT Cho who betrayed!
No Quidditch

I will rate this movie as 3.5/5. So, till now Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban remains my favorite book and also the favorite movie.

Here are some useless facts for you:

This is the 1st movie of Harry Potter series that I have seen in a hall.
This is the 1st time that I have seen a movie on day 1 and that too the 1st show.
This is the 2nd movie that I have seen in Bangalore, the 1st being Fantastic 4.
This is for the 1st time that I saw a movie in hall with DADA.

Now, I am eagerly waiting for the Book 7 - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the last investment by JK Rowling in the Harry Potter series. She said that 2 major characters will die. Well, I can bet that they are neigther Hermione nor Luna.

In case you have some theories or some humorous fan-fictions, then submit them at here and here respectively!

Update: I forgot to thank DADA for the movie. Thank you DADA for the wonderful farewell treat!!

Orkut Spam Stopper

2007-06-28T20:17:00.000+06:00

Today I noticed a new way that orkut has introduced (when ?) to stop spraps (Spam + Scraps).

we're sorry, but you must wait 713 more minute(s) before you can post another scrap to this scrapbook because you have posted other scraps too recently.

Other method that orkut was using before was image verification feature when a scrap had a link.

If orkut is planning to stop someone for 713 minutes then what will happen to their "organic growth" ??

We do not actively review content that users post on orkut. As you can imagine, it would be nearly impossible keeping up with all the new photos, community posts, and changes to user profiles. Additionally, reviewing newly written posts, photos and profiles would dampen the organic growth essential to any social network.

Google Offers Rounded AdSense Corners

2007-06-27T08:14:00.000+06:00

Google AdSense has a new option for you to customize your AdSense ads. You can now choose between “square corners” (as before), but also “slightly rounded” as well as “very rounded” when customizing your ad. This will trigger a change in the JavaScript snippet, which now has the line google_ui_features = “rc:x”, where “x” is 0, 6, or 10 (from non-rounded to very rounded – brave souls may try other RC values, though this is against the AdSense terms and might cause you problems).

Google in the official AdSense blog says that they’re “also working to give you even more choices to customize your ad formats.”

An entirely new interface for Google Docs

2007-06-27T08:05:00.000+06:00

Now when you signin to Google Docs & Spreadsheets, you will see an entirely new (and better) interface.

The entire document list has been given a complete visual overhaul - new icons, more content, and better organizational controls.

Now, they have added folders in this application. Although it was previously having tag feature just like gmail, but now they have given folders which was one of the most wanted feature.

Google Docs & Spreadsheets now offers dynamically filtered results from your document list as you type, saving you time and getting you to your documents more quickly just like Google Suggest.

It is having drag-drop functionality just like in new Yahoo! Mail (Beta).

To read more about this new interface, head over to the Docs & Spreadsheets blog.

Conference in Google Talk Gadget

2007-06-22T18:19:00.000+06:00

Google Talk Gadget added support group chat. Just click on the "Group Chat" button when you are in a conversation, and you can invite other people to join your discussion. Unfortunately, this feature is not available in any other client, so if you invite someone who uses Google Talk for Windows, Gmail Chat or other Jabber client, he'll get a link to the web version of Google Talk.

Harry Potter and the Deadly Hacker

2007-06-22T12:15:00.000+06:00

The hacker, who calls himself Gabriel, said he had religious reasons for revealing the names of two key characters who allegedly die in the final pages of J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows."

Bloomsbury, the London-based publisher of the Harry Potter series, deepened the mystery by refusing to say whether the ending published by the hacker was a hoax. Scholastic, the book's American publisher, also declined to confirm or deny whether the ending had been spoiled.

"There is a lot of material on the Internet. You can't believe everything you see," said Kyle Good, a Scholastic spokeswoman. "The only way we'll know for sure what happens is to read the book July 21st."

I think that this is just another fan-fiction publicised in a different manner. Given the number of fan-fictions available for the last book on the internet, no one would have liked to read this ^{(Alert: might be a spoiler)} one but this is a smart strategy, I must say.

JKRowling once wrote on her website :

“We’re a little under three months away, now, and the first distant rumblings of the weirdness that usually precedes a Harry Potter publication can be heard on the horizon. I want the readers who have, in many instances, grown up with Harry, to embark on the last adventure they will share with him without knowing where they are they going. Some, perhaps, will read this and take the view that all publicity is good publicity, that spoilers are part of hype, and that I am trying to protect sales rather than my readership. However, spoilers won’t stop people buying the book, they never have - all it will do is diminish their pleasure in the book."

With a month to go until the book's release, Potter-mania is starting to build to a fever pitch. Read authentic information about the book here.

Update: Walmart has started "Harry Potter and the Walmart Pledge". Join their worldwide pledge and make the promise that you will keep the magic and not share the story's end!

How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture

2007-06-09T11:06:00.000+06:00

There is a 8 minute video-journey through how things have changed since 1996 and takes us all the way through to 2014. The video gives us a glimpse of how Internet is changing the way we live with couple of examples. However, if you think about all the other areas of life that are going to be positively affected due to advancements in technology, your excitement will know no bound. I say we are lucky to live in this day and age. The video mostly talks about Google and its innovation and future path.

There are 2 more nice videos on youtube (gooTube) worth watching:

Google MasterPlan
Web 2.0

There is a excellent book on search industry: The Search.

John Battelle’s, The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture is the only book you need to read about the search industry in present day. John Battelle’s research is completely comprehensive and his style of writing is so easy to read you would never know you were reading about as complex a subject as the search industry. The book delves into the history of search and the monetization of search engine queries. The search also goes into depth about the present and future of search mainly revolving around Google’s role within the industry. The great thing about this piece of literature is that John Battelle does not take a side. He doesn’t write from the angle of being a Google supporter or a Google Hater. He takes a very neutral stance which makes is a much more enjoyable read. Mr. Battelle’s outlook on search becoming integrated with every facet of advertising is an opinion I have never read in the past but makes a lot of sense.

I have a small article which says: Don't be Too Evil

lalBagh and Garuda Mall

2007-06-03T00:11:00.001+06:00

What a sinusoidal sightseeing(-?) I had today. I cannot recall such a mixed kind of feelings on a single evening.

8 of us from IIT Roorkee having internship at different organisations in Bangalore set out on a nice (and unfortunately a bit hot {by Bangalore standards}) saturday evening to enjoy. We all had predecided and had not taken the tickets for Aerosmith who performed live! in Bangalore today.

We went to lal bagh. Unfortunately, we already got review for that place:

wahaan par sirf couples aate hain and family ke log aate hain apne bachhon ko ice cream khilaane ke liye. toh tum log yaa toh 8 ladkiyoon ka intezaam karo, yaa phir 8 ke multiples mein bachoon ka, yaa phir ek doosre ko ice cream khilla dena. vaise bhi aaj aerosmith ka show hai, toh raaste mein kaafi traffic milega.

However, the worst part was that today we could not spot any couple expressing love and that place was amongst the worst things I have ever seen in my last 20 years.

As far as history of this place is concerned:

The garden was laid out by Hyder Ali and his son, Tipu Sultan, during the eighteenth century and now has a large collection of tropical plants. There is a glass house which was inspired by the Crystal Palace in London.

This so called crystal palace was today exhibiting mangoes!!!! (hey! don't confuse it with top rat3d mangoes in orkut!)

After some time, when all of us were convinced that this is not our evening, we left that place and discussed on the options we had. All of us agreed to disagree on the plan to visit vidhan sabha.

Then some divine stars conspired in my favour and aligned themselves in the perfect position.
4 of us went to Garuda Mall on Magrath Road [Size: 300,000 sq ft]. A perfect place for window shopping, filling your empty stomachs, resting your legs and above all - refreshing your eyes by the excellent display of moving products!

It was very painful to leave that place at just 9.40pm but then there is a Chinese saying which says, "All good things must come to an end". However, I would like to modify it a bit - "All good things must take a break!"

Note: Opinions expressed above are my personal opinions and should not be taken into consideration while making any decision. There were few pics clicked at lalBagh, will try to upload them soon.

Feeding orkut

2007-05-31T18:42:00.000+06:00

Want to share your photos from Fotolog, Picasa Web Albums or Flickr? Have a blog on Blogger, WordPress or LiveJournal?

Now, you can add your blog, photos, events, bookmarks and more to your orkut profile. Add the website or RSS/Atom feed address and orkut will automatically import it and fetch new items.

Note: Once a feed has been crawled, the content cannot be deleted from orkut. For example, last week you wrote a blog post that was crawled by orkut's feed reader and appeared in your profile. If you delete the post today, it will still show up as part of your orkut feed.

Googlel Gears - Enabling Offline Web Applications

2007-05-31T08:26:00.000+06:00

Google launched an open source browser extension called Google Gears that makes web applications available offline.

"Gears is an incremental improvement to the web as it is today. It adds just enough to AJAX to make current web applications work offline. Gears today covers what we think is the minimal set of primitives required for offline apps. It is still a bit rough and in need of polish, but we are releasing it early because we think the best way to make Gears really useful is to evolve it into an open standard. We are releasing Gears as an open source project and we are working with Adobe, Mozilla and Opera and other industry partners to make sure that Gears is the right solution for everyone," explains Google.

Google Gears (BETA) is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux
This is an early release of Google Gears (BETA). After installation, please pay attention to the warning dialogs and grant access only to websites that you trust.

US 'Order of the Phoenix' release changed?

2007-05-30T18:57:00.000+06:00

The release date for the Order of the Phoenix movie has been changed from July 13th to July 11th. You might remember that WB recently announced that the UK release would be July 12th instead of July 13th.

A possible reason for these changes may be to allow extra space between the movie and Deathly Hallows releases.