Found a different place

Hey just incase you still view this area of my post, I've since shifted it now to http://venkkats.wordpress.com

So, please update your blog readers :-)

Windows Live Writer!

Well this is a realy cool blogging applicaton I've got my hands on now. Its called Windows Live Writer and it lets you compose your blogs in the comforts of MS's visually appealing UIs. :-) I actually like it cause it gives you things in a WYSIWYG form so you can edit the pictures and other things with ease. Man that's something you just can't get right when you're on blogger!

Check this app out if you get the chance. Am too lazy to put up the link so just go do a live search for windows live writer! ;-) Enjoy!

50% pass, the icing on the cake!

So I shifted to Bangalore last week and by Tuesday felt like a fish out of water wondering if I'd done the right thing... Sniff sniff... its always a bit nostalgic leaving... Somehow I thought I wouldn't feel it considering the amount of travelling I've been doing but then 12 years in one place was a lot longer than my other best of 4. Still things seem to be fitting in now...

Well, the first week at work here was anything but lite... And trust me sitting in a conf room for a large part of the day is not exactly 'fun'. :-) Still I somehow got through the week and was kinda relieved that the weekend had come and that I'd actually be home to do something instead of just coming home to sleep! It was really a learning week, especially the travelling. 1.5hrs each way and well all I can say is that I'm glad I had those 50 songs on my trusty V3i to listen to while on the bus.

Cut to the weekend. Man I had a large set of items set to go like getting a new cell number, picking up a bag and setting up the wireless LAN in the house. Phew seemed like a lots tasks and in the end I was amazed that I got all of it done on Saturday itself!

The cell connection was ready in like half and hour. Man I never knew that a government agency like BSNL could operate that fast. I still remember having to wait 10 days for Hutch in Mumbai to activate my number! Hmpf! Go Gov! Got the bag as well pretty easily, but then the wireless LAN had me in tangles. Finally got a piece of info that I should connect my broadband into a normal LAN port instead of the internet port. Thing works like a dream now. I also managed to add access control and WEP security (whatever that is...). The security stuff had me in twists at the beginning but then it worked out well in the end.

So that explains what the cake was but then what's the icing I'm sure you're wondering. Well... I checked out the results for the CNET quiz and woooooo hoooooo I got the marks I needed to pass! :-) Exactly 50% marks that were required. Man I can still remember the days of trying to get 90% and all and now its down to just passing! Oh well... guess the times have changed. LOL!

So that's the 50% icing on my cake this week. Just can't wait to see how the coming week turns out.

Something to keep this going...

Just writing something to keep this place going... There's nothing really to comment on other than Israel and well that's really not something that has lack of coverage for me to spend space on it :-) Went to see Golmaal and it is a cool flick. Definitely worth seeing!

"When in doubt always blame the other guy!"

If only I'd left half an hour later...

There are times when you feel, why did I do that? I guess this is one of those days looking at the amount of rain that fell!

Here's some of the snaps I managed to capture on my adventure out there:

Never seen S V road this empty!

The water is rising in SEEPZ

SEEPZ getting its fair share of water!

S V Road is really never this empty!

England go HOME!!!

There's only one way to describe what England did in the penalty shootout and that's 'pitiful'. After being gifted a 1 up lead they just couldn't hammer home the advantage. Its kinda strange how Gerrad missed but then if you can't hit those then you better be hitting home! Looks like they could learn a bit from the Germans on how to hit penalities!

Microsoft to buy eBay????

Perhaps I'm late on this but then is Microsoft going to buy out eBay???

http://news.com.com/2061-11199_3-6077695.html

This seems to have interesting implications in the dymaics of the on going Google - MS wars. :-)

Do read the comments section of the article. Makes more interesting reading than the actual article itself.

Reservations? Lets talk about economical upliftment!

Been a long time sicne I've got around to blogging but when you read someting like:

http://reservation-and-present.blogspot.com/

then it really makes you wanna get up and say something.

There's probably been enough said on how reservation is bad blah blah and what all these articles seem to portray is that they want reservation for the low income backward castes.

My question (as I have posted a comment on that above blog) is how does this help the backward upper castes? When you look at places in India today, its starting to become a fact that OBC = Other Brahmin Communities! Upper caste people facing poor socio-economic situations and on top of that now have to put up with more reservation, less chances of getting to do something to uplift themselves. Some justice eh?

What we need is not social discriminaiton, but some sort of system to help those that don't have enough money to live properly to gain some sort of livelihood. Lets try and look at providing a truely equal sense of upliftment for people.

Innovative monitoring

Interesting article about using a PSP for plant monitoring. Read on:

http://www.automationworld.com/cds_search.html?rec_id=2002

Holi

This post has nothing to do with Holi other than the fact that its being put up on 'Holi' day. The good thing though about today is that we get a holiday for it! Bonus!

There was something intereseting that crossed me yesterday though... I came across this blog which was saying goodbye to everyone. Something to the extent of, "I had a good time blogging and reading all your comments but now its time to say goodbye." Seemed kinda weird, cause you can blog no matter where you are unless of course someone has unplugged your net connection.

What it did though was re-iterate this thing I had come across of how people are now communicating with eachother using blogs. Its like, stuff email and IM, I'll just blog about myself and people can come and comment on it and end up knowing what's going on with me and what I think by reading my blog. Reminded me of message queues in programming. Asynchronous communication if you want.

Subscribe to a service. The service keeps posting information. Whenever you feel like seeing it, you go and view it using your service reader. Pretty neat. Something I guess that .NET also is trying to push with WCF et al. I could be wrong of course, so correct me here if I am but it does look like message driven architectures are coming up.

Anyway, while this type of asynchrous stuff seems good as far as programming goes, but is just a bit too weird to think of talking to people that way. Maybe that will also evolve. :-)))

Nothing to say... Just putting up another blog entry.

Programming tips...

Came across this nice article for newbie programmers on some good tips for programming... Somehow the tips seems like something we could all do with when we find ourselves spending a lot of time writing code.

http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/academics/courses/is255/f01/assignments/assignment4.html

"Its sometimes easiest to just keep going rather than stopping and starting later"

Sify Tales... part 7

Ok guys, so just when you thought that the clog of Sify tales was over, its time for the grand finale! :-)) It so happned that after a lot of emailing and wasting of time, the gurus of swindling thought that they'd give me a free pack. A free pack! Wooo HOOOO! Am I lucky or what! LOL! But then you can hardly call 7 days of free surfing worthy compensation for a 20 day loss. Oh well. I guess I need to learn how to bargain, an art I unfortunately just don't possess.

Well... I used the 7 days to the best that I could. 7 days got over. And well the connection was still working. So I thought since I had read about the connection being enabled late, I had been given some extra days. I used it on that day as well. And then next day when I logged in, it showed my expiry date as NULL. Interesting piece of software they got there. I wonder how many people can understand what NULL means on your expiray date. Well to me it meant, this connection is yours forever! LOL.

Somehow, good things don't last that long and anyway I was getting sick and tired of the pathetically slow speeds they offer in comparison to Triband!!! I logged in and it showed that the account would expire on the 21st of November. Okay... so now something was fishy. It appears that SIFY likes to just disconnect and renew your account without asking you ever if you want to do that. Well I guess like the idiot I am I decided that I won't use cause these guys may come around asking for their dues. Actually I should have vasooled the opportunity but then, you know.. I think I'd get my work done quicker @256 kbps on Triband rather than @64kbps on SIFY...

Ok, cut to a couple of days ago. Local cable wala shows up asking for money. I must say that he was most uncerimonioulsy sent away. Cut to yesterday when I got a call from SIFY. Asked them, "How do you expect a customer to continue with a company that chooses when it shall disconnect and reconnect their connections. Was a pathetic experience."

I wouldn't say that I got fair compensation in the end. I mean you can hardly call 7 days free in lieu of 20 days perfect especially after having taken another internet connection. I should have really gotten one month's money back from them. But anyway, I guess its just a question of what's better:

"Something's better than nothing."

OR

"If you're doing something then do it properly!"

Return of Airtel

This past week has been good. Projects finishing, holidays approaching. There has been one dampner on the situation though. That being, one Airtel sales rep sitting outside of my work place all day selling some wierdo scheme! And to think I thought that I was rid of those chors! Great and now someone I know has just decided to switch from Orange to Airtel. Ani't nothing sacred no more?!

Moving on to better things. I'm about to be off to Bahrain for a nice long Diwali vacation. Shubh Diwali to all of you reading this. May you have a fun filled and safe Diwali and new year!

The the past so many days hasn't been too interesting on the techie front. Either that or I'm just not following news hard enough. Has anyone heard more about the San Francisco WiFi project for which Google was offering to do for free?! Seems to be an interesting area where a new arena of price wars is going to spark off. I think companies like Verizon, Cingular, etc that operate cellular services in the US are getting a bit touchy about the whole affair! Now I wonder why??? :-))

"Wait and watch, There's a whole lot of things happening around you!"

Chocolate...

Chocolate is a neat movie. Slick and shot with cool camera angles. Will have to write about it sometime ... :-)

eBay bought Skype and that's old news.. the fact that they're going to integrate a lot of eBay services into it is well I guess newer but still stale news. Now, eBay giving free WiFi.. That's news I think! Perhaps I'm still behind the times, but it appears that the new mantra out there for advertisement funded online companies is to get a good VoIP client and then start giving free WiFi. Now I wonder what they're all up to?! :-)

Spymac has come up with this cool new interface for web based mail. Not too sure how it works on a slow connection, but its pretty cool. They've emulated an Outlook Express styled layout and you have the option of switching between the two. The only catch being that for the new layout u need to have IE6. So firefox fans... you'll have to hang on.

The interface as such sports a lot of cool features like the preview pane and address book on the side, so you don't need to remember names to get the autocomplete up. :-)) The whole interface sports right click menus to help you get easy access to whatever you want. Its like a full fledged online thick client. Check it out @ www.spymac.com

Well that's where this info post ends.... Am still trying to find something interesting happening, but the only thing I can find these days are crib posts about SIFY broadband! :-)) Its pretty cool though to read!

"When in Rome, do as the Romans say."

Google Talk and Wi Fi: The Rebirth of telephony?

I just happened to be reading this book on computer networking by Andrew S Tanenbaum. For all of you who have ever done something in computer networking I’m sure you don’t need any introduction as to how amazing and author this guy is. Well anyway, I happened to be reading up about mobile communication standards in his book. What struck me in all cases was how most of the time, in the development of computer networks, it has always been telephony that has been developed first and then the same infrastructure is then built upon to support data.

For e.g. you had PSTN first and then dial up internet was built on that. You then got DSL and then ADSL built on that for broadband access. Even cable internet was again technology being put on top of your television channel. If you take mobile communications, then you have GSM on top of which GPRS is built and once CDMA became a hit, you had data services and high speed connections via CDMA. Makes you wonder then what has this got to do with Wi Fi. I’ll come to that later on…

Well now the funny thing is that once you had data over telephony, we then started trying to put voice over this data. Why? It was just cheaper. So you had things like VoIP born. Already popular chat systems like yahoo and msn then grabbed this opportunity to provide voice services (for free) between computers. Not bad. I know when it costed you more than Rs40 a min to call the US, talking for just Rs.20 an hour on your dial up via a messenger was pretty cool!

So messengers became cool and off late a company then spun in to the foray called Skype! Well those guys were a runaway success. Adding users at a rapid pace because their voice technology was just amazing. In fact just today I used Skype and I must say that voice clarity on it is definitely better than what else you have out there. Apart from that Skype also lets you call up land line phones, mobile phones and even have calls coming into your phones diverted to your Skype account. Some pretty nifty features which of course come at a price. So there you have it now, net telephony becoming the hot piece of pie.

Which now brings us to Google. The search company that is practically weaving a thick mist over what they’re really planning to roll out. GMail, Google News and now you have their latest entrant, Google Talk what I prefer to call GTalk now. GTalk is a pretty cool application. Light weight and even a real dumbo could use it without any hassles. No audio tuning wizards, just hit a button and talk. Although I must admit that its still a bit glitchy. Guess that’s why they still label it as a ‘Beta’!

So back to Wi Fi. Hmmm.. Probably something that has come up more as a by product of Ethernet. People wanting to hook up to the network without wires. So there you have a technology which for once evolved out of a networking standard rather than building technology on top of some telephony system. Wi Fi is pretty cool that way and with newer technology you’re getting faster and faster speeds. I mean just take a look at 802.11. Its pretty cool stuff. And now the interesting thing is that there are rumors of Google providing internet access via Wi Fi. So for those who have been wondering why Google has been buying up lots of high speed links. Again a rumor, I’m not claiming any of this to be true, but that’s what’s floating around. So, in the near future Google is going to be bringing you Wi Fi based internet. Interesting…

So now there’s just one link remaining, I hope you’ve read this far cause this is where things get interesting. You have GTalk, and you have G-WiFi. What does that mean. Well ever thought of using google talk to talk to you friends while you were on the move? Not possible right? How could you do that, you’d run a big bill on you cell phone if you were trying to dial up. Or else the GPRS charges would be prohibitive. The whole cost effectiveness of this free system would be lost. Enter WiFi. Now you go around with your notebook connected to the net via WiFi and then use your GTalk, Skype, whatever to communicate with people! Amazing ain’t it?!
For once now, it seems like telephony is going to born out of data based services. And with the increasing number of articles online about WiFi enabled phones, I think you’re looking more and more at a new band of voice providers. We’re going to be seeing WiFi providers providing you with telephony. Log on and start talking with whoever you want. Switch calls, video conference, you name it and WiFi is going to provide it at a very cheap cost. I’m not too sure about how cheap a net connection via WiFi is going to be, but its definitely going to be cheaper to say use GTalk over WiFi to talk to someone in the US than to make a ISD phone call from your normal telephone handset.

Wake up world. Its finally time for the customers to get back some of the money they’ve been pouring into cell cos! Just wait a bit longer and you’ll be able to walk around Wi Fi enabled cities and just log onto the net normally with your WiFi enabled handsets and talk to anyone in the world at well I’m hoping really cheap costs! Ironic though, that what gave birth to the internet is now going to be re-born from its creation! Maybe that’s what they mean by re-birth eh?

“What comes around, goes around!”

MTNL hai tho SAHI HAI!

I never thought that I'd be putting a post like this so quickly. But then the last 2 days has made me feel just like that title to this blog. Actually this place was going to be reserved for SIFY tales 8, 9 ,10, etc but then I've realised that they're now not even wasting blog space on!

Man, after my trysts with Dolphin's networks I never thought I'd be saying this, but then sachchi, MTNL hai tho Sahi hai! I can't believe the blazing speed at which their DSL conneciton is and then, well I was going to blog about this earlier but then didn't want to jinx it, so I didnt. And voila today when I get home from work, the net connection is gone. I was like, "Here we go again!" But then a phone call later (that too at 12 midnight) to their call center and I'm online with a fix like, change your DNS server address to this. I was like, "Whoaaaaaaa. How did you guys come up with that!" That too the first person who picks up the phone tells me that. No asking anyone, no nothing, just plain simple business. THis is something I'm willing to give them 'kudos' for. Amazing stuff. They've made my day.

I hope I'm still not jinxing things, but I think that so far things are just amazing from them. Be it customer care or service. Just got two words, "Sahi hai!". I'm saying it again that I hope I"m not speaking too soon, but I'm sure that these guys are finally serious to things. And to the others out there (aka SIFY), wake up and smell the flowers guys! This is called 'Service'. I think the age has dawned where the private guys can take a leaf out of the book of our good old sarkari blokes. Please please someone stop me know before I go overboard! LOL.

I'm saying it again, louder than ever:

"MTNL hai tho Sahi Hai!!!"

Sify tales... part 6

So I’m a frustrated individual who likes to blog. What can say, except that one tends to get frustrated when you are trying to talk to a person about your problem and they keep avoiding you. Well I’m kind of going through something like that now.

5pm, I call up the SIFY guy. Tring tring… tring tring… tring tring… snap! The line goes off. Ok so the guy doesn’t want to talk to me. 5.30pm I call up the cable wala. I then get to hear this lovely story about how they have told everything to SIFY and that nothing is there in their hands now. How nice? As I said before in a post, that’s ‘business’!

Cut to the night, I’m like kind of bored and in the mood for some entertainment and I just noticed that my SIFY connection is not being restored here. So, I decide to call up the SIFY wala again. 2 rings and he’s on. I tell him my username and then he’s on about how I’ll get this done, can you call me back in 10min. I’m like, “Ok.”

13mins later (why am feeling superstitious now!), I call Mr SIFY again. He picks up and says that his call center people will be talking to me about it. (WHAAAAAAAT?!) So I ask him, when are they going to talk to me and he’s like, “They’ll call up in 5 mins”. Again I’m like ok. 5 mins later, no call, so I call up Mr SIFY again. Basically I’m just hitting redial by now. Now he’s like, “Oh, mein thoda nashta karne gaya. I’m in office only Sir, I’ll tell them to call you up.” Again I’m like, “Ok”. By now I’m sure the educated are wondering why am I going on saying, ‘OK’! LOL. Even I dunno why I’m being so patient about this.

I hit redial again after 15mins, because still no call center people are calling me. By now I’m like in a mood to really blast this guy. But then ‘lucky me’, he cuts the phone after like 5 or 6 tring trings! Typical! Guess that things aren’t going to get any better. I suppose that I’ll have to call him up now again! J Lets see what he’s go to say now. Probably it’ll be another 10 mins for the call center bungo brains to call up. I guess its getting boring to read this, but then I just keep asking myself, “Where is the professionalism here?!”

“Whatever happened to customer service? Oh, sorry could you please call our call center for your queries?”

Sify Tales… part 5

Ok, so now you’re either like waiting to read this post or you’re like sitting there wondering, “Doesn’t this guy ever stop?!” Well it turned out that the SIFY morons called up at my place when I was at work. Typical! Hmpf! Anyways, I got the message and the rang up the cable wala to find out what was happening. First thing that I’m asked about is, “Do you want to renew your account?” At this point I’m thinking, “Sure I’d love to renew your brain! Why don’t I first bang your current brains out!”

Anyway for some reason I kept my cool and then went through the whole story again. Of course once they heard my username they pretty much knew who I was. So the lady says that ‘shailu bhai’ is not around and will be in later. So I’m like ok, give me the SIFY guy’s number. So I get it. Phew! At least one thing went smoothly.

So, I call up Mr. SIFY and tell him about how I had called him up before and all. First question, “What’s your username” I’m like whatever it was. Pause… Then he’s like, “Oh yeah I remember. Mereko 2 ghanta de mein teek kar dega.” So I said Ok and kept the phone. Now at a time like this you should know that things don’t work so smoothly. Still I was driven by hope that something good would happen today!

I reach home, turn on the pc and voila, NO net connection! I got the good old message of, “Your account has expired!“ It was meant to be right? I mean I guess I was just a bit toooooo gullible today. Oh well. Looks like tomorrow I’ll again have to call him up and get the things done. Hopefully get the things done. Boy am I bored… No tell me how in the world are we supposed to trust service providers like this!

“Sometimes you’ll wonder why you keep trying. Thing will not look like getting resolved you’ll never know why, but then you’ll just try again anyway!”

Sify Tales... part 4

As I right this post, its interesting to note that I’m using a font called perptua, so that this post will perpetuate into the minds of people (aka SIFY for this post) so that they realise that something is a miss with their way of doing ‘business‘.

Business, it’s a funny term and often makes you feel that there ought to be no feelings attached to it. After all, a successful business cannot be run on sympathy! But, that doesn’t mean that a business is run without integrity or transparency. And well, its sad to say this, but what happened to me is just that. I was, to put it a bit harshly, swindled into paying for one month of internet and receiving only 10 days of it! In short ended up doing ‘business’ with people of no integrity, no transparency.

The question here that hits one is WHY? Well it happened because certain individuals prefer to do ‘business’. They don’t like to tell their customers what they are giving them. So for a person who for the past 5 years has never had to worry about download limits on his cable internet connection, suddenly finds himself faced with the harsh reality of seeing his account expire in 10 days simply because a 150MB download limit was suddenly capped on him.

Now, perhaps its alright to have this type of limit imposed, but then it has to be communicated to the person before the take up the plan! And, well ok it slipped your mind, hey we’re all human right? But then why oh why wasn’t it built into the software to warn the user that their 150MB for the day is over? Why I ask you?! I mean that is just sick. How can you as a user then verify that you haven’t been cheated of your limit for the day?

How do you know that when you transit from the paying to time to the free time (you get free access from 10pm onwards till 6am) that you’re not being charged now? How do you know? I’m afraid there is no way to know! You just have to take it on face value. CRAP! In short you just have to trust the integrity of a corporation that is not willing to even tell you when their plans change. So, even today, although you’re told that your quota is over, you could be pretty sure it isn’t because that‘s just how much integrity they have! In fact they probably don’t warn you that you’re reaching your 150MB limit just so that they can swindle some more money from us. Hehehehehe! Great ‘business’ model right?!

Hell, if this person had known that there was such a scheme he wouldn’t have gone to SIFY. He would have stuck on with the providers he was on previously or better still moved on to what he’s doing now. But the sad part here is that after being a customer to a provider (aka the cable wala) for 5 years this person is not at all valued. You’re just another person on the doorstep with the begging bowl as far as they’re concerned. Crap, who’s gonna stand for that!

What hurts you in the end is the fact that you think you’re paying for good service, but your actually stuck with something that gives ‘mediocre’ a bad name. I have no words to describe what has been happening, but I sure have acquired a lot of phone numbers of various personal from SIFY and cable walas. Personally, what’s the use of having those numbers cause every number leads you to another. Its like you’re playing treasure hunt and at the end of it all if you’re the first one to reach the end you’ll get your remaining internet days back!

So here it stands, with yours truly swindled out of 20 days of internet time that he paid for. Maybe there are some die hard SIFY fans out there who wish to bring up my ignorance to changing policies to justify the actions of their demi-god internet provider. But then what can a person do when they receive a receipt which very clearly says unlimited usage for a month. I guess they can’t say much right? Its always too bad for the customer cause the customer didn’t know it. Pity really, but then hey, THAT’S BUSINESS!

“There comes a time in a man’s life when realization shall dawn upon him. When that happens he better wake up!”