Rollercoaster's Bunker.

Which smartphone is better? Compare iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry? o_O

2011-10-25T14:41:00.001+05:30

Most people want an iPhone if they have the money to get it, it has class, it is a status symbol in some circles. It is worth the money. Unfortunately, It also carries a lot of 'Apple' bullshit.

Next comes Android for the geeks, power users, value-for-money, Google services users, Android v4.0 is cutting edge. Unfortunately, droids have short lifes, low quality apps and market fragmentation which is its Achilles heel.

Next comes Blackberry for the suits! (iMessage & gTalk threaten BBM quite well). Perfect For Thumb-Jockeys. Design is inherently counterproductive to the whole 'touch' scene.

Next comes Windows Phone, a new contender due to the upcoming Win8, sure to make it big if Microsoft plays it right. Attracts Microsoft services users(Windows, MS Office etc), cheaper then Apple phones, connected with windows OS and Office products.

My first phone was an Android (HTC Desire).
My second phone is an iPhone 4.
My third phone will be Windows Phone 8.

Most of those who advocate Android, I agree by the way, are actually 'power users' and are aware of the 'open source advantage' and the 'apple bullshit' I mentioned earlier. But if you go stand in a smartphone store that sells accessories for all types of phones then you will see a pattern emerge.

You have no idea how empowered a non tech user feels when there is only one button on a phone, it negates the very idea of 'what if I press the wrong button?/which button do I press?'! Try handing the iPhone 4 and the Samsung Galaxy S2 to your grandma(any non tech person, who by they way number more then the power users) and see which one she likes. For an average user an iPhone looks like the best choice because it provides a much more managed and smooth user experience. Android 4.0 is mainly targeted at a better user experience to combat this very area.

I am an Indian and Apple is most definitely a status symbol here as it was a couple of years ago in the US/UK. And as it is worldwide when the newest model is released.

The life of a droid – It starts dying as soon as it is born

Android OS dev community churns out new features that have new hardware needs.
This vanilla OS is then passed on to phone manufacturers who repack it with their own UI, features and branding. They also take the OS to the butcher table to fit it in the various kind of models they make.
These phones are then passed on to cellular carriers who again modify the manufacturer's OS and apply their own UI, features(more like feature restrictions) and branding.
Finally the user can buy the device and is very happy. Fragmentation is awesome till here.
The inevitable happens, the android dev community churns out a new version. This is where the pain starts. The vanilla OS is not usable by the average user, unless they are power users and have rooted their devices and are ready to debrand their device.
The new version then has to pass thru the drawing board of the manufacturer, who tailors it to fit the specific models and then it has to pass thru the cellular carrier's drawing board. This process takes a extremely long time. The manufacturer as well as the cellular carrier are both not very good or very fast at it and they dont like to spend money on it.
In the end, the user gets the update very late and doesnt like it. In addition it dawns on the user that very soon the manufacturer and the cellular carrier will stop churning out updates for their specific model. They are profit oriented corps after all.

So a droid starts dying as soon as it is born.

An example: My HTC Desire. The latest HTC gave us is v2.3 on June 2011, It took HTC 6 months to churn out the update, vanilla release was on December 2010. HTC also stops supporting the device at that time.. This update is however not recommended for most users and wipes the phone, so officially it is stuck at v2.2 (the original version only). The hardware in the phone is however capable of running Android v4.0 which is the newest. But to get that on my device, I need to be a power user, root it, loose HTC Sense, wait for the community to port the OS to this device (which is very unlikely).

How old is this phone? Born on February 16, 2010 and died June, 2011. 16 months. R.I.P.
How many major updates it received: 1 (v2.1 to v2.2).

* HTC Desire akin to HTC Sensation at the moment. i.e a top of the line phone.

Android Development is messy at best

Google is working hard on trying to remove the manufacturer and the cellular provider from the OS-to-user pipeline. Experts call it one of the reasons for Google's takeover of Motorola. But alas I don’t think it can be fixed. It is the nature of the beast.

There are many other aspects of market fragmentation. The second main one has to do with apps and their quality. An app developer is constrained by the lowest common denominator when developing an app or the app wont function on all devices. The dev also has to handle a variety of screen sizes, performances issues and individual quirks. Never mind the need for the dev to own a number of devices(most droid devs dont have that much money!) to test the app and the extra work hours needed to have the app perform 'ok' on all devices. So due to this fragmentation the life of a droid dev becomes unnecessarily harder and is only worsened by super fast OS updates, new hardware etc.

The result is a low quality app because the hands of the dev were tied behind their back!
Just for a comparison, see the iOS (Apple mobile device OS) development. Apple guarantees that an OS update will work on all but the oldest models. There is a strict standard that the devs can rely on. There are high quality development tools available. The dev does not need to buy a bunch of devices to test the apps. The dev gets support from Apple. For all that they have to give up control and a larger profit share to Apple. It hurts but seems like the lesser of two evils.

Apple phones users have their own personal nightmares

Dependence on iTunes.
The feeling of being only able to do what Apple ‘allows’ as to do.
No widgets, advanced apps like File System browser, Advanced settings etc
The so called ‘major features’ like crop in photo gallery or snapping pics using the volume button, which should have been there right from the start.
Restriction on hardware peripherals, Apple devices are notorious to work up to their potential only when paired with Apple products.
From the developer POV, you have to pay a premium to get Apple hardware to develop apps, Apple eats up a large share of the profits, the app screening process are unfair with a policy effectively of ‘we are the kings, we decide your fate’.

Developing for the Windows Phone Platform

I have high hopes for this gambit because Microsoft seems to be keeping in mind both the issues. Market fragmentation will be lower then Android as Microsoft restricts the type of devices that can run Windows Phone 8 OS and provides a much better development environment then Android. Microsoft platform will also have less restrictions on what Apps can do or not and historically Microsoft has a lesser tendency to exert control on the platform, in comparison to Apple. Also, due to the large number Microsoft of users, any lockdown will be torn apart soon.

In the end all I can say is each phone/platform has its good and bad sides.

An update: A much more eloquent and more accurate article was posted about the Android updates issue by MICHAEL DEGUSTA which shows how Android updates fair. It paints a picture much worse then I thought..

"It appears to be a widely held viewpoint that there’s no incentive for smartphone manufacturers to update the OS: because manufacturers don’t make any money after the hardware sale, they want you to buy another phone as soon as possible. If that’s really the case, the phone manufacturers are spectacularly dumb: ignoring the 2 year contract cycle & abandoning your users isn’t going to engender much loyalty when they do buy a new phone. Further, it’s been fairly well established that Apple also really only makes money from hardware sales, and yet their long term update support is excellent (see chart)." read more

* I am a developer on the web and mobile platforms so I do believe I know slight, just slightly, more then the average Joe. But please understand that that assessment is based on a very small 'data sample' and no scientific methods whatsoever. It is just my opinion.

Say yes to mobile blogging!

2011-05-14T15:27:00.001+05:30

Trying out the new android app from Google. It seems to have good features and is designed to do micro blogging.

iPhone 3G/2G on BSNL 3G settings and WiFi on BSNL Dataone Speed tests

2011-03-22T12:59:00.003+05:30

I recently got an iPhone 4 32GB after already being a droid fan for a long time. Now I am torn between the two. Some things are great in the iPhone and other in the HTC Desire running Android 2.2.

And to top the cake with a cherry, BSNL recently launched 3G in my home town, Dehradun. I went thru the whole bureaucratic red tape and got a prepaid 3G SIM for Rs 180 (120 + 60) thats gives me Rs 50 talktime and 500MB data for one month. Good enough for a test run.

After dealing with the minisim - microsim fiasco, which was a tough thing to sort out in itself, I got the phone running on Cellone (BSNL) carrier network.

This was my first time with 3G and it was liberating. It goes to say even wifi is not true wireless freedom as it has a very limit range. 3G helps a lot with that.

To activate 3G I have to put ‘bsnlnet’ for APN Settings under Settings>General>Network>Cellular Data Network. It took a few switching on and off of the ‘Cellular Data’ settings. Toggle ‘Enable 3G’ to switch between 3G and 2G(Edge/GPRS)

The good thing is that bsnl push notifications work great and let us know hwo much data we used up as soon as we switch off ‘Cellular Data’.

The browser and youtube work fine but it is hard to tell if the speeds are faster then wifi. (i have a 512Kbps Unlimited plan from BSNL Dataone).

In this screenshot of the “SpeedTest.Net” app you can see the speeds that I get. The first one is Wifi which is not surprising as I have a 0.5 Mbps dataone landline connection. The second is the 2G setting for cellular network. It is pathetic. But as soon as we switch to 3G the beasts are unleashed! 1Mbps+ is more that sufficient for a mobile connection.

This also opens up the possibilities of using the phone as a WIFI or USB tethered device for mobile internet access on your laptop. I switched on wifi tethering and connected my laptop to the phone’s wifi hotspot and I was browsing 720p videos on youtube! It was amazing. Take that USB Stick modem!

PS: To take a screen shot on you iPhone, press and hold the home button while you press the power button and the screen will flash and save the image in the camera roll.

Bought New Hardware: Microsoft Sidewinder X6 Keyboard, Sidewinder X8 Mouse, Corsair TX650W PSU

2010-04-21T19:35:00.001+05:30

I got really tired of using my Logitech S510 wireless Media remote/keyboard/mouse set for the last 4 years. 4 Years! It has served me well but man was it time for change. Well This time I wanted to get the best of the best (with as usual in a affordable price range). The Razer Mamba and Lycosa set was awesome but too expensive and their server coverage it not much in India so I went with the next best. Microsoft Sidewinder X6 Keyboard, Sidewinder X8 Mouse. I am still keeping the media remote tho :)

I also had a strange problem for the fast 3 months. When ever someone switched on the tube light in my room, my PC froze! Seriously man. It drove me insane and dont even ask how I pinned down that that was what was happening. Totally crazy. An educated guess was that the PSU was not filtering the spikes caused by the flickering of the tube-light when it switches on. I decided to buy a new PSU and a proper one this time. Also a new PSU gives me the ability to add another graphic card (in Dual SLI mode) which would give my aging PC a new lease on gaming life. You can imaging how sad I felt when I tried out the game Metro 2033. It has minimum sys requirements that are my PC specs! So sad. My (once) top of the line gfx card was fading away, even before its warranty ended.

Anyway, here is my take on the three main items I purchased.

Microsoft SideWinder X8 Wireless Gaming Mouse

Trust me gaming grade wireless mice are no simple piece of hardware. This sweet mouse can track on anything (M$ even tested it on human hair) and it has this awesome magnetic charging cord that gently snaps into place when bought near the mouse! no fumbling around for the cable in the dark. It also provides a break free transition from wireless and wired mode and you never have to worry about batteries again. Oh and it tracks at 4000 DPI o_O.

Microsoft SideWinder X6 Macro and backlit Keyboard, detachable numpad

One thing I have learned, you cant have enough keys on a keyboard! And this one has a whole bunch of extra keys. the numpad can be removed and attached to either side of the keyboard and can be converted into a macro pad with each key programmable. Though the pretties and the coolest thing I liked right in the beginning is the backlighting. It is insanely cool! They also have a near knob that can change the brightness of the backlight, which is awesome and I also liked the fact that this monstrosity also has media buttons and a volume knob and a whole bunch of keys that can be programmed on the fly!

One thing I hated was (might be a mis-config on my part). The macro keys dont work in visual studio. i.e they dont fire the macros. So sad. It is a priority for me to find a fix.workaround for that. You can imagine the usefulness for programmable keys for coding. Imagine a button to insert a button control from the toolbox :D and other super cool things that we can never remember the shortcut for.

It is amazing the power so many macro keys bring. When surfing, use a dedicated key to open up google search, another to open youtube and another to initiate a new compose window in gmail. It is a huge benefit and I couldn't possibly switch to a standard keyboard now. It would feel like a handicap.

Corsair TX650W 650 Watt Power Supply

This baby is Single Rail, 80% efficient with active power correction. Super quite and very sturdy. The best part is it comes with a 5 year warranty! That is a loooong time. I doubt anyone was to hear much about power supplies so I will keep it simple and just show you some pics-

I purchased all these from . They have good customer service and great prices. But best of all they have a lot of cool products available. The only drawback is their shipping costs are a bit higher as they are in south and I am in north India and they only use सरकारी SpeedPost to send across state borders.

Here are some videos

Add Calibre libraries to Windows search Indexer and use it efficiently - (The Modern Reader Series - A guide to getting more out of Calibre – Issue #2)

2010-03-07T19:01:00.001+05:30

Windows Indexing service is an operating system level service that maintains an index of most of the files on a computer and updates them without user intervention. To Modify your indexing options:

Open the start menu and start typing “Indexing Options”. It should appear in the results. Select it to open
You should see a list of locations already being indexed. Click the Modify Button.
In the new window select the folders you want to index and press OK to save.

Or alternatively, when you are searching a location in explorer that is not indexed, you get a yellow bar at the top asking you to add it to the indexing service. Right click on that yellow bar and select ‘Index this location’.

Now that you have indexed you calibre libraries it is time to have fun with the searches. I recommend reading this short tutorial about windows searches and available operands like AND OR etc before continuing. (Power users: Advanced Guide)

We all agree that calibre does a great job of managing out ebooks and what not but in my personal opinion, calibre’s search and presentation is more targeted towards a user who knows what he is searching for. Say I want to see all the books in the Dune Series. I can go ahead and quite easily do that in calibre. But what about the peruser user. In today’s world an average personal library may hold anywhere from 1000 to 10000 books depending on how mad the owner of the library is :) . How about when you want to see the books you read in the last 2 weeks? or a list of reference books that one would want, usually, on a moments notice? etc etc… Well I have tried here to make some of those easy. Read on dear ebook worm (Open Explorer and navigate to one of you libraries. Now in the search box enter one of the following)

List all the books in a library -

NOT type:"file folder" NOT name:cover.jpg NOT name:metadata.db

This works best when you want to quickly access a book and don’t want to wait for calibre to load. I use it all the time to access my tech books library. For smaller libraries such as a tech books library or an encyclopaedia this work very efficiently and the search is very fast. So create a separate calibre library for this kind of categories.

Create and save a search for recently accessed books -

date:thismonth OR date:lastmonth NOT type:"file folder" NOT name:cover.jpg NOT name:metadata.db

You should then see a list of all the books that have accessed this month or last month. Pretty Neat? :)

Browse the covers as if it were a bookshelf -

NOT type:"file folder" name:cover.jpg NOT name:metadata.db

Select the “Extra large Icons” view option and you have a bare minimum of a bookshelf here.

I find this a very good way to browse thru what I have as it is much faster then calibre’s cover browser
I have found many interesting items to read that I added to the library and forgot.
This is also useful to remove useless covers like some group covers or default covers added to .lit files
Use the Preview Pane to see larger versions of the covers
Hide the navigation pane and the details pane and use full screen (F11) for best results
If you save this search(see below) Most newer applications like Windows Preview will treat it as a folder

Save a search for easy future access -

For all of the above and any custom searches you make, you can save them. Just go ahead and click “Save Search” button in the explorer toolbar and give it a friendly name like “Recent books” or “My Covers” etc. This will add the search to you favourites(can be removed) and save it in the Searches folder under the current user (Start menu>[CurrentLoginName]>Searches). This way you can use the search as if it were a folder and apply additional search filters like by type or size and use various sorting and grouping options.

Filter Covers by Author-

For e.g., Navigate to you searches location and open “My Covers” and in the empty search box enter an author and see the magic happen. This will work even better with recent listing and book listing search above. (only work for author names due to the folder structure of calibre).

Use Saved searches smartly -

This technique can be used in countless ways like when you want to search for -

Authors : add author name e.g. “Robin Cook” to a saved search or ‘ name:”Robin Cook” ’
Title: add “name:dune” to list all books with “dune in their title”
Format: add “name:.mobi” or ‘ type:”MOBI” ‘ or “name:.lit” or ‘ type:”LIT” ‘
You can in fact use any column name in the format columnname:”query” (note: remove space from column name like Date Modified becomes datemodified) See Rigth-Click in empty area> Sort/Group>More.. for a list of columns

Other options for cooler searches yet -

Use different View options to make the results more pleasing and fun
Use the preview pane as windows can show content preview for some file types like text, rtf, doc, images etc
Right-click in an empty area and choose Sort By to get neat results. such as by folder or by name or size
Right-click in an empty area and choose Group By to group the search results. Very useful for separating by type so that you see all mobi files in one group and pub files in another
use the More… option in Sort, Group and Details View options to access from a ton of file property options.
You can increase the size of the search box by dragging the divider to the left of the search box
To view the location of a file in the search results Right Click>Open File Location (Press shift for a new window)
Indexing service also searches inside books it can read like txt, rtf, doc etc. If you dont want to search inside files then add column names to you searches. e.g. search for “name:dune” instead of “dune”

I think I have list a lot of options for you to play with and as it may be apparent it is just a beginning! Discover searches of your own and share

Jumplist for Calibre: The eBook Management Software - (The Modern Reader Series - A guide to getting more out of Calibre – Issue #1)

2010-03-05T12:53:00.001+05:30

I am a reader. You are a reader. Everyone is a reader and Calibre is open source! Aren’t we living in a golden age?

Calibre is a great application and it belongs to the community, but this also means that the community is in return responsible for calibre and its development. I was thoroughly impressed by it the first time I used it and am still surprised by its modular flexibility and potential. So I decided to participate and try to make the ‘calibre experience’ more smarter as that seems to be the mantra of this age. So I have decided to start with a simple yet powerful tip for Calibre Users in the form of utilizing Win7’s Jump list feature. Here is does….

Aim : Facilitate launching of calibre and related tools with different start parameters.

Side effects : Multiple libraries, Integration in Windows 7 using Jumplist feature, Easy of launching and grouping calibre related links

Requirements: Calibre eBook Management Software, Windows 7, Hedgehog’s JumplistLauncher (Download 476.6 KB), (Administrator Privileges may be required based on the location of the installation of the launcher)

Limitations: Only runs on Windows 7

Setting Up Icons:

Open Explorer with Ctrl+Shift to start it in Admin mode and Navigate to calibre’s installation directory (usually C:\Program Files\Calibre2)
Create a new folder and Extract JumplistLauncher e.g. C:\Program Files\Calibre2\Jumplist (power user tip: can be anywhere, can have multiple installs)
Right Click on JumplistLauncher.exe and select “Create Shortcut”. Select yes when asked to place on desktop. You can optionally cut-paste the shortcut back in the jumplist folder.
Rename the shortcut to “Calibre E-Book Management”. Optionally change it’s Icon to use calibre’s. See tutorial to change icon here
Right click the shortcut and select “Pin to Start Menu”
Right click the shortcut and select “Pin to Taskbar” (drag the icon to your preferred location)
The Icons should appear on you task bar as well as in start menu. Congratulations you are half done.

Setting up Jumplist items:

Press Ctrl+Shift and Click on the new icon to start the JumplistLauncher interface in admin mode. (Don’t worry if yours is empty, We are going to create these links.)
Add Items to the jump list

Click the ‘Add File’ button to create a new item.
Browse to calibre’s executable (C:\Program Files\Calibre2\calibre.exe) and press ‘Open’
In the ‘Selected Entry’ field group you can specify the name of you choice. for e.g ‘Calibre’
In the ‘Parameters’ field add command line configuration parameters.

To launch calibre with another library location then default enter “--with-library <path>” where <path> is the path to that library e.g. E:\Books\Library2 . See the official support guide for more parameters.
To add a URL (for e.g. a friend’s content server) use a browser’s exe for the file and the URL for the parameter. For e.g. I used Firefox with is normally located at C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe
Add Calibre-server.exe to easily start your content server. see available params
If you have a skydrive, network backup etc, you can specify it’s path for the library
If you use the various modular executable in calibre’s directory, create batch files for common tasks and add them by creating a shortcut with the Run minimised option

Optionally change the icon of the jump list item by pressing the icon button.

Use the ‘Add Group’ button to great sections in the list. To edit a group’s name click on it in the list and it changes to a editable textbox.
Selecting one of the checkboxes in the list makes it the default launch operation when clicking on the icons we added to the task bad and start menu. If none is selected then this configuration window opens up.
Press the ‘Update Jumplist’ button to same you options and update the jump list without restarting the launcher.
Exit the configuration window and you are done!

I hope this is a very helpful tutorial and will go a long way to utilizing calibre to its full potential. I will be create more posts and tutorials in the future so please send me feedback on the calibre’s mobileread forum or here.

My Application Owns the Computer!

2010-02-26T22:39:00.003+05:30

A pervasive attitude among programmers is that the only reason people own a computer is to run their application. Symptoms include:

Usurping shared resources like the desktop, system folders, task bar, registry, ... ("The whole machine is for my use.")
Can't turn off the app ("The only reason the machine would be on is to run my app, so I'll install an auto-startup service, a startup app, an Explorer plug-in, ...").
Resource hogging ("I can just grab exclusive access to files, database, or network connections when I launch and keep everything open.")
Interrupts workflow with pop-up messages, tooltips, alert balloons, taskbar messages, status messages, sound effects, ... ("Look at me! I'm working! Do you see me? I'm doing something!!")
Collateral damage ("I don't use that so I'll delete it.")
Race conditions ("Anything I do will stay that way forever until I change it.")
Security breaches ("I can expose everything on the machine, since I am the only one that will ever access it.")
Lack of interoperability ("My app has everything it needs so I don't need to support file export or cut and paste.")
No deployment ("I will never have to update or uninstall my app; they'll just get a new machine.")

IRCTC’s new face

2010-02-15T19:05:00.003+05:30

Online booking is now very common and more appreciated then the brainless babus on the counters and the sweaty, slow moving lines they rule on. But Indian sites have really stayed behind in providing a clean and effective consumer experience. Who doesn’t curse a few times when using the IRCTC site or other govt sites. But the new beta interface seems to be on track. Have a look -

It is no longer a mad struggle between a bunch of pages and little popups. You don’t have to ‘Find Trains’ every time for different kind of seats like Chair Car or Sleeper Berth. It is really better now. they have gone with the generic booking design with a From/To/Date panel on one side and trains in the rest. The great part is when you click on a radio button for a train/type, it immediately loads the relevant info like Fair and Availability.

Though, I also think it is looking so good now because their previous interface was so damn dirty and clunky. Like a bully, the norm is getting picked on and the day that stops it feels extraordinary. But dear, that is what is ordinary supposed to be!

So IRCTC seems to be reaching ‘ordinary’ level which is extra ordinary based on previous experience!

PS: the link to the beta interface is in the top right corner of the homepage.

Christmas.NET - Dedicated to all the programmers out there

2009-12-26T13:52:00.000+05:30

using Self;
using Self.Emotions;
using Self.Online.Blog;
using Self.Rides.Bike.Pulsar150;
using Self.Offline.GirlFriend;
using Self.Offline.SocialCircle.Dudes;
using Self.Gadgets.Canon500D;
using Self.Gadgets.AmazonKindle;

namespace Self.Life.Experience
{
    public class Christmas
    {
        public Christmas()
        {
            InitialiseComponents(Self.Life.Instances[CURRENT_INSTANCE]);

            GalacticDomination.Thread.Suspend();

            Emotion emo = Chrismas_Start(new System.TimeSpan(48, 0, 0));
            Self.Life.Experience.Add(emo.Summary);
            Self.Life.Components[2009].Vacation.Add("Chritmas", emo);

            GalacticDomination.Thread.Resume();

            var settings = new { Audience = "Public", LevelOfDetail = "Overview", OutputLanguage = "Human, C# v3.5" };

            Blogs[TECH_BLOG].Post(this, emo, settings);
        }

        [System.Serializable]
        [System.STAThread]
        public Emotion Chrismas_Start(System.TimeSpan duration)
        {
            if (Self.CurrentStatus == Status.Married)
            {
                Monotonus.Do("boring, chistmas tree, boring, big dinner, boring, gifts under tree, boring");
                throw new InvalidSystemStateException("maybe try a few linux commands like sudo. If not on mono then no chance buddy");
            }

            Shopping("Gifts", "for friends, family, her");

            WithHer("Bike to Secluded spots, Curvy Hilly Roads", "use lots of breaking ;)");
            WatchMovie("London Dreams", "could have been better movie but only spent half the time actually watching movie");
            WithHer("xoxo", "[censored]");
            WithHer("Dinner", "Chinese");
            if (GiveGift("Her", "Necklace").IsHappy) Self.MentalState.SaveSnapshot();
            WithHer("xoxo", "[censored], snuggle, [censored], snuggle");
            Gadget("Kindle", "Read some more from 'Spin by Robert Charles Wilson'");

            duration.Subtract(new System.TimeSpan(24, 0, 0));

            BikeTo("Mussoorie", "No Snow, still lots of fun");
            WatchMovie("De Dana Dan", "great Hera Pheri like fun");
            Gadget("Kindle", "Catch up on blogs using google reader mobile ed.");

            BikeTo("Back Home", "make too much noise, overspeed, pit stop for beer");
            WithBuddies("Get Drunk", "best part of the day");
            GiveGift("Buddies", "Suspicious dvds, " + Emoticons.EvilGrin.Load());
            Gadget("Canon500D", "takes pics of buddies in wierd and compromising situations");
            WithBuddies("Passed Out", "best part of the Night");

            duration.Subtract(new System.TimeSpan(24, 0, 0));

            return new Emotion(this, "Happy", "Huge Handover");
        }
    }
}

Buying an Amazon Kindle 2 in India? Bollywood estyle!

2009-12-22T15:19:00.003+05:30

Scene 0 – The hero spots the heroine. Love at first sight – General Specs

First off, I purchased a Kindle 2 and am very happy with the product. It is what it is said to be and then some!

But acquiring this neat gadget is not so easy if you are in India. It makes for a neat story with a whole lot of bollywood style twists. Read: kicking the ass of the hero(me) for the whole movie and then unite with the heroine (kindle 2 global) right at the end. o-O.

Like everyone else outside the US, The hero went crazy for a few seconds when he learnt about the Kindle going ~~international~~ global :D He simply had to have it. Any science fiction bookworm would agree. Reading about awesome alien worlds and insane time-travel ideas on a comparably cool gadget is boundless fun.

So sit back, relax and enjoy the saga.

Aside from being extremely hot, the Kindle 2 is an amazing device. It’s form factor is surprisingly thin and E-Ink is so clear and easy on your eyes that it looks even better in the sun unlike other displays we are accustomed to. It can show a whole variety of file formats and for those it cant, one can find even more converters to get the job done. The Wispernet is great and covers almost all over the world. Via EVDO and falls back to 3G, EDGE and GPRS respectively based on the cellular service. It can charge via USB too and functions as a pen drive when plugged in.

Scene 1 - The seduction – Geek specs

It uses a Lithium-polymer battery which does not degrade after each charge cycle. It has a processor faster then the Iphone. It has a Cellular modem that has hidden GPS features. It is extremely easy to use as it follows the minimalism methodology set by google. It has stereo speakers albeit not a full blown MP3 player. It runs linux! and with some cool software you can easily be looking at the root prompt and happily compiling a custom kernel. It has many experimental features like a browser, picture viewer (manga), MP3 player, audio books and Text 2 Speech in addition to the million and one hacks out there in the wild due to the OS being linux. Oh and did I mention, an internet access is free.

View Full Album

All this in a 290 gram, super sleek, white hot body. The hero yells within ‘just take me. take me right here…’

Scene 2 – First date, her daddy is strict, no dates before marriage - Import fees and ways around

So, The hero trotted of to her home (Amazon.com) all giggly and bubbly and gobble up all the information on the new release and decided to ask her out on a date (check out the payment options).

The large import fees really made me mad and like all desi people couldn’t find it easy to pay the proper fees, need a jugaad shortcut. So I scour google with all the search trick i know. I find a few options like using one of those sites that provide you with a US address where you can ship the item and they forward it to you for a modest fee. The other one was a Chinese site selling Kindle at a much reduced price. However since kindle has a tiny cell phone for its eyes and ears I couldn't risk one of those options due to the fear of void warranty or wispernet not working.

So our hero wastes a lot of time on her from afar and finally succumbed to the Righteous ways. Marriage with the full 7 rounds. (i.e. the displayed $259 become $378.57). That is what girls do a guy’s pocket so the hero shouldn’t be surprised :)

Scene 3 – Family wants NRI - Payment options Credit card only

Soon thereafter the first hurdle comes, You have to have a credit card which I dont have (a whole other rebellious policy I subscribe to but best left out of this post). It wiped the smile off my face. More days pass searching and looking for options. Come up with only two. Either get someone to buy it for you or get someone to buy you a gift card which can then be used to make the purchase. I was a bit worried as, like other mobile devices, they get tagged to the purchaser.

The hero doesn’t want some random NRI to marry her and bring her to him. She is too hot to be trusted with anyone else.

After some talk here and there I find another in the middle option, Get someone to buy it for you as a gift ! In such a case the kindle is unregistered and one can then register it themselves. However, that options is some what hidden and not easy to catch. There is only one option and that is gift wrapping and that costs further more money. God help our hero. However after reading a lot more text in amazon support on the not so easy on eye non E-Ink monitor I find that just select gift wrap and dont select any wrapping method and add some gift message text and you are done. The purchase is made via a trusted friend

The heroine will stay single! All roads appear clear and our hero sings a couple of melodies. But he doesn’t know the mafia (whole shipping industry) is after her. The Mafia sends their minions all over the route. Will the heroine survive? Will they unite? The mafia is sure to be badass, what will the hero do?

Stay tuned for the next episode.

Ever thought what goes on in the mind and life of a scener(pirate)?

2009-12-08T16:21:00.001+05:30

Ever thought what goes on in the mind and life of a scener(pirate)? Watch The Scene series and see the first season first.

I was(am) a big fan of 'The Scene', a mini series that you can freely download and watch online, and stumbled back to their site today. This series is an awesome creative work about the life of pirates and it started the cycle of thought in me. I have researched this subjects many times and wanted to write a post about it as it is a very interesting world as well as a community of exceptional talent.

‘The Scene’ refers to the online piracy world including the real world aspects of it and the Sceners are the people who make warez(pirated stuff) available to us i.e. the public. They put themselves in real danger and, if caught, are exposed to very real consequences. This is not to be confused w ith hackers as that is a whole separate world and much more evil ;).

Organizations and Governments all around the world spend millions of dollars to try and stop piracy both by developing newer and difficult to pirate protection systems and legal teams to catch the culprits but we, the people, still get everything without paying anything. All due to the sceners.

We find it so easy to just go about downloading anything in sight, but the story of how that ‘thing’ found its way to the public sharing sites is a long and interesting one with all sorts of organized crime like aspects to it. Generally speaking, releases(warez) are created by a Release Group. In such a group there are sources and couriers, like someone in a DVD printing factory who will sneak one out to send to the encoders who convert the original stuff and package it into online deliverables via top-sites and uploaders. After going thru all those ranks of the group do the files reach out in the public. There are also the Primes who are people who donate hardware to the top-sites for access rights on their servers so that they can get the very best releases, post requests for special items and to get the rights of bragging that they are the first ones to enjoy the releases.

Why do they do it. The most common reasons are along the lines like – they can do it so they do it, for the fun of it, for the thrill of doing something wrong and getting away with it and also for the fierce competitive world that The Scene is. Scene lifes are made and destroyed based on who goes thru the process of obtaining and releasing an item first and in the correct way, leaving the others sulking in the dust behind them.

Despite what you might thing, The Scene is cut-throat and yet self-regulated community i.e. has its own rules and principles which the participants must follow or be removed. Without trust between the members of a group they would be caught easily or simply not live up to the competition. Due to the high risk life of a scener they use sophisticated anonymity and security software to fool anyone looking for them. They spoof, hop, run in circles and spew garbage leaving very little if any trace behind them. To this effect, there are a lot of methods that have evolved to keep some measure of control like release lists, where bad releases are nuked and access controls mechanisms to keep the blacklisted out, most of which the common man cant get a glimpse of.

The most hardcore of all sceners live a very secretive life and definitely are not the ones who like fame and exposure. It is extremely difficult to get in contact with such people even though be sure that they live among us. I like to think they live on a separate plane of existence :).

Now that you know a tiny bit about The Scene, next time you download ‘stuff’, take a moment to thank the uploaded and keep those speed limits off.

Cheers. Peace Out.

~~Links:~~ ~~Wiki~~ ~~1 2 3 4~~. I was going to post a bunch of links here but it better to let you search it yourself and there is a whole lot of stuff out there.

Cooler Master Storm Scout Cabinet – Ramp Walk

2009-10-29T12:57:00.001+05:30

My cyborg arm has been itching for a few days due to the lack of the modding for an insanely long time. So, solely to satisfy the inner BuckRodger, I decided to dump my previous cabinet and freshen things up.

I am also a photography hobbyist with a Canon 500D and since spending the whole Diwali snapping fireworks, I wanted to do something different. So, I went with a mod that would look the coolest in pictures :D As you may be able to tell, shooting colourful lights is the best kind of photography I like. (Straight LowDown - See all the pics of this cabinet – slideshow, set)

Enter Cooler Master Storm Scout (see manufacturer page, video review). I purchased one from theitdepot.com along with some neons and internal lighting paraphernalia. I spent the last weekend switching cabinets and installing the internal lighting.

This is my first time with a ‘proper’ cabinet. I was amazed by the tool-free design, the solid steel, wire management, dust filters, wire mesh and side window. The best however is the quality of cooling it provides. My system temperatures went down 10 degrees right away in comparison to the temps in the previous cabinet. The handles on the top are really sturdy and made it very easy to move it around for the ‘photoshoot’ ;)

It is such a shame that I didn’t move to a branded cabinet earlier then now. The benefits are so many and indispensable once you have tasted them. The stock fans are huge and very well placed. It is also such a wonder that the cabinet is so quite.

Radical Modes (Green/Red/Blue) - Rear View

Another feature I really love is the small switch on the front panel that can switch ON/OFF the LEDs and attached with the other additions I made works very well when you need it to be dark. In addition I installed a parallel port controllable relay to turn off the chassis fans as well. It is very handy when you want that zero decibel sound level. I use Win7’s powershell to switch to a quite mode that throttles down CPU and GPU clocks and runs my tiny utility to switch of the fans. When I get time, I am planning to write a full utility to control the internals of a system via the age old parallel port electronics addon method.

Frontal Assault - Mode Green and Red

Other owners of the same cabinet may be really happy to know that the ceiling fan actually has speed control support. The default wireup of the cabinet just attaches it to the +12v rail and we can disconnect it from that and plug it into the mobo. Which will allow us to monitor and control the fan speed. Unfortunately, and this is the only thing I dont like about this cabinet is, the other fans dont have speed control capability. It would have been nice to have a switch like the the ones offered by Antec.

HDD Rack, Read Exhaust and the GPU

This cabinet is a far cry from my last 500Rs one. That one was so old and so modded out that it had become rickety like a UP Roadways Bus. Years ago, I had to mod it out to make it functional(new HDD rack, front exhaust, addition front panel USB etc) to my hardware and was unable to upgrade from a long time as I knew that the other local ones would have the same shortcomings and would required modding. So I am very happy that this cabinet is already functional and so I am free to concentrate on visual pleasure alone!

This brings me to the end of the outside view of the cabinet. I will do the internals next time, when I get time. I hope you guys enjoyed it. Dont forget the view the other equally awesome pics slideshow, set.

PhotoSketch: Simone here I come…

2009-10-06T10:42:00.001+05:30

There are times when I am really mad at my chosen field of professionalism (as if.. ). But there are also times when ‘awesome’ doesn't seem to suffice as well, which makes life worth living. Today is such a day. Come along and enjoy the ride..

(: Oh! and btw if you haven’t see S1m0ne yet then jump out of your office window, in front of a truck, grab a gun and point at the guy in the mirror or do whatever preference you have towards suicide. :)

We have all seen a variety of awesome stuff in novels, sci-fi movies, on the web, in computer games, in great software and web applications and in unique project, we as devs, may be a part of (Google OS someone? :p). Some of those transcend and stay as a part of our subconscious. For eg a few things for me are The Matrix, A fire in the deep, Abduction, Chromosome 6, Windows 7 :D, etc etc. This one is a newest entry in that collection. The ‘think and make real’ kinda stuff.

What if

you could draw a sketch on a tablet and have it turned into a real image with real people, objects and background?
you have been going crazy about that wedding photo of yours what missed a crucial item, like a family member, an emblem or ur pet?
you want to add that special someone in a really nice pic of urs or a missing friend in a group photo ?
you want to see yourself kayaking or hiking in that dream destination or want to stand next to the president?

Forget photoshop just PhotoSketch.

A group of students in China have created PhotoSketch, a project that does exactly what I just described: it takes a rough, hand-drawn sketch, scours the web for photos that match, and runs them through an algorithm, stitching it all together. Watch this video presentation, you will not regret it:

Now we just need to add another dimension to it (No! my dear Einstein I don’t mean Time.. we already have that in the video progress bar :p ) and -> S1m0ne here I come !!

Discovering Windows 7 – Awesome Explorer

2009-10-04T13:24:00.003+05:30

Who would have thought that the work ‘awesome’ could possible be used near ‘explorer’. I mean, no one ever goes “Dude, windows explorer is awesome!”. Ever. I though that those words together should be called a ‘grammatical mistake’ :p

It is totally not the case now. Even after months of using Win7 I, almost everyday, keep discovering new features and ingenuities.

I was trying to fix tag information for the music I recently got from amardeep. He never has neatly organised data. So I was doing the usual. Select a group of files >Right click> Properties > Details tab and fill it up or something similar can be done from Media Player’s library but with only the advantage of a smoother UI. Right?

I then noticed details pane in the lower part smoothly displaying all the tag info. Some elements were missing so I did the obvious (Right Click) and sure enough there as a menu to control the details and a couple options. I chose the large size to see more property elements.

I intuitively moved my mouse over the displayed data and noticed the value getting highlighted as if they could be edited. I was like wow that is great. No need go to the details pane. Just select files and you are a bunch of clicks/steps faster. You dont have to repeat the RightClick>Prop>Details for each group of files you select to edit.

It was great discovery up till now but as soon as I moved to try something more complex it became awesome. Lets take the example of a folder I have called ‘Top Singles’ where I keep the latest hits and add new numbers as they hit the top (pretty great method to only filter and collect the best songs only). In such a folder the tags are hard to manage as you cant group them because they are from different artists/albums etc. This method greatly reduced the effort required in such places.

Earlier I had to create and update a bunch of playlists there to manage updates in single folder. For e.g. if I want to listen to a particular week’s updates hits in the order they were in at that time.. impossible right? Just try it..

Anyway, I started editing some tags with this method and, you are gonna love it, then came the biggest ‘aaaaaah’ from my mouth. Just as I started typing the edit fields came alive with real-time suggestions based on my library! Don’t believe me? have a look -

At the very least this feature completely kills the misspelling mistake (which resulted in really bad looking library like artists would have ‘Kailas’ and ‘Kailash’. Really messing up playback selction. In addition it further speeds up the task and offers us a strong overview in cases where, say, we forgot the artist name/spelling etc.

I wondered what else can we do with this thing.. and it occurred to me - the search field! I went to the top directory and entered a search for which I knew the results were spread out in many folders.

Here is a search for “List top songs or music videos since June 2008 by Beyonce or Eminem” :D

This was just a forced complex search. Now imagine this(search, live suggestions tags etc) for all files and documents! Tagging made super easy which in turn makes further searching and tagging easier. It is an exponential relationship. And dont forget Windows media center and other network stream devices that Win7 can attach to. It makes navigating on them many times easier. Even more mind boggling is, try to associate this with the open search filters/addon capability of Windows 7. Like searching last.fm or flickr or even a torrent site in inclusion to you network, Homegroup and libraries!

Tell me you are in love, shout aloud “Awesome Explorer” :)

Windows 7 Boot Errors - No More !

2009-10-04T09:35:00.003+05:30

How may times have we been plagued by a failed boot manager? Remember ‘NTLDR Missing’ or ‘No OS found’ or ‘Boot manager failed to load…’

Well I got one today, after a long time, on my desktop. It was absolutely fine yesterday night when I switched it off. Something clashed/broker windows was left unbootable.

Earlier one would be frantically running around to find a rescue disk or a windows setup disk to boot from and somehow remember how he had fixed it the last time.

Enter Windows 7. Simply restart the system and the next time you get a sweet screen with the options -

“Fix problems that are preventing windows from starting” Now tell me that isn’t sweet!

I just press enter and it does it’s thing. Kudos to the devs and the leads taking initiative to implement such functions :)

It also goes to show that end user software is now in that phase of crossing over from dumb to intelligent. I wonder what wonder will come next…

Windows 7, Visual Studio 2008 and Sql Server 2005/2008 are made for each other…. well almost.

2009-08-04T00:09:00.005+05:30

It is like walking into a field of sunflowers with northern lights above and a bright and happy sun shining warmly on your face. That is what Windows 7 feels like. I got the Windows 7 iso(2.3Gb) floating around on the net and decided to try the 30 days trial ;) on my development laptop which is not even Vista certified!

Note: This is going to be a long haul. Feel free to skip and do what ever boring stuff you do normally.

…Setup Windows 7 without a DVD

Installing is a breeze with a pen drive so do the following and everyone around you will think you are a magician.

C:\>G:\Boot\BOOTSECT /NT60 H: where G is the mounted ISO(using UltraIso or similar) and H is you pen drive. After that copy all the content from the Win7 image to the pen drive as well. You are all set! Reboot and choose to boot from the pen drive. 10 minutes later you will feel the sun in your face :P

…Installing applications

The installation was swift with 3 restarts and all hardware detected automatically. One quick windows later I was up to date. I looked like I was on to a fabulous start. The performance was looking great and it was very stable. I then moved to the real deal stuff and the tedious job of downloading and installing everything. Firefox, Chrome Faststone, 7z, uTorrent, AVG Free, Atomic clock, Google Desktop, Windows live components(which is what I am writing in right now), CutePDF, Skype, Gtalk, Synaptic Touchpad utility and you know all the odds and ends I could remember. My previous XP was loaded and server me well for 1.2 years without fail. I was hoping to stay on the same steady road but with all the jazz of the world :D

…Importing settings and customisations

None of the above mentioned stuff gave any warning or error and installed blazing fast thanks to the Windows 7 installation routine revamping. However then came the crazy task of importing setting and customizations that accumulate with time on one’s PC. I did uTorrent, Media Library(which was going to prove useless against the supreme Windows 7 Libraries function), Atomic Clock, Google Desktop gadgets and Index files, Skype History etc. They all were marvellous and did I say no errors or compatibility issues yet?

…Using Firefox profile from Windows XP

Well the sweet part was over after that and came the crazy stuff. I had to import my Firefox profile, you know with the extensions, history, sessions, passwords and all that, which is usually very easy to do but I hit a mental block for some reason and it would work for the longest time. Firefox profile is something that I would start using Win98 to get it working! What is a guy without his internet history, bookmarks and passwords?

Anyway there were two problems. First, I was putting it in the wrong location. %AppData% in is AppData/Roaming not in AppData/Local Dugh! and Second to make it work you have to use “Firefox.exe –profilemanager” and create a new profile. After that close Firefox and replace all files in the new profile from you precious one and lo and behold you are back!

…Installing SQL Server and Visual Studio

Well I have to say it, this was the toughest. Mainly because there is so little information about Windows 7 (not the RC) on the net. As soon as you start the setup you will be bombarded with a few ‘known compatibility’ messages which were ever so frequent in Vista. If you install anyway you wont get anywhere as the SQL native client wont install and thus the Database service wont install. The simple thing is to download the SP3 streamlined setup of SQL Server 2005 or 2008 from Microsoft and if you cant then extract the SP2 or earlier setup with 7z and manually run sqlncli.exe for the native client. After that It should install smoothly. Just remembered, before all this, remember to setup IIS if you are going to do SQL CLR Debugging and in general Managed debugging using IIS and Visual studio 2008. Follow is very neat guild.

Visual studio and ASP.NET MVC install without hiccups. Remember to install the newest service pack though. It is also very easy to import your previous visual studio settings file and keep you visual studio theme too. And most important don’t forget to install Monaco font! :)

…IIS 7.5, SQL Server, Debugging Quirks

I ran into a couple of problems that you might too. I had to dig around the net for a loooong time and do a lot of trial and error to fix the solutions.

1. Create a Application under default website and run into a wierd problem. The default page doesnt load. For Eg. http/localhost/MyApp/ will give a 404 where as http/localhost/MyApp/Default.aspx will open file. After a lot of trial and error I found out that creating a Virtual Folder and then right-clicking to convert to application solved the issue.

2. Server Error in '/' Application.

Cannot open database "<Database Name>" requested by the login. The login failed. Login failed for user 'IIS APPPOOL\DefaultAppPool'.

There are other, some will say better, ways to fix this problem but the simplest and fastest to get it out of way is to change the. Go to IIS Manager>Server>Applications Pools> DefaultAppPool>Right-Click>Advanced Settings>Change Identity to LocalSystem. This will allow debugging.

3. Cant find the right process in ‘Attack to process…’ Just check ‘Show Processes in all Sessions’ and select w3wp.exe. If you still cant find it then open your browser and open some page on one of the local applications or virtual directory hosted apps. IIS service is efficient so it terminates fairly quickly on idle. Reopen the Attach to process and you should find it there.

4. Debugger terminates debugging after a few seconds into break points etc. This one is out from the help pages in case you were too lazy to click the help button. This is another one of the performance enhancements in IIS. Click here for the fix. :)

…Development tools

I use a whole bunch of tools around my Visual Studio and wont list them all. Here are few of the prominent ones. I installed Web Deployment projects addin, TortoiseSVN, Codesmith, netITers, Code Rush, Refactor pro, Red Gate SQL Toolbelt, ANTS Profiler, SQL Profiler, Sql Server Business Studio, MS Charts.. etc They all worked fine without any error or compatibility issues.

…Library and Home group

It is a revolution! These two features alone are enough to tell you something good is here. I was able arrange everything in my Laptop and my Gaming PC in less then 30 minutes. Which I was unable to do for the past years!! This will be awesome to the extreme when they release some kind go installed for earlier OS and I able to use it with the new NAS I am planning to buy for a 4TB+ storage.

However there was a problem that will possibly hit half the users. I spent 2 hours trying to connect both the PCs together in a home group. The process is very simple, you enable home group and are shown the password. Just click join on the ot

her systems and enter the password. All done… Not. They say a rotten apple can spoil all the others in the basket. That rotten apple is the team lead for the home group feature. They don’t tell anywhere that the time on both the machines have to be accurately matched! At the very least when you enter the password it should report and ‘Dude correct the time’ instead of a lame ’ Wrong Password’ message. Just enable internet time sync or do once to fix it.

...Windows Media Center

Probably the only thing keeping me sane. I love windows media center. I only run vista on my PC just to watch movies. internet radio, Music and what not. Especially with the Logitech s510 Media Remote makes is home theater heaven. The one in Win7 is quite imporved and fast like everything else. I detected my Pinnacle i110 right off the bat and download the TV Guide in a jiffy. After that I was surfin' the tube.

…Conclusion

I have been using Windows 7 for 3 days will all the above and a lot more. Win7 increases productivity a lot as well by making everyday things easier. I tried a lot of other stuff like ReadyBoost with 8gb pen drive, BitLocker and the revamped accessories like Programmable calculator and MS paint. Some benchmarks actually are much better then XP like in graphic intensive or multitasking software. The XP emulator is also apparently to die for, I was not able to try it since it requires a large amount of ram, disk space and virtualization capable CPUs. The upcoming Visual Studio 2010 and .net 4 are also being tailored for Windows 7.

It is quite possible I am in love…. ….again. Ciao.

Ever wondered about programming in Hindi !!

2009-07-09T18:03:00.006+05:30

Sounds crazy and completely useless, doesn't it? But I am sure I will be able to change you mind about that but then end of this post. However it wont be feasible in the real world as we all work in teams and English remains the primary programming language.

I started, as always, with google and ended up here on my blog which rarely meets anyone (including me).

Anyway I started a new project in Visual Studio 2008 and voila! Magic happens -


public class myClass
{
   public void MyHindiTextFunction()
   {
       प्रबंधक<कंपनी<int>, List<कंपनी<int>>> प्रबंधक१ = new प्रबंधक<कंपनी<int>, List<कंपनी<int>>>();
       प्रबंधक<परियोजना<Guid>, HashSet<परियोजना<Guid>>> प्रबंधक२ = new प्रबंधक<परियोजना<Guid>, HashSet<परियोजना<Guid>>>();
              
       प्रबंधक१.प्रबंधित_इकाईयां.AddRange(new List<कंपनी<int>> {
           new कंपनी<int>(1, "company1"),
           new कंपनी<int>(2, "company2"),
           new कंपनी<int>(3, "company3"),
           new कंपनी<int>(4, "company4"),
           new कंपनी<int>(5, "company5") });

       प्रबंधक२.प्रबंधित_इकाईयां.Add(new परियोजना<Guid>(Guid.NewGuid(), "project1"));
       प्रबंधक२.प्रबंधित_इकाईयां.Add(new परियोजना<Guid>(Guid.NewGuid(), "project2"));
       प्रबंधक२.प्रबंधित_इकाईयां.Add(new परियोजना<Guid>(Guid.NewGuid(), "project3"));
       प्रबंधक२.प्रबंधित_इकाईयां.Add(new परियोजना<Guid>(Guid.NewGuid(), "project4"));
       प्रबंधक२.प्रबंधित_इकाईयां.Add(new परियोजना<Guid>(Guid.NewGuid(), "project5"));

       //Select company where company id is in the Product's guid as string 0-o
       var क्वेरी = प्रबंधक१.प्रबंधित_इकाईयां.Join(
                     प्रबंधक२.प्रबंधित_इकाईयां,
                     क => क.संख्या.ToString(),
                     क => क.संख्या.ToString(),
                     (क, ख) => ख.संख्या.ToString().Contains(क.संख्या.ToString()));

   }
}

public class प्रबंधक<इकाई_प्रकार, सरणी_प्रकार>
           where सरणी_प्रकार : new()
{
   private सरणी_प्रकार _प्रबंधित_इकाईयां;
   public सरणी_प्रकार प्रबंधित_इकाईयां
   {
       get { return _प्रबंधित_इकाईयां; }
   }

   public प्रबंधक()
   {
       _प्रबंधित_इकाईयां = new सरणी_प्रकार();
   }
}

public class कंपनी<कंपनी_संख्या_प्रकार>
{
   public कंपनी_संख्या_प्रकार संख्या { get; set; }
   public string नाम { get; set; }
   public कंपनी(कंपनी_संख्या_प्रकार _संख्या, string _नाम)
   {
       संख्या = _संख्या;
       नाम = _नाम;
   }
}

public class परियोजना<कंपनी_संख्या_प्रकार>
{
   public कंपनी_संख्या_प्रकार संख्या { get; set; }
   public string नाम { get; set; }

   public परियोजना(कंपनी_संख्या_प्रकार _संख्या, string _नाम)
   {
       संख्या = _संख्या;
       नाम = _नाम;
   }
}
}

I know I know.. Mad Scientist at work :) But is stands to reason that Generics and crazy LINQ is always fun and allows getting more hindi then you could otherwise :)

Further:

SKTN - You have to watch his videos. I went LOL+ROLF
add en2hi@bot.talk.google.com to GTalks :D

Observations:

VS2008 is not complete in supporting Unicode unless the underlying OS is. So Kick you XP and pirate Win7 (Tooltips, Intellisense etc are just square blocks)
You can use the hindi transtation of numbers (१, २, ३..) as vars. That are still numbers :[
Go to Control panel>Language Ops>Add Hindi keyboard and enable the Language Bar. After that start>Accessories>Accessibility>OnScreen Keyboard. Who the hell owns a hindi keyboard anyways

Note: XP goes crazy with hindi file and folder names and no one want to set Hindi as the primary language. Vista and Win 7 are much better if you rally want to try this.

Windows 7 RC1 - Ready to plunge in

2009-05-07T19:27:00.001+05:30

Well it is that time again. Another new windows version is about to be unleashed upon us. So, be good little geeks and dive headon. Worry about the breathing gear later.

That is how it is always with windows, but there is a bit of hope this time. may be we can dare to have a good feeling..

Check out an article on engadget on this.

Personally I am interested in the Windows Media Center. i hope it has received a generous amount of jazzing up :)

Secure/Encrypted cookies in ASP.NET with System.Cryptography

2008-07-28T13:41:00.016+05:30

In today's world one cant transmit a digital syllable without some kind of protective wrapper around it. Us Neos of the binary world have always struggled with proper cipher methods to do so.

In other words, beginners always have had difficulty in implementing a reliable yet flexible method for securing cookies. I have used the following code often and I am sure this will help anyone looking for a quick-fix solution to secure cookies.

The basic architecture is to create static methods to which you pass a cookie and get a encrypted version in return. It also conveniently retrieves the Algorithm to use as well as the key to encrypt/decrypt from the web.config file and can be adapted to retrieve/generate the key in other ways.

Step 1: Start off with our class.


 using System.Security.Cryptography; //and other...  
   
 public class Security  
 {  
     //If you dont want ur methods to be static then use this and  instantiate an object before use   
     //byte[] Key;  
     //string AlgorithmName;  
   
     public Security()  
     {  
         //If you dont want ur methods to be static then use this  
         //char[] chars = { ',' };  
         //string[] splits = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["CookieSecurityKey"].Split(chars);  
         //AlgorithmName = splits[0];  
         //Key = new byte[Int32.Parse(splits[1])];// = KEY_64;  
         //for (int i = 2; i < Key.Length + 2; i++)  
         //  Key[i - 2] = byte.Parse(splits[i].Trim());           
     }  
...

You can store the key/algoritm name in the web.config like this:

Step 2: Create the basic methods that encode/decode a piece of string


public static string Encode(string value, Byte[] key, string AlgorithmName)
{
 // Convert string data to byte array
 byte[] ClearData = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(value);

 // Now create the algorithm from the provided name
 SymmetricAlgorithm Algorithm = SymmetricAlgorithm.Create(AlgorithmName);
 Algorithm.Key = key; //you can apply your own key mechs here
 MemoryStream Target = new MemoryStream();

 // Generate a random initialization vector (IV), helps to prevent brute-force
 Algorithm.GenerateIV();
 Target.Write(Algorithm.IV, 0, Algorithm.IV.Length);

 // Encrypt information
 CryptoStream cs = new CryptoStream(Target, Algorithm.CreateEncryptor(), CryptoStreamMode.Write);
 cs.Write(ClearData, 0, ClearData.Length);
 cs.FlushFinalBlock();

 // Convert the encrypted stream back to string
 return Convert.ToBase64String(Target.GetBuffer(), 0, (int)Target.Length);
}

public static string Decode(string value, Byte[] key, string AlgorithmName)
{
 // Convert string data to byte array
 byte[] ClearData = Convert.FromBase64String(value);

 // Create the algorithm
 SymmetricAlgorithm Algorithm = SymmetricAlgorithm.Create(AlgorithmName);
 Algorithm.Key = key;
 MemoryStream Target = new MemoryStream();

 // Read IV and initialize the algorithm with it
 int ReadPos = 0;
 byte[] IV = new byte[Algorithm.IV.Length];
 Array.Copy(ClearData, IV, IV.Length);
 Algorithm.IV = IV;
 ReadPos += Algorithm.IV.Length;

 // Decrypt information
 CryptoStream cs = new CryptoStream(Target, Algorithm.CreateDecryptor(), CryptoStreamMode.Write);
 cs.Write(ClearData, ReadPos, ClearData.Length - ReadPos);
 cs.FlushFinalBlock();

 // Get the bytes from the memory stream and convert them to text
 return System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetString(Target.ToArray());
}

Note: there methods are static so that you can use them directly from code without the additional line to create an object.

Step 3: Create the methods that encode/decode the cookie


public static HttpCookie EncodeCookie(HttpCookie cookie)  
{  
    if (cookie == null) return null;  
  
    //get key and algorithm from web.config/appsettings  
    //Comment this section if you do now what this method to be static  
    char[] chars = { ',' };  
    string[] splits = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["CookieEncodingKey"].Split(chars);  
    string AlgorithmName = splits[0];  
    byte[] Key = new byte[Int32.Parse(splits[1])];// = KEY_64;  
    for (int i = 2; i < Key.Length + 2; i++)  
      Key[i - 2] = byte.Parse(splits[i].Trim());  
  
    HttpCookie eCookie = new HttpCookie(cookie.Name);  
  
    for (int i = 0; i < cookie.Values.Count; i++)  
    {  
        string value = HttpContext.Current.Server.UrlEncode(Encode(cookie.Values[i], Key, AlgorithmName));  
        string name = HttpContext.Current.Server.UrlEncode(Encode(cookie.Values.GetKey(i), Key, AlgorithmName));
        eCookie.Values.Set(name, value);  
    }  
    return eCookie;  
}  
  
public static HttpCookie DecodeCookie(HttpCookie cookie)  
{  
    if (cookie == null) return null;  
  
    //Comment this section if you do now what this method to be static  
    char[] chars = { ',' };  
    string[] splits = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["CookieEncodingKey"].Split(chars);  
    string AlgorithmName = splits[0];  
    byte[] Key = new byte[Int32.Parse(splits[1])];// = KEY_64;  
    for (int i = 2; i < Key.Length + 2; i++)  
      Key[i - 2] = byte.Parse(splits[i].Trim());  
  
    HttpCookie dCookie = new HttpCookie(cookie.Name);  
  
    for (int i = 0; i < cookie.Values.Count; i++)  
    {  
        string value = Decode(HttpContext.Current.Server.UrlDecode(cookie.Values[i]), Key, AlgorithmName);  
        string name = Decode(HttpContext.Current.Server.UrlDecode(cookie.Values.GetKey(i)), Key, AlgorithmName);  
        dCookie.Values.Set(name, value);  
    }  
    return dCookie;  
}

At this point you have the basis setup and you can use the class in your code.

Encoding Example:


HttpCookie cookie = new HttpCookie("MySecureCookie");
cookie["ID"] = "39369a0d-975e-4456-9ade-3f04639fd309"; //recommended: use some unique value to later check for fraudulent cookies while retrieving
cookie["Name"] = username;
cookie["Email"] = email;

cookie = Security.EncodeCookie(cookie); //encode
cookie.Expires = DateTime.Now.AddDays(90);
Response.Cookies.Add(cookie);
...

Decoding Example:


HttpCookie cookie = context.Request.Cookies["MySecureCookie"];
cookie = Security.DecodeCookie(cookie); //decode

if (cookie["ID"] == "39369a0d-975e-4456-9ade-3f04639fd309") cookieChecksOut = true;
//process cookie
...

This code allows using a single generic implementation to use a variety of algorithms based on their merits and properties. I hope this will help a lot of beginners.

Port Forwarding solution for Dataone's new Siemens SL2-141 ADSL router/modem

2008-03-05T13:12:00.001+05:30

Well what can I say about the Indian Telephony services. They dont do much else then screw up and are always proud of it. This time they have got a nice wifi enabled ADSL router and f'ed up its html interface such that the user cannot set anything other then the very basic settings. I dug around the internet but couldnt find any solution for portforwarding in this perticular device using the standard html interface. But my rusted college time networking skills finally sparked up the manual config options. Here Goes...

Btw, there is no streight forward way to do it from the html interface that the router provides as the firmware has been modified by Dataone and all the advanced features are gone. The only method is to do it manually.

Requirements

1. Siemens SL2-141 router's username and passward.(Default Username - admin, Passward - admin)
2. Siemens SL2-141 router configured for always-on internet. (Otherwise u need to dial to connect and internet connection will be on only one PC at a time, but then u dont need to port forward at all.)
3. A terminal utility like HyperTerminal at Start>All Programs>Accesseries>Communication.
4. Static IP address and the port configured in your torrent client. (See utorrent wiki, Azureus wiki)
5. Obvious stuff - Dataone A/c, ISP login details, Windows/linux terminal utility, Assuming router at 192.168.1.1.

Method

1. Open HyperTerminal
2. Configure ur Location/area code if asked.
3. Enter some name at the 'New Connection' message box. Hit Ok.
4. In the 'Connect to' message box select 'Tcp/Ip(winsock)' under 'Connect Using' menu.
5. Enter 192.168.1.1 in 'Host Address'. Hit Ok.
6. Now u r in the terminal and it will ask for login/passward. type and press enter one by one.
7. Main menu: Type 6 and press Enter.
8. NAT menu: Type 1 and press Enter.
9. Virtual server menu: Type 1 and press Enter.
10.Service name - type anything like utorrent or text. Press Enter.
11.Protocol - Type 0. Press Enter.
12. External start port - Type the port of ur torrent client and Press Enter.
13. External end port - Type the port of ur torrent client and Press Enter.
14. Internal start port - Type the port of ur torrent client and Press Enter.
15. Internal end port - Type the port of ur torrent client and Press Enter.
16. Internal server IP address - Type the (static) IP of pc running ur torrent client and Press Enter.
17. See confirmation. Check using some web based port checking webpage or ur torrent client.
18. Exit the terminal. Done.

Misc

1. Port forwarding basics and method for other then dataone coustomers at portforward.com
2. utorrent's Port forwarding test at http://www.utorrent.com/testport.php?port=<enter port here>. ^
3. Dataone website. (Has Speed test, Webmail, Usage portal, Mail Client config steps etc)
4. Siemens SL2-141 Quick start guide(Pdf 1.31Mb, Illustrated), Manual(Pdf 5.44mb) and Datasheet.
5. Sample network configuration illustration.
6. Reset you modem from the HTML interface in case u mess up.

Now thank me for all the hardwark. :)

Yahoo REJECTS Microsoft's $44.6 Billion takeover Offer (Part of World domination)!

2008-02-10T13:40:00.001+05:30

I feel a bit disturbed about microsoft's 'world domination' plans. It is a scary glimpse of the future. If M$ keeps taking of the internet in such a fashion then it wont be long before groups like Anonymous, who are currently in the process of surgical strikes on the Chruch of scientology, declare similar wars on companies like microsoft. I personally would like to see Yahoo join hands with Google.

Anyways, have a look at this news item about yahoo's rejection and this Youtube video(s) about 'the message' of war from Anonymous which has already crossed 2 million views at the time of writing this blog entry.

You might also be wondering why i have written the word microsoft with a lower cap character. I intend this as my own little private display of resistance and ask anyone who is serious about the future of our race to fallow suite. [Looks for a sniper laser pointer ]

The best latest torrent soruce - Releaselog

2007-09-29T19:38:00.000+05:30

This is a website that is my homepage now and that alone aught to speak a ton about it. You know all that time you spend in searching for a good torrent for a new releases in the scene, now you don't have to wait for the seed to catch up so that you be sure that you have found an authentic torrent.

Now, Just read the Releaselog!

It caters to a variety of content but mainly the very newest in PC games (hear! hear!) , Tv shows and all types of movies the scene releases. You will find Dvdrip, telesync, Cam, HD, R5, Old movies and what not. From what i have seen this site does a superb job of keeping up with the scene, which can be very daunting. Within minutes of a release you will find a informative and concise article consisting of an introduction, beautiful images, releasing group info, System requirements, features and a lot more about the torrent. All the best groups like Fairlight, Hatred, Reloaded and all the other big boys can be found mentioned here.

You think that is a lot? But wait there is more! Oh yes.

You will also find hundreds of very properly moderated comments with each post and categories for Technology news, music and Applications with all the love of a scene lover glowing out from every bit of the site. I know what you are gonna say. Where the hell has it been till now if not as your homepage!!!

Go get em all Fellas!

Secrets Disclosure- Microsoft Surface (Codename Milan)

2007-08-10T11:58:00.000+05:30

Though, many of you must have heard about this newest MS "Top-Secret" project but for those who are still in oblivion I present this and of course who can keep such a cool product off their blogs.Our beloved (and sometimes hated) software giant has built a new touch screen computer. Something that utilizes the latest Multi-Input Surfaces. The newest brainchild, codenamed Milan, can definitely be called a completely new platform of computing. This product essentially puts into form the millions of concepts displayed in so many futuristic movies. Milan features a IR sensor-net under the surface to automatically detect and connect with any object placed on the surface like a digital camera, Bluetooth phone or a simple cup of' Jo.

Microsoft surface will be available for consumers as soon as the end of 2007, at a very steep price of $10,000, in a coffee table shape. More shapes are being targets at various users like a board room projection, Cafe table with ordering, Showroom counter, Kitchen helper, Education and creativity table, Real-Time project wall-size screens and many more.

News about Milan have been flooding the internet fiber-optics since around 25th May 2007. Since then a multitude of websites have served this eye-candy and surely caused a few sugar level dis-balances.

Must View:

Highly Recommended : Popular Mechanics Video and the related article
Microsoft Surface website
Gizmodo - Project Milan (all images in this article credited to gizmobo)
Google Search 'Microsoft Surface' and 'Microsoft Milan'
Wikipedia on MS Surface

What was New in .Net 2.0

2007-08-10T11:15:00.000+05:30

Version 3.0 is the latest release of dot.net and a much anticipated one from both me and the community. I am going to talk about the major changes in dot.net 3.0 soon. But, first I think it would be prudent to look over this article to see the major changes in dot.net 2.0 over the earlier 1.1.

What was New in .Net 2.0

1. SQL server integration - This was a big change, dot.net 2.0 brought with it a CLR version of SQL server. Thus meaning that the three products .Net Framework 2.0, Visual studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 were released in unison. This gave all the .NET compliant programming languages unprecedented direct access thru-code to database features like building Stored procedures, triggers and seamless use of DB data types. The new addition of the free SQL server express 2005 replaced the severely limited MSDE.

2. 64-Bit Support - It was a big leap forward when systems changed from 16-Bit to 32-Bit and now to 64-Bit. You can now build your applications in 64-Bit with just a simple options change in the Advanced Build page found under Application Properties. Microsoft worked hard to make sure that anything you built in the 32-bit world would work transparently in the 64-bit one. Moving to 64-Bit gives us some powerful addition like, most important of all, larger address space and larger primitive types. For the earthly folk 2^32 would give 4,294,976,296, while 2^64 will give you the humongous 18,446,744,709,551,616. Probably enough to could all the sand particles on all the beaches or something.

3. Generics - Any modern programmer worth his salt would tell you that generics are the stem cells of programming. With version 2.0 came the support for generics, a powerfull and efficient feature, enabling strongly typed collections. Generics can be applied to Stack, Dictionary, sortedDictionary, List, Queue, user classes, delegates, methods and many more.

4. Anonymous methods - This is a fairly known concept but was absent before .NET 2.0. It is a method to declare fictions that have no names and use them as delegates.

5. Nullable Types - Nullable types were built into the .Net framework 2.0 giving us the valuable feature of creating variables, thru generics, that can have Null values assigned to them. This made interaction with databases values that are null easier too.

6. Iterators - Thru the IEnumerable interface under the System.Collections namespace we can now use foreach on our own custom types and classes.

7. Partial classes - This is a new feature in .Net 2.0 and extensively inter-weaved with languages like C#, VB.Net, Asp.Net. This feature allows us to use the partial keyword before class declarations so that classes can span over multiple files and locations. Some uses are in the Visual studio designer to store all the initialization and property values of your project in a separate file and to implement code behind feature in ASP.Net.

Overall, these are pretty good features and advance .NET up many levels. We will soon see what in new in .NET 3.0 in comparison.

Want ebooks? Get them at ebookshare.net

2007-08-07T14:19:00.000+05:30

This is a amazing website for ebook lovers. The huge collection and categories is amazing. You will find all kinds of magazines, novels or study books. A perfect way to preview a ebook version before you put in your hard earned money in a paperback one.

The website is blog oriented design and presents an article each specifing every kind of detail you would want on a ebook or a ezine. ISBN numbers, ripping group, size, format, publisher and writer info, short description, link to publisher's site.. its all there.

The book download itself is via P2P torrent network thus providing good speeds and feedback. As the books get older and less popular they are phased out from the community. So, you might want to check the website periodically too grab what you like early on and before the sharing stops.

Some ebooks that are available are - Reader's Digest, You Magazine, The Ticket, Wrox Professional C# with .Net 3.0, Harry potter 7, Science, PC World, Computer power user... Basically everything you would ever want.

Here are the categories, at the time of writing this article, available at ebookshare (click to visit)-

Overall, you wouldn't want to miss such an important website. Also, you will need a torrent client to download the books, so get utorrent here. For information on torrent network see the wiki.

Happy Reading.

- Coming soon: A review of various ebook readers for all formats and reading habits -

Who really created "Windows"

2007-07-21T01:10:00.000+05:30

Contrary to popular belief, the omnipresent Windows operating system does not owe its existence to Bill Gates, Paul Allen or the development team at Microsoft.

The man responsible for giving us Windows was actually a marketing expert called Rowland Hanson. Work on the operating system had started after Gates had seen a demo of VisiCorp’s software called VisiOn, which featured a graphical user interface (GUI), at Comdex, in 1982, and had decided that Microsoft would also come out with a GUIbased operating system. Gates and
the development team referred to it as ‘Interface Manager’ and the name stuck, at least until Hanson was hired to develop a marketing campaign for the product. He was unimpressed by the rather geekish ‘Interface Manager’ and proposed that the product be named ‘Windows’, as the user saw a number of ‘windows’ on the screen that contained the tools and files they needed to work with.

And the rest, as they love to say, is history. Had it not been for Hanson, ‘IM’ would have been an abbreviation for an operating system rather than for instant messaging.

btw this a documented and acknowledged fact...

Also see History of Microsoft Windows at Answers.com

adapted from: anandk

Einstein's letter to US President Franklin D. Roosevelt

2007-07-10T20:25:00.000+05:30

This is an amazing find. I was reading The Andromeda Strain, a strong techno-thriller, written by Michael Crichton in 1969, and I came across a fact in it about a letter to President Roosevelt written by Albert Einstein on August 2nd 1939, just a month before World War II began. I felt a sudden urge to investigate and was amazed at what Google and Wikipedia said, which also confirmed it to be correct. The content of the two page letter is amazing, you can view high-res scans of the letter from

Quote from dannen.com -

In the summer of 1939, six months after the discovery of uranium fission, American newspapers and magazines openly discussed the prospect of atomic energy. However, most American physicists doubted that atomic energy or atomic bombs were realistic possibilities. No official U.S. atomic energy project existed. Leo Szilard was profoundly disturbed by the lack of American action. If atomic bombs were possible, as he believed they were, Nazi Germany might gain an unbeatable lead in developing them. It was especially troubling that Germany had stopped the sale of uranium ore from occupied Czechoslovakia. Unable to find official support, and unable to convince Enrico Fermi of the need to continue experiments, Szilard turned to his old friend Albert Einstein...[Continue the Story]

After going thru some links and lots of text I conclude that, Albert Einstein did not directly participate in the invention of the atomic bomb or World War II, but he was inadvertently instrumental in facilitating, respectively, the development and disintegration of both. This letter from Albert Einstein to President Franklin D. Roosevelt led to the Manhattan Engineering District, also known as "The Manhattan Project". This is where early US nuclear development happened, and the nuclear bombs code-named "Little Boy" and "Fat Man" were constructed and dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan on August 6 and August 9, respectively. The Manhattan Project, a national crash program racing to develop atomic weapons before Nazi Germany, was the seed that grew into the modern national laboratory system, which today includes many non-weapons-research laboratories, such as Argonne (a U.S. D.O.E RnD Lab).

Worth a look -

Aerial photo of the Argonne National Laboratory
Concept design of "Little Boy"
Concept design of "Fat Man"
Albert Einstein at the U.S. Library of Congress
Franklin D. Roosevelt American Heritage Center Museum
The Andromeda Strain at Amazon
The Andromeda Strain movie adaptation (1971) at IMDB

Smart Search tip for FireFox users

2007-05-07T00:46:00.002+05:30

I know what some of you are going to say, "Dude! You and Firefox? I thought you were an Opera Die hard." I admit, I have finally switched to Firefox from opera. Whatever the reasons, I don't want to spark another one of those famous browser wars here.

Today's stuff is about smart searching. When you want to search something on a site you have to open the website's search page and then type in a query. That means u gotta see the same ol' page each and every time. Modern browsers have those little search bars to avoid loading the search page and take you directly to the search results.

Here, I will show the way to add your favorite websites to that search box in Firefox. I will use MSDN search as an example here. You have to first find out the search URL for the site. for that you simply open the website, put in a search query and reach the result page. Copy the resulting URL from the address bar.

Like if I search 'HELLO' on MSDN i get -

http://search.msdn.microsoft.com/search/Default.aspx?brand=msdn&locale=en-us&query=HELLO

Lets' analyze this URL-

Locate the query string is ('HELLO' in this case is at the end like 'query=HELLO') If you change 'HELLO' to something else and press enter you will see that the results are changed appropriately.
There are two parts in the URL. One is the search template and the second is the list of parameters after that URL.
The search URL is 'http://search.msdn.microsoft.com/search/Default.aspx'. i.e the part before the first question mark.
The Parameter List is "brand=msdn","locale=en-us","query=HELLO" i.e after the question mark.
In the parameter list there are parameter/value pairs, each separated with a ampersand.
Notice in the parameter list there will we a param/value pair in which the value is the search query. i.e "query=HELLO"

So, the total data we have is-

Name of site=MSDN
Description=MSDN Search
Search template=http://search.msdn.microsoft.com/search/Default.aspx
Parameters-

brand=msdn
locale=en-us
query=HELLO

Search Parameter whose value we need to change=query.

Now the procedure to add this to firefox is-

1. Create a XML file in [firefox install folder]\searchplugins . i.e MSDNSearch.xml

2. Use the template

<searchplugin xmlns="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/">
<shortname>[Name of site]</shortname>
<description>[Description]</description>
<inputencoding>UTF-8</inputencoding>
<url type="text/html" method="GET" template="[search template]">
<param name="[Param1]" value="[Param1Value]">
...
<param name="[Param2]" value="[Param2Value]">
<param name="[Search Param]" value="{searchTerms}">
</url>
</searchplugin>

3. Fill the values. (MSDN example)

<searchplugin xmlns="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/">
<shortname>MSDN</shortname>
<description>MSDN Search</description>
<inputencoding>UTF-8</inputencoding>
<url type="text/html" method="GET"
template="http://search.msdn.microsoft.com/search/Default.aspx">
<param name="brand" value="msdn">
<param name="locale" value="en-us">
<param name="query" value="{searchTerms}">
</url>
</searchplugin>

4. Save the file and restart firefox.

5. Now select the item from the search engine list and type in a query to test.

Another example using TorrentSpy -

<SearchPlugin xmlns="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/">
<ShortName>TorrentSpy</ShortName>
<Description>TorrentSpy Search</Description>
<InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
<Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://www.torrentspy.com/search">
 <Param name="query" value="{searchTerms}"/>
</Url>
</SearchPlugin>

Happy Searching...

Scientists Create Molecule-Size Keypad Lock

2007-04-18T20:41:00.000+05:30

Israeli scientists have come up with the ultimate in small-scale security:, a molecule that can act as an electronic keypad lock like the ones in home security. This process give new heights to small scale safety measures and has the potential of providing unbreakable security. The molecule lock, resembling an iron binding compound secreted by special bacteria, ‘unlocks’ when exposed to a smart combination of two chemicals and UV Light, giving out florescence as a signal. The molecule consists of pyrene and fluorescein linked by an iron-binding segment. The molecule lights up green or blue in response to the correct passwords and fluoresces dimly if the same inputs are introduced in a different order(wrong password). Moreover, the molecule would lock-up upon failed retries and block any further attempts at breaking it.

As acid, base, and irradiating UV light are introduced at three minute intervals, the molecule jumps between various charged states. The result, report researchers at the Weizmann Institute, Rehovot, is that the sequence ‘acid-base-light’ makes the molecule fluoresce green, while a separate input ‘acid-light’ gives a blue fluorescence. Any other sequence input gives dim light or none at all. This behaviour, says co-author Abraham Shanzer, mimics an electronic keypad lock. The device lights up only when the correct chemical ‘passwords’ are introduced.

Basic Molecule Structure

"By harnessing the principles of molecular Boolean logic, we have designed a molecular device that mimics the operation of an electronic keypad, a common security circuit used for numerous applications in which access to an object or data is to be restricted to a limited number of persons," the researchers state. "The development of a molecular-scale keypad lock is a particularly attractive goal as it represents a new approach to protecting information at the molecular scale."

How the molecular keypad lock works

A significant application to this lock might be to recognize when certain sequences of chemicals are released in the body—for instance, after exposure to Sarin or another deadly chemical including various biological weapons and allow safeguard triggers.

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by American Chemical Society, Science Daily, Live Science and Scientific American.

Citing Wikipedia? Read this first…

2007-03-27T16:40:00.000+05:30

Are you a wiki fan? Do you have the compulsive nature of automatically going for wikipidia?org when u want to know about anything? Are you amused by the top bunks that wiki occupies in Google search results? If yes then u need to understand the dual nature of information presented on wikipedia.

Lets first understand how Wikipedia get all that information? It is an open community encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone? Other then the rules of well formed structure, it does not tell us what not to write and how to define things. So it becomes very possible that a user writes or edits a topic on which he is not an expert or the user thinks that he has the correct information. Since there is no authority to validate that information, it becomes a very real possibility for the published information to be incorrect. But from the view of a user of that information, the popularity and enormity of the wiki foundation makes it easy to believe that the contained information is correct. Thus, the information looses credibility and becomes contradictory with the concept of citation. For a primer here are a few excerpts for the web-

History Department Bans Citing Wikipedia as a Research Source
By NOAM COHEN Published in New York Times, February 21, 2007

Dr. Waters and other professors in the history department at Middlebury College had begun noticing about a year ago that students were citing Wikipedia as a source in their papers. But the errors on the Japanese history test last semester were the last straw. At Dr. Waters’s urging, the Middlebury history department notified its students this month that Wikipedia could not be cited in papers or exams, and that students could not “point to Wikipedia or any similar source that may appear in the future to escape the consequences of errors.”

Referencing Wikipedia? Use Caution
By Kevin Garcia (The Brownsville Herald ) January 24, 2007

To many, Wikipedia is a godsend. It's a way to find information on any topic quickly and easily. What some fail to realize, however, is that nothing on the Web site can be taken at face value. Anyone, from age 8 to 80, from a high school dropout to a rogue scholar, can edit the online encyclopedia. Wikipedia can actually be a good source of information. It can lead people to any number of ideas that they might never have considered. That's the beauty of mass media. What Wikipedia is not, however, is a credible source.

When it comes to Computer Science, don't reference Wikipedia
by Christopher Diggins written July 31, 2005

This is not the first time a Wikipedia computer-science definition has made me want to pull my hair out. In the end I don't care, as long as people don't make the mistake of taking Wikipedia definitions seriously. Just remember that in Wikipedia the definitions are written by random people, and edited by random people, not experts.

It is not all bad, wiki is a very good source for information about any topic. But considering it’s use as a credible source of information is not good. There are many more such articles that advice people not to use Wikipedia for citation and every user should try and find a credible source for information for such purposed.

A take on C++ by its creator Bjarne Stroustrup

2007-03-23T11:47:00.000+05:30

Wow, I mean simply wow. Today a friend(Amardeep) IMed me a link to a leaked interview(taken on 1st Jan 1998 and never published), supposedly with Bjarne Stroustrup, the creator of then C++ programming language. The language that changed the world of programming and software engineers. When I was in college I was attracted to the world of computers and c++ gave me the way to actually contribute to the IT world. It created the base for me to understand how a computer works and how I can customize it to my liking.

In this interview with Stroustrup, the reporter thought he would get a retrospective view of the revolutionary programming language Stroustrup had created but instead by the end of the interview he was boggled. Stroustrup, unfortunately, had a very different take on his effort and went on to say that c++ was actually the result of a scheme he conjured up one day because he thought that the present programming languages were actually demeaning the importance of programmers by being too easy to learn!

Stroustrup thought that in the beginning programmers were royalty and had huge salaries but since earlier programming languages were easy enough to be learned by anyone, it resulted in too many programmers thus dropping the status of programmers as a 'demi-god'. So, he went on to create a programming language that was so insanely complex that most people would not be able to learn it and the few who did would stay high up in the software industry food chain.

To better explain his point of view here are a few quotes by Stroustrup from the interview-

"Well, in the beginning, these guys were like demi-gods. Their salaries were high, and they were treated like royalty."

"Well, one day, when I was sitting in my office, I thought of this little scheme, which would redress the balance a little. I thought 'I wonder what would happen, if there were a language so complicated, so difficult to learn, that nobody would ever be able to swamp the market with programmers? Actually, I got some of the ideas from X10, you know, X windows. That was such a bitch of a graphics system, that it only just ran on those Sun 3/60 things. They had all the ingredients for what I wanted. A really ridiculously complex syntax, obscure functions, and pseudo-OO structure. Even now, nobody writes raw X-windows code. Motif is the only way to go if you want to retain your sanity."

"Well, it's been long enough, now, and I believe most people have figured out for themselves that C++ is a waste of time but, I must say, it's taken them a lot longer than I thought it would."

"It was only supposed to be a joke, I never thought people would take the book seriously. Anyone with half a brain can see that object-oriented programming is counter-intuitive, illogical and inefficient."

Later he goes on explaining the 'illogical and un-important' features like operator overloading, executable size, typedefs, inheritance etc. Oh and did i say what he felt about C++ when he finished working on it he said, "Hated it. It even looks clumsy, don't you agree? But when the book royalties started to come in... well, you get the picture."

To tell u the truth I really hated this kind of response from Stroustrup, who was one of my computing childhood heroes। How often has it been said that never come face to face with your childhood hero if you want them to say an inspiration। In the end I would like to believe that this interview is not true but a search on Google says otherwise and that you should not believe everything you read.

See full interview here or here.

(Vista & XP)Share saved games between multiple OS

2007-03-12T15:13:00.000+05:30

Introduction

With the release of vista I was excited and noticed that the era of multiple operating systems had returned। Just as when XP was released Computer enthusiasts had both 98 and XP installed. Similarly since the launch of Vista a lot of people now have vista as well as XP installed.

Problem

With multiple OSes we definitely have problems like installing software twice. But a lot of Software and applications can be run from the same location. For example games. Say u were playing NFS MW in XP. You install vista and want to play MW, You have two options, ONE, do the tiresome job of either copying the saved games from the XP drive to the vista drive(and then back if u want to play from XP again) or TWO, restart the system to XP. It is very inconvenient.

Solution

The best solution i came across is to create virtual folders(aka Hard links, Special Folders. not Virtual folders feature in Vista). What we want to do is have the actual save game files in one location, like XP, and create a virtual folder linking it to them from vista.

Assumptions

XP installed in I:\Windows
Vista installed in C:\Windows
Games installed in D:\ (eg "e:\NFS Most wanted") (can be anywhere)
MW creates saves in XP "I:\Documents and Settings\%username%\my documents\NFS Most Wanted"
Req. virtual folder in vista at(MW creates saves here in vista) "C:\users\%username%\documents\NFS Most Wanted"
Substitute drive letters, directory and username to ur system specific
BACKUP YOUR DATA BEFORE MOVING FORWARD!

There are many options to do this like-

mapping a folder to a drive then mapping that drive to another folder
using DOS Commands like SUBST and FSUTIL
Shell extensions(playing with objectID, BirthvolumeID etc and desktop।ini scripts)
Windows Resource kit utility - linkd.exe

These options are messy, unless u r a 5 year veteran Linux admin। After a lot of very hard searching I found the utility called 'Winhardlink'. It does all the dirty work for You. You just have to specify the source directory/file and the target directory/file.

About WinHardLink - Homepage - Direct Download
Software License(free) - Size(563 KB (576,687 bytes))

Advantages of WinHardLink

Works on vista
Created Hard links work across OSes i.e. if u create it in vista it will automatically be available as a normal folder in the other OS even if this utility is not installed
XP cannot differentiate between links and actual folders
Vista shows a shortcut icon on the hard link but reports as a folder in properties

How-to (example using NFS MW and above assumptions)

Download and install WinHardLink in one OS(say vista)
Launch from start menu
Select Hard Link>New Virtual Folder. a windows will pop up
Click "..." against the 'Alias dir' to select the destination to "C:\users\%username%\documents\NFS Most Wanted" (You may have to create a new folder 'NFS Most wanted)
Click "..." against the 'Source dir' to select the location of the saved game to "I:\Documents and Settings\%username%\my documents\NFS Most Wanted"
Click OK.You are done.
Make sure the checkbox is checked along the folder in the main window of WinHardLink।

Testing

Browse to see that the folder exists
Create a new text file in either folder and put some text in it
Check the other folder for its existence
Cross check by editing both files and re opening from the other folder
They should behave as normal file folders
Start the game and see that the profile is loaded
Now u can play MW from any os without worrying about multiple सवेस

More Suggested uses

consolidation of saved games। i.e. u can move the all save games to a central location like "d:\saves\[game-name]" and create virtual folders in both OSes where the games expect the saved games to be. Now u can format/reinstall etc without disturbing saves.
When one drive is full u can move any folder to another location and just create a hard link for it in its place (see moving the whole MS office folder at the homepage above)
Use in conjunction with 'saved searches (aka virtual folders)' feature of Vista to have the ultimate control over data accessibility

Tested with- NFS MW, NFS Carbon(but there is some compatibility problem in vista in loading saves created in XP), Just Cause, Battlefield 2 & 2142, Fifa 07, PES6, GTA SA, MS Flight Simulator X, Visual Studio Projects, Portable apps launch icons, NOT tested with network folders.

Cheers. If you like this solution then please leave a comment.

Make DVD iso from CD isos of Fedora Core

2007-03-12T15:00:00.000+05:30

Allright people.. lots of ya all seem to be interested in this.

it is quite simple. Since things have gone multi-giga-byte now a days, handeling one DVD is way easier then poppin n jiggling six CDs one after the other.

Ok here are the steps.

What u need:
1. The CD isos of Fedora core ofcourse(the 1st five only, as sixth is rescue)
2. Magic ISO to edit images. or any other free alternative
3. An editor.
4. A Dvd Burner.
5. Daemon tools(makes life easier and lessens the free space req.)
6. 4 Gb free HDD space(+ the space the CD isos are taking up)

HowTo:
1. Copy the CD1 to a temp folder.(there should be 4 GB space on this drive)
2. Open Magic ISO and browse for the file.
3. From the root of the image see for a file named ".diskinfo"
4. Right click and extract on desktop.
5. Open a command promp and type "edit"(notepad doest work with this nicely, u can use textpad too)

6. Browse to the ".diskinfo" file. it will look like this:
1142397842.393345
Fedora Core
x86_64
1
Fedora/base
Fedora/RPMS
Fedora/pixmaps

7. Edit the file to look like this, basically append ",2,3,4,5" after "1" in line 4.
1142397842.393345
Fedora Core
x86_64
1,2,3,4,5
Fedora/base
Fedora/RPMS
Fedora/pixmaps

8. Save the file.

9. Drag and drop it to the open iso in Magiciso.

10. Right click on daemon tools in the taskbar and goto virtual CD/DVD-ROM>set no of deviced>4 Drives.

11. After the drives have been created left click on daemon tools again and select "Device 0" and Browse to the 2nd CD image to mount it.

12. Repeat the above step for Cds 3 thru 5. (and select device 1 thru 3 respectively). You should have cds 2 thru 5 loaded in virtual drives. check thru My computer.

13. Next, for each drive(mounted image) go to Drive:\Fedora\RPMS and select and drag and drop all files onto the magic iso window under the folder Fedora\RPMS.(alternatively add then thru magic iso, whatever, just add all). You will be asked to over write a file "TRANS.TBL" each time u drag and drop. just select yes(for explanation see page 3 of this thread).

14. After you have added all rpm files. select File>save under magiciso. rename the file to DVD from CD.

15. You are all done. Now Burn and enjoy!!!

Clean UP:
1. Left click on deamon tools and select unmount all.
2. Right click deamon tools and goto virtual CD/DVD-ROM>set no of deviced>1 Drives
3. Delete the CD isos if u want to free up space(1st check the DVD Image to be sure)
4. Delete ".diskinfo" from desktop

SHORTCOMING: This media will NOT pass the media check. so do no test it. If u are paranoid'nf then load a virtual machine and emulate the linux setup and "media-check" the individual cd isos there. To make it pass the media check u need to regenerate the checksums. which is beyond the scope here and worthless for home users. others google.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

EDIT: src2206 and aditya.shevade were interested in the reverse i.e. DVD to CD iso...
(this is a painfull method)

1. Go to the fedora website hosting the CD isos.
2. Directly mount the CD isos one by one in deamon tools via the webaddress(suppose drive x)
3. Run "CMD" and execute the following commands:
4. Change directory to drive x by typeing "x:"
5. type "copy .diskinfo c:\cd1.diskinfo"
6. Type "tree > c:\cd1.txt"
7. Load the next iso in deamon tools and repeat the two commands above but keep changing the 'cd1' to cd2 and so on(in both commands).
8. Now after u have all the directory structure u gotta get working. load the DVD iso in deamon tools
9. Now using explorer create five folders named CD1 ... CD5
10. See the directory structure but running CMD and using the edit utility.
11. Now for each folder duplicate the contents by copying the files from DVD according to the CD structure.
12. Rename each "cdx.diskinfo" file to ".diskinfo" and place in respectibe CD folder
13. Make iso using magiciso or nero.
14. Varify the file size.
15. Any files u dont find in the DVD, copy them off by loading the CD iso
again in Deamon tools directly from the web.

I sincerely dont think u will go thru the above painfull process.
I am not aware of any simpler processes except downloading the ISO images.
Just think of my effort to write this procedure and try it. give feedback.
I havent tried the above so no promices but logically it should work.

Beat this home Entertainment system

2006-08-09T13:38:00.000+05:30

I have my Home entertainment set up as follows:
(After a lot of effor and time and Mullah)

It is like this:

Hardware:

XFX6600gt(2monitor_one SVideo out)
Pixelview Play TV Pro(VideoIN+SVideoIN)
Pinnacle PCTV 50i
54"TV(VideoIN+SVideoIN)
PHIlips DVD Player(DIVX+MPEG+MP3VBR... basically the Play anything model)
Phillips HTS3000 5.1 Speaker setup, recommended becuase of inbuilt FM and 3 Audio In(2x5.1 and 1 stereo) that can be switched via its remote)
Logitech Rumblepad 2 wirelss gamepad
A8NSLI Onboard Sound
Creative sound Blaster PCI64(dedicated for Voice chat/phone)
Desi Wireless Headset

Remote/Wireless:

Logitech s510 Media Remote(Wireless MEdia Keyboard+Wireless mouse+Media remote)
TV Remote
Pixelview Tuner Remote
Pinnacle Tuner Remote
Philips DVD Player Remote
Philips HTS3000 SOund System remote
FM Based Headset for wireless sound and phonecalls

Software:

Windows Media Player 11
Pixelview TV Pro
Pinnacle Media Center
Logitech MEdiaLife(Super good alternative to Windows media center)+Setpoint
Logitech Wingman gaming software(for controlling mouse/keystrokes etc with gamepad)
Voice Chat software(like gtalk/yahoo)
Musicmatch
Winamp (will add more compatible software later)

Video Connections:

Both monitors connected to the two Monitor Out of GFX card(One for computing other for watching TV/DVD/MOVIE/MUSIC PLAYLIST/H/W MOnitor
SVideoOUT of GFT to SVideo IN of TVTUNER and Svideo IN of TV(I made the cable at home, just two out connectors connected in parallel)
DVDPlayer VideoOUT to VideoIN of TVTUNER and TV VideoIN in Paraller)again home made)
Control is super easy with Wireless Mouse/Keyword+logitech remote+TV Remote+Tuner Remote

Audio Connections:

5.1 Out from DVD player to HTS 3000
5.1 out from A8N-SLI Prem mobo to HTS3000 AMPlifier
2 channel audio of Tuner to Line IN of Mobo
2 Channel Audio of TV to AuX2 IN of mobo
Audio In/Out between Creative PCI64 and Wireless HEadset reciever/transmitter

Other Connections:

Cable IN to TV and TV Tuner
Phone in from pole>UPS SpikeBuster>BSNL SmartAX MT841 Wifi Router Broadband ADSL modem>PHONE IN of Wireless Reviever base
A Scary wiring setup for power/speaker/phone/cable/lan. so scary that there is more wire on walls then paint and my Mom's Maid refuses to enter to clean the room. will be working on tidying up the wiring soon.

Everyting can be seen/heard/captured everywere in any combination!!!

Plus i have my compaq laptop (based on V2000 series) with wifi for that special mobility around my house. This Setup kicks ass (to be modest) be it Saving Private Ryan or F.E.A.R or FiFa 2006 on TV via the rumbelling gamepad or NFS or Star movies or recording Emenim videos or Fear Factor or Gulam Ali or friend in Australia.. complete with a broad sofa set in the center.(or even the most imp part is switch of everything without getting up from the sofa/bet

There is a problem though. I keep a basket to put in all the remotes and wireless mice so that i dont lose it and sometimes i loose my mobile phone in that basket or one of those times when the mobile rings and i put one of the remotes to my ear. :-)

I am thinking of adding a 10 channel DJ TurnTable later...
LOL Dont CHoke it's just a JOke!!!

What do u think? Everything here is based on usability and economy not like OOOhhhh 10000Watts of blow-ur-cloths-of-in-a-beat speaker system or the one lacs rs Plasma screen or Damn quake@ 5000FPS...

BTW the PC config: AMD64 3000+(OC 2.6GHZ@1.475v + A8N SLI Premium(1009.11) + 1 GB Hynex DDR400 RAM in dual channel + XFX 6600GT 256MB + 2x160GB SATA RAID-0(nRAID) + 80GB PATA Seagate Barracuda + LG CDROM + LG DVDROM + Samsung DVDRW 16x + Creative PCI64+PCI WIFI 54mbps card + two chassis fan+500W Odyssee PSU.