I don’t want to sound cynical but two posts I have read recently were too close for comfort. I first read a blog post Duncan Riley on TechCrunch titled “Google Earth Heading Towards Extinction?” on November 28th 2007. Then I found a blog post dated November 30th 2007 on Official Google Blog titled “Tracking Santa, then and now” by some Carrie Farrell, which talks about tracking Santa Claus with Google Earth and NORAD(North American Aerospace Defence Command). Now that’s what I call really farfetched. Is Google trying to cash in on Christmas? If you ask my opinion I don’t think Google would stoop so low for such mundane things but then again as they say desperate times call for desperate measures. May be Google Earth IS heading towards extinction.

When they could have simply told us about the new fun feature, they say:

You can download Google Earth and add the NORAD Tracks Santa iGoogle gadget to your iGoogle page anytime, but make sure to come back to noradsanta.org on December 24th to download the special Santa Tracking file for an enhanced 3D Santa-tracking experience.

Now you can see that you have to install Google Earth and go to the noradsanta.org and download the tracking file for Google Earth on Christmas eve. So may be they are thinking of kick starting the use of Google Earth, again.

When I finally took my computer home and had to get an Internet connection, I was skeptical about the connection provided by BSNL which is the state owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd. I was glad that I did not get any other connection after five months of being with BSNL. I hear people bickering and crying about how bad their BSNL connection is. But in my area, when I say that it has an uptime of nearly 99%, I’m not pulling your leg. By my area I mean Guntur, Andhra Pradesh, India.

I have used the above mentioned plans for about five months now and the unlimited plan is the best for someone like me. The first month I had my connection my PC was on 24/7 and did a total data transfer of about 65GB. I’m currently using the Home 500 plan since I’m not home most of the time these days. shuttling between Delhi and Guntur, ferrying financial documents for my Visa interview that I have December 5th in Delhi.

The whole of last week I was home and was amazed by the speed the "Upto 2Mbps" connection gives you. Just see the screenshot that I took while I downlaoded one of the TV episodes:

And most of the time I get a near flat line constant speed provided that its a good torrent.

I give all this just to prove one single point - Contrary to the popular belief, BSNL Broadband is one of the best ISP’s out there bringing cheap Internet to the masses. There is one single very big problem with BSNL, I CAN"T ACCESS MY BLOG OR POST FROM HOME WITH BSNL. I mean that sucks big time. May be because my blog does a lot of outside PHP connections or because the DNS times out I could not figure it our yet. That’s the reason I was unable to post for a whole week though I tried like a zillion times and over.

I travel almost 2000kms(~1300miles) home thinking that I can go back to blogging only to find it totally wrecked by my brother. Don’t know what people manage to do with my PC but nothing happens to it as long as I use it. But keep it in the hands of others and they will literally wreck it. I had to remove everything - graphics adapter, RAM, Hard Disk Drive, motherboard, and everything thats in there. Had to clean everything, reconnect all the power connectors and waste about half a day with nothing better to do than gazing out of the window. But mom’s food as always brings some solace into this bad day. I had to travel everywhere today to get my documents ready for my big Visa interview which I think is gonna happen on Dec 5th if all goes well.

The iPod i had(borrowed) provided excellent music throughout the journey. Increasing my Cool Quotient, CQ, wherever required.

An update has been made to Google Adsense. Now you cannot click anywhere on the text ad and go to the advertised site. Only the site name and link are explicitly click-able. The text in between is normal text. This saves the advertisers from fake clicks and bad traffic to their site. Though the earning might initially drop for several web publishers I think this is a good move by Google considering that they had to shell out $90million in a settlement case with an advertiser. But the image ad units are click-able throughout.

I turn a year older today. I never get around celebrating my birthday as other people do. I feel that to celebrate you need have an occasion. Of course, you surviving in this rotten, dog-eat-dog, backbiting, double crossing, twisted world for more than two decades is worth mentioning as a red letter day. Sometimes I feel nostalgic of all those childhood birthdays I used to celebrate when I was a kid and some my family used to celebrate for me that I had to attend like a guest.

Yes I enjoy all the attention. People call in from all over the world to greet me. Friends, Family, colleagues and everyone who ever knew me. They scrap me on Orkut, write-on-wall on facebook, leave me offlines on Yahoo IM or anything for that matter to just greet me. Feels real good that people remember me and wish to greet me. They might have got those birthday reminders or notifications, whatever you call them. But they managing to get themselves to message me is more than one could ask for.

Just want to say, “Thank you! One and All. I miss you and the time we spent together. I really do.”

I recently had a chance to browse a 30GB video iPod that my friend has. It really was a very good piece for all those gadget lovers like me. I came across one of the less used features of the iPod - Contacts. I was really impressed with the detail and design of the contacts in iPod complete with an option for a contact image. So I thought why not import all the Gmail contacts into the iPod.

Step 1: Export contacts from Gmail. Open Gmail in your browser windows, go to Contacts and select Export.

Read the rest of this entry »

The CRIA, Canadian Recording Industry Association, took down Demonoid. It seems they threatened the company providing the Demonoid servers so they had to take the site down. Note that previously in September Demonoid was offline for a few days and then they were back again saying they were blocking Canadian traffic due to some legal issues which was CRIA. But this time I guess they are gone till they find some hosting company with some guts.

This is what you get when you go to Demonoid.com →

The CRIA threatened the company renting the servers to us, and because of this it is not possible to keep the site online. Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for your understanding.

The message on the Demonoid IRC channel says that the tracker is still running and that we should expect the site to return soon. What is wrong with these guys?
RIAA, MPAA, CRIA

Fedora 8 released today minus the ‘core’ mid word which has been dropped after Fedora Core 6. Fedora Linux has been my fav even though many flavours of linux like Mandrake, SuSE, Redhat and Ubuntu have come and gone. You can view the complete release notes here: http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f8/en_US/

Same of the Latest Features that everyone should be excited about:

• Fedora 8 features a 2.6.23 based kernel.
• NetworkManager 0.7 provides improved wireless network management support. It includes support for multiple devices and provides the capability of system-wide configuration, among many other enhancements.(Yay! More wireless support. They always say ‘improved’ but never things like complete wireless support)
• PulseAudio is now installed and enabled by default. PulseAudio allows for hot-switching audio outputs, individual volume controls for each audio stream, networked audio, and more.(One of the first linux distributions to use PulseAudio by default)
• CodecBuddy is now included, and promotes free, superior quality, open formats to end users trying to play multimedia content under patent encumbered or proprietary formats.
• Compiz Fusion, the compositing window manager that re-merges Compiz and Beryl, is installed by default. To enable Compiz Fusion in GNOME, use the System → Preferences → Desktop Effects tool.
• Bluetooth devices and tools now have better graphical and system integration.
• Laptop users benefit from the “quirks” feature in HAL, including better suspend/resume and multimedia keyboard support. The pam_console module usage has been removed in favor of access control via HAL, which modernizes the desktop.
• Security: A brand new graphical firewall configuration tool, system-config-firewall, replaces system-config-securitylevel. This release offers Kiosk functionality via SELinux, among many new enhancements and security policy changes. A new PolicyKit authentication system that makes secure authority escalation possible for individual operations rather than for the entire program when required.

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I finally got the New Gmail today. But it did not make me all that happy. The first thing that annoyed me was that when you log into the New Gmail the chat is enabled by default and you are logged in without your consent. Ok, I signed out of Gmail and started looking for the “standard without chat” option as it was in the Old Gmail.

Its not there! I search the settings for chat, not there either. I don’t know whose big idea it was to remove this great feature, surely not everybody uses chat in their email accounts. The New Gmail has only the option of “turn off chat“.

I prefer the desktop client where you can log in when you want instead of people seeing you online whenever you log in to check your mail. I keep my Gmail logged in as long as I’m on my PC. And you don’t even have the option of hiding the chat box when it is turned off.

The chat box just stands there without any function taking up precious screen space. You can either move it above or below the Labels box but never remove it entirely. One important they should have done is to do away with the “Invite a friend” frame. Since now almost everyone can register for a Google Account its a vestigial application.

The one good blogging platform I like, Windows Live Writer is out of the Beta. This was posted on their blog 7 minutes ago. It seems over 1.5 million downloads were recorded for the last beta release. The previously Windows Live Writer is now named “Windows Live Writer 2008 (version 12.0.1366.1026)”. I don’t know why they HAD to add that 2008. Looks like Microsoft is superstitious about adding release years into product names.

The new writer offers spell checking in four languages:

1. English (US, UK, Canadian)
2. French
3. German
4. Spanish

Installation on Windows Vista x64 is now fully supported. But there seems to one little snag with the whole affair. The download button on the blog redirected to some Windows Live Page while I was trying. I think its fixed now. You can download the new Windows Live Writer by clicking on the link below.

Check this link too for direct download: Download