Blogging India

I don’t believe I did this, but Blogging India is back up after 2 years!

Hi all,

Typing a quick post from the free wifi access at The Forum Mall (Bangalore) to wish you all a very happy Republic Day! I know its kind of late, but still, better late than never.

I would like to, on this occasion, to reciprocate Dr A P J Abdul Kalam’s message on this day, like Sandil on Mutiny.in

1. Wherever I am, a thought will always come to my mind - What can I give?

2. Whatever the mission I will do, my motto will be to work with integrity and succeed with integrity.

3. I will always remember that my winged days, be not spent in vain.

4. I realise I have to set a great goal that will lead me to think high, work and realise the goal.

5. My greatest friends will be great human beings, great teachers and great books.

6. I will firmly believe that no problem can defeat me; I will become the captain of the problem, defeat the problem and succeed.

7. My National Flag flies in my heart and I will bring glory to my nation.

Published at Rediff.

Signing off, since my battery is low. Have a great year India!

Tags: India, republic day

getting stuck in traffic…

i want live traffic
reports!

im new to the city…

i want
directions!

i want auto fares, bus routes, and car
pool information as well!
Yes, and now its possible.

If you don’t know about it already, its high time you knew Ladies and gentlemen, if you’re from Bangalore, Hyderabad or Chennai, you can get directions, you can get live traffic reports, and you can get them as SMSes on your mobile!

Bangalore Transport Information System, or BTIS, gives you live traffic reports - where’s busy, and where’s not; whether its offpeak time, or peak time; whether there is a road block, or not. It can also provide directions, along with bus routes. It can also help you to carpool. And best of all, all this can be accessed by SMSing! Apart from these, the website also provides information on the city traffic, safety regulations, rules and so on.

A project by Mapunity and Airtel, the online Transport Information System concept began with their pilot project in Hyderabad. Immediately, BTIS was launched, and now Chennai is in the beta stages.

When Live Traffic is clicked, you get a map wherein the roads are marked with green, orange, or red buttons. Green means that the traffic is ok. Orange means that the traffic is moderately high, and Red means that the traffic is very high, and most probably blocked.

If you want traffic directions, go to Directions, and enter the place from where you want to travel, and you destination. Then click Go and you’re in business. The map shows a line, which is the path you must take. It also displays the distance, average auto fare, and bus routes. You can zoom in on areas. You can get the directions by SMS as well.

Best of all, if you have GPRS enabled on your mobile, you can get all features of BTIS on your mobile. Like a semi GPS!

Currently, Mapunity has these information systems for Bangalore (BTIS), Hyderabad (HTIS), and Chennai (CTIS). Well,
next time you’re in doubt about directions, or if you want a quick check on traffic before you go, or if you want to research side streets to use, you know where to go

[tags]BTIS, HTIS, CTIS, bangalore, hyderabad, chennai, traffic, bangalore traffic, traffic problems, directions, car pool, auto fare, bangalore traffic information system, traffic information system[/tags]

Hi all,
There has been a mail circulating with the title “must see slideshow ….world is ending” and the mail body goes like this -

As per Nostradamus world will end in 2012 and the start of the end is march 2008, look at the slide show to unreveal the future events. click on the link below and login with your gmail.
http://www.freewebs.com/venkateshshenoi/index.html
regards

Do not click on the link

Do not provide your email id or password in the fields mention in the site, if at all you open the site

This is a phishing attempt against your Google account. It looks like the popular Google owned social networking website Orkut and asks for your Google account id and password to log in. Even the mail says “login with your gmail”. Once you enter your email and password, you are redirected to a page which looks like the Orkut-About Us page. And the information you provide (email and password) is sent to this guy’s email address.

Since I whole heartedly disagree with such stupid, hopeless and desperate phishing attempts, I hereby declare this phisher’s email address for public abuse

The email id of this phisher is kart_willshire@yahoo.com

This can be obtained by viewing the page source code.

Feel free to hurl abuses at him Also hoping that a few thousand spam bots will gather his email address from here.

Anyway, I’ve already reported this site to a few anti-phishing directories, and Google. Hopefully, his site will be removed in a couple of days. But until then, please spread this message. Stumble and Digg

[tags]phishing, google phishing, google account, hacking, phishing attempt, must see, slideshow, world ending, nostradamus[/tags]

Hello all,

One of my blogging pals forwarded this YouTube video to me, and I thought that it conveyed a very important message, rather than just being hilarious. Go ahead, and watch it, and scroll down for my comments, and after reading, please do add your own comments.

Yes, I know it was damn hilarious. It was fun to relate to most of the stuff said in the video, and glimpse back like baboons and exclaim "Oh my God, thats pretty amazing true!".

But did you get the final point? The video, like many of its predecessors, are questioning whether Web 2.0 is a bubble which could just break like that. From what we’ve seen so far - the rapid expansion - it could certainly be a bubble which could break at any moment. But how could it break?

Either, something major like a 9/11 could happen again, bringing about a paradigm shift of technology and cause the bubble to burst. Or, Web 2.0 might give way for something more radical and dynamic. Or even a massive discovery in terms of hardware could bring about a shift.

What do you think? Is what we see and use everyday, Web 2.0, a bubble? If so, what will cause it to burst - economy? War? Development? Technology? Post in your comments through the comments field.

Adios until ma next

[tags]web 2.0, new media, web 2.0 bubble, video, fun[/tags]

Files missing?
My Computer not opening?
Programs not opening?
Installations not occurring?
Task Manager not opening?
System deadly slow?

If your case can be matched with the conditions given above, in all probability, you’ve got the Autoit.BD worm, better known by a file it deposits in your C:\ drive, Funny UST Scandal.avi.exe. Pretty annoying. Almost nothing you can do. Only NOD32 v3 with updates can detect this trouble maker worm. Kaspersky can detect, but cannot remove. AVG, Norton, Avast! - all don’t even detect the virus.

Wait! Don’t format your system yet! Its a pretty simple virus to remove, and won’t take more than 10 minutes. It is recommended that you start up in Safe Mode before you do the following steps to remove the virus -

[scroll down for a file which automates all this]

1. Download and install TaskKiller (326 KB freeware). We’re doing this because we need to remove a few tasks running, and Windows Task Manager (Alt + Ctrl + Del) gets killed by the virus
2. Run Task Killer, and a red skull icon will appear on the system tray
3. Left click it, and click Processes
4. Select to kill these processes -
   • killer.exe
   • lsass.exe
   • smss.exe
5. Now open up Command Prompt (Start>Run>command). Type each command and press Enter to run it -
   • cd\
   • attrib -h -s smss.exe
   • attrib -h -s autorun.inf
     [NOTE : Type each command exactly as its given here]
6. Open My Computer and go to C:\ or whichever partition in which you’ve installed Windows.
7. Delete the following files -
   • smss.exe
   • autorun.inf
   • Funny UST Scandal.avi.exe
8. Go to Command Prompt again. Run this command -
   • attrib -h -s smss.exe
9. Go to C:\Windows or wherever else you’ve installed Windows, and delete the file smss.exe.
10. Now, go to C:\Documents and Settings\All users\Startmenu\Programs\Startup and delete the file lsass.exe.
11. Open Registry Editor (Start>Run>regedit)
12. Delete the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\
    Microsoft\WindowNT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon=shell(killer.exe
13. Delete the key  HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\
    Microsoft\windows\Currentversion\Run=runonce(c:\windows\smss.exe)
14. You’re done!

OR, you can just download a remover file : Download Autoit.BD remover

• After downloading, unzip, and run the exe file.
• Then, do the steps 11, 12 and 13 as mentioned above.
• You’re done

Thanks to fs6519 for recommending these steps, and making the remover file.

I hope that this post was useful. Cheers

[tags]autoit.bd, worm, funny UST scandal, fs6519, removal, worm removal, virus removal, installation stopping, task manager not opening, smss.exe, Funny UST Scandal.avi.exe [/tags]

Hello all,

I seem to be talking "Google" a lot during these times, but what else can I do with all the stuff I keep finding about this behemoth website?

Today for instance, I found something pretty amazing. I was going through my search stats, when I found a keyword "INDIAN BYBY NAMES" through which a person came to Blogging India. Now that was pretty weird, since I had no idea what the keyword was all about. So I decided to search for it and guess what I found?

I have reason to believe that Google is using the aid of pronounciation(pronunciation) to better refine its searches. Google used the pronounciation of "BYBY" and matched it with "Bye Bye". And then, it searched for and highlighted pages having the term "Bye Bye" rather than "BYBY". Never before have I seen it happening, and it didn’t work for a few other combinations I tried, but nevertheless, the fact remains, it equated one search term, with the other, without a command from the user.

Again fascinating in this same query is that search terms are never sliced to find a match. i.e. If you search for "multiplayer", you don’t get results for "multi" and "player", or for "mul" and "tiplayer". Here, you can see that "Indian" has been substituted with "India" and "Names" with "Name". Of course, Google had mentioned earlier that it would consider plural results when we searched for singular queries, and vis versa. So that explains the "Name" result. But what about "Indian" being substituted with "India" in a search result?

Don’t believe me? Try searching for "baba black sheep" on Google. You get results on "Baa Baa Black Sheep", and the search engine doesn’t show a correction("Did you mean…").

Now does this mean that Google is experimenting with pronounciation search? Its a field I’ve never heard of before, nor have I heard of search engine experts talk about it. Would it be an innovative break for all those words which have different pronounciations throughout the world? We shall wait and see.

But one thing is for sure, if Google is indeed playing with pronounciation search, they are heading the semantic way. And a slight amount of semantic search mixed into the present Google formula could make it a lot better.

[tags]google, pronounciation, pronunciation, search, best search, better search[/tags]

Hello all,

A week ago, Wordpress released a patched version of version 2.3, which included a couple of security patches. Its highly recommended that you update to Wordpress 2.3.2 if you’re running on 2.3.1.

WordPress 2.3.2 is an urgent security release that fixes a bug that can be used to expose your draft posts. 2.3.2 also suppresses some error messages that can give away information about your database table structure and limits and stops some information leaks in the XML-RPC and APP implementations. Get 2.3.2 now to protect your blog from these disclosures.

Go to the Wordpress blog announcing the release for more information. To download, go to the Wordpress download page. Additionally, you can also view the list of fixed bugs, and changes introduced from 2.3.1 to 2.3.2.

Since this is a security release, its highly recommended that you update to the latest version. You might find the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin useful

[tags]wordpress, wordpress upgrade, security release, wordpress automatic upgrade, wordpress 2.3[/tags]

Hello all,

I found this rather curious little thing while I was browsing about a week back. I was searching for something in Google, and it was something rather hard to find, so I thought of searching for it in Google Groups and News. So I scrolled to the top of the Google search page, where the little links to Google Images Search, Google News Search, Google Scholar Search and other Google utility searches were displayed.

To my surprise, there was a link to Orkut(Orkut is the social networking website owned by Google)! This particular link took me to an Orkut search page for what I searched. I was logged in to Orkut at that time, and thats why it showed me the search page. When I logged out, and searched, and clicked Orkut again, the usual log in page appeared.

But the interesting point is that, Google either thinks that Orkut has useful material, or it wants to drive traffic to its Social Networking site. It is most probably the latter, since most of the content on Orkut are either highly personal (and useless for a 3rd person, unless he’s studying customer psychology) or extremely spammy. Most of the communities I’ve been to so far, barring a single one on Indian stock exchange updates, are notoriously spam filled, thus presenting nothing search-worthy.

Then we have to question - why is Google going so orkutty?  A few of my observations -

• Information contained in Orkut is highly useless to any person searching for something conrete
• Orkut communities are extremely spam filled - thus leading to incorrect information
• Orkut communities harbour many illegal activities, like hacking/phising attempts
• Thus, presenting Orkut search as an option in Google search destroys the search engine’s credibility by providing highly incorrect search results.
• Google, by putting in the Orkut link, is trying to get more visitors to sign up at Orkut, thereby providing more income to Google

So finally, we have to ask a few questions… Is Google compromising on search quality to drive forward its products? Isn’t Google thus creating an unfair advantage for Orkut over other social networking websites? Isn’t Google misleading people to click on the Orkut search link, and thus making them sign up?

Unfortunately, we do not have answers. Hopefully, a Googler will see this post, and send me a rather flighty email But until then folks, ciao, take care

[tags]orkut, orkut search, google, google search, decreasing google, google standards, orkut information, google news[/tags]

MPlayer, as I had mentioned in my previous post on my Top 3 Audio/Video players, is a media player for Linux, which supports almost all kinds of audio and video formats. It can even play semi-corrupted, and semi-downloaded files. And it rates # 1, as my most favourite and preferred video player.

It is, by creation, a player for Linux, coded by Astral and team. It is essentially a command line operated player, but later on GUIs were introduced for it. Of late, it has GUIs even in Windows, but these GUIs are not very stable, and often destroy the stable credibility of MPlayer. The MPlayer is now available for all operating systems - Linux, Unix based OSes, Windows, and Mac OS X.

How to install MPlayer -

For Linux, go to http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html . They have a very good explanation on how to install MPlayer on Linux. Of late, MPlayer comes as the default AV(audio/video) player in many Linux distros.

For Mac OS X, go to http://mplayerosx.sourceforge.net/ . They’ve developed a very good GUI for MPlayer on Mac. Its as simple as download, install, and drag and drop to play.

For Windows, the procedure is a bit more tedious, but worth the effort.

1. Go to http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html and download the MPlayer 1.0rc2 Windows.
2. After downloading, unzip the package to somewhere easy to remember. For example, unzip it to C:\Program Files\MPlayer so that its easy to locate at a future date.
3. For Windows XP and 2000, go to Step 4. For Windows 98 and previous, go to step 5.
4. Next, go to your Documents and Settings folder. By default, it will be in the root directory, C:\, but could differ if you’ve changed the location or have installed Windows in a different directory. In Documents and Settings, chose the folder which corresponds to your Windows username. i.e. If your Windows username is Geekboy. open the folder Geekboy in the Documents and Settings folder. Inside that folder, there will be a hidden folder called SendTo. If you can see it, open it. If you can’t, either enable the View Hidden Folders (Tools > Folder Options > View > Show Hidden Files and Folders > OK) or append "SendTo" (without the quotes) in the address bar. Go to step 6.
5. (for Windows 98 and previous versions) Go to your Windows folder (by default, it should be C:\Windows\). There will be a hidden folder named "SendTo". Open it. (if you can’t see it, either append SendTo to the address bar, or enable viewing of hidden files by going to Folder Options).
6. Create a shortcut (Right Click > New > Shortcut) and point the shortcut to a file named mplayer.exe in our MPlayer folder (in our example, C:\Program Files\MPlayer\mplayer.exe). You’re all set to go!
7. Now, to play a file using MPlayer, right click on the file, and scroll over Send To  and click Mplayer. Enjoy!

To get an idea of the controls in Windows, go to Interactive Control in the MPlayer Manual.

But here are a few basic controls -

• f - to toggle fullscreen
• arrow keys - to fast forward/rewind
• Page Up and Page Down - to fast forward/rewind by 10 minutes
• p - Pause/Play
• q or Esc - to quit
• / and * OR 9 and 0 - increase and decrease volume
• m - to mute sound
• o - to toggle timer

Those are the basic controls. There are more advanced controls for everything from increase/decrease movie speed to adjusting hue/brightness/colour etc. Check out Interactive Control for more information.

Supported Media Formats

• Physical media: CDs, DVDs, Video CDs* Container formats: 3GP, AVI, ASF, FLV, Matroska, MOV (QuickTime), MP4, NUT, Ogg, OGM, RealMedia
• Video formats: Cinepak, DV, H.263, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, HuffYUV, Indeo, MJPEG, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Part 2, RealVideo, Sorenson, Theora, WMV
• Audio formats: AAC, AC3, ALAC, AMR, FLAC, Intel Music Coder, Monkey’s Audio, MP3, RealAudio, Shorten, Speex, Vorbis, WMA
• Subtitle formats: AQTitle, ASS/SSA, CC, JACOsub, MicroDVD, MPsub, OGM, PJS, RT, Sami, SRT, SubViewer, VOBsub, VPlayer

I hope that this post was useful and informative. Enjoy the MPlayer world!

[tags]MPlayer, media player for linux, linux media player, MPlayer windows, Windows media, play all formats, movie player, best media player[/tags]