Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Sony Ericsson K550i - Network icons

Just pondering over the 'G' and 'E' icons displayed near the network tower indicator on the top left corner of the phone screen. Lately found that it represents the network capability of your mobile service provider.

For more information refer the network tutorial on the Learning Center in SE site.

Legend:

Monday, June 25, 2007

Sony Ericsson K550i review

After a span four years with Motorolla C350i, I moved to Sony Ericsson K550i.

I guess I am the one to use Motorolla C350i to the max extent. This cell phone's battery started cranking out about 6 months back, I somehow managed extending its life (because of under usage).

Before starting to lookout for a new mobile, I just framed my must-have requirements.

1. Good call quality
2. Good battery life
3. Good camera (~2 MP)
4. MP3 player support
5. *No* 3G (no affordable 3G support in any near future, that is my prediction)
6. Price range Rs ~10K
7. Form factor - Candy Bar (easy single hand handling)
8. Connectivity - Bluetooth, IR, GRPS, Quadband

This restricted search resulted in a couple of options. I blatantly ignored LG, Samsung and Motorolla for their poor battery life and build quality.

So the options were
1. Sony Ericsson K550i
2. Nokia 6300

Nokia 6300 didn't pass the litmus test with its poor battery (before this phone I believed that Nokia had the reputation of good batteries, but in the reviews it has been stated that Nokia changed their battery to gain the slim factor). So the best choice I am left with is Sony Ericsson K500i. Before hitting the stores, I read through the reviews on CNet Asia and GSM Arena.

Somehow these reviews lacked that feel good factor. Eventually when I had the phone on my hand, I was impressed. The build quality is much superior than I expected. Based on a couple days of use, the phone is beating all my expectations.

Pros:
1. Good camera with better options
2. Comes with all standard connectivity options (read the specs)
3. Good battery (with full charge running for 2-3 days, avg use)
4. Mp3 player is awesome (generates easier navigation list)
5. Accessible keys
6. Speaker phone support
7. Neat look
8. Slim - 14mm
9. Value for money

Cons:
1. Smaller keys (do not bother much unless you message a lot)

What is in the pack:
1. K550i phone
2. Battery (Li-ion)
3. USB cable
4. Hands-free
5. Charger (universal)
6. Software CD and Docs

Verdict:
Recommended for those with aforesaid requirements.

To munch on a rainy day

For the past week, Rain God is showing mercy and the authentic bangalore cloudy climate is back. With the chill weather around, it makes awesome if you have something crispy to munch.

Tried preparing baby-corn fry and it came out well.





(Photos: taken with SE K550i)

Thursday, June 21, 2007

Home Loan tips and tricks

While I was frantically searching for a home loan, I happen to see some tips and understand some tricks.

1. Banks are never under loss
Will ever the loan lending bank reel under loss if they finance a home and the borrower defaults? NO, for PSU banks, for private banks, they use some unparliamentary means to recover the money back.

Before approving a home loan the bank checks for sufficient credibility of the borrower. As per the general trend, the borrower would be paying the EMI for a few years. During those initial years the bank will recover most of their interest part of the loan. And since the home is mortgaged to the bank, they can recover the capital from the home.

2. When to prepay?
The best time to do prepayment is the initial years after taking the loan. Since the initial years are the period when the bank recovers a lot of interest. If you see the EMI calculation, during the initial years, most of the EMI goes towards interest.

3. On prepayment, what to reduce?
Some banks gives you the option of either recalculating the EMI or period of loan on prepayment. The best option is to reduce the period of loan. Because you pay less on reducing the period and keeping the EMI constant.

Things to consider while writing public APIs

When you expose public class/APIs, there are certain things that you need to consider

1. Arguments/Parameters
Carefully consider the arguments that gets passed into the API.

2. Method Name
Choose an apt meaningful name for the public methods or classes. Avoid ambiguity.

3. Exceptions
Throw only non-runtime exceptions, so that clients can handle them. Do try to handle all the exceptions in the method. If you have logging framework, log the exceptions and rethrow them.

4. Backward Compatibility
Once the APIs get released and you need to support them for an extended period of time. So if you modifying existing public APIs take care of backward compatibility, such that you wont break client code.

5. Intented use
The public APIs should do only what it is intended to do

6. Java docs
Provide clear crisp java docs. The best example is the one that comes with JDKs.

7. Trace / Log / Debug
Provide support for tracing/logging. Both serves different purposes. Trace is used to find the control flow inside the public APIs. Logging is used to log any error messages and exceptions.

8. Error statements
In case of wrong parameters getting passed, log descriptive error messages. The error message should typically say what went wrong and what is the corrective action.

Monday, June 18, 2007

Find java class files in JAR

Typically in a development environment of a big J2EE product, you often cross the step of including the right jars in your library path to get your product compile/run/debug. With lot of jars lying in you lib folder, you face the daunting task of including the needed few.

OR

In case if you want to find from which jar a particular class gets picked up, you face the same daunting task of opening the various jars and looking out for a particular class file packaged inside it.

To get rid of this one, I came up with a java program that takes a path and class name and spits out the jars which contains the class. The usage of FindClass is simple

java FindClass C:\j2ee\product\lib MyClass

FindClass iterates through the folder (and subsequent subfolders) to get the list of available jars and list out the jars, which contains the specified class.

I used JarFile and JarEntry to read a jar file. Rest is all simple File operations.
If you love to use this util class, drop a comment.

Aquaguard: Chase for invoice begins

When I see my referring links on my blog stats, many of them are from google with search query "aquagaurd" (notice there is a mis-spell over there). So taking a suo-motto cognizance of the visit trend I have decided to document the horrible experiences a customer goes through after purchasing the noble water purifier (aha, see my frustration).

Disclaimer:
The honest intention of the aquaguard related posts on this blog is to educate the intelligent net-savy customers about the horrible services offered by the aquaguard people. Nothing more and nothing less.

So the first chase begins here.

When you buy a water purifier from the "well-informed" (read it sarcastic) sales rep from Aquaguard, little will be known to you about their invoice process. At the completion of the sale, the happy sales rep will handover a slip stating that you had paid on the delivery of the device. It is not an invoice or a bill stating that you had bought the product. The sales rep will promptly inform you that you will get an invoice within 15 days by mail.

That 15 day deadline will never happen. I have bought the product about 4 months back and still haven't received any invoice.

One more thing that you will not know is that the sales rep from whom you have bought the device, would have done either of one these in the following few weeks

1. Changed his mobile number, so that you cannot reach him
2. Changed his job
3. Changed his department with in aquaguard

In my case, it was option 3. I am chasing them through their customer care and every time they tell me the same crappy story. They ask me my mailing address and receipt number, stating that the invoice will be delivered in 2 days. Again nothing happens.

This is not an one off case. My friend has ended up calling them more than 100 times to get the invoice. Many more are in the process. Some are blissful enough with out caring that they require a legitimate invoice some time later when their device starts mall-functioning.

Tuesday, June 05, 2007

MyJavaServer - Signup Challenge

When I tried to sign-up for MyJavaServer service, I was quiet amused by their sign-up challenge. The challenge is to write a small Java program (just to make sure that you are conversant with Java). The site then compiles your program and runs a couple of tests to validate the program. Quiet a novel way to authenticate the users.

Signup Challenge
Master a simple Java programming challenge (STATUS: NOT PASSED)

As the principal engineer of an HTTP web server, you are responsible for implementing the request processing subsystem of the server.
An incoming request for a specific resource, identified by an URI, must be dispatched to the appropriate handler according to the server configuration which maps URIs to request handlers. 'HandlerFactory.getHandler' must be implemented:

public class HandlerFactory
{
public String getHandler(String[] config, String requestUri)
{
}
}

The string array 'config' contains URI patterns and handler names. Two consecutive values form a key-value pair comprised of URI pattern and handler. 'requestUri' represents an incoming request, the URI to match against the configured handlers. 'getHandler' must return the correct handler for a given URI as a string value.

An URI pattern never contains wildcards and represents the start of an URI string, a prefix. Matching must be implemented accordingly. The handler with the longest matching URI pattern wins if more than one pattern matches. If no handler can be found, "XqAoLy" must be returned.

MyJavaServer

Found that MyJavaServer is a free online java application server that one could use to host their web applications for free. They offer the following services on their site for developers.

Java
Java SE 6.0 based application server
Servlet 2.3
Java Server Pages (JSP) 1.2
Pre-installed third-party libraries

RDBMS services
Embedded: HSQLDB, InstantDB

Miscellaneous
SMTP service
Unfiltered HTTP responses (no ad placement)
WAP/WML, Java WebStart MIME extensions

Storage
5 MB initial filesystem quota
Full native filesystem read/write access
File Transfer Protocol (FTP) file management


Quite cool. They use Tomcat application server to provide the service. So if you just want to host any simple web app for free, MyJavaServer is the place to go!

Sting operations by Private News channels

One good fallout of the private news TV channels. Recently NDTV exposed through a sting operation the nexus between defense and prosecution in the BMW hit and run case. Such clandestine deals could prevent people from getting a fair justice.

Friday, May 25, 2007

Google turns down my request suspecting a virus

See the snapshot



Btw had a hard time guessing the word verification. The image is so crumbled.

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Will this spell the end of aquaguard monpoly

I had been cribbing about the monopolistic practices by Aquagaurd Water purifiers. It seems that Philips had listened to it. Philips India is entering the water purifier market. I hope two things will make Philips a big hit

1. The price range of their water purifiers are in the same range of Aquagaurd.
2. They sell their product through retail outlets. (So customers win here. They get cheaper maintenance)
3. Battery backup

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Google's Bot is amazingly fast

Google's web crawler bot is amazingly fast. My yesterday's post on Nimishambha Temple trip has been already added to google's search index and ranks first.

Monday, May 21, 2007

Nimishambha Temple and Sangam Trip (13-May-2007)

After a long while, the remnant guys in Bangalore (myself, Nag, Gops and VK) (that's how I guess we should call ourselves after the brain-drain in our gang) thought of a get-together. I came up with the idea of lunching together, but as per the de-facto standard, Nag came with the dynamic plan of a one day picnic. The choice of place, transport, itinerary were all decided on the previous day night.

So we all stared an hour late on Sunday due to the mess-up my car created. Vk's new Indica Xeta came to our rescue. We stopped at Kamat on Mysore Road for breakfast (We made use of the buffet really well).


(Remnant Gang with the Guest of Honor Nag Jr.)


(Gops, VK with Guest of Honor Nag Jr.)


(Simian Acrobatics for the Guest of honor)


(Simian Acrobatics for the Guest of honor)

Reached our picnic spot of Nimishambha temple around noon-time. This place is near SriRangapatna en-route to Mysore. The Mysore highway SH-17 had unusual high traffic on the weekend.


(Cauvery River bank)


(Gops on way to cool off his heels)


(Nag and VK taking a dip)


(Nag and Vk discussing a shot)


(Vk and Nag fishy)

Ate lot of junk stuff (such that we can skip lunch). Unusually there was lot of crowd over the place.

Then on the way back went to Sangam.

(Confluence of three rivers)


(Winding flow)


(Another shot)


(Rocky terrain on the banks)


(Grand view of Sangam)


(Another shot)


(Nag Jr. on a pensive mood... on how to get a mallu girl)

Evening tiffin again at Kamat. Back in bangalore on time.






(End of Trip)

Game shows: People attitude

These days private TV channels are flooded with umpty number of game shows covering people in all age categories right from kids to couples. Out of these some are quite interesting like BBC's MasterMind and Star Sports Quiz. Even DD's BSNL Sports quiz is worth watching. Sun TVs "Thiruvalar Thirumathi" is for married couples and is one whole crap game show.

I am alarmed at the outwardness of the people participating in such game shows. They reveal lot of their personal things to the whole world for the take-aways they get in the shows. I hope not those holiday packages comes with no-strings attached. We the viewers never get any clue whether the people who were given the holiday packages really went for such ones.

Friday, May 11, 2007

How to connect cellphone using IrDA port

This post is based on the experience of transferring content between your cellphone and laptop using IrDA port.

Is this the latest standard?
Using IrDA port to transfer content between your cellphone and laptop is really old way. The latest way to communicate is to use bluetooth.

Then why?
But at some juncture IrDA comes in really handy. Say when your laptop doesn't have a built-in bluetooth adapter and you doesn't have an external one too. And more you are lazy to use the wired approach of connecting using USB cable.

How to?
Laptop: Dell Latitude D600
OS: Win XP
Cellphone: Sony Ericsson K700i


Firstly the Dell D600 had built-in IrDA adapter. One needs to enable them.
  1. Go to BIOS setup. (Press F2 when the laptop boots up to enter the BIOS setup)
  2. Press Alt+P to go the various pages in the setup program
  3. Find the IrDA section in the Commuincation Ports page (I guess so)
  4. If it is disabled, then enable and set to a particular COM port. I used COM2 as COM1 is used in my laptop.
  5. Save and Exit the setup and boot the laptop.

Enable IrDA in your phone and place in the line-of-sight with IrDA port

Win XP had default drivers and it was able to recognize the device. From then on, it is a single click to transfer data from laptop to the cellphone and vice versa.

Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Recent tamil movies and my ratings

All of a sudden tamil movie buff kicked in to me and I happened to see four movies in a span of two weekends. I have given "my" fair ratings for these movies.

1. Unnale Unnale - Promising (Happened to see part of the movie and it looks pretty promising)
2. Mayakkannadi - Cheran movie, realistic approach. Average
3. Naan Avan Illai - Below average. Hopeless screenplay
4. Parattai Engira Azhagu Sundaram - Pathetic (only one word)

Thursday, May 03, 2007

Online Vulnerabilities

The other day when I was having a conversation with a friend using orkut scrapbook, suddenly I realized how much personal information is left open to the world wide web. Scrapbooks are not private, anyone can read others scrapbook. If one could correlate they could get all vital information about a person.

Other way if one uses mail, there is much more confidentiality involved. Mailboxes are private. Hence the rule to delete scrapbook entries once I reply. By the way then why is there a scrapbook and what is its purpose?

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

AntiCorruption

When you get obsessed with rampant corruption, you really want to break free and take punitive steps against those who demand it. But being a meek person, you will never have courage and time to do so.

Now there is a non-profit NGO who helps in this. It seems that there is light at the end of the tunnel. Visit 5th Pillar

'0' Rupee note is the brain child of this org to root out the corruption.

Monday, April 23, 2007

It is raining in bangalore

Over the weekend it rained cats and dogs in bangalore. Though the pre-monsoon shower is a good one, the heavy downpour caused much misery to low-lying areas. On the Bannerghatta Road, clogged storm water drains overflowed on the road and flats with basement car parks were inundated.

News on TOI
News on Hindu

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Cooking Recipe

Came across this excellent site hosting Priya Madhan's gourmet recipes. The ingredients for most of the recipes are the standard spices that are available in any home and not that you get only in a five-star hotel chef's kitchen. Last week I tried out Chettinad Pepper Chicken and turned out good.

Monday, April 16, 2007

Photos from Road trip to Erode

Some where in between Salem and Dharmapuri, where I had a small pit-stop



Thoppur Dam


The toll-gate near krishnagiri


Sunset near Hosur


Some more photos on the Flick (Tag : Road trip to Erode)

Against KPN

Gops has posted his horrifying experience with KPN travels and their sheer disgrace towards the customers.

I have already posted about my horrifying experience. There was one more, sometime back which I skipped unintentionally. I had booked tickets to Salem from Bangalore in 11:00 pm Thiruchengode bus. I was particular about this bus, since it reached Salem at the time I wanted to land there.

After reaching KPN office at Bommanahalli and waiting more than the slated time, the staff announced that the bus has arrived mentioning its registration number. When I reached the designated bus, I was told by the cleaner that bus is not heading for Thirchengode. A little later one of staff told me that the original bus has broken down and there is no alternate bus. Since I had booked only till Salem, they will put in some bus which goes via Salem. Imagine this situation in middle of the night with dependents by your side.

After waiting for a while in the pavements, I was given two seats in another VOLVO bus. All my plans got disrupted and managed to reach Salem with this horrifying incident running back on my mind all the time.

Hope Gops would succeed in teaching a lesson to KPN through customer redressal forum.

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Road trip to Erode

During the long weekend, I did a road trip from Bangalore-Erode-Thiruchengode-Bangalore traveling in the gorgeous 4-lane NH-7. While the NH-7 is till Salem, I had to travel in NH-47 from there.

NH-7 is part of the North-South corridor and NH-47 is part of the Golden Quadrilateral project.
Map of the Highways in India shows the extent of coverage by these highways.

In both the highways, the work is in progress to make it 4-lane completely. The 4-lane is from Bangalore till Thoppur and then from Thumpipadi to Salem. These projects are implemented by NHAI.

A glimpse of how the highway looks (picture courtesy NHAI)

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Upgrade

Had a few free cycles and thought of upgrading my blog layout. With blogger2, tools are provided to edit the template. The past option of editing the template manually is gone. Now you have widgets that you can add to your template.





Also upgraded the statcounter script, so that now I catch the referral links and visitor activities.

Monday, April 02, 2007

How to connect you laptop video output to a TV

"Necessity is the mother of invention" - by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato

No, I didn't invent anything over here. While in the process of setting up a home entertainment system, I preferred not to buy anything in haste. In India, the home entertainment portfolio is under major revamp now. LCD's and Plasma's are entering the home entertainment market in a big way. The prices of the TV's and home theater systems are crashing down.

In the meantime, to enable me watch my favorite movies, I was in need of a stop-gap solution. I thought of using my laptop as a DVD player and connecting its video-o/p to the TV. The following are the steps to connect Dell Latitude D600 laptop to Sony 29" CRT TV.

What you need?
1. Dell S-Video to Composite TV out adapter. (You get this adapter normally with the laptop)

2. Composite video cable (You can purchase one from your local electronics store)

How to connect?
1. Connect the S-Video to Composite TV out adapter in your laptop S-video output.
2. Connect one end of you composite video cable to the S-Video to Composite TV out adapter
3. Connect the other end of your composite video cable to your TV video input
4. Switch the TV to appropriate Video mode
5. Boot your laptop
6. Go to Control Panel > Display > Setting tab (Win XP OS)
7. Right click 2nd display and attach it.
8. Set the resolution and color properties. (Generally the TV supports 800x600 resolution. Sony 29" TV supported 1280x780 resolution with 32 bit Color)
9. You will see the extended desktop.
The TV screen behaves like a extended monitor. Drag the applications you want to run into the TV screen.

This way you can run movies from your laptop on to your TV screen. In order to get your audio output into your TV, you need to take the audio out from the headphone-jack in your laptop to your TV audio input.

P.S: It is imperative that you get a properly insulated composite video capable. Otherwise when you connect the power chord to your laptop, you shall get electrical noises in your video signal

Links:
Dell Documentation
HP India site documentation
S-Video site

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Titan Gold Plus - Erode

A mention about the Titan Gold Plus store in Erode. The store had a made a brisk business last year to earn a revenue of Rs 25 crore.

Friday, March 23, 2007

Crowd Pattern

While watching the "Closures for Java" presentation, I observed the following crowd pattern...

At the time when the presentation began...



At the time when the presentation ended...

Thursday, March 22, 2007

Closures in Java


Watch the talk given by Neal Gafter from Google

How to download video from Google Video



By now, most of us would have watched videos online using Google Video sharing site. Google doesn't allow you to download the video file. And when you download, it gets you the gvp (google video player) file. In order to get the video file, you need to do a small hack. Edit the gvp file and you will see the URL. Use this URL to download the avi file.

Beware that google had encoded the video file in such a way that only its player will be able to play the avi file.

This titbit will be of great use when you want to watch the videos off-line.

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Pace of development

Gops made a post on the pace of infrastructure development happening in coimbatore which follows the similar bangalore phenomenon. Another example of bangalore phenomenon.

BESCOM decided to upgrade the electrical lines near my place. The plan is switch from overhead lines to underground. They started working on this project about 3 months back. Until now, they have partially dug the road and left it open. No signs of work. Heard from the daytime security that they work only once in a month on this project :-(

Monday, March 12, 2007

Planetarium and Musical Fountain

Out of the few places to visit in bangalore, Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium is one. As per their website, you got to see some replicas, science park, exhibition and a tele-show in the dome screen.

On the first look, the whole campus is dilapidated. There is no entry free for the science park. There are some simple experiments demonstrating the basics physics facts and only a few of them work. The experiment showing sound waves traveling in a parabolic path is simply amazing.

For the tele-show the entry fee is Rs25 and it runs full house during weekends. The night sky shown in the dome screen is breath-taking.

Musical Fountain is located just opposite to the planetarium and the show starts in the evening by 7:00 pm. In order to club these two together, take the 4:30 show in planetarium and get to the musical fountain show at 7:00 pm.

Aquaguard == monopoly



Another incident of sheer monopoly.

Aquaguard is an undisputed leader in the world of water purifiers in India. They practice unethical marketing strategies to sell their products to the households. They sell their products in door-door marketing fashion. So their marketing agents just tell all possible lies on earth to convince you to buy their product. On the day, when your first annual maintenance contract ends, you have to face the brutal facts about their product.


I bought a Aquaguard Reviva (Reverse Osmosis) based purifier about a year back. At that time I was told that the membrane has to be changed only when it wears out and its average life-time is about 8000-12000 lts of water. I did a simple math and for two persons the potable water consumption per day is about 10 lts and the membrane should last for about 2.5 years.

When the first year was over, the service engineer came and told us that we had to change the membrane and it wont last more than a year. The cost of the membrane is about 2500Rs and with the maintenance expense comes to about Rs3600 per year (which works out to be more expensive than if you buy mineral water from some vendor).

You are left in lurch as you wont get any spares outside in the market and you had to be dependent on their service for the life. Secondly they are free to charge any amount for the service and mostly will not heed to complaints (one could see lot of people complaining about their shoddy service network in the net) .



The height is that I have bought one more purifier from them as I am left with none in the market that could satisfy the requirements. They win and we loose the case always!

Track BMTC VOLVO Buses using SMS

One of few things that have improved in bangalore over the past year is BMTC. BMTC started deploying VOLVO buses in its city service fleet and it was an instant hit. No more you need to haggle with autowala's. You get a plush ride in clean A/C VOLVO buses with minimal cost (compared to autos). The buses are of state-of-the-art kind equipped with entertainment system, GPS enabled and information system.




Lately, BMTC introduced SMS tracking of these buses. The service is called "Yelli Iddira". You can track the position of a particular bus by sending an SMS. It is really a boon as we need not wait endlessly in bus stops for the bus to arrive. With ever mounting traffic, you can track the buses real time.

Photo courtesy: BMTC site.

Friday, March 09, 2007

Picture Collage

A couple of collages that I created with the macro shots that I took. Turns out nice! Used Picasa to create the collages.



Thursday, March 08, 2007

International Women's Day

This is what I wrote about women's day in 2005. All that I have written applies the same with some additions. In addition to my mom, now I have one more women, my wife, to stand by me in all my endeavors and consistently push me over the extremes and endure confidence in me in all those hard times.

This post is a petty dedication for the two souls for their insurmountable effort and contribution towards betterment.

The chronology behind the women's day.

Friday, March 02, 2007

Doubly Zipped

When you compress a folder/files, doubly zipping reduces the size further compared to the single zip. Why is it so? Why can't single zip does the same compression? If we keep-on zipping, will the size keep on reducing further?

Yet to find answers for all these? Any pointers?

Thursday, March 01, 2007

Blog stats

I have been running statcounter on this blog from mid-2005. The following are the stats



Impressive hits for personal blog?

Monday, February 26, 2007

Search Ranking

This blogs ranks 4th in the google page rank.



With yahoo and MSN, I do not see it in the search results.

Saturday, February 24, 2007

SUN TV Network Monopoly

On the news today, once more incident of monopolistic attitude displayed by SUN TV Network. They are not sharing their feed with the rival Tata-Sky DTH.

Earlier incidents
Google blog search results page from SambharMafia

Thursday, February 22, 2007

Home Loan : Calculating the Balance Sheet yourself

Off late I have been involved in home loans a lot. Just I wanted to understand the mystery behind the calculation of EMI, the prepayment and the balance computation. Since my home loan is with the Corporation Bank, and it being a PSU, I cannot expect the account statement to be shown online. By the way do any of you see such a facility with any private banks?

I took home loan of type fixed interest rate and monthly resting option. The following steps should help you calculate the monthly balance of your home loan

Step 1: Calculate EMI. I used the formula given by Ranjit.
Step 2: For the first month the balance can be calculated as
Balance Principal = Principal + (ROI * Principal) - EMI
Step 3: The balance principal becomes the principal for the next month. Repeat Step 2

Note: If you have done prepayment on a particular month, deduct the amount from the balance principal to get the actual balance.

I wrote a small java program to do the calculation for me. This can be extended for daily resting option and also for the floating rate of interest.

P.S: Apart from such minor nuances, I felt the relationship with the bank much better. There has been no hidden charges and the default options in the home loans are better tweaked to benefit the customers. I felt that with private banks unless the customer is alert, they ought shell out more.

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Quote of the Day

"If you pay peanuts, you only get monkeys."

courtesy: A rediff.com reader
This reminds me of the TimesJob ad.

Photo Post

Some of the best photos covering the activities of over last 3 months

Munnar: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rajakumar/tags/munnar/

Cherai: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rajakumar/tags/cherai/

Cochin: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rajakumar/tags/cochin/

Bannerghatta National Park: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rajakumar/tags/bannerghattanationalpark/