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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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)

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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)

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.

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

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.

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...

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.