New address
My blog’s feed now has a new address.
This address is better from the point of me tracking how many subscribes are there and how many hits does my feed actually get. It will also guarantee a good uptime and better and faster feed rendering for you guys. It will also give you a golden egg every week delivered to your home and will full fill all your wishes bla bla bla…
Hey Hey :D.
Jokes aside, Feedburner is a great way to deliver your feeds. It gives site administrators great control over their feeds, and offers great flexibility over standard delivery.
I would request all the subscribers of this feed to shift to this address:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/setu
To make it easier for you, here are a few buttons:
Make sure you read my next blog via feedburner !
Thanks!
Happy Diwali!
Happy Diwali!
This is the message I saw when I logged into orkut today :). This inadvertently brought a smile on my face.
The message appears in the header on the top where you have the site nav and is fairly ignorable. Apparently, the message also has some action associated with it which I was unable to test on the slow GPRS connection on my iPhone :(.
Things like these mean a lot to tech nerds like me. It shows that the big giants are paying attention to the vast traffic that hits their servers from India. India (read Indians) is undoubtedly a major consumer of web services trolling around the web. And its high time that the service providers support customization for India. Google started with support for Hindi across all its services and the state of the art Google indic translator revolutionized the way people type in Hindi. Yahoo followed with Yahoo India maps (http://in.maps.yahoo.com -copy & paste as there is no insert hyper link feature in WordPress’ iPhone version).
Now Google is gearing up with Android which I am sure will support i18n. There are rumors for an Indian version of Amazon as well!
This will bring a new paradigm in Internet awareness in India. I can foresee more and more homes signing up for broadband connections.
With customized content for the most dynamic market in the world, the opportunities are endless.
A very Happy Diwali to all of you !
[UPDATE] Clicking on the “Happy Diwali” link on the top changes the CSS! The specially designed CSS for Diwali looks great on orkut ! Thank you Google !
Real Talent
This post is again related to the talent shows gaining popularity over Ekta Kapoor’s daily TV soaps (and this somehow makes me happy).
I feel that a lot of credit is given to the singers who sing well on stage. However, no one even knows the names of the musicians who play the music on which the contestants sing.
I believe that they have the real talent. If it was not for them, none of the contestants could sing and sound so well. Hats off to these people!!
If you observe closely, you will see that they catch up every song real quick. I mean the contestants and judges sing many songs at random. But these guys have no problem playing them.
This post is dedicated to all those people. Of all of them I only rememher the name of Shantanu Da who plays a lot of instruments but primarily guitar.
Keep up the good work people!
Dhikkar hai…
I just finished watching the repeat telecast of Amul Star Voice of India’s latest episode in which Toshi got eliminated from the league.
I am an avid music listener and have some basic knowledge of Indian music. With whatever little knowledge I have, I would say that “Dhikkar hai Rajasthan ki janta par”. If they could not identify such a golden voice, they should go to hell (interpret it as something more offensive).
I have never heard any reality show contestant sing so well. He is literally a pro singer and can very well sing for Bollywood movies.
I seriously believe (looking at good contestants being eliminated) that these reality shows should stop taking polls from the general public. I mean i do not understand the concept of taking judgement from general people when you have judges and guests like the music directors of Bollywood and highly respected and worldwide acclaimed Pandit Jasraj.
Although Sajid -Wajid and probably Aadesh Srivastava have signed up Toshi to sing in their films in the future but i guess everyone (and Toshi) would have loved him to become the Voice of India.
Dhikkar hai.. Dhikkar hai..
Hello World
People living in the National Capital Region (NCR) usually crib about a lot of stuff:
1/ Delhi metro’s network not enough.
2/ They are not maintaining the roads.
3/ Lately the travel time to/from office has incrased significantly due to quantum increase in traffic.
4/ There are not many places to hang out/dine.
However, once in a while few friends come from Bangalore (as they have their lay over at Delhi) and then they realize that how bad things can be and how good they are in the NCR. More over, if one has lived in Bangalore. Then he realizes the ballant truth.
The above is what happening to me now a days. But I am happy.
Ok. I understand that this is an unnecessary post but this train is taking crazy long time to reach Lucknow and I have nothing else to do.
Also I was thinking for the title of this post and i could think of nothing better. Its both semantically and technically a good fit.
Hmm sound like I have been programming a lot lately…
I love my iPhone (&Airtel)
This is getting more exciting. iPhone and Airtel work great in India. I am right now sitting in 2004 Lucknow Shatabdi express and accessing the internet on my iPhone using Airtel’s seamless GPRS network.
There is one thing that I love about the Airtel’s network in India – coverage. You just go anywhere (except J&K) and you find Airtel there. Also, it offers all its value added services like EDGE etc. everywhere.
I am using meebo to chat with my friends and using the Google reader’s customized iPhone interface to catch up on my subscribed feeds.
More upon reaching the city of nawabs…
Its kinda cool
This wphone plugin (http://www.wphoneplugin.org) is kinda cool. I have an iphone type interface for the wordpress admin console from where I can do almost anything (including posting).
This is the first of the many blogs that I am gonna write from here :).
It does have bugs though. Although I am hopeful that they will be fixed in the next release.
Stay tuned…
After a long time…
I am posting this after a long time.
Some of the things that have been keeping me busy were:
1/ The all new look n feel of http://ocw.mit.edu
2/ Yet to be launched HFH
3/ My short US trip – http://www.setugarg.com/simpleviewer/castleIsland
4/ My new iPhone 🙂
Those of you who have been following the breaking news in the gadget world, would know that iPhone has been soft unlocked and is working fine with the majority of carriers in countries around the world. Well atleast its working for sure with T-mobile in the US and Airtel and Vodafone in India as per my little experiment :).
I believe in “Vidya Dadati Vinayam” and hence would soon be sharing the details of my little experiment here. Those getting impatient and geeky can go to http://iphone.unlock.no for the time being. You should get everything you need there.
I would like to thank the folks at iPhone Dev Community for making this possible and engadget.com for bringing this into my notice.
I think all this was destined to happen :). My trip got extended just for the right amount of time (well ofcourse there was a business reason attached with the same :D). Engadget released the confirmation that the hack works in India 1 day before my return flight and to top it all, Apple opened a new store with lots of 4GB iPhones in stock in Natick near my home in Shrewsbury.
Stay tuned… More to come soon.
P.S – I am writing this from my iPhone :). So please do not mind the spelling mistakes.
It just doesn’t work
I recently installed Windows Vista Home Premium on my PC.
First, I want you to read this to get some context.
Ever since the installation, I have been facing incompatibility issues. I do not know why ? Aren’t we supposed to get Wowed (!) after installing it ?
My current critical task -> Get the (supposedly updated and better) Media Center to play a DVD movie.
There is a strange thing I noticed about Windows Vista. It has some kind of enmity with Nero. Basically, whenever I search for a solution to my problem, people just ask “Do you have Nero installed ?” They suggest to uninstall it to solve the problem. Sounds kinda weird, but, probably its true. I had the explorer crashing every time i opened a folder containing video files (DivX primarily). Basically it was facing some issues with thumbnail generation. After I removed nero, the problem got solved ! Now here is something to think. What does a disc burning software got to do with DivX files thumbnails ?
Also, the in house disc burning application sucks. On its first run, it (mis) configured itself and hid the previous sessions written on one of my multi session discs.
Basically its a piece of crap produced by M$ as an answer to Apple’s Mac OS X (which is now gaining popularity everywhere). There are only UI enhancements (that too useless) and no UE enhancements (except search).
Welcome to the new world of Windows. Where you have to trouble shoot every software you install on it. Just stay away from it.
Expect more bhadaas on this one …
SimpleViewer Gallery.xml Generator
SimpleViewer is a great tool to create your own image galleries. The interface is smooth, intuitive and user friendly.
I have been using SimpleViewer for a while. I used to generate its gallery.xml file manually. There are ways to generate the xml using Picasa and other tools, but then you need to have the images on your desktop. I have my photos on photobucket . The best part with photobucket is that it offers static URLs for all your images. So, you can download your images in full size from anywhere. Also, there is a handy Windows XP publisher plugin available to easily upload your photos in your account 🙂
The problem was to automatically create Simpleviewer’s gallery.xml from photobucket static links. I could not find any tool available on the internet which could help me in doing so. Hence, I decided to write a tool myself :).
Being a Java programmer, I built the tool as a Java class. The tool worked smoothly. Then I thought of making it available for everyone through the internet. I created a HTML form to call a JSP which used this class to generate the xml and print it on screen. I tried uploading these in my account on myjavaserver.com but they did not work. I then merged the JSP code and the JAVA code into a servlet and thne tried to deploy it on myjavaserver.com. But all efforts went in gutter. Actually, I think its fair. The procedure to get a myjavaserver.com account is not easy. How can we expect the deployment procedure to be easy ?
So, I shifted to the server side scripting language of the heaven: PHP. I referred to w3schools.com and php.net just to learn the required stuff. And yes, I have the tool up and running at http://www.setugarg.in/SimpleViewerXMLGenerator.
Please use it to create your own image galleries. Feel free to pass this URL to your frinds and family. Its the basic thing (kind of beta) right now. I will be enhancing its functionality as and when I get time. People who are wandering over the internet for such a tool, please accept it as my chritmas gift to you :).
And yes, please mails your comments/suggestions/bugs to SimpleViewerXMLGenerator [at] setugarg [dot] com