Two books got chance to be in my reading list:

1. The High Performance Entrepreneur, by Subroto Bagchi.
   Well, there is no golden rule which can bring success, and that’s fact! For all you need these books/talks is to keep you motivated, raised, working, rocking; else u may loose your aspiration in very early days. Thank you flipkart for delivering in absolute two days; you guys rock.
2. Software Product Lines: Patterns and Practices, by Paul Clements, Linda Northrop.
   I could not stop reading first chapter. These guys have put a new perspective to my thinking about product lines, they describe very well what is not a software-product-line and what actually it’s. Building a software and serving multiple clients is not achieved by a great software architecture, instead you should think from a perspective of a product line. Just started reading this book. The book describes concepts with relevant case-studies.

 

- Ankit
( Note: Guten Tag is everyday German greetings! )

1. Install User Agent Switcher addon in Firefox
2. Restart Firefox
3. Go to Options Menu > Default User Agent. Select iPhone 3.0
4. Log on to https://m.google.com/app/buzz

and you are there… Happy Buzzing!

Typically, on this day either government or some organizations publish public service ads declaring their vision. But today it seems our government is run out of funds. There were some ads by Ministry of Power, but that did not cover all leading publications. The TOI group has huge spaces and funds for promoting TimesNow and their reports’ bravery, but not for our freedom fighters.

Ack: Wikipedia

* These newspapers are referred in Kanpur. Probably a Kanpur or Lucknow edition.

Note: Seagate’s quoted “1TB” disk is actually a 931GB disk.

Once installed, you will see IITK’s Proxy Switcher in Tools menu. This extension switches from bsnlproxy to vsnlproxy and vice versa. It only modifies server-address and leaves PORT number as it is.

* This software/extension is provided “as is” and without any warranty or support. The author will not be liable for data loss, damages or any other kind of loss while using or misusing this software. The extension is FREE and copy left.

Lets see where do we stand in the massive Web of Internet. There are total 3,109,827,840 IPv4 addresses issued worldwide. India owns merely 0.6% (19,267,224) of them. We hold world’s 17.6% population and only 0.6% of internet is hosted/used inside India! On the other side, with 19% of world’s population China has 7.2% of IPv4 addresses becoming the third after USA (48%), UK (8%).

You may argue that I should have measured by # of Internet users, but there are not exact figures to support it. Some agencies say 40M Indians have touched Internet while other say 80M. Whatever, I feel # of IP addresses gives pretty accurate measure of a country’s Web presence (web-servers hosted) as well as usage (ISPs).

India comes at 15th in owning total 0.51% of all ccTLDs. China is at 5th with 3.36% of all ccTLDs (after US – 64%, Germany – 5%, UK – 3.7% and Canada – 3.6%). Where is the awareness for country specific domain names? Why are we still running for .com?

There is big gap between no of people who use internet vs no of people who know there is a Internet. Obviously, education is a must to get into this. But not everyone can get English education. The Internet has accepted, they cannot bring the whole world in one language, then why do we want to push English? I am sure there are 100 times more pages in Chinese than a total of Hindi/Marathi/Punjabi/Gujarati/Tamil/etc in Google index.

Apart from cheaper equipment and tariff, the other factor behind mobile revolution in India is the support for local languages (Hindi, Tamil, Marathi, Punjabi, etc;) in handsets. We need the same for Internet. Not everyone can speak and understand English. Even ICANN has accepted this after a long time. Why IRCTC is not available in Hindi? Why Indian social networks like Bharatstudent.com, Bigadda.com, Hi5.com are not available in regional languages. There Wikipedia, BBC, Facebook & Orkut are available in Indian regional languages and gaining popularity. Why not Linux community provides free OS in Hindi? Besides, there is a Hindi keyboard layout, tools available for easy typing in Hindi/Gujarati/Tamil. And thanks to Google for Transliteration.

I am waiting for a day when our government shall issue a law/guidelines for website owners for enabling Internet for disabled people. I am waiting for a day when an Indian web-hosting giant opens up a data center in US/UK (for cost cutting bcoz their cooler climate and cheaper bandwidth) instead of collaborating with existing foreign providers. Today preliminary knowledge is almost free over Internet. I am waiting for a day when every member of our society has access to such information free and a child does not necessarily need to buy a book. I am waiting for a day when free internet kiosks will be available roadside and we can access Wikipedia, maps/routes and information will be a hand apart for the poorest guy in my country.

- Ankit

Ref:
* Country wise IP count as of 2009-12-19
* ICANN Wiki and Country-wise Total Domains Data as of 2009-12-14
* Second source for IP stats http://www.ip2location.com/ip2location-internet-ip-address-2010-report.aspx . Here too India is at 19th, and China at 3rd.

They claim to be world’s cleanest Gola made from mineral water ice! Reach them at Fun Republic, Andheri. You may also like to visit their official website Go Gola.com or check out Go-gola at flickr.

*Bombay is the old name for the city Mumbai, India.

Thanks Vineet !

Problem: While surfing around, I came across a website whose content encoding is not being supported with my latest Firefox v3.5.4 showed me unsupported compression error.

Content Encoding Error
The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because it uses an invalid or unsupported form of compression.
* Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem.

Solution: As per my knowledge web-servers generally use GZ compression and Firefox well supports that. Then what’s wrong here? Digging a bit into Firefox’s ‘about:config‘, I did a search for ‘gz’. The setting network.http.accept-encoding was set to gzip,deflate. What’s wrong? Let’s try setting it gzip,deflate,gz. And it worked!. The catch here is gzip and gz are two different extensions used for the same gzip compression. Eventually, the questions is who’s in fault, Firefox or the website?

- ankit

It’s really a weird behavior and that’s one more reason why I hate Ubuntu (but unfortunately I have to work on Linux box and Ubuntu seems to be the best of all distros). Read on..

Problem: When I connect to wireless network and give it wireless network password, it asks me for default keyring password.
Solution: Pointed out by Ivan Torres. This all starts the moment you change your first Ubuntu password (the one you have set at the time of installation) as it does not change keyring password. So, if your user password is changed, every time you log in Keyring Manager will ask for the password you supplied during Ubuntu’s installation. To fix this go to Applications -> Accessories -> Passwords and Encryption Keys), and then go to Edit -> Preferences menu. Select GNOME Keyring tab and change the password to match your actual Linux user password. Now one you use your