Remember the days of 4GB of disk space? That was just 10 years back… Our demand for space is kicking each day and I have seen all for 4, 40, 160, 1000. So, what all we want to store? Primarily *media, *songs, *photos and a few (i mean very very few) data files. If I calculate (approximately), my all precious data can fit in 4GB. Remaining 996GB is for storing entertainment stuff? (actually yes 
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Need for Storage! 1TB
12-Jan-10At IITK we have two Internet proxy-servers. Sometimes, one server goes down and we are required to switch to another by navigating to Tools > Options > Advanced > Network > Settings. With Firefox, I tried to simplify this effort with following extension – one click proxy switcher!
Once installed, you will see IITK’s Proxy Switcher in Tools menu. This extension switches between direct connection, bsnlproxy and vsnlproxy. It only modifies server-address and leaves PORT number as it is.
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India and Internet
20-Dec-09You may have heard – the reach of Internet in India is increasing rapidly. VoIP has came in, 3G & IPtv is at the doorstep, bandwidth prices are falling down, BSNL’s netPC launched, but I still do not see a great future. I do not see awareness of .in domains, for promoting Hindi, I do not see true Indian web-hosting companies, I do not see IT professionals solving India’s a few fundamental problems. We have built a good economy by serving west IT companies. The time is now to focus inside!
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
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.
Brand Ka Band Bajao
25-Nov-09Yah, you read it right. Brand . Look at following small scale Gola business running in Bombay*.
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.
Handling Data in Mega Scale Systems
20-Nov-09Vineet Gupta (from Directi) touches some practical aspects of scaling web-applications. He talks about scaling app-servers, database-servers, alternatives of RDBMS, handling replication and transactional behavior. Thought the presentation is big, it touches all major aspects of scaling and gives broader insight. Check out yourself…
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Understanding Errors
05-Nov-09The following solution just came random to my mind and it worked!
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
Ubuntu (hardy) Default Keyring Password
30-Sep-09You see a dialog asking “Enter password for default keyring to unlock”
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
Split Pascalcase String
11-Sep-09Do you ever need to split a camel case or pascal case string to a set of words? This can be achieved simply by regular expressions in Java as well as C#. The following code is for Java:
String camelCase = "StructuralDesignPattern";
StringBuffer label = new StringBuffer(camelCase + 10);
java.util.regex.Pattern p = java.util.regex.Pattern.compile("[A-Z][a-z]+");
java.util.regex.Matcher m = p.matcher(camelCase);
while ( m.find() )
{
label.append( m.group() + " ");
}
System.out.println(camelCase + " >> " + label.toString());
[ Note: this does not work for all test cases. You may also want to try regexp as "[A-Z][a-z]+”, for matching any continues uppercase letters too (e.g. AnkitJainFROMIndia >> Ankit Jain FROMIndia) ]
Jon Galloway points out a tricky method for C#.
Domain Names I own
20-Aug-09Holy Smoke !! How many domain-names I own?
ankit.tk – free
ankitja.in – paid
enroller.in – paid
ankitJain.tk – free
ankitJain.info – paid
YeMeriLifeHai.com – paid planning to drop this one
AnkitAsDeveloper.tk – free
POLAROID-EFFECT.TK – free
Get your own FREE .tk domain name << and you can have unlimited !!
(the only catch in this offer is you need at least 25 hits in 90 days, I think that you can manage by your own 
)
- Ankit
