Vivek live and kickin'

Its almost like a birthday tradition for me now. This is the 4th year I will be posting on my birthday. I was going through the earlier b'day posts and I realized I always want to launch a project or a site on my b'day but something or the other comes up and it ends up getting delayed. This year no such promises just work and release things as and when it happens. The project is already delayed by 3 years. It just shows that I should focus on one project and not try to put my hand into 10 different things at once. This year I want to take a long vacation and probably figure out things that have been going on in my mind for a while now. Lets see if I am able to take it. In the year gone by I achieved one major goal and that was to shed excess weight. I lost 10 Kgs but have gained 3 Kgs over the last 2 weeks :P, that still makes it 7 Kgs in an year. I now need a good fitness regime if I want to stay healthy. The last 2 months have been full of ups and downs. Mostly in terms of h...

Somehow today Murphy's Law : If any thing can go wrong, it will! applies to me. I woke up at 5:00 AM and was in bed again at 5:30 A.M. Just kept twisting and tossing around in the bed but could not sleep. Since I could not do much I ended up writing the last blog post. Got up at 6:30 and planned to go out for a walk. Something that just could not happen. I had planned to get rid of a few bugs in fefoo but I never got time for it either. By 8:00 AM someone came over and my plan to work went down the drain. I ended up fixing a laptop and that took another 2 and half hours. I had planned to be in office by 9:30 but finally got in by 10:30. Thats enough ranting for a day I guess :P. Here is hoping things would be a little better now.

This comic strip captures my frame of mind as of now. Guess I am going through something like this as of now. I still have a week to go but am still not sure if I've achieved what I had wished for by the time I was this old. Guess its just another number but then thinking back I had planned to do quite a lot by now and I am still quite far away from the goal. I finally plan to launch beta version of fefoo.com on my birthday. Its still an alpha release as of now and most things that should work are broken. I hope to clear up the pile of bugs over the weekend and get the site upto a beta quality. I am still hopeful that it would be possible to launch it on my Birthday.

I wish I could get back the time I spent in watching these movies. I could never expect a person like Aamir Khan to act in this good for nothing movie. I generally don't watch too many movies but over the last 4 weeks have been out to watch a movie every weekend. I had a torturous time watching Ghajni and Chandni Chowk to China . CC2C would have to take the cake for the worst movie that any director could come up with. It was a torture to stay through the movie. Last week I went out for Luck By Chance . Its an amazing movie with a really great concept. It really showed that there was a director who knew what she wanted and there was a script, which was lacking in CC2C. This weekend I went out for Dev D . I went out with the frame of mind that I would not like the movie but in the end I loved the movie. It was amazing to say the least.

You need to read the review of Slumdog Millioner by Arindam Chaudhuri , i.e. incase you've not already read it in all the major possible English newspapers in India. It is a full page advert of IIPM where Mr. Chaudhuri is currently the Honorary Dean for Centre for Economic Research and Advanced Studies and it has this review in the end. This review seems so stupid in an advert for an Educational Institute. It seems like this person is really looking for some cheap publicity and you can see that from the comments on the blog post. I have a feeling that this guy really believes in "There is no such thing as bad publicity" . I am still not sure why would someone actually pay for a full page advert for something like this. Come to think of it Mr. Chaudhuri is also a film maker and it almost sounds like envy more than a honest review. I really love some of the comments on the blog post. Some of them follow now. To leader2630 who said: -------------------------- Very true we ...

I wanted to watch a divx movie on my aspire one laptop which runs a Linux based OS. I tried to play the file but I did not see the video in the preinstalled video player. My next logical step was to download VLC for Linux. But as it turns out there is no VLC for Linux, there is a VLC for Ubuntu, Fedora and Source Code for any other flavor of Linux. It took me a good 30 minutes of searching on half a dozen forums to figure out a way to install VLC. It takes less than a minute on any windows based machine even if you download the zip version. And I thought this was a problem just with windows. As it turns out if you are using Mac OSX there is a separate version of Safari for Leopard and Tiger while a single binary edition for Windows XP and Vista. Guess Microsoft is doing something right somewhere. I was working on one of my friends computers which had OSX and Safari 2.x and figured it would be better if I installed Safari 3.x on it. I downloaded Safari and the moment I tried to install...

Happy new year and I hope you have a great year ahead. The last year has been different to say the least. Quite a bit of good, some bad, some boring and some exciting. The last few days have been good at least for my personal project. Its finally coming up and I am hoping to release a preview this month.

I have finally got some time after a really long time and working hard to complete a few tasks before this year ends. I have been busy with work and trying to give some time to my own personal project and hopefully after hanging there for the last 3 years it will finally see the light. I am still not very hopeful given the changes and the amount of work required to finish it. Also the features seem to come into my head every now and then. I am trying to move most of them to version 2.0 lets see if 1.0 will ever come out for now :P

I've been reading Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net for a while now. And its finally in my daily schedule. I have a list of comics that I read daily at http://comics.vivekjishtu.com and have finally added Cyanide & Happiness to it. Its risqué at best but has a few gems every other day. The other new comic to the list is Ask Dr. Eldritch . This one is also a bit risqué at times but one funny comic once you get a hang of it.

If you want anonymous results from Google you can use this simple DNS hack to get the results from Google. Since you will never be logged in you will always get clean results and also no searchwiki results. Never realized how much cleaner the results are if you are not logged in. To get the cleaner results add the engine to Opera, Firefox, IE and Google Chrome. Its just a DNS hack so you still get all the results from Google. But its all anonymous since you never log in. All the traffic is sent to Google but the cookies are not set as you can never log in so more or less you can be anonymous. Its still a hack so it can be turned off by Google anytime. But its good while it lasts. This is what you see once you use Google Clean . You are never logged in so the results are anonymous and you will never get any SearchWiki results. You can always go back with a single click incase you want the SearchWiki results. Here is how you add it to Firefox. The search box should be a little blu...

Before leaving for Oslo I had updated my laptop and the update screwed up the WiFi drivers and it was impossible to get online. I had to completely reinstall everything. I ended up spending the whole night trying to fix it. If you want to use anything besides the default settings you need to know a few shortcuts Alt + F2 is a life saver to start with. This will popup the run dialog and you can start bash in a terminal and move forward from there. Everything on Linux seems to be super sized. The default font size is 12px  nd that seems so weird. The next thing I do is do bring down the size to 8px and change the font to closely match Tahoma 8px. I am so used to it that anything other than this seems so ugly. Also not to forget the command " xfce-setting-show " which will enable the menu when you right click on the desktop. It will give you a menu like the start menu. You can also add/remove programs in the setting menu. For me the main application that I have to install is rd...

Today evening I was listening to Seth Godin on YouTube . And most of what he said made sense and I got thinking about the thing about ideas. I've had various idea's at different stages of my life. Just that none of them get completed for one or the other reason and since most of them are personal tech projects. I would normally think of the technology and never really think much about marketing. That seems like the last thing on my mind. Technology is all about archiving something that others cannot even think about. The other thing is trying to get everything right from the word go. In the effort to get everything right in the first version it never seems to get delivered. Most of the times the features seems to keep creeping up and the project never gets completed. I've seen this happen on most of my personal projects. Since I am the one to decide I keep adding more and more features and the final project never seems to get completed.

This post is again personal and has nothing to do with technology. Its been a while since my last post but I do have a few answers and more questions seem to have popped up into my head since then. I finally figured out that I am going through QLC but then again I am not looking for the meaning of life or anything of that sorts right now. Just need to figure out where I am heading and if that is the right direction for me. This post seems as vague as possible but this post if more for me a few years down the line when I come back and read it and laugh at what I was going through.

This is a personal post and has little or nothing to do with technology. Its my 3rd week in Oslo and I still don't have any answers to questions I had in mind. I wanted a break and time to think and plan for what I wanted out of life. Have been really busy in the last 3 weeks and hardly had time to think or analyze anything. ... Will probably complete is some other time.... not sure when.. hopefully once I get some answers to things in my head.

I hate calling up the Airtel customer care and I try to find a solution online if I can. I've found two solutions to my problem but none of them seem to be working so I will have to call and spend the next half hour to get this information from a customer care executive. Anyhow these are the solutions I've found online. 1) Rs. 20 per day send GPRS to 56789 2) Rs. 75 per week send GPRS7 to 56789 3) Rs. 15 per day send GPRSACT to 511 to deactivate this service send GPRSDEACT to 511 4) Write MO and send to 52696 to activate n DMO @ same no. for de-activation I've tried all the solutions but without results. Let me know if you have a better way. Anyhow I better start calling, its going to take a while to get through. UPDATE : Anyhow I called them up and this is what I got. 1) SMS NOP to 52696 to activate the service. 2) SMS NOP to 52567 to get the settings 3) SMS DNOP to 52696 to deactivate the service. 4) Call 121443 and you will directly talk to the customer care ex...

Just checking with AutoRuns for Windows and Google Update almost feels like a spyware in every possible place. It acts as a service so when you turn on your computer it will make sure that its always on. If you somehow remove it as a service, it also acts like a BHO . The next time you start IE it will start. If for some weird reason these two failed its also in the scheduled tasks. Just waiting till it installs itself as a driver as well.

Mygazines is like the youtube of magazines. It allows you to read and store your magazines online. But they are in a little bit of trouble with the copyright infringement notices flying across it right left and center. Its a really neat concept, as you can read magazines that you would not get in your local store. They post the complete magazine with all the adverts intact so that should in a way be good for the publishing house. In the long run if they survive they should only be like a repository of old magazines. In any case most magazines have a shelf life of no more than a month. If they start storing older magazines with all the adverts intact it should work in the favor of the publishers. Also people would be able to sample magazines which they would not otherwise. Its almost like online music. If someone likes the music they will pay for it. Same goes for a magazine. I loved reading the magazines online but for most other times I would like a physical copy, and I won't mi...

I was using Shozu to upload pictures and videos to flickr and youtube using my Nokia E61i. It is a really cool application and I had talked about it earlier when I had installed it on my earlier phone. When I finally bought the new phone I was missing this application as currently the Samsung i780 is unsupported and I was unable to find a version that I could run on it. After trying out a few versions I stumbled upon the HTC Touch version and it works quite well on this phone. So if you have a Samsung i780 download the shozu application for HTC Touch and use it. Atleast till they provide support for this phone.

I recently bought a Samsung i780 which has Windows Mobile 6. There is a tiny bit of a problem specially with the GPRS connection. Everytime the mobile checked my email it would keep the connection alive and would not disconnect. Since it remains connected it drains out the battery. You will need a registry editor to make these changes. You can download a free registry editor from http://www.phm.lu/products/PocketPC/RegEdit/ . Download the Pocket PC 2002/2003 (ARM/PXA) version and install it on your mobile phone. To change the settings follow the detailed steps listed on this page . I have listed the steps in brief. You will need to use the registry editor to make the changes. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Comm\ConnMgr\Planner\Settings\ The 1st key is DWORD CacheTime the number denotes the number of seconds to wait before the auto disconnect, by default it is 600 seconds. the 2nd key is Multiline value / String SuspendResume which can have 2 values ~GPRS! :- 3G always On GPRS_bye_if_device_off...

You need javascript turned on for this to work. Just something really random that I came across just now. Not sure how anyone can exploit it but it can sure spook a few people out.