Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Joke on Intel and McAfee


Intel CEO: "We need antivirus, can someone buy me McAfee?"
Few hours later,
"Done."
"Great, which version?"
"Version ... ?"

I read this joke few days back, and I could not understand it. Today, I understood it after reading the news that, Intel bought McAfee.

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Unnecessary Expenditure by the Government


Recently, Government started a new scheme by which, it pays Rs.35,000 per annum per student to the corporate junior colleges as the fees for the selected poor students. Government has allocated more than Rs.21 crore for this. If the same money is allocated to improve the government junior colleges, the number of beneficiaries would increase by atleast 10 times.

Government is ready to give Rs.25,000 for an operation to the corporate hospital in the name of Arogya sri, but, it is not interested in giving resources worth of Rs.5,000 to a government hospital which can do the same operation. Government is ready to spend lakhs of rupees for an operation, but, is not ready to spend Rs.10 per person for the medicine which will prevent the disease in the first place.

Government may say that, they want to give quality service to the poor people by this. But, first government should provide basic necessities to everyone and if it has surplus money, then it can improve in other aspects. When there are many people who are not getting basic health/education, instead of providing them less expensive facilities, if government takes more expensive approach just for very selected people, that does not do any good for the state.

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Mail Alerts on Way2sms - IISc Life (BhOndOO)


We can setup email alerts by SMS from way2sms. If we setup email alerts on way2sms, and if anyone sends mail to <OurId>@way2sms.com, then they would send SMS to us with the sender and subject of the mail.

This is a really good feature from way2sms. But, the problem is, the mail alerts expire exactly after 14 days from the date of activation. Before expiring the alerts, they don't give option to renew. After expiring, you will not get mail alerts till you activate the alerts again. This is one big drawback in this.

With Way2sms, we can send an SMS in future (in the next 10 days). What I used to do was, I used to setup a future SMS alert as a remainder to renew my alerts. After 10 days, when I get the SMS alert, I used to setup another future SMS alert for 4 more days as a remainder. Even then, there was a loss of alerts for few hours.

Now, I realized that, there is much simpler way. After 10 days, I can deactivate the mail alerts, and activate it again. With that, it will expire 14 days after the re-activation, and I can have another SMS alert in 10 days. With that, I don't lose even a single mail alert.

Update: With ibibo.com also, we can setup mail alerts, and there is no need to renew mail alerts. But, it sends few promotional SMSes once in a while.

IISc Life

IISc Life is a very good blog written by my classmate Rupesh Nasre. I like the stories of bhOndOO very much. If you have some interest in reading love stories or humour stories, then I would strongly advise you to read the bhOndOO stories.

After reading the story, Does she love me?, I thought, I should not delay any time in reading the stories of bhOndOO. As soon as the article is published, I should read the story. I use google reader for reading anything. But, the frequency is not high enough and SLA for reading this blog will not be met with this. I asked for enabling the posts via mail, and he enabled it. Even that did not meet my SLA. I created way2sms mail account, and I enabled forwarding of the blog mails to my way2sms email account and enabled mail alerts. So, whenever there is any post, I get mail on my gmail account, which forwards to my way2sms account, which sends an SMS alert to my mobile. I have GPRS on my mobile, and can browse from my mobile. So, except when I am in sleep, I can read the posts within half an hour after posting it in iisc.wordpress.com. With that, I have met my SLA, and my way2sms mail account is exclusively used for sending this alerts only.

Wednesday, August 04, 2010

Transliteration From English to 6 Indian Languages


Try Transliterate from http://www.tnsatish.com/translate.jsp.

I developed a small tool to transliterate from English to Telugu, Devanagari, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya and Bengali. This tool was developed 3 years back, when the local languages were not that much popular in google sites. Now, nobody needs this, since all the google sites support local languages. I did not want to throw away this. So, I put it on the site. You can access the transliteration from http://www.tnsatish.com/translate.jsp. If you write the text in english, it converts and shows it in the language that you chose. If you see the view source, you will also get the html (with the unicode) for that, and you can use that html in your sites.

Except Telugu and Devanagari, I have not tested other languages. If you find any issues please let me know.

English Text

harE kRRushNa harE kRRushNa kRRushNa kRRushNa harE harE
harE rAma harE rAma rAma rAma harE harE

Transliteration

హరే కృష్ణ హరే కృష్ణ కృష్ణ కృష్ణ హరే హరే
హరే రామ హరే రామ రామ రామ హరే హరే

হরে কৃষ্ণ হরে কৃষ্ণ কৃষ্ণ কৃষ্ণ হরে হরে
হরে রাম হরে রাম রাম রাম হরে হরে

हरे कृष्ण हरे कृष्ण कृष्ण कृष्ण हरे हरे
हरे राम हरे राम राम राम हरे हरे

ಹರೇ ಕೃಷ್ಣ ಹರೇ ಕೃಷ್ಣ ಕೃಷ್ಣ ಕೃಷ್ಣ ಹರೇ ಹರೇ
ಹರೇ ರಾಮ ಹರೇ ರಾಮ ರಾಮ ರಾಮ ಹರೇ ಹರೇ

ഹരേ കൃഷ്ണ ഹരേ കൃഷ്ണ കൃഷ്ണ കൃഷ്ണ ഹരേ ഹരേ
ഹരേ രാമ ഹരേ രാമ രാമ രാമ ഹരേ ഹരേ

ହରେ କୃଷ୍ଣ ହରେ କୃଷ୍ଣ କୃଷ୍ଣ କୃଷ୍ଣ ହରେ ହରେ
ହରେ ରାମ ହରେ ରାମ ରାମ ରାମ ହରେ ହରେ