Gift Vouchers and Gift Cards

Whenever I get an invitation for any function, the first trouble that I face is, "What gift should I give?" I am very bad at selection, and I used to chose something random. Most of the time, the recipients told me that the gift was good, and I am 99% sure, they told that out of courtesy.

Some time back, when I was moving out of the team that I was working, I came to know that, the team members were thinking of some gift for me. I was 100% sure that, whatever they give, I would put it in my suitcase safely atleast for the next 5 years. But, I was 100% wrong.

They had given me gift vouchers of Crossword Book stores. Very soon, I visited the store, and spent equivalent money of the gift vouchers by purchasing the books equivalent to the double the value of the gift vouchers.

After they gave me the gift vouchers, one of the team members said, if I am going to buy a book of Rs.350, then, I can give two Rs.250 gift vouchers, and the shopkeeper gives back a credit note of Rs.150, and I can use that credit note to buy another book in 6 months time. When, he was telling that, I did not say anything to him. But, I was 100% sure that, I will never need to take a credit note, and I did not take.

Thanks to (in no particular order)

Anurag N
Krishna Doss
Parag Bhand
Praburaj Thiagarajan
Raghavendra Babu
Santosh Javagondanahalli Padaraj
Sravanthi Rajanala
Srikrishna Mutnuru
Srinivas Patnaik
Tanu Singhal

This was the second gift that I had received that was useful for me.

Gift Voucher is a very good gift that can be given to anyone who is staying in a city. Recently Canara Bank introduced Gift Cards which can be used like a credit card. That is also a very good option to give it as a gift.

Extra Storage For Mails

Those who are old enough would know that, 10 years back, yahoo used to offer 4 MB of email space, and by paying some amount, one could upgrade to 10 MB. (If you are a kid, you are reading the numbers and measurements correctly.)

At that time, I thought, why would anyone upgrade the email account? Everybody would just register another email account and forward all the old mails to that account. In 2004, Gmail started giving 1 GB, and in couple of years, it increased to 6 GB and then to 7 GB. That is a lot of storage. Till two years back, I was under the same impression that, we never need to buy extra storage for the mails, and in the worst case, we can register another email id.

Now, I have upgraded my Gmail account, and I am paying money for my personal email account. Ignoring how much I am paying for the extra space, even two years back, I thought, there was no question of paying money for my personal email account. But, it became invalid in just two years.

One famous quote that is misattributed to Bill Gates
        640K ought to be enough for anybody.

The Case Against Lord Krishna

A nun in Warsaw, Poland, filed a case against ISKCON (International Society for Krishna Consciousness). The case came up in court.

The nun remarked that ISKCON was spreading its activities and gaining followers in Poland. She wanted ISKCON to be banned because its followers were glorifying a character called 'Krishna', "who had loose morals," having married to 16,000 women called Gopikas.

The ISKCON defendant to the Judge: "Please ask the nun to repeat the oath she took when she was ordained as a nun."

The Judge asked the nun to recite the oath loudly. She did not.

The ISKCON man asked whether he could read out the oath for the nun.

"Go ahead", said the judge.

The oath said in effect that "she (the nun) is married to Jesus Christ". The ISKCON man said, "Your Lordship! Lord Krishna is alleged to have 'married' 16,000 women only. There are more than a million nuns who assert that they are married to Jesus Christ. Between the two, Krishna and Jesus Christ, who has a loose character?"

The case was dismissed.

Source: http://durgeswara.blogspot.com/2010/12/blog-post_23.html (Don't know the authenticity)

Sent by Rajesh Tiruveedula

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One common misconception everyone have is, Krishna married to 16,000 Gopikas. Actually, Krishna did not marry Gopikas. He married 16,100 queens of different kingdoms who were captured by Narakasura. After Krishna killed Narakasura, the queens said, since, they were captured by Narakasura, and no one would marry them now, they asked Krishna to marry them. And, Krishna married all of them. Another misconception that people have is, Satyabhama killed Narakasura. It is not correct. Satyabhama helped Krishna, and she even fought with Narakasura for some time. But, at the end Krishna himself killed Narakasura.

Doctors - Responsibilities

• Drinking 2 liters of water everyday morning before brushing with empty stomach
  
• Eating sweets regularly to maintain sugar levels
  
• Drinking warm salt water in case of stomach pain
  

The above three health tips saved me from lot of pain, money and time. Unfortunately, doctors did not give these advices, but my friend and relatives have given. (one of them is a doctor, but, she has not given the advice as a doctor.)

I have met many doctors, and I have told them all my problems. All the doctors gave the medicines that solves the problem for the time being. But, none of them gave any health tips by which the disease will not come back in future. A doctor giving just an advice without medicine as the treatment is too much to expect. The doctors should give treatment in such a way that, the patient does not need to come back. But, I hardly met a doctor who does treatment like that. When I ask for the root problem, almost everyone tells in very abstract terms, which are not at all useful. I feel many doctors are not doing what they are supposed to do.

Drinking 2 liters of water everyday morning with empty stomach before brushing cleans the stomach, and many problems related to intestine would be solved by that.

If the sugar level goes down, then one may get frequent headache and feel stressed even by small work. One must maintain sugar levels for good health. Except those who have high sugar levels, everyone should take enough sugar or related products regularly to maintain the sugar level.

Courtesy: Krishnan Sundaram and Dr.Usha Rani Vinnakota

Bug in Blogger in Alignment in HTML Mode

Sometimes, in blogger, when you post in edit HTML mode, the alignment fails partially/fully. The partial/full text is shown in a single paragraph. That is due to some bug in blogger, where it stops converting the new lines to <br>. In that case, wherever you want new lines, use <br> tags yourself and don't depend on blogger for converting automatically.

Anonymous Feedback Without Anonymity

I know a company which takes regular anonymous feedback. They have enough checks to make sure that, the feedback is really anonymous. The feedback is conducted by a third party, and it contains many objective questions. The third party aggregates all the responses at the senior manager level for each question and gives it back to that company. All the senior managers and above would know the aggregated feedback, and they are obliged to publish the aggregated feedback to his/her team.

In that company, some time back, under one senior manager, for the question, Intent to stay in the company, nobody said, they would stay in the company.

Where is the anonymity in that? If there was atleast one person who intended to stay in the company, the anonymity would have been there for everyone. But, now, it is clear that the entire team under that senior manager wants to leave the company soon, it would be too embarrassing for everyone in that team.

By the way, soon after publishing the results, the senior manager left that company.

Error With %0D in Linux - Removing 0D characters in VIM

Symptom
If there is a batch file in Dos/Windows, and if it is copied to Unix/Linux and run it as a shell file, it appends %0D at the end, and the command won't work. But, if the file is opened in a text editor, everything looks proper and you cannot find any ^M characters.

Cause:
In DOS/Windows, the new line is represented by CRLF. In Linux, it is represented by LF, and in Mac, it is represented by CR. If you are getting error with 0x0D in Unix/Linux, it is due to the difference in the line terminator only. The hexadecimal code for CR is 0x0D and it is represented by ^M in VIM and other similar text editors.

Verifying:
Run hexdump on that file, and see whether you are seeing 0a0d or only 0a. If you see 0a0d, it means, it is a DOS file.

Resolution:
Easiest solution is, if you have dos2unix command, then just running that command on that file would remove the 0x0D characters.

You can remove it from VIM also. If you open that file in VIM, and if you see ^M characters, then run the command

:%s/<Ctrl+V><Enter>//g

The above command will remove all the ^M characters in the file, and the file can be used as if, it is a unix/linux file.

If you don't see ^M characters in the file, it may be because, the configuration has been set to recognize DOS files. (i.e., you will not see ^M characters, which are valid in DOS). To remove the ^M characters, first we have to let VIM to show them. For that, we need to set the file format as unix, and reload the file to open in that format. The following commands set the file format to unix and reloads the file.

:set ffs=unix
:e <filename>

If we run the above two commands, it will show ^M characters, and by running the command (:%s/<Ctrl+V><Enter>//g), those characters would be removed, and you can use that file as if, it is unix/linux file. The above commands have the scope of the present buffer, and if we reopen VIM, the file format would be reverted to the one that is set in the configuration file.

Transliteration From English to Indian Languages in HTML and Javascript

In continuation with Transliteration From English to 6 Indian Languages, I have changed the transliteration from Java/JSP to Html and Javascript.

The primary differences are, the transliteration happens instantly and anyone can use this offline without installing any softwares.

URL: http://www.tnsatish.com/translate

To access this offline, save http://www.tnsatish.com/translate/index.html and http://www.tnsatish.com/translate/translate.js in the same directory and open translate.html.

I have tested this in Firefox 3.6, IE 8, Opera 10.63, and Google Chrome. If you face any issues please let me know.

Courtesy: Cannot be disclosed. [If I disclose it, they may fight for copyright ;) ]

Corruption Vs Policies

If I have to choose one of the following

• Getting back 10 times of what we lost in 2G scam
  
• Completely liberalizing Education and Transport in India
  

Without any second thought, I would choose the second option.