Posts filed under ' General'
Update (13-Apr-2007): Apparently, I heard recently that they have changed the design - due to the nature of the soil at the construction area. I think it won’t be a inverted pyramid as shown below.
OK. This one is for real, unlike the major HOAX forward mail that was floating around a couple of months back.
The real proposed Design of the new Infosys Campus at Mangalore looks as shown below:
Source : http://www.hafeezcontractor.com
Will post more pictures if I get a chance!
You can find designs of other proposed Infosys buildings at the Hafeez Contractor’s website.
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November 11th, 2005 at 12:41pm
Perplexing Paradox No. 1
A crocodile caught a kid and when kid’s mother came for rescue, crocodile posed her a question - ‘You can make a statement. If you speak the truth in it, i will return your kid . Otherwise i will eat him.’ And the mother agreed. The clever mother made the statement - “You will eat my kid’. Now, the crocodile is in a dilemma of what to do.
Perplexing paradox No. 2
A king caught the bandit chief and before punishing , offered him a statement. The king said ‘ You can make a statement. If you say the truth in it, you will be shot and if not you will be hanged ‘ . The clever bandit chief replied ‘ I will be hanged’. The king got into a dilemma of what to do.
Perplexing Paradox No. 3
Few centuries ago, a Law teacher came across a student who was willing to learn but was unable to pay the fee. The student struck a deal saying ‘ I would pay your fee the day i win my first case in the court’.
Teacher agreed and proceeded with the law course.
When the course was finished and teacher started pestering the student to pay up the fee, student reminded the deal and pushed days. Fed up with this, the teacher decided to sue the student in the court of law and both of them decided to argue for themselves.
The teacher put forward his argument saying : ” If i win this case, as per the court of law, student has to pay me. And if i lose the case, student will still pay me because he would have won his first case. So either way i will have to get the money “.
Equally brilliant student argued back saying : “If i win the case, as per the court of law, i don’t have to pay anything to the teacher. And if i lose the case, i don’t have to pay him because i haven’t won my first case yet. So either way, i am not going to pay the teacher anything “.
Any more such Paradoxes that you have come across ?
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November 10th, 2005 at 10:33pm
The next two weeks are kind of going to be very hectic. My wife, would be travelling to US of A again. This would be her second work assignment in US. She would be traveling to Houston, TX. So, lot of things to do. Starting for finding accomodation to buying and packing stuff. This time we are a bit relaxed since its her second trip, and her travel itineary is almost the same as the previous one. (except for the final destination - which was Norcross, Atlanta, GA last time)
In the mean time, our entire family has planned to go to Tirupati this saturday to visit Sri Venkateswara Temple. We should be back by Monday end of the day. Lot of people would be around, so I think it wont be a boring trip.
And then the following week, I would have to travel to Chennai on official work!. So, lot of running around for the next two weeks.
In office too, some new and intresting work as come up. Getting a chance to work on a software called eRoom and Sharepoint Portal Server 2003 ( or Windows Sharepoint Portal Services on Windows Server 2003). But most of the folks at office are on vacation since its festive season here in India. Specially people who leave quite far from home are on leave. So, office is kind-of half empty. But no major impact on work/projects.
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October 27th, 2005 at 12:59am
Floods in Bangalore! Can’t believe it right ?
Got these images as forwards today. These Images were clicked somewhere in Bomannahalli behind M2 (Wipro office), Bangalore. Seems like they were taken using a camera phone.
Can’t believe that this happened in Bangalore!
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October 25th, 2005 at 07:53pm
Update - Oct 25, 2005: Finally my GPRS is working on BSNL Prepaid. Check update number 4 given below.
Does anyone knows how to activate the BSNL’s GPRS service for prepaid connections in Mangalore, Karnataka (south) ? Please leave a comment if you can help.
Here is what I have done so far (I use a Nokia 6600):
1. Sent a SMS to 3733 with the text ‘ACTGPRS’.
2. Received a SMS within a few minutes saying my request is received, and the message asked to wait for a confirmation SMS.
3. Confirmation SMS from +444 received tell me that GPRS and MMS service has been activated.
4. I called up the customer care for the configuration settings. They SMS’ed me the settings. (You can get the settings from : This Place too. Its available on the BSNL site too.)
5. Installed the settings. Its as simple as saving the SMS.
6. Tried to connect to the net using opera/netfront/services (built in browser), using the access point created by the configration settings.
7. It tries to connect, but so far no success. The GPRS signal indicator (the little “G”) blinks for sometime and then disappears. No specific error message.
9. Sent a SMS again to 3733 with the text ‘ACTGPRS’, to which I got a reply back saying, ‘GPRS and MMS services are already enabled’.
Has anyone successfully set this thing up ?
I have called the customer care, spoken to them ‘n’ number of times, but its of no use. Typical government stuff.
Any pointers to success would be really helpful.
Update 1 (Around Sept 19th, 2005) : BSNL customer care folks told me that the GPRS service is down for a few days and should be back online withing couple of days.
Update 2 (Sep 26th, 2005) : Called up local customer care center at Mangalore. The person says that Nokia 6600 handset has some problem with BSNL GPRS network! - Can anyone confirm this ? Cant directly trust these folks. Everytime you call them, they give you some new reason. If I get a chance, i will check it with an different handset. BTW, the solution suggested by the BSNL local guy is to upgrade software (firmware to the latest version - costs around Rs. 500).
Update 3 (Oct First week) : Spoke to one more person at the local exchange. Could reach that person after getting redirected atleast 5 times. Almost always, the person at the enter end, conviniently gives one more number saying that the next person is ‘the’ person who can handle this!. Finally, I end up talking to a technical guy (I think!). Now, this person doesn’t say anything about Nokia 6600 problem. He says even he wasn’t able to access GPRS for a couple of days. Asks me to call in a couple of days. I call back after couple of days. He says some settings have been changed just a few days back, and he doesn’t have the settings. Asks me to call back after 20 mins. I call back. Says, settings are too lengthy. Says, he cant tell the settings over the phone (WTF???). Points me the BSNL webpage mentioned above to download the settings. I downloaded the settings again. No change. Still no GPRS. Anyone from BSNL with a decent knowledge of whats happening … reading this ?
Update 4 (Oct 25, 2005) : Finally got my GPRS activiated today. The endless calls to the customer care turned out to be a total waste. Yesterday, I called up the local customer service center in mangalore. They refered me a the number of JTO of mangalore. JTO inturn gave me one more number. It was kind of endless chain. Finally I landed up with some technical person. The person confirmed that all my settings were fine. Then he checked the system (HLR) and told me that my GPRS wasn’t activated at all!. WTF!!!!!!!. He told me that at Mangalore, he wont be able to activate it, and he gave me the contact number of a person in bangalore. The person at bangalore told me that I need to call him up again today. It seems this is happening all the time and that he is fed up. Some how, the reporting system says that the GPRS is activated, but in reality (switch) it isn’t.!
So, I gave the same person a call today. And finally, he enabled my GPRS access. Now, I am able to browse on my phone. But its quite expensive. Only in emergency!
Update 5: For the benefit of all everyone, here are the correct GPRS Settings for BSNL south users for Nokia 6600. These settings work for me.
Navigate to : Menu -> Tools -> Settings -> Connection
Select GPRS (Second item on the screen)
GRPS Connection -> When needed (if you select when available, GPRS will be always active, and you would be charged. So, use with caution)
Access Point -> gprs.cellone.in
Click on ->Back
Select Access Points (first item on the screen)
Option -> New Access Point -> Use default settings
Connection name -> bsnl-gprs (can be anything)
Data Bearer -> GPRS
Access point name -> bsnlwap (not bsnlsouth)
User name : ppp
Password : ppp123
Authentication : Normal
Homepage : http://localhost/home.wml
Then….
Options ->Advance settings
Phone IP address -> Automatic
Primary name server : 0.0.0.0
Secondary name server : 0.0.0.0
Proxy server address : 10.31.54.2
Proxy Port Number : 9401
Done.
If you want to browse the net using Opera, then you must set the proxy server address and proxy port number mentioned above in opera settings too. The same holds true for other browser too.
If the above settings don’t work, then clearly, your GPRS is NOT activated by BSNL. Call up the local BSNL exchange, and ask them to check if GPRS is activated in the HLR.
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September 16th, 2005 at 02:19pm
Are you a Alumni of Manipal Institute of Technology - MIT, Manipal ? Then do register yourself as an Alumni by filling up the alumni registration form available at :
http://www.manipal.edu/mit/forstudents/alumni.htm
This database would be maintained by the college itself, and should be quite useful for all MITians in future.
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July 28th, 2005 at 02:08am
The ants needed some hard disk space, and so, my hard disk was attacked by red ants last Friday.
Result : Hard disk conked off.
For the past couple of days, I could see some ants on my table. But never thought that they would get into the machine and take shelter inside the hard disk.
Everything was working fine till Friday morning. When i switched on my machine Friday night, the boot sequence was kind of abnormal. Scan-disk came up, and reported that some parts of my HDD weren’t readable, and was kind of stuck. Then I rebooted my machine, skipped scandisk, and managed to boot into windows. But it took around 30 mins to boot into windows. Damn slow. Knew something was wrong with the HDD. Rebooted again, and went into BIOS setup to detect HDD. In BIOS, things were behaving in a very unpredictable fashion. BIOS would detect the HDD sometimes and sometimes, on boot, i would get the message ‘Primary master failed’ etc. So, I decided to open up the PC and see whats up inside. Only to find that there were lot of ants right inside the HDD. :(
I have 2 HDD. Seagate (40 GB) and Maxtor(160GB). Both are stacked one about the other inside the cabinet. The ants were between these two HDD. Both the HDD’s were effected. But my primary HDD - Seagate was kind of damaged - may be bcoz of a short circuit. I immediately cleared off most of the ants that were outside. But there were ants inside too. i.e., between the PCB on the HDD and the sealed section of the HDD.
Took the hard disk /machine to the local vendor on Saturday, opened up the PCB of the HDD, cleared it. But the damage was already done to Primary HDD. :(.
Impact : Immediate and major impact was, lost the windows installation and some data. But nothing major that i can remember. So, i had to start from scrape on the other HDD. I am done installing all the basic stuff needed for day to day use.
Recovery : Luckily, the failed HDD (Seagate), was recognized by the BIOS. But there weren’t any partitions. I guess the partition table was damaged. Now, the recovery is on. I have managed to recover 3 out of the 4 partitions, and attempts are on to recover the last partition too. Some data is gone. But thats nothing to be worried about.
Reason : Not very sure what the reason is, but this is what my wild guess is. Its rainy season now, and is pretty cold outside. I keep my PC on for the whole night most of the days, and as a result, the HDD area is kind of Hottest spot in our room/house! So, i guess the ants sensed the warmth, and decided to take shelter over here.
Need to do a full fledged pest-control of my room/home. Now, no antivirus software can prevent this :). Can they ?
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July 24th, 2005 at 01:43pm
Scene: A flood affected area of Vadodara, Gujrat
Cast: Joint Commissioner of Police, K. Kumaraswamy, riding on the shoulders of a Constable to save his feet and trousers from Flood Water!!!
Source: The Indian Express, July 2, 2005.
Not sure about the validity of the source. Got this one as a mail forward. But, by all possibility, it could be true in a country like ours.
No wonder India is the way it is today. We have lot more to learn and improve.
Update : Harsh Says … “there is a report of correction to above from Indian Express of 15 July 2005. It says he was on work for last 17 hours at that time and is having a permanent injury in his leg from a bullet 10 years back”. Thanks Harsh for the update.
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July 13th, 2005 at 10:31pm
Parineetha - The married women. Great movie. Saw it over the weekend. Wanted to watch this one in the theater, but unfortunately, the local theater here in Mangalore (Jyothi) showed the movie only for 2 weeks i guess. So we missed out.
Nice movie. Good setup. Nice direction. The music is good.
Vidya Balan is the new actress, and she has done an excellent job in here first hindi movie. She is a Tamilian Iyer by birth, born in Kerala. She has been on the TV screens for sometime now. Infact, she has acted in the serial call ‘Hum Paanch’ which used to be aired on Zee TV. She has also appeared in some Ads on TV, also in some music videos of Euphoria. This is her first Hindi film, and she has done complete justice to the role. Loved the expression on her face. Cute.
The music is catchy, and goes well with the film. No hard sounds. Light and melodious. The settings are great. The dresses are too good. Typical traditional Bengali stuff.
The only downside is the the way in which the movie ends, which is kind of stupid!. Could have been better. But overall a great movie to be watched.
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July 11th, 2005 at 10:11pm
Did some minor to this blog. The first major change you would notice is the header image. It keeps changing now for every refresh. Used the image rotation script from matt. Do let me know your feedback on the images used. All of the images are shot by me using my Digital Rebel.
Other changes.. some minor cosmetic changes to ads displayed (this would keep changing for some more time), some minor changes to the items that can be seen on the sidebar.
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June 21st, 2005 at 06:45pm
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