Welcome to Jwalant's Blog!

Tasks for Saturday evening

jwalant.soneji@gmail.com (Jwalant Natvarlal Soneji) — Sat, 5 Nov 2011 20:22:00 -0400

Well, I am now done with my official tasks for the week and looking forward to complete some personal-Internet related tasks.

Here are those:

Streamline blogs - This involves separating materials currently getting blogged to separate buckets - personal, social, Internet related, and miscellaneous.
Create blogs - Now, I am feeling a need to separate personal blog. Till now it was only facebook or sometimes blogspot or twitter. Though, the "other" mediums are good at spreading information, they are not good at managing personal notes, communicating with friends, learning technologies and posting about technological updates all together. I have to "revolutionize" my website to match to my "expectations". :-)

List of blogs and what those are intended for:

Blog on Blogspot - Only technical stuff
Blog on Wordpress - Only social stuff
Other blog on Wordpress - Only new consumer technologies
Website: Linking all of the above at one place + personal notebook

Why I am positng this article on Technology blog? Because its related to personal management with use of Technology.

Let's start!

Wonderful Software for Linux

jwalant.soneji@gmail.com (Jwalant Natvarlal Soneji) — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 21:13:00 -0400

Hi,

It has been quite sometime that I have been trying my hands on Linx.
So, I am gonna put some wonderful software for your perview.

For All (Many) Linux Distros:

Tixati: The great torrent downloader (Tixati website: http://www.tixati.com/, Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_BitTorrent_clients)
LeafPad: A lite-weight, easy to use text editor (LeafPad website: http://tarot.freeshell.org/leafpad/, Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leafpad)
PyRoom: Looking for writing down something today in a total chaos? PyRoom is here to help you! (PyRoom website: http://pyroom.org, Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PyRoom)

For Fedora:

Yum Extender - A great software to manage your programs (Yum Extender website: http://www.yum-extender.org/, Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowdog_Updater,_Modified)

For Ubuntu:

Synaptic - One of the most promising software on Ubuntu; makes searching, installing and managing software a real fun. (Synaptic website: http://www.nongnu.org/synaptic/, Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synaptic_(software))

Let me know your feedback about the list.

Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari fight "The Battle of Life"

jwalant.soneji@gmail.com (Jwalant Natvarlal Soneji) — Tue, 7 Jun 2011 20:57:00 -0400

Its been a good amount of time that I posted something on this blog. No, It's not true that I was not reading and writing technical posts, but on other medias for sometime; and yes, it was Facebook. :)

Now, I am back to Google's blogger site.

This time its a very Interesting article on browser wars. The modern battle which is expected to cause many browsers struggling for their dailies.

The original link was published in CodeProject's daily newsletter. The original site is ArsTechnica. I like the site for blogs posted on it; they are very informative and well structured.

Here's the link:
http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2011/06/may-browser-market-share-microsoft-and-mozillas-continuing-chrome-conundrum.ars

Read the article and let me know your views by replying to this post.

Starting from the next post, I am going to put my thoughts on this war.

I will also try to provide neutral view on various internet browsers I have used and will recommend the best one(s) for you.

Thanks for reading!

Facebook does not want me to find friends in my GMail address book

jwalant.soneji@gmail.com (Jwalant Natvarlal Soneji) — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 17:24:00 -0400

I don't know when this website-wars will end.
Now, its Facebook.com which has started saying that it can not find friends from my GMail address book.
It does not support the given email addresses.

I am not sure what exactly has happened in recent months, but it feels that Facebook.com has started giving signs of monopoly over the social networking market. Well, one reason could be the 4 years old deal between Microsoft and Facebook; and the former may feel that its time to take revenge.

I would like to remind said social networking websites that no one can control social networking by non-social means.

Microsoft Live Mail Contacts has lots of problems

jwalant.soneji@gmail.com (Jwalant Natvarlal Soneji) — Wed, 2 Feb 2011 01:28:00 -0500

Microsoft Live Mail Contacts has good features of importing your contacts from various sources like GMail, Facebook, Hi5, etc.

However, once you are done with import, you will see many contacts with same names.
Well, it has feature to Clean Up Contacts, which will diligently show you duplicate contacts, and ask you to click to Auto-Merge them. Impressive, right?

Here comes the legacy problems with Microsoft's web applications. The merging functionality is not working for a long-long time now. When clicked on Merge, it shows pages with sorry text:

####

This page is temporarily unavailable

We're sorry, there was a problem showing this page. We experienced some technical difficulties retrieving the content.

Please try this page again in a few minutes.

####

There are some more bugs and ill-placed features as well. For a person like me who wants SkyDrive's 25GB free online space and wants to connect to friends as well, there is no other option than to manage in whatever is provided by Microsoft.

Is there any alternative to this? :(

Update: Today is 14-Jun-2011; and the problem still persists.
Update: Today is 29-Jun-2011; and the problem still persists. Now my Hotmail account is linked with Microsoft Outlook 2010, which does not have contacts cleaning option. Also, I am using Windows Live Mail (Desktop Client) which has menu item for Cleaning Contact; and that eventually puts me to the same bugy Contact Manager webpage.

Drupal - Disable Create Account request by anonymous users

jwalant.soneji@gmail.com (Jwalant Natvarlal Soneji) — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 00:17:00 -0500

Hi friends,
I wanted to disable 'Create Account' option for anonymous user visiting Drupal site.
It is a very basic task; but, important!

Here are the steps:

Log in to your Drupal site as with Administrator credentials
Go to: Administer --> User Management
Select Public registrations: Only site administrators can create new user accounts.
Save; and your done. The link to Create Account from site is gone for users other than Administrator.

Have fun with Drupal!

Trying Outlook Programming

jwalant.soneji@gmail.com (Jwalant Natvarlal Soneji) — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 16:37:00 -0500

Finally the day has come when I really felt the need of VBA programming for Microsoft Office Outlook.
Wish me the best....

Update: According to Adding Contact Picture To Custom Contact Form | TheDailyReviewer, it is not possible to have the contact picture functionalities such as printing a custom business card with contact picture....
Why? :-x
I'm gone.... :(

Google Reader: Lots off stuff, with some pain

jwalant.soneji@gmail.com (Jwalant Natvarlal Soneji) — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 00:44:00 -0500

I have been using Bloglines for quite a some time; it was world's no. 1 RSS feed reader for long time.
And then came in Google Reader, its all fresh Ajax scripting combined with Google's search database provided excellent growth to it compared to Bloglines.
And now, Google Reader enjoys the top position. Bloglines started beta in parallel, did well, but finally, it was shut. And I was shocked!

MerchantCircle bought Bloglines and now it is in process of migration of feeds from Bloglines to Netvibes.

Anyways, coming back to the point, Google Reader has everthing that you don't need from a RSS feed reader, however, it does not have a simple "Create Folder" button. :-x
It's help is dull and old: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/reader/thread?tid=727517bedacca0b8&hl=en
It's really really painful to create a new folder in Google Reader and on top of that you can't have nested folder, i.e. folder inside a folder.

I don't know what to do; just imported an OPML file got from somewhere and now those new feed folder are lying in my reader view, there is no way to manage them.
Google says create a bundle, which is a virtual one, and also, it can not have folders in it. :(

Any solution?

FB - See suggestion, but can't deny them..?

jwalant.soneji@gmail.com (Jwalant Natvarlal Soneji) — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 20:23:00 -0500

Facebook has thrown a new page for its users, where users can see suggestions for them, however, I do not see any link to say: "Thanks, but no thanks! He/She is not my friend!" Why?

Is it a 100% positive attitude?

Check it out in your profile: http://www.facebook.com/#!/find-friends/browser/

Let me know what you think about the new feature!

Issue with Drupal setup on XAMPP

jwalant.soneji@gmail.com (Jwalant Natvarlal Soneji) — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 15:13:00 -0400

Hi friends,
For the whole evening I was trying to complete a local installation of Drupal.
I was done once, and then I changed the root password; and the MySQL database refused to connect from PHPMyAdmin then onwards. :(

The current setup is:
OS: WinXP
Software: XAMPP (following all components are installed on it only)

Web Server: Apache
Database Server: MySQL
Web Portal: Drupal

And now getting this error:
###############################################

Access forbidden!

You don't have permission to access the requested object. It is either read-protected or not readable by the server.
If you think this is a server error, please contact the webmaster.

Error 403

localhost
8/22/2010 12:31:58 AM
Apache/2.2.14 (Win32) DAV/2 mod_ssl/2.2.14 OpenSSL/0.9.8l mod_autoindex_color PHP/5.3.1 mod_apreq2-20090110/2.7.1 mod_perl/2.0.4 Perl/v5.10.1

###############################################

Let me know if anyone has faced it; and know how to resolve.

LinkedIn not able to fetch my webmail contacts

jwalant.soneji@gmail.com (Jwalant Natvarlal Soneji) — Sat, 7 Aug 2010 08:22:00 -0400

Now, its LinkedIn.com, the very much reliable, trusted, and robust web software, doing some goof-ups, and it follows Facebook.com, Blogger.com in the league of buggy web-software. Read my previous posts for the details. Importing web-mail contacts to LinkedIn.com is not working fine, for me at least, for quite a few months now. What happens on the page?:

URL: Import Contacts and Invite | LinkedIn
Enter web-mail details
Click on Continue
LinkedIn.com reaches to the site in order to find your address-book contacts list
A confirmation on the web-mail page to allow LinkedIn.com with access to your contact list
Result: Error on the LinkedIn.com page: We're sorry but there was a problem importing your contacts. Please check back later.

Let me know if you are facing the same problem.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Update: Today, 28-Dec-2010, is the day, when I do see successful import of my GMail.com contacts to LinkedIn.com. Let's celebrate. :)

Update: Today, 17-Jun-2011, after checking my GMail.com contacts, LinkedIn.com told me that you have 411 friends already on its site. What? Amazing!

Blogger allows spam comments

jwalant.soneji@gmail.com (Jwalant Natvarlal Soneji) — Fri, 6 Aug 2010 10:41:00 -0400

It's been a very bad month for me with Blogger.com; my posts got spam-comments, all in Chinese language; and you know what - they have kept coming.
Every post gets almost 2 back to back spam comments.

How do I tackle with this spamming?:

The worst things about Blogger.com is that it does not allow me, the owner of the blog, to mark the comment as spam, or even, report them as abuse.
Then I login as the owner of the blog and move to the post with spam comment.
Now, as I need to report the same to Blogger.com, I move to the Blogger.com profile who has put the comment, by clicking his name on the comment.
Interestingly enough, the Chinese spammer has got an empty blog on Blogger.com in every case.
Blogger.com again do not have functionality to this kind of profile as a spammer; there is no "report abuse" on the user details page.
Then, I move to the blog of the spammer and report that blog as abuse: spamming. :-x
Having done this, remove the spam-comment by deleting the comment with "remove it completely" option.
And then, again with a new post repeat from step no 1. :)

Now, some of you may ask for a demo; here's it: this post is bound to have a spam comment again.
And remember, Blogger.com is going to allow the spammer to put the comment; and I will be continuously moving between step 1 to 8 every time.
At lease untill Google looks upon the issue. Let's pray for it. :)

Problem in Facebook friend finding page

jwalant.soneji@gmail.com (Jwalant Natvarlal Soneji) — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 12:30:00 -0400

One of the best feature of social/professional networking sites is to locate your existing friends. One step ahead of others Facebook also suggests friends. Not really sure what algorithm they use to suggest friends, it has been quite a handy tool.
I have been using this feature quite often on Facebook; however, for some days I have noticed buggy things in this page.
Once clicked on the close button of a suggestions page, the suggestion closes, and appears again after sometime as another suggestion, i.e., the same suggestion comes multiple times.

Try yourself: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/find-friends/?__a=22&ajaxpipe=1

Experiements with Drupal

jwalant.soneji@gmail.com (Jwalant Natvarlal Soneji) — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 09:21:00 -0400

Well, recently started wondering how Drupal, Joomla, DotNetNuke work.
It's very interesting install all these and try variety of things they can perform.

Right now, trying to integrate Drupal with Twitter.
The purpose it to have 2 way twitting from Drupal. Got some modules to do the same, however, I don't understand much out of them.

Friends who have already done this are welcome to provide ideas.

Thanks!

Firefox 4.0 beta 1 is available

jwalant.soneji@gmail.com (Jwalant Natvarlal Soneji) — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 03:19:00 -0400

Firefox 4.0b1 is available for download: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html

I tried it on Windows as well as Ubuntu... it's great - fast and furious..

Let me know how you feel about it..

National Students Day - July 9

jwalant.soneji@gmail.com (Jwalant Natvarlal Soneji) — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 03:15:00 -0400

Congratulations to all students; July 9 is dedicated to you...

Akhil Bhartiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the largest student organization across the world, celebrates July 9 as National Students Day across India.

Ref: http://www.hindu.com/2008/07/08/stories/2008070850280200.htm

Microsoft Silverlight does magic

jwalant.soneji@gmail.com (Jwalant Natvarlal Soneji) — Wed, 9 Jun 2010 22:07:00 -0400

Silverlight has done it.
Microsoft Office Live is live now.
You can create Microsoft Office documents online and store them to your Microsoft Live Skydrive account.
Here: http://office.live.com

Not rolled out for all countries yet; I believe, the English version is available for all.

Enjoy!

Next Fedora release

jwalant.soneji@gmail.com (Jwalant Natvarlal Soneji) — Sun, 9 May 2010 02:38:00 -0400

List of features of CMS/Web/Blog Hosting Servies

jwalant.soneji@gmail.com (Jwalant Natvarlal Soneji) — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 22:24:00 -0400

How to foil traffic cameras

jwalant.soneji@gmail.com (Jwalant Natvarlal Soneji) — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 12:48:00 -0400

IT people are really getting innovative when it comes to confer government systems. :)

One guy imagined to foil the traffic camera with license plate attacking a traffic camera through SQL injection technique:

What an inspiration to think innovative!

Share your thoughts...

twirdie - Golf game on Twitter

jwalant.soneji@gmail.com (Jwalant Natvarlal Soneji) — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 13:11:00 -0400

twirdie has given a new way of enjoying tweeting - Golf.

The site, in beta right now, allows you to input word(s) on its page, depending on in what proportion the word(s) are used in tweets in last 20 secs (yes, only last 20 seconds), the ball will move towards the post.

The swing your shot gets depends on only one thing: how many tweets are done with those word(s) in last 20 secs

I got a big score when input "office" when it was noon in US; at the same time got near to nothing for "tea". :)

You may need to write some less tweeted word(s) when you are near to the post.

Enjoy twirdie and let me know your feedback!

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Firefox 3.6 is here!

jwalant.soneji@gmail.com (Jwalant Natvarlal Soneji) — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 11:43:00 -0500

Firefox 3.6 is here!

Posted using ShareThis

10 Web Browsers You Probably Haven't Heard Of

jwalant.soneji@gmail.com (Jwalant Natvarlal Soneji) — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 11:59:00 -0500

Now, here comes a complete new list of browsers!

Read them all, especially the "why you should use it?" stuff, and you will surely enjoy!

At the end is my favorite browser: Flock - www.flock.com
There are lot of things for Linux and Mac guys as well!
Konqurer has a surprise entry, at least a surprise to me. I am glad to know that it has taken inputs from Netscape Navigator.
I wish K-Meleon was there: http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/

Enjoy!

Infy Story - Good Things Do Happen

jwalant.soneji@gmail.com (Jwalant Natvarlal Soneji) — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 01:45:00 -0500

It's part 1 of the story.

I liked the way it is presented.

As the author says, its a bit long story, but read it completely to enjoy it fully.

http://gauravm.wordpress.com/2009/12/25/good-things-do-happen

With you, I am also waiting for sequel.

Infy Stories - What say!

jwalant.soneji@gmail.com (Jwalant Natvarlal Soneji) — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 01:41:00 -0500

Hey,
Thinking about starting a series of Infy stories, what say?

I would like to collect them from the web and the club them here, only for you.

Comments are welcomed!