I had such an experience recently with BSNL when I subscribed to their CDMA based internet connection which they call the ‘NIC Card’. On Aug 2nd I went into their Customer Service Center in NR Colony, filled in the application, submitted the required documents and paid in the security deposit and got the device (Huawei EC325). I was told the number would be activated by Aug 4th (Monday). Monday came and went so did Tuesday, nothing happened, I was still unable to connect and no official communication from they about any blockers.

So on Wednesday (Aug 6th) I went to their office at 10am (which is their opening time for such queries), 5 mins….10 mins…20 mins…30 mins…still the concerned person had not yet come to the office. Finally one of the other official told me to give my contact details and told me they would get back to me.

Finally at around 12pm I got a call from the CSC office telling me that there was a problem with the exchange and they would have to reconfigure the device so I was asked to get the device to their office at 10am on Thurday. So next day I reach their office at 10am sharp…and the same story continues…the person who had called me was not going to be coming to office that day and the next in charge who would look into this arrived only at around 10:35. The official told me that there was a mistake in the number alloted, instead of the number number ending with 89 they had feeded it as 59. Oh! Come on…so the official had a long talk with the various dept’s and finally confirmed that the device would be reconfigure to have the number ending with 59.

Once reconfigured, there was no network available hence was told it would work, as it was already 11:30am and I had to get to my office, I accepted their word for it and went. Tried it later that night; it was still not connecting. So went to their CSC office once again at 10am…and as usual waited for the customary 30 minutes, after which the main official came, checked and tried various things and finally told me that there might be some malfunction in the device and it was best for me to cancel the connection and get a new one.

I squarely refused to do so, since there was a three month commitment period and if I ask for disconnection it would mean that it was my fault and I would have to end up paying the three months rental. So I gave them two options, either repair the existing device or if they feel it is not possible to do so they could give me a new device which they could without my involvement that is internally closing and opening a new connection. They went for the first option and told me that they would send the device to the Whitefield office to check and asked me to come on Tuesday (12th Aug).

On Tuesday….I wait for the mandatory half an hour and then they tell me that they are yet to send it to Whitefield. I ask them when I should come back for which I was told that they would call back when it is done. Days pass by and no progress, since I was free on Aug 16th (Saturday) I went into their office and enquired again, and they tell me it has still not been sent to Whitefield. W

Now this was getting a bit too much even for my level of patience, so I told them to check the device again and I sat along with them to see. They again started calling up different department, on one such call they mentioned the ESN number to the other dept, this is when I realised that they had the ESN entered wrongly into their system as well, and not just the phone number. Instead of the ESN number ending with 50D, they had entered it was 500. I told them this, they were really happy at my discovery and the other dept quickly changed the ESN number in their records to the correct one. Tried connecting again….still not happening.

Was this device faulty or something…well I was not the one to give up after all this…so asked them to reconfigure the device again, this is when I noticed that when reconfiguring the device earlier they had changed it from ending with ‘89′ to ‘99′, instead of ‘59′. This was the epitome of mistakes. They finally changed it under my hawk eyes and when they tried to reconnect…viola the connection happened. Half a month of patience, numerous rounds to their office and hours of waiting had finally ended. They thanked me for helping out and as I left I had just one sentence for them “Thank me now, but when the bill for the month comes I will be back again, since I have not had service for half the month (2nd Aug to 16th Aug) and you will have to deduct that.”

Omkar Hills also known as Omkara betta is situated about 4 to 5 Kms off the Mysore Road and is one of the lesser known places for weekend hangout. Situated at an altitude of 2,800 ft it is one of the highest points in the city of Bangalore and offers an magnificent view of southern Bangalore. Another attraction of this place is the very huge clock built by HMT, more about this later.

Coming back to the complete details, I started off to Omkara hills by getting on a route 225 BMTC bus from KR Market (Next to Tipu’s fort) at 12:10 pm, I am compelled to believe all the #225 and #222 route buses go till very close to the Omkara hills, but it is always best to confirm with the conductor/driver before getting in. As most of the people may not be aware of the place, the next best identification of this place is Rajarajeshwari Nagar and JSS college.

The bus continued on the Mysore road (halting for a brief while at satellite bus stand) till the huge arch leading to Rajarajeshwari Nagar and then turned left to reach Rajarajeshwari Nagar and continued on, I am not sure which place the bus was going, but I got down at the JSS college stop and after a short walk reached the JSS college at around 12:55 pm.

Once on top hill there are a couple of things that caught my eye, the first is the very huge clock whose dial has a diameter of 24 ft. This clock was made by HMT and is assumed to be the second biggest clock (I would not bet on that…) and is told to be bigger than the Big Ben….yes the world famous clock situated in UK.

The other aspect of the clock which makes it unique is: (quoted from http://omkarhills.org/) :

At the commencement of every hour, the clock chimes the sound of couch (Shankanada) followed by “Om” five times. The Shankanada is meant to awaken the consciousness of everyone to the great truth which is revealed by five Omkara to follow. Om which is a combination of three syllables A, U and M – represents the three states of life (the waking, the dreaming and the deep sleep state), creation, existence and dissolution, etc. It is the hub of the wheel which represents all the gamut’s of our life.

Second thing that caught my eye was the beautiful view of Bangalore, though the new temple coming up in the premises blocks us getting the complete view, it is still a very good experience, the cold breeze blowing about….no one around to bother you…..this is a true untapped bliss.

May be the time I reached was the reason not many people being around, but there was sure a huge platoon of the special task force (police) ready for action. But sure had a great time spending a good hour and a half here.

Another attraction is the area surrounded by the banyan tree which is named the ‘Sarvadharma Samanvaya Peetha’ which means seat of equality for all religions. The tree is surrounded by eight mini shrines of different religions.

The hill is known for the beautiful view it offers of the sunset, but alas I could not wait for another 4-5 odd hours waiting for the sun to set. So I set off to another location near by called ‘Shidhar Gudda’, I took a bus from near the JSS college and got down two stops later, walked for a good quarter kilometer only to see the place closed. It had visiting hours 8am-1pm and 5pm-8pm. So seeing no point in waiting around there I headed back to the bus stop. On reaching the bus stop I asked a person about the bus frequency, on knowing that I wanted to go to Kengeri bus stop he told it is better to walk as it is just half a kilometer away,

So I quickly walked to the bus stop and got into #227 bus back to the city. This is when I realised, If one starts early around 9am, one can go to not only the above two places but also to other two places I had already been namely ‘Dodda Alada Mara’ (read about it at http://nithinkamath.info/archives/2008/03/dodda-aalada-mara-big-banyan-tree-trip/ and ‘Muktinaga temple’ by boarding the #227 bus from Kengeri. And if one has a vehicle one can go till the Menchibele dam also.

All in all had a great mini trip and enjoyed every moment of it.

June 17 2008 was the day the Mozilla team decided to release Version 3 of the Firefox browser. And to add to all the new features that come along with it, they took upon the challenge to create a record for most downloads in a day for a software.

I took part in this initiative and here is the certificate provided by the Mozilla team to recognise by download.

You can download the latest version 3 of the really fast and one of the most extensible browsers at the browser website.

For the past few months I have been using my Sony Cybershot W80 extensively and taking photos left and right. One of the features that I use is that of creating folders on the memory card. On one such occasion I created a new folder which was for experimenting with the camera options next day.

Once I finished with the experimenting I wanted to delete them, since there were lots of photos deleting them individually did not make any sense so I used the ‘delete all photos in the folder’. The pictures got deleted fine….but as luck may have it the initial few photos were the one which I wanted. So was it all gone for ever??

Well….Google is here…..did a quick round of search and ended up with a quick open source solution to recover media files from a memory card. here is what needs to be done.

• Install ‘testdisk’ package for your distribution
  The first step which I did was to install a software package named “testdisk”, depending on the distribution you use you should easily be able to find the package.
• Make an image of the memory card
  The next step is to make an image of your memory card, this is achieved using the ‘dd’ command which comes by default with most distributions, the command you will have to issue is:

  $ dd if=/dev/sda1 of=memory_card.img bs=1024

  In the above command, ‘if’ is the input drive which should be your memory card, ‘of’ is the file name for the image which we are creating, and ‘bs’ is the byte size.

• Recover files by scanning the image using photorec
  The final step is to use a command provided by testdisk package. The ‘photorec’ command will recover all the JPG and GIF files which were recently deleted from your memory card. The command is very simple:

  $ photorec memory_card.img

  The software will take you through a menu driven interface where you will have to select a few options to get your work done. It is simple and anyone should be able to use it with ease.

So by following the above three simple steps I was able to recover the pictures which I had thought were lost for ever and that to using only free software and on a Linux system. There is one or the other software in a Linux system which will always be there for your requirement but may have been unknown to you, but once you know your requirement you would be amazed at the options that are available, atleast I was blown away. Three cheers to free software and lots of thanks to the developers of ‘testdisk’ and ‘photorec’. Now only if someone would write a proper GUI for this….well I don’t want to be too greedy…

So I am off to take more photos without having to worry about losing some photos unintentionally when deleting photos from the Cybershot memory card…

Finally, I found a simple and really fast image viewer for my gnome desktop - GPicView. The first impression I got of this software was that this looked very much similar to the Microsoft Image and Fax Viewer, and the layout of the buttons is quite similar to it.

Before coming across GPicView I was using ‘Eye of Gnome’ for viewing images and photos. But some how or the other I felt it was a bit slow to start up and use. But GPicView, though not as polished as the other software is a no nonsense approach to image viewing. It just has a few options to offer, but it does what it is designed to do - that is view images and pictures. A must have program, given its small footprint and the small install files size. The best things about GPicView is its really fast load time on low end machines with very less RAM.

The features of the program are as below (taken from the sites homepage, link provided at the bottom of the post):

• Extremely lightweight and fast with low memory usage
• Very suitable for default image viewer of desktop system
• Simple and intuitive interface
• Minimal lib dependency: Only pure GTK+ is used
• Desktop independent: Doesn’t require any specific desktop environment
• Open source, licensed under GNU GPL

I download the rpm for my Suse 10.2 from the http://rpm.pbone.net/ site.

You can find more information about this project at its home page - http://lxde.sourceforge.net/gpicview/.