Exactly one year back on 19th of January my blog post on my trip to Shivagange Betta was published as an article in Bangalore Mirror newspaper. For those you missed reading/seeing it you can read it at On Top of Shivagange. Or if you would like to see the actual representation of the article as it appear in the newspaper with all the photos, view the pdf On Top of Shivagange (PDF).

Do write your comments below.

Last week my BSNL CDMA based internet connection (NIC Card) was giving very slow speeds of around 1KBps. So I needed to call the BSNL people to register a complaint. Here are the telephone numbers that I came across (for my future reference):

[1] 080 – 28450010
[2] 080 – 28450410
[3] 080 – 28450420

All the numbers seem to be diverted to some other number and were mainly busy all the time. After a couple of tries a person lifted the phone (with number end 010). He listened to my problem and told me to report it to another number, which is mentioned below:
080 – 22385969

The above number looks to be some call center but might be of a technician, don’t know. He told me a solution wherein I needed to take my data card to their Customer Service Center and get some configuration changes done. I didn’t care to implement as I was sure it was not the problem. So I asked him if that does not work what should I do? His reply was upgrade to EVDO.

The solutions provided involved just looking at the issue at customer end instead of looking at the issue as some problem with their infrastructure, hence they provide options which involve me running around to the Customer Service Center or buying a new EVDO device.

Anyways since yesterday I am back to normal speed. So no issues at the moment.

I have been using Firefox for as long as I can remember, but lately I had been facing a issue of Firefox taking around 5-10 seconds to exit when I closed it. I had been lazy to look up and resolve this issue, but today I finally got down to it.

After searching and reading lots of sites, wherein most of them pointed to some issue with the extensions. So one option was to disable all the extensions and enable them one by one and test to see which one was causing the problem. But this would take a lot of time. And most of the sites had users who mentioned the extensions they were using and they had tested them, so all the extensions I use were listed there. So I was pretty much sure extensions were not an issue.

Then on one site it was mentioned that this could be caused by a plugin like Flash. This is when I noticed that I had only a couple of plugins and I could test them in one go. So I disabled the Picasa plugin which I do not use much and restarted Firefox. Then closed it. Poof! It was gone immediately.

To confirm I open Firefox again, loaded a few pages closed some of them and exited Firefox again. Again, Poof! Immediately closed. So the slow exit was caused by the Picasa plugin which I was using. So much for the issues, one small plugin can cause so much slowdown in shutdown of an application. Looking forward to the next release of Firefox viz., 3.6. Hear it is a lot faster. Happy Browsing till then.

Tired of seeing the new mail alerts in Thunderbird which is inconsistent with the other alerts in your Ubuntu based system and want to use the Ubuntu’s libnotify based notification system.. Then there is good news for you, there is a project going on which is currently in beta stage which provides a add-on which will display notification messages using the libnotify library which is used in the Ubuntu Notification System. You can find the add-on at Libnotify for Mozilla.

The add-on is more useful if you are like me who has multiple email accounts managed by Thunderbird. Using the native Thunderbird mail alert, it always using to show the details of the first mail account which receives the mail.

For example if I have two mail accounts GMail and Yahoo!, and I receive two mails in my GMail account, it would have shown ‘You have received 2 mails in GMail’, and subsequently when I get a mail in Yahoo! it would have shown the alert ‘You have received 0 mails in GMail’. This is a know bug which has been open for a long time. But when I used this add-on it worked like charm. No issues at all with multiple mail accounts. Thanks to the developers for this add-on.

Get it from : Libnotify for Mozilla

Reservation/Quota! The two words which you will hear a lot in India, where ever you go these are the words you cannot escape. Right from school till you die you will have to live with this, why? Becuase with more and more catagories being created what is left for the so called ‘General’ category is marching towards nill. I would not be surprised if we soon reach a stage where there will be only 5% available to ‘General Category’ and the rest will be reserved for one of the various catagories, in process paving way to ‘Reservation’ based community like in olden times, just the names would be different, now it would be SC/ST/OBC etc.

Let me take the example here, for the BBMP (local) polls here in Bangalore there are 198 wards/seats out of which 127 have some sort of reservation linked to them!! It may be either SC/ST/BC/Women etc, which leaves only a mearge 71 for the ‘General’!! Then there is a news article in today’s paper which tells that the Madras High Court has asked the nationalised banks to promote to officer cadre the people who have joined under the reserved quota. The banks had put forward the point that the promotions should be based on merit cum seniority and not quota, but the HC didn’t fully agree with this. So this bring me to the point “Where are we heading?”

It is not that I am fully against the concept of reserved quota for certain section of the society. I feel it should be only available at max till the end of Graduation, after that there should be no Reservation concept at all. There is no point in giving jobs to people who do not have the required skills by overriding people who have slogged it out and are denied the opportunity just because of the quota system. When this happens the person with skills is discouraged and encouragement is given to people who can under quota get a job even though they are not apt to do the job. I do not say that everyone who get a job under quota do not work properly but a reasonable portion spoil it for all. So at the end everyone suffers, the people are denied proper service and every thing gets delayed.

I think the time had come for India to look forward to a new way to provide opportunities without using the Reservation quota system. But with politician who are here to promote their own selfish desires rather than people causes it looks like a dream that the system would change.

What do you all think about the reservation/quota system in India?