I’ve been using this for the past few weeks months now, and seems to work fine atleast on Win 7. Under Linux, the app runs fine using Mono + Winforms without any changes – although there’s a slight glitch – the generated URL doesn’t see to get copied to the clipboard. Let me know your feedback / rants.

(PS: Don’t judge my code, its horribly n00bish and nowhere close to being called “professional”)

Download Link:
Sources available on GitHub

( Based on Omkar’s ScreenUp and uses Bryce’s C# Wrapper for ImageShack XML API. Also, thanks to Omkar for the selection screenshot library. )

Screenshot of the software in action:

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Note: This is something I had stored on txtb.in, long, long ago. I decided to post this because people keep saying the same old shit – ‘its only 4k in US blah blah. This post was triggered by that guy Pranav ( ). Pranav – if you’re trying to reject this –

pranav.shastri: its a noob noob world

Sathyajith: and you believed that too /eyeroll

pranav.shastri: i didnt…thts y i wanted to clarify frm u

cos i knw u gt urs frm there

Sathyajith: pranav.shastri204: frickin iphone is $99 in US man
Sathyajith: no it isnt
pranav.shastri: yup it is

pranav.shastri: hmmm

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1. Back In India

Previously, I depended a lot on the crappy Airtel data card. In course of time things happened, ( which is not relevant to the review ) and I shifted to a new place. This place had a pre-existing Reliance WiMax connection, so I really cannot comment on the installation charges and support.

So I’m going to focus more on the way it works, speed and support. To begin with: the WiMAX connection isn’t exactly plug and play: once you switch on PoE you’ll have to wait for couple of minutes before you get onto Reliance’s internal network when you can sign in, via their web portal. Which is my first problem – The session sign on is web based. Why is this a problem ? Because I cannot automate the task of logging on. I have to launch the browser, visit the page, enter the username / password and then signon. If it was something like a bridged connection present on tradition DSL based lines then I could easily write a script to do the same.
My second problem is Reliance’s session management: I’ve been  using it in excess of 4 months, and I still can’t figure out when the session gets timed out. There have been times when the session hasn’t expired for more than 24 hours, and yet at times it gets expired in 4 hours – this is really frustrating more so with the way session logon is handled ( ref above).
That said, I’ve had no problems with speed. I was on the 600Kbps( 75KBps) plan then migrated to 1000Kbps (125 KBps)plan, and in both cases the speed has always been very close to the peak speed. Unfortunately, the service is anything close to what the company name is – anything but reliable. I’ve faced less number of downtimes but when its down – its down for atleast a day – in worse cases upto 3 days.
The service and support isn’t too good – whenever I faced downtimes I’d dial the toll free number. It seems that Reliance is very well aware of the issues that plague their service – the first option in the toll free IVRS is to lodge a complaint! After lodging a complaint and providing a contact number you’ll be informed that you’ll be contacted within an hour – but realistically don’t expect a call for 4-6 hours.

Pros: Speeds on par with that mentioned on plan.
Cons: Frequent downtimes, quirky session management which times out at random.
To conclude – I didn’t expect the ‘net to be as good – I’ve always been skeptical of wireless connections in general and Reliance  in specific but I’ve had good experience with this one.

As posted on MouthShut.

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I don’t take off from work very often – the main reason being me working in Chennai means it nigh impossible to visit my hometown of Mangalore over the weekend. So generally I have a set routine of work for about 3-4 months, then take a week or so off (often coinciding with some festivals/holidays/extended weekends to get the maximum number of holidays with minimum number of leaves) to take a nice break, relax and rejuvenate – an approach which had worked very well over the past couple of years that I’ve been working.

Speaking of breaks – its been quite sometime since I took a break – the last time when I was on a leave was back in August when I came back to India after my Austin jig. Initially I had planned to take an off during second week of November – a plan which sadly never materialized due to my increasing workload. While this was going on, I was in constant touch with my engineering classmates – Rakesh, Prasad, Sid,  Smi & Rach via mails, and one thing that we were always contemplating was a meetup (reunion ?) at a place so that all of can catch up at a common point. Bangalore seemed to logical choice given that it was the central location from Chennai as well as Mangalore. Deciding on the date was bit of a bother as we struggled to decide on a weekend when everyone was free. Finally we decided that New Year’s weekend would be the best time to meet, and I booked my bus tickets for Bangalore ( Volvo A/C Sleeper, night bus).

The plan was that I’d reach Bangalore on 1st morning ( yeah, was travelling on 31st night boo!), Rakesh & Smi would join at Rac’s place the same day while Prasad would join the next day. Sid couldn’t make it to the meet unfortunately. I reached Bangalore at ~ 05:45, and though I had heard it was cold, it didn’t expect it to be _this_ cold:

Brr.  Anyhow the rest of the day I was Rac’s place, just catching up, talking and wondering and discussing who is now at which place. Later on in the evening we decided to move to Amoeba for a game of bowling – and were er, disappointed to say the least once there. Being a holiday, and a weekend, there was a mad rush which mean a waiting time of 2 and half hours. For bowling. Yeah. Not too keen on waiting for that long, we didn’t bother signing up for bowling, rather went to the top floor where bunch of arcade games were there, played a game of throw-thebasketball-over-the-barrier and won a bunch of ticket – handed them over to Rac for “later use”

After the babe-watching arcade gaming we moved out of Amoeba, and decided to grab something for dinner. We decided to go to Vaayu – The Sky Lounge. Vaayu was pretty alright -basically a open air/rooftop lunge bar. The music was so-so – they were playing “pop-hits” rather than anything theme based. We had the Non-veg platter which was basically several Mughlai cuisine based dishes. To compliment the non-veg platter we also had a pitcher of Beer, and were there for couple of hours just relaxing

After that we headed back home, and once at home were trying desperately to book some tickets for 3 idiots/ Avatar but unfortunately most of the theatres were full till weekend

The next day Prasad joined us. Being the lazy  bums that we are, we were just hanging out in the house till late afternoon, when we decided to move our lazy arse and head somewhere. We headed over to Sigma Mall at Cunningham Road and headed straight over to the food court. While over there, a little menu board with Mexican cuisine suddenly brought out a craving for Mexican food in me. Being in Austin, TX for a bit meant that I’d taken an immense liking for Mexican food and wanted to try it out. Seeing that I was going for this, Prasad & Rakesh also decided to go to the same place, while I ordered for Quesedilla, Prasad and Rakesh went for Enchilada. Uh-oh. Bad move . I should’ve stuck to McD’s or something. I was cursing myself for going for these, and I can only imagine how much Prasad and Rakesh were cursing me. -.-

After stomachs (half) full, we went roaming about the mall a bit, and then to the Reliance timeout store for a bit. All the staring-at-widescreen-ultra-large-TVs-I-cannot-purchase was getting kinda boring, so we headed over to Funcity for a game of bowling. Meanwhile – Ashwin informed me that we would be leaving office and we would meetup at Windsor Pub, which was pretty close ( just around the corner, actually) from our current location.

The bowling game was meh for me – I started out OK but then things got rather embarrassing.  We wrapped the game, and Rakesh, Prasad and me headed over to Windsor. Upon reaching there we found that Ashwin couldn’t quite wait for us and started off on Beer & Fries already (grr..). After the initial introductions, Ashwin informed that 2 of his buddies, Paresh and Shreenidhi would join us. We had a great time (well I hope the others did, I surelt did), talking about music, work, life over Beer, French Fries, Fried Squid Rings(which nearly choked Shreenidhi ), Rajah’s Special, Fried Fish(Pomfret to be specific) – good times indeed .

( from L – Rakesh, Me, Prasad, Paresh, Shreenidhi, Ashwin)

Being an avid travel addict that Ashwin is, he mentioned about his desire to drive to Ladakh – to which me & Prasad expressed our desire to join in!  We spent few hours at Windsor, it was great meeting up with all of those folks!

We bid our farewells, hoping to meet again and headed back to home. The final day in Bagalore was nothing eventful, just more laziness, meeting more people and general mall roaming. Overall I had a great time in Bangalore – I got a chance to meetup with old classmates, some new folks, and I got my much deserved break

Well I’m back in Chennai again, night shifts as always

Will try to squeeze in a post about the previous year, till then – Ciao!

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2. Happy Birthday To Me
3. Homecoming is here…almost!

Well nothing in particular, just that you know, you have to keep things changing (OK not *that* much) to it look fresh. I’d been planning for a theme change for a bit now, but was too lazy to scope out which would be good. And then just yesterday I stumbled onto Theo Jones’ blog and was just blown away by his theme. And the best part was that he had released it for all, and integrates well with the social networks I frequent on (well, except that the last.fm records plugin is *slightly* broken but doesn’t affect the blog looks at all).

What I really liked about the theme was that it was clean, I mean realy *crispy* clean, no distractions, no annoying popups or ads ( yeah I got rid of InfoLinks and AdSense – which didn’t do much and I didn’t bother about anyway). Surprisingly, the lack of a sidebar didn’t bother me – I generally stuff up the sidebar with *ahem* goodies but.. yeah I guess I fell for the clean look. I’d prolly do ever-so-slight changes (for one, rename that, err, “Rotating block” to something else). Probably add few of my links, and a blogroll to the end as well. Though I’ve received fairly OK response over twitter & fb on the theme (most of it being – its way too clean/looks like a newspaper) but what the heck – I’m gonna use this theme for a bit.

Comments on the theme/how further are always welcome.

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Anyways back to the post,  couple of days ago, as I was spending time in morning, my iPhone started to buzz away. It wasn’t very surprising, since getting a message in morning isn’t something out of the ordinary. Opened the message only to see it was a blank SMS from an unknown number. Ignored it at first, but then the buzzing went on continuously. In a matter of few minutes my inbox looked like this:

I got a breather for few minutes, and then it started AGAIN. Much worse than first, “wave” if you will. The way I was getting, I was wondering if it was some sort of mass-SoSS (Sending of Spam SMS, my term, just move on). In an hour, I got nearly 100 blank messages. 100. ONE HUNDRED. Think about! One frikking hundred messages.

What’s worse is that because of the way iPhone works, soon as you get an SMS, there’s a popup on the screen showing (x) new SMS. And you can’t make it go away. Not by pressing Home button, lock, unlock yadda, yadda, yadda – nothing. Only way to make it go away is by tapping the “close” button ( yeah – think about tapping “Close”x100 times). I was frantically trying to switch off the sound and vibration, so that it becomes less irritating and doesn’t resemble a giant sex toy vibrator. Meanwhile I was thinking of an blacklist application, so that this frikkin’ madness can  stop and I distinctly remember reading about iBlacklist on Cydia. Immediately launched Cydia so that I could install it. Now since I was accessing it via EDGE, I loath having to open Cydia because it has to undergo an entire refresh repository cycle. Given that these SMS were coming in thick and fast, the data connection would timeout and Cydia would crash

Finally, I was able to connect to Cydia and install iBlacklist. Next step was to figure out, who this bugger was. Suksy pointed me to a site where I could get details on approximate location, based on the number (thanks dude – much appreciated!) & figured that this bugger is a Chennai guy and has a Vodafone connection. Next up called Airtel and spoke to them about my predicament. Airtel customer care mentioned that since it was a Vodafone number they couldn’t do much, but they informed me to call up Vodafone customer care or the Cyber Crime cell. I tried to  give Vodafone Vodafail customer care number but all I got was a “Number is too busy”. ENTIRE FREAKING DAY. Ever heard of Customer Care numbers being busy whole day ? Yeah.

I posted on Chip forums if anyone had Vodafone number, Giri informed me that he was near a Vodafone centre and asked me to send the number over to him. Ashwin also asked me to send over the number to him, and I did so.Giri replied couple of hours later informing me that Vodafone Vodafail is helpless and could not do anything ( HUH?? MORONS!). Anyhow at this time iBlacklist was taking care of the SMS and I got involved in work. Next day, I got a call from the same number (I’d setup the blacklist for SMS, not calls), the guy seemed frantic and kept saying he got the phone just yesterday, he has no idea how this happened, said he won’t do it again. (heh). He also mentioned something about getting calls from Bangalore and asking not to get his number barred (heh, Ashwin at work). Anyhow I said OK, OK in my broken Tamil never got a call or SMS from him. I did examine the blacklist history, and seems that there was close to 170 SMS that I received from him. With Rs. 0.25 charged per message, I can only feel sorry for the unwanted expenditure of the guy. Oh well.

On the brightside, I’ve noticed that iBlacklist is an awesome app. Will post more on it soon.

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First thing: the return trip. The return flight was rather uneventful, nowhere near how my flight from Mumbai to Austin was ( well, that’s a good thing).

My flight itself was rather long ( heck what do ya expect from a transcontinental flight anyway), covering 4 different flights – American Airlines from Austin to Chicago, and from Chicago to New York  and Jet Airways from New York to Brussels (stop over) and from Brussels to Chennai.

I was rather surprised at the airport, for one the security check was nowhere near as extensive when I entered US, or for that matter when I left India. My baggage was checked in all the way to Chennai so baggage wasn’t a problem either.

My Jet Airways flight didn’t exactly start off with the right foot, with my in-flight entertainment system not switching on(kept throwing an “ERR” on the remote control) and the Cabin Crew couldn’t do much (they said they “reset” it, but meh it was the same thing). The Cabin Crew, however, did manage to get me another seat and the inflight console was functioning. Initially I thought I was the only person who was having problems with the console but turned out *a lot* more folks were having the same problem. Infact the guy sitting next to me(ie, after I changed my seat) was rather pissed and asked for a complaint form and filled it up. Besides that it was alright. Watched Rock On, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Star Trek, CSI, Friends & 2 and a Half Men, besides listening to lot of songs on my iPhone ( yea,  I got an iPhone 3G, 16GB ). Left for Austin at Saturday morning 08:00 Austin time, and finally landed in Chennai on Sunday night 23:30 IST.

Ankit was kind enough to come to the airport to pick me up and had some accomodation ready for me ( it was a Mansion at Triplicane, though not my previous mansion). I was in Chennai for a whole week ( amidst colleagues asking about how my US stay was, when I’m leaving home etc) . Just before I left Chennai for Mangalore I made a decision to move over from Triplicane to Perungudy, mainly because well, I’d be working half Indian, half US shift since I’d have to support my colleague in US and the distance from my office to Triplicane is rather far away and it’d be difficult to goto my room. Perungudy’s lot closer to my office ( about 2 Kms) so travel isn’t much of a hassle now. Unfortunately that means that I won’t be Ankit’s roommate anymore, I asked Ankit if he wanted to come but he declined.

Following week I left for Mangalore for a much deserved 2-week break – I hadn’t had seen my family for over a year and gotta say – the feeling when Shriya came running yelling “Sathyu Maamu, Sathyu Maamu” was uber fantastic . In Mangalore, didn’t do much, met with Rakesh, Sid, Prasad, & Seema. Went to few places like Sultan Battery, the beach, my ancestral  place in Uppinangady, it was great stuff

As mentioned, I’ve shifted to a new PG in Perungudy, it’s a nice place, got food, Internet, AC so all good

Also, last week we had our first ever Chip forum member meetup, and we had a forum member AshwinSid who came all from Bangalore for the meet! We met at Blur, had a nice time chatting, and some gaming time. You can catch the details, photos all over here.

We’ll be having our second meet this weekend, will write more on that soon.

Cheers till then!

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First the basics:

1. Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition (new purchase) price: $799
2. Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition (upgrade) price: $549
3. Microsoft Visual Studio 2008: Express Edition price: FREE

Here’s the kicker:

To qualify for upgrade pricing, you must be a licensed user of an earlier version of Microsoft Visual Studio or any other developer tool (including free developer tools, such as Visual Studio Express Editions or Eclipse).

So – here’s your $250 off! Install Visual Studio Express Edition and then upgrade it to Visual Studio Professional Edition, saving $250 off  instantly! Now wasn’t that easy?

As on Microsoft’s page and MSDN forums.

PS: Yes, I’m back in India. Will update soon

PPS: You can use Express Edition and save $800 –  but thats according to your requirements

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Lets travel back in time – nearly 3 years ago. I was just about done with my 6th semester in College. I was barely scraping through college, no thanks to me and a certain VTU (“V Torture U” – my university). 3rd – 6th sems were probably one  of the worst phases of my life. I almost lost a year, with my overdues (“OD”) almost killing me. Almost – is the keyword – I didn’t. My folks were pretty supportive, as were my friends. My “escapades” through mid-college meant that I was ineligible for campus selections, and here I was seeing those people snapping jobs left and right because they were able to “cram” everything into their frigging minds and “vomit” them out onto answer paper – word by word, letter by letter, punctuation mark by punctuation mark. This cramming thing was something I could never do. It was rather disgusting to see these people (mainly girls – no I’m NOT being sexist here) spew out letter by letter things from the “prescribed” textbooks – ask them a Question and they would tell you which page, paragraph and line these definitions were there.

Come campus selection time, and it was cramming and vomitting all over again – only this time the “source” was different – aptitude books, C Programming books, lab programs you name it, these guys had crammed them all ready to vomit. It was also rather painful when these people would ask me why a certain function works this way, just minutes before the scheduled interview times, only for their good luck to be asked the same question, they’d vomit it out, get selected – and hey after that they get this air of “superiority” and snobbishness and sneer at people who helped them get the freaking job in the first place. I just let it go – didn’t even bother going to College during these scheduled test/interview days.

It was about beginning of 7th sem when I started to pull it together – the subjects got interesting ( to my liking anyway), got some good marks but not enough to salvage the damage caused initially.

This fine day – I saw this notice on our notice board about Aptitude test for another job. I was just about to dismiss it, but this clause of “required marks criteria” NOT being present got me thinking and I was like – probably my last shot – why not give it a try.

I mentioned this to few other folks – notably Neeths & Sid. The three of us, and few others from my college gave the test – and I  cleared the test and the Interview (if you’re wondering – no, I didn’t “practice” for it) – and finally got a job.

Over the course of time after I was selected for the job but before joining, I started speaking to few of my would be colleagues, friends and room mates about where to stay and etc. Soon I was done with college – and the D-day had come. I had been posted to Chennai and hence I left my hometown of Mangalore for Chennai.

The memories are still fresh in my mind – I reached Chennai few days in advance as I didn’t have a place to stay there, and thought I’ll need a day or two to scope out few guest houses and mansions. Met Adi on July 6th, we went about hopping from Mansion to Mansion, speaking a mix of English, Hindi, Kannada, Konkani, Tulu to bring out pseudo Tamil – ‘t was a though time trying to communicate with the guest house owners. The next day Ankit reached Chennai, Shankar the day after.

2 years have passed by since then. We’ve had our fair share of ups and downs. The first 3 months of training – which was an absolute bliss. The pondy trip brought the Ruby gang¹  closer than ever. Once we were assigned projects and teams it was different altogether. But we never missed our daily lunch and evening snack times – when all (well, most anyways) would join in, discuss on what’s happening around the organization and world.  A practice, which is still continued today – I believe. Though about half of Ruby gang has moved on – some got married, some left for higher studies – but the memories still remain.

A big Salute – to the Ruby gang. It’s been an awesome time – and truly I’ve had the pleasure of having some cherished memories with the gang.

1. Ruby gang – because Ruby was the name of our training room

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I’ve been trying to find a utility which would offer me a similar function for Windows XP, which not much success. Found a few apps but they just simulate the “Show Desktop” kind of a feature, till I came across this post at Lifehacker, that is.

[ad]

I tried it out – and the application – ViGlance is just fabulous. Just what I wanted. ViGlance emulates the Windows 7 superbar pretty much in an awesome manner. But wait in addition to the grouping of Windows, it also replaces the standard 16×16 icons to 48×48 icons and replaces the Start button with the Start button, with transparency effects to boot. The icing on the cake ? It doesn’t require helfty, screw-with-system-transformation packs, neither does it require installation – Yup its a portable app – and its only frikkin’ 239KB in size! Yeah – read that again.

The obligatory before and after pictures.

After installing ViGlance

Ofcourse, the ViGlance doesn’t have Jumplist feature – but I’m not so bothered about that as I don’t make use of it. I wanted AeroPeek, and I got it.
IMO, this is a must have app for Windows XP & Vista users, especially if you’re sorely missing out on AeroPeek while not on Windows 7.

Download it from here or from here(Direct download, My DropBox).

Do post your comments, or let me know if you use some other app for the same!

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