• Sold off my iPhone 3G and purchased a Nexus S
• Supposed long term US stay gets cut short.
• 3+ years of work on project gone down the drain. On the upside, learnt quite a lot.
• Met Manaa in person, after being a very close friend for 6+ years
• Was elected as Community Moderator for one of the Stack Exchange sites, Super User
• Wrote my first Chrome Extension to get around WebNonsense crap
• Bad security practice from the past comes to haunt me.
• Quit 3i and joined Logica at the middle of the year – after almost having joined TCS, rejected in final round of interview at Oracle & a bungled interview at Société Générale.
• Did a short term stint in Bangalore for training at Logica
• My beloved Nexus S got stolen, purchased a iPhone 3GS from Shivaranjan as it’s replacement
• Went on a road trip to Goa with Appy, AshwinSid and SwaroopH during the middle of the rainy season.
• Test drove the Swift & Figo. Waited for the new Swift to arrive in market and then went and booked the Ford Figo. Swift’s price put it out of my budget & couldn’t wait 6+ months for the Swift
• Met Harshad Sharma & Malcolm after having known them for *years* on twitter.
• Gatecrashed Ravi’s wedding.
• Ran all over Chennai in trying to get the paperwork & formalities done for the car loan
• Car loan got disbursed, did the payment, only to be told, couple days before taking delivery that I will be relocated to Bangalore
• Cancelled car booking, return loan since re-registration of TN car in KA === heavy losses. Total damages: 2.3k(loan processing fees) + 4k (first month interest)
• Got a permanent transfer to Bangalore! (woohoo!) Ashwinsid & 9_6 welcome me in style.
• Moved to a 1BHK house on rent. Much thanks to Dkris for allowing me to stay at his house and give expert tips on house hunting.
• Watched Poets of the Fall perform with front row, centre stage view at The Great Indian Octoberfest
• Got clicked for #TAD365, thanks Roycin!
• Met GeekGod & Waste-u Photographer, Waste-u Photographer’s bitch and Frequent Flyer Manish
• Finally, welcomed the New Year at a far-away coffee estate in Chikmagalur.

Gadgets bought/acquired/reviewed

• Kingston V100 SSDNow 128GB SSD
• Belkin Gold 8-socket Surge Protector
• Mugen Extended Battery for the Nexus S
• iPhone 3GS
• Razer Goliathus Omega Control Gaming Pad
• DLink DSL-2520 ADSL Router
• Dell UltraSharp U2312HM 23” IPS Screen
• Lava S12 Android phone

Overall, a fab year. Happy New Year – and best wishes for the year ahead.

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MARUTI SUZUKI INDIA LTD (MSIL)
Head Office Maruti Suzuki,
India Limited Nelson Mandela Road,
Vasant Kunj, New Delhi-110070.
Board no.46781000.
Fax: 46150275 and 46150276

OFFICE NUMBER : +917838133834

“MARUTI SUZUKI” DIRECT RECRUITMENTS OFFER.
This Company selected 62 candidates list for Senior Engineer, IT,
Administration, Production, marketing and general service Departments, It
your Resume was selected as one of the 62 candidates shortlisted for the interview. MARUTI SUZUKI
is the best Manufacturing Car Company in India, The Company is recruiting the
candidates for our new Plants in Delhi, Bangalore, and Pune and
mumbai.Your interview will be held at The Company Corporate office in New
Delhi on 18 OF JANUARY 2012 at 11.30 AM, You will be pleased to know That
The 62 candidates selected 55 candidates will be giving appointment,
Meaning that your Application can progress to final stage. You will have
come to The Company corporate office in New Delhi. Your offer letter with
Air Ticket will be sent to you by courier before date of interview. The
Company can offer you a salary with benefits for this post 62, 000/- to
200, 000/- P.M. + (HRA + D.A + Conveyance and other Company benefits. The
designation and Job Location will be fixing by Company HRD. At time of
final process. You have to come with photo-copies of all required
documents.
REQUIRED DOCUMENTS BY THE COMPANY HRD.
======================================
1) Photo-copies of Qualification Documents.
2) Photo-copies of Experience Certificates (If any)
3) Photo-copies of Address Proof
4) Two Passport Size Photograph.
You have to deposit the (Cash) as an initial amount in favour of our
company accountant name in charges to collect your payment. Department.
for Rs. 12,500/- ( Twelve thousand five hundred rupees ) through any [STATE
BANK OF INDIA], HDFC BANK OR [ICICI BANK] Branch from your Home City to our Company
accountant name in charges. Account NO, which will be sending to you upon
your response. This is a refundable interview security. Your offer letter
with Air tickets will be sent to your Home Address by courier after
receiving the confirmation of interview security deposited in any of the
STATE BANK OF INDIA OR ICICI BANK. This Company will pay all the
expenditure to you at the time of face-to-face meeting with you in
Company. The Job profile, salary offer, and date -time of interview will
be mention in your offer letter. Your offer letter will dispatch very
shortly after receiving your confirmation of cash deposited in STATE BANK
OF INDIA OR ICICI BANK. We wish you the best of luck for the subsequent
and remaining stage. you have to give the information after deposited the
security amount in bank to The Company HRD -direct recruitment via email.
Your Letter with supporting document will be dispatch same time by

courier to your postal address after receipt of security deposited
confirmation in bank. The interview process and arrangement expenditure
will be paid by SUZUKI COMPANY. Lodging, travelling and local conveyance
actual will be paid by SUZUKI COMPANY as per bills. The candidate has to
deposit the initial refundable security as mentioned by HRD.NB: You are
advice to reconfirm your mailing address and phone number in your reply.
And 12,500/- (Twelve thousand five hundred rupees) will be the refundable
amount, as 200 rupees will be deducted as bank charges for funds deposit.
and if you are been selected or not, still the amount will be refunded to
you, as the amount is just to prove that you will be coming for the
interview in order for us not to run at lost after sending you the air
ticket and you don’t show up on the day of interview. Wishing you the
best of lucks
Regards,
Shinzo Nakanishi
Chief Executive Officer, Managing Director,
MARUTI SUZUKI INDIA LTD (MSIL)
Email : maruritisuzuki.job2011@live.com
OFFICE NUMBER : 0783813834

Unlike other spams, this one targets the job seekers( and I can assure you, there are a *lot* of them). First glance a “direct job” offer looks tempting, along with the “feeling” that you are part of the “elite” few. And hey, you’re getting an all-expenses paid(!) ticket for the interview.

Now if you’re jumping up & down and respond immediately, you’re just getting sucked deeper into the scam and in the end, you’ll lose a lot and make headlines as “n candidates scammed Rs y of their cash”.

If you take a second look at the email, there are signs of obvious spam.

• “Direct offer” without being “shortlisted” (of course, if you had applied for MSIL, you might think this is real!)
• Interview security deposit? Uh-oh
• Account number of the accountant to be sent to you? Why accountant?
• Offer letter till be sent without the job interview being completed? Why hold the interview then?
• Offer letter will contain date of interview? Okaay..
• The horrible language, grammar, lack of punctuation(although, I’ll admit – I’ve seen call for interview letters with bad grammar too)
• Ah yes, the live.com email address(why not MSIL’s domain?) and yes the blatantly incorrect spelling for Maruti in the email address.

Goes without saying, if you get this email – don’t respond, don’t reply cursing(F&#^ YOU! YOU’RE SCAMMING!) – hit the report spam option.

Meanwhile, I’ll have to check if there’s a way to report an email as spam from outside the webmail client…

No related posts.

The culprits so far:

• Airtel (telephone, Broadband)
• Reliance (telephone, Broadband)
• Tata Teleservices (Broadband)
• You Telecom(Broadband)
• Maruti ( car)
• Ford (car)
• Hyundai (car)
• Volkwagen (car)
• Honda (car)
• Fiat (cat)

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Unfortunately, I was standing up and the moment I plugged the drive in, the USB drive slipped from my hands and fell on the ground, just as the drive had spun up to it’s maximum speed of 7200 rpm, instantly killing it. I plugged it back in, with little hopes of it being alright, but listening to the sounds confirmed what I had feared – the drive was dead, making the click of death. The data loss was minimal – most important documents were on Dropbox, Pictures on flickr, Picasa, Posterous & Dropbox. Bulk of the hard drive was populated with data from my previous install of Windows, which I meant to clear up but never bothered. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any backup of my Music – so I’ll have to redownload them again. I’ve been using last.fm, Grooveshark or Spotify (depending on my mood |) pretty extensively, so I’m not too heavily hit by the loss of my music collection. And with me using last.fm to scrobble all of my listened music, my entire music library is available online.

Another data which comprised the bulk of the data on the hard drive were the installed games that I had purchased via Steam – I’ll have to redownload these again but I’ll do them as and they’re needed.

****

That was on the start of the week. This Thursday, however I faced the most significant loss – my beloved Nexus S – was stolen while boarding the bus. Anyone who’s known me or met me knows how possessive I am about my phone – don’t let it go out of my hand. I was heading back home from work, waiting for the bus to come. The bus was crowded, more than usual. I hesitated at first on whether or not to take the bus, bus considering that I had been waiting for half hour, decided to board the bus. While climbing, some dude bumped into me. Once in the bus, after I paid for the bus ticket, I decided to listen to some music and *wham*. That sickening feeling of knowing that your phone’s no longer there hit me. I asked a lady standing next to me to give a call – but it was coming as switched off. And bear in mind all this happened within a span of 10-15 minutes.

The thief flicked my phone, switched it off, tossed out the SIM within that period. *sigh*. I didn’t have any tracking apps installed either to make things worse. My first concern was that the thief would try to delete my contacts, and since contacts are sync’d to my Google account, they would be deleted from there as well, so I rushed over and changed my password. Since I use LastPass premium, I also revoked access to the app.

For now, I purchased a second hand iPhone 3GS from Shivaranjan – ideally I would have gone for the Nexus S again(yes, I love that phone!) but it was out of stock on Flipkart. Knowing Shiva would have a phone or two as backup(!) I DM’d him if he was willing to sell any of his Android phones, he said negative but offered me the 3GS.

****

If these 2 incidents weren’t enough, ICICI was there to fuck up things even further. I had opted for an upgrade to my debit & credit cards(both were due to expire soon) about 2-3 weeks ago. This week, I finally got my debit card. ICICI nicely informed me that they would send over the PIN for the debit card in another postal mail for “security reasons” – this would take another 7 or so days. While that was fine, these dumbasses also deactivated my existing debit card, which meant I couldn’t withdraw from the ATM, all this while I’m due to pay rent for my room. And with my phone stolen, I couldn’t even get the phone banking to work – it would reject my account number and report that the debit card entry was invalid.

Finally after a lot of head banging, I managed to get the debit card activated.

To top it off, Airtel decided to take their own sweet time in reactivating my replacement SIM request. Yeesh. Hope at least the next week turns out to be a little bit better.

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Mugen Power Batteries, one of the most popular aftermarket battery manufacturers have brought out some high capacity batteries for quite a few mobile devices, including the Nexus S. Mugen were kind enough to send me a review sample of the Mugen Power Nexus S Extended Capacity 3300mAH Batteries, and I’ve been testing them for the past 3 weeks and have been quite pleased.

First, a look at the extended battery specifications:
Cell Type: Li-Ion
Voltage: 3.7v
Capacity (mAh): 3300

In comparison the stock Nexus S battery is a Li-Ion, 3.7v 1500mAh battery. Theoretically, the battery capacity is about 2.2 times the stock battery. Unfortunately, this also means that the battery is quite thick – almost 2 times as thick as the stock battery. The thickness of the battery means that Stock Nexus S back cover will not fit over the extended battery.

Mugen has thoughtfully provided a replacement battery door. It’s worth pointing out that the replacement battery door also features a NFC Antenna so that you don’t have to worry about losing any functionality.

Build Quality, Weight & Thickness

A pet-peeve I’ve had with the Nexus S is that the plastic back door doesn’t seem to be very durable and there’s this constant fear of it breaking into two while trying to remove the cover. While the replacement back cover is still plastic, thankfully it has a more rugged & sturdy feel. To aid in easy removal of the cover, there’s a handy little notch at the top of the cover. The notch also assists in giving you a nice grip to remove the cover.

As mentioned earlier, the higher capacity battery is about 2 times as thick as the stock battery. This results in your very slim & slick Nexus S looking quite literally like a chalkboard duster. The battery also adds considerable weight to the phone. If you have trousers with rather tight pockets, the results are definitely not pretty and it’s going to look like a big bulge. The thickness also means that the phone will now be more susceptible to scratches from keys and the like.

Despite the bulk & thickness, the phone doesn’t feel awkard to hold, fits in your palms rather well.

Performance

For testing, rather than using any synthetic battery testing software or benchmarks, I subjected to my daily rigor.  I consider my usage to be on the heavy side: on an average, my usage is as below:

• Auto sync, background data transfer enabled.
• Sync Accounts: Google Apps ( Mail, Contacts, Calender), Google Account(Picasa, Google+), WhatsApp, facebook(all contacts)
• Background apps: twicca, Skype, Latitude, Foursquare, Gtalk
• About 3 hours of music playback( app used: PowerAmp + VooDoo sound)
• Atleast 1.5 hours of dedicated Internet browsing( lunch time, while compiling)
• Checking up on tweets, facebook, Hacker News once every 45 minutes or so.
• About 1 hour of calls,  10 or so SMS

I subjected the battery to yet another torture test: one of my favourite features of the Android: Portable WiFi Hotspot. With the portable hotspot running for about 3 hours on 3G, the battery drain was about 25%. That’s just awesome.

Conclusion

Links:

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Although, I was not  *strictly* Bangalored, barely a week after joining Logica I was asked to come over for Bangalore for 2 weeks for some training sessions. Now since this was a company sponsored training, my travel and accomodation was handled by them.

Reached Bangalore on Sunday, May 1st morning via the Jan Shatabdi Chennai-Mysore train at 10:45am. Ashwin was kind enough to come over to the railway station to pick me up. Headed over to At-home Guest House at Koramangala, which was to be my place of stay for the duration of the visit. With no agenda being set, Ashwin & Me were wondering what be the next thing to do. Ashwin & Me remembered Ashwin Murali ( “Cruise” to avoid any confusions” ) tweeting about TGIF having reopened in Royal Meenakshi Mall, and that’s where we decided to move next.

In true twaddict fashion, we sent a tweet about a tweetup at TGIF and we were joined by DKris & Fossil. Daaku was supposed to come but cancelled last minute due to some heavy rains. Santosh & HNP also cancelled since it was too far away from where they stay. We spent a good 3-4 hours there, discussing about anything and everything over pitchers of Beer & Mojitos, and some excellent food. Needless to say, it was one of the best meetups that I’ve had. Although we were supposed to meet Santosh & HNP at Guzzlers, we decided to cancel that because of the distance.

The rest of the week went about in traditional clockwork style – met up with my new team mates ( as of now, I’m the sole member of my Project in Chennai, rest are in Bangalore). I did get a chance to meet up with my engineering classmates Prasad, Sharath & Sadanand though – it was nice catching up with them.

Also managed to pay a visit to see my nephew Neel – I’ve been meaning to visit the every time I paid a visit to Bangalore but something or the other always came up.

The upcoming weekend on Saturday was spent with another tweetup, this time at The Egg Factory with Ashwin, Arun(aka mixdev), Sameer Panchangam & Deepak. With Arun carrying his D500, Ashwin decided to apply his creative genius and take some nice pictures.

Sameer also took a pic of the 4 Samsung phones that were on display in the shape of Google’s Nexus brand

We headed over to UB City after that for… actually I have no idea what for We just needed to do some time pass I guess.

After roaming about aimlessly in UB City, we decided to drop by Naturals icecream before calling it a day.

Over the second week I was a little bit more swamped with work, and the days flew by really fast. Before heading back to Chennai, met up with Neeta & Sujith over at Forum.

For my return trip, I wasn’t able to get a train ticket (full, as usual) so took a KSRTC AC sleeper bus. Ashwin had come to pick me up, and after settling the Guest House dues, we headed over to Bobby Ganesan¹ only to find that the place was totally reserved ( even though 99% of the tables were empty). Ashwin suggested we head over to Olio’s and we proceeded there. The food was pretty OK ( quantity was rather sad though).

) and since we had asked for a pitcher of Beer, some KingFisher folks were around, and they told us that we were eligible to tear open a voucher for a surprise gift – which ended up being a Cricket bat keychain.

Anyhow, it was a nice 2 weeks in Bangalore – not sure when I’d back back there again. Before signing off, I wanted to make a note – Bangalore used to be a place where trees used to quite common – even within city ( heck it was known as the Garden city)

However, now, sights like these are very rare.
(sorry about black bands)

1. Barbeque Nation

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Today seemed like just another day. Little did I know, in a span of about 20 minutes, the resulting set of events would be hugely embarrassing for me. I had barely woken up, when my phone started going bonkers with notifications coming from emails, chats & twitter replies. A glance at the notifications indicated that my email account had been compromised and phishing emails had been sent to every one in my contacts list.

[...]

So, what went wrong? It all boils down to a culmination of the PlayStation Network hacking, some bad habits from my yesteryear and some nice features from Gmail which resulted in the phishing email to look like it came from my current domain account instead of the old Gmail account. Let’s have a look at each vector:

• PlayStation Network break-in
• Not monitoring my email account
• Password Reuse
• Send mail as and Reply-to set to my domain address

Read a complete account of what happened over at techie-buzz

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I had tweeted these 2 simple sentences, the former about 3 months ago, the latter yesterday. Yep, after nearly 4 years, I’m moving away from 3i. It’s been an interesting experience – I’ve ranted and raved about my journeys on twitter, and often blogged about my experiences and misadventures in 3i ( if you have same free time, go read through the archives – good stories there). In these past (almost-)4 years, I started out as a trainee, creating patches & shipments, moved onto to GUI development using Oracle forms, switched over to backend stored procedures development using PL/SQL. Then came the big challenges – client interaction & data migration. Moving data from a 30-year old legacy system is no easy task, and with the constraints & adherence to business logic to be followed – was no doubt, the most challenging task that I had undertaken. Big props to all my colleagues, team mates, peers who helped me along and encouraged and motivated me. Also, a special Thank You to the Ruby gang.

So what’s next? I will be moving over to Logica, starting Monday. I’ll still be in Chennai, though.  Here’s for the new challenge ahead.

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While the SSD was in transit, I started researching on how would I be able to fit the SSD into my laptop, with the SSD as the primary drive and the existing Seagate Momentus 7200rpm hard drive as the secondary drive. Digging up the Envy 14 manual, I was under the impression that having both drives would be possible.

(here 1 indicates the primary HDD bay, 2 the secondary HDD/SSD bay)

Soon as I got the SSD, I set about ripping apart my Envy 14, only to be dismayed.

Seagate HDD on the Envy

Second empty bay for HDD/SSD

While you can certainly add a second drive, it’s by no means user replaceable/serviceable and seems to be tightly sealed off. So I had to dump my plans to have the Seagate HDD as the secondary internal HDD and was forced to convert to an external USB 2.0 hard drive ( criminal, I know!) using this Transcend StoreJet case for an internal drive.

Replacing the existing hard disk, however was simple and straightforward. Had to slide off the battery cover, remove the battery, unscrew the 4×2.5MM screws holding the drive and slide the HDD off.

Envy 14 with the Seagate Momentus

Seagate Momentus, with screws removed and ready to be slid off

Envy 14 with SSD fitted

Trying to fit in the Seagate internal HDD into the case, however, took a little bit more effort – nothing substantial though. I had to unscrew the mounting brackets & the metal guard so that the drive could slide in.

Some more pics:

Kingston v100 SSD box

Kingston v100 SSD front side

Kingston v100SD - back side

Some more shots of the Transcend external drive case:

Transcend StoreJet casing box

Transcend StoreJet casing

Connecting the HDD to the casing

Removing the railing on the drive

I’ll have the SSD review up in a day or two. For now, I’m enjoying the zippy response and near instant resume from sleep à la my Cr-48.

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Further probing indicated that the Oracle installation was a 64-bit one, and PL/SQL Developer is incapable of loading 64-bit version of oci.dll file. To fix this, download the 32-bit version of Oracle Instant Client, extract it to a directory such as \instant_client.

Next, configure PL/SQL Developer to use this version by clicking on Tool menus -> Preferences. Under Oracle Home, point to the location where you had extracted Instant client (\instant_client, in this case)  and under location of OCI Library, point to the oci.dll file present in location where you had extracted Instant client ( \instant_client\oci.dll). Restart PL/SQL Developer and you should be able to connect now.

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