Browse Happy

When I logged into my blog from Firefox 3.6, WordPress prompted me to upgrade my browser.

The amusing prompt also had a link to a site called BrowseHappy. This site contains info about the latest versions of major browsers viz. Ie, Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera and links to download them. A nice initiative by WordPress.

If everybody had the latest browsers, both the users as well as web developers can breate easy.

Up Again

At last, I forced myself to do what I should have done 6 months ago. Brought my blog back to life.

6 months ago, when I was trying to upgrade the WordPress version on my blog, it crashed. And I had not been able to open my blog and I was getting Internal Server Error ever since. Somehow I couldn’t devote time for my blog. Heights of Laziness.

So last week, I got into FileZilla. Connected to my server. Took a back up all the WP related files and content. Deleted everything from the server. Downloaded a fresh copy of WP. Replaced the wp-config.php with the old one which contains all the db related data. Also replaced the wp-content folder from the backup.

All it took was 5-10 mins. No idea why I had been delaying this for so many months. Should blog regularly now.

Six Months With HTC Wildfire

A very short update about my experiences with the HTC Wildfire. This is my first smartphone. And I’m loving it. It is no doubt a handsome phone and its easy to fall in love with it. But no doubt, it is also a low end phone from HTC compared to HTC Legend, HTC Desire or HTC Incredible. As a result there are a few features that are missing and a few apps are not compatible with this phone.

The upsides of using this phone is the Android platform which provides you with a number of fascinating applications. There are a few applications with amazing interfaces that include TweetDeck, Google Reader, WordPress, Maps, Dolphin Browser, Angry Birds etc. The integration with Facebook brings in hundreds of contacts and phone numbers directly to your phone. The sensitivity of the capacitive sensor is also quite good.

The downsides have to be the low resolution screen. As a result many apps are not compatible with this phone. Even the 5MP camera doesn’t work as good as a normal 5MP camera would. Running too many apps at a time may cause this phone to lag.

The phone is an excellent low-budget entry-level android phone for anyone who wishes to be a part of the ‘smartphone generation’.

Photos and Watermarking

I have been travelling and trekking a bit. And I have been taking a lot of photos. Many of my friends and colleagues too are into photography and I see a lot of them adding watermarks to their photos. Even I wanted to add them. Not that each of them is a masterpiece but still I wanted to retain my rights to the photos.

First I got Photoshop running and added a text at the corner of the image with around 50% opacity. The text just contained a URL to my site http://alagappan.co.in. But it was really a pain to do so individually for each photograph. Then I started googling for easier ways to do the same stuff.

That is when I came across a Batch Photo Watermarker tool that allows you to add watermarks to a whole batch of photos. They provide access to a trial version of their tool for up to 50 photos. Beyond that you either have to pay and get their application or do one of these to get a free registration key.

Of course, If you are a Photoshop guru you can create your own macros (or actions as they are called in Photoshop) and run them on multiple photos at the same time. I am yet to learn all that stuff. But yeah! Learning that and further photo enhancement techniques on Photoshop would be an added advantage for a budding photographer like me.

Music and Mobile

I listen to loads of songs at home. Thousands of songs are stored in my hard disk consuming huge amounts of storage space. The best way to listen to them is to play those songs in a randomly shuffled playlist. There is no better feeling than listening to song Awesome Song after a long time and drowning in that ocean of music.

But when it comes to Mobile, we have a very limited storage space. Often not more than 4GB or 8GB. Now, if you take truck loads of photos and download hundreds of apps just to try them out, then there’d be acute shortage of space. With so much space constraints, we often end up storing just a dozen albums and listen repeatedly to the same again and again and again. Or if you are fortunate enough to live in a city like Chennai or Mumbai you can alternatively choose to listen to the wonderful radio stations.

I feel that there needs to be a way with which we can sync our music files on the computer with the mobile seamlessly. There is the DropBox app available with which we can sync files. But again that too has very limited space for the unpaid version and am not too sure how effective that is for music files.

There are various internet radio options which exist. Like Pandora. But majority of them don’t support listening through mobile or are restricted to the US due to licensing constraints.

Grooveshark app is available to solve most of our problems but its collection of Indian songs is VERY limited and moreover it is a paid service.

Any service that lets me listen to my choice of songs direct from the internet through my mobile would be awesome. If implemented in an attractive and impressive way, it does have an opportunity to become huge. If there is any such existing service that I am unaware of, then do let me know in the comments.

WordPress Hacked?!

Couple of weeks ago, on a Sunday morning I got up unusually early and logged in to my laptop. And surprisingly I decided to make a visit to my poor neglected blog. And what I saw shocked me. I saw a lot of my posts that I had intentionally saved in drafts had been published. Was my account hacked?!?

The fact is that I had been using my WordPress account as a Notes app. Whenever I come across something interesting, I just make a note of it in my blog and save it in the drafts. Most of the time what happens is that I don’t find the time to craft it into a complete post and they end up as drafts permanently. And to see them published shocked the hell out of me. Apart from the drafts being published, each of my earlier posts appeared over 10 times on the blog. I tried deleting the posts. But they kept reappearing again. Now I didn’t have any idea of what I was gonna do.

That made me wonder if I had carelessly left my account logged in somewhere sometime. I started tearing my hair apart trying to remember where things went wrong. I logged into gmail to check my latest account activity. I changed my WordPress password. I also changed my Twitter, Facebook and Gmail passwords. I checked up with my bro’s website to check if everything was working fine for him. And whoa. Even his site contained each post published multiple number of times. Now I was quite convinced that the problem was with our web hosting since both our blogs had been hosted together. I informed my bro about it and slept off again (after all it was a Sunday).

After a couple of hours, my bro pinged me and said that the problem was a with a category excluder plugin that had crashed. So much for my wandering thoughts that this blog was something great enough to be the target of a hacking attack. Silly Me!

Roadside Soup Shops

Some of you might have heard of the roadside soup kiosks that are common in the Chennai landscape. These shops were started by a bunch of self help youth groups whose intention was to earn a quick buck during their free time in the evenings. The soups are fairly good and the prices are decent. Moreover the soups are topped with crisp fried cornflakes. Some of the varieties of soup available here include mushroom, tomato, vegetable, banana stem among others.

It started off in the year 2005 I guess. Located at strategic locations of the city, these kiosks cater to people looking for something light before heading home. These guys make considerable sales everyday and the idea was soon replicated by many. Recently some people have even started selling non-veg soups like mutton bone soup (aattu kaal) in a couple of locations in Velachery.

Like every other shop, inflation and price rise has forced these shops to hike their prices too. Am not complaining about the prices. But what I found interesting was the way with which gradual changes were done. First they started off with making the soup more watery. Next change came in the form of reduction in the amount of mushroom/banana stem used in the soup. Despite all this the quality of the soup didn’t deteriorate much and remained good enough for the 10 bucks that we paid. What changed next was the size of the cups that they used to serve the soups in. Change in size was significant enough to be noticed and commented about. Gradually they started charging more for the same cup of soup. And the prices increased upto 15 for a cup.

Am not complaining as long as I get a hot cup of soup. After all its much cheaper than the Mancho soups and Tom Yom soups at big restaurants and you can also get them instantly at a kiosk close to home. So the next time you are looking for some soup, look around. Chances are you’ll come across one of these kiosks, so you can indulge and still get back home for a meal.

‘Ya We No’ and What It Means!

You might be wondering what this ‘Ya We No’ refers to. It is a random expression which a few of us in college used very frequently. It was generally used in a humorous context and it meant exactly the same – ‘Yeah, We Know!’. It was slowly morphed into what it is on the top of my blog.

But going beyond the humor part of it, I consider ‘Ya We No’  to refer to the collective wisdom of people. It refers to the power of the internet. When each one of us contribute something, and encourage others to do so, then we get an ocean of knowledge. Wikipedia is the best example of collective wisdom of the internet junta. There are millions of people interacting every instant on the Internet. Be it twitter, facebook or any other social networking site. With the internet at our disposal, there is nothing that ‘we cannot know’.

There is a new phenomenon emerging. Its called crowdsourcing. It refers to the trend of mass collaboration enabled by the Web 2.0 technologies. It is so because, ‘Yeah! We Know’ it all.

I’m just reiterating the same with the title of my blog. You and I, together we know it all. Ya We No.

Update – I’ve changed my Blog Title again. Its no longer Ya We No. So you might actually find this post pointless.

Solving the Rubik’s Cube

Am a beginner at solving the original 3x3x3 Rubik’s cube. Its the world’s top selling puzzle having sold over 350 millions cubes. I started about a couple of week backs and I have already solved it over a hundred times. Each time I see a solved cube, I have that uncontrollable urge to scramble it and start solving it all over again. Believe me, its really addictive.

If you are a beginner, it can be really frustrating and may seem next to impossible to solve the cube. However if you learn a few simple algorithms, it is very easy to solve. You too can learn to solve a Rubik’s cube by watching this wonderful two part video tutorial by Dan Brown.  Part 1. Part 2. These two videos should be sufficient. If you want more, there is also a tutorial on wH giving you all the details that you might need.

Wayanad

We went the capital of God’s Own Country, Wayanad for a three-day trip. Ten of us. This is a big travel log of our trip.

*Warning* You’ll be damn bored by the time you finish reading this. I was. Thats why you can see that the size of each day’s description keeps on decreasing.

Day -0

We left NITT Campus at around 6.30. After dinner at Pushpam’s we boarded the tea garden express which left Trichy station at 8.20. We went through our original itinerary and made a few changes to it based on the distances and the approximate time we’d spend at each of the places. We dropped Chembra Peak from our list of places to be covered. Then Arun spoke to a few people in order to arrange for a cab and for accommodation. We reached Erode station at around 11. Since our train from Erode to Calicut was scheduled at 2 am we roamed around the erode station for about an hour before returning to the station to charge our mobiles.

Day -1

Once we boarded the Mangalore mail we directly went to our berths and fell asleep soon enough. I got up at around 6 and got freshened up in the train itself and i was looking forward to reach the station. We reached Kozhikode station at around 8 and had breakfast at one of the refreshment rooms available in the station. Those who woke up late went to the waiting rooms and got ready. Meanwhile a tempo traveller was waiting for us outside the station. Once everyone was ready we commenced our journey to Wayanad.

At around 11 we stopped at a hotel a few kms before Lakkidi. We drank something called Elaneer juice, which is a juice made up of smashed coconuts and is much differnet from tender coconuts. After buying some more snacks to fill our stomachs, we resumed our journey.

We temporarily halted at a small viewpoint from where there was an amazing view of the mountains and the valleys. After a few minutes travel we reached Pookot lake. It was an amazing lake but the only negative side was the unbearable heat. We hired three pedal boats and went for boating in the lake for about 20 minutes. Just as we were about to get down from our boats a huge group of girls came to the lake. As luck would have it the same group followed us to all the places we visited for the next two days. Coming back to the lake part, there was a beautiful path made around the perimeter of the lake. We walked some distance and clicked a few pics before returning to our van.

Our next stop was the Soochipara falls. One turn at Chundale and we could see numerous tea gardens. It was an amazing sight with so many small mountains covered with tea plantations.

Balki conveniently captured the window seats by threatening to vomit if not given one. It was around this time that most of the guys started talking about kalakkis an half boils from the stomach. But it was Smok who first made the half boil, a few kms before Soochipara.

It was somewhere here that I had a glimpse of the mighty Chembra peak. It was an amazing sight and i totally wanted to be at the top of the peak. but the other guys still preferred not to waste an entire day there. I still have a strong desire to scale the peak and i hope it’ll come true one day.

We reached Soochipara falls at around 2. We placed orders for lunch so that it’ll be ready by the time we return from the falls. Soochipara falls was about 1.5 to 2 kilometres away from the parking location. We had a climb down a bit in the path provided to reach the falls. It was during the same time that a shooting for an Ayurveda product was going on at the falls. Thankfully it didn’t stop us from having some quality time at the falls. We got ourselves all wet at the falls and soaked ourselves in the fresh water there for sometime. Then we started clicking pics at various locations each of us seated on one of the rocks.
After climbing back to the top we ate some fruits and drank some juices before proceeding to the van. After having lunch a few guys did some shopping buying hats, chocolates and tea.

We had originally planned to go to the Karapuzha dam in the evening. but it was almost 5 by the time we left Soochipara. So we stopped at one of the numerous tea gardens on the way to click a few pics.

Since the dam was on our way to the accommodation we thought of giving it a try. Luckily it wasn’t dark by the time we reached the dam. There wasn’t much to see at the dam except for the vast stretch of water and mountains.It was a great spot for landscape pics. I went to a clicking spree taking quite a few pics during sunset.

After it was quite dark we started to our accommodation. It was some Mor Ignatius Nagar, a lodging maintained by the cathedral of Meenangadi which is around 12 kms from Kalpetta. Accommodation was quite cheap there and it was very much comfortable. The same girls gang had followed us to the accomodation too.

We played a few games of bluff before going to sleep.

Day – 2

The next day we got up at around 6 and went for having tea at a nearby tea stall. We also ate the so called banana roast made of nendarampalam. Then after all of us took bath and had breakfast we went to the Edakkal Caves.  It was about a km climb up to reach the caves and after the ticket counter the climb was more steeper. Once at the top the view of the mountains and valleys was spectacular. Inside the caves we found thousands of years old carvings. After more pics clicked there we returned to the van.

We started for our journey to the Kuruva islands. We had lunch at a small hotel in Mananthavady. And we reached kuruva at around 2. Kuruva islands were located between the tributaries of the Kabini river. we had to cross the river to reach the islands. Once inside the islands we clicked a few pics at the seats made of bamboo.
Then we began our walk inside the islands. After walking for a while a few of us wanted to go for rafting. It was just still water rafting where the raft took us across the river! It was nothing like the white water rafting I went in Himachal in 2003.
After roaming around the island for some more time we started to walk back. On our way back we saw the Ayurveda ad shooting with some Saamiyars carrying some herbal stuff. What nonsense! After returning to the van we spent sometime eating before our return to the dormitory.

Day – 3

Next day we got up around the same time and left for the Meenmutty falls. Similar to Soojipara falls, here too we had to climb down the hills to reach the falls. But this was much more exciting and fun since it was peripheral trekking which gave us a spectacular view of the mountains and valleys. We spent quite some time inside the pool of water at the feet of the falls. It was fun.

After filling our stomachs with ice creams and soft drinks we started on our journey to the Calicut beach. We reached Calicut at around 4 and we dranks some milkshakes. It was extremely crowded just like any other place in India on a sunday. At the beach we spent sometime waiting for the sunset. But we had to leave early since our train departed at around 7 from the station. We travelled  till Tirussur in an open ticket. Then we switched trains and we moved on to our berths and slept till Trichy. Had breakfast again at Pushpam’s and reached college at around 9.30.

Overall it was a fun trip which could have been much better if only the climate had been better.