chirag.patnaiks.in

Yahoo Mail Goes out of beta... I guess this happened last night.

Apart from the severe criticism the Vodafone agency is getting for the campaign that they are currently running to announce the change. Here is another goof up on their part... If you try to get on to the web to pay your Vodafone phone bill online , it takes ages for the page to load up... I tried several times , before I gave up on the process. I called up Customer Care and cribbed about it. Nothing came of it. The due date arrived. So, I tried once more; this time from work. and after a really long wait (I wish I had timed it) the page finally opened. Keep in mind that it took long enough for me to call up customer care crib once more AND try to pay the bill through the phone (unsuccessfully, I might add) . So the page opened, I should be happy rite.? I'm being done a favour after all, by the Hutch (oops... Vodafone) gods. Well the geek in me decided to investigate further. It turns out the login page weighs in at about 1.4 megabytes. Duh! someone there in the web division needs...

Amazon is by far the best online shopping experience. I (and many hundreds of thousands) already knew that... I've been shopping on Amazon for the past 5 odd years... and have held, that is the best shopping experience anywhere on the web. With ebay now imitating the Amazon experience, just proves what I and many many others also believe to be true. ZDNet story here Amazon is beyond just the shopping experience, I see Amazon to be one of the most innovative online entities. The amount of innovation that occurs there, is quite frankly, amazing...

There are voices clamoring for the opening up of the Facebook network. So will it happen? Sure! It happened with Email than a decade ago (Yes, there was a time, when email couldn't be sent if the recipient was with a different provider). IM started a couple of years ago. (ICQ+AOL, MSN+Yahoo). We are also now talking about an open document format. So, yes. there is a demand for a unified standard for interoperability. The next may well be social networks. Facebook as the dominant leader (I know orkut is larger, but in the hipper circles of India (and I suspect in other countries as well) Facebook is de rigueur ) will be the last of the lot to jump onto the open standards bit. But it will happen as the market matures. Whether Facebook will survive as a independent company is another matter. Like Jeff Bezo's said, " I guarantee that five years from now, no one will want to be a social-networking company ". This was last year, that leaves four years to go...

वन्दे मातरम ! nuff said...

I've joined Quatrro as Marketing Manager and the Product Manager for Qresolve . Qresolve is a Technical Support Service, which is centered in India, but targets customers in the US. It is a one of a kind service for an organisation, which is a full fledged BPO (KPO?) otherwise. Will keep you posted as to what happens in this unique experiment.

This is the 500th Post on my Blog which is now more than 7 years old. It pleases me no end that it is about the New Indiatimes Mail which was one of the bigger projects I did with The Times Group . The new mail platform is based on the Zimbra Collaboration Suite . Feature for feature, it beats the pants of the largest mail solutions in the world currently. When we were shortlisting the possible solutions for the new platform, we went through a nightmarish scenario of deciding between the India of today and India of tomorrow. We bet on the fact that Broadband in India will happen, sooner rather than later, and that the Indian Internet user will demand a better experience than the plain vanilla offerings that were available to us at that time. We could have chosen to go with the India of today, and lived with a light mail solution, but on the whole I feel we made the right choice to go with this rich solution along with a lite version for slower connections. Indiatimes will be the larg...

I just got hold of the (Product) RED variant of the ipod Nano. and was connecting it up to my comp. and then I realised something... My desktop is a mess of gadgets... With a Dual Monitor, a PSP, a 400 gig external HDD, a phone and of course the ipod...

I was looking for a away to get rid of Mcafee AV which was slowing down my comp but had been forced to my comp by the companywide policy, when I ran across this article This was similar to using cron in *nix systems to spawn a root shell. Anyway I did try it. And it didn't work, as my computer was patched up to date, again by system policy. So the cmd call by at would show a failed result. I thought that was that, till I ran across something called Microsoft Powershell. It struck me while I was downloading it that I might be able to use the same exploit through powershell. This is what it looks like before Note that cmd and explorer are processes run by my user id. In powershell I repeat the steps like so... and voila! cmd as a system process I kill explorer and fire up explorer from this instance and now I have both cmd and explorer running as system. I suddenly remembered, why I was doing all this. so I go into Add Remove. and uninstall McAfee :) and my computer flies...

Thailand Junket Sep 20, 2006 - 21 Photos

Thailand Junket Sep 18, 2006 - 17 Photos

I'm off to Thailand tomorrow mornig for the week. My first trip abroad.

Hmmm... what is this... Googlesightseeing.com (not affiliated with google ofcourse)

Yahoo is also doing celebratory mastheads like Google and Times of India. But with a twist First I saw this in Firefox Then a little later I saw this in Internet Explorer Nothing different? Right? Wrong! In IE they are using a flash file for a dynamic masthead. Try chasing the crab… Have a look. The flash file is here

Will Honda City VTEC prices fall, considering Toyota's super offer on their base model Corolla. i wish I could afford the EMI's...

I just saw Layer Cake . While I was watching something about the movie kept reminding me of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels . Sure enough, it was by the same producer, Michael Vaughn. Only the producer is now the director... Very fitting and a fab flick. This flick has to go down in my all time great list of thriller movies along with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels Pulp Fiction Reservoir Dogs & Fight Club

The ad nauseum coverage of Pramod Mahajan incident is irritating to say the least. It is quite obvious that they have nothing better to report. Bah! What rubbish. Best of Luck to Pramod Mahajan for a speedy recovery. A big thumbs down to the mornic coverage by Indian Media.

I finbally got these a couple of weeks ago The Complete Peanuts 1950-1954 & The Complete Peanuts 1955-1958 and I also ordered The Complete Far Side 1980-1994 & Wiener Dog Art & Prehistory of the Far Side this was in addition to The Complete Calvin and Hobbes which I got last year...

Picture Seaarch Directly in Google results. If a search term is pre-pended with "pictures" Google returns pictures search as part of the search results...  

Yay! I got an invite to Riya... Screen shots on soon. You'll remember that Riya is a photo recognition tool, which was supposed to be bought by Google... For a change this is one beta, where they don't impose any of the usual restrictions on screenshots etc.