Null Bit Me

I always wondered how much money did utility softwares make. Such as WinZip. I've never paid for it.. first it was that I had no idea how to pay in dollars. And then it was just too much after converting it to rupees. And we're Indians. We live with too many nags to be bothered about a nag screen

This guy shows how WinZip actually made money…

I paid for my copy of WinZip back in the day. I know others who did as well. But individual users are the exception. The real revenue stream for a product like WinZip these days is from corporations, which dare not have dodgy unlicensed evaluation software on their users machines. So because they know that some of their users will try to sneak WinZip in, they buy site licenses that cover the cost for every seat in the organization. It’s cheap insurance against lawsuits.

Buy movie tickets standing in the queue… done that.

Buy movie tickets online.. done that.

Buy movie tickets on the telephone… done that.

Run to buy snacks during the interval… done that.

Order snacks for the interval online along with buying the ticket… nopes. But there is hope. Check this out. An awesome idea.
Order snacks on the telephone during the interval… nopes… perhaps never!

Busy not working… It's around 4:00 PM … time for some tea

Tring Tring… Damn… a call from an unknown number … +914039845465 .. who's this idiot calling.

Caller: Sir, I am calling from ICICI Bank regarding some payments that you have made from the website.

Me: (worried… I did make some online payments 2 weeks back which had mysteriously failed) Eh… ok.. what's this about?

Caller: Sir, this is about *&%*&%

Me: Sorry but I didn't get that. Could you repeat it again?

Caller: Sir, this is about &*^&^%%*

Me: (Time to get my ears checked) Right… thanks. Ok.. so?

Caller: Sir, Did you make a payment to …. Hutch… of Rs. 465/-?

Me: No… (Hutch… I never have had a Hutch phone!)

Caller: Sir, your credit card number is xxxx xxxx xxx?

Me: (hmmm… the first 8 digits match) Excuse me… but I thought you said this was regarding online payments..

Caller: Sir, this is regarding &^%*^%*&$

Me: (pissed off) Right… anyway you have given me only 11 digits. A credit card would have 16 digit, right?

Caller: Sir…. could you confirm that your credit card number is xxxx xxxx xxx?

Me: (paitently) And I just told you, unless you give me all the 16 digits I cannot verify if this is my credit card number or not.

Caller: Ok.. just a moment… Sir, could you tell me your credit card number?

Me: (whoa slow down baby) No I cannot. Could you tell me again what this is all about? Is this about failed online payments?

Caller: Err… sir, is your credit card number xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx?

Me: (ok, 16 digits finally. Where did he get them now?) No it is not…

Caller: ok <disconnect>

OK… what was that all about? Was somebody trying to steal my credit card numbers or is it just me with an overactive imagination?

An interesting site… have been spending the last half-hour on it.

I would have wanted to say, "awesome site". But then that would have been politically incorrect, right?

Start with this link, I'd say.

Remember the SETI@Home programme? Well, I am very hopeful that I will meet E.T.’s in my lifetime, but am not very optimistic. I rather believe the Men In Black concept where aliens live amongst us and unknown to us.

However, the Climate Change Experiment programme by the BBC is more interesting to me. I am for some reason more worried about our environment than poverty, corruption and the like. Yeah… blame me for acting like a rich kid. I don’t care Even though the movie The Day After Tomorrow was awful, the whole idea of something like that happening gives me the jitters. So I am taking part in the experiment.

The participant map shows 50,880 hosts currently. Out of which, 38,956 is in the UK alone! And India has a paltry 66 computers!!! Come on people…

The best blonde joke ever skewed my WordPress.com stats like crazy. See for yourself. What does your stats say?

A Happy Christmas to you and you. There couldn’t be more, could they?
I am not much of a holiday person… and I’d rather just sleep and watch movies. Unfortunately, when there is a life to be lived, I can do no such thing. And I am off to soak in the festive spirit wherever I can find it

[UPDATE: This also happens to be my 100th post here! Wow.]

After being gaga over Performancing for Firefox when it was working flawlessly, something stopped working. And I could not use it anymore and had to move over to Zoundry
What happened was that on clicking on the icon in the lower right corner of my Firefox status bar, the lower pane for blogging would open, but the Categories list would not appear. The Categories tab kept saying “Loading categories…”. I tried publishing without setting the category, but even that would not work I tried the same thing at home which is a different machine on a different network, but had the same problem. So the problem was most probably not with Performancing, but maybe with the WordPress.com site or something that I was doing wrong at both places.
Just now, I finally got it working! The problem wasn’t in WordPress.com. So… yep. It was me doing something specific at both the browsers so that it wouldn’t work. I use the Master Password feature in Firefox. And I think it stored the username& password that I configured Performancing with. The next time I opened the browser, I dismissed the master password prompt box. After all I wasn’t doing anything and hadn’t even started to blog! So why should I enter a password to open a blog editor? And so the categories list never was populated. And I could not publish
As far as I recall, why I did not submit my master password was because switching on Performancing prompted me to submit my master password 4 times!! I got suspicious and then dismissed it. I’ve checked it again now. I open a new session of the browser, start Performancing, and I am prompted for my master password 4 times This is not good…

[UPDATE: The problem has already been discussed at http://performancing.com/node/523]

One disadvantage of using Zoundry or other blog tools is that you miss the action on the WordPress.com Dashboard. I now have a “Stats ” (yes… including the smiley) page on my Dashboard. And I wonder what these are…

I checked Matt’s, Donncha’s and the WordPress.com FAQ blog, but none of them have any details

And to follow up on my earlier post… I’ve just discovered this.
I had just one complaint… this news article lists many more…
What is wrong? I might have moved to Opera, but some of these Firefox extensions that people have thought up are just too cool not to be able to try… yep. I have a Favourite Firefox extensions list that I’ll publish some other time.

Ok. GMail finally says “Delete”. The “Move to Trash” action option has been renamed to “Delete”.
And when they started, they never wanted to use the word “Delete” anywhere They said, why delete? We give you 1 GB of space.

All that is ok. But if I have 1 GB of email, 950 MB would definetely be crap. And to sift through all that crap to search my really useful email… well Google search technology better be very very powerful.

[Update: One account says "Delete". The other one still says "Move to Trash". Hmmm... what's going on?]

I just found a link to SpreadGoogleTalk from the official GoogleTalk blog. So I visit the site, and I see this:

What a asshole!

Since then, the GoogleTalk blog has removed mention of this site. But then Bloglines has cached it for me

I just complained about crappy “Help” pages by Web 2.0 sites. And then del.icio.us redoes their help page. And it is better than before. I am NOT suggesting that they listened to me I am sure they wouldn’t even know that this blog exists. But it feels nice to have pointed out something and people listening.

By the way, del.icio.us rocks I really love that site. It is not something that was unexpected. I am sure lots and lots of people had felt the need for a common place for their favourite links… with more and more people working from office and home. But the way del.icio.us made it easy is absolutely fantastic

Got this info first from Atul Chitnis’s blog journal.

India finally has a (one-stop?) portal.

This is the National Portal of the India, developed with an objective to enable a single window access to information and services being provided by the various Indian Government entities.

Seriously wonderful colors, (please don’t crib about the American spelling… I couldn’t care ), good and simple fonts. However, the “SignIndia” option does not work after successful registration. Anyways, what extra will I get after signing in? I wish they had made it clearer. Is there a way to send query emails to various ministries? I couldn’t find any, and I wish it was that easy to send suggestion/improvement/query mails to various government institutions. In addtion (I know I am asking for the moon… ), I’d like proper reference numbers for each feedback mail that I send that I can use to refer on non-response or future reference.

Hmmm. .. haven’t done too much with it. But I know it will be useful. Now I can happily link to http://india.gov.in instead of http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/in.html, which happens to be the first link on searching India on Google.

So I liked the Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Slick, fast, different… and a wacko Johnny Depp.
So I’d expect a sequel due in 2006.
But shooting some parts for the sequel of the sequel… isn’t that over-confidence!?
How many sequels have been as good as the original? I barely know any…
But I’m already waiting for POTC 2 now