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Meeting with Syed, the Internet Guy

In India we often name people according to their profession. Like someone selling aloo or potatoes becomes aloowala meaning potato guy. Same goes for rickshaw wala (a man who drives rickshaws). I was having serious issues due to insufficient speed due to a shared connection . It was not the fault of the people sharing it. When the speed is high, the fair usage limit (read miser speed limit) needs to be high. Unfortunately, the download limit was low and so after exhausting it in a couple of days, the rest of the month we would just be sharing a 512KB connection. That is completely inadequate for my needs. Hence, I was forced to order for a new connection. I called up the local DSL network operator . If you are not familiar with how things work in India - these are small cable operators who buy bandwidth from the ISPs and then themselves rent out small bits at a time. Hence they get them at a bargain. We get them cheaper than other players in the market. The only downside? Suppor...

5p34k 1337

I did not know facebook had this sweet little feature that shows everything in leet speak. Leet is the language spoken by geeks. Though I would prefer not to be one, I found changing the language settings from facebook really made facebook a lot more interesting and much more funny. Here is how you do it. Go to Account Settings, Now change the language to leet speak (Other interesting ones are under the English category, say English upside down or Pirate English.) Click on Save Changes. Everything will turn to leet speak! Go to 'Home' or 127.0.0.1 and see the fun. There are a number of funny changes, like : Messages - /msg Find Friends - find n00bz and Profile Pictures become pr0n, acronym for p0rn! Anyway if you can accept it as harmless fun, you can make your facebook experience more enjoyable. Have a good time.

Simple Site Building with Webmatrix

Microsoft WebMatrix is intended to serve the website creation, customisation and publication needs of designers and amateurs, and not as a substitute for Visual Studio or other professional development tools. As a professional developer, I can see why it might appeal to its target audience, but I can't stand to use it myself for more than 15 minutes at a time. Rick Grehan's  preview of WebMatrix  in November covered most of the product features well, so I won't repeat his descriptions and analysis. Since then, a few features and gallery items have been added, which I'll discuss as I go along. I've included a handful of screen images at the end of the article. Rick picked on the weakness of the editor and the lack of a debugger, and until I worked with the product myself, I didn't understand how kind he was in the way he phrased his objections. After spending time with WebMatrix, I know otherwise. By choosing the WordPress framework, for example...

A Pale Moon Brightens The Sky

If you find the latest version of  Firefox is not up to the mark, you may as well try out the new Pale Moon Browser. Now for all the Firefox purists out there, I must mention here that this is actually Firefox on steroids, as per speed that is. Firefox is an open source project, meaning which, you can actually change the code any way you want and release it. This allows for more customization. You can keep the features you like and trash the rest. Actually when Mozilla releases a version of Firefox, they keep maximum compatibility in their mind. Which means it is made to work on very low end machines, thus sacrificing speed and efficiency.Pale Moon tries a slightly different approach. Instead of trying to create a browser for everyone, they try to build a Windows optimized browser. At this point of time, Pale Moon has completely discontinued the Firefox 4.x and 5.x versions because they were largely similar any way. Their main development centers around the Fire...

Office Online

Online Office Solutions Reviewed Suppose you don't have any office suite installed on your machine, yet you must complete a presentation within the next hour. You can download some software of the Web, true, but what if the speed is not that good? Or if you had prepared the presentation but have not brought it to office. Deadlines running out? Spreadsheets behaving like spread sh**? Running out of disk space? Well, you can try and familiarize yourself with big office suites, paid or free, or you can save yourself all the hassle and just go to some of the online office suites available and get your job done. Your space is saved. Documents are stored in the Cloud, Collaboration with clients is simple, you can access your document and edit them anywhere you want. All you need is an internet connection. Yes, slow ones will do fine. You will require more patience. A word of caution, don't try giving presentations in board rooms if you have a dial up connection. You may have t...