All posts by Utkarsh

Solution designer with Firstsource solutions. A post grad in Networks and IT Infrastructure. Technology enthusiast, blogger, webdesigner, Network security aspirant and in love with electronics and gadgets. This blog is an attempt to share what I find interesting... almost anything @Mtaram on twitter and
Events

BarCamp @ I2IT 13 March ’10

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BarCampI2IT (barcamp isquareit) is going to be an ad-hoc un-conference organised by the Post Graduate (Management & Technology) Students of International Institute of Information Technology, Pune. Where participants will discuss and share their knowledge / ideas / suggestions about Emerging Technology, Softwares, Networking, Management, Innovation, Web, Opensource, Entrepreneurship etc. by giving sessions, moreover personally interacting with each other.

Anyone with something to Share or with the desire to learn is welcome and invited to BarCampI2IT.

BarCampI2IT = Technology +  Management + Innovation +Web + Opensource + Entrepreneurship +…etc.

Main Objectives of BarCampI2IT are:

  • To offer a platform to individuals for Sharing Knowledge / ideas.
  • Bridging the gap between student and industry (Interaction among students, industry professionals & Professors).
  • Open Learning Experience.
  • Open Networking.
  • Community Building.

Register here

iLike, Intellect

What is your Deepest Fear – Coach Karter

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http://www.thatjonesgirl.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/img_76641_fear_380_450x360.jpg

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant,
gorgeous, talented, fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small does not serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking
so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.
We are all meant to shine, as children do.
We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.
It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone.
And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously
give other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear,
our presence automatically liberates others.

A return to love – Marianne Williamson

How Tos, Twitter

How to make most of the Twitter #tags

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Tags on Twitter or more popularly known as hashtags or simply #tags are a way of cataloging tweets on Twitter. Just like the wild wild [www] web Twitter too is a micro www in its own where the rate of flow of information is so immense that one can easily freak out. The intelligent users created hashtags and then Twitter incorporated them in its interface making it more useful for users to find the tweets of their interest at the click of a button [or tap of a finger if you use a notebook computer  ]

Now that we have billions of tweets and millions of hashtags how do we make the most of it. [ as if it’s a matter of life and death. BTW Who cares? ]

http://cdn.mashable.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/hashtagorg.jpg

First things First!

What does this hashtag stand for? It can be as difficult for Twitter veterans as it is for a newbie to make out what the hashtag stands for from the tag itself. While people are still busy finding the most efficient way to do it use the following to make your way through.

Tagalus: Tagalus is a simple dictionary for hashtags. It’s very easy to find information on thousands of hashtags as defined by other users.

Twubs: Uses a wiki system to help disseminate information on a hashtag. It aggregates tweets and imports pictures to help illuminate the topics being discussed.

Hashtags.org: While not the best at helping you understand the meaning behind a tag, Hashtags.org is good at showing you its use over time and recent tweets, which oftentimes is enough to figure out the meaning behind the tag.

What the Trend?: This useful little service makes it really easy to learn about trending hashtags. When something starts trending.

Tracking the Twitter world via the hashtags.

If you are a journalist, marketing pro or just an individual and like to track the topics of your interest, you can do so via the hashtags. Monitter and Twitterfall are good choices recommended by Mashable to do so.

If you need to track a less popular Twitter hashtag, try setting up a Twilert to get a daily email of the use of a specific hashtag.

Is it really that simple to understand and use?

Yes it is unless some of the unwritten rules are followed. Twitter hashtags are just like Google’s meta keywords [ if you don’t find youself on the same page with us we recommend reading through this article.]

Use them don’t abuse them. If you make every word of your tweet a hashtag then firstly It doesn’t look neat and secondly it doesn’t make sense. It’s just like copying pasting the whole webpage in the keywords field.

Give your hashtag context. Most people won’t actually know what your hashtag means, so give a quick explanation in one of your tweets or, if you’re making a hashtag, make it very apparent what it’s talking about. Be specific and use specific tags instead of generalized words.

I guess that would be end of the gyan from us. We would like to know from you all how you have used hashtags to make the most out of your tweets. Do leave a comment.

General

Reasons why SIU sucks

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SIU The Symbiosis Infotech Campus is a blissful place bubbling with joy and passion in every nook and corner of the campus. Despite all this there are times when it really sucks. This time the occasion is the festival of Holi. The administration calls this place a home away from home, and if it is so then why the hell the students are restricted from playing Holi and to top all that the college University has decided not to declare an off on the day of Holi while the whole of India celebrates Holi.

Why restrictions are imposed on students to play Holi when there are special arrangements made for south Indian festivals like Onam and Pongal. It’s totally uncalled for when the administration decided not to allow the students to play Holi. Is this the way they want us to feel at home away from home? To top it all the water supply too has been restricted to just 3 hours for the 3 days at the time of the festival.

It’s not at all justified to stop students from playing celebrating a festival when festival of one community are celebrated without any restriction and even special arrangement are mode for it then why not for Holi, a festival which every student wants to enjoy with the friends.

This was my opinion about SIU not being student friendly specially If the festival is not a south Indian one. I would like to have your comments on the issue too.

Thank you all.

Twitter

Twitter hashtags 101

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Limitation is the mother of innovations and twitter hashtags is a wonderful example of it.  Twitter is one of the fastest growing website with more than 600 tweets per second. And it was becoming too difficult for the tweeple to keep track of the topics of interests with more and more tweeple following each other. And hence the #tag was born.

Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They’re like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post ~ via Search Engine Journal

Twitter provided no easy way to group tweets or add extra data so the Twitter community came up with their own way: hashtags.  A hashtag is similar to other web tags- it helps add tweets to a category. A hash tag is simply a way for people to search for tweets that have a common topic.

Hashtags have the # symbol before the keyword.

For example # + Google = #Google is a hashtag.

It’s not case sensitive so #google and #Google is one and the same thing.

#tag image
This snapshot from siesmic shows a tweet with #USB #futuregadgets and #gadgets . This signifies that the tweet emphasizes on usb, featuredgadgets and gadgets and has information about some usb gadget that has been featured on the article that can be found on that particular shortlink.

How does it work?

The words that are preceded by # are treated special by Twitter. They become the keywords and kind of help the users track the tweets and trends in a better manner.  #tag has more weight than a normal word without a # when searched for.

Suppose we are searching for tweets related to newly launched Buzz by Google. We just need to look for the #Buzz or #Google and this would list the tweets that contain any of these two #tags in them.

Suppose we want to start our own trend then we need to just decide on a keyword. And before just going ahead with adding a # to it and start tweeting we just need to check whether the #tag already exists. If it doesn’t we can use it and then tweet and tell our friends about out #tag and start a trend of our own.

The larger the number of tweets containing a particular #tag more popular it gets and hence has a higher trend. To check what are the trending topics [#tags] check out #hashtag.

Environment

Save water – Play Holi with dry colors

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Come Holi, the Hindu festival of colours, and many people confine themselves, even lock themselves up to run away from the scourge of synthetic colours. Most holi colours available in the market contain oxidized metals or industrial dyes mixed with engine oil, which are dangerous for the skin. The black colour, for instance, is made of lead oxide, green from copper sulphate, silver from aluminium bromide and red from mercury sulphite. These chemicals can cause allergy, temporary blindness, renal failure, skin cancer and even paralysis. It can even prove fatal. The dangerous side-effects of holi colours can ruin the spirit of the festival.

Apart from that a lot of water is wasted and this post of ours is dedicated to the “Save Water” cause.

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Stop! how much more will you play

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Events

Happy Holi

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IMG_5082

The trees smile with their sprout
of tender leaves and blooming flowers,
Eternal nature with its transient expression.
Hails spring with ecstasy and joy!
Bewildering shades with so many tinge.
The land of beauty and greatness,
India, witnessing color of happiness and peace.
Nation come alive to enjoy the spirit
A celebration of color- Holi!
An experience of content, harmony and delight.

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he ‘Holi’ festival is a very fun-filled and popular occasion in the northern part of India. It is an occasion when people smear each other with bright colored powders, which are known as Gulal, and colored water. This festival is celebrated around early March each year. It can be said that ‘Holi’ festival is called a bright festival as a wide range of bright colors is used during it. The people believe that the bright colors represent energy, life, and joy.

Legend

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There are many legends given as the reason for celebrating ‘Holi’. There is one popular legend that is reputed to bring about the birth of ‘Holi’. It seems that long ago there was an evil king named King Hiranyakasipu. His son, prince Prahlad however was very holy and often prayed to God and this infuriated his father. One day, the wicked king ordered his sister, the demon Holika, to kill his son. The demon Holika, who was immune to fire, captured prince Prahlad and entered a fire furnace. She had done this to kill the prince, however it was her who was burnt to ashes. Prince Prahlad was safe and was not burnt at all. The legend goes that before the demon aunt died, she begged for prince Prahlad’s forgiveness and the prince forgave her and announced that her name would be remembered once a year. Thus the festival ‘Holi’ was created.

INDIA-RELIGION-HOLI-LATHMAR

There is also another story behind the festival of ‘Holi’ and it is based on the everlasting love between Krishna and Radha. It seemed that in the Hindu mythology Lord Krishna was known to court Radha and the light-hearted mischievous courtship of his was linked to Holi. Thus Holi is known to be the celebration of love between the two of them.

Celebrations

To start off the festival, preparations are usually made on the eve of Holi: huge bonfires are burnt as a symbol of its representation. These fires are created to ward off evil spirits around the place.

‘Holi’ is grandly celebrated in villages around Mathura, the place where Krishna is said to be born. Before the start of the festival, shops are busy selling ‘Gulal,’ the colored powders, and it is no surprise that the shops are flooded with festive shoppers. In preparation for the festival, new clothes are also bought for the family: it is a tradition for mothers to buy new clothes for their married daughters.

On ‘Holi’, mothers let their children go out on the streets to indulge in the splashing of colors. Men like to wear white ‘Kurtas’ while ladies prefer to wear white saris, or ‘Salwar Khameez,’ on ‘Holi’.

One thing that is very attractive about this festival is the spirit of the people who celebrate the occasion.

Whether they are young or old, all the people are lost in the joyful occasion, having fun throwing colors at each other. Even water balloons would be thrown at each other.

When they splash colored water on passer-bys, it is common for the passer-bys to get involved in the color riots themselves. Even kids love this festival, as they enjoy being drenched in colored water.

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On this happy occasion, dances and folk songs are also important features in the festival.

Computer Troubleshooting

XPS m1210 7400go Windows 7 64 bit driver issue fix

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I had recently upgraded to windows 7 home premium. I had all divers installed other than the Nvidia Geforce go 7400 graphics chip. This particular chip has troubled me since so many years with all the 64 bit versions of windows whether Xp or Vista or 7. I had a beta version of forceware from Nvidia’s website 178.49 which seemed to solve the purpose but had one major issue.

drivererrorop4

After some hours of running normaly it would stop responding and the computer wud freeze take a minute and recover back. This made the whole machine sluggish and I needed to restart again and again. I simply hate restarting my computer. There have been times when it kept running for more than two weeks at a stretch.

To resolve the driver stopped responding issue I googled some and came to know on Nvidia forum that many other also face the same issue on Geforce go 7400 and several others face similar issue with a variety of cards just because of the drivers lacking full support for windows 7 64 bit.

Here is a fix for the Geforce go 7400.

Download the drivers version 196.21 from laptopvideo2go.com

Download both the driver and modified inf file.

Extract the driver to a comfortable location.

Copy the downloaded nv_disp.inf and replace it with the one found in the folder where you extracted the driver .

Move the downloaded nv_disp.inf (176K) file into the 196.21_win7×64 folder to replace the older nv_disp.inf file in that folder. – as suggested by Kate

First uninstall the installed driver

Run the setup.exe and you would be prompted to install or abort as this is not WHQL certified driver.It might happen that the driver takes longer than normal to install. Be patient and let it finish.

Restart when the setup asks you to.

nvidia installed

And you are done. Enjoy 🙂

After installing the new patched driver from laptopvideo2go there has beena significant improvement in the performance and response of my XPS m1210 aka Minimachine. Also the directx version displayed by the driver changed from 10 to 11. This is a must fix for all XPS m1210 owners with windows 7 64 bit.

windows

Windows 7 64 bit demystified

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win7 64Windows 7 represents the first viable upgrade from Windows XP for PC users in many ways, especially considering that Vista was largely overlooked due to various problems with compatibility and performance.  For engineering and scientific applications, the combination of Windows 7 (64-bit) and the latest version of LabVIEW and NI Device Drivers make it possible to tap into the potential of 64-bit hardware thanks to native support.
Not every application stands to benefit from the x64 architecture, and it will take time for 64-bit editions of Windows to gain widespread adoption, but the following types of applications are most likely to see performance benefits on Windows 7 x64 Edition, provided that both 64-bit application software and drivers are available:

* Applications that require mathematical precision and floating-point performance
* Applications that involve large, high-performance databases
* Vision acquisition and analysis applications with large amounts of data moving directly into memory at rapid rates

Performance and Virtualization

64-bit versions of operating systems such as Windows Vista and Windows 7 are not automatically faster than their 32-bit counterparts. In some cases, they may even perform slower because of the larger pointers as well unrelated OS overhead. Overall, an application’s performance depends on what it is used for and how it is implemented. Emulated applications running within the Windows on Windows (WOW) 64 layer (discussed in more detail later in this article) will not be able to address any more memory than they could on a 32-bit system.
Most 32-bit software will still function because of a Microsoft emulation layer. This emulation layer, known as Windows on Windows 64 or WoW64, enables 32-bit programs to run as though on a 32-bit version of Windows by translating instructions passing in and out of 32-bit applications into 64-bit instructions. Emulated programs act as though they are running on an x86 computer and operate within the 2 GB of virtual memory that a 32-bit version of Windows allocates to every process. However, despite Wow64, 32-bit programs on 64-bit versions of Windows Vista and Windows 7 cannot take advantage of the larger 64-bit address spaces or wider 64-bit registers on 64-bit processors.

Potential Benefits of 64-bit

The transition to the 64-bit architecture is overwhelmingly driven by the limitations of the x86 architecture in terms of addressing memory. Applications running on a 64-bit edition of Windows should theoretically experience improved performance because of the larger quantity of available memory, even if the application is running within the WoW64 layer. Much like the advantage offered by increasing physical memory in a 32-bit system, the larger memory space on 64-bit versions of Windows Vista and Windows 7 allows more processes to actively reside in the system RAM simultaneously.  It allows allows users to add additional RAM beyond the previous 4 GB limit, up to the amount supported by the mainboard.
This change potentially eliminates or reduces time spent loading and switching between processes, a condition that can lead to “thrashing” when all the processor’s efforts are spent merely loading and switching between threads. To reap the benefits of a 64-bit operating system such as Windows Vista x64 Edition, you should invest in a large amount of RAM (4 GB or more) and a compatible motherboard.
For 64-bit version of Windows, Microsoft also requires a digital signature on all drivers. By requiring new, signed drivers, Microsoft aims to reduce failures and improve stability by shining a spotlight on vendor responsibility for bugs. With 32-bit version of Windows, administrators can install unsigned drivers, but Microsoft continues to discourage their use. All non-legacy National Instruments drivers are digitally signed and available for both the 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows.
Potential Drawbacks to Windows x64 Edition

Windows XP was available only as a 32-bit operating system for 32-bit processors until 2005, when Microsoft released a 64-bit edition. This version of Windows XP did not see widespread adoption due to a lack of available software and hardware drivers. Vendors were hesitant to invest in a platform that seemed more novel than practical for consumers at the time, which led to compatibility issues with common devices such as sound and graphics cards.  Developers interested in using 64-bit operating systems found the migration path to Vista much smoother due to the WOW emulation layer, which allowed older applications to run.  However, most did not see performance increases due to a lack of applications with native support for 64-bit processors.
Given the increasing number of 64-bit processors, Windows 7 x64 Edition is unlikely to suffer the same lack of support.  A potential drawback stems from the possibility that some hardware vendors may not release Windows Vista/7 x64 Edition-compatible versions of drivers quickly.

Windows 7 x64 Edition represents the first mainstream 64-bit operating system from Microsoft in terms of general availability and support from third-party add-on vendors. Because of this, moving from a 32-bit operating system such as Windows XP to a 64-bit operating system such as Windows 7 x64 Edition merits serious consideration in many cases.
However, the feasibility of successfully making the jump to Windows 7 x64 Edition depends largely on your application and its requirements. For some, Windows 7 x64 Edition offers much needed performance improvement, while for others, it could needlessly complicate applications designed to operate on x86 platforms or even have a negative effect on performance.

Gadgets, iLike

James bond style watch phone by LG

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http://feelgizmos.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/lg-3g-watch-phone-3.jpgAt first glance, LG’s new Watch Phone appears to simply be a high-end timepiece. The company used materials and stylistic elements found in watches from top manufacturers to ensure that people will be comfortable wearing it for any occasion. The Watch Phone has a curved tempered glass face, high quality metal casing and is a mere 13.9mm thick.

The Watch Phone is as technologically advanced as it is stylish. It is the first touch watch phone in the world to feature 7.2 Mbps 3G HSDPA compatibility, enabling high-speed data transmission and video phone calls using the built-in camera.

http://www.mobilephoneonly.co.uk/phonereviews/upload/LGGD910.jpgLG did not sacrifice functionality in favor of size and the Watch Phone is fully capable of sending text messages, making phone calls, and, of course, keeping accurate time. This is all achieved using the phone’s touchscreen interface on its 3.63cm (1.43-inch) screen and LG’s intuitive Flash Interface.

Voice recognition features, which can be used with or without a Bluetooth headset, make it easier to place calls and look up contacts. Text to Speech (TTS) reads text messages and other information out loud for even greater convenience. The phone also includes stereo Bluetooth and a built-in speaker for playing back music files. A large phonebook and scheduler help with organization.

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