Vivek's Soup

Using Voicemail with Airtel Prepaid Karnataka

Call *321*671# to activate the service on your phone.
It will ask you for permission if you want to enable it.
To customize the account dial 52555
To disable voicemail dial *321*673#

You can also activate it by sending out a SMS
Send START VMS to 54321 for activation
Send STOP VMS to 54321 for de-activation

This post if for my own reference. If you have any questions leave a comment and if I know about it I will try and answer it.

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Which mobile OS will win the battle?

tl;dr If I had to predict today which OS will finally win the battle it has to be Android.

Once the market stabilizes there are only so many OS's that can survive. Android is to the mobile what Windows is to the PC. It might not be the best to begin with but given enough time it can finally catch up to the competition. There are only that many new features that you can add. Once you've added those there will hardly be any differentiating feature amongst the competing OS's.

In the end it will be about hardware. And as of now only Android is the only OS which can run from a very low end smartphone to the top of the line phone.

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Running node.exe windows

Finally node.js is available as a windows binary without requiring Cygwin to be installed.

As of writing this post you can download the node.js binary 0.5.6. Currently npm does not work with node.js on windows. You need to download and use ryppi.py instead of npm. It works similar to npm but requires python. To setup node.js first set the PATH and NODE_PATH to the where you have copied node.exe.

             set PATH=%PATH%;c:\node
             set NODE_PATH=c:\node

It is better to set these environment variables in the System Properties so that you don't have to set these variables every time. Follow the following steps to do that.

Right-click Computer, and then click Properties.
Click the Advanced system settings in the left side bar.
Click the Advanced tab.
Click Environment variables.
Append the node path to the PATH variable
Create a new variable NODE_PATH and set it to the path where node is installed

Once you are done with it need to install Python as ryppi.py is a python script which works like npm. Once you are done with it you can install any of the libraries by using the following command.

python ryppi.py install socket.io express

Am assuming here that python is setup using the installer which also will also setup the path of python in the environment variables.

Tags: javascript node.js programming

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TIL: In JavaScript function.length returns the number of arguments it supports

 function test(a, b, c)
{
    
}

alert(test.length);

In this piece of code if you use .length on a function it returns the number of named arguments that this function accepts.

Tags: javascript

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Play fullscreen

Simon and Garfunkel - Bridge Over Troubled Water Original Version

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Conditional compilation in IE

I normally know about conditional compilation of JS in IE using  but here is something new I figured out today.


var IE;
//@cc_on IE = parseFloat(navigator.appVersion);

The best part here is that the JS code stays in your JS files and does not uglify the HTML if you ever have to use conditional compilation. Here is some more information about it from MSDN article Conditional Compilation (Windows Scripting - JScript).

Tags: javascript tech tips

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Speed up your JavaScript

This post is just for my own reference. Here are the slides and the video of the presentation by Nicholas Zakas. Goes into great detail in ways to improve the speed of your javascript code.

Speed Up Your JavaScript

View more presentations from Nicholas Zakas

The article summarizes most of the points in the slides and video http://james.padolsey.com/javascript/zakas-javascript-performance-tips/

Tags: javascript tech tips programming

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Is this finally the year of Linux on the desktop?

If I have a new system the only things I install are a browser, IM clients and some development environment. But the thing that has really changed now is that I can do the same thing on Linux without thinking too much. I can install Chrome/Firefox, the IM's are pre-installed and most of the development environments are available on Linux.

You could do that earlier as well but now the main thing that has changed is that there are new tools that are only available on Linux or Mac. The main softwares coming to mind are GIT and node.js. They are available on Windows but often seem crippled. If you really want to use them you will move to Linux or Mac. That is where things have really shifted. There are half a dozen twitter clients for Mac and quite a few for Linux but have a look around the only twitter clients you will find on Windows are Adobe Air based clients. No one seems to be writing native or .net based clients. To be fair there are some obscure .net based clients which no one uses but till date there is no official native/.net client from Twitter.

Quite a bit of the developer community moved towards Mac specially after the amazingly successful iOS. The rest moved towards web development. And as far as web development is concerned most of the newer projects are hosted on GitHub where being a Windows user really hurts.

The tide is moving towards Unix based systems with most of the hot new developments happening there. Its frankly been ages since I last installed a new software on Windows. Have not heard of any Tweetie or Coda for Windows. There is hardly any new software that has been specially targeted for Windows. There are half a dozen new apps that are released for Mac but don't think have heard a lot about any new Windows apps.

The other reason for the drastic shift has been the mainstream blogs. Most of the bloggers moved to Mac and the only thing they see is Apple and yet more apples. They cover technology as long as it is the only thing around. Check out Techmeme anytime of the day and all you will hear is Apple this and Apple that. Once in a while you might see a review of an app on Mac but there is hardly any news of any new software for windows. You might see a lot of reviews of web applications but then for those you don't really need Windows. You could be on Linux and they would just work fine.

Its just a matter of time when people realize that they can no longer use the newest shiniest piece of software on Windows that they currently use. In this case I am referring to IE9. Once people on Windows XP move to another HTML5 compatible browser and they get used to Chrome or Firefox there is little else that would hold them back on Windows. Ubuntu would run Chrome or Firefox just fine. With most app moving to the web I really don't see why you would pay for a licence of Windows.

Tags: linux tech

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New theme for the blog

The previous theme was supposed to be there for a few months but it ended up being there for years. In this new theme I got rid of all the junk that had ended up in the sidebars. There are no advertisements as those were just distractions and since its a personal blog there was no real need to put them in. Also removed the twitter, soup and the other blog feeds. They were adding too much distractions to the content. Have got rid of search, rss feeds and a dozen other distractions that were coming the way of the content.

This new theme is supposed to be a little better as it puts focus on the content. And hopefully with twitter going towards the dark side I end up blogging again. There are so many topics that are in the drafts mode. Whenever I get sometime to polish them a little I will do that. Overtime this blog has turned from being about technology to being about me. All the unpublished posts are about technology so lets see when they finally go public.

Had planned to work a bit this weekend and so far with a new theme last night I think am still on track. Still there are elements on this blog that can be removed or edited but for now it seems fine. Hopefully this weekend will be a little more fruitful than the last few weekends and months.

Not sure if anyone still reads the blog. But if you do, don't forget to leave a comment about the new theme.

Tags: personal tech

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It happens only in India...

See the full gallery on Posterous

Permalink | Leave a comment »

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Finally cleared up the mess created up by hackers

Some of my websites hosted on dreamhost were compromised and iframe pointing to a url http://alcobro.net/t.php was added to all the index.html and index.php files. Had to wack my brains a bit to find the solution though. Finally saw the solution on the dreamhost wiki article Recovering from an iframe injection hack. The solution was relatively easy but the difficult part was figuring out how they got in. Also the mess of changing all the passwords is not something I really enjoy.
If nothing else this exercise made me realize that I need to create separate user and profile for each domain. Though it will be a little messy but still better than having all the domains hacked in one go. Wasted a whole day in cleaning the mess and creating backups and removing things that I did not need on the server.

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Birthday blues and the year gone by..

Another year just went by and I never even realized it. This year was exciting and quite a bit happened. Moved to a new company and city. With each passing year I did have my share of birthday blues but this time I feel a lot more calmer. The title is there just to make it sound a little melodramatic and also keeping with the tradition of the birthday blogpost titles. In that sense this year I feel a lot more stable. I know where I am heading, though not sure when I will get there, but there is a plan.

This year saw a lot of ups and downs in terms of where I was heading. Finally moved to Bangalore which is the last thing I would have ever imagined. So far not really regretting the decision. In terms of blogging and tweeting did nothing amazing. None of my blogpost were on reddit, digg or slashdot (Since I did not write anything). I made nothing amazing in terms of s/w or released anything that would be noteworthy.

Actually there was one thing that I did release pics.fefoo.com. It was a weekend project and like one of my previous project comics.vivekjishtu.com was just something that I wanted. Nothing big or amazing. But just something that I was missing from reddit. It was not really a hit but neither was it a complete flop. I still use it and find it useful.

In terms of what all I missed in terms of deadlines. The next version of fefoo.com has been hanging on for a while now. So are the videos that will go with the release. All the other projects have also been delayed lately. It had a bit to do with my health and a lot to do with me being lazy.

There are a whole lot of things that I want to do this year. From making new theme for the blog and my websites to releasing the half finished projects. Lets see how far I get on those.

Tags: personal bday

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The best mobile development platform for hobbyist programmer - IV

The best mobile development platform for hobbyist programmer - I
The best mobile development platform for hobbyist programmer - II
The best mobile development platform for hobbyist programmer - III

Over the last few years the whole mobile landscape has completely changed. Now the contenders have also changed. When I last wrote about the topic there was no SDK for the iPhone and Android had not launched. Since then the whole landscape has changed. iPhone is the king amongst the platforms. Android is a close second. J2ME is a platform which still goes unnoticed since its just not part of most new smartphones. The process to develop Windows Mobile apps has gone a complete transformation with a completely brand new way of developing apps. Symbian is in its last leg, Nokia will be moving to MeeGo soon enough. Palm development also changed completely with the launch of Web OS. If you plan to develop today here is how you can go about it.

1) iOS Development - SDK for iDevices
2) Android
3) Palm Web OS
4) Windows Mobile
5) Symbian
6) RIM - Developing for the BlackBerry
7) MeeGo - Upcoming mobile platform
8) Java ME - If you plan to develop for most feature phones.

Tags: mobile tech programming

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Iomega ScreenPlay Director HD review/hacks

I bought the iomega ScreenPlay Director HD a few weeks back. Hardware wise the product is perfect. The only place where it really lets you down is the software. Calling the UI on this system ugly would be an understatement of the century. To top it all none of the advertised features like Youtube and Shoutcast work. If you want to copy a file over the network get ready to sleep. The speed is no more than 10MBps and again that is on the higher side, it more like 4-5 MBps. If you want to copy all your stuff you will have to copy it using USB. The Ethernet cable will not really help you. I had initially thought that I would use it like a NAS but that seems almost impossible with such a slow speed.

I figured since this system runs of Linux I would be able to somehow telnet into the system. This system is completely locked down. I've been searching quite a bit to figure out ways to atleast telnet but so far all the efforts have not yielded any results. I still don't get it, if iomega cannot provide good quailty software why don't they atleast let others who know how to develop software tinker with the device.

If you are looking for places to find information about how to get started with hacking the device here are a few links which can get you started. If you somehow figure out a way to telnet please do let me know.

http://foro.wydev.es/ - Forum is in Spanish but some good information. You can use Chrome with its auto translate mode incase you don't know Spanish.

http://www.iomegasupportforums.com/ - This is the official forum and surprisingly its not indexed by Google so will very rarely see the links using Google.

There is one very interesting piece of information in the forums if you try http://screenplay-550c:49152/, here screenplay-550c is name or ip of the device. It returns a 500 Internal Server Error. So there is a webserver running on the device. I think its got to do something with UPnP A/V & DLNA Media Server.