March 2008

WordPress, the publishing platform used for this site just got upgraded to version 2.5. As usual I used the Dreamhost "one click upgrade" and the upgrade to 2.5 was done within minutes. (I love this feature in Dreamhost :) )

However it took more than a few minutes to actually get the site going after the upgrade.

The first major issue was that I could not login to the WordPress Admin Console ! The error message indicated a fatal exception while registering the widgets and hence the dashboard could not be opened.

I knew that the error was related to a WordPress plugin and hence checked on the

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A 16 GB iPhone just made its way to my home today all the way from an US store. Even though I had "experienced" iPhone by reading about it and by seeing tons of videos on YouTube, using it live was a totally different experience.

iPhone is an amazing, astounding, remarkable, wonderful, incredible, marvelous product from Apple!

The sad fact is that I can use this phone only for the next 20 days after which my brother would take ownership! (He is the actual owner of this phone)

Sadder is the fact that I have to return using my HTC Touch. Believe me,

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Online Banking has really caught up in India and you rarely see a bank not providing online access to your bank account. However the quality of user experience varies across banks and the same can be said about the security.

ING Vysya Bank, the Indian arm of ING is one example of a crappy online banking portal. Checkout this exception while trying to access the portal:

StringIndexOutOfBoundsException ! hmm .. My complaint is not much on the stack trace print, but on not encapsulating this message in a meaningful string.

I for one like the way Citibank handles exceptions, you just get a message saying "We

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The BIOS on my Acer 1694 laptop was 3 years old and I did manage to find an updated version of the same on the Acer support web site. However ever after trying for about say 10 times, I couldn't upgrade the BIOS from Windows Vista.

The upgrade from Vista always ended with a blue screen and a system restart. I even booted from the Vista DVD and got into the command console (using Alt + F10 on the License screen) and tried updating the BIOS using command line; again blue screen followed by a system restart !!

After digging through some forums I realized that the BIOS could only be updated via XP which meant

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Ah.. the day I have been waiting for ! Windows Vista SP1 has been finally released via windows update today !

I upgraded to Vista last year and there were a few issues bugging me including the file copy to external drives, WiFi connectivity, Printer Connectivity etc.

Few of the issues were addressed by patches and few of them were also fixed when I upgraded to the beta release of Vista SP1. With today's final release of SP1 I am hoping that MS has addressed all the reported issues in Vista.

Vista SP1 details:

You can download the SP1 via Windows update; Note that if

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eBay Desktop, the free alternative to eBay web portal is a very good application to showcase the power of Adobe AIR. I totally fell in love with the user interface; easy to use and very fast.

One reason I prefer FeedDemon over Google reader is the pace at which I can navigate between the feeds and perform operations on the feeds/news items. Google Reader is fast but its still a long way from matching the speed of a desktop app. Its the exact difference you find even in eBay Desktop compared to its web peer.

I don't do much of shopping on eBay but definitely

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When Google Calendar was launched in 2006, I didn't find anything unique except the "Quick Add" feature. I might not have spent too much time exploring the powerful features of Google calendar then, but I am sure that most of them would agree that there was no single compelling feature in Google Calendar. At that time, my usage of Calendar was also pretty limited; However age is catching up with me and I really had to start using a calendar to keep track of my day to day events. (I am not going to write in detail about these events, but these were the ones which made me realize that I was getting old :) ) When I ...

The demonstration of WorldWide Telescope made Scoble cry and in his follow up post he did explain as to what made him cry.  I didn't cry (not to prove that I am stronger than Scoble :) ) , but was definitely impressed after seeing the following video.

(Note: It's a lengthy video and the streaming isn't that fast)

viewNode("0411aaa38a77a", {"height": "320", "width": "500"});

 

You might also like reading this paper from Jim Gray which triggered the worldwide telescope project.