Personal Blogs

This site saw the last post almost 3 months back and since then many have been checking with me on my well-being. Few services even banned this site for having no activity in the last 3 months. I just took a long break from blogging and hope to be back as soon as possible ! It was time at my workplace which initially (and is still) held me from being "online". Later I just felt better being "away". I also got hooked onto reading fiction novels! Currently I have these many books waiting to be finished :) On the top of these 9 books, I have an additional 7 books ...

The new Bangalore International airport started operating from today and seems to have already handled around 341 flights.

I tried to check on the official website to know more about the launch day only to find the website down ! I tried accessing the site contents via Google cache; even that seemed to lead to pages with errors.

Update - Bialairport.com is now redirecting to http://www.bengaluruairport.com. The site is half baked and is hosted on Bharti in Karnataka, India.

The site was well designed and optimized for search engine queries. However looks like the IT team overlooked the

...

The Bangalore/Bengaluru International Airport (BIA) is finally commencing operations from 23 May 2008.

The switch to the new airport will take place at midnight on May 23. As per the statement from BIAL (BIA Limited) all flights landing and departing after midnight will operate from the new airport.

Update: BIA opened on May 24 (Saturday) and handled 341 flights on Day One

Also flights arriving before midnight (on May 22) can also choose to land on the new airport.

Air India's flight from Bangalore to Singapore will supposedly be the first flight to take off from the new international airport in the city, when it becomes operational on May 23.

...

There has been another round of pagerank  update and I see that many sites have got a higher pagerank and few of them have even managed to get a PR of 4 within few months !

This site had a PR of 4 from quite some time and even during the last update where few sites were penalized for selling Text Link Ads the PR of this site remained at 4

At that time, I thought that I wasn't penalized since I was not selling Text Link Ads from my home page (which had PR4) and was only having post level ads (Around 5 post level ads were active).

However this round of pagerank update has taken the

...

My 8Mbps broadband plan is sucking out money from the past 2 months; somehow I am managing to exceed the 4GB download limit.

With the intent of checking on some new plans, I tried to access the Airtel website http://www.airtel.in

I ended up with this:

The URL was being re-directed to http://www.airtel.in/srilanka/srilanka..... Looks like the site was hacked by somebody !

Talking of Airtel web portal, Airtel seems to be changing its domain every other month; Few months back, it was airtelworld.com (It was something else before this) and now its Airtel.in !

And with every domain change, they seem to be changing the URL for some of

...

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

...

Recently Raj found out that he was color blind and requested his readers to take the color blindness test on Flixter. When I first scrolled through the quiz questions, I thought it was some kind of fun since I wasn't able to find numbers in those circles.

After spending considerable amount of time, I finally came up with 6 correct answers out of the 10 questions. The 4 failed ones had single numbers and even if someone showed me where the number was I couldn't see it!

I still thought that the quiz was some kind of fun and that very few people would have scored 10 out of 10. But I was

...

The new year has bought in a new look to my weblog. Here is a snapshot of the site opened in Safari.

The last update was done in July 2007. After checking lot of themes, I finally settled on the Freicurv theme. I still have to work on the ad placements and some of the page templates (archives etc). Meanwhile check out the new look and let me know your thoughts on the same.

I have been planning to write about my visit to Staples from quite some time and now I have finally found some time :)

Staples is one of the worlds largest office supply retail store chain and they entered India via a joint venture with Kishore Biyani's Pantaloon Retail Limited. The biggest store in Bangalore is located on the Sarjapur Outer Ring Road (Next to Reliance Fresh/Opposite Innovative Multiplex).

Update - Staples has now opened a new store in Koramangala (near Forum Mall)

A store like Staples is tailor made for a gadget freak like me. When it comes to electronic goods/computer accessories, I am not constrained by my bank balance,

...

I keep a regular check on the IMDB Top 250 to see if any new movies have made it to the elite list. Today I noticed that both Godfather and Shawshank Redemption have got the same weighted rating of 9.1

(I am not sure it was the same few months back, I guess Shawshank had a mean rating of 9 I believe)

Even though Shawshank has more number of votes (296,165 vs 250,516) compared to Godfather, its still placed at No 2.

I had a look at the formula used by IMDB

I am not sure if 9.1 is the weighted rating

...