Ankit 's Life And Technology Reviews

Irritating : The new Firefox location bar

2008-06-18T11:21:00.001+05:30

This is a small post to tell you how irritated i am with the new address/location bar in Firefox.

It searches by the titles of the pages rather than url, so when you want to access wisetechie.com, the first url it will show will be wisetechie.com/something/something. The root site is shown much down the order and a lot of time is spent in accessing sites.

It would be great if someone can show me how to disable this pseudo smart location bar.

John Carpenter on Who wants to be a millionaire

2008-06-18T00:49:00.001+05:30

If you haven't seen this man, you haven't seen anything

What's up doc ?

2008-06-07T12:39:00.001+05:30

Well its been a long time since i updated the blog, been really busy doing other stuff like studying, playing games, searching for stuff to spend money on etc. Anyway there is a lot going on with me.

Firstly i got a new laptop, its a DELL Inspiron 1525,in totality it cost me around 1026 USD (including tax and customs) and is awesome. The only thing lacking is a good graphics card. In order to make the Inspiron smaller and sleeker DELL have removed support for an external graphics card on this laptop. The laptop has a 2 GHZ processor with 4 MB cache. It has all the finer things in life including built-in Bluetooth, webcamera and an IR remote to control Windows Media Player and Powerpoint Presentations. It also had touchscreen media buttons. I compared it to an old Dell Inspiron and it kicked butt both in terms of design and performance.

I also got a Bluetooth mouse to complement it. It was paid for by my brother :P. Its the Logitech V470 and it connects seamlessly without any dongle or receiver to my laptop.

All i gotta do now is learn how to install Windows Xp on this Dell machine. ;) , currently i have Windows Vista Home Premium which aint so bad also. In fact i am starting to like Windows Vista, especially the Aero interface.

Also the laptop is so glossy , you can see my ceiling and my hand taking the photograph. It turns heads wherever you are and everyone comments on how cool your laptop looks.

Free Almost !

2008-05-23T18:32:00.001+05:30

I had my last theory exam today. The blog is lying neglected due to the extreme study pressure.

I had communications today, the exam was so tough that most people, even the super toppers were left bewildered. But my exam didnt go so bad, infact it was good.

Thanks to the super huge amount i devoted to communications as i had scored pathetic marks in the mid-semesters, and if there was one subject i was going to flunk this semester, it was going to be communications. I wont be failing now unless something extremely drastic happens. Hopefully that wont happen.

Anyway i wont know until next semester when the results come out.

I have 2 exams left, on Monday i have my data structures viva and on Friday i have my Linux/Unix winter training viva.

Wish me luck !

Make it worth the time

2008-04-22T20:21:00.001+05:30

I was catching up on some data structures,i have been really busy studying this sem. So i am reading this lecture by a professor and i found that sense of humour is really a universal attribute. Even while teaching , the prof found a good joke in his sorting class ::

2F1.1. Fraud and Deceit; Forgery; Offenses Involving Altered or Counterfeit Instruments other than Counterfeit Bearer Obligations of the United States.

(a) Base offense Level: 6

(b) Specific offense Characteristics

(1) If the loss exceeded $2,000, increase the offense level as follows:

The federal sentencing guidelines are designed to help judges be consistent in assigning punishment. The time-to-serve is a roughly linear function of the total level.

However, notice that the increase in level as a function of the amount of money you steal grows logarithmically in the amount of money stolen.

This very slow growth means it pays to commit one crime stealing a lot of money, rather than many small crimes adding up to the same amount of money, because the time to serve if you get caught is much less.

The Moral: ``if you are gonna do the crime, make it worth the time!''

Not the ROFL kind of humour, but subtle humour :)

Found it worth sharing, from here

Trip To Pune

2008-02-23T23:07:00.001+05:30

I recently went on a short trip to Pune to attend to some family matters, the trip was intentionally kept as small as possible in order to ensure minimum missing of college classes. If there is one thing i have learnt in college, its that missing classes is pretty bad for your marks if you are the non-rattu and non-jugadu student.

Well anyway, here are some photos of my trip (bad quality and quantity of pics as dad forgot to carry the digital camera, so it was left to Nokia N72 to show its magic) ::

Photos from the plane, including the famous Mumbai Jhuggis near the airport, the Pune airport was closed BTW. So we took a taxi from Mumbai to Pune. On the way we ate at Dosa Plaza which boasts of around 100 different types of Dosas. I can safely say their Mysore Masala dosa was 10 times better than Sagar Ratna and probably at half the price.

Also some photos from a Mall in Navi Mumbai :

Interestingly there is no photo from Pune in the ones i have posted :P

Inspirational Video

2008-02-13T20:42:00.000+05:30

Found this on the Orkut page of a friend !

Force Fest 2008 Quiz

2008-01-25T21:27:00.000+05:30

So i had hosted the Force Fest 2008 quiz, a small turnout due to the timings, anyway i will post the questions soon, till then here are the Xerox ads discussed in the quiz.

Force India F1 Ad

2008-01-04T14:56:00.000+05:30

Pleasures of an External Hard Disk

2007-12-25T22:36:00.000+05:30

I recently purchased a new Seagate Free Agent hard disk, the 250 GB version. The hard disk is a sleek external harddisk which comes assemble by Seagate only and comes with a 5 year company warranty.

I had gone to Nehru Place to purchase the external hard disk, there the dealers tried to lure me into buying cheap Hitachi hard disks enclosed in local Intex casings. What they do is that they take regular internal hard disks and mount them in casings of cheap Chinese companies, these casings have an IDE to USB interface so that these internal (externalised) hard disks work with your computer. In fact one of my classmates had bought one of these makeshift external hard disks and as expected , the disk is giving him problems and he has given it for repair.

So anyone looking to buy an external hard disk , be warned , the dealers at Nehru Place will try to shove these assembled notebooks in your face, beware of them.

Coming back to the pleasures part, its great to have a huge external storage. I can keep all my multimedia in the external drive while keeping my hard disk space for software. I recently installed Visual Studio and Windows Mobile SDK so needed space for that and my Windows Xp partition was really out of it. I was able to generate enough space by moving less commonly used files from the internal drive to the external one.

As far as the Visual Studio goes, i use an original licensed copy from MSDNAA !!!

The NSIT Quiz Club: Quiz Review- MLNC Event Horizon

2007-12-21T09:54:00.000+05:30

The NSIT Quiz Club: Quiz Review- MLNC Event Horizon

Like Sharat said this was one big anger management session, i am sure i lost some minutes of my life due to the high blood pressure induced by the particular event.

WWF Wildlife Quiz at IP College for Women

2007-12-17T18:27:00.000+05:30

We won again , woohoooooooo !!!

And not only that, we won 5k cash. It was a wildlife quiz conducted by the World Wildlife Fund (for nature). The prelims had 30 questions, me and Manan (single 'n') scored quite a few but also missed some we knew. Anyway we went out of the audi and on coming back we found that we had indeed qualified.

In the finals we did pretty good and in the end we won the quiz, it was a nicely executed quiz with great prizes.
Anyway nice outing, good money , lets hope they hold one next year too !

Also earlier in the week we won the Science Quiz at Miranda , the winnings of which are still not with us.

Math Quiz

2007-12-13T19:42:00.000+05:30

Money Finally, we won some cool bucks at Dyal Singh college in their maths quiz (Mannan did most of the stuff :P) , anyway it was a good outing and finally some cash for my cash-strapped pockets.

We have practical trainings in the morning and quizzes after that, a wonderful season this is turning out to be :)

Another shady DU Quiz

2007-12-11T19:48:00.000+05:30

Sometimes i feel sad that DCE/NSIT must share quizzing heritage with a lot of fellow DU colleges. The sad truth is that most of these DU colleges arent so great at conducting/managing/doing quizzes. In fact they should not host quizzes at all. Take today for instance :

I went to this college in north campus, one which is a good college in terms of academics (wont name it). But the quiz today left a bad taste in my mouth. So basically we were tied for qualification and had to go through this tiebreaker sort of thing. We were asked 3 questions, we both answered one correct, so tie again. Now another 2 questions , no one got it.

The shocker, a teacher comes and says that only 3 teams will qualify if we don't break the tie. And now in this physics themed quiz we are asked a Mahabharata question by the teacher. The other team answered and we were reduced to being the audience.

The questions had a lot of mistakes and the quiz was generally very shady. Roshan (facha) won a chocolate though.

Microsoft Lifechat LX - 3000 Review

2007-12-10T18:17:00.000+05:30

When you buy Microsoft hardware for twice the money of other products, you expect it to be good. So after my sound card blacked out and my USB sound card to flipped off, i needed a new one. Fairly fed up of the cheap Chinese ones, i opted to spend some money for a good one. So i zeroed in on this Microsoft beauty, the Lifechat LX-3000, the perfect replacement for your Sound Card. And Microsoft didnt disappoint me.

The thing looks like its from a future movie or something, i mean unlike other headphones, it manages to look slick and modern, yet not bulky. I also have Philips Headphones, which are bulky and dont look this cool. And also the Lifechat series includes integration with Windows Live Messengers which is another useful feature.

Within hours of using it, i got compliments from my relatives abroad that the voice quality on this set is much better. If you want to know, my earlier mic was of creative which is also an uber cool company, but it seems that Microsoft has overtook them in terms of voice quality while recording. I wont be surprised if the software included has a noise cancelling algorithm, as when i record i cant hear any background noises, just my voice, nothing else ! No Hum, no air noise, nothing.

The sound quality while hearing songs is also greatly improved. I would say that my computer is giving sound quality much better than that of an Ipod (isnt it supposed to anyway ?). The sound is pure pleasure, again no hums, or noise. Only the sound you play.

Verdict :

Rating:

We deducted .5 for the cost, otherwise its a perfect piece of hardware.

Pros ::

Super Voice Quality
Super Playback Quality
Uber cool Looks
Volume and Mute control panel thingy on the wire itself.
Long Wire provided and USB interface

Cons ::

The pricing is a little on the higher side. Around Rs. 1500 for it is slightly expensive compared to the USB sound cards available in the market.

Biz Quiz at FMS

2007-12-10T15:13:00.000+05:30

We went to DU north campus again yesterday for a quiz, Gautam Bhimani was the quiz-master at the quiz at FMS. The quiz was all trivia, some picked up, some well researched. Anyway some questions were incredibly stupid ::

Q. Whose advertising is 'Drops of Joy' and whats special about it ?
The answer was Coca Cola , but the why part got me, a stupid explanation was given ::

During winters coke cannot advertise refreshing etc., hence it advertises with another tag line.

Now this might be correct, but it looks a lot like the person's own interpretation. The drops of joy is a thing to build brand confidence as far as what i as a consumer understand. Its got more to do with the pesticide controversies than anything else let alone the winter season.

Anyway we had a lot of fun and Sharat gets the quote of the day award(right after the coke question) ::

"Gautam Bhimani should quit quizzing and go back to being Harsha Bhogle's sidekick"

No offence to the man of course ( i didnt say it anyway, but did laugh a lot), in case he lands here after some ego surfing.

Later we went to Rajiv Chowk, and moved around the CP inner circle, fed ourselves and came back :)

The intelligent people fight back

2007-12-06T14:09:00.000+05:30

You fight fire with fire(actually water), but anyway to bring people who use Orkut to their senses, fight spam with spam.

I lost my brand new Natraj HB pencil with a rubber attached. The pencil costs Rs.3/. If u forward this msg I will get one paisa from orkut. If you have heart and want to
help a poor child in need, plz fwd it to atleast 10 friends. Please don't neglect. Otherwise my mom will scold me.

If you forward it then your life will change for ever (u will get one pack of sketch pens and an apsara non-dust eraser within 3 days). Do NOT delete this message otherwise greek gods will get angry with you and your life will be pencil-less forever.
Good Luck will come to you for wasting time.

Man, if i had got this earlier i could have gotten a free non-dust eraser. Send this message to all the people who send you stupid spam.

Why being smart is advantageous !

2007-12-06T10:12:00.000+05:30

Why being smart is advantageous !

Only if MD and Power App had such a provision !

Orkut To be closed :P

2007-12-05T22:24:00.000+05:30

Hey Bhagwaan ! (Oh God !) Its Dianna from the director of Orkut (Whatever that means). Gullible Folks !

HEY ITS DIANNA, FROM THE DIRECTOR OF ORKUT,EVERYBODY SORRY FOR THEINTERRUPTION BUT ORKUT IS CLOSING THE SYSTEM DOWN BECAUSE TOO MANY BOTTERS ARE TAKING UP ALL THE NAMES, WE ONLY HAVE 57 NAMES LEFT,
IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO CLOSE YOUR ACCOUNT, DONT SEND THIS MESSAGE, IF YOU WANT
TO KEEP YOUR ACCOUNT ,SEND THIS MESSAGE TO EVERYONE ON YOUR LIST.
THIS IS NOT A JOKE, YOU'LL BE SORRY IF YOU DONT SEND IT. THANKS DIRECTOR OFORKUT, TIM BUISKI. WHOEVER DOESNT SEND THIS MESSAGE, YOUR ACCOUNT WILLBEDEACTIVATED AND IT WILL COST YOU $ 10.00 A MONTH TO USE IT.

And when intelligent people forward this, then you know this world is nor going in the right direction. For those confused : The message is pure shit , delete it as soon as you receive it. Dont forward the shit.

NSIT Photo Collage

2007-12-02T11:37:00.000+05:30

A photo i found on facebook !

Getting Ripped off and refunded

2007-12-01T17:00:00.000+05:30

Ah well just a short post to warn you about homeshop18.com, i had ordered some stuff from them, turned out to be cheap chinese stuff which didnt even work, so beware !

But the good thing is that after bugging them for a long time, my money has been refunded. Pehredaar needs to do a episode on their own site.

More on this later !!!

Exams over !!!

2007-11-30T15:13:00.000+05:30

Yes , finally the theory exams are done, and only 2 practicals left. My exams were from excellent (Elec.) to Ok-ish(C&S,Maths) to Pathetic(Power App). Somehow our batch's papers are always the weirdest. Also i have realised that regular studying and hard work don't get you good marks ::

Mugging UP does, as some people from my class have proved this sem.

More Later !

James Randi exposes psychic

2007-11-10T19:09:00.000+05:30

Enjoy !

HP's Snapfish Review after exams

2007-11-05T23:24:00.000+05:30

Ah well, i tried HP's new photo service Snapfish, and i will be writing a proper review after my exams, the photo printing and accessories service is a bold step by HP in the Indian market, but misses the target by a lot. We will discuss the weaknesses and flaws in their plan when i write the review.

In other news, its exam time again , which means i must immerse myself into MOSFETS,BJTS and Complex Integration and Vector Integration etc. Bye now !

F1chronicles.com is now pagerank 5 ! Also i got a 26/30 in MD internals which is the joint highest in the class !

Woohooooooo !

My latest Gadget

2007-10-21T21:06:00.000+05:30

Ah yes i call it a gadget, for non Mach 3 users : You really cant imagine the shave this baby gives you. I mean the closest shave, 0% irritation and zero cuts (which is a first for me, putting on aftershave i felt no pain :O )

No i am not being paid by gillette, and no i have not lost my mind !