Khalbali on Keyboard

Tried playing the song "Khalbali" from Rang de basanti on my miniature keyboard...

A ban ,only makes a blog popular

I decided to check out "exposingtheleft.blogspot.com" one of the blocked blogs out of curiosity .It was like any other blog, with the author's opinions .

Next I checked out that site's statistics - just see the surge in hits this week after the ban ! 98% of the visitors are first time visitors ! About 6000 people have visited the blog instead of the trivial numberwho did before the ban.

What has the ban achieved? Made that blog dead popular.

Blogs to be unblocked soon ??

Finally some hope for the bloggers in India - Looks like the blog block in India will be gone in 48 hours if Amitabh Singhal, a spokesperson of the Internet Service Providers Association of India is to be believed.

He has acknowledged that the ISP's mistook the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) notice and blocked entire blog domains.

Here's a quote from the Rediff article :

"An advisory is being sent from ISPAI to member ISPs saying they should configure their Domain Name Servers (DNS) in such a way that they block only the sub-domains DoT wants blocked," said Singhal, adding, "It would help if, in future, DoT could also mention the mechanism by which sites should be blocked."

What ,our ISP's are saying they dont know how to block a sub-domain? These companies provide internet for 40 million Indians ! [ India is the world's fourth largest internet user btw]. Who are they trying to bluff??? Clearly all the ISPs had decided in unison to block the whole sites.

Now singhal says an advisory has been sent to ISP's to blockonly the sub-domains DoT wants blocked....

But here's the more worrying part - this is not the official reasoning - but sites were blocked on the grounds that they had articles against Sonia Gandhi & Indian Muslims........

Wow ! So If you write a article against the congress president your blog will be blocked?
India wants to emulate China on internet censorship & control ??

Thanks to Shivam Vij for his coverage.

Indian ISP's Block Blogs

I assumed it was another one of blogspot.com's downtimes tonight,until I saw Rediff.com's RSS feed "Are ISP"S Blocking Blogs?".Turns out that indeed they are!

Apparently,it seems the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-IN) , an Indian Govt body , has sent a 22 page list of sites to be blocked to ISP's & this has resulted in the blocking of blogs hosted on blogspot, typepad & even Geocities among others.

While I had noticed none of the pages hosted on geocities [ including geocities.com] were accessible for the last 15 days,It never occured to me that they were actually being blocked - Why would Geocities be blocked?

I called up the Airtel customer care & they did acknowledge that blogspot pages were blocked but couldnt comment further.As for geocities,seems like they didnt know it & asked me to run tracert,ping etc and check.

They said they would check at their server end and revert back to me....

But here's the funny part - bloggers can still post to blogspot since the posting page is @blogger.com. However the blog itself hosted on blogspot.com cannot be seen :p

The Zidane Way !

A fuuny take on the zidane head butt.

A 720 Megapixel Image

Came across two great images today & I have to share it!

The first is a picture of Sydney Harbour at a resolution of about 720 Megapixels!! That means you can zooooom into the pic to the point where you can see inside every one of those windows !




Below you can see the what the above pic looks like when zoomed [the area marked by arrow]


The image size is over 1 GB,but you can see it using Flash.....Link Here.

The other image is a extreme close up of Velcro .....@ 94x magnification!

The iPod Your company 'gifted' may not be yours after all.....

Yes.If you are celebrating with the latest video iPod your company gifted, think again- for,it might not be 'yours' in the exact sense.Companies that reaped a good bounty these days seem to reward their employees with a ipod to everyone one of them.Employees are ofcourse only too happy to listen to it or gift it to relatives or sell it.

Bringning a jolt to those people ,National Semiconductors, a electronics giant of USA ,which had only recently 'gifted' iPods to its employees has asked those who have been laid off recently to return their iPods or pay a 'fair' market price to the company !

Earlier this year Cognizant Technologies gifted a iPod to all the employees on payroll at that time to celebrate reaching the $1bn revenue milestone.While I dont think Cognizant would do something as lame as NS ,people should be aware what companies can do.

Things people do !

This one's about my neighbour.She said " The last few days have been very hectic.I've had to take him to hospital everyday.He has broken his legs when playing". They go the hospital to have a fresh band of plaster & as soon they return home,he removes it all ! He is given the medicines daily by her. The docs have said that his legs have to be operated upon.He'll be under observation for 15 days & then they will decide whether his body can withstand the operation...

If you are thinking " What is so interesting about this? " ,well the point is, the 'he' thats being referred to throughout is a Cat !

Ok. If you are the kind who says "Cats have to be taken care too .Whats wrong in it ! ", nothing wrong as such.But it puzzles me no end, why people bring upon problems to themselves like this !