Monthly Archive for April, 2006

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Buying a Apple iMac is easy?

Published on April 13, 2006 in Computers and Internet. 2 Comments

Stefan Constantinescu is gearing up to buy a Apple iMac. Is this a big deal? He made it as one. It is not a big deal for a person to buy a Intel iMac. Then, how did it get into the news?

Stefan is not a rich guy to shell out all the money on a high-end PC or a notebook. He has sub 500 Mhz IBM Think pad. Now, he wants to get into the world of Apple with a Intel iMac. Too big of a wish? News is that he is gonna buy it soon with donations. He has setup his blog to ask donations from people. Believe it or not,he has accumulated $465 in just two days. And the donations through paypal seems to be pouring in. He has added a wiki page for all the donation statistics and also has added two youtube videos to strengthen the cause.
It would not be long, when guys start asking donations for ipod,digital cameras and every gadget that is available.

History of my Internet life

Published on April 9, 2006 in Humor, Internet and Just for Jolly. 3 Comments

I started to use internet after I finished my 12th grade. only by 2000, internet became popular in and was affordable. I spent the first few years of my internet life only creating email ids. I think I had around a dozen then. I used to pay Rs.30, only for checking all the dozzen mailboxes, for an hour. In fact, people with a email id were real geeks that time in India.�weird???????

Then I got introduced to Mouthshut. I increased my dad’s monthly phone bills a lot only because of this website. Idea behind mouthshut was to get people writing reviews for different categories of products. I was a very active writer in mouthshut till a year ago. Even I had a profile created for myself in mouthshut. Then the mp3 download mania caught me too. I started to search the web for mp3s of tamil and english songs and was downloading them. Mind you, I had a dial-up connection that time. It took hours and hours to download�just a few songs. All I did while downloading mp3s was to login to all my dozen email accounts and delete the junk mails I receive. The truth was that junk mails were the only ones I received for months.

By 2004, broadband internet was introduced to India and I was one of the early getters. After installing broadband, my area of browsing shifted to technical stuff. I started to read a lot of technical articles and also enrolled myself in geekstogo. Geekstogo is a free computer help forum. Here, I learnt a lot of technical and troubleshooting techniques for PCs. By this time, I had retained three email addresses and used only those.

Now that I have started my own weblog, I have started to read other blogs and comment on them too. I was speaking about this to one of colleagues over a cup of coffee and found that his internet life history resembles mine. Is this generic?

Weblogs- the mystery demystified

Published on April 9, 2006 in Internet. 0 Comments

Today, I am going to share a little knowledge on what I know about the so-called weblogs or blogs.

What are weblogs?

A weblog, or “blog”, is a personal journal on the Web. Weblogs cover as many different topics, and express as many opinions, as there are people writing them. Some blogs are highly influential and have enormous readership, while others are mainly intended for a close circle of family and friends.

Who is a blogger?

A person who writes or creates weblogs

What is a comment?

When a blogger writes a post in his weblog, he opens it to the public for the opinion or comments.

What is RSS?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and it is used to subscribe to feeds of blogs. With RSS readers available, a reader can easily subscribe to numerous blogs and read them in a categorized way. RSS feeds are avilable for both posts and comments. And also, there are free online feed readers like Yahoo, Google etc;

What Blog does to the web?

Blogs serve the purpose of the writer mainly. It encourages people to share their interests and also a lot of blogs are dedicated to technical interests.

How can I start a blog myself?

Anyone who has a domain name registrered in their name and has bought server space to host the blog, can start a blog easily. With a lot of free blog software like WordPress around, it has become easy to start blogs. There are DIY blog tutorials available on the web. Alternatively, for people who cannot afford money or time to start a blog of their own, there are a lot of websites which give a free blog space on the web on registration. Sites like blogger serves this purpose.

Hope this was really helpful. Meet you all with a next one.

A gift for my brother

Published on April 7, 2006 in books. 1 Comment

I went on a shopping spree today. I bought myself a pair of slip-ons and some cool Tees and a couple of 3/4 pants. The whole shopping was in Spencer’s plaza, which of course is the only shopping mall in Chennai of high standards. As always, dropped into landmark for a quick book browsing and a particular book caught my attention. It was “The Google Story” by David Vise. After going through the cover, I found that it will be a quite interesting one. Knowing more about my brother Balaji’s interest in Google, I thought it will be a good gift for him. I grabbed it up without a second thought. Heading back home, I was thinking about how Google has changed lives of million people around the worl through their range of products.

Back home, I gave the book to my bro with a little scribbling in the first page. It goes like this, ” A gift to my wonderful brother for setting up my site www.karthickraghavan.com”. I had it signed too. I hope he liked it and reads�the book.

And also to mention, I bought a layman’s guide to Income tax for myself. I think I will finish this off in a day or too. As a tax paying citizen, I am obliged to know how income tax works.

Google Page Rankings of my site

Published on April 7, 2006 in General stuff. 2 Comments

Come the 21st of April, it will be two months since this site was launched. I was curious to see how google ranked me with search queries karthick, karthick raghavan and raghavan. Karthick earns me a spot in the second page. I remember it being in the fourth place a month before. karthick raghavan earns me the first result. raghavan comes nowhere near in the picture at all. Hmmm! May be, my posts do not contain the keywords or the ad-sense or the adwords that google robots are prying for. whatever, I atleast ranked by google. May be I should ask Balaji or Umesh to throw more light on the concept of google page ranking with their posts.

Satyam Cinemas’ online ticket booking

Published on April 7, 2006 in General stuff and places to go. 34 Comments

People who have been to chennai or ones who hail from Chennai will be familiar about Satyam Cinemas. A couple of months ago, I thought of going out to a movie with my college buddies. And the apparent choice of the cinema was Satyama and the movie was Rang de Basanti. When I looked in deccan chronicle for the show schedules, the ad about the online ticket booking caught my attention. Logged into Satyam Cinemas’ online booking site. I was in for a surprise with a invalid security certificate warning me. I was still in a dilemma about the site’s security features. Anyway, it thought to take the gamble and booked 6 tickets online. The next hurdle I faced while booking was using a credit card. They don’t accept debit cards. Pretty weird! When I enquired about the same to one of their executives over phone, they said that their policy accepts only credit card bookings. What a great policy?????????

I somehow managed to book the tickets through a ICICI credit card. Thanks to my colleague. Good that Satyam charges Rs.5 extra for tickets booked online. The equation goes this way, for a booking of 6 tickets which cost Rs.110 each, you pay Rs.30 extra. Cool! when compared to the hassles of going to the cinema and standing in the queue for long hours. The ticket confirmation receipt can be printed and the tickets are to collected 30 minutes before the show. It was a very good and a novel experience to me. Outcome was that we enjoyed the movie well with our booked tickets in hand already!

P.S.:-

Certain things are there for Satyam to work on their website .They are

The expired security certificate
Site is built in Flash. It degrades the usability features. And it does not work with ad-block feature turned on in mozilla.
Acceptance of debit cards as a mode of payment.

Angel falls – Traveller’s ultimate destination

Published on April 5, 2006 in Travel. 0 Comments

Is�Angel falls�a traveller’s ultimate destination? I am not sure but it is for me. After I buy out all the traveller’s essential gear, I wil head to Venezuela.

Ian Wright’s travel tour to Venezuela impressed me so much that I have chosen it as my first travel destination. Angel falls was the last part in Ian Wright’s tour of Venezuela.

The splendor of Angel falls got me gobsmacked. At 2,648 feet, it is the world’s highest falls. It takes more than 3 days to reach Angel falls by a kayack ride in a river and also a few miles of trekking in the forest. After all these hardships, I am pretty sure that one will really understand the meaning of travel. Ian compared the statistics of Angel falls with the Empire estate bulding and the Niagara falls. They were many times smaller when compared to the mammoth falls.

Here on, I am going to work towards my travel to ultimate travel destination.

gogole and google

Published on April 4, 2006 in Internet. 1 Comment

I am not very accurate when it comes to typing fast in computers. One day at office, I had to search for something which made to open google in IE. Trying to type really fast, I ended up typing gogole. gogole and ctrl+enter led me to google. Surprised, I noted it down and thought of looking at it a later time.

After forgetting about it for a few weeks,I stumbled on a forward email from my friend which had trivial and very good information in it. Going through it, I was amazed to see how Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of google search engine initially named their site as gogole and how it evolved into google. Hmmm! So, I found the answer to my typo error.