Once you register you have more credits for free and you can manage your contacts as well.The delivery is also quite fast. It hardly takes 5 seconds. This for a free service is quite ok I feel. The revenue model for this site is based on advertisements and building sms advertisement campaigns for business. 

It also provides users the ability to send with their own sender ID. Probably this will fit the business group. It also aims at sending advertisements along with the messages sent for free. 

It’s worth having a look and giving it  a try…!

I wanted this site ( single page) to load faster without any complications. I’ve just put the IP of the visitor and a small JS to copy the IP to your clipboard.

Snapshot of ItismyIP.com

I think,  I’m far better this time in choosing my domain name..I’ve seen around 100 hits already in a day without much doing from my side. So I added my adsense today to it.. Hope it gives me back the 10 USD within this year.

I know there are ‘n’ number of popular sites giving this service. But I’m thinking of something different that would help me have my share of traffic. Any suggestions welcome in this regard…!

Have a look here and do share your comments..

    As usual, my friend kept me waiting in the waiting lobby in her office. I was just thinking about the exams these security personals were writing. I tried hard to remember any such exams I’ve written in my last 4 years after coming to a job. I couldn’t remember any and that too in such a strict examination environment. There has been never an attempt to measure our skills at the cost of our job. (It’s not only for me, but for 99% of us).

    I do agree we do take up interviews before joining a job. I’m worried when we stay at the job for longer periods. I’ve seen many of my seniors staying in the job for more than a decade. I’m not sure of the present system we have. Probably with the time, we learn on our job. But are we really evaluated at any point? Maybe for the annual appraisal we are evaluated. But here again, on the tasks we’ve performed for the last twelve months and not for what we’ve learnt. I agree the learning and job go hand-in-hand. But when a person on job which don’t require a top-class techie, takes up regular exams in his subjects on latest advancements, it make me think aloud…

Thinking still louder, I’ve got few points to make

• Every employee should be evaluated on technical or non-technical skills relevant to the current market demand, to his job and to his experience.
• For any organization to be successful, atleast the 5% of the workforce should be replenished annually. (May the above said evaluation be a scale?)
• I agree the infrastructure for this set up calls for additional costs, but in the long run, the ROI is definite.

The above points may be little extravagant in terms of reality. But I see them as a necessity to survive. Please do share your comments.

I added one more switch to my script ‘S’. It accepts the keywords and searches the YouTube for related videos. Now my scripts usage is like

This helps a lot for me now. Just I trigger something like

C:\Videos> Cscript yt_dl.vbs S 10 Sachin Warne

It downloads 10 videos related to Sachin & Warne from the YouTube.

Hope this improvement helps. The only limitation (atleast that I’ve noticed) is it can download the maximum number of 20 related videos. Please do share your comments.

The modified version can be downloaded here.

    You need to be online to watch a video from YouTube. It also supports buffering. That’s the video can be buffered when connected to the internet and watched offline. (This has helped me to watch so many videos when I’m not connected). But the pain part is if you close the browser, the buffered content is lost. You again have to connect to internet to watch the same video clip.

    Why not we download it and have it offline? I googled and found some websites that provide this service. You tell them the video you need, they give you the download link after sometime. You can download it. But you get this service at the cost of advertisements and annoying popups. There is a plug-in available for Firefox users. Still IE users don’t have any options. All I wanted was to download many video clips in a single shot. The only option was to code myself!

    I chose VBscript as I don’t need any more software installation necessary for this to run. Almost all the Windows comes with the scripting support. Hence I can run my VBscript anywhere even in the Cyber-cafes. It supports two switches currently. Either I can directly supply the list of URLs of videos I want when I’m calling it or I can provide a text file with list of URLs. Something like

When you call the script with ‘U’ switch you can provide the URLs directly. Something like

YT_DL.VBS U http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMYw8SodMWQ, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRMyR8BJ74A

When you call the script with ‘F’ switch you can just provide a path to text file which contains the list of URLs

    YT_DL.VBS F url_list.txt

    The main advantage of the script is that you can just create a list of videos you want and put in a text file and pass it on to the script with ‘F’ switch. It downloads and saves them in the same folder with the title of the videos as the file names. You are done with a single command. No waiting, No popup and it can run on your background. You need not even bother about it.

    Please note, when you running this script for the first time, you will (most probably) get an error message stating, “msxml3.dll: Access is denied”. Don’t worry, it’s a security catch. You need to add http://youtube.com to your list of trusted sites. For this go to the ‘Internet options àSecurity tabà select Trusted and click the ‘Sites..’ button. There you add http://youtube.com. Now run your script. You won’t have any issues.

    Once downloaded, you can play those .FLV files using FLV players available over the web for free. You can download one from here. Hope you find this script useful. You can use it and modify it in the way you want. If you have any issues or suggestions, please let me know. Have fun and do share your comments here.

The script can be downloaded here.

The complete script can be configured by setting some variables in it. I’ll explain the configuration parameters below.

    Once you have the configuration done. Open the Windows Scheduler (from control panel) add this batch file and schedule it with the interval you want. You are done. You have your backup process running. The same script can be modified slightly to handle multiple databases if you need. This script can be downloaded from here

Do share your comments.

    Even I was one of you. Now I’ve moved my personal laptop to Linux though I had a licensed copy of Windows Vista. That’s the power and craze of Linux. It’ll get you there once you try it out. Ok to try it out what can I do ? Simple, first there are two ways of doing it.

• First is to have a dual-boot option where you can have Linux and Windows running in a same machine. Try it out. Get your hands dirt. You’ll be able to feel the power and ease of using it soon. Eventually you will end up discarding one OS. I leave it to you to decide which one… J But this option requires some technical know-how about the installation, partition tables, file system… If you don’t know leave it, I’ve another option for you.
• The second option is quite simple and straight forward – Virtualization. I’ll talk about this in this post.

   

To Virtualize, there are many options available. I’ll give you an option that is easy and free to use. We’ll work with “VMware Player” which is free and easy. Now follow the steps

• Download it directly from here. It helps you to run any VMware appliances.
• Now we need to download VMware appliances for Linux. The options are many. You can yourself search for anything here. For Linux, there are numerous options available for various distributions and flavours. You can also download the Appliance from this site. I found it Googling.

Now you are ready to run Linux in your PC which runs Windows. Just install the VMware player. Extract the Contents of the archive file you have downloaded from the above links. Just launch the “.vmx” file available. It’ll be launched in VMware player by default. Wait for some time, allow it to launch the VMware. You’ll have the “Linux” running in your PC now. Most probably you’ll be provided with the user credentials along with the downloaded archive in a separate text file. Login and there you go… J

VMware Rocks…! Do share your comments…!

Writing any Mashup involves the following steps /actions

• Deciding what to write (choose a topic)
• Deciding the data stores (service providers like Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Hostinfo …etc)
• Look for necessary APIs exposed them

Once you are at this point, you can really ‘Mashup ‘ you data to provide your end user a creative user-interface. Now, I’ll take an example and go through the above steps and finally come up with a Mashup widget. I’d try to create a ‘Geo-IP-Map’. It’d show the end-user position (place) on the map. It can be embedded on any web page. I’ve just embedded it in my own sidebar.

For producing this I need the following data

• The Map’s base data
• The latitude and longitude of users’ present location
• The City / Country / Geographical location of the user
• The IP of the end-user

I’ve given the data in the top-down order. Now let’s decide the data store provider for each of the data required

Now you have the API and the data store ready. Both of the above data stores I’ve used require you to register with them for receiving the API key. This requirement varies with the data providers. Now you have this ready, you can just put things in place and provide a creative UI to your users. I used PHP to code my GEO-IP-Map. I’ve added this Mashup maplet to my own blog. You can see it in action in the sidebar itself. After all it is simple and cool…!

If you are interested in this code, you can download the sample from here. I’m not a PHP programmer, hence you may find this very crude. You can modify it to your taste and convenience. Do keep me posted.

I’ll write more on Mashups in my next post.