Google reader now supports ARIA technologies which makes google reader to read the feeds through voice

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Today came across a web tool to test the speed of Broadband Internet service Provider , SpeedTest.net. The site provides a flash based tool, with neat animation and counters to measure the speed of the upload / download limit of the broadband provided by your ISP.

It provides facility to measure the speed using various servers around the world. I’ve measured my ISP’s speed using servers located at Mumbai, Sweden, Texas and I could see a variable difference in my ISP’s speed.

This makes me understand on, how big does a server makes difference when it is available near by. I used to wonder why Yahoo had moved my data to India server. I got my answers now.

I’ve a 256 KBPs , Bharti Airtel Broadband and I’m quite impressed and satisfied with the test result. I just ran the test result 5 times and I could see an average of 280KBPs as Upload limit and 220 KBPs for Download limit.

Using Mumbai Server

Using Sweden Server

Oh god, it’s declining…

Using Texas Server

Such a long distance connect, still working quite faster. I was expecting to drop below 100Kbps.

Also they provide some interesting comparison on the speed of Broadband provided by various ISP’s in my location ( Chennai ). Also it charts the usage of Broadband and various speed limits across state and country. I checked with Tamilnadu and India.

Across India

I could see Assam ( :-0 ) has a greater download speed

and Jammu & Kashmir has a greater upload speed.

I couldn’t believe the above comparison. How could these two states might have a greater speed. Probably people doesn’t use Internet much in those area, so that bandwidth is not very much occupied.

Continent Wise

I could not see India anywhere in the chart. Do any of your find it? I guess India has a long way to go ahead in the Broadband revolution.

This results proves that India has more way to travel in the Broadband road to reach other countries. It’s really sad that even the India’s NIC centre doesn’t have such a rocking Internet to compete with other countries.

It was a buzz in online world for few days when Yahoo announced it’s open ID support. And today I was logging into the Plaxo and noticed the Yahoo’s OpenID sign in.

So thought of giving a try. Here is a sequence of screenshots for you if you haven’t tried Yahoo OpenID. Previously I was using my WordPress user id for the OpenID. But now I’m using my Yahoo ID.

It’s good that Yahoo shows up image CAPTCHA.

And this page reveals to which URL we will be redirected to. So Y! lets us verify that we don’t go to any Phishing page.

And finally it’s done . I’m into the Plaxo.

Today read a good post on Trackbacks. Andy Wibbels had written in a elegant and way to know about Trackbacks in blog and how to make use of that efficiently. Have a look at his post.

One sample is, OpenGiga had written an article linking to one of my article on Adobe Share on it’s blog.

You you would see Trackbacks link in your WordPress admin area.

This post has been moved to the new “My Mind…Leaks” site.

http://mymindleaks.com/why-you-wont-love-macbook-air/

Today I noticed something fishy in the Google Reader while reading the Chennai MetBlog Post of Iniya Pongal Nalvalthukkal. I was viewing the post through Google Reader using Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.11( Downloaded yesterday Jan-14-2008).

The fishy thing is Tamil Indic text rendered by Firefox was garbled. I checked quickly with other Indic language scripts( Hindi, Telugu, Kannada ). They seems to render properly.

The post which I was reading in Firefox , which renders Tamil Indic text.

Same through the Microsoft Internet Explorer. I could see correct text rendered.

I checked with one of the Wikipedia article which runs test for rendering the Unicode Indic scripts.

The 2nd Column shows the correct rendering, 3rd column displays the Wrong Indic rendering in the current browser ( Firefox )

The 2nd Column shows the correct rendering, 3rd column displays the Correct Indic rendering in the current browser ( Internet Explorer )

Then I verified the rendering of Tamil Wikipedia in both the Browsers.

Tamil Wikipedia rendered in Internet Explorer

IE rocks in rendering the Tamil Unicode pages properly.

I checked in the BlogoSphere to find any such blogs have already complained about this problem and found I found Vasanth Dharmaraj’s blog. Surprising things is, he complained the problem on Aug, 2005.

Also I checked with another site which has the details of the bug and the fix. The site says that the fix will be shipped in 2007. Also, it lists some trackbacks of the bug.

Immediately I did a search in Bugzilla. The bug has been reported more than twice to the developers.

• Bug 292429 – Tamil Unicode is not displayed properly
• Bug 391805 – Firefox 2.0.0.6 does not display proper Tamil,Telugu letters(Unicode)
• Bug 333659 – Move nsTextFrame over to Thebes APIs

It’s about 2.5+ years and still the problem is in Firefox. I’m really surprised why Firefox developers hasn’t fixed it until.

Yahoo Pipes filter for Hindu BusinessLine Magazine!!!
This filters down the news items from Hindu Business line. This pipe filters Technology, Finance, Auto, Computer News items. I’ve just developed it , when I got irritated reading 1000+ news items from Hindu BusinessLine magazine.

Below are the feed sources for the pipe.

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/rss/02hdline.xml
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/rss/14hdline.xml
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/rss/27hdline.xml
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/rss/03hdline.xml
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/rss/15hdline.xml
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/rss/iw20hdline.xml
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/rss/09hdline.xml
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/rss/19hdline.xml
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/rss/05hdline.xml
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/rss/06hdline.xml
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/rss/04hdline.xml
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/rss/18hdline.xml

Check out my pipe here incase you want to customize more.

digg story

I heard this word mid of last year ( 2007 ). I was just scratching my head and trying to twist my tongue to pronounce the word “Zeitgeist“.

Man what the hell word is this, getting famous in Web. I started to search. Google seems to be culprit of making such tough words famous.

Zeit.geist -pronounce as siet.gust. ( A German Word ).

It means, a group of People, who spills world view on anything ( Mostly on Products, Trends ) over time.

About the Google Zeitgeist

Pulling together interesting search trends and patterns requires both computing power and human power too.

Even a movie will be release in March 2008. I’m wondering how the tamil movie industry will name the film.

This post has been moved to the below link

http://mymindleaks.com/gmail-account-could-have-been-hacked-warning/

This post has been moved to new blog “My Mind Leaks“

http://mymindleaks.com/adobe-share-flex-based-online-document-manager/

I installed Microsoft Windows XP SP3 a week back. I could notice a considerable change in my laptop. Read about the details on SP3 some fixes. Opening up Windows Explorer, Right click on Windows desktop, Open Desktop, Opening up of Programs Menu everything is quickly appearing after installing the SP3. For Genuine Windows XP version, you don’t have to worry about it. Get the copy of SP3 package from Microsoft website. It’s free to download and it’s about 336 MB package. There’s been a news that XP SP3 has borrowed features from the Windows Vista too.

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I’m using Windows Live Writer for writing my blogs. It’s awesome features impressed me to stick to it.Since I use WordPress blog and it’s free hosting services, I couldn’t make my blog look and feel like what I want. Until few days back, I couldn’t insert Digg, I couldn’t add the links of Social sites to share my posts. Few days back I came to know about how to insert a Digg link into the blog post.

Insert the below snippet in your blog post HTML.This small snippet in the WordPress is cool.

[ "digg = You digg link to the blogpost" ]

So similarly I tried searching for Windows Live Writer plugins that would make me to add my blog various social sites.

Here came a plug-in from Rahul Soni’s blog.

But one small drawback is, you can’t get things out of this plug-in during your first submission of any blog post.

Becuase the plug-in requires URL of your blog post.

So, first submit your post and let your blog software generate a URL. Then again edit the same blog post to create the social site links for sharing your blog posts.

You get this,

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Google Notebook, a novel idea from google, at first didn’t impress me. Whenever I come across any content that should be made note of, I used to copy and store it in my gmail. But things became difficult when my corporate blocked the mail programs. Then the only way was to forward the mail to my corporate id for any references that I’ve made.

Herecomes the Google Notebook the saviour of time and energy for me.

Google Notebook, allows me to add text items.

Each items are dragabble, so it’s very comfortable to organize the notes made.

Tag your notes for easy references.

The Trash section is very useful when you unknowingly deleted any notes

Also create categories, sections to the notes that you make in the notebook.

Sort your numerous topics notes that you have created.

It would be very useful if google could add a facility to make a note through mobile, like Twitter or Google Calendar.

You like it? Share it!! :

This post has been moved to the below link..
http://mymindleaks.com/google-calendar-a-get-things-done-todo-and-micro-journal/

Today I faced the problem of loading the MySQL Extentsion when I upgraded the PHP from 5.0 to 5.2.5.
I search for websites on HOW-TO load the PHP MySQL Extension.
All the websites quoted saying remove the semicolon “;” in the extensions section.
It was the same answer even in MySQL forums, which I already knew.

But that didn’t fix the problem. The problem is, the PHP cannot find the extension directory.
Update the below line in your “php.ini” file.

; Directory in which the loadable extensions (modules) reside.

extension_dir = “./ext”

Yesterday I’ve noticed that my blog hit have crossed the 50,000+ mark. I still remember the day that I’ve created the WordPress ( in March 29th 2006 ) blog and migrated from Blogger software. The main reason I had at that time for the migration is the organizing the content under tags. WordPress, gave a great interface organizing the information accordingly. Also, various themes, stat tools really impressed me to switch over to it.

I could see a gradual increase over the readership of my blog. And in the month of October, it have reached the 50,000+ readers.

I just glanced the information of my blog. I feel that my blog should need a re-org of information. In future I’m planning to add new contents and topics. Hope I keep my readers providing new information.

A Couple of days back my corporate CTO blog had a discussion on the “Unconference” stuff and it had a great response. People are ready and interested for the Unconference and created lot of motive in it. It was again a new term that I came across in the CTO blog for the first time. I just started to dig into it and found lot of interested stuff about it. Now recently came across an effort of creating a book on Unconference. I just loved the quote “Because the Audience is More Intelligent than the speaker”. Thinking over the idea of Unconference, from the day one of the human started to make use of languages and acquire friends, there is Unconference. The Unconference usually occurs between two or more, either in family or friends. If you sit and think over it for quite few minutes, being with friends, we would have discussed about lot of things , comments on various things we see etc. So, we are always doing Unconference and it will exist and evolve in all aspects from this movement!!!

Technorati tags: Unconference, Unconference Book

del.icio.us tags: Unconference, Unconference Book

I always used to keep updates of all my software, tools and utilities I use. Because, I would like use to best of items in everything. Similarly, I was interested in knowing about the WordPress facilities and would like to compare between it’s contemporaries.

But I was clueless like how to start with the comparison and how to approach and end with that. I’m sure that it would like a couple of days to make such comparison. And according to me, it’s not w

orth spending for such thing( don’t think of much, I’m just a lazy fellow ). So was just Googling and found an interesting site where people of my mind had put a big comparison table .

This is the link which I found!!!

http://www.ojr.org/ojr/images/blog_software_comparison.cfm

  But, WordPress disappoints me in quite few things. WordPress, offers editing custom CSS at some cost. Also, no Captchas is built in the wordpress yet ( I guess people should be working on it ). So, I used to get lot of junk comments and my Akismet is tired of filtering it out.

Anyways, This make me that I use one of the best blogging software.

October & November are the months of festivals. Starting  from Tirupathi Bhramostavam, the mood of festival continues to Ramzan and Diwali. This time, my choice of shopping were towards Jhill Mil and Globus. I’d like to go to lifestyle, but still I have no enough courage to go there , coz my wallet sweeps , even I’ve to give him enough money and allow him to serve the lifetime purpose right in my pocket( heh he..).Jhill Mil, a subsidiary of Kumaran Stores, Chennai’s famous silk house. I’ve got my lovely mom a colorful saree, where I would like to tear the price tag, else she would love to scream over me.Whoop, I can’t just do all the gimmicks to escape from things!!! Globus has prices it’s items quite high. I would get a thin knitted T-shirt for 500 bucks, where if my dad would screw me if he hears that. Got nice trousers and t-shirts and a cosmetic. But, these Globus fellows are great biz-minded. They had given two watches ( One watch for 3000 bucks ), one fast track goggle. as a free gift. Gosh, I was just thinking how much profit would these fellow earn. I’m damn sure that the price that I’ve paid for the items I’ve purchased includes the price for watches and goggles. Because the rule is simple ,

No one does business for free

After a long time long purchase, had a nice lunch at Green Park hotel. With all my hungry stomach that I went inside Green Park, just made me smile when I saw a rack full of lunch. I’m a food lover and like to eat varieties and lot. Having a good dining is always pleasing. 

Technorati tags: Globus, Green Park, Writings, Chennai, Diwali, Shopping

del.icio.us tags: Globus, Green Park, Writings, Chennai, Diwali, Shopping

I don’t know what happened to me for the past few days. I’ve started playing Table tennis, Shuttle Cork ( some call as Badminton ) and my legs, shoulders and body whoop…started paining. I was just thinking from where does such an enthuse came into my body. I was like a Couch potato, sitting in the same old rotating chair, in front of a high tech & high configured PC and working for more than 10 hours per day!!

Previously, I was a “No Time” guy ( like the most ) for a past two years. I’ve got to hear lot of advise , speeches, arivurai & bhudi from my near and dear ones. But nothing tried to change me. Once myself and my friend started taking resolutions , i.e. leaving home from office by 6:00 PM and on demand, can be to a max of 7:00 PM. But like any new year / b’day resolution, even my resolution went in air.

It was one fine day, where I was sitting and thinking of my work style and thinking of migration to the new Office at Siruseri ( Red Push Pin in Map ) . My new office will be like a “Water World” island, where if you miss out the timings , forget the chance of reaching home. Such a wonderland, we are going to move.

The thought of such haunted locality, really keeps me to think of something that I can do seriously and cultivate it as a habit. The only think I can  think of is the same old resolution. But this time, serious. I’ve started implementing it and I have to. Because, I can’t risk myself on anything silly things that I do. So, started to finish off my work soon, engage myself in other activities that keeps both my mind and body healthy. So, the above said games participation. And as a luck or chance, the cultural & sports event of our project started. So, things synced up right now. And I hope I would succeed in my resolution.