Rainbow FM: Rocks!

FM Radio -- the only saving grace of Mumbai. Minus that, the 30 min commute in the crawling traffic, amidst the early morning smog, would be a major pain in the ass!

And the crown jewel, of the eight or so channels my borrowed T.Sonic 610 receieves, is the unheard of government operated channel called Rainbow FM. Seriously! The best collection of music (the early morning english show, late afternoon ghazals, evening english show, etc.); the hourly news round ups in Hindi, which remind you of medium wave radio; sensible RJs; and lack of advertisements.

While Rainbow FM is busy concentrating on music, other channels are busy putting up posters in the Mumbai local trains, coming up with funky radio ads, and playing "Crazy Kiya Re" for the three-millionth-twenty-two-thousandth-three hunderedth-seventy-second time!

The only thing that I'm afraid of is Rainbow FM "going the Go FM way." I hope not! But the lack of advertisements means that it's inevitable. Unless the government keeps subsidising the channel to preserve the "culture of good music." Seriously, if the government can dole out subsidies for Haj pilgrims, this is a much better thing to subsidise IMHO!

If you're in Mumbai give Rainbow FM (107.1 MHz) a shot -- you'll love it!

Fixing the Air Deccan website on Firefox

The wacky geek in me got the better of me this morning. Instead of spending the customary 30 mins reading up news on Google Reader, I spent my time fixing up the b0rked up Air Deccan website.

The Air Deccan website is broken due to poorly written Javascript and HTML which works only in IE. This was not the case some time back when the website used to work in Firefox uptil the payment step. Some recent "upgrades" broke the basic flight search in Firefox as well.

Thanks to the cool Firefox add-on called Greasemonkey you can fire up custom javascript after a website has been loaded. I quickly hacked up a greasemonkey script to fix the air deccan website on Firefox. Simply click on the previous link to install the userscript after you have installed Greasmonkey.

Steps to make the Air Deccan website work in Firefox:

1. Install Greasemonkey
2. Install the userscript to fix the Air Deccan website
3. In case the script doesn't work for you delete all cookies from airdeccan.net and try reloading the page. (Edit > Preferences > Privacy > Cookies > View Cookies. Search for airdeccan.net; select all the cookies and click on the "Remove Cookies" button)

Let me know in case you end up doing Step 3 given above. I'll try to modify the userscript to fix that case as well.

How to know the Greasemonkey script worked?

Before the script


After the script

Now I'll go back to reading the news :)