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 :)

Your spouse may be a click away!

I know, I know. Everything is fair in love and war, and everything HAS to be fair in the Indian marriage market -- which btw, is getting high tech and riding the DotCom Bubble ver 2.0 -- but this, simply takes the cake, the pandal, the jaimaal, and all the brouhaha along with it!

Even though it comes from the house of our resident tabloid (some like to call it The Slimes of India), it's surprising! First of all, how can you ever... possibly... even remotely... think of a URL called SimplyMarry.com! I mean, what the hell is it supposed to be? Buying pet food online?

And for all those losers who're simply dying for something to "click" in their lives, the marketing department has come up with the perfect line, "Simple Search - Your spouse may be a mouse click away." As Amit Varma would say -- "Happiness Explodes!"


And to prove that they're not just another run-of-the-mill matrimony site who woke up too late for the DotCom marriage party (or reception!), they actually have a section called "Success Stories!" Will I get a refund if I have a divorce within three months? What about a replacement guarantee?

Oh, and just cuz I want to nitpick, their site SUCKS! I mean, apart from the fact that I hate this online marriage shit, it technically sucks. It got caught into an infinite javascript popup loop while I was registering. Check out the screenshot for a proof -- the goddamn error just didn't go away!


And to nitpick even further, why does the profile creation form force me to enter my body type and complexion!


Anyways, I sincerely want to thank the folks there at Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd. for coming up with stuff like this. It made my day. Seriously.

Of (un)clothing and weird orgies!

From our resident tabloid:

Vatican defrocks priests for sex abuse

Am I the only one who sees humour in this, or what?!

Blah blah!

At least that's what Yatra seems to think of it's partners!



Just hover your mouse over the scrolling Flash unit at the bottom of their webpage -- my mouse pointer seems to have been left out by the screen capturing tool :|

I hope they don't think the same about their customers too :P

Note: This seems to work only with Firefox -- probably that's why they put that "Best viewed in IE 5.5 or higher" disclaimer down there :)

Bad zoke :)

Q: What is an Australian called in Bangalore?
A: Kangaluroo

HAR! HAR HAR!

WTF?

The screenshot says it all! And they actually have a Top-10 for this topic! Though I wonder who "Khala " is?!

My Dream Phone!

I've never cared much about phones -- I always picked the one which had the least number of buttons, was the sturdiest, and was from Nokia (that's because of the guaranteed amazing battery backup and omnipresence of Nokia chargers)!

For a long time I had the Nokia 1100 -- the "Made In India" phone! And I absolutely loved its usability.

One button to access them all,
One button to find them,
One button to do all the stuff,
And in usability bind them :)

But then I had to shift over to Reliance to get a RIM-to-RIM free pack, and it went downhill from there. Not even a single phone was good enough. I picked the least of all evils -- the Nokia 2112. But I still wonder why would Nokia, the only company that had got its phone UI right, go back and screw it all up! Who the fuck needs the "receive call" and "disconnect call" buttons -- you know the stupid red and green buttons on all phones. From 3 clicks to send an SMS in the 1100, I now need 7 clicks through a cluttered and complicated menu to be able to send a single message!

So, I've never cared much about phones, until today -- the FIC Neo1973 has me all worked up! No MotoRazrs, MotoPEBL, Nokia SOME_RANDOM_NUMBER_HERE, Sony Ericsson's, and what have you have ever excited me as much as this phone does! An open Linux phone with GPRS. Apt-get style software updates. Open SDK. The power to tinker and write your own apps. The power to install hundreds of existing Linux apps. The power to change the UI if it sucks! Wow -- the possibilites are endless!

Can't wait to get my hands on one! Though I wonder how it would feel to dial a number using a touchscreen and not a keypad -- receiving/making calls while having food, washing hands, etc. is out of the window, I guess!

And I love the presentation that Sean Moss-Pultz (the creator of the phone) gave at the "Open Souce in Mobile" conference in Amsterdam. The power of simplicity!

That's what the phone looks like. A little on the unusal side, I must say -- but for all the phone narcissists out there -- it will make everyone take a second look at your latest "tool"!


The phone is called FIC Neo1973 but the software platform is called OpenMoko. The OpenMoko dialer.


The OpenMoko menu.

Privacy in India, Rediff, and seemingly interesting issues

From a Rediff Article -- it talks about how the Indian police and government treat the privacy of Indian citizens and how, as an Indian e-mail provider, Rediff has to deal with it.

"Government will cancel your licence if you don't comply with these police requests," he said finally. I was astounded. Here was I, hoping for a morally and hopefully legally defensible resolution to our dilemma and what we were getting was "practical" advice. "Our business does not depend on any government licences," I finally managed to blurt out.

Seeing the disappointed look on our faces, he leafed through his papers again. "You see, the law that governs this kind of case, the Indian Telegraph Act, 1885, was enacted with the shadow of the 1857 'mutiny' still over the Raj government, and is really an instrument to control such events rather than to govern the evolution of an industry. There is nothing you can do but comply if the request comes with the proper authorisation."

Which brings me to a couple of interesting questions:

• In case I'm under surveillance and the investigating agency has proper "search warrents" can it order me to decrypt my PGP (choose your favourite encryption mechanism here) data with my private key? What if I delete my private key or claim that I lost it? Compare it with a real world analogy -- if they ask me to unlock a physical safe, and I claim to have lost the key, they can break down the locks. What in the case of encrypted data?


• Is Rediff trying to "do a Google"? I remember reading a lot of blog posts on the Official Google Blog about their stand in the case where the US government wanted search query logs to track down "child porn".


• Is there a free webmail solution where all my mail is encrypted and the private key is with me alone? Decryption is done on the fly? I'm sure it can't be done without a browser plugin.

Innovation in Google Text Ads

Nice way to attract attention of the right kind of audience!