So, I needed to buy a mobile. Those who have seen me working know that mobile is an essential part of my life. Involvement in different things bring importance of connectivity. And anyways, a mobile gives pretty security to family people as well. Anyways, so since many of friends had AT&T, I thought of buying the same. AT&T seems to have biggest coverage as well, and rates weren’t bad either. So, I went to the AT&T shop. The store had iphones on display. I used them for few minutes. And believe me, I fell in love. Apple makes awesome products. So, I asked the guy if I can buy the iphone, not that I was about to buy but I wanted that option open. I know thats a sick idea but iphone really had a very nice impression on me. The guy was like, you can buy iphone only in first 4 months of your 2 year contract or the last 4 years. (I had to buy the 2 year contract for getting post paid). And I thought wow, why the last 4 months is in option. First 4 months make sense, but why last 4 months. I asked the same question to the guy at store. And he replied with full confidence and will pride that he knew the answer. He said that this is how the contract between Apple and AT&T is. And I was like, WTF, of course thats the contract, but why is it like this. And that guy didn’t have a clue. That guy is selling the product and he probably never cared and probably was never told by his manager why things are working that way. Seriously, where is the desire to understand things? This is what Einstein was indicating when he said “Its surprising that curiousity survived formal education”.

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This is rather a late post. I am at Purdue now. Arrived here on 12th of August. A few glitches ( 0)The taxi driver charged me 300$ for a ride from JFK to LGA, 1) we didn’t get the apartment on the first day, thanks to Vikas and Himanshu to letting me stay in their house, 2) buying big things like mattress, table is a big deal. The walmart here doesn’t deliver things, and thats the only place here to buy things from. ) but otherwise it was fine. I *think* we are more or less settled now. I am sharing a 3 bed-room apartment with Ankit Jain, and Sourabh Dongoankar. Both are in ECE department, so we don’t discuss acads when we are together.

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My chacha (Ramesh) (father’ brother) owns a pharmaceutical company. Another chacha (Ravi) is good programmer and system analysist. Ravi chacha made a software for this company. The software was sort of ERP software and completed all major needs. He kept increasing functionalities to it, and it grew like anything. Finally Ravi chacha found it hard to keep it updated (the software was DOS based). So, we started looking for a proper commercial ERP solution for our needs. We bought a software, but it finally didn’t work out good. For that software we *bought* Windows Server 2008.

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There are 3 posts that I started writing and left incomplete. So, here is the tiny summary to everything: (more…)

Finally Bluehost guys didn’t listen to any logic. I sent them a complete list of all songs and their source and license. They still weren’t ready to listen. Of course I didn’t remove the songs. So, my site was pulled down. 1 day before the given deadline. I hope I didn’t loose any important email. The mailing list I made on my account are still working :x.

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So, yesterday I got a mail from bluehost saying that there are some copyrighted material on my site. I bought an account with bluehost in June/July 2007. I share it with some of my friends. One of them is bheekling who hates US copyright laws and the way they use it to exploit people. If you talk in favor of RIAA, he will probably kill you. . And he also prefers to play with these laws. … so anyways, when we bought the hosting space, we decided that we will not put any pirated material on the site. It so seems that initially we were in doubt that japanese animes are not copyrighted. But it so seems they are. Its not copyrighted in US though. So, US law can not make me remove them from my site. Anyways Bluehost guys said that I have the following thing on site, which I must remove. (they use the word “copy written material”. I have no idea what that means )

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In continuation to my last post. I wrote the following on newsgroups inside IITK:

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Yesterday, when I was doing the final preparation for my presentation for CS727 course project, someone was tying rope around the fan in his room, and sometime after that, a good observation was made. The way suicides are shown in Bollywood movies, its pretty much true. Fan can in fact take the burden of a dead body. Oh, by the way, IITK is best at that. It is bearing (why bearing? you will know as this post progresses) burden of God knows how many suicides. At least it is 5th time in my stay here in IITK. Only 2 of my batch mates “could” do this daring task. I “know” some more tried, at least thought about it. Its not only daring but geeky as well to come up with new ideas. See, all 5 had different ways of doing this deed. What actually is more problematic for me is that this guy had to do this just before end semester exam. I remember screwing my 625 end semester exam because of similar incidence. And I have got 648 exam tomorrow. …. oh yeah, my 727 presentation went well. It was my 20th project at IITK.

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Last week I went to Hyderabad to this “IIT Hire Meet” of Microsoft. It sort of sucked. They called all IIT students hired by Microsoft Indian Development Center. Yes, they had hired me as well. In December when placements started in IITK, Microsoft was the first CS company to hire students. I didn’t plan to sit for their first exam, but my friend woke me and asked me to take the test for the sake of practice. I did that. Though I was sure I wouldn’t get selected (considering that I had a bad fight (about Open Source community infringing some patents) with them just 1 months back when they came here for Microsoft Day, and the same HR lady came for placements as well.). Anyways Arun called me (otherwise I wasn’t very keen to know the result) and informed that I have cleared first round. The next round was just after 15 minutes and I didn’t have clothes and hadn’t had bath. That was a fun day. I was finally selected. I was 1 of the 4 selected from UG students. I then wanted to join Microsoft. I think it would have been cool to have an experience to see them working. And anyways since I am fan of some of their products it would have been cooler.

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Pidgin has a cool plugin named “Text Replacement”. It has a built in big mapping between wrong spellings and correct spellings. So recently in #xchat IRC channel, someone asked for auto replace plugin. XChat has plugin for auto replacement, but it doesn’t have a map. You have to make the map yourself. XChat doesn’t allow cool options that pidgin gives (like case sensitive/insensitive or exact match or partial), so the mapping I am providing is case sensitive and exact match. I converted that Pidgin map (which is usually stored in “~/.purple/dict”) into XChat format (stored in “~/.xchat2/replace.conf”) . So, you can download the replace.conf file from the below given link, and can replace your current replace.conf with this file.

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