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India’s bandwidth consumption is growing by the days. But most of the traffic goes to servers outside the country (primarily the US). One of the ways, to reduce the broadband cost is to increase the traffic within the country. ISPs in India instead of going outside the country to exchange traffic, instead do it internally. This saves Foreign Exchange for the country and also helps in reducing the cost for a consumer. In this direction, Govt. of India (GOI), couple of years back established NiXi (National Internet eXchange of India). Unfortunately, so far its impact was not felt by consumers.
This week, GOI announced that .IN Domain (the top-level Country specific domain for India) will now be made easy to register online. NiXi will be made the nodal point for the registration. This hopefully will improve the number of registrations with .IN Domain and also help NiXi with much needed cash.
When you are writing technical articles or a spagetti blog (with general, travel and also Technical entries) like this, you will need to use screenshot images.
The problem with screenshots (especially with today’s high-res displays) is that the saved image files are huge in size. To solve this, you will generally resize the images. With reduction in size, Screenshots becomes unreadable.
While doing such a screenshot today for an earlier entry, using Adobe PhotoShop Elements (PSE) and Zabgrab (the free utility I use to capture a portion of screen) I came across a nice option in Photoshop elements. It is called “Adjust Blacklighting” available under the “Enhance” menu option in PSE.
1) The original screenshot I started looked like this (753×688)
2) I resized the image to 400×365. It looked like this, with unreadable text.
3) Next I used the Adjust blacklighting option like this
4) Finally with Auto Levels and adjusting Contrast, I got the final output like this. This definitely looks readable even at the 50% reduced size.
I guess this entry will be useful for non-photoshop pro’s like me. Did you find this tip useful, post your feedback below.
Download ZAPGRAB2.zip (9.41 KB)
Spywares are irritating and outright waste of resources.
The first step towards fighting Spywares is to get a good detection and fix tool. Apart from the tools I mentioned in my earlier post on spywares, I recently found a free anti-spyware tool SpyBot-Search & Destroy. This tool has been around for sometime and is famous on the Internet for its effectiveness, but I discovered it, only recently 
The next step against spywares, if you are using Windows XP, is to install Windows XP SP2. Among the many enhancements of Windows XP SP2 the one I simply love is the “Manage Add-Ons” menu in IE Tools menu. This option (finally) allows me to View/Disable/Enable all the IE Add-Ons and ActiveX controls loaded by IE.
(Read here on what I learned while doing this screenshot?)
HTTP Trace
When you are doing some HTTP upload or download development, like in a Web Client it is useful to do a HTTP Trace. A HTTP Trace basically dumps on screen or in a file the entire dialog that takes place between your client (typically your Web Browser) and the server (Web Server).
One handy HTTP Trace tool I use is called Fiddler. Fiddler is free and is developed by a Microsoftie. The good thing I like in Fiddler is that it works without any configuration. You just browse from your favourite browser or client application as normal, and fiddler is tracing it in the background. In fact, Fiddler doesn’t even have an options dialog box!.
There is also an useful Page in Fiddler website that links to useful HTTP/HTML Resources on the Internet.
Web Service Trace
If you are programming SOAP/Web services, it is useful to have a SOAP Trace utility. A SOAP Trace tool is a specialized HTTP Trace tool that understands SOAP messages and displays them accordingly. If you are programming with Microsoft WSE 2.0, then a good free tool is available from Mike Taulty. Once you have downloaded the application, you read the example.config file. It has a small portion of XML Configuration code, that you need to insert in your web.config or app.config files for tracing to begin.
Mike’s WSE 2.0 Tracing Utility is written in .NET Framework 1.x. I loved this tool so much I used in my WSE Security session in this India Tech Ed 2004.
Recently if you were watching media in India, you will be surprised to see tons of tourism ads from all the near-by countries. You will see Malaysia - “Truly Asia”, Singapore, Thailand and others.
Last week during the state visit of New Zealand Prime Minister to India, apart from IT and investments, the big emphazise was on Tourism to NZ.
I wondered why the sudden love of the World towards India and Indian Tourist. According to this article it turns out to be pure economics. Now it is not the “Japanese“ Global Traveller or the traveller from Asian Powerhouse “China“ who spend most. It is the Indian Tourist who is the biggest spender abroad – on an average $200 per day. WOW, who said India is poor!
Gurgaon is a Satellite City near New Delhi. It is promoted by its state “Haryana” as a model Cyber city. I thought in Bangalore, construction activities are being the highest in the country, but seeing Gurgaon, that title should go it.
Everywhere I saw in Gurgaon, there were new roads, bridges, multi-storey commercial buildings, housing communities, mega-malls and more.
Many major MNCs, like Ericsson, Nestle, Microsoft have their Indian head-offices in Gurgaon. People working in these companies, need not go outside, everything seems to be available in Gurgaon.
What is your opinion about Gurgaon or the tons of new satellite townships coming near various Indian cities?. Post it in the comments link below.
Today was my birthday; It was “Saraswathi Pooja” – an auspicious day here in South India where we pray to “Saraswathi” goddess of Education & Knowledge. I travelled to Gurgaon for a very important business meeting and it went well. So in all dimensions, today was a very good day for me. More about my Gurgaon experience tomorrow.
I learned a new term today, “Surrogate Piracy”. The term refers to the practise of licensing a cheaper priced application and then using pirated copies of another (full-fledged) expensive application. An example of usage of the term is when some someone licenses “Star-Office” or “Open-Office” and then continues to use “MS-Office” or “Corel Office”; or licenses “GIMP” or “PaintShop Pro” and then uses pirated version of “Adobe PhotoShop”.
On a side note, while I am penning this, I noticed from JASC website (makers of PaintShop Pro) that they have been aquired by Corel. I always thought PaintShop Pro was a good photo editing product and with the support of a big company like Corel, I am sure we will start to see some healthy competition to Adobe Photoshop. What out the Photo Editing tool space in the coming months.
(Navarathri Arrangements in my house)
Update 29/Sep/2006: The above photo has been featured in குமுதம் சிநேகிதி (பக்கம் 9) – செப்டம்பர் 15, 2006, . Not sure how they got it
It is the time of the year again in India – the time of festivals. From yesterday in South India (and more particularly in Tamilnadu) it is the nine days of Navarathri (Nine Days) festivals. During this the dolls and idols of gods and godesses are kept neatly decorated. Friends and Relatives are called to each others house to see their arrangements and we exchange “Sundal” – an South Indian Snack.
Read more about Navarathri here.
With the hundreds of usernames and password every typical Internet user has to remember, it is very important we all use a Password Manager. A typical Password manager is a secure database that allows us to store and retrieve hundreds of Usernames and Passwords with one key “Password“. Most of these tools have high level of security measures ensured to protect the passwords stored, both from in-memory and from-disk attacks.
For last several months I am using the popular Password Manager “Passwords Safe”. This Windows tool is an open-source Sourceforge project, that is free for use. The tool is easy to use, has a decent secure database, nice features like “Browse to Site”, Comments Field and more. Many of my friends and colleagues have been using it for months and they will Swear by it. Unfortunately, last couple of weeks I am finding for some reasons in my laptop, Password Safe losing my latest update of stored passwords. Even the backup file doesn’t show my recently stored passwords. And all this happens randomly. This may be due to my configuration, but I am moving.
I decided to move to a native managed .NET tool called “Password Minder”. Password Minder was written by Keith Brown, an authority when it comes to Security in Windows/.NET world. You can read about how Password Minder works in this MSDN Magazine Article and the Internals of it here. The latest version 1.5.0.4 has an extremely secure database and application architecture. But it lacked some of the “Tricks” of Password Safe. This included the ability on Right Click to have “Copy Username to Clipboard”, “Copy Password to Clipboard”, “Browse to site” and comments field. Though the source is available for the tool, I decided to write to Keith Brown for his permission to modify with these changes and release the new build. He readily agreed, so ladies and gentleman, please await shortly a build of “Password Minder” with these changes.
Also when I first ran “Password Minder” I realized it didn’t allow my Normal Windows user to run the program. On investigation it turns out for the path I have set for storing the Password XML, the permissions where wrongly set. So I turned off the option “Let Password Minder Control the DACL” in the dialog shown below and then manually set the permissions for the XML file. Everything is fine, the tool works perfectly even from a Normal Windows user. If you let Password Minder store the XML file in your profile, you may not face this problem in the first place.
(Path in the screenshot above is fictitious )
Inserted on 18th October: “Today we have released the Password Minder with the above enhancements as Password 1.5.0.4, Extensions 0.1. You can download either the Installable MSI file or Complete Visual Studio.NET project as a ZIP file from EasyTools.com Freebies page“.
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