"Diwali" is celebrated by Indians all over the world today. It is an important Indian festival celebrated with pomp and gaiety across linguistic boundaries. In the Hindu calendar, which is a lunar one, it falls on amavasya, or the new moon, about twenty days after the festival of Dussehra, in the month of Kartik.

Diwali/Deepavali symbolizes the victory of light over darkness. In the South, Deepavali is celebrated to mark the triumph of Lord Krishna over the demon king Narakasura. In North India, Diwali is celebrated as Rama's homecoming to Ayodhya after the defeat of Ravana and his coronation as king.

More about Deepavali here

எல்லோருக்கும் என் இனிய தீபாவளி நல்வாழ்த்துக்கள்

It is generally said that in a complex software product like Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, Visual Studio, etc., 80% of people use only 20% of the feature. I realized how true it is yesterday.

I have in my Laptop, MS Office 2003 installed, loaded with all the bells and whistles, including the new OneNote application. Though I have been using OneNote for sometime now and find it convenient to put down quick notes, audio clips, etc,  I didn't know it had a good screen capture funtion.

In my one of my earlier blog entry, I have written about how I use Zabgrab to mark and capture a portion of the screen. Yesterday, I accidentally pressed “Window Key + S”, the screen flashed and I got a “+” as mouse pointer. I was able to move my mouse, mark a region and get it captured in OneNote instantly. WOW, this was cool. This means, I don't need to have ZabGrab installed in my machine and I also have a better way to do my job.

If you have more such rarely known jewels of MS Office, please post it in the comment section below.

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 (753x688)
2) I resized the image to 400x365. 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.