How bad can an ISP go? ( London , 25/09/2006 )
I recently moved house and applied for a new Virgin broadband connection as my ex-ISP Telewest was unavailable there. Even though Telewest was expensive, they had a pretty good connection and service.

So last Friday evening, I got my Virgin 8Mbps/unlimited connection ($46/month) activated, after a week's time of waiting/ I quickly setup a wireless network with a Belkin ADSL mimo router and everything went just fine. First thing I did was check the connection speed using some popular online services and the results were impressive. A few minutes passed, and to my dismay I found that the connection speed was fluctuating every now and then, for no reason. To make things worse, I found that a lot of websites were'nt opening on the connection, like digg.com, Hotmail.com, my university website etc.. etc.. Even the Microsoft site wouldn't load and MSN messenger wouldn't work. Weird, I played with the wireless configs, dns settings, tried everything I knew, but no avail.

The interesting part
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I then phoned up the Virgin customer support, which costs $.50 / minute. To my surprise, support was very rude, like "I asked for your username and password mate, nothing else". Waste of money and time, they were helpless and hopeless.

Then I tried Virgin's online livesupport chat room. This time, the support wasn't rude, but stupid. Do you use IE? Have you checked your settings? standard questions. "Try using some proxy servers" ! that was the final solution the guy suggested. When I told him that was totally absurd and stupid, he said he's forward the issue to the technical department and said "sorry, I cannot help you any further".

That was it, I called Virgin's "cancellation line" and submitted a cancellation request, and it costs $100 to cancel too. Cancelled in less than 24 hours of the reception of the service.

Virgin is the worst ISP I've ever used, bad bad services, useless support. No wonder why their connections are not bound by a contract.

Sir Richard Branson, if only your broadband was something like Virgin Air. I hope Virgin Galactic's space tour program doesn't abandon passengers in space

Its been over a month since I posted something. Anyway, Google's GWT is an interesting Java framework actually converts Java programs you write to cross browser compliant HTML and JS ! GWT can be found here http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/

PS: I've got some interesting stuff coming up in a week

This is Web 2.0, as they say We see atleast dozen '2.0' apps spring up everyday; majority of these are some kind of api mashups or ones that juggle with existing sites and services. (needless to say, Pingoat is a perfect example). Such utilities are good for the eye and even useful at times, but they seldom survive in the long run. Take another example, newzpile.com I built. Its basically a news aggregator feeding on news feeds from hundreds and hundreds of sources. Its not at all independant, its lifespan is lesser than or equal to that of the news sources. Same with Pingoat.com, it'll live only until the targets it pings are open.

So this is what has been happening on the web lately. And there is no limit to the number of google (maps) and yahoo (maps,flickr..) mashups popping up everyday. Even I've got involved in this trend, I must admit. Personally, I dont find this pleaseing at all, weird enough, I find it really annoying. 'Unique' and 'Innovative' gets my vote. Pingoat and Splogspot will be bidding bye soon (details later), so now its time I rolled out something even better, and trust me, I am already on it!

If you have a Symbian series 60 phone, you *must* be having these freeware apps.

Opera
The popular Opera web browser. The latest version is 8.5
http://www.opera.com/products/mobile/products/?os=series60

Fexplorer
File manager (like Windows explorer). Its the most popular one and its my favorite. Has advanced features like edit/preview/cut/copy/paste..
http://www.gosymbian.com

Bemused
An app that allows you to control various PC applications via bluetooth. Supports Winamp, Windows Media player and powerpoint. (I am not sure whether the latest versions of these apps are supported)
http://bemused.sourceforge.net

Forward
Foward is a simple program that allows you to forwward on (by bluetooth, MMS etc.) that have been received via bluetooth, MMS, infrared etc and are in the Inbox. It also allows you to save files in the inbox elsewhere on the phone
http://www.compsoc.man.ac.uk/~ashley/

Real Player
The most popular mobile audio/video player. It comes preinstalled on most of the Series 60 phones
http://symbian.helixcommunity.org

Task Spy
A task manager similar to the Windows task manger
http://www.pushl.com/taskspy

Calcium
An advanced calculater with a nice set of features
http://mtvoid.com

Here's my brand new notebook, Compaq B1803TU Its awesome, ultra thin, light weight. It looks very cute but its a monster in reality !

http://h50025.www5.hp.com/hpcom/id_en/11_29_64_4297_EG004PA.html
Being just 12" (widescreen), its not a laptop actually, but a Notebook.

Lets get technical.
- Intel Pentium M 2.0GHz (533MHz FSB)
- 512MB RAM (max 2GB)
- 80 GB HD
- Dual layer DVD±RW/R ( translates to DVD (Re)Writer! )
- Intel Graphics media accl (upto 128MB! shared mem)
- A Card reader (5 type)
- Built in support for Bluetooth,WiFi, blah blah..

Its fun connecting my Nokia 6630 to my notebook

When Google talk finally came out after much hype and hustle-bustle, everybody was stunned. Everyone's assumption and prediction about Google talk turned out to be rubbish! Its the simplest for of an IM client, with just text and voice and nothing more, not even smilies!

Now would Google really produce an application so lite and simple with not even a single 'extra' feature to boast of, to compete with Yahoo or MSN ? I dont think so. Maybe like people say, it must be google's debut in the VoIP market. Only Google knows!

But is that really it? Just to get a taste of VoIP? I have a strong feeling that Google's upto something fishy with Talk. Now this must be sounding real stupid and you might be even mocking at me. Recently, I read about Google's upcoming voice services. (they say, recording all the sounds on the planet) Does gTalk has to do something with it? I'm not saying that Google's recording all the conversation made via Talk, but does it have anything to do with it? Or is Google studying the voice data and put the results into use in its Voice search program?

Only google knows..

Update
Just as I expected! Overwhelming response! Actually, this post was made to do a 'test' on Digg.com; I wanted to see how it goes, but instead of 'diggs', I see 'comments' Sorry !

Spam blogs have become such a menace. They degrade the quality of the blogosphere and poison it. I've written a small paper (hypthosis actually) demonstrating several steps to determine whether a blog is spam or not. Its somewhat similiar to SpamAssassin, but a lot simpler

The paper
http://www.kailashnadh.name/docs/spam_blog (html,word,pdf)

This is actually a hypothesis (somewhat), that might be prove to be effective..

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Edit:
I see that Blogger introduced a 'Flag button' to report blogs of objectionable content. Is this the result of the long (and somewhat rude) email I sent them last week saying about the amount of spam blogs they farm there! ?
http://buzz.blogger.com/2005/08/flag-as-objectionable.html