Perfume Factory

Yet another year ended (YAYE)! 2007 has made me feel the world a better place than previous year. It has given me a better life. During 2007, I have learnt a lot of new things both personally and professionally.2007 has introduced me lot of new friends throughout its duration. I am thankful to it as some of them have become very close to me, closer than i thought. Someone has rightly said, relationship will not fade away, if it is true, no matter how far they are. 2007 has given me very genuine friends who stay far from me and who I never met. I am very grateful to Internet for making this happen.

Professionally, I have become more better compared to last year. I have made many new friends here. 2007 introduced me to blogging and InfyBlogs for I am very grateful to it. I got interest back in blogging during 2007. InfyBlogs has played a major role in that.

Personally, I have seen some ups and downs this year. I have gained many real friends. I found some false ones too. I used to give more importance to some than what they are worth and for some very less but they had definitely deserved more. 2007 has taught me a very good lesson in the matter of relationships. Sometimes I have been seriously hurt and other times I have hurt many. 2007 has made me emotionally more weak and also more practical( in other words more cruel ).

One thing I learnt clearly in 2007, “You can’t maintain all relationships. Every relationship is not worth to continue. Don’t give equal importance to everyone ( I was wrong earlier. Eventually one lady taught me this ). Always see who deserves more. Some need to be treated very specially for the trust they have in us and some need to be thrown out of your way for the worth they deserved. I feel happy I am slowly applying it and it has given good results.

I am glad to say that 2007 has made a better person in this world and I hope 2008 will make me even more better.

As usual, for coming year, I have set some resolutions.

So here goes my list

• Learn something new everyday
• Exercise for fitness at least thrice in a week
• Read two books every month ( condition is that those two books should be purchased by myself not borrowed from someone )
• Not to use pirated software.
• Help others as much as I can.
• Involve more in blogging and wiki. Try to answer queries in tech forums.
• Encourage people to use more open source softwares. Spread FOSS.
• Learn guitar and violin.
• And last but not the least, to improve my vocabulary.

BTW, “w00t”, an expression of joy coined by online gamers, was declared as the word of the year 2008.With all smiles and roses, let us welcome a new year in a grand way!

Welcome w00t !!!

Wish you a very Happy New Year !!!

Mungaru Male has successfully completed 365 days! The film was released exactly 1 year ago on 29th December, 2006. It has set a new national record by successfully running for 1 year at PVRs and it’s still heading to full packed houses. It is a national record because it is the first Indian language movie to run for 1 year at PVR Cinemas.The film has grossed more than Rs. 50 crores since its release. It has made a successful run even outside Karnataka. It has attracted many non-kannadigas equally. I have seen many of my colleagues always humming the ‘anisuthidhe..’ song even though they don’t understand Kannada. Many have Mungaru male audio cd as their personal collection. Few have set it as their cell ringtone.

Mano Murthy’s melodious music, Jayanth Kaikini’s wonderful lyrics, Krishna’s camera work, Yograj Bhat’s direction under the banner of E Krishnappa has created a new era in Sandalwood.

This film made Ganesh ‘Golden Star’ and Puja Gandhi more popular.

Heartiest Congratulations to the whole team of Mungaru Male.

During this celebration time, here I am reposting the lyrics of all songs of Mungaru Male ( which I had posted earlier in my old blog )

Here we go…
(more…)

Firefox 3 Beta 1 was released on 19th November, 2007 for developers and testers. As it is a beta version, it has been strictly mentioned that, Firefox 3 Beta 1 should be used only by developers and testers only.

I am using Firefox 3 Beta 1 for last two weeks. I have been using Firefox for many years. The main eye-candy of Firefox is its tabbed browsing. Tabbed browsing attracted me so much that, it made me to switch to Firefox from IE permanently. Now I rarely use IE even though IE7 featured tabbed browsing. MS communities have now started talking about IE8 in much more enthused way. Let me wait for that.

Back to Firefox 3… when I installed it, the first thing I encountered is incompatibility of many extensions, like google photos screensaver, which I use in Firefox 2. This definitely made me very disappointed. Since its beta, this can be accepted.

Having a first look, it didn’t seem there is a much change but UI looked somewhat brighter and clearer compared to Firefox 2. However for Vista users, it displays menus with vista native theme.

Although I didn’t see much change initially, as I went on using it, I saw drastic improvements over Firefox 2 .

Firefox 3 beta 1 has taken care of memory issue very well. Firefox 3 doesn’t consume huge memory. Although release notes says that over 300 memory leaks ha been fixed but I am still not sure whether memory leakage issue has been completely taken care of.

Second thing, I noticed is the speed of firefox loading, page loading and tab opening. Speed has been increased considerably. Now tabs open faster. Firefox doesn’t hangs if I open many tabs simultaneously.

As a security point of view, more stress has been given to it. Now, firefox blocks known malware, web forgery, phishing sites to make you to browse more securely. Now , only secure add-ons are allowed. Anti-virus integration is embedded to check for downloaded executables automatically. Also, by clicking on favicon of site you are browsing you can view the details of that site.

One more major change you will notice is inclusion of ‘Firefox Places’. Now all bookmarks, history and preferences are stored on SQLite database instead of flat files. This prevents accidental data loss due to crashes.

Bookmarking has been made simpler and better. The star button beside address bar lets you bookmark the site with a single click without any interruption. You can add text tags to bookmarks. Searching for bookmarks and history is also made simpler. By just typing keywords or tags in address bar, you can get corresponding matching site urls.

Regarding password management, now popup doesn’t appears for asking to save password instead an info bar appears on the top from which you can save password. The advantage here is it lets you save passwords after successful login. This avoids you saving incorrect password for that site.

Save Tabs feature has been added. Now if you try to close firefox while multiple tabs are open, it will ask you whether you want to save tabs before quitting.

One more new feature added is Page Zoom. Now, Firefox, like Opera, can zoom page wise instead of zooming only text. It also enables you to save zoom settings per site.

A search feature has been added to download manager so that we can track downloads easily. Now downloads can be paused and resumed across sessions.

Initially I thought to use this new beta version only for a while. But now I have addicted to it although I find some minor bugs during usage

You can download beta from here.

As I promised, here goes the post on Infy Bloggers Meet with pics!
Infy Bloggers Meet for Bangalore DC was arranged on 30th Nov, 2007 at Plaintain Leaf (FC1) near Cafe Coffee Day. It was scheduled at 11.00 AM. Nearly around 30 bloggers gathered at place although some came late.

RajeshB alias ‘RB’ and patrickJ alias ‘Archiver’ were the first to arrive. These two were then joined by me, veetrag, geo and shailen. Soon after, madhan, malvika and jyothi joined the crew.

One more group, sounak, sunitha, Ruchi, Yogita and few others were already searching for us. Rest all joined soon.
(more…)