Get PNR status on your mobile sms. Powered by Google

Posted on September 23, 2009 by Ajo Paul

Google has a host of mobile products for the Indian market, the full list can be seen here. Among them, the pick of the lot is the SMS product, using which one can get instant PNR status for your Indian railway ticket reservation.

Excerpts from the page here.

Get cricket scores, Indian Railways train schedules & ticket status, horoscopes, movie showtimes, restaurant information and more …all through SMS on your phone.

Best of all, you don’t pay a premium charge for any of this, just the price of a standard SMS.

Try it out! Simply send your search query by SMS to 9-77-33-00000 and we’ll send you results back by SMS immediately.

Of course, don’t forget to save 9-77-33-00000 to your phonebook for quick and easy access to Google SMS in the future!

There are no premium charges for this service, only the cost of sending a standard SMS. Incoming messages from Google are not charged.

Also there are host of other services we can use too. Found them useful. Like movies, news, train fare, local business etc.

Duplicate tab for firefox 3.5

Posted on August 28, 2009 by Ajo Paul

Until I saw this post , I was sorely missing the duplicate tab for firefox. It was near the top of my most loved firefox extensions till firefox 2.x. The addons page for this extension said it does not support 3.5. Well, and then I learnt 3.5 has a built in duplicate tab feature.

Just press the ctrl key and hold the tab you want to duplicate, drag and drop it to the place/area you want the new duplicate tab to appear. And thats it!!..

Life is simple now 🙂

Undo SVN merge from a Collabnet eclipse merge client

Posted on August 24, 2009 by Ajo Paul

Collabnet has added a enhanced merge client to work on top of Eclipse and subclipse. While it replaces the existing merge client given by default in subclipse, it adds quite few features for the merge process.

Every body knows the pain surrounded in an svn merge. No matter how you do it, there’s always a “merge related bug” that props up post a merge. The intention of this client was to simplify the merge process in a wizard fashion. While it does so, a very important feature was done away with: the dry-run feature.

Instead, it expects you to go ahead with the merge type you choose to, and then preview the conflicts and results in the Merge Results view. There is a menu option a called “Undo Merge” given there to let you undo your actions. So all these are done post a actual merge but before you commit the changes back to the server tree.

I got little nervous and uninstalled the feature coz I wanted to preview my merge before i “actually do it”. And then I bumped into this article on the new merge client, which clarifies the reasons for removing dry-run feature.

Happy merging 🙂

Enable sound for 3gp videos in ubuntu using mplayer

Posted on July 15, 2009 by Ajo Paul

To play 3gp videos with audio using mplayer in Ubuntu Jaunty, add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list file

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/jaunty.list --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list

You need the GPG key for medibuntu packages. Get it the following way.

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring

sudo apt-get update

now install the following packages

w32codecs mplayer mencoder amrnb amrwb

You should be able to hear the sound in mplayer now.

Source

Unable to connect Yahoo messenger in Kopete?

Posted on July 12, 2009 by Ajo Paul

[UPDATE] As of now the latest update on jaunty for the kopete package, the problem is fixed in the version 4:4.2.2-0ubuntu2.

It seems Yahoo! is changing their protocols for client connection. Heard somewhere this is done to disallow 3rd party clients like pidgin and trillian access yahoo’s messenger service. On my Ubuntu Jaunty, this has not affected pidgin yet! (looks like it auto adjusted) , but for Kopete I had to override the server connection to cn.scs.msg.yahoo.com and now its working fine.

Got the workaround from here.

Kopete is the only yahoo client on linux, AFAIK that allows video chat. Not sure if anything else has surfaced up yet. Haven’t been able to use Gyache yet with my webcam.

Flex builder on Linux kept on Hold?

Posted on June 12, 2009 by Ajo Paul

This post has reported that the flex builder work on linux has been put on hold. Noted Adobe techie has said “there is not enough requisition for the product to continue its development”

Well, that’s not a great news to hear.. considering the open sourced SDK of adobe flex, good amount of interest was generated in the FOSS developer community. To help it revive again, use this link to vote on the adobe site.

http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FB-19053

From the current builder available on linux ,which is infact a eclipse plugin, the main feature I missed was, the design view in it. Hopefully, when the development continues design view is also ported to linux.

Gmail Inbox preview while gmail is loading

Posted on May 27, 2009 by Ajo Paul

New in gmail labs allows you to preview your inbox when gmail is loading. Useful, if you have a little slow connection. Your anxiety of which mails you are about to open will be served too.:) Just goto gmail -> settings – > labs look for inbox preview enable it, close the browser and relogin again.

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/new-in-labs-inbox-preview.html

gmailinbox

Patch for Flex builder 3 with Eclipse 3.4 Ganymede

Posted on May 26, 2009 by Ajo Paul

If you have been working with Eclipse 3.2 or 3.3 with flex builder 3, and if the upgrade to 3.4 broke the builder, try the following patch http://www.tekool.net/blog/2008/06/28/flex-builder-3-plugin-dont-work-with-eclipse-34/

Just download the patch from here unzip it somewhere on your desktop and copy the plugins content ( 2 jar files) to your eclipse’s plugins folder. If you have any existing files while copying good idea would be to take a backup before doing so.

Now restart eclipse with -clean option. Your flex builder should work as it used to before.

FOSS.in 2008 announced.

Posted on November 2, 2008 by Ajo Paul

India’s only and premiere foss event has been announced. It is to be held at its traditional home, IISC Bangalore between 25th November and 29th Novemeber 2008.

or visit http://foss.in for more info.

Happy FOSSing!

World record attempted, and I got a certificate!

Posted on June 19, 2008 by Ajo Paul

Around 8 million downloads in 24 hours for Firefox 3, great feat! Get your certificate from here..