Characteristics of Bhondus

Atheism, India 0 Comment

Bhondus

They have various names – Internet Bhondus, Virat Bhondus. Bhondutva is their ideology and I have found following to be their salient features -

  • Narendra Modi for PM!
  • Ardent Bhondu nationalists
  • Adore RSS and it’s leaders – Golvalkar, Hegdevar, Mohan Bhagwat etc.
  • Savarkar – oh sorry Vir Savarkar – is their father of the nation
  • Like to quote Vivekanand
  • Will defend any and every crook – Asaram, Ravishankar, Ramdev etc.
  • Take immense pride in the stories of past Hindu kings – Shivaji, Maharana Pratap, Prithviraj Chauhan etc.
  • Their hero is Subramanian Swamy – originator of the term Virat Bhondu, who likes to poke his nose in and take credit for anything and everything right from 2G scam expose, Italian Marines’s return to India or NASA’s moon landings!
  • Nathuram Godse is a martyr
  • Absolutely hate Congress and MK Gandhi and Nehru-Gandhi family
  • Want India to be like Israel while dealing with Pakistan
  • Vedas is epitome of knowledge notwithstanding the fact that it won’t even help you make a stone age tool
  • Astrology is science!
  • Cow is their favourite animal and cow urine is their preferred drink, aftershave, fuel, shampoo, toilet cleaner and more. They love cow so much that if you open their skulls all you will find is cow dung!

Clarification: This post is not pro Congress or anti-BJP. I am not a fan of any political party nor do I hate any one in particular. This is just a collection of common traits of right wing bhondu nationalists.

Fuck you PayPal!

Uconomix 1 Comment

Another day, another fuck up from you. Like I wrote just a few days ago how you did not return me the money in the name of currency conversion, another scumbag customer raised a dispute today and again you took away $12.33 under the garb of currency conversion.

Just called your customer support with regards to the money I have lost and I was told that I will not get credited for the money lost in conversion. I was told I just have to bear that loss! PayPal will happily keep MY money!

Just want you to know that you guys suck!

I guarantee you that you will not have me as a customer for long.

I know you just don’t give a shit about me and my business. And this rant will just be another one in the long list of people you have pissed off.

This is why I am always on the lookout for a PayPal alternative

Uconomix 34 Comments

I use PayPal to sell my software online. It’s good enough but at times there are incidents which make you say WTF!

As per RBI’s rules Indian users of PayPal can not keep the balance in PayPal. It has to be withdrawn immediately. So PayPal initiates an automatic withdrawal every day to your bank account. Yesterday a withdrawal for $199.04 was initiated. When money is withdrawn from PayPal, PayPal first converts it to your local currency and then it sends it to your bank. So the $199.04 was converted to Rs. 10,363.01. PayPal’s exchange rate is pathetic. My bank would give me a better rate if PayPal sent me USD. But PayPal wants to make the most money whatever way it can so it sends me INR and takes a small cut in currency conversion. Besides they also need to give a cut to the partner bank because eventually its a bank (Citibank) that transfers the money to my bank. But that is something I have come to accept as a necessary cost of doing business Internationally.

This withdrawal was cancelled because an asshole who had purchased uMark last month decided to chargeback. Chargeback is the ultimate weapon for a buyer and for a seller selling intangible goods like a software license key, there is absolutely no protection. So PayPal cancelled the withdrawal and credited my account back with $186.38. $12.66 less. Why? This was not because of the chargeback. Chargeback was for $34 and that would be taken from the balance later on. That was because PayPal converted INR 10,363.01 to USD and which according to their pathetic conversion rate came to $186.38.

The buying and selling rates of currencies are always different. In this instance PayPal behaved as if I sold Dollars to them for Rupees and then sold the Rupees for Dollars. This has not happened for the first time. This happened numerous times in the past and after a few emails, and some phone calls they will credit the difference back but it will take days and a lot of wasted time. But if you don’t call them the money is gone. There was actually no currency conversion because the withdrawal was initiated and cancelled almost immediately. It was only some automated conversion entries in the database, something PayPal can easily correct if they want to. But they won’t.

The moment I find an alternative for PayPal which is cheap, easy to integrate and allows me to charge customers in USD, I am off.

Update on 7 May 2013:

Just had another case of a cancelled withdrawal. Again $12.33 went missing and when I called the customer support, I was told the money won’t be credited back! It’s a loss! Forget it!

Yes PayPal will keep my money just like that!

Men rape because we teach them to

India 0 Comment

Another day, another rape in the Indian capital. This time a five year old girl. Rapes are daily phenomena in India. Even after the great outrage over the gang rape few months back. It goes on. Why?

The number one reason of rapes is the male supremacist attitude of the society. Right from the birth we teach our sons and daughters one single thing – girls are weak, boys are stronger. Girls should be protected and boys should be the ones to protect them. This differentiation starts from the very young age itself. Girls get delicate dolls to play with. Boys get supposedly macho and manly toys like guns and cars and action figures. It is as if we train the boys to be fighters and girls to be mothers and care takers and home makers.

Look at you, look in your home, look around you. You will see silent discrimination against women. They do not have as much freedom as boys do. Come home by this time, don’t go out alone, don’t make friends with boys, don’t do this, don’t do that! All restrictions on girls. Yes there are restrictions on boys as well but not as much as on girls. Why? Oh for their own safety! The world is a bad place you know, so girls should take extra care!

Why?

Because we teach our boys that they are superiors to girls!

That’s the only reason why some men rape. They look at women as lowly creatures. Someone who should obey every single command of a man! Cook for the man, feed him, wash his clothes, take care of him, have sex with him. Do whatever the man asks! Why? Because he is the man damn it!

Men and their world!

It’s a men’s world. Women should carry their father’s name and later the husband’s. Move in to husband’s house after marriage. Property – owned by men. Jobs – owned by men. Money – owned by men. Men. Men. Men! It’s their world and women are only here for their consumption!

Every single institution made by men is fundamentally against women. Religion – in every flavour  – is the oldest and most potent weapon of suppression. And it goes on year after year, decade after decade, century after century in the name of culture and tradition!

And then to compensate we allocate women a few festivals. Some god spots, some reserved seats in buses and trains.

This is a fucked up situation.

Unless and until we teach our boys to treat the other sex as equal, rapes will not stop. Unless we ourselves don’t treat our sons and daughters equally, rapes will not stop. Unless we don’t recognize women as humans, rapes will not stop.

What to do in case you get an error while paying TDS online thorough HDFC Bank?

Interesting 0 Comment

I was paying TDS today through HDFC bank. Have been paying it for many years without any problem. Today I faced a problem. After I filled up all details on NSDL’s site I was redirected to my HDFC net banking and I filled up the amount there and paid and on the last stage where I can see the challan complete with challan serial number and code I got an error. ON the other hand I got an SMS confirming the tax amount so money had been deducted but the challan could not be generated. Now what to do?

First I logged into HDFC net banking and checked the statement. Sure enough the amount was debited and an entry in the format of 0510308060413#####- CBDT Tax was showing. So the tax was paid but I did not have the challan. The challan is important because when I file the eTDS return I need to put the challan serial number along with the BSR code and everything else. I could get BSR code from other challans I had because I always use HDFC for paying tax and the BSR code is the same. I needed challan number.

So I searched online for a solution and I found this page where you can view all your TDS challans by entering your TAN or a specific challan details by entering the CIN (Challan identification number) I entered my TAN and searched but the tax was just paid and so it didn’t show up in the search. Because obviously it will show up in NSDL’s database only when the bank submits it. I could wait a few days and then check again.

Then I thought may be the entry in my bank statement can give me some info. So I looked at my older challans and their corresponding entries in the statement and I found my challan number! My last month’s challan entry had the format 0510308040313#####. This is made up of three parts 0510308, 040313 and #####. The first number 0510308 is the BSR code of the collecting branch for HDFC bank and all tax paid online will have this BSR code. Next six digits are the date in DDMMYY format and the last five digits is the challan serial number or the CIN. So I looked at today’s entry 0510308060413##### and found my challan serial number.

Based on this serial number I will check on Monday again at NSDL’s challan status page to see if my challan has been submitted.

Reserve Bank of India and its senseless policies!

Entrepreneurship, Idiocy 0 Comment

F*** you RBI! Because of YOU I can not use balance in my PayPal account to make a payment abroad! Every time I spend $$ for something where I could have used my PayPal balance I have to give a cut to some worthless Indian bank for using the credit card!

You know what, your stupid policies have made sure I will never launch a product or service for Indian audiences! When I launch my next subscription based idea I will register a company in the US just to be able to use something like Stripe!

And then people say why India doens’t have its Facebooks and Googles.

Gadhe jab desh ko chala rahe hai to desh ka kya ghanta kuchh hoga!!

InfoBox – free text entry password manager and information store

Programming 0 Comment

When I was running IT services business at Uconomix, I had to store information about a lot of projects at any time for various clients. The server IP, login page url, database details, passwords, access tokens, API keys, PIN numbers and what not. At first I used to dump it all in word or plain text files under each project’s folder but that wasn’t very efficient and not safe either because it was all plain text. I needed a place to store it all at one place. I tried with password protected word files, access database etc but nothing was as simple as I wanted.

What I really wanted was a dump bin where I can copy paste stuff from an email about access details of a new server and find it quickly the next time I need it. There have been tons of password managers available, I am using spb wallet myself on my mobile and computer to store my credit card information and all. But I didn’t want to use that for storing my project related information because all those products were very structured and fields based. There were fields for a server url a username and a password. My case was unique. I had a server url, multiple accounts, smtp details, ftp details, url to phpMyAdmin and it’s login details – lots of stuff. I basically wanted free form text entry so I developed InfoBox.


That was back in 2008. I developed it and it was good enough for my own use and I have been using it since then to store all my programming related info. Now I have decided to release it to the world as a freeware. It’s very limited in features. You can create Boxes and Boxes contain Info. I had added basic formatting options a while back and that’s it. I just added some embedded banners for uMark and PhotoJoiner and released it. It’s a portable app so you can run it from a pen drive and put your Box anywhere you want – pen drive, Dropbox folder or a network share.

InfoBox uses SQLite to store the data. Every box is essentially a password protected SQLite database.

Download it and let me know what you think.

How to combine panorama photos together? Use PhotoJoiner.net

Programming, Technology, Uconomix 0 Comment

Lot of cameras have a panorama mode where you can take several photos which can be combined to make a long photo that covers a very wide viewing angle. But not all camera have option to actually join those photos together. You may also want to combine some photos to make a collage or a strip of photos so what do you do?

Presenting PhotoJoiner.net – a free web app to join photos together. Upload a bunch of photos, select whether you want to join them horizontally or vertically, set a margin between photos and the colour to fill the margin with and you are done. Download the joined photos with the click on a button.

Check it out.

uMark for Mac launched

Programming, Uconomix 0 Comment

Finally after working on it for over a year, we launched uMark for Mac fulfilling one of the oldest demand from our customers for uMark.

I had released original uMark for Windows back in 2005 and since then it has gone through a lot of changes. I had ignored the software for a couple of years but it kept selling and finally when I decided to quit the software services business last year, I decided to concentrate fully on uMark. Few days back we had launched an online version of uMark at uMarkOnline.com that allows watermarking one photo at a time and now we have uMark for Mac. Next up is uMark 4 for Windows and then uMark for iPad and Android tablets.

The programming credit goes to Arokkia! :)

uMark for Mac can be downloaded from http://www.uconomix.com/Downloads.aspx

PS: The awesome screenshot has been created by using place it by breezi

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