Yashventures

How many times you have come across a website wanting to read an article or looking for some information and the site forced you to register before you could access that information? Chances are that you have faced this situation at least once. Although such compulsory registration is free, most of the times it is just a waste of time and too many details to fill in the registration forms. You are never ever going to visit that site again so registering just proves to be a useless exercise.

Say good bye to this problem with BugMeNot. BugMeNot has a database of username/passwords for most of the popular websites contributed by the users. Recently I reached to techtarget.com through a Google search and found that the site required me to log in before I could view the content. Registering would have been a waste of time so I just used a login provided by BugMeNot and accessed the information.

Very handy tool. I have added it to my Janoos homepage.

A few months back I was looking for a software that could let me type in Indian languages like Hindi or Gujarati. I was specifically searching for a program that would let me type phonetically i.e. if I type yash it would display यश in Hindi or યશ in Gujarati.

I came across a nice web based project created by Vijay Lakshminarayanan that was exactly what I was looking for. It had many Indian languages but no Gujarati. However it was open source and it was easy to add a new language so I added Gujarati to it. Other languages supported are – Bengali, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil and Telugu. That project can be found here. There are a few glitches with the script so I continued my search and came across another open source project called Baraha. Baraha is a windows application that has many more features. Actually it is a bunch of useful applications including a unicode edit pad, a Kannada spell checker, Indian language sort etc.
If you are on Windows then you can use Baraha and if you are on other platform or want to type online then you can use the online tool.

I have been a member of Orkut for a few days. For those who don’t know about Orkut, it’s a social networking site where people can communicate with their old friends and colleagues. There are other popular social networking sites as well like Linked In which is primarily for business purpose, Rediff Connexions, Friendster etc. The special thing about Orkut is that it is owned by Google.

Orkut is named after its creator Orkut Büyükkökten, a Turkish software engineer and an employee of Google. What sets Orkut apart from other similar services is that it is invitation only. You need to be invited by an existing user to join Orkut. This is similar to GMail. Another startling feature (according to me) is that it is developed in ASP.Net! A Google product developed on a Microsoft’s technology! This is strange because although Orkut is not an organic Google product it was launched by Google in January 2004. Two and a half years is enough for Google to convert it to their proprietary platform. Probably it is not that easy since Orkut has a huge user base.

Orkut is addictive for sure. I found a lot of old colleagues over there. But the server seems to be buckling under the pressure far too often. Bad bad server, no donut for you message is becoming frequent. May be since it’s in .Net so it is hosted on Windows servers and probably that’s why the service is not able to leverage Google’s huge computing power which mainly runs Linux and probably Google’s own operating system.

But Orkut is fun! Let me know if you want to join and I will send you an invite.

I haven’t seen something like this before!

I came across this link – http://darpg-grievance.nic.in/

An online Public Grievance lodging and monitoring system by the Department of Administrative Reforms & Public Grievances of Government of India!

If you have any complaint about the functioning of any of the 20 government departments listed below then you can lodge a complaint on this site.

The 20 departments about which you can lodge a complaint are -

1. Railways
2. Posts
3. Telecom (incl. BSNL & MTNL)
4. Urban Development (DDA, L&DO, CPWD, etc)
5. Petroleum & Natural Gas
6. Civil Aviation (IA, AI, AAI, etc)
7. Shipping, Road Transport & Highways
8. Tourism
9. Public Sector Banks
10. Public Sector Insurance Companies
11. National Saving Scheme of Ministry of Finance
12. Employees Provident Fund Organization
13. Regional Passport Authorities
14. Central Government Health Scheme
15. Central Board of Secondary Education
16. Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan
17. National Institute of Open Schooling
18. Navodaya Vidyalaya Samiti
19. Central Universities
20. ESI Hospitals and Dispensaries directly controlled by ESI Corporation under Ministry of Labour

This is cool. If what I have read in the mail where I found the link is true then the action IS taken within a week’s time. We can’t assume how effective this would be but we can definitely treat it as a start. At least there is someone to listen!