Resetting WiFi location reported by Google

Most people who have moved to a different location have faced an annoying problem. When they are connected to their WiFi router, their phone (or any device using Google's APIs through WiFi connection) reports that they are still at their old location.
When a brand new WiFi router comes online, Google associates it's physical location with it's MAC address. But when you move your router to a different location, Google's location API still reports that you are at old location.

To reset the location, simply append _nomap to your WiFi's SSID; the connection name.
For example, if your WiFi's SSID is MyHomeNet, then rename it to MyHomeNet_nomap

Google will then reset the cached information for that particular MAC address.

Raspberry Pi has finally arrived!

My Raspberry Pi has finally arrived; after being in waiting list for 8 months!
As the website said, its really slick.

Some pictures:

  

Pi running:

It was quite easy to get it up and running. Most of the Debian packages are available for ARM which is great.

My Grandma

Grandma

Everyone loves their grandma
But I love mine even more
Whenever life was difficult
She would be there for sure

She's like no other person I know
Believes in working every day
She was all fit-n-fine or so
Until a heart attack shook her day

I rushed to the hospital quickly
Which was very faraway
My heart pounded heavily
Every now and then

When I went in the ICU
She smiled and held my hand
She said I should rather study
Instead of wasting my time

She hates being in the hospital
Told me she would rather go out
Her world is not some hospital
It gives her creeps and doubts

And now that she is somewhat well
It feels like I can breath again
It all happened so fast to tell
Seems like I had a bad dream then

- Abhijeet Pathak

---

* Based on the real incident. My grandmother had a heart attack 3 days ago (on 7th Mar 2010).

My poem

Walking down a mile
He comes across a smile
Boy likes a girl
She's like a pearl

Friends they become
The blossoms have come
Very much they enjoy the time
Till now its all fun and fine

In a dream he comes to know
The feelings he had from a while ago
Love was occupying his mind
For the one and the only kind

Mind reading is not what he can do
And that his friend didn't knew
His feelings are so pure
Does she have any cure?

- Abhi

BareMetal OS, 64bit OS in under 64KB

Return Infinity computer software and research group has released BareMetal OS. Its a 64bit operating system entirely written in assembly language and is only 42kB in size.
Features include multi-processor and multi-core support, open source.

Get real time updates of Twitter and Flickr visually on Earth Map

flickrvision
See who is adding which photo on flickr on the map as they add it in real time.


twittervision
See the updates from twitter on the map as they are posted on the site.

Make USB disks/drives write protected (or read-only) using USB WriteProtector

Do you always fear that your USB drive, which contains your important data, may get affected instantly when plugged into a foreign computer in a cyber café, computer lab in your college or even at your friend's place? Then USB WriteProtector by Gaijin is for you.


This program can be downloaded from http://www.gaijin.at/en/dlusbwp.php
Moreover this program is FREE and Portable, i.e. it does not requires installation.
Extract the files from the archive and run USBWriteProtect.exe.
The default interface language is not English, so choose English from the list of available labguages and you are ready to go.

This nice little app turns On/Off the write protection flag in the file syetem of your USB drive. So if you turn write protection on, then no changes can be done to the contents of USB drive, not even viruses can infect your drive.


When ever you turn write protection on or off, you just have to remove/eject the drive and attach it again.

Microsoft Bing - A quick review

Microsoft launched it's brand new search (oops I mean, decision) engine two days before the scheduled date. Here's a quick review (and of course, comparison) of Bing with two major search engines Google and Yahoo!.

Did you mean...
One of the most important feature that is missing from Bing is spelling suggestions. Its a must for any search engine.

Web and Images
Bing provides good search results for web and images. Plus the categorization for images is also very good, especially the option for searching images with "Face only" and "Face and Shoulders". This can be used to find images with people only very easily.

Local Search
Google has vast amount of data for local listing (I guess from Google Maps), that's why Google shows local listings with web site and phone numbers for almost every search. In comparison Bing does not have that much of data so we miss out local listings.

Currency Conversion
Google's currency conversion feature is very handy.
Bing and Yahoo! don't provide currency conversion.

Courier Search
If a package number such as 1Z9999W99999999999 is entered, then both Bing and Google show a link to track that package. But Yahoo doesn't.

Time
Another handy feature is that entering 'Time' shows current local time in Google. Bing and Yahoo! both miss it out.

Enabling All Features
You may not be able to access all the features of Bing (like Shopping, CashBack etc.) in your country. To access and try all the features, click on the country name on the top horizontal navigation bar and choose United States - English.

Using unicode in ASP.Net

When using unicode in ASP.Net, be sure to save the files in "UTF-8 " (i.e. with BOM, Byte Order Mark). Otherwise the characters in languages other than English won't be displayed correctly.

This is different from PHP which requires files to be saved in "UTF-8 without BOM" as discussed earlier in one of the other posts in this blog.

Window resize bug in Vista's "Connect To" dialog

The "Connect To" menu option in Windows Vista Start Menu can be used to connect to a network. But I've noticed weird resizing of this window as shown in the following images.

Before:

After minimizing and restoring:

If this window is minimized and restored, then it's width increases! According to my observations, this happens very few times when Aero theme is enabled, but almost every time when using Windows Vista in Classic Theme with Themes service not running.

Session problems while developing multilingual pages in PHP

You need to use UTF encoding for files while developing multilingual pages.
In that case, if you are using sessions then PHP interpreter may give a warning like "session_start() [function.session-start]: Cannot send session cache limiter - headers already sent". even when session_start() is the line of the code.

This can be avoided by using "UTF without BOM" (byte order mark) instead of just UTF encoding which does not insert extra bytes at the start of the file.

Design for Web Explod and GUI Events

VITality '09 Poster

This is the final draft of I've made for VITality '09; the technical event at VIT, Pune.

Check out http://www.vitality.org.in for event details.

Speakers that automatically go in Standby mode

Gone are the days when people used to have stereo speakers. Now a days speakers with 2.1 to 5.1 channel configuration are very common.

But there is something that irritates me about them. These speakers have powerful amplifiers. They consume lot of power, plus they produce a little hum which is very noticeable in the quiet environment or at night.

The idea is that they should also have the ability to go to s mode like most of the devices (monitors, hard disks etc.) today have. So that it will consume less power and let people take sound sleep!

I hope these kind of speakers will come out in market soon.

Has Large Hardon Collider destroyed the Earth yet?

Do you want to know the answer to this question?
Then visit http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/ to find out.

I wonder whether you'll be alive to see the site when it says 'YES'. :P