When Past Haunts.

"Now those memories come back to haunt me. They haunt me like a curse" - Bruce Springsteen.

Thinking about past we will encounter so many situations where we would have expected nothing good/bad to occur and more over looking forward to (or avoiding) it. But when the event actually happens we are 'caught pants down'. Nature/Destiny always has something special in store for us. It has a unique way to get even with us. It can either be much much better than the fears that we had. Or it could be just the opposite. When Nature gifts us, we feel invincible/delighted and credit ourself. However when luck doesn't favour us, we are left wondering what stuck us and left spending few nights wondering about the
Glory days - well, they'll pass you by - glory days In the wink of a young girl's eye - glory days, glory days : - Bruce Springsteen.

Guide to select MF courtesy freefincal.com

I have come across lot of people asking me on how to choose a mutual fund.
There is no better answer than this

http://freefincal.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/how-to-choose-a-mutual-fund.pdf

Cool tip to remove unwanted flak in your System.

While I was browsing today, I found cool little software called bleachbit. I did try it and found that it clears temporary data, caches of lots of applications. It has a preview mode in which it shows what all it deletes. It also allows you to select the locales you are interested and that removes lots of unnecessary data. It stores the previous selections, once you select the packages, using it again and again becomes very very easy. This is surely a boon for desktop like my home systems that have very less RAM and disk space. I still want to try it out at my home system. Will update you if removing all this unnecessary data actually helps speed ups my System.

Way to use fastest and nearest available dns servers

Have you were wondered on what could be the fastest dns server for your setup?
Then check this free software at http://code.google.com/p/namebench/.
namebench goes thro the already configured domain name servers, public available servers and lets you know which is the best possible name server for your setup.

If you are wondering whats a dns then check this

Nregs, drought and wage distribution

Here is a article by Swaminathan Aiyer that talks of NREGS.

NREGS is definitely a good scheme. However I would like to understand.
- Who decides what work is to be done?
- Who decides whether work got completed in a proper fashion?
- Who decides if workers were ever paid and were paid the correct amount?

I think its the ruling party men decide what work needs to be done, how many actually work, who were paid and how much.

I think this scheme can lead to more unorganized work than organized work. Also it still emphasizes that middlemen and people with political connections who make more money than the needy.

I do a news article where out Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh said "State governments are being encouraged to make wage payments under the programme through banks and post office accounts. Nearly 7.8 crore of such accounts have been opened. The growing practice of making use of the financial institutions for of wages is one means of reducing leakages and in often ensuring that wages are paid in accordance with prescribed schedule,"

If its really gets done that way .. then our PM deserves Kudos

Nice Firefox Extension for lazy ppl like me.

I keep adding a lot of bookmarks. It so happens that the same bookmarks are added at more than one place and even duplicate bookmarks in the same folder.

Though it isn't a big issue/Problem to have multiple bookmarks but it did occur to me why not cleanup the bookmarks (atleast get the duplicates out as a first step). Hence I searched for a firefox extension that can recognize duplicate bookmarks and I was happy with what I found.

Bookmark Duplicate Detector https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1553 not only helps find duplicates but also warns you everytime you add a bookmark and its already bookmarked.

However it does have a drawback if you have bookmarked two links to the same file but to two different sub-topics, Bookmark Duplicate Detector doesn't seem to recognize that they are actually duplicates.

And the better part, I actually didn't have so many duplicate bookmarks and that made me happy.

I liked Rajeev Chandrashekar's blog

I must have seen the ad for Rajeev's blog many many times. It never seem to interest me.
However today I accidently started reading it. I really found it worth reading it.
He sounds pretty reasonable and most of his ideas and thoughts are similar to mine. May be thats why I liked his blog. Here is the link to his blog.
http://www.rajeev.in/blog/

Happy reading.

The Open-Door Bailout and few of my thoughts

Indians can help the US tide over the depression ... starts of Thomas L Friedman in a post to the Nytimes. Its a very good article to read. Click here to read the article.
The highlight of the articles is a quote from Shekhar Gupta, editor of The Indian Express - "All you need to do is grant visas to two million Indians, Chinese and Koreans. We will buy up all the subprime homes. We will work 18 hours a day to pay for them. We will immediately improve your savings rate - no Indian bank today has more than 2 percent nonperforming loans because not paying your mortgage is considered shameful here. And we will start new companies to create our own jobs and jobs for more Americans."

Though I tend to believe most of what Shekhar Gupta said, I would disagree in couple of things with him
1. Current Indians are good at aping. We may not really come up path breaking ideas even though we are the best when it comes to copying. Xerox is not a Indian Company but probably Indian liked Xerox Corp more than any other country.
2. Indians are not saints when it comes to repayment. Didn't we hear requests for loans being waived? I have known in my own family about incidents when people who took loan but never repayed. Its just that every Indian knows himself and his fellow citizens so well that we dont lend money that easily and if ever somebody paid back it was because of "power of the money lender", or the loans were secured or the loans are disbursed for a few trusted ones (unlike the foolish American banks and lenders)

Beware of fake notes.

This post has a explaination to identify fake notes.
http://whatho.satpathy.org/tag/atm/

Though its tough to identify fake notes everytime .. we could atleast be more vigilant.

Tried connecting to my Office wireless network using WICD. My office network is secured by LEAP. Wicd failed to connect to Office wireless. I was unable to connect to Office Wireless Network from Network Manager also. So no regression there. Amazingly I have a small 4 line script using wpa_supplicant and dhclient that connects me to Office wireless Network. The wpa_supplicant conf file used manually (my script) and the wpa_supplicant file used by wicd resemble a lot. Hence the failure of wicd to connect to hidden essid Office wireless network is all the more intriguing. One positive that came out of this whole exercise: When manually connected to a wireless network, wicd atleast recognizes that I am on the network and also shows the network connected (if there are more than one). Network Manager was unable to do this.