Shameless Skype Software Horror (SSSH….)

16th August : Skype is down…and everyone are panic. The world of communication is not fallen or AT & T, Virgin did not lost their satellites..but skype has got crashed data servers and the world is panic.

16th August : As a usual routine, the major OS vendor, Microsoft has issued critical security patches to their operating systems Windows XP and Windows Vista worldwide. These patches are available as part of Windows Update (which can be configured not to download updates automatically by any user) worldwide. The criticality of these patches also demands a safe restart of the operating system to make sure it is secured from any malicious attacks. Every machine in this world which has been updated using windows update was restarted….

What happend to skype?

Now the funniest thing that could ever happened to a software which was made with no idea of disaster scenarios comes in to picture. The massive restart of windows machines all over the world has apparently brought down skype servers and caused a big disaster. To my understanding , Skype does closes the connections and commits the calls in shutdown process. Massive start of windows machines (skype is not sure how many ….), it has got massive log-in  requests which are enough to give their servers a sleeping pill.

Who is the culprit ?

My vote goes to Skype. Hats-off to their product engineering which has never taken such a scenario of disaster. I am wondering what the hell their testing team doing with load testing? Do they test skype servers with a 500 simultaneous login transactions? How could anyone blame someone with so much of irresponsibility at their own house? This is funnier than fun.

Windows update restarted many machines and all the other IM networks survived including AIM, MSN, Yahoo and Google and why not skype? Does skype is going to disable the auto sign-in feature in future? 🙂 are the questions now…

Read more on this..

What makes Indians busy on Internet?

Guess what? No..It’s not work or bollywood :-), It’s “Scrapping”. According Alexa traffic rankings for India, Orkut.com stands the most viewed/visited website after yahoo.com. I would give Orkut.com as numero Uno, because I believe Yahoo.com gets most of the hits due to it’s messenger traffic but towards the website.

The Rankings are as follows…(top 10 rankings)

01. Yahoo!

02. Orkut.com (Where people fight on stupid topics for days and years)

03. Google India

04. Google.com

05. Rediff

06. MSN (msn.com)

07. Naukri.com (A Job’s site)

08. YouTube

09. Windows Live (live.com)

10. Blogger.com

Some more interesting facts seems weird to me. The trends clear shows that Indians are wasting lot of limited Internet connectivity that country has as of today. Let’s see some interesting rankings

• 11 : RapidShare.com – A site which is well known for sharing files on internet.
• 14: Debonairblog – A porn blog. Posts lot of MMS videos online.
• 16. MegaUpload.com – Similiar to RapidShare
• 37: MegaShare.com – Similiar to RapidShare

Top Informational, Corporate & News Sites (India only)

• 12: Wikipedia.org (Good to see Wikipedia growing in India)
• 13 : Indiatimes.com (Times Of India’s web portal)
• 15: Microsoft.com
• 17 : Raaga.com (Indian music streaming site)
• 18: Sify (Satyam Infoway web portal)
• 20: Timesjobs.com (Times of India’s Job’s portal)
• 21: Monster India (Jobs portal)
• 24: Jeevansaathi.com (Matrimonial)
• 28: ClickJobs.com (Jobs)
• 62. Eenadu.net (Telugu News Paper)

The top ranked sites (1-10) are showing a healthy traffic in netizens. “Search” is still stands as a hot trend in India. Blogger.com coming at rank 10 shows that India is stepping in to serious blogging right from masses.

At medium level ranks, pornographic and pirated software downloads have taken most of the traffic. This is clearly showing an indication of usage of pirated software. Very bad !

WTH you did on the so called "Shutdown Day" ?

So, what the hell you did on the world’s shutdown day (sounds funny…). Hmm.yes it’s the shutdown day for computers as the website shutdownday.org says.

Well, On 24th March, 2007 (IST), I DID NOT SHUT DOWN MY COMPUTER. Because I did not see any reason to do so. I do balance my life and computer better way, hence I don’t have to kick the a** of my computer.

The ShutdownDay.org web site has setup a post-event board where you can post your experience on WSD Day. Let’s see the world did on that day…

Most of the people who visited this site after March 24th, expressed that they are working on that very day 🙂

The second ranked is “interesting thing” as you see in the above table.

But overall, I feel this experiment has done nothing but a big failure. I am not sure if they shutdown the web site’s server on that very day also.

Final Verdict is…You don’t have to shutdown your computer to do something else. You just shutdown your brain and sleep to relax.

Technorati tags: shutdownday, shutdown

Digg effect on Yahoo….It’s Bad !

Yahoo Auto Suggestion’s new design is creating ripple through the aggressive unmanaged community of Digg.com for all of it’s similarities with Digg.com design. They call it as Shameless ! God ! what’s happening to these crowds? Yahoo even did mentioned that they wanted to go with Digg style of voting for some purpose in their blog. That was really a good thing they did. There is no rule that someone should not follow the way you do things…There is no patent filed for the GREAT style of digg.com as well or that is not the style of century also. Well if we don’t like digg to be mentioned on yahoo, why the hell every blog and site in this world should say “Digg This” and “Digg that?” Let’s Stop it !

Once again Digg.com community has proven that it has major number kids and unprofessional cowards by making/defacing Yahoo auto’s page as shown below…

When can we see a "signed" FireFox plugin ?

I have been using FireFox for a while and Installed fair number add-ins too. I felt the plugins are creating a strong backbone for FireFox.

But….

I had never seen a single plugin with a proper digital certificate which provides the authenticity of the source. I always get to see the plugin installation as shown below..(note : FasterFox is one of the famous plugins)…

When we can see a “Signed” FireFox plugin ?

Democracry…

GOOD News : Ban was lifted….:-)

http://www.ibnlive.com/news/government-lifts-ban-o…

The Department of Telecommunications of the Government of India has lifted the ban on blogs  following pressure from the Indian blogger community and the media. Even with the lifting of the ban several bloggers from BloggersCollective are getting ready to file a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) in the Supreme Court of India against the Government censorship of the Internet.

Flash News : Blog Blockade will be lifted in 48 hours (Source : Rediff)

Helping hand from Pakistan :  This is a great gesture….The pakistani bloggers community is giving its helping hand to support all Indian bloggers to route thier blog links to pkblogs using a cool-nifty script…find more about it here….

Heard from friends : Blockade still continues…seems some ISPs have removed the restrictions already and the banned blog sites are now accessible. well, the real good news is not yet out 😦

Wired Coverage :

“In its efforts to shut down extremists blogs, the government ended up blocking all access to several websites, including the popular Blogspot.com. That brought calls from angry internet users and software executives on Wednesday. They called for the Indian government to reopen access to the sites.

“The Indian internet service providers don’t have the technological wherewithal to block specific blogs on a blogging site. Consequently, they ended up blocking the entire site,” said technology expert Pawan Duggal.

Gulshan Rai, director of the state-run Computer Emergency Response Team of the Information Technology Ministry, said the government order targeted four blogs hosted on blogspot.

“There’s no attempt to block blogspot.com from our side,” the Hindustan Times quoted him as saying.

On Wednesday morning it was still difficult to access blogs on that website from India. Angry Indian internet users exchanged e-mails and flooded message boards with postings in protest.

Kiran Karnick, president of The National Association of Software and Services Companies, the country’s main information technology trade group, said his organization would take up the matter with the government.”

India is the world’s largest democratic country…once upon a time. It’s a shame to add the last part, but it seems we are successfully heading towards that destination.

Indian government now successfully have shutdown the access to all blogspot, typepad and geocities blogs at ISP level. This is a serios violation of primary rights possessed by all indians by means of Indian Constitutional Law.

The right to freedom is one of the most important fundamental right that have been granted to us by the founders of Indian Constitution. This right allow every citizen of India to be free from the ancient form of slavery. This fundamental right is described in the constitution as:

All citizens shall have the right-

• “To freedom of speech and expression;”
• To assemble peaceably and without arms;
• To form associations or unions;
• To move freely throughout the territory of India;
• To reside and settle in any part of the territory of India;
• to practise any profession, or to carry on any occupation, trade or business.

India Uncut coverage on this Disaster

My heart feels burnt when I see India beside countries like Pakistan, China where freedom and democracy has no meaning.

This is what you will see on pkblogs.com homepage

Is your blog blocked in India, Pakistan, Iran or China?

If Yes then you can still access your blog anytime using pkblogs free Blog Gateway.

Updates & Tracking:

Scoble Says “It Sucks” : http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2006/07/17/blockin…

Global Voices Online : http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/2006/07/17/india…

Desipundit : http://www.desipundit.com/2006/07/15/blogspotcom-b…

Protests by Bloggers : http://censorship.wikia.com/wiki/Protests_By_Blogg…(add your protest here)

Coverage by The Hindu : http://www.hindu.com/2006/07/19/stories/2006071902…

Join Blogger’s Collective @ Google Groups : http://groups.google.com/group/BloggersCollective

RTI Petition against Telecom & Dept of Information Technology : http://baxiabhishek.spaces.msn.com/blog/cns!8A8DB0…

List of Banned Sites in India : http://censorship.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_Sites_Ban…

MSN India proved it again…

MSN India proved it again that they only see India through thier cheap, bollywood glasses. I have once reported on the same issue with MSN india Portal here. I am ok if they are targeting to a specific group of audience in India who only want to read and with movie stuff and movie stars, gossips and other stupid stuff. But If MSN India is trying to be a leader in India Portal wars, I think it is completely destroying itself and going towards a dead end.

Look at thier woman’s day special page.

Any Indian woman who knows what are the strengths & great attributes of a woman would laugh at this site. I still not able to digest that a movie star with a temporary glamour can gain a 1st position beating some great women in India there on the same page like Sudha Murthy, Sania Mirza, Kiran Mazumdar etc. These women made the country proud and guiding the next generations towards the self independance from any sort of issues and path towards ultimate success.

Let’s take aishwarya’s case : A normal woman..entered in to modelling, someone made her act,(she is still not good in that) and won Miss World, had been in to lot of issues with some other movie co-stars for many bad reasons… what else? I don’t think there is something that the women in India could learn from her…It’s just crazy that MSN India thinks aishwarya comes on first place if you think about great women in india.

I am repeating…MSN India…Grow up !

 

MSN.co.in home page and their obsessions

I think its high time for MSN India team to change thier domain name msn.co.in to “msnads.co.in” or “msnbollywood.co.in”. Look at this stupid home page which is supposed to be a start page for any indian to know as per expectations from any portal like www.msn.com.

Right from the top of the page, I have marked all ADs in Yellow Boxes and Movie information in Red boxes. As per my observation MSN.co.in covers or contains only 10% of thier home page which is “information”. And the remaining stuff is all about aishwarya and salman khan, may be the cute pics of sameera reddy etc…. I am attaching the home page for your reference below… (I did not digged in to MSN Channels much…) – Click on the image to see the original image.

The funniest part is filling this page with various technical web sites like windows update etc.

Dear MSN India…Do you have any idea about your audience? Do you think they are running after bollywood actors and actresses pics and wallpapers all the time. You got to think about the future as many self made portals like live.com, google homepage are coming on the way. Please try to understand the word “Entertainment”, it’s not just movies & Wallpapers for sure 🙂

Bye Bye FireFox 1.5

I have decided to live with out FireFox 1.5 for some time. Its giving pathetic performance in loading the pages or any other complex rendering. I found IE is better than FireFox 1.5 in performance, though it crashes very often.

May be I will consider Firefox again after major performance fixes. Till then Bye Bye FireFox !

One more Beta from Big “G”

Google launched one more “Beta” today…”Google Base“. When I was told about this by my buddy srinivas, I asked if it is a database engine from google? “No..I don’t know what it is” he said…I tried to understand the concept but could’nt go further because of “Internal Server Error” for any option that I select there…

Exhaustion = Zero Innovation..So ? Who cares about it?

Read this today morning…

http://www.indicthreads.com/content/view/316/0/1/0/

I got this FWDMail from one of my collegue…as an Indian IT worker, I must agree that even I have gone through this once a while in my career, but its not permanent at all…bottom line is “Its your life and you have chosen it…” If you dont want to live with it, just quit the job and open a candle shop near you house or migrate to US or some country where you get the position to threaten offshore indian workers to work 12 hours a day 🙂

I have observed few of my collegues who got used to this kinda stuff. Most of them are bachelors and live in working men/womens hostel. Most of them expressed a crazy concern to go home..”What I will do by going home?” LOL…yes they do get coffee, coke and Internet/Phone in an airconditioned office but never in home…It means they do not have a good personal life style to manage thier life @ home…at the same time I have seen married folks expressing concerns over working late, since they have a good personal life waiting after working hours every day.

I do agree that top companies like Infy, wipro, satyam etc provide very good office atmospehere and facilities. But do they survey on them? very rare…Most of these facilities are provided as part of standardizing the vendor profile for big clients. But the employees who really live with work (work with life) are rare. Very few companies like google, amazon, microsoft are exception to this.

My last words on this are : This is a problem of COIN with same face at both sides…there are problems with companies and there are problems with in mindsets of Workers too. Workers should set thier mind free and become professional, and it will for sure change the way companies behave.