Category Archives: misc

05.16.13
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Competition Monitoring

A book costs 11.36 Lakhs. Source: Silence on the Wire | BookAdda.com.

Screenshot:

screenshot-bookadda-13lakhs-book

Something like this happened between two sellers on Amazon.com few years ago. Both of them were thinking about buying the product from the other person and the script increased it thousands of dollars.

10.17.09
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Amazon.com announces order deadlines for 2009 holiday

Amazon.com announces order deadlines for 2009 holiday season.

Amazon has introduced these shipping enhancements just in time for the holidays. For the 2009 holiday season, the following order deadlines apply for delivery by Dec. 24:
Dec. 17: FREE Super Saver Shipping
Dec. 20: Standard Shipping
Dec. 22: Two-Day Shipping (order as late as 7 p.m. PST; varies by item; free with Amazon Prime)
Dec. 23: One-Day Shipping (order as late as 3:30 p.m. PST; varies by item; just $3.99 per item with Amazon Prime)
Dec. 24: Same-Day Shipping (order as late as 1 p.m. PST; varies by item; just $5.99 per item with Amazon Prime

source: Amazon Investor Relations

Hottest product that ships internationally on Amazon:

10.14.09
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a dumb but a clever hack for .co.cc and Weebly

Maintaining four individual domains having similar content is a little pain.

So, I decided to scrape off the cc domain sairam.co.cc(which I bought for $3) after an year and so, planned to redirect it to a constructed website on Weebly.

But, there is a little problem with the way you redirect from one url to another at http://www.co.cc , You cannot redirect a .co.cc domain to another .co.cc domain which could be used by spammers. But the flaw in the concept was one could redirect links via other links. The one that is free, short, customizable, famous is a URL shortener. So I cooked up a tinyurl link for my site and got it running.

Also, checked using http://www.url.sc/ – A free anonymous proxy (since DNS usually takes few hours to get updated).

So, what’s new about sairamkunala.co.cc ?
I am making another homepage for me on a neat, good looking, customizable interaface (so customizable that you can also add javascript into it), add analytics, add links, adsense,flickr widgets etc. for free on Weebly. The Interface provided by Webbly is very intuitive and neat.

The positive points about the site

  • Intuitive Interface
  • Loads of templates
  • Customizable themes
  • Free Subdomain
  • Link to a domain through A DNS record
  • Pro membership
  • Cheap Hosting

Negative points:

  • Cannot add custom widgets
  • Cannot have more than one domain pointing to the same weebly site
10.07.09
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Kindle drops its price to $259 and its available in India

And the good part, its available to more than 100 countries for $279 including India. yay!

Kindle-india-checkout
405USD
Oops ! forgot the custom duty !!

Looks like there is a ton of competition over the ebook reader and tablets. Waiting for the Apple Tablet (releasing in Jan 2010 according to rumors)

Similar Posts:
crunchgear

09.08.09
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New domains

Actually I am bored of buying costly domains like .am which are $50 for outsiders . Of course there are more domains like .tt,.im which offers two letter and one letter/digit domain which can be considered to be costlier.

.tt [src] = $500 per year. Ex: ma.tt

.im [src] = 2 letter £495, 1 letter £995 per year. Ex: ff.im

So, the cheapest one could get it for of course free . http://www.co.cc offers big names like sairamkunala.co.cc for free and small names like sairam.co.cc for $3 per year. And also, has a nice interface for managing the free hosting for ns, cname entries. Adding to it, you get a webstore website domain.cc.cc for free.

Note: The .cz.cc, .co.cc, cc.cc & uni.cc domains are not official TLDs. They are used for free URL redirection services, though .cz.cc, .co.cc and .cc.cc can be used as a real DNS service[src]
07.25.09
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organizing yourself on the web

Continuation of organizing myself on the web

The question boils down to .. Which service is best for storing this information and why ? How can one manage so many different passwords , information  where all we were registered to and to set data online safe(=encrypted). I have logged in my way of doing this – storing passwords, publishing information on the www about myself and my likes etc. and storing digital content which you bought online or personal content that is private.

Say, I want everyone(www)/friends that I like a webpage or suggest a webpage to a friend or a webpage would be very useful to me or read the daily news from various RSS feeds and want to know who all liked it or tweet your status to your friend community or share the score that you could make in a game to your friends. But all these services are unique and each of the service aims at providing you a single service like bookmarking, making friends and playing games, tweeting , digging a page. But when seen through a end-user’s perspective, one would end up creating an account in almost all websites atleast one of a kind. One would start digging about on an article about Jackson or  want to tell his friends about a cool game where their score is 25000 points after spending 5 hours of time. That is where services like Google Reader/FriendFeed/Facebook come into picture.But again, what each of them is aiming is different, Friendfeed gets the list of shared items from various services and your friends onto your screen and only gives the summary or links to the actual activity and updates work in close to real time like posts to twitter or stumbleupon or public bookmarks on delicious etc.  , but Google Reader is mostly used for reading looong articles by staying on the same page/site which also tries to get the blog feeds in close to real time,but not the links where very few users subscribed to (for ex: a infamous/lowranking website).

The most important you need in your real life is privacy on the internet and in life. Why privacy? Because, your private information is the key to unlock or request for a new password for your online banking account or your personal email account. That’s the reason not to have the same password for buxfer.com and digg.com, and the same reason an alert window pops up on your login every 5 months requesting to change your password on the corporate account. The problem is there is no official verification or ranking on how sites store passwords, how the authentication happens? (over plain text or secure) or how ‘Forgot Password’ works etc.

Below is the list using which I am trying to organize myself

Public Data :
FriendFeed – to track the list of my social updates that I publish to the web. Any feed can go through this and the best part is, you can even see data shared by anyone liked by any one of your contacts/friends.

View my FriendFeed

  • twitter » tweet tweet
  • facebook » you dont want me to explain do you ?
  • Google Reader » Reading articles & blog posts with keyboard shortcuts, with no “themes” attached.
  • last.fm » Songs you listen to and identify similar music
  • youtube » video songs/almost everything that you missed on tv
  • delicious » bookmarking (Yahooed!)
  • stumbleupon » more bookmarks (the feature I like is shows you random pages shared in that category) . Usually I prefer to keep the pages I like on this.
  • Digg » You either DIGG or BURY an article/page
  • flickr » photos !! (also Yahooed!)
  • intensedebate » one stop shop to comment on blog posts ( started by the same company that started wordpress)
  • linkedin » Your professional facebook/social networking site

Private Data :
Following are those which you can’t track in friendfeed because of the sensitivity of the information. So, how do you track … ?

  • Expenses » buxfer.com » A place where you can track your income/expense, share bill with friends, maintain multiple accounts, maintain budgets, track monthly expenses via tags etc. and every transaction with the server goes on https
  • Tasks » rememberthemilk.com » the best one to choose if you dont like the task list that your email client provides. As you can see the project was always in the Beta stage. nice shortcut keys , takes a little while to get used to it.
  • Passwords » lastpass.com » Check out how it works. It can autofill user accounts, auto login into websites. You can even securely store “notes” like your bank account details etc.

That’s how I organize myself. I am sure that I didn’t miss anything else other than securely storing backups of files and other data that is considerably huge (> KB) in size. Of course any programmers answer would be S3. I would get my scripts ready before presenting it and first things first.

BQA (Basic Questions&Answers):

What information not to give to any website which asks you ? DOB !! since that’s the main identity to identify you when you register for a service or to any other services. I do not say that the company would be using it unethically, but for the one and only reason it would not even bother to encrypt/hash a user’s password during registration/changing password on a website. I even see on this very fine day, passwords not encrypted flowing on plain http and even unencryptedly stored in their text files (I guess the websites want to be frugal and want to save their resources to not get a database and to not encrypt a user’s password).

Note: Check the privacy notice on the site (which are usually/always ignored). If you are not planning to read it , this is the summary : I am not the reason &  I am not atleast a byte responsible if you lose something because of following this post, I ain’t promoting any product present here. I am only sharing information that has helped me.