EmbeePay

EmbeePay is the Social Way to get Free mobile recharge around the world.  It supports majority of the mobile service providers and rewards users with free mobile service and content to engage with leading brands. Works as a Facebook application, you can get free recharges by inviting your friends, doing surveys, signing up in websites, etc. It doesn’t post any unwanted posts on your wall or on your friends wall. If you have a good friendship circle, EmbeePay can be helpful in cutting down your mobile bills. For more details, visit the website @ embeemobile.com and Facebook Page

AirTel Money

AirTel, one of the top telephone and Internet service provider in India has introduced their mobile wallet service named AirTel Money months ago. Its almost 2 weeks before, I decided to give it a try. I got used to it faster and now uses it to recharge my mobile and my friends. Unlike other mobile recharge related applications, based on USSD code, Airtel Money works on any mobile phones, even in the Nokia 1100. Another major attraction is that it provides full talktime for RS 50 recharge and more than full talktime for recharges above RS 100. You can also recharge for any valid recharge values from AirTel. Apart from recharges, it also provides features like merchant pay and money transfer. It also provides many offers, during Airtel related payments and other merchant payments. The only difficulty found with AirTel Money is that Debit Cards are not accepted at the moment. You will need an Internet banking account to add money to your wallet. More details at airtelmoney.in

Tata Docomo Online Recharge

Among the mobile service providers in India, TATA Docomo has the best online recharge facility. Supporting almost all payment methods, its not only user friendly, but also has the largest offers. Earlier, it used to give full talktime for all recharges starting from RS 20, but has now changed due to TRAI regulations. Now you get full talktime on recharges above 50 and more than full talktime on recharges above 100. Also, the site shows all available special recharges and 3G recharges. If you are a Docomo user, the online recharge feature will surely save you some money. More at http://www.tatadocomo.com/online-recharge.aspx

Recharge it now

Recharge it now is an award winning ecommerce website, designed entirely for mobile and DTH recharges. It is a one stop place for all mobile related recharges in India. Though there aren’t special full talk time offers, it provides many free coupons during every recharges, which can be redeemed in your future transactions in the corresponding websites. It supports all major payment options and can be helpful, when your friends asks you to recharge their mobile. They have many contests too, like the lucky draw, etc. If you have luck, you may end up receiving free recharges. Check rechargeitnow.com for more details.

ngpay

ngpay, with the tagline “mall on mobile” is a mobile application, currently available for android, symbian and blackberrry users. This application works using the GPRS connection, and provides an easy to use interface to recharge your mobile. Apart from recharge, it provides many services like ticket booking for films, train and bus, buying items, etc. You can accumulate points which you get on every purchase and redeem it later. To get the application in your mobile, sms ngpay to 56767 or check their website; ngpay.com. You can also check their Facebook Page for more details.

Lot more services are available to recharge your mobile, giving more advantage than the traditional recharge options. These are ones I have tested personally. If I come across good ones, will update the post. Do comment, if you find any other service better.

Its now almost 2 months since we have shifted to Kochi. Here, there are 7 people living in a 2 storied house. During the first days, everyone was interested in cooking and morning walk. But, things changed very fast. Most of us now wake up by 10 in the morning, skips breakfast, whoever feels hungry, makes the food, etc. Few among us, who ates lot, couldn’t bear this and started complaining.

Since we already have bitter experience with the human made schedule for cooking  from our Hyderabad days, decided to go for a more technical solution. Thus, the food preparation schedule algorithm and the program was born.

Its a simple python program, uses the historical data to judge who has to prepare food, in our case 2 persons per group, doesn’t schedule a person for both times a day if more than 3 people are present that time, etc.

If you need to see the code, its at http://labs.bizzard.info/?a=summary&p=FoodPrepare 

Firstly, aren’t you tired of paying hand-over-fist for the latest operating system, only to realise that it’s full of bugs, slow, infested with bloatware and just generally not worth the money? Me too, and that’s one of the reasons GNU/Linux really is a demonstration of just how good an operating system can be despite its lack of a price tag.

This isn’t a hard-to-install OS, either – whether you’re a programmer or a poker.de player, all you need to do is know how to burn files to a disc. After that, it’s just a case of using that disc to install your new operating system. Presently, most GNU/Linux distributions support installations from USB drives too.

The best thing about GNU/Linux is the considerable choice you get, when it comes to your operating system. Believe it or not, it’s not just “Linux” – there are many different operating systems built using the foundations GNU and Linux has set down. Ubuntu is quite a common variation on the Linux theme – a friendly, easy-to-use method of doing anything from playing games to writing a novel.

Of course, GNU/Linux is also extremely fast – there’s no pre-installed bloatware to slow down your computer, and it makes optimum use of your system’s hardware capabilities. It’s really difficult to fault it for what it does, and even if it cost just as much as Windows you’d be hard-pressed to criticse the fact that all the software for it is – you guessed it – also free. GNU/Linux is an incredible boost to anyone tired of the current operating system market, so dig in and find your own computing happiness.

I personally use Debian in my Laptop and servers, but for newbies, I recommend Linux Mint

More about the team and their efforts at http://freefallfilms.in/

I don’t have much hope to see it again, but if anyone found them, please return it back. It has a black frame with glass lenses (Not the now popular fiber lens).

I am supporting the movement, by all possible means and urge you to be a part of it.

If you are not aware of the movement and the cause, please check the links below:

• http://jamewils.blogspot.com/2010/11/arugments-by-tamil-nadu-and-counter.html
• http://mowr.gov.in/index3.asp?subsublinkid=751&langid=1&sslid=733
• http://rebuilddam.blogspot.com/
• https://www.facebook.com/savemullaperiyar
• http://www.santhoshj.in/tag/mullaperiyar/

Just collected few of the banners/posters created by volunteers for the promotion of the campaign. Sharing them below. All the credits goes to the concerned persons behind the art.

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I don’t care for the publicity stunts by putting logo of companies in the posters and banners related to the mullaperiyar issue. What I care is the real cause. The voluntary work of designers must also be appreciated. I am collecting more and more images related to the mullaperiyar campaign and can be found at:

• http://www.bizzard.info/gallery/?album=1&gallery=14
• http://www.bizzard.info/gallery/?album=1&gallery=15

I have installed this app for android a week before and only now thought to give it a try, so that I could use it for updating my blog when I am on the move.

My first blog post from Hyderabad that too from the class. Hope this gets posted

The slide can be downloaded from here.

Show your support too…

The participation was low, around 15, but I would consider it as a successful event as all those who came were really interested. The dev camp 2 started by 10AM. Jishnu welcomed all to the event. Baiju and Sooraj Kenoth introduced themselves. We all introduced ourselves too. I was surprised to hear that Baiju, who initiated the work of SMC was from civil engineering background. This shows that interest is what all matters.

We started off with how to contribute to a project in the basic level, such as bug reporting. Baiju explained about the bug reporting and tracking process and what happens within the developer community when a new bug was reported. We took the example of bugzilla at kde on how to report a bug. Sruthi Devi from GEC Thrissur, shared her experience with it as she had resolved bugs of kstars, a planetarium application of KDE. Even though I have reported bugs to Debian and few other projects earlier, the session gave me more ideas on how to report bug in a more descriptive manner and to follow up with it.

Then we moved on to resolving bugs. Sruthi and Baiju introduced tools like indent, diff and patch, and their working. Indent was new to me and someday I’ll give that a try.

Then we moved our discussion on to version control systems. We had a small overview of cvs, svn, bazaar, mercurial and git. We then looked a bit into git and its basic commands and working. After that we took our break for lunch.

The afternoon session was more on to communicating, like IRC mailing lists and bits and bytes of this and that. We had few issues with IRC as for desktop clients, the port is blocked at college and few browser related errors for webchat.

By 4PM, we concluded the camp and had a small discussion about the event and on how to improve. As of me, the morning session was great, but the afternoon wasn’t much productive. I was also busy trying to fix the monitor resolution in Jasir’s Dell Mini and the Tata Photon whiz connection for Musfir, but without success. Need to give them one more try, when I am free.

Thanks to Sooraj for organizing such an event and Baiju for spending his time with us. Special thanks to Sruti Devi for coming to MESCE and changing the minds of few here on what they could do… Special thanks to Raju sir and staff of IT department at MESCE for giving us all the support to host such a camp.

I have clicked few pics. Will add it here soon.
Few pics I clicked are below.

Well, I am writing this at midnight, and almost sleepy. Publishing it now. Will add the links tomorrow. Also, the “h” key of my laptop has got some problems. So, I might have missed “h” within the post.

Here are few other links related to the event:

• http://wiki.smc.org.in/Developer_Camp/MES
• http://it.mesce.ac.in/wiki/index.php/Developer_Camp