Since WordPress 2.8 “Baker” went gold today, I decided to immediately upgrade. I took the essential backups and hit the automatic upgrade link in the WordPress Dashboard. Voila! WordPress 2.8 was up and running in an instant and seemed perfectly bug free. The reality though, was different.

I decided to update some of my plugins as I got notifications that new versions were out. I clicked the link to update and was treated with the following error :

Downloading update from http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/YOURPLUGINHERE.zip.

Unpacking the update.

Incompatible archive PCLZIP_ERR_BAD_FORMAT (-10) : Invalid archive structure

I thought of it to be a random error, so I hit back and retried. Again, I got the error. I tried to install some new plugins via the Plugin Browser and got the same error. But if I uploaded the plugin archive file from my PC, it would install correctly. The Theme Browser showed no such errors and the themes were updated and new themes installed easily.

I headed over to the WordPress.org support forums and found that some users were indeed facing the same issue. Finally, I tweeted Ryan Boren, who was kind enough to immediately respond. Another user, demetris had already isolated the issue and filed a bug report.

The issue stands resolved now. Ryan has linked to a http.php in the support forum thread, which you will need to download and then overwrite the existing http.php in the wp-includes folder. The bug fix will be included in version 2.8.1. So, if you get errors while installing or upgrading plugins in WordPress 2.8 and cannot wait for the next release, kindly head over to the forum thread and follow the instructions. Another point to be noted here is that this issue does not effect all blogs. I have two blogs hosted on the same server and only one of them is affected by the bug.

Thanks again to Ryan Boren and demetris for being the heroes!

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There was a time during the days of Windows XP, when you could simply right click on your My Documents folder, go to properties and relocate your entire documents folder. When Vista came, it brought with it a number of folders that were now associated with the user. This included Downloads, Searches, Music etc etc. Even though it initially seemed complicated, this uniform structure for each user has eased the backup process. Now, the process I describe is not actually a backup but still the first step that I take to prevent loss of data in the event the drive on which the OS resides, crashes.

I know there will always be another way or simpler method to move your files from one drive to the other but what I describe here is tried and tested – on Vista and Windows 7. The basic logic is to simply create a symbolic link for each user folder inside the “Users” directory in the root of your drive. You may also relocate the entire “Users” folder to another drive or like me, simply relocate the user you want to.

Say, you are user “Peter”. Correspondingly, your folder is C:\Users\Peter (C: being the drive where Windows is installed). Now, you want to move your user data to another drive, say D:.

1. Firstly, open Control Panel and navigate to User Accounts. You may also execute “control userpasswords” in the Run dialog.
2. Create a new account. Name it “Dummy” and designate it as an Administrator.
3. Go to Start and Log Off from the account “Peter”.
4. Click on the username “Dummy” and login to the newly created administrator account.
5. In Windows Explorer, navigate to C:\Users. Select the user directory you wish to copy, in our case it is “Peter”. Copy C:\Users\Peter to say D:\Users\Peter. Confirm all prompts that may follow this operation.
6. Once you have copied the entire folder, navigate back to C:\Users and rename the folder “Peter” to say, “Peter_OLD”. I encountered trouble during this step in Windows 7 where it kept on asking me to try again. A simple workaround is to login to Windows in Safe Mode by pressing F8 again-and-again when the OS starts to boot and selecting Safe Mode from the menu that opens. When Windows boots in Safe Mode, simple open C:\Users and renam the folder “Peter” to “Peter_OLD”. In Vista, you may just have to confirm a series of UAC prompts.
7. This next step involves using the command line. Fire up the Run dialog box and type “cmd” and press ENTER. When the command prompt opens, navigate to the directory C:\Users. Now, type the following :
   

   mklink /d Peter D:\Users\Peter

    

8. Press ENTER. A shortcut named Peter is now created in the directory C:\Users. This is a symbolic link which redirects all requests to the folder D:\Users\Peter.
9. Restart your PC and login to the account “Peter”. It should display everything normally except for the hidden fact that every file associated with the current account is stored on the other drive.
10. If everything is normal, then you may simply delete the folder “Peter_OLD” from C:\Users. Open up the User Accounts in Control Panel and delete the account “Dummy” and all files associated with it. If there is an error, just login to the Dummy account, delete the symbolic link “Peter” and rename “Peter_OLD” to “Peter”. If you encounter errors, login to safe mode and try.

The above method works perfectly. The only drawback that I have seen is that Internet Explorer becomes extremely slow and is unstable in both Vista and 7.

The original guide for Vista is here.

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I use the StatPress plugin on this blog installation to gather some basic and live statistics of the visitors to my blog. I also use the WassUp plugin to capture some similar statistics. While both plugins have their own pros and cons, there is one thing that used to bother me about the StatPress plugin.

While there is an option to delete the older records from the table after a certain time, there is no option to empty the entire table of the stats. Why is this option required? Well, certain people like me host their blogs on servers which give a limited amount of database storage. Statistics plugins like WassUp and StatPress tend to accumulate a large amount of data and thereby take up a lot of database space.

WassUp has an option to empty the table whereas StatPress misses this functionality. I had to manually go into phpMyAdmin and empty the table. So, I decided to look into the plugin and try to add this functionality within it so that I could save myself from the hassle of going to a another software to manage the mess. I am no coder. I read through the entire code in statpress.php and made modifications as required.

I present to you, StatPress with empty table option.

As the above screenshot clearly shows, when you click on StatPress tab within your WordPress Dashboard, you will see an extra option called “Empty”. Clicking on it will delete all your stats from within the database and makes StatPress start afresh. However, please note that this action is permanent unless you have a previous backup. Once you click on Empty, it will empty your database without any further prompts or warnings.

DOWNLOAD : StatPress v 1.2.9.2 with Empty table option (79KB).

Those of you not wanting to undergo the exercise of downloading a new ZIP file of a plugin, deactivating the original StatPress 1.2.9.2 and reactivating this plugin may simply copy the entire code from the text file linked below.

DOWNLOAD : statpress.txt

Open the statpress.txt file. Either save it as statpress.php and overwrite the wp-content/plugins/wp-statpress/statpress.php file. Otherwise, from within your WordPress Dashboard, click on Plugins. Navigate to StatPress and click on Edit. Replace the entire text in the textbox on the next page with the text from the statpress.txt file you just downloaded.

Please note that I am in no way responsible to any damage or loss whatsoever the use of this modified plugin may cause to your installation. I am Jack of all trades, master of none. I don’t claim the code and modification is perfect. It is just a basic implementation. Take all precautions before you activate this plugin.

Finally, the development of StatPress seems to have stalled. There is another plugin StatPress Reloaded. Check it out.

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No. I’m not on a In.com bashing/loving/reporting spree here. It just so happened that I was browsing both the websites side by side when I noticed the favicons on their respective tabs.

Now, is it just me or the “in” part in both the logos seem kind of similar. The similar background colour, similar text colour and except for a few minor tweaks, the “in” looks quite the same. Now, this could be a far-fetched theory but I’m just writing what I feel (and what I see!).

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It was the 1st of August, 2008. I came to know about a website, “in.com”, which had been launched by the guys at Web18 and offered free email accounts @in.com. The offer seemed lucrative to me. In.com is a very tiny domain and I wanted an email address on it, jus for the cosmetic value of the address.

I went over to the website. It clearly said that it was in “beta” stage (testing). I registered for a couple of addresses just for the heck of testing out the service. Then I thought of creating an ID with some special characters. I tried underscore, hyphen and a dot. The minimum number of characters for an ID was 4. Then a brilliant (exaggeration) idea struck me. What if I could compensate some of the characters in my ID with special characters?!!!

Hyphen (-) and underscore (_) are so Web 1.0. I stuck with dot (.). Now, just to test my hypothesis, I typed four dots (….) in the “Email Id” space on the registration page. Immediately, below the form element, it said “Account Available : Yes” !! I never expected this. Seriously. I had my idea in my head but had never expected the software to be vulnerable to it. I went over to the next step and tried to register but it failed.

I hurried back to the registration page again and this time I put it “..in” as my ID. Sure enough, it was available. I went to the next step and BOOM! I was in! Now you, I and everybody would say, what’s the big deal with an email address that starts with two stupid periods? Well the thing is, the in.com website magically eliminated the dots from my id and now I had a shiny 2 letter username on their website, which I supposedly could not have had.

I had “in@in.com” with me. I logged in with “..in” and seperately with “in” and I got into my mailbox successfully. This email address was tiny, very tiny! I liked it just for that. The interface kind of sucked. Yes, they tried to make it all Web 2.0 with ajax and stuff but it was still slow and buggy. On top of that, their SPAM filter was and still is simply useless. And SPAM was the biggest reason that I never really suck to this tiny email address that I had acquired.

It seemed that every third person on this planet earth, who registered for any serive on the web, typed in their email as in@in.com! From Friendster accounts to Cellphone purchases, I got emails from everywhere! On top of that, there was the regular SPAM which targeted my inbox. When there are so many disposable email address services on the Internet, why the hell do you guys have to type in a random email address when you register on a website?! So practically, the super cool looking email address that I had somewhow registered for myself was simply useless because of the sheer amount unsolicited messages that it received with each passing day.

The account kept lying unused for about a fortnight after which again I tried to login. It failed. I tried again. It failed again. I logged into the other 2 letter and 3 letter accounts that I had registered along with in@in.com I successfully logged into each of them. So it was evident that the folks at In.com had found out about my successful circumvention of their registration restrictions and had disabled the email address : in@in.com.

The same day, I tried to see if the bug still existed in their software. It did. It was there for a few more weeks. This morning, when I checked, it was gone. They had patched their software. A bug, which should have not been there in the first place itself; a bug, that should have been found on the first day of the testing; a bug, which affected the most fundamental module of their software – the registration had been rectified after months and months of so-called testing.

So what have I learnt after all this? Well for starters, the other email accounts I had grabbed are still intact and functioning. Secondly, I should have sold off the email address to some fool while I had the chance (just kidding) ! Thirdly, the guys at Web18 need to employ some actual testers at their development centre itself. And lastly, the advertisments that they are currently running on their TV18 network make no sense at all.

And one more thing, the guys at in.com should give me the id back as a token of gratitude for not disclosing the bug until it was rectified (some might say I should have informed them myself). What would I do if I got in@in.com back? The answer is nothing until people start using their real email addresses or take some pain and use a disposable email service to register accounts on different websites accross the web.

Adios.

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From what I saw on Zee Business, the iPhone is to be launched in India by Airtel on the 22nd of August. They also telecast a telephonic interview with some president of Airtel who confirmed that there would be no subsidy on the iPhone.

That final statement alone is a deal breaker for me. 3G is a long way to come. Free WiFi is not a realistic option. EDGE is really crappy in its current form. What is the use for a device whose USP is its ablity to connect to the Internet but has no means to do so in India? And now that Airtel has confirmed that there is going to be no subsidy, I can safely say that we must forget about getting the iPhone for anywhere around Rs. 8000 to 12000. Not that I’m dying to. Get realistic people. Buy an E71.

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Closely on the heals of me.com, which is the official site for Apple’s MobileMe service, Web18, a venture of Network18 has launched in.com. in.com was rumoured to be bought by Web18 for a sum of 2 crores, which is equal to 20 million.

I happened to see the advertisement for in.com on tech2.com which is another website owned by Web18.

Now that I’m on the topic of the shortest email address, the shortest address that I have been able to find on the Internet is www.v.gg. That’s right, yourname@v.gg. It has a free as well as a premium version. The free version offers 25MB of storage. But “v.gg”, although two characters shorter than in.com, does not seem to be cool or hip. Furthermore, their interface is ancient offering just 25MB of email storage.

On the other hand, in.com offers us an AJAX-ified interface, with gmail style linked conversations and a sufficient 10GB of space. Since the service is new, you can easily grab a cool email address of your choice. I grabbed a couple just to reserve . For example, usernames like fcuk or kick (kick-in, get it?) are still available. The least number of letters allowed in a username is 4. So, counting the @ and the period, the shortest email one can grab is four+@+in+.+com = 12 letters. Not too shabby! Go grab yours!

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The last time I reported, Airtel Broadband was redirecting the erroneous traffic to a partnered website (onspeedsearch) where they displayed advertisements.

Just five minutes back, I noticed that erroneous traffic is now being redirected to a page hosted by OpenDNS. Now, I have no clue if Airtel has in some way partnered with OpenDNS to monetize this kind of traffic.

Another theory that is currently running through my brain is that maybe Airtel is redirecting its customers to the OpenDNS servers. This could be because of the recently disclosed vulnerability by Dan Kaminsky which makes all DNS servers prone to attacks. OpenDNS has already stated that it’s servers are patched. What I feel is that Airtel is unable to patch it’s own DNS servers at this point of time so they redirected their customers to OpenDNS. Obviously, there is no way to verify this and obviously this means that OpenDNS is the party that is profiting here.

I am still using the same DNS servers as mentioned in my previous post but this time I am redirected to :

http://guide.opendns.com/?url=badbadurl.in

badbadurl.in is used as an example here.

More discussion about this can be found at IBF.

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Airtel has started redirecting traffic from dead links, non-existant domains and typos to a website of its own where it displays advertisements and a search box surrounded by some categories.

The search box is just a dummy form element because if you type in another term it yields no result. Airtel is in partnership with a website called onspeedsearch.com for this and a quick search on Google revealed that many other ISPs have also partnered with onspeedsearch to display advertisements for erroneous traffic on their networks.

Here’s a screenshot of the said redirected page :

The DNS currently in use are :

• 202.56.215.55
• 202.56.215.54

Seems Airtel is trying to earn from it’s customers’ mistakes. Sweet.

Update : For further discussion on this subject, check out this thread on IBF.

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I was surfing the Internet when I came across another piece of news which suggests that iPhone will be launched in India on the 18th of August, 3 days after the Independence Day.

Vodafone will be joining the iPhone bash earlier than Airtel. The iPhone wll be available exclusively on Vodafone for the first fifteen days.

Source :

• India to Get iPhone 3G on August 18
• Vodafone To Beat Airtel To iPhone 3G Launch; Expected Next Month

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One of my friends went over to the Vodafone store in Sector 19, Chandigarh yesterday. He wanted to book the iPhone. They asked him to send a message to a number (Airtel and Vodafone have been playing this stupid booking game since long) which I think is kind of an alert service since they have not asked for any booking amount.

Now, on to the main news. The sales representive told my friend that the iPhone would be priced at INR 8000. Yes, Rs. 8000 which almost equals to $199. Airtel hasn’t confirmed anything about their pricing. I highly doubt what the Vodafone people are saying. The iPhone has to be imported. Where do they include the duties etc in the price? And what use is a 3G device which mainly boasts of a rich internet experience when even their existing EDGE network is shitty and expensive with no good unlimited browsing plans.

But if it does indeed launch at Rs. 8000 then there’s nothing like it in the market. I would definitely not be one of the early adopters. I’ll just fiddle with the iPhone that someone buys and make up my mind if it’s really worth getting into a contract that would surely be expensive.

My only motive of buying the iPhone would be the rich Internet browsing it’s browser offers. I’m not in for the memory, the iPod etc. It’s just the phone and the Internet on the move.

Another news that was given to my friend was that the phone would be launched when the next month commences, i.e. August.

That’s all the news I have about the iPhone due to be launched on Vodafone and Airtel in India. Gotta hand it to Apple, they manage to create an amazing hype. People don’t even know what the iPhone is and are already dying to own one.

UPDATE: iPhone to be launched on August 18th, 2008 in India. Vodafone gets a head start over Airtel.

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Well since I just finished migrating this blog over to this new domain, I thought I’d just describe how I actually did it. Firstly, login to your existing blog, Goto Settings, Permalinks and activate the default permalink structure. I recommend doing this because I’ve been locked out a dozen times while updating my blog because of a misplaced .htaccess file. If that happens, whenever you try and login to the WordPress dashboard, it fails. Save your custom permalink structure, if any, for use later. Goto Plugins and de-activate all your plugins. Open up the Akismet page and delete all SPAM that you have in queue (to keep out the junk from getting imported to the new server). The next step is to disallow all robots from your new server. For this, create a file robots.txt with the following content :

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Now, since I changed servers also, I copied over all my WordPress files from my old server to the new location i.e., from www.uthfull.org/blog to rahulsarin.com. This must include all the content that you might have uploaded, your plugins & themes, the .htaccess and the wp-config.php file.

Use whatever database administration tool you like (I used PhpMyAdmin) and export your database in the form of SQL queries (.SQL) and save it to your PC. Now, use a text editor, such as Notepad++ to open the databse and find all instances of your old domain name and replace it with the new domain. For example, what I did was :

Find : http://www.uthfull.org/blog     Replace with : http://www.rahulsarin.com
Find : http://uthfull.org/blog     Replace with : http://www.rahulsarin.com
Find : http://blog.uthfull.org     Replace with : http://www.rahulsarin.com

Now you might ask why one shouldn’t just change the blog URL in the WordPress admin panel. Well, changing there changes your blog URL but it will not fix the links within your posts, the links on your comments, the link in your user profile and trackbacks & pingbacks (remember, if you link a post on your blog within another post, it sends the post a pingback). You can either go over each change one-by-one or just press the Replace-all button like I did!

Save the edited database file. Now, head over to your new server and create a new empty database. Create a new user and grant it all priviledges to operate upon the database. Now, simply use the import feature to import the database you just edited into the empty database. Wait patiently for it to complete the import.

Once you’ve setup your database, its time to head into your WordPress directory and edit the wp-config.php file. Change the database name to the database you have just created. Change the username and password to that of the new user you have created.

Fire up your browser and type in your new blog address. Hit enter. If you did everything right, then your blog will appear as it normally would on your previous domain. Open up the WordPress dashboard. Re-activate the plugins you had disabled in the first step. If you have any problems with any of the plugins, I recommend deleting all the plugins and simply installing them all over again. I ran into a few errors and they were sorted out this way. Now, head over to Settings, Permalinks and change the permalink structure to your custom structure, if any. Enable your themes, check your blog settings once again and make sure you give your blog a thorough run.

Remove the robots.txt file that you had created to let the spiders come rolling in!!

The final step is to head over to your previous domain. Open up the .htaccess file and type in the following :

Redirect 301 /blog/ http://www.rahulsarin.com/

Change the above according to your own domains. This will help set up a permanent redirect which will point your readers and the search engines automatically to the new domain. It will even work for all pages and posts. So, no readers lost and you get to keep that SEO juice!!

That’s it! Your blog should be up and running on the new domain with all the hits from your previous domain being automatically redirected to the new address. Hope this article helps. I got help from these websites :

• Move your WordPress blog to a new domain in 10 steps!
• Moving your WordPress blog to a different host and address

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The story posted on a Youtube video goes something like this :

In March the Hungarian government made a contract with Microsoft, about licensing their software for university students and public servants (cca. 500000 ppl). The contract will last till March 2009, so only one year, and it costs (25000 Million FT = 147M $) from the taxpayers money. (just calculate: 147M/500k = 300$/man for a 1 year microsoft license, LOL )
The competitors of Microsoft hadn’t had a chance, so they went to court.
Today, Ballmer came, and the court put the trial off, which is clearly illegal according to hungarian law.
And to make it more irritating, Ballmer today made another 10000 Million Ft contract with the government, for theaching Microsoft software

In short, Microsoft and the Hungarian government indulged in corrupt practices and locked out the competition. The gentleman in the video was certainly displeased and decided to teach Mr. Ballmer a lesson! He did what anybody would do (yeah right!) – attacked Ballmer with eggs. Simply imaginative! When you cannot smuggle bombs and grenades, use eggs. Kinda reminds me of Shaheed Bhagat Singh and his exploding a bomb in the Assembly (not that I’m comparing this jerk with a martyr). Way to go dude, guess you’re now expelled and sitting at home enjoying a sunny side up!

A better quality video can also be found here or here.

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I know I’m a bit late on this but I just found out that Symbian v9.2 has been hacked. Yes… God does exist!!! The hack is available for pre Feature Pack 1 phones (N73) and Feature Pack 1(N95, N82) but does not correctly work on all firmware versions of N93.

I was in two minds recently on whether to buy a Windows Mobile based smartphone or a Symbian based phone. Ever since Symbian Signed forced all users out of their system, it had become a pain to install any application on your Symbian smartphone. I had begun to hate Symbian as it behaved liked a stupid locked system.

While the buzz was around with every second person hacking into the iPhone, it seemed that Symbian had been completely ignored. But along came some dedicated individuals who proved me wrong… and kicked Nokia’s ass!!

Hurray!! Symbian pwned!! Time to start collecting cash for the N82!!

If you wanna know more about the hack, read this post on the Symbian Freak’s forum :

http://www.symbian-freak.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=17479

It took me some time sifting through the entire post (84pages) but it was well worth the knowledge I gained.

History has been created… finally!!

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This is probably one of the funniest videos I’ve seen in a while.
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This week I came across an article on Lifehacker providing a way to hide and lock a folder in Windows XP. The moment I read it, I fond out that they were using the same technique to hide files that I used to use in the start of 2005 to hide porn on my PC.

Although there’s no porn on my machine now, I had still kept the folder structure and the tools that I had used to accomplish this task back then in order to document the procedure sometime later. I never really got the motivation until now. I used to be of the opinion that no one would really be interested in it. I had discovered this process by snooping around to find how a software, by the name of “Folder Lock” that I was using worked.

The process is fairly simple and requires little technical expertise. I would also like to address some of the issues faced by the readers of Lifehacker. This tutorial will cover mostly all of the aspects of creating special system folders and to use them to mask your secret files. Even though this method is not fool-proof, yet it is amazingly easy to implement and fools the other person effectively.

View the next page for more…

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Na na… that’s not the code name for some terrorist organization. Its just a model number of a battery that comes with a number of Nokia phones – 46 million of them to be precise.

And its defective. It overheats. It gets deformed. Who knows, it might even burst!!

I seriously advise people to check Nokia’s website for more information and to check if their battery if one from the defective
lot.

• http://www.nokia.com/batteryreplacement/en/

The good part is, Nokia will replace the defective pieces. So don’t start panicking and switch off your phones. Wait for Monday to come (Aug 15th is a holiday, Saturday, Sunday too) and get your battery replaced. Don’t wanna discourage you here but the Nokia Care people are even more terrorizing. They returned my phone after two weeks and they just had to tighten a screw. So make sure you put some pressure on them. Good luck and stay safe!!

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Twango? Dunno??!! Well its quite a cool media sharing website. Sorta like Flickr but allows you to upload video, audio etc.

Well Nokia has acquired Twango according to an email I received from the Twango guys. Strange move considering nokia is developing a social media sharing network specifically for mobile devices on its own. MOSH is the name of the network that Nokia is developing and is currently in private beta (yeah right!! Click here for a Techcrunch post with info about MOSH and how to access it). Even Twango had a mobile interface, which was quite basic but MOSH look pretty cool to me.

Considering that it has been developed by Nokia, the website must have been optimized to work better with mobile devices. I have registered with the service though I’m yet to play with it.

Here is the email that I received.

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I usually don’t visit social networking websites much but I was quite surprised to land on the front page of Orkut.com and find the Orkut logo coloured in the colours of the India National Flag. Good thinking on the part of the Orkut team to connect to and engage a substantial number of users on their network. They even have a number of polls up for the users asking various questions about the 60 year old baby, who is still growing… growing stronger day-by-day!!

A similar gesture for Pakistan (Aug 14th) would have been appreciated too by the users from Pak I guess. I wonder why the Orkut team didn’t do it. It most definitely has to do with the userbase from both the countries. From what I know, Indians dominate this social network after the Brazillians.

Click here for more info from the official Orkut Blog.

Jai Hind!

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I have just launched a brand new project. Something similar to the Dreams Database that was present on Tandem Felix.

Its called Surreal Stories. You go, register, post your dreams and other people post their thoughts.

Give it a whirl. I don’t dream. Seriously. And this site is just an attempt to peep into your mind. Please participate and spread the word.

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