Just received an email from Paypal India. The main parts are these:

With effect from 1 March 2011, you are required to comply with the requirements set out in the notification of the Reserve Bank of India governing the processing and settlement of export-related receipts facilitated by online payment gateways (“RBI Guidelines”).

In order to comply with the RBI Guidelines, our user agreement in India will be amended for the following services as follows:

1. Any balance in and all future payments into your PayPal account may not be used to buy goods or services and must be transferred to your bank account in India within 7 days from the receipt of confirmation from the buyer in respect of the goods or services; and
2. Export-related payments for goods and services into your PayPal account may not exceed US$500 per transaction.

So no more buying stuff. It is only useful for getting payments now (and that too <500$ per transaction). I don’t know what to make of this but my advice is this: “Get your money out of there while you still can“. There is no telling what PayFoe will do next (or will be made to do by our sad Government).

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Paypal India Goes Even More Downhill. Get Your Money Out, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

Just a small post to let you know that I just published a small app in the android market, which scratches an itch of mine and I thought probably it will be help others too. It basically provides a quick, one-click access to the accounts and sync settings of Android. The use case for me was that I need to enable/disable syncing for my work email while I’m at work every day as I am already in front of my office PC so don’t need to waste battery and be annoyed by mail notifications on phone but still need to keep google calendar syncing. To do this I had to spend too many clicks and long-presses to get to the accounts settings, so made this app. Let me know if you like it. More details and download links here: Android Quick Sync Settings

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Android App: Quickly Open Accounts & Sync Settings, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

I got myself a Microtek 800VA UPS (MDP800+) a couple of weeks ago to save my PS3 from the frequent power outages that we are seeing in Hyderabad but the purpose was rather lost when I found that it worked fine only till the mains power was on. As soon as there was an outage, it couldn’t stop the PS3 from an abrupt shut down. I ran around the pathetic Microtek customer service for days and they finally sent an “engineer” down to my place (after a week) to diagnose the issue and he couldn’t say anything more than that the UPS is meant for a PC and nothing else. All logical discussions to tell him that PS3 is essentially a PC but in a different form were kind of like pouring water on a well-oiled rock and hoping it would stick.

Kind of disappointed, I had a hunch which solved it for me though today . When I tried to read the output voltage from the output ports on the UPS, it showed me 225–230V when main supply was on. As soon as it was switched off, the output dropped to around 160V. On connecting the PS3, it went up a bit (to around 180V). Now, the load should not have been an issue because a PS3 requires 180–350W I think, which can easily be given by even a 500VA UPS. So far, all suggestions given to me were to remove everything else from the UPS except the PS3, but that was actually my setup in the very first place.

The weird idea that I had was that the problem is, in fact, that the PS3 is not enough load for it. Call me crazy but as soon as I connected my TV also to the UPS, it started working just fine and dandy. No trip ups now, and I can even cold-boot my PS3 and TV from the UPS backup alone.

Now, I ain’t the sharpest tool in the shed when it comes to electrical stuff (in fact this was one of my most dreaded subjects during my graduation). So, if anyone can give me a sound reasoning behind what I just saw would be very much appreciated. Or is this a real fault with the unit that I got, or maybe it is a defect in all the Microtek UPS’s? Anyways, I ain’t complaining till it’s working for me and if you are seeing the same issues you could try the same as well.

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Microtek UPS Problems (And A Solution), was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

Just read over at groklaw about a ruling made last night by the US Appeals Court. According to it, the patents granted for business practices would have to undergo specific and stringent testing procedures to check the worthiness of granting a patent to it. Essentially, they are aiming to mandate a passing of “machine-or-transformation test” as a pre-requisite for granting a patent. This means that a mere “idea in my head” doesn’t qualify for a patent until it is put into practice on a machine or can transform the state of an object for a specific purpose. Am no lawyer but what the experts are making out from the long judgement is that many industries will be hit hard by this ruling. Especially software companies who own most of the software patents as business practices, and a majority of these would be found unworthy of patents as they would be found too generic and stifling for the growth of industry.

So, companies like Microsoft would have a lot to rue about as a huge portion of their patent portfolio has become circumspect. This not only would rob them of revenues in terms of royalties but would also open up a lot of space for competition as well. Special thanks to Red Hat to take up the fight and providing crucial data to the court to take this decision. Stallman and FSF would be very happy today

Linky: The Bilski Desicion [tags]Microsoft, Stallman, FSF, The Bilski Desicion, Software Patents, Machine-or-transformation-test[/tags]

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Microsoft Has A Problem: Software Patents Go Up In Smoke, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

Amit has written a detailed Satellite TV (DTH) Guide and Comparison about the scene in India. He compares the various players that are operating right now and gives suggestions on what should one look at while choosing out of all the available operators. If you are confused about what the advent of all these different names like Tata Sky (Tata), Big TV (Reliance) and Airtel Digital TV (Bharti) means for you, then do take a look at it.

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Satellite TV (DTH) In India: A Guide, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

I’ve known about ImageMagick tools for quite some time now but never dabbled with it. A couple of weeks ago I played with it for some time (notice the new cascaded polaroid pics header above) and was amazed even more. Few of its shining features:

• It has almost unlimited features to manipulate your images through its tools like convert, montage, mogrify etc and their long list of options.
• It is available for Windows, Linux and Mac as well.
• Runs on web servers also (most of those nifty image sites use it for run time image manipulation)
• It is amazingly fast.
• Runs on the command line, which means batching of operations can be done and is also good for butter fingered people like me who are clumsy with GUI based image manipulation programs
• Has modules for interfacing with C, perl, php, C++, C#, java, etc. So, you can create your own applications around it.
• It’s FREE (as in speech and as in beer)
• It has an amazing documentation over at imagemagick.org and also a very thriving community, so help is just a few clicks away.

As a very rudimentary sample of what it can do for you, take a look at my blog’s header above. I just gave it a few pics and ran a command, and it resized them, turned them into polaroid pics, rotated them at random angles, made the background transparent, strung them together to make a webpage header/banner.

Since the command was specific for the number and names of images, I made a simple perl script to automate the command making process so you can also download this script (link at the end of post) and run it to create your own header. (You might want to tweak the $w and $h variables in the script to specify your header’s width and height). Running it would be like

./pano.pl <imagenames>

e.g.

./pano.pl myimages/*

After I made this script, I came across Stas Bekman’s photo gallery which has a much better and cool stack effect with photos. And he generously agreed to share his script (much more sophisticated than my my few lines) with me. His script is also attached below.

Polaroid web header Creation Script

Stas Bekman’s Image Stacking script

Let me know if you use any of these scripts (as it is or after modifying them) to create any cool effects.

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled ImageMagick: Weaving Magic With Your Pictures, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

Just read on BGR, that RIM will have to close down its BlackBerry service in India if they don’t allow our government to snoop on every little piece of data that goes through it. WTF? On an even more serious note, if they do comply, then will the same demand be made to all the ISPs? I just shudder at the mere thought of this…Quotin BGR below

It looks as if the Indian government is not content with its inability to decrypt their citizens BlackBerry e-mails, and is threatening a shutdown of Research In Motion’s devices in the country as punishment. Business Standard reports that the Indian government desires access to RIM’s proprietary e-mail network, in order to monitor e-mails being sent and received through the country. It is reported that a meeting will take place on March 14th, involving RIM representatives, members of wireless companies within the country, and representatives of the Indian government.

[tags]BGR, boy genious reports, RIM, Research In Motion, BlackBerry, India, Government, Idiocy, shutdown Blackberry[/tags]

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Indian Govt. vs Blackberry: Yet Another Example of Idiocy From Our “Leaders”, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

A gaping mouth was all I had when my 3 year ol’ Canon Powershot S1 IS’s LCD/EVF went blank all of a sudden a few months ago. Nothing could be seen, clicking the picture button resulted in blank pics. Googling about it revealed an advisory by Canon, stating that it is a known issue with the CCD image sensor. Canon impressed me by that notice when they said they will fix it for free, even for cameras out of warranty period, and will also pay to-and-fro shipping. Contacting canon support in India (support, in India? Is that a joke?) resulted in just their ignorance about any such advisory.

Undeterred, I sent the camera to the land of dreams (USA) with a friend, e-mailed the Canon USA support at carecenter@cits.canon.com with my predicament, and they promptly sent shipping labels to my friend. So far so good. But a couple of months went by, with no word from them. Customer support told me they are awaiting parts. Sad I was that day .

One fine day, I just checked the status of the return shipping label on a whim, and found that they had shipped my camera back. I was disheartened thinking it had been returned unrepaired, but then my friend called to let me know that they had sent some other camera back. I thought they might have sent some low price, refurbished camera, but atleast a working camera is better than a non-working one.

Today my friend came back from the US, and what do we have? A brand spanking new Canon Powershot S5 IS (8 MP, 12x Optical zoom, flip out and twist LCD). Yessir . Here is a pic of my new baby (Ah, the irony, the clicking powerhouse has been clicked with a low-res phone camera, but anyways.)

Note: Contact canon immediately if you are facing the same problem and your camera is one of these:

- Camcorders: ZR60, ZR65 MC, ZR70 MC, ZR80, ZR85, ZR90, ELURA 40 MC, ELURA 50
- Digital Cameras A60, A70, A75, A300, A310, S230, SD100, SD110, A40(*), A80(*), A85(*), A95(*), S1 IS(*), S60(*), S200(*), S330(*), S400(*), S410(*), S500(*)

[tags]canon, customer care, powershot, S1 IS, s5 IS, CCD problem, blank lcd, blank evf, blank picture, image sensor problem[/tags]

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled I Heart Canon, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

Came across this funny, but still thought provoking, definition of an engineer.

(Taken from “The Embedded Muse”, a useful embedded stuff related newsletter published by Jack Ganssel.)

“An engineer is a person who passes as an exacting expert on the basis
of being able to turn out with prolific fortitude infinite strings of
incomprehensible formulas calculated with micrometric precision from
vague assumptions which are based on debatable figures taken from
inconclusive experiments carried out with instruments of problematical
accuracy by persons of questionable mentality and doubtful reliability
for the avowed purpose of annoying and confusing a hopelessly
chimerical group of esoteric fanatics referred to altogether too
frequently as technicians.”

Crossposted to both my blogs: My Technophilic Musings and Never Knew I Was Living In The World

[tags]engineer, definition, funny definition, quote, funny quote, The Embedded Muse, jack ganssel, ganssel[/tags]

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Engineer: A New Definition, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings