Jalaj P. Jha

How did Slumdog Millionaire win 8 Oscar Awards?

A) Because they deserved it.

B) Because they bribed Judges

C) Because Judges gave marks based on hypes

D) Because It was Written

After getting Ubuntu CDs I did not have to wait to see Ubuntu in Action as you do not need to install it to have a preview. Just insert the CD, boot from CD and select ‘Live Run’ when option for installations is asked for. Once I had checked that I could not keep  myself from performing the full installation.

Since I did not want to risk loosing existing content on my system, and added to it the fact I was installing Ubuntu as a secondary OS, I choose to go safe by Installing it on existing Windows Partition. There is a decrease in performance associated with it but was ok with me.

To install on existing Windows Partition, start a Windows session and insert the CD and execute it (if autorun fails). You get option to check the demo (by booting from CD) and performing the installation from within demo or “Install inside Windows”. Choose the latter.

First you need to choose the drive where you want to install, Interface Language, and a username and password. (Don’t choose admin as it’s a reserved username)

The above screen has an “Accessibility” button that allows you to install accessibility features as Screen Reader, Magnifier, Braille terminal etc. You can choose to skip this step by keeping ‘None’ selected and return to above screen by pressing “Next”. Click on install.

Done with above steps? Now the installation proceeds at its own till completion. It first checks the installation files.

It then creates images. The ‘’home’, ‘root’, ‘usr’ folders as seen from within Linux all exist as single files within windows partition.

Done! Remove the CD, Reboot, and choose Ubuntu in boot loader menu.

I don’t see too many movies, so if I am to prepare a list of movies that I missed it would be a long one. “Jaane Tu… Ya Jaane Na” was one that I missed. In fact I regret missing its star-studded premiere that was held at Oberoi Mall, Goregaon, just two kilometers from my residence.

Colors channel recently announced the world premiere of “Jaane Tu… Ya Jaane Na” on 22nd Feb. I sat all day reminding myself that I want to see that. Just a few minutes after the movie started it was interrupted by messages “E48 No Signal” and “E52 Searching for Signal”. I first thought it to be a problem at Local Cable Operator level but later realized it to be from Satellite.

 
After signal got OK, the movie ran for less than a couple of minutes and started showing same screens again. I waited for more than an hour hoping that condition would get better but it remained as it is i.e. 3 minutes of movie then 12 minutes of signal breakage.

If this behavior is to be compared to that old Microsoft joke “This is a feature not a bug”, all we can say this is just a new Digital Rights Management  and anti-piracy measure. Right?

When I closed the television I was asked "What happened?” I replied “Pappu Didn’t Dance Saala” (Parody to a song from the same movie)

I am sharing here three features in Google Reader that people rarely use.

Subscribe to an RSS without knowing its URL:

Yes! You don’t need to know the URL to RSS for a site/blog. If that site/blog provides RSS feed it most probably carries a META tag in its page to point to that url. When you are viewing a site and find it promising enough to subscribe its RSS feed, you don’t need to search for the RSS url. Just copy the current URL that you are visiting from the address bar and paste it in the Dialog that appears in the Google Reader when you click on “Add a subscription”. Google Reader will parse the page and detect the RSS url and the next moment you will be subscribed to it.

Force a feed ‘Refresh’

By default all the feeds that you add to Google Reader are checked for update after every 3 or more hours. So if you are reading a feed which was checked by Google an hour ago, and just a few minutes back a post appeared on the blog, chances are that you will not shown that post on Google Reader for the next two hours as Google Reader itself is not aware of the development. You can though force Google to check the feed by pressing the “Refresh” button

This feature is particularly useful for blog owners who can use this feature after making a post, so the post is immediately available to other Google Reader users too.

Translate to your own Language

Language should not be a barrier between you and knowledge. Google Translate is a service that allows you to translate text or full pages between 41 languages. It auto-detects the language used in a text/page and translates it to the desired language. This capability is now integrated into Google Reader too.

Subscribe a feed in some foreign language and under feed settings check “Translate into my Language”…

… and in no time you will get to read the translated feed.

Now a bad news the ‘My Language’ as mentioned above is the language that you set in the Language settings and has only 21 options as shown below. These are the ones for which the complete Google Reader interface is available. So if my want to read feeds translated from Hindi to English, I can do so by setting ‘My Language’ as English, but if I want to read English feeds in Hindi it’s not possible now until the Google Reader is available in Hindi interface too.