1. Social

There is a new start page now which includes a list of “trending” songs among the friends along with the usual “New Releases”. It resembles more like Rdio with album art from the latest albums and the tracks your friends are listening to. There is also a separate tab in the sidebar for people. The people tab loads in the main window now instead of the list in the sidebar. This is more efficient and the large portraits of friends looks great.

2. Apps

Apps seem to be buzz word these days. Spotify now has an ability to add apps to the program. This means that you don’t have to go different sites searching for playlists. The biggest thing missing from Spotify was the ability to have music discover ability like Pandora/Rdio/Mog and having apps is going to fix this in a big way. There is a Radio option which generates playlist based on the genre/music type you like. There are also top lists and app that generates music based on mood (Moodagent), an app that displays lyrics (Tunewiki) and my favorite app that displays the top tracks in emerging/mainstream media (We Are Hunted).

There are also Billboard and Rollingstone playlists. I had trouble with Rollingstone playlists so I don’t know if it’s working right now. I really like this version of Spotify. It looks very clean and usable. It hasn’t even hit version 1.o yet. I can only hope there are good things in the future for Spotify.

Having said all that, the biggest downside to having to pay streaming media is that you don’t own anything when you finally cancel the subscription. It’s true that you have access to all the amazing library of songs but it’s about $120 /year and you could own 12 albums or 120 songs for that price for life. Is streaming media really worth it? I’ve tried using Zune Pass/Mog/Rdio before and nothing really satisfied like Lala did. I am currently leaning towards Amazon Cloud and Google Music but Spotify is really convincing me to take the bait and buy a premium subscription because they’re on a lot of devices. Do you like buying music or streaming music or pirate it? Let me know in the comments what you think.

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Absolute and Relative cell addressing:

Sometimes when we enter a formula in the spreadsheet, we want to fix a cell value (Eg: Mannings constant or Young’s Modulus). This can be done by adding $ signs. If you want to fix the value in A4, then it should be written as $A$4. You can copy the formula wherever you want but the cell address does not change automatically. If you only want to fix the column then use $A4 and if you want to fix the row then use A$4. Just put the $ sign before the column or row you want to fix.

Using Activecell to select a cell:

This is probably my favorite thing to do in Visual Basic. Most people like to use cells() to reference a cell number in the spreadsheet. That is quite easy to do but if you switch things around, you will need to change the cell values for everything you referenced. However, with Activecell way or referencing, you just need to offset it to the reference to the new cells.

For example: Lets say originally you wanted to put velocity in cells A2, Dispersivity in A3 and so on. Then you realized, you want to move the cells down by a row so now the velocity is in A3, Dispersivity in A4 and so on. Now all  you have to change the original selected Range to Range(“A3″) instead of Range(“A2″).

Additionally, Activecell.offset(rowoffset,columnoffset) allows you to move the cell reference to a new cell number.

Adding color and changing font attributes

After using Range or Activecell to select a cell number, we can change the color of the cell and the font attributes of the cell.

Selection.Font.Bold=True – Sets the font to bold

Selection.Interior.Colorindex=44 – Sets the cell color to yellow.

However, when you clear the contents of a cell, the color does not go away. So it’s a good idea to set the colorindex to 0 (white). The code segment below is something I use often to clear a sheet.

    Range(“a16:z1000″).Select
Selection.Cells.ClearContents
Selection.Interior.ColorIndex = 0

The above code segment clears the cells from A16 to Z1000. The color palette for all the excel colors can be found here.

I hope this helps anyone. I assume that you’re familiar with most things in Excel programming before you came here. If you need a more detailed instructions, do let me know in the comments. I would be glad to help you out.

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1. Piratebay’s Immunity…

Introductions aside, I think that the website is run by crooks, frauds and cheats. I’m not talking about the typical “NRI Tax” imposed by all these websites that ship to India.For eg: A cake that costs Rs 500 in India typically costs over 2500 online (excluding the shipping charges) and a Pen that costs Rs 100 costs about Rs 800. For most people who want to quickly send something, that is acceptable considering that shipping something from here takes over $20 and will definitely take several days to reach India.

However, my problem is not with this increase in prices. Sometimes, you have to pay for convenience and I’m okay with that. My problem is that they have horrible customer service and they send different products because they run out of stock instead of returning the money or putting up an out of stock sign before letting more orders through. There have been two major issues with the site. Let me explain below:

1. I bought my brother an iPod Nano an year ago for his birthday. I think it cost about Rs 11,000 something at that time. There was a promotion running at that time that said you’ll be getting a gift card matching the amount of purchase for a maximum of Rs 5000. My girlfriend also made a couple of purchases during that time until the promotion ran out. We never got those giftcards. I have written to the customer care and they apologized saying they would fix it but that never really happened. I got tired of it and because I didn’t make those purchases for the free money, I never pushed it too far and let it go.

2. More recently, my sister ordered a Rakhi from their website. It was a week late and they sent me the wrong Rakhi. She tried really hard to get it shipped on time and they hadn’t even shipped it until the end of the week ( a day after it was supposed to be delivered). I didn’t even receive the shipment until the end of next week. There were sweets with that package and obviously they’re not mean to stay out for that long. They were supposed to send me a peacock feather Rakhi and I got a bland one instead. I’m sure she must’ve been terribly disappointed considering she paid her hard earned rupees (not dollars) for something I didn’t even get to see.

It makes me really mad that these people are just milking people’s emotions like this for their benefit. To say that I’m disappointed with the site is an understatement. Those are just a few instances that are worth mentioning. The site is run by crooks who steal the hard earned money of honest people. Next time you want to send something to your loved ones in India, send them money. They can get something much better than the shoddy service that is Indiaplaza. I won’t use this site ever and if you came across looking for help with the site, take my advice and go somewhere else. The title should’ve said enough anyway.

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In the past couple of years, the decreased bandwidth limitations and the easy access to broadband services have paved way from a hugely written media to a streaming media platform that we know these days. People have moved from blogs to vlogs. There is more content on YouTube and Hulu at any given time than the TV. Granted that TV is still the champion of live telecast but the coolness of the internet comes from being an “on-demand” medium. With the busy lives, people have really stopped making time for TV. Instead, they just tune into Hulu/DVR/TiVo and watch their content when possible. The increased popularity of Netflix and the ability to stream Netflix movies on several other devices other than just PCs have severely increased the bandwidth demands on the ISPs. It is not just about using P2P services like torrents but it’s also about using legitimate means like Netflix, YouTube, Hulu and online gaming that put a lot of strain on the ISPs. The increased consumption of bandwidth means that they will have to push their prices up higher for those bandwidth hungry people or increase it for everyone. The fact that most of these services are in competition with the cable service gives them more reason to make these services crippled or inaccessible in some way.

This is where “Net Neutrality” comes in. This is what lets us do whatever we want on the internet without the ISPs getting down and nasty like Comcast does/did. I’m angry because FCC passed a new regulation that basically allows for some shady government regulation. The mobile operators can do whatever they want meaning competing services will be blocked. The wired operators need to disclose what is going on but they can impose a fee for access to specific services. Also this means that services could be blocked and your blog might not be as readily accessible because you’re not part of the corporate elite. This kind of screws up the whole system. Everyone is not equal anymore, there will be preferential treatment for the corporations that are able to pay the cable companies for quicker access.

I am severely disappointed by the role Obama played in this whole thing. I have been trying to read up on this whole thing and many news groups have been claiming this as a victory whereas the real news people will tell you that this muddled and unclear way of FCC has been a huge setback for net neutrality. It will probably take a while for these regulations to come into effect but seriously this is gonna set us back in terms of freedom of speech on the internet. Very soon we will probably have to pay for being able to access “special” content. The spineless administration will dub this as victory for Net Neutrality but it is not. This is another way of pushing the corporate agenda down the throats of tax payers. First he extends the Bush tax cuts and now this Net Neutrality thing. I doubt he is winning any points with the people he is trying to please but he is definitely pissing off the people who voted for him and his change.

A few good articles to read on this:

FCC breaks Obama’s promise on Net Neutrality: 3 things you need to know

Obama FCC Caves on Net Neutrality; Tuesday Betrayal Assured

FCC set to enact new net neutrality rules

Anyone with a perspective on this, please comment or leave a link to your blog. Thanks.

Image source: Wikipedia Internet censorship map

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Google e-book store has support for the Nook and I can’t wait to use it. I find that Amazon has a wider selection of books when compared to B&N store or other e-book stores. The sad part is that you can read Amazon e-book only on Kindle software. It’s a good thing that I own an iPod touch which has a Kindle app and lets me read the books I buy on Amazon. I’m hoping that Google with their truck loads of money gets the publishers on board to sell their books in a format that is accessible to non-Kindle users. It is good to have competition and that can only mean good things for the consumers.

Coming to the next thing on the title, the Mac App store. I have severe loathing for everything Apple does these days. I have been seething with anger since the day they killed Lala and robbed me of an online portal that plays all my favorite songs. Their iPhone which is a good phone but I can’t stand the snobby little college students acting like it’s the second coming of Jesus when my MotoQ from 2007 could play flash videos on Skyfire. There are some good things about the iPhone, it has made smartphones popular and people expect a lot more from their phone these days than just calling and texting. The App store also significantly eased the way you install software on your phone. No longer do you have to scour the internet for cab files and then transfer them to the phone and then install them.

Apple wants to bring a similar ecosystem to the MacBooks. I own a MacBook and I have to say the software offerings are not as varied and free as the Windows. I also find that people who own MacBooks are probably more inclined to purchase software than PC users (insert mac users are too dumb to use torrents joke here).  There are two things that are possible here.

1. There could be an influx of developers to develop software for Mac just like the App store had done for the iPhone.
2. More people will find useful software that they hadn’t discovered before.

But honestly, why would any developer want to put their software on an App store? Are you seriously going to give 30% of your hard-earned money to Apple just because they’re putting it on their “App store”? Every time I think about this, it makes me really angry. I do coding and write software and I know how much effort goes into writing a bug-free app. Why should Apple get any part of this? They are not really promoting my software by any means? How is it any different from searching for software in a search engine rather than an App store search engine? If my software is good enough, people would probably find it through a search engine and buy it from my site and I can keep all the money except taxes. I just don’t like that Apple wants 30% of the developers’ money for doing nothing at all. It makes sense in a closed ecosystem like an iPhone but a Macbook is not closed and if Apple so much as makes a move in that direction. I am gonna dump my overpriced Macbook and buy a Windows laptop. I don’t understand the need for Apple to make money off of everything. I hope the users are smart enough to move away from this kind of ecosystem. So far the users haven’t shown anything to prove that they are smart. They’ve just been sheep to Steve Jobs’ magical keynotes. Don’t be sheep people.. get smart.

I would like to know what everyone else thinks? If you’re a developer would you be okay with Apple taking 30% for “promoting” your app? If you’re a user, do you think its okay for Apple to use an App store when people can find software using a browser and a search engine?

Google ebooks Ad

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I have finally given up on Ultimate GA plugin. I had no issue with the plugin but during my search for an Adsense plugin, I found that the Google Analytics for WordPress by Yoast was much more popular and easy to use. I will report any improvements in performance as soon as I see them.

I was lucky that the theme I use is kinda an Adsense ready theme. The Rock Solid theme I use comes with a few basic options to monetize your website. And my search for a plugin that makes this job easier resulted in quite a few options. I really couldn’t try them all but WhyDoWork caught my eye after a few recommendations from different sources. The name says it all and because I am lazy enough to configure everything, it seemed like a perfect option for me. There are better and sophisticated options out there but right now, this does a good job. It has an option to paste 10 codes for different types of ad units. You could select different ad unit for each page/post. That’s all there is it to do. No changes to the template are necessary. It also follows the Google rules of having a maximum of 3 link boxes per page. Overall, I recommend it, if you want to do as less work as possible.

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3. Glyde – Site Review

Glyde follows the minimalistic design made popular by Google. There is a big search box in the middle of the page (hard to miss ). It also comes up with suggestions as you keep typing. This is really quick if you are looking for something specific. However, if you want to browse through categories, you would have to click on all items at the bottom. There is also an option to click through daily deals on top of the site. There is no way to sort the games in alphabetical order or in terms of popularity or even by price. You can only filter them through categories and consoles. Again, let me be clear here: if you are looking for something specific, glyde automatically gives you the cheapest price of that product in different condition categories (New, Excelling, Good, Disc only).

If you are looking to sell your products, then all you do is enter the name of the product and pick one of the options (if your game is multi-platform). Glyde automatically picks a suitable price for you. You can increase or decrease the price to your liking. It also tells you how many people have priced the item lower than that. Considering the fact that there are many people trying to sell the same thing, it might be a good idea to price it lower than the prescribed price. Glyde will also ask you to pick the condition of the game. I am not sure about the payment procedure and such. I think the general idea is that your money gets deposit into  your account once you request for it or you could use that money to buy other games on the site. I think the commission is 10% on sale price (again please read the FAQs on site for detailed information).

Coming to my experience with Glyde, I have purchased two games from the site and received one of them. I was a little worried about the purchase because unlike ebay there was  no option contact the seller for pictures or get assurances about the condition of the item. There was no feedback score either. So, there was really no way of knowing if the seller’s interpretation of Excellent is same as mine. Also the shipping was painfully slow. For some reason, Glyde decided that they would mail the envelope (ala Netflix style) to the seller with the buyer’s address on it. And the seller would stick his game in that envelop and drop it in the mailbox. This means that there is twice as much shipping time involved compared to ebay. Essentially, most games take about two weeks to arrive. There is no expedited option for shipping either. If you are looking to get something quick, this is not the place to go. This is one of the major gripes I have with the service. I do not understand why Glyde does not just allow the seller to print the mailing receipt and stick it on a “Glyde prescribed envelope”. The bubble wrap media mail envelopes are like $2 or less and are available at every USPS store. I have to say, I did not like the waiting but the game I received allayed all my fears. The game was in great condition. It was  “Like New” just as it should be . It made me go and buy another game .

I am not sure if I got lucky but my next purchase would tell. If you don’t mind the waiting time, Glyde is a great service to try. They have tons of games for all the current generation and the previous generation consoles as well as the current gen handhelds. You will definitely find a great price on that game you have been looking for. Make sure you search for Glyde coupons online before you click Buy Now. You could easily save $3 by using on these coupon codes: KOTAKU, UGO, HIATI. You could also follow them on Twitter (@Glyde) to get more deals and coupon codes. Glyde is a good service like ebay’s half.com if you are looking to buy something quickly. Just look at both sites and buy it from the cheaper place.

Pros:

• Clean simplistic interface
• One click buying.
• Automatically finds the cheapest price for the product in each condition category.
• Easy-mode selling. (no need to package or buy shipping supplies)
• Get better trade-in values for your used games (better than gamestop).

Cons:

• Long shipping times (2 weeks)
• No option for expedited shipping.
• Credibility: No way to trust the seller.
• No pictures of the product before purchase (Just the stock picture).
• No feedback option.

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I can understand pirating games is bad but I have always commended Piratebay for its fight against the Music industry (RIAA). RIAA has sued a lot of people for downloading music illegally and pushed the governments to create anti-piracy laws. I don’t understand why one has to “buy” so many versions of a song. I have a huge collection of cassettes back home. I spent a lot of money buying them too. I have a huge collection of Michael Jackson, Metallica, Bryan Adams, Iron Maiden, Aerosmith, Deep purple and many more. Each cassette cost me over Rs 200 and considering that my pocket money per month was a meager Rs 50 per month, that was quite a large sum I spent making up that collection. They came up with CD’s next and I still bought some of the CD’s and they allowed to rip the mp3′s to be played on the computer but now they have DRM that prevents you from doing that. I just don’t understand how many formats of the same song, do we have to buy? Is it not enough that the artists themselves put several old songs in their new albums? Do we really have to buy a tape, CD, DVD and an mp3 version of the same album? Who is stupid enough to do that?

The copyright laws are incredibly ridiculous and you don’t even own the song you buy? Apparently, you pay $10 to buy an album (or $0.99 and more per song) but you down own it. That’s why I tend to lean into subscription based services these days. I paid to stream unlimited music on Napster for a month but I canceled it because I was not using it as much as I wanted to. I did download 5 songs for free so the subscription paid for itself really. I just use Lala now, you can add a web version of the song for 10cents and you can listen to it unlimited number of times. I also like the fact that you can export your existing music online using Lala’s music uploader. It will match your music library with their online library and automatically add it to your collection.

Anyway, the crux of this blog is that Piratebay has been sold to Global Gaming Factory on June 30th (this is old news really!). GGF says it wants to legalize the whole file sharing system(which probably means paying for content). I don’t blame Piratebay for selling out because they had a huge amount of money to pay because of the lawsuit and if this is a way to pay off the dues, good for them. They have been fighting this fight alone for a long time and its time they got their due. I commend them for giving the music industry a good fight. But in war, you will be honored if you die a hero and stoned if you surrender. So if people are giving Piratebay some slack for selling out, its only because they expected more from them. If you are into Pirating stuff, its time to move on to private trackers and make donations to keep them alive. I have been a Demonoid user for a long time now. I have seen them go up and down too but they have been surviving all this. People will keep finding new ways to share stuff because there will always be people who question the laws that most people take for granted. They might be branded as thieves and pirates by this generation but the future generations will see them as revolutionaries and innovators. Rest in peace Piratebay and thanks for the fight.

P.S: If you want an invite to Demonoid, just leave a comment saying you want one.

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Anyway, a lot of things happened since I last blogged. A few things I really hated and a very few things I enjoyed. Just thought I’d make a list in no particular order.

• Nadal lost
• Federer won French Open. I kinda expected this would happen though
• Deccan chargers have won the IPL. Chennai kings lost in semis.
• My girlfriend bought me a MacBook. I don’t know if I should cheer about this or not. I am a windows guy, not a great fan of Mac. But I will have to try to use it and see I guess.
• Apple released a new iPhone which I really wanted to get. I even planned to get out of my contract with Sprint but really not a wise move considering AT&T has really bad network. Coming from a Sprint customer that is a huge insult.
• Palm pre, the most loved phone since the original iPhone has finally been released, it is another phone I still want but I might not get it because I just don’t want to spend all that money and change my existing $30 SERO plan.
• E3 has come and gone and so much to cheer about .
• Microsoft – great show, highly impressed with Project Natal but I doubt it would work as well as they showed it would. It is not going to be an easy task pulling it off. And honestly, Peter Molyneux should shut the fuck up. He has a big mouth and I doubt if Milo would work as well he touted he would. Artificial intelligence is a still thing of science fiction and we are far from it. This is coming from a guy who does programming for a living, you better believe it .
• Nintendo – probably the most boring show of all three. I am a rabid Nintendo fanboy and even I couldn’t help but yawn a few times but the announcement of Metroid: Other M has completely offset everything. Also I heard that there is a new Zelda in the making, there was a trailer for Super Mario Galaxy 2 and finally Little Big Planet Mario style. All exciting things but Nintendo is still missing that one puzzle piece, Wii-HD. Get it done, Nintendo. Give us HD.
• Sony – Sony came up with the regular stuff. They had a brilliant show and very entertaining as well. God of War 3 was amazing, the Last Guardian trailer was awesome as well. Have to say, their motion controller seemed very interesting too. But they only showed a bunch of tech demos and no games yet. This kinda proves that MS and Sony have finally adopted the Nintendo philosophy and they jumped on the bandwagon a little too late. It might still take them a year or two to pull it off but HD is one thing Nintendo is far behind, so unless Nintendo comes up with Wii-HD, MS and Sony will be moving ahead this generation.
• India lost the T20 World cup. They didn’t even qualify for the semis. They have been winning a lot lately, so this was expected to happen one day. I had no interest to start with anyway.
• Lakers WON!! Enough said!

I guess that covers everything. Maybe I will blog often now that I have gotten that off my chest

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Since the advent of the new Millennium (2001 not 2000), Bill Gates has been touting that tablet PCs are the future of computing. Almost 10 years and his retirement later, we still don’t seem them very popular. These devices which have no physical keyboard and all the inputs are based on touch screen, were supposed to replace the laptops. Microsoft failed miserably mostly because the touch screen technology in those days was naive and dysfunctional, handwriting recognition was pitiful. Microsoft probably pushed the technology a little too early. In 2001, desktop PCs were the norm but now, laptops rule the roost. Even Netbooks which are tiny are selling like hot cakes. Touch screen technology is definitely much better now with the multi-touch and what not! I am still curious to see how apple will attach a keyboard to this thing. I mean there are already lot of complaints about the iPhone’s virtual keyboard, something like that will never work on a Tablet. CNET does a quick round-up of all the pros and cons of a Tablet Mac.

It is surprising that there is so much attention being paid to speculation and rumors. But, this is supposed to be a “confirmed” rumor. So I guess this is all okay. I am not sure if this will succeed, but I have been wrong before

Pros and cons of a touch-screen Mac tablet | The Digital Home – CNET News.

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