As usual I was lookig for a site that would show the Indian goverment election 2009 and I found out that electio commision has a site set up with the maps and stats online.
Here is the web site http://www.eciresults.nic.in/
The intersting part is they have a amazing interative map online using ESRI Arcgis Flex API and Arcgis server.
BTW ESRI is a company that I work for and now I can tell my friends when my friends ask about the place I work.
Yet again I was immersed reading Wikipedia articles and I found a site that basically provides search interface to search the electoral roll list of India.
With elections on the way this tool would avoid people from visiting the poll booth and return back with out voting since they aren’t in the list. It can be accessed from the below link.
BTW I’m not sure if it really works because I kept encountering this login pop up which was annoying so I found the site for Tamil Nadu Election commison to check if I was there in the list.
One more you need to download their own tamil fonts and install. I know..
Bummer TN election has a search interface with Under construction message. They do have another form which gives out tamil pdf for district – Constituency ward list for each of them.
Again bummer its in tamil so I can’t search in firefox or inside pdf which is a pain. So I had to literally read through all names in my ward and to every ones surprise I’m not listed 
Waste of time. One good thing now I know my neighbours name and avoided a trip for my dad to check out the list.
Yamm Petra Inbam intha Vaiyakamum peratum..
As I was testing one of my print style sheet in all browsers I found out that Google Chrome (1.0.154.48) doesn’t have a print preview button which is pretty much available in most of the browsers.
Did they miss it in the requirement or decided to leave it out like that to stand out of the herd 
Ee adi chan copy nu solla mudiyathula ippa 
Generally I procrastinate filing the tax every year but this year I filed it too early considering my standard.
Although I’m not getting much in federal and paying some to CA 
tax its the free e-file feature, sudden interest to file my tax and get the return before federal govt goes bankrupt that motivated me to file early.
Thanks to FreeTaxUSA.Com for providing free federal tax return using the coupon code ‘FEDFREE‘.
People say California is on the verge of going bankrupt but still they made to provide this free e-file tool called CalFile which is pretty good. Instead of free e-file California can just remove the state tax itself 
, I wish……..
Both the free e-file option are basic and it should be good for most of my single friends in H1b or in F1 OPT.
Free aaah Kudutha ……. 
Exclusive online indicators is one of the features that Yahoo messenger power users get which can be used to display those special status images in Web and Messenger. Since Yahoo power user is one of the top 5 search keyword that get users to my site I decided to reveal a simple to get the web Exclusive Online indicator.
The exclusive online indicators are just better images nothing more than that. The online status indicator was their with the old Yahoo profile which got removed with new beta profile and I initially thought they removed it to prevents bots from getting user id. But every ones surprise they just hide this feature under the carpet and re-marketed the same Indicator with new images as a special feature for power users. One good marketing strategy which created the buzz..
Well not to bore you here is the URL that you would have to change to get online status of a user.
http://presence.msg.yahoo.com/online?u=XYZ&m=g&t=14
Just pass the user id to the U query string and t is an integer (0 – 16) and viola you get the beautiful icons. If you have too much time then you can create your own icons and switch the image.
Well here is something people should know about this service. The service will return an online status for an user when
It returns the offline when users is offline or invisible for every one.
I was looking around for a U3 drive to buy and I found out there is an open source portable application loader called Portableapps which is gr8 and has all my favorite applications running directly from the drive.
It can even run from my mobile…:) I’m on my way to order a non U3 drive…
Today I got an email from the Yahoo messenger team stating that I have fallen in to the category of power user usin yahoo messenger which basically means I stay online more often then other users and annoy my friends 
.
As a way to thank me for using Yahoo messenger they are providing me with these new features which I’m happy to accept. You can also find the benefits of being a power user @ the following link.
Things that I would like to receive from Yahoo for being a power user/premium mail user which I have been asking for a long time.
I have always wondered why Yahoo didn’t implement a message archiver that exports the message and a search interface to search the log which Gtalk has been doing it for a long time.
This has been nagging me for a long time and today I finally found a free ware called YAMMY that converts all the message logs to individual html file. It doesnt have the search feature but at least I could back my messages now.
Its a very simple future that everyone needs but Yahoo denies the end users small wishes.
Talking about this I just remembered; When will Microsoft add the future to delete multiple book marks in IE.
Do you see it Microsoft – Yahoo are made for each other both deny the end user their small wishes.
I guess this song will be an apt situation song.
Chinna Chinna Aasai..
try{use xp;}catch(n crashes;slow;){use Ubuntu;}
Well the title explains it all. After using my IBM Thinkpad R50e for almost 3.7 years after
I don’t hate XP but the software’s in this current world has made my laptop work like a 6 moths old Netbook.
All these have forced me to finally try out Ubuntu 9.04 OS instead of XP. All though there was a pretty big learning curve to use Ubuntu but it has been fruitful so far with all my required software running fine without any performance hit. I still have to figure out how to fix the Flash full screen lag issue with Ubuntu 9.04 and my system expect that everything looks gr8.
If you have enough patience,time and old laptop u still want to use please try out Ubuntu out which has gr8 UI.
Thanks to eclipse, cfeclipse, mysql and railo CF engine for their gr8 open source products.