Tag Archives: Web

Amazon S3 isn’t for everyone

Posted by toalakan-web on February 9, 2010 None comments

Its always been a pain to maintain a  backup of all photos and personal documents.When I heard about Amazon S3 cloud storage with its cheap pricing structure, I was in heaven finally a place I can store my data for eternity for cheap.

But when I started to move my data to Amazon S3 , the reality struck me hard was that

  1. my so called broadband connection which boasts a 512kbps upstream took me more than an hour to push a 200MB file and I have about 10gb of data.
  2. Most of all I can’t even switch to FIOS internet (Verizon) which has better up stream because they don’t have coverage in my locality.
  3. None of the freeware S3 sync applications like S3Fox, cloudberry and S3 Explorer support bandwidth limiting capability on up stream. So they basically occupy the pipeline until the upload is done annoying my room mate who was  trying to figure what the hell’s happening with the connection for like 2 days.

So until I get a better internet connection or smart app that can push data like torrents clients, I will not be able to use Amazon S3 as my primary back up storage.

Amazon S3 back up or file storage isn’t for people who are stuck in the cable world like me.

Orkut No Donut for you..You can only add upto 250 favorites

Posted by toalakan-web on November 1, 2009 1 comments

Well who ever has used Orkut are aware the blog post title message which shows up when Orkut’s server are too busy to respond.

But this time no donuts for the whole Orkut team since they have set a hard limit of only 250 video links per profile which I hate personally hate and I’m not even a heavy user of Orkut. Here is the message I get when I add a video:

You can only add upto 250 favorites. Please remove some favorites in order to add new ones.

Looks like the Orkut network is going backwards instead of moving forward by implementing this kind of limit.  Considering India being one the major market for India this is a really bad move since Indian music industry is driven by the film industry with each having 5 songs minimum.  Don’t ask me why we need 5 songs in middle of a movie that’s a whole different story.

The reality is every orkut user bookmarks(embeds) all kind of youtube Indian film songs and this limit is going to make the users move to a different network. Wake up Orkut..

Here are some suggestions Orkut might do to improve the videos section which I personally used to like:

  1. Will it be too hard to create a playlist of all videos so we can listen to all of our favorite song.
  2. Has it even considering enabling search for the videos? It makes me wonder if this product is really from Google.
  3. If a youtube video has been disabled can it at least remove them by default instead of occupying my limited video library limit.

Considering all this downfalls of Orkut I do think may be I should join Facebook but I use these social networks to keep in touch with friends which Orkut does it ok for me.

May be I should depend more on my blog running on WordPress more where I control my app/data than letting them control me what I can and can’t do.

India Electoral Roll List search

Posted by toalakan-web on February 27, 2009 None comments

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.

http://search.eci.gov.in/

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 :cry:

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..

Tamil Nadu census site

Posted by toalakan-web on November 19, 2008 None comments

As usual I was browsing around and was surprised to find the Tamil Nadu census site online containing the most recent census data from 2001 with all kind of data like male,female,working,literates count etc with district,taluks,blocks based maps and charts.

Good to know Tamil Nadu has a 73.5% literacy rate.

It would be nice if they get some neat charts. I was able to find the Indian Census site but wasn’t able to view data since it requires a login created which is free. So if you got time and curious check it out.

How to get Exclusive online Indicators

Posted by toalakan-web on November 6, 2008 1 comments

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

  1. User is online in any of the messenger.
  2. User is invisible to a particular user but visible to other users. Yes the stealth setting are not stealth enough its like covering an elephant head with a paper towel and leaving the other area open.

It returns the offline when users is offline or invisible for every one.

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