.Techdots.

The reason I am writing this post is this. I got recruited into Oracle through my campus placements. And I got to know that I will be posted in hyderabad only a month back.  The offer letter said that I am supposed to report to Hitec city by June 29th 09. Naturally I was curious to know whats sooo HIGH-TECH about that place. So I Googled to find the wikipedia entry and a couple of blogs. But I wasnt happy with the info about the city. So I decided I’ll make a post containing more info about it after I reach. Here it comes , the complete guide to Hitec city…

HITEC stands for Hyderabad Information Technology Engineering Consultancy City. It is the technology hub of Hyderabad. Its about 15 - 20 kms from the main Hyderabad city.  You can find more about it in the wikipedia entry.

So if you are one of those who are lucky(?) enough to be posted at Hightec city , then this guide will be usefull to you.

Accomodation :

The main concern when you land up in an unknown city is finding a place to do what humans do for 1/3 of their lives, sleep. If you are looking for a place near Hightec city there are 2 choices you can consider.

1. Either stay in Madhapur which is closer to the Hyderabad city but has lesser number of flats available for rent

2. Look out for a rented flat in Kondapur which is farther from Hyderabad city but is a residential area and has better choice of rented flats available.
Read more…

Hey all
This is a small flash widget I had created long back. Just thought of sharing it.
It is a dynamic XML powered flash CS3 swf file with a few customizing options.
It is useful for displaying your website updates or showing dynamic chat messages.
It auto refreshes the text content with a time interval specified in the xml file. The time gap between each message being displayed can also set in the same xml file.

The swf initially loads updates_setup.xml (shown below)

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<data>
<title>Set your title here</title>
<data_source>updates.xml</data_source>
<reload_source_delay>0</reload_source_delay>
<next_update_delay>10</next_update_delay>
</data>

The <title> tag sets the title of the display widget.

The <data_source> is the relative path to the second xml file which contains the text content to be displayed (see below).

<reload_source_delay> must specify the time(beginning right after the xml loads) in seconds after which the text content auto refreshes itself. Set it to zero, if you want to disable auto refresh. Setting it to a value less than 10 seconds is not desirable.

<next_update_delay> will decide the time interval(beginning right after the previous message is shown) in seconds after which the next message/update is displayed. This value must be greater than the <reload_source_delay>, failing which the text content updates and shows the first update before all the remaining updates are shown.

Next, the swf will load updates.xml file and the updates get displayed

The Zip file attached includes the 2 XML files, the source .fla file and the TweenLite class required for the Tween. Extract all file to a single folder. Then open the .fla file in Adobe Flash CS3/4 if you want to modify it. The full source code is present in updates_class.as.

If you want to upload the files to your website without any modifications, you must upload updates_setup.xml,updates.xml and updates.swf into the same directory and then include a flash embed code in the html file on which you want to display the updates.

P.S: If the widget doesnt display updates on your site.. and just shows “loading..”, it could be that the url path of not pointing to the right XML. If you arent sure what relative and absolute urls are, just try using the url like http://yoursite.com/your_directory/updates.xml.

Hello all,

I have been using the windows vista sidebar a lot lately and found a gadget for every purpose from love calculators to email alerters. Yesterday I came across the eftel usage meter and then felt that there must be a gadget for my ISP too. So I created this small gadget.

Vista Sidebar Gadget

The dataone usage finder vista sidebar gadget is a must if you use the BSNL’s Dataone broadband connection. It will automatically login to your dataone account and retreive the off-peak and total bandwidth usage and calculates the bandwidth remaining in the current month. It will also refresh itself after a certain specified time interval.

There are other tools which do the exact same thing by staying in the system tray like Dataone Quick Usage Finder, Dataone Usage Finder, Dataone tool. These tools are excellent and have better features than the Dataone gadget.

But the advantage of this gadget is that its tiny, consumes lesser resources, simple and requires no installation. It also fetches the data in less than 5 seconds much lesser than the other programs.

Instructions for use :

To install it, just double click the gadget file you download. It gets added to the sidebar automatically. No separate installation needed.

Usage :

Before using it, enter your username ,password and monthly usage limit  in the settings page by clicking on the small spanner icon which appears when you roll over the cursor on the gadget. The gadget automatically shows the stats on clicking the OK button in settings page.

The First line displays the broadband package you have subscribed ( Home 250/500 etc). The second line gives you the total traffic ( download + upload ). If you have night unlimited package, the traffic includes the night usage also. The third line shows the billable usage which excludes the night (2am to 8am) usage. The progressbar shows the percentage of traffic used during the month. The usage limit i.e. the maximum traffic permitted for your package ( e.g Home 500 - 2.5 GB ) has to be set in the settings page. The fourth line shows the bandwidth remaining per day. i.e. the remaining bandwidth divided by the remaining number of days. The progress bar when at 100% will correspond to the average bandwidth remaining per day at the beginning of the month. If you can maintain the progress bar at 100 % , you can be sure that you will never run out of the bandwidth limit at the end of the month.The refresh button(green circular button) at the bottom left corner can be used to manually refresh the stats. Remember, the stats on the BSNL server get updated only if you disconnect the network(if you use the OS dialer) or if you restart the modem (if you are using the modem’s inbuilt pppoe dialer - holds true if your connection is always ON ).

The gadget will only work in Windows Vista and on a BSNL’s DataOne Broadband connection.

P.S. This gadget wont work for new dataone connections i.e. If you check the usage using bbservice.bsnl.in, the gadget wont work.

I do not have access to bbservice.bsnl.in. If someone who does have access could mail me their username and password, I would be happy to make the gadget work for newer connections too.

Hello universe !!

Hello world’s a passe because it is restricted to the earth. We know that robots out of this world can access the internet and eBay accounts !! Thanks to the movie Transformers.  I wonder what clustrmaps would have shown when a non-earthling visits a website. Lets hope the sequel movie releasing this month doesnt do such absurd unearth(l)ings.

Jokes apart. I have been planning to enter the blogosphere from a long time.The only reason it didnt happen is this. If I could just take the ‘post’ out of postponement everytime, wordpress would have crashed not being able to handle the number of posts! But all of a sudden my blog is up and running. The following relationship will better explain how : (prereq C programming)

Boredom : Procrastination :: break : while(1)

Yes. You are right. When you are seriously bored, amazing things happen. You must have heard the quote - >Behind every successful man there’s boredom…. (if you havent heard, now you have). The fear of it can make anyone continue to be productive. But doesnt it sound too good to be true ? Here the catch… The past tense of ‘bear’ is ‘bore’ which itself conveys that when you bear with something/someone for a long time you get bored.(sounds cool?). So who knows, I may get bored writing blog posts for a long time and stop doing it. Boredom leading to more boredom??!? BTW Entropy increases always

Anyway, I’ll post on a variety of topics ranging from technology to philisophy(nothing much in between though) and if there are any ‘out of this world‘ readers dont forget to drop in a comment.