For rent: 3 BR +Servant's quarter Off Bannerghata Road, Opp IIM-B

Adarsh Palm Retreat 3 Br Apartment with servant's quarter for rent. Excellent Evershine Modular Kitchen and designer wardrobes. 3 bed/3bath - 2 BRs with attached bath. Servant's quarter with toilet. Rent Rs 30K/month. (negotiable). Brokers excuse.

Available: Immediately.

Location: Off Bannerghata Road, Behind Wockhardt Hospital, Opp IIM-B. Close to HSBC, HoneyWell and Accenture.

Apartment has common facilities like Club house, Swimming pool, Kids Play area, Sun deck, Barbeque plaza, Landscape garden, Squash court, Health club, Badminton court. etc. Facilities to be ready in 2 months.

Contact: smblr75@gmail.com (M) 9845438441

Checkout the interiors.

Resizeable Textarea - A great firefox plugin

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3818

Allows you to adjust the size of the textarea in Firefox. Absolutely mandatory if you are into social blogging or working on twiki.

GMail conversation view in Outlook

Guess this must be old news by now but finally I set-up my outlook to show conversation view which is such a great feature in GMail. Of-course Outlook natively supports conversation view on a per folder basis but that's not useful as you will loose out on your replies which are in a different folder e.g. "Sent Items". I found a great article which shows how to mimic GMail's functionality (more or less) in Outlook.
See Dan's post on coversation view in Outlook.

Thanks Dan!

GPL vs LGPL

Developers always have question about legality of using an open source library in a commercial product. This particular article very clearly settles that question at-least for GPL and LGPL licenses.

Some tips regarding Mutual Fund investments (Specifically for India)

I recently answered an internal mail in Yahoo! asking for tips to invest in Mutual funds for a first time investor. I thought to share it with a wider audience (oh yeah!)

First the legal disclaimer: Pursue this at your own risk.

1. There are two broad types: Equity and Debt. Experts recommend mixing up the two for lower volatility. If you can stomach high risk, go all equity route.
2. Don't invest in sector specific funds. Go for diversified funds (for equity funds). Again for lower risk.
3. There are three types based on market caps of the invested companies: Large cap, mid cap, small cap. Large caps, of-course, are considered safer but generate lower returns (generally). Small caps are exactly reversed in their behavior.
4. Never invest in one go. This is the most important tip. If you had invested all you money in mid Jan of this year, you would have lost 30-40% in 2 months time. There are Systematic investment plans or SIPs(all MFs have it). They allow you to invest a fixed amount (through cheques or ECS) on a regular basis (weekly, monthly, quarterly). If you a chunk of money to invest, divide it up and invest at-least over a year.
5. Don't invest in NFO (new fund offerings). Rather invest in established and proven funds. Sites like Value Research and Moneycontrol will let you compare returns of all MFs over varying periods of time. Do spend some time doing that. Remember if you invest through brokers (like your bank), they will always recommend NFOs as that has more commission.
6. Look at the star ratings given by these MF sites. They are helpful to give you a head start.
7. Don't invest in too many funds. Restrict yourself to a few good ones. If a fund makes up a very small part of your portfolio, it does not make any difference even if it performs phenomenally. On the other hand more than a certain number of funds don't lower your risk any further.
8. You can save upto 1 Lac in ELSS funds. Read about them.
9. If you can spare some time and money, browse through magazines like Outlook money or Mutual fund insight.
10. Never compare NAVs. NAV of 10 is not better or worse than NAV of 100. There is no equivalent of IPO in MF. NFOs don't offer any advantage over established funds.
11. Don't churn your portfolio frequently. There are entry and exit costs associated.
12. Long term capital gain tax in equity funds is zero. So try staying invested in equity funds for at-least a year.
13. No short term gains. Enter with a long term approach.
14. Use brokers which allow you to buy/sell online. This will save a lot of hassles for you. Check the online coverage of the broker. Most of them will allow you to buy any MF through paper forms but cover only limited MFs in their online service. If you do some investing through online and some offline, you will end-up with lots of hassles.
15. Use online portfolio tools provided by MF review sites (Value Reserach, Money Control etc). They are very useful.

Yahoo!

Well, my timing couldn't much more perfect :-) I joined Yahoo just as Microsoft announced the bid for Yahoo! Will they, won't they ... it's a million dollar question. Reminds me of the Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times".

Lost in translation

We all know about multitude of translation engines out there like altavista's BabelFish, Google translate etc. But if you don't know the translated language, how do you figuer out the quality of your translation. One simple way is to translate back again to original language :-)

I tried out following statement from English to Spanish on babelfish:

"I love to stand on one leg with my arms raised."

It resulted in following in Spanish phrase:

Amo estar parado en una pierna con mis brazos levantados.

Now I have no clue what the hack this means. So decided to translate this Spanish phrase back to English. It resulted in following English translation:

"Master to be unemployed in a leg with my raised arms."

Wow! All I can say is be careful, very careful if you are trying to use any of this translation engines.

Problem in sending secured email using outlook express

Scenario:
1) You have setup outlook express (OE) to use secure connection (SSL) while sending messages (SMTP)
2) Your email server is other than Microsoft Exchange
3) You are using a non-standard SMTP port
4) You get following exception:

Your server has unexpectedly terminated the connection. Possible causes for this include server problems, network problems, or a long period of inactivity. Account: a.b.c.d', Server: x.y.z.p', Protocol: SMTP, Port: 2025, Secure(SSL): Yes, Error Number: 0x800CCC0F

This happens because outlook express when doing SMTP over a non standard port tries to establish TLS session before starting SMTP session. The standard behaviour is first to start SMTP session and then negotiate opening of TLS session.

Please note that Outlook does not have this problem. It can successfully send secured emails on standard as well as non-standard SMTP ports.

We encountered this while using Postfix SMTP server listening at a non standard SMTP port.

Changing the SMTP port to 25 on email server will fix the problem.

Other way to fix this is to check whether your email server supports this non-standard (TLS first followed by SMTP) behavior. In case of Postfix this is supported by configuring another port which will just work for this non-standard behavior. All you subscribers using OE will have to use a port which is different from subscribers using non-OE clients.

Fun activities at Mahableswar

Riding a dancing horse




Para-gliding

Website registration headaches?

Now-a-days every website wants you to register with them using your email address. One solution is to create an email account just for this purpose so that your real email account is not bombarded with Spam and web site announcements.

Another neat trick is to use temporary email services. They allow you to create a temporary email id that you can use while registration and also allow you to check confirmation emails that get sent to these emails ids.

Check out the this list which gives 20 websites providing this service.

Find distance between any two cities in the world

Lots of websites help you in finding distance between two cities. Some of them listed below:
GeoBytes
Indo

Its cool. Check it out.