Appending the id/username in question to the query parameter – ‘Email’ on the following URL invokes the same service which is used by Google products to validate existing usernames.

Ex:

https://www.google.com/accounts/CheckAvailability?Email=test

You can replace ‘test’ by the id or username you want to validate and hopefully expect a corresponding response from Google.

Checking the balance on the PF account used to be a cumbersome process. It’s not cumbersome anymore (well, almost) and we can actually check our PF balance online on the organisation’s website – www.epfindia.com

Here’s how to check on the website:

1. Navigate to http://www.epfindia.com/

2. Click ‘Know your EPF balance’.

3. You should see an instruction page which has a ‘Click Here to know the balance’ link. Do as suggested.

4. You get a page from which you need to select the appropriate EPFO office. To make the selection easier, you can search by state, region and also by the employer name.

5. Once, the right selection is made, another page displays the EPFO’s details pre-filled in the Employee PF Account Number box. The remaining boxes need to be filled with your PF number (you can obtain that by contacting your respective employer or in most cases it’s available on the pay-slip)

The Employee PF Account Number consists of 5 boxes. The first 2 are filled up automatically depending on the EPFO selection. The remaining 3 boxes are for the individual’s PF number.

As shown, the 1st and 2nd boxes are filled up based on the choice of the EPFO office.

The individual PF account usually is made up of 2 numbers – xxxxxxx/yyyyyyy. Sometimes, there might be an extension number as well which is mentioned between the other 2 numbers like this – xxxxxxx/zzz/yyyyyyy. You need to fill boxes 3 to 4 using your PF number. If your PF doesn’t have any extension, then leave box 4 empty.

6. Fill out the rest of the details and you should receive the status on your mobile phone assuming the information you’ve entered is intact.

It also provides a feature to track any claim you make on your EPF account. This is definitely a handy initiative which removes a lot of red-tapism surrounding it.

Websites using HTTPS need to employ private and public keys. Our browsers generate a random key and encrypt it using the website’s public key. This encrypted data can only be decrypted by using the website’s private key and since the website is the sole owner of the private key, it’ll be able to decrypt the data and identify the suggested random key. Later on, the entire transfer of data between the browser and the website is encrypted using this random key as it’s known only to the two of them. Although, there are a lot more steps that happen in here, this is the working of HTTPS in a gist.

If someone has the public key and the encrypted data, finding the private key is theoretically possible however computationally infeasible. With the present processing power available, cracking a pair of keys might take years. So, we are safe, or are we?

There are going to be technical advancements in computational hardware and this will definitely spur an attacker to make an attack on historical data. Essentially, if someone is going to save today’s encrypted data, the chances of decrypting them 10 years down the lane might be higher owing to technological improvements as mentioned before. Although this might sound insignificant as of now, there might be a lot of today’s data which still needs to be maintained “secretive” years down the lane. Who knows the conversations which we are hiding now might become commonplace in a matter of few years. This is referred to as a retrospective decryption attack.

With forward secrecy, Google will be using different private keys to encrypt sessions and also deleting the keys later. This will ensure that even if an attacker is able to decrypt one key, he won’t have access to significant quantity of data. The thing to be noted here is forward secrecy is not part of SSL, Google has implemented this extension to the OpenSSL toolkit.

This advancement is already in place for Google services like  – Gmail, Google docs, etc. You can verify if forward secrecy is enabled on your present Google service and checking the certificate details (the padlock symbol) on Firefox or Google Chrome.

If you find that the key exchange is done by ECDHE_RSA, then your current data exchange is safe from future attackers. Unfortunately, this key exchange algorithm is not supported on IE yet and its traffic is susceptible to attack by people in the future.

I’m sure that other websites will implement a similar modification to their HTTPS traffic, until then commit your secrets to Google.

WPI – As the name suggests, it is an index which measures the change in the average price of goods traded in the wholesale market. In India, this index is updated on a weekly basis. A total of 435 commodities are tracked to prepare the index and its fluctuation is monitored on a weekly basis. This gives an indication of the movement of the prices in the market. India uses the WPI as an indicator of the rate of inflation.

CPI – This index is calculated by performing a weighted average on a specified set of goods and services purchased by consumers. Many economists believe that this is a true indicator of the actual cost of living of a consumer and this should decide the changes in the inflation rate. This index actually involves the calculation of the price fluctuation affecting the consumers while WPI does not properly measure the exact price fluctuation a consumer will experience as it’s at the wholesale level. Another thing to note is that, some of the commodities that are part of the WPI basket have lost importance from a consumption point of view.

Most countries calculate the inflation based on the CPI while India calculates based on the WPI. There have been researches provided by many economists which urge the government to move to the CPI model, however there are policy problems which the government points out in moving to that index.

The online music store is going to contain both free and paid songs. The price for paid songs is in the range of 99cents to $1.29 in line with the pricing available on iTunes. Users can access this store on the web and on their Android smartphones in a few days.

Another interesting feature allows independent artists to create their own pages and sell music at the price they want to. They get to keep 70% of the sale value.

Users who have purchased a song can share it with their friends for a one-time listen on Google +.

Google Music can be accessed at – http://music.google.com/

With the new version, the update checks happen over HTTPS which prevents man-in-the-middle attacks. Because, the request is encrypted, it becomes impossible for anyone to sniff the update request and tailor a fraudulent response.

This particular scenario won’t happen if the ‘Apple Software Component’ is present. More details at – http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5030

The responses are returned as JSON objects. They can be requested using the following format:

https://graph.facebook.com/username

or

https://graph.facebook.com/ID

Ex: https://graph.facebook.com/19292868552

https://graph.facebook.com/platform

Sample response for https://graph.facebook.com/19292868552 :

{
   "id": "19292868552",
   "name": "Facebook Platform",
   "picture": "http://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/hprofile-ak-ash2/276791_19292868552_1958181823_s.jpg",
   "link": "http://www.facebook.com/platform",
   "likes": 3391049,
   "category": "Product/service",
   "website": "http://developers.facebook.com",
   "username": "platform",
   "founded": "2007",
   "company_overview": "Facebook Platform enables anyone to build social apps on Facebook and the web.",
   "mission": "To make the web more open and social."
}

The last time the Aussies suffered a series defeat at home was in the last millenium (infact 1992), when the Windies routed them. 16 years later, when Australia were actually contemplating to get the word ‘series defeat’ out of the MCC cricketing dictionary, synonyms to that started to come by. Annihilation by India in the Border-Gavaskar series was the first entry into the thesaurus. And then came the big one. South Africa achieved in 15 days what the entire cricketing world were after since the last 16 years. Defeated Australia in Australia!!!!

Australia has always been a great champion of the sport. Peter Roebuck is indeed correct when he said Aussies helped sustain Test cricket in the world. But, they weren’t the champions adored by everyone. The mind games and the ‘under the skin’ attitude of the Australian game were disliked by many a opposition they faced. It is this arrogance of the team that made it so unfamiliar to defeat. And when defeat finally came, it swept them off their feet and almost from the Test rankings too.

I believe Australia will not go the way the Windies went after their glorious era. This is because they have a good domestic cricketing structure. However, the dominance at the top is surely coming to an end. It’s time to witness a race between two of the most flamboyant captains in Dhoni and Smith towards the retiring incumbent, Ponting. No matter who wins the race, one thing’s for sure, Australia is going down under!!

The first time i watched the movie, i couldn’t pick up most of the lines. I needed the subtitles!!!

Apparently, it’s quite easy. These steps might help you to view sub-titles of movies which are already downloaded as a .avi or a .divx movie(but not as a DVD movie).

1. The movie needs to be encoded in XviD or DivX codecs.

2. Download the subtitle for the movie. You can use this link to find out websites to download the subtitles from.

3. Save the subtitle file with the same name as the movie but with a .srt or .sub extension. (.srt and .sub are generally used to denote subtitle files).For example, if the name of the movie is Test_Movie.avi, save the subtitle file as Test_Movie.srt. Also, care should be taken to save the subtitle in the same directory as the movie.

4. Use VLC media player to play the video as usual. VLC picks up the subtitle and synchronises it with the movie. ( I didn’t have much luck when i played with other video players. Anyhow, VLC remains my personal favourite )

5. Enjoy the dialogue!

I bet ya can box a little, can’t ya sir? Aye, you look like a boxer.

Are there any simpler ways to do the same?

Let me put it over here for those who use the web, and i’m available to explain in the old-school way as well (Face to face ).

Easily put, 3G is the 3rd generation of the wireless technology, distinctly for mobile communications. ( easy to discern from the name itself )

The earlier versions of the technology were used more or less to carry only voice traffic. However, with 3G, high transfer speeds can be obtained which will inturn rev up the engines of video streaming, mobile TV and mobile gaming through a mobile!! It can carry both voice and data at high speeds.

How to get 3G?

Well, first of all to support 3G, there should be a mobile service provider offering 3G subscription. It doesn’t end there. You further need a device which is 3G enabled (3G mobile phone). Most new phones are already 3G enabled. Nokia N70 priced at 8000 rupees is a good choice for the device.

Situation of 3G in India

On Dec 11, 2008, 3G was finally launched as part of a pilot project in parts of Delhi and NCR. As always, state owned heads like BSNL and MTNL will have the first bite at the cherry. It’s speculated that the entry of private players might be somewhere close to end of Q2 2009. It’s worth will be more significant in rural India. It’ll increase the penetration of broadband internet to remote places and save the need for expensive cabling. This is auguring well for the overall internet growth in the country.

The main competition (apart from the initial investment) is being witnessed from another technology called WiMAX which offers “wireless” metropolitan internet access.