So I recentlty bought (or rather booked) my most expensive acquisition so far. A Volkswagen Polo 1.6L. Every dealer in bangalore was quoting a road tax of 15.4%. But no one was able to substantiate it on paper or from the official RTO site. In addition, there was a team-BHP thread where people talked about it being 13% + 10% cess on tax = 14.3% tax total. I also read the same initially, but then found out that the tax is rather 14% (as mentioned in the addendum) and cess 11% (not updated on site but checked with RTO official on phone).

So, if you are here to find out the road tax in karnataka, hit here:

http://rto.kar.nic.in/KMVTA%202010.pdf

I would ve updated the team BHP thread rather than putting a blog post here but team BHP wont accept my “registration”. Your loss team BHP-ians.

Yodel for the Algorithmic Search Bing Transition Team
The Algorithmic Search Bing Transition team maniacally focused on desktop and mobile migration of web, image and video search in 40+ global markets from Yahoo’s YST infrastructure to Microsoft’s Bing platform. The Bing Transition Team in Bangalore specifically took complete responsibility for transitioning image and video search to the Bing platform. The Bing transition represents a first-of-its kind partnership for Yahoo!. It is an inherently complex relationship, extremely difficult technical transition and horizontal cross company project unlike any Yahoo! has undertaken in the past. But this team was up to the challenge, delivering with speed and quality. Successful completion of the Algorithmic Search transition in multiple global markets will save $150M+ annually in capital expenditure costs, allowing Yahoo! to focus on global search experience innovation and beyond, both in our core desktop search business, but also importantly across mobile and tablet devices.

Team Winner, Superstar 2011

I ve been changing my roms often on my nexus S, the latest being Icecream. One thing thats always been painful was all application restore across roms. Market downloads it all over again but you ve to wait for it. In my case, my apps size about 300 MB in all, abut 130 apps. So I ve to wait for all of them to download all over again.

There are means and ways of taking backup and restores. But being a command line guy, I always was too lazy for them. That’s when I decided to create my own way of backing up the apps and restoring them.

I am assuming you’ll know what it means by adb and mount when you read them. If not, please head over to xda forums or other similar android forums. Another assumption am making is you are already rooted.

How to take backup of apps before flashing:

1) Go to recovery -> mounts and storage
2) mount /data and /sdcard.
3) mount USB storage
4) go to adb shell
5) Copy your app .apk files to the USB storage
mkdir /sdcard/app_backup
cp -rv /data/app/* /sdcard/app_backup

Once you are done, you can make another copy out of the USB storage on your computer as well.

When you are done with your flash, repeat the above (1-4) steps, and copy the files from /sdcard/app_backup to /data/app/
cp -rv /sdcard/app_backup /data/app/

(there is adb push and pull as well, I ven’t tried that. See adb -h for more info and maybe you can try that as well).

6) clear the cache (wipe cache partition)
7) Advanced -> wipe dalvik cache

reboot

The reboot might take time after the steps above for restore as it will create the dalvik cache out of the apps.
It might look like its stuck on the bootloader screen (CM round circle or whatever is your rom). Give it sometime, go for a coffee. Time will depend upon your number of apps. I did went for a cup of coffee and it was ready by the time I came back.

This is a very rudimentary post on how to restore apps. You can create nandroid backups as well. In that case your /data will be saved as data.ext.tar or something similar. Just untar it and get the files for restoring.

Let me know if you need more help.

cheers
Anshu Prateek

PS: In case you want to unroot your nexus s to a stock image, here is a good compilation of stock images:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1063664

All the hullabaloo around the India’s 2G scam is something that I deeply detest. Am I the only one who sees the public benefit that happened due to spectrums being handed out for little to no license fees? Look at where India’s cellular penetration is. Look at the cellular tariff’s in India and compare it to the rest of the world. India now has the lowest tariff in the world. Could this ve happened had the spectrum’s being instead sold at exorbitant prices? Look where the 3G network infrastructure, penetration and the availability is today in India. Of course the government “earned” a lot of money from these 3G licenses (and in fact it were these 3G spectrum bids and final prices which brought the “apparent” 2G spectrum scam to forelight), but who is the ultimate loser in this game? Telco’s brought 3G licenses at the obscene prices only coz they were buoyant by the existing 2G environment. What they forgot was that the 2G era happened because of cheap licenses which left the telcos with enough money to spend on the infrastructure.

In my opinion, the guy who decided to sell the 3G license is the bigger culprit. Typical Indian style, milk the cow as much as you can. Infact this was worse than slaying the golden goose.

Just imagine the internet penetration that 3G would have brought to masses if these were easliy available. I remember the days when I was on dialup. I used to get 12-13kBps average, 40kBps peak. Today I ve a 5MBps connection and am in 99.1 percentile of the Indian population having high speed internet. The definition of broadband in India is pathetic. 256kBps is defined as Broadband by TRAI.

IMO, one of the best decisions that was made in the last decade was the free giveaway of the 2G spectrum. Money might have changed hands, and whats wrong is wrong, but not selling the 2G spectrum was definitely the best decision the silent PM agreed to.

I needed to clean up my home account, to remove all the usual files, except for the hidden files (the various gnome/app confs/settings etc) into one directory. This is what I used:

find . -type f -maxdepth 1 \( ! -regex '.*/\..*' \) -exec mv -vf {} all \;

I got the regex part from here:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-general-1/how-do-i-make-find-exclude-hidden-files-files-613793/

Also, later I found another one that I vent tried yet, maybe later:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-newbie-8/delete-regular-files-not-hidden-files-with-find-rm-in-one-line-older-than-15-a-855070/


find /home -type f -mtime +15 -not -name ".*" -exec rm {} \;


hi,

Let me first tell you what all I am going to tell you.

If you are coming from the world of svn/cvs (like me), I am going to tell you how to do git equivalent of

svn checkout ( git clone)

svn commit = (git add + git commit + git push)

What I am not going to tell you is how to setup your git account, create a new git repo etc, as the existing documentation on git is pretty good for these.

Ok, so lets begin now. I am assuming that your git account is ready, new files/folders are setup and you want to checkout your project in a new workspace.

In SVN, its a simple

svn checkout {location}

however when we try similar thing in git, we get an error!

git checkout git@github.com:anshprat/myFiles.git
fatal: Not a git repository (or any parent up to mount parent )
Stopping at filesystem boundary (GIT_DISCOVERY_ACROSS_FILESYSTEM not set).

Whoops!
You see, git checkout is not like svn checkout. What git checkout does is checkout a branch or paths to the working tree.

So to do a fresh git “checkout”, you basically have to do a git clone.

git clone git@github.com:anshprat/myFiles.git
Cloning into myFiles...
Enter passphrase for key '/home/anshup/.ssh/id_rsa':
remote: Counting objects: 6, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (3/3), done.
remote: Total 6 (delta 0), reused 3 (delta 0)
Receiving objects: 100% (6/6), done.

Voila! Am done.

Now how to do a git equivalent of svn commit ?

In git, this is broken down into 3 parts:

git add
git commit
git push

In svn, svn add is only for adding a new file to under revision control.
In git, git add, is useful for adding any changes to the index that would be finally merged or committed to the git repo online.

git commit : by this you are confirming that the changed files that you ve added by git add are ready to be committed.

git push: This is the command that finally pushes your changes back to the git repository!

So now you know how to do a “svn checkout and svn commit” using git

Look out for more as I delve more into git

Just got this mail from wordpress asking me to change my password. They also offered a 15% discount on their services as a Sorry coupon.. :!

I just wonder how many accounts were affected and what was the exact issue. Hope it wasn’t saved in cleartext!

And yes, its a legit email. Just be careful that the link you get finally ends up in https://wordpress.com.

Also, it doesn’t ask you to enter your old password but just new password.

Well, I ve changed my password here, but where else is it? Thankfully its one of my lesser used password..

WordPress.com ✆ passwordcoupon@wordpress.com to me

show details 4:43 AM (1 hour ago)

Hello h4ck@lyst,

We recently found and fixed a mistake that we’d like to tell you about. Passwords on WordPress.com are saved in a way that makes them extremely secure, such that even our own employees are unable to see your actual password – the one you enter to login to your WordPress.com account. However, between July 2007 and April 2008, and September 2010 and July 2011, a mistake in one of our systems used to find and correct bugs on WordPress.com accidentally logged some users’ passwords in a less secure format during registration.

We’ve updated our systems to prevent passwords from being logged this way in the future, so this will not happen again. We don’t have any evidence that this data has been accessed maliciously or misused, but to be on the safe side we are resetting your password since your account is among those affected.

Please change your password using this link or copy and paste the URL below into your web browser:

https://wordpress.com/wp-login.php?action=rp&key={key}&login={myUserId}

If the password you used when you registered on WordPress.com was one you use elsewhere, you should change it there, too. In the future, remember that it’s good practice to always use unique passwords for different services.

We are terribly sorry about this mistake. No one likes having to create new passwords and we’d like to include a 15% off coupon to say we’re sorry. The coupon can be used for a custom domain, a design upgrade, VideoPress, or a storage space increase. Just use the code below on any of the upgrades on the WordPress.com Store:

{myCOde}

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Thank you,
The WordPress.com Team

WordPress

WordPress.com | Thanks for flying with WordPress!

This blog post is about my recent switch to Vodafone 3G and related experience. Or just related woes. Experience hasn’t been much yet.

Vodafone finally launched 3G in bangalore (I think using Airtel infrastructure).

I had tested BSNL 3G earlier (pretty good) but wasn’t ready to make a permanent switch to BSNL (number woes despite MNP). Also am quiet satisfied with Vodafone phone services.

Anyways, after I moved to 3G, I suffered a drastic setback. My calls wont be connected! Not dropped connections, but calls simply wont be connected. After I dial a number, it would just hang up in a matter of minutes. Everytime I would ve to reselect the Operator from the network menu. And somehow, the menu would always show two vodafone (and NO Airtel at all!).

I ve an android phone. And there was no simple way to select manual selection of operator explicitly ( I do miss the good old days of not so smartphones at times!).

I did tweet about my woes and VodafoneIN replied with a complaint number.

And on the sidelines, I found the solution, by mistake..

I selected “Use only 2G Network” and voila! All my calls were being connected at ease like before!

Guess this demonstrates the fact that Vodafone uses 3G using airtel network and since airtel becomes the preferred network, the outgoing calls have some issues.

Will debug more on this later in the week.

I was hunting for this question for the past few days, ever since I enabled 3G on my nexus S vodafone connection. The phone would use auto PRL (preferred Roaming List) to switch over the network with better connection. In my case I was getting two vodafone networks. While I could always receive calls and messages, I could never send a message or make a call unless I reselected the other network.

To avoid this, and cases like these , you need to switch off automatically select prefereed network.

The way to do this is

dial *#*#4636#*#*

click Phone Info -> Set preferred network type -> GSM only (or CDMA if you are using CDMA).

The important thing here is not to use any auto or PRL settings.

And voila, now your android phone will only use manual network operator, just like the golden times…

Live stream would be shown below, alternatively also at the site linked above: http://www.livestreampro.com/samsung/ on August 10th, 2011, @12 pm till 2pm.