Inverse Karma

I’ve been playing around with HTTP Web Requests for quite some time now (See Retrieving PNR status in C#) and it is incredible how we can fetch data from plain webpages with a few lines of code. As another experiment, I tried fetching song lyrics from one of the many online lyrics databases. Which one [...]

One of the very first applications I found to be extremely useful on my Windows Phone was the IndianRail app. I had been looking into APIs for PNR retrieval, and found that none exists. I wanted to simulate the app, and ended up doing just that in .NET, using C#. Note: This method involves scraping [...]

Many applications install a bunch of services when installed, which in most cases, are needed to be run only when the application is run. However, these services are set to start up automatically at logon, which can significantly affect startup performance, leaving you to watch the waiting cursor while a bunch of useless (at least, [...]

My latest project requires me to work on Ubuntu, run using VMPlayer on a Windows PC. Not being an expert in Ubuntu, I didn’t know how to compare files in it. The only option I could think of was to import those files in Eclipse and do a subversion compare. But then I also had [...]

The new Indian rupee sign has been adopted so quickly, that in 6 months (the competition was announced in March 2009 and the final decision was given in July 2010), it is now seen on all magazines, dairy products, farm produce, newspapers — pretty much anything you could pick up at a supermarket! And blogs [...]

Often at work,I work on both Windows and *NIX machines at the same time. My favourite text editor on Windows is Notepad2 and on *NIX, vi. Often, I have to edit Java source files on Windows and then FTP it on to our Red Hat server. Windows/DOS uses carriage return and line feed (“\r\n”) as [...]

Photography had always been a passion for me, and I was clicking pictures (good and bad) and reading about photography techniques all the time. With the time just right for buying a good camera (read: have enough money), and putting months of research into good use, I finally decided to buy a camera on my [...]

A good amount of IK readers own Nokia phones, and many of them also use the accompanying Nokia PC Suite. It is a great piece of software of course, but have you noticed it adding a ‘Nokia Phone Browser’ icon in your My Computer that you can’t just get rid of? Wait.. Why get rid [...]

Last month, I decided to learn .NET. A few classes later, I had started coding simple Windows applications. In my VB6 days, I was obsessed with coding a Snake game and had actually succeeded in it (but it looked so ugly that my friends still laugh about it after 5 years!). I’ve been learning C# [...]