Karthik's blog

Was stuck yesterday with two subtitle (.srt) files and just the one avi. Searched high and low for something to either join the two files or offset the times in the second file appropriately, and finally ended here, a perl script that did the trick admirably. So to show my appreciation and help increase his google rank here's a nice shiny link back to his/her site :D

.srt subtitle joiner and adjuster

Cheers
-K

Just added the plan information for MTNL; Updated the links page with speed test links and links to the few looking glass mirrors around the country.

I've also just been told that the Hathway plans listed might be Chennai ONLY :S So will probably need to update the page with all the liteway, paceway bs.

-K

Modified menus - added "My Blog" to the user menu and a link to the Broadband pages to the primary menu.

Updated the trackback module, but it's still buggy :/

Added about a dozen more sites to the block-referrers list :(

-K

I just noticed that the squads for the upcoming superseries between an ICC selected World XI and world champions Australia, have been released. As usual, it baffles me how some of these selections could have been made. The result seems to be some kind of power play between selectors from each country. The selectors were Gavaskar (any team selected by him has to have Sachin in it :P), Hadlee, Jonty Rhodes, Clive Lloyd, Aravinda De Silva and Mike Atherton. A level-headed bunch, but some poor selections.

The following is the ICC selected World XI test squad for the World XI vs. Australia super series.

You know those employee satisfaction forms that you regularly have to fill out in whichever bureaucracy you work for? It's supposedly completely anonymous; so you lace it with all the emotions - commonly negative - and brutal honesty that you feel for the company's practices and your higher-ups.. The analogy might be slightly stretched, but that's what reading this "review" of life in India felt like :P

It's more like the feedback of mostly US consular officials (on their time in India) to other prospective .. applicants, and makes for some interesting reading, if silly, misinformed and at times embarrassing.. Some of them are so emotionally.. honest that you can sense the frustrations, excitement etc. etc. in the text.. Palpable is the word I suppose - Not sure if this is because they are writing about India, or because it's something that I could relate to - *shrug*. Either way, I thought that a slightly frivolous 1:13 a.m Monday morning post would round off the weekend quite nicely :D

For the last week or so, my breaks have basically been spent playing (the newly released) EA Sports Cricket 2005. The game is a marked improvement over previous versions, and while I'd written it off early on, it's grown on me in the last couple of days - well, enough that I'm actually writing this ;)

Updates made since the last post:

-Drupal 4.6.3 released - security fix for (another) XML-RPC bug. I've just deleted the file as this site doesn't really use it at present. Other fixes in the patch were minor.
-Added MTNL to primary broadband page.
-Added Beta pages for Sify, Reliance and "Others". Need to decide on a better format for the Others page.

That's about it. I'm working on getting a price list for Net4India, but getting hold of the local sales guy is turning out to be a chore - it'll prolly be a lot easier getting hold of our trenched-in Prime Minister instead of this feller.

A number of ISP pages have gone into Beta mode - Hathway, BSNL, Airtel, Reliance, Iqara et. al. Next up is Sify, and that's a task I'm not looking forward to. If sorting through Iqara's plans was a chore, Sify is going to be more akin to a penance :S

-K

I needed to set up WinAMP to play m4a [MPEG-4 Audio] files, but was told that the only way to play it would be once I'd installed Quicktime on the system. However, I, like a lot of people suffer from a congenital [sic] aversion for QT - everything about it right from its file size, clunky interface, unintuitive short cuts, annoying tray icon, file association hijacking, browser hijacking, to the whole you-have-to-download-iTunes-or-suffer-the-consequences marketing BS, really gets under my skin.

So, I do my utmost to keep it away from my box with the same fervour as other rubbish like Real Player, [anything by] Yahoo! and the like. But, in the case of getting my m4a files playable via WinAMP [transcoding isn't really an option here], I was seemingly banging my head against a brick wall. Anyways, after much digging around, I found that it's actually rather simple, but just not documented well enough - hence this post :P

Just published the first few pages of the broadband section. The pages will remain in beta until they are completed to my satisfaction. In the meantime, please feel free to recommend any changes :)

-K