Know the distance and auto fare by sending SMS – A txtWeb service

Usually any website which is providing different services would expect user to log-in to their website to use their services. Optionally few sites allow to user there services without log-in to their websites. Well, we have here one more website which allows us to use their services by sending SMS (short message service) .

Getting services by sending SMS  is not a new concept. We already saw such services particularly in the  Information Services sites like asklaila. But this website txtWeb taken a different form of handling services. Today IndianExpress published an article about one such service which is developed by Bangalore-based Ideophone Technosol Pvt Ltd, a start-up software applications firm. This service runs on SMS and the requester has to send sms to 9243342000.  The good thing with this txtWeb website is,  anyone can develop a custom services using their core services. One such interesting  ”autofare” application which was developed by the co-founder of Ideophone “Sandeep Bhaskar“.  The next time when you are travelling in autorickshaw and you feel the auto you are in has a faulty meter or you suspect that the autowala is making roundtrip to our destination, and you have a fancy smartphone you can track the distance and the fare in real time. Even you can use this service to know the distance between the two points of travel and the approximate fare  just by sending an sms keyword ‘@autofare’ and send it  to 9243342000. Earlier I used to depend on Google Maps service to get the information on distance and a manual calculation of approaximate fare.   and Ideophone will get back with a summary of the total distance, the likely tariff and the major landmarks on the way that are stored in their database.  This service surely will help in knowing the distance and rough fare. But you cannot use this result to fight against the autowala , you know why? because they have a handful of explanations to make to convince. Very long back when i had the same situation and i found that the meter is showing Rs. 80/- more than the actual, the driver said he has taken indirect routes to eliminate traffic, and i have no idea how to calculate this ‘indirect’ route so, simply paid and walked away.

Example usage of this application as mentioned in their website. I tried with my own query string (@autofare bangalore, madiwala, sarjapura) which did not result any reply even after waiting 15 minutes. So, i changed the query string to (@autofare Bangalore, Madiwala, Sarjapura Road) which gave me some results but appears like the target is taken wrongly. Instead of “Sarjapura Road” it has taken “Rd” (may be a short form for Road and ignored the Sarjapura) and gave the directions to “Hosa Road”. The service has to improve more to be used by people new to that place.

eg: @autofare Mumbai, Powai, Bandra    -  (and send it to 9243342000) Gives the approximate auto fare from Powai to Bandra in Mumbai city

Sample Response:

Auto Fare Details for Mumbai

From: Powai, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India

To: Bandra West, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India

Distance: 19.4 km(s)

Tariff: Rs. 157.2 (approx)

Important Landmarks:

Adi Shankaracharya Marg

Jogeshwari Vikhroli Link Rd

Krantiveer Lakhuji salve Marg

Mahakali Caves Rd

Jeejamata Rd

Western Express Hwy/NH 8

S V Rd

Hill Road

St Peter’s Rd

Confused of That vs. Which & Will vs. Shall etc.,

Should i use “Will or Shall”? Should i go for “That or Which”? Too many questions…
DailyBlog network site started and managing a site DailyWritingTips to answer all these questions. You can also post your questions to get the answers from them. Here is a sample question from their site

When proofreading a peer’s article on the solar system, I realized that she, and I, are unsure of the proper use of “that” and “which” in a sentence. Below is two examples of the same sentence, one using “that” and the other “which.”

“To our knowledge, it is the only body in the solar system which currently sustains life, although several other bodies are under investigation.”

“To our knowledge, it is the only body in the solar system that currently sustains life, although several other bodies are under investigation.”

Which is the correct sentence, and what is the general rule of thumb?

Look at their site for the answers in the gramner section and get updated about many more questions like above.

US economy slowdown- The Impact on indian Software

I was into stock market for the last 2 years and doing trading on BSE and NSE through my broker HDFC Securities. Overall i was on good profits until January 2008. Suddenly i observed that in a 15 days span my profits are gone down to 40%. I came out of stock market by selling all the holdings and booked the remaining profits. Then only i realized the fact that USA’s economy is in worst phase and it it going to hit the Indian economy too.

I also receiving some news related to IT slowdown in India and companies are terminating employees to reduce their costs.  The company which i was working right now has a good strength and i heard that it did not terminated any employees even in year 2000-2001. During 2000 i used to work for another company and was one of the victim for pick slip. But very recently my company has terminated around 400 employees in their Hyderabad branch. Who will be the next??

If US is not going recover soon, i believe it is going to affect India too in a worse way, especially the IT industry because most of our IT customers are from USA. I used to believe our central  minister Mr. Chidambaram’s statements about Indian economy and >9% GDP growth. It seems very silly to me now. Isn’t it?

Fire Fox-3 Beta – Support for Telugu language

ఈ రోజే కొత్త FireFox-3 Beta version ని download చేసుకుని testing మొదలు పెట్టాను. ఇంకా అన్ని features ని పరిశీలించనప్పటికీ, ముఖ్యమైన తేడా, నాకు నచ్చినది ఏమిటంటే, కొత్త వెర్షన్ లో తెలుగు భాషని కూడా చక్కగా చదవవచ్చు. ఇంతకు ముందు అన్ని site లకు ForeFox-2 వాడుతున్నప్పటికీ, తెలుగు సైట్ లకు మటుకు IE ని వాడవలసి వచ్చేది.  తేడా ని మీరు కింద చూడవచ్చు.  మీరు రెండు version లను కావాలంటే install చేసుకోవచ్చు. మీరు ఇప్పటికే FireFox 2 ని వాడుతూవుండి, దానిలో చాలా Add-ons కనుక వుంటే, FireFox 3 beta మొదటకొంచెం trouble ఇస్తుంది. ఎన్నిAddons వుంటే అన్ని సార్లు మీరు proxy యొక్క user id/ password ఇవ్వవలసి వుంటుంది. ఈ issu, FireFox 3 final version లో పోవచ్చు.

FireFox 2 తో

FireFox 3 తో

HDFC Securities changing its trading interface?

As everybody these days, i am also  into the share market business since one year using HDFCSec trading platform. When i opened the 3-in-1 account with HDFC, it was just supporting trading in NSE, nothing else. Now it supports most of the things except Mutual Fund trading. The interface of this trading system was not so elegant and the software used was php for information and JSP for trading. Now seems to be like they are in the process of changing their user interface and the software also. The new platform using .NET it seems and the interface is looking good. The main page looks similar to Reliance’s money trading site. The charting is better than old charts. Seems like both version (php/.NET) of the trading platform are available, and defaultly it will goto php version of the site. You can access this site at http://hdfcsec.com/Investor.aspx

 Update: As of now only information related to market is available in the new version and the trading is still refering old site.

Round border in wordpress posts

	My First Rounded Border
	Round Cornered borders (like this post’s border) is always looks nicer and it is a first choice to not only me but also many web designers. We can use round corners in two ways. one is using tables which is a old fashioned, and another approach is using style sheets (CSS). I wanted to use CSS for this post but wordpress has restricted the use of certain style tags. If some body wanted to use external CSS they should pay a little amount to wordpress. At present i am not interested to upgrade my account as i am not that much proficient in CSS. So i decided to go ahead with tables and images. Using CSS it is possible to create a round cornered table without using a single image. These are the images used to build this table: Top Left, Top Right, Top Middle and a Transparent Spacer. All these images are made as transparent so that they can give same round effect irrespective of the page background color. The HTML Code is…=================================================== <table style=”table-layout: fixed” border=”0″ cellpadding=”0″ cellspacing=”0″ width=”100%”> <tr> <td style=”background-image: url(‘bskin1_tl.gif’)” height=”20″ width=”15″></td> <td style=”background-image: url(‘bskin1_tm.gif’); text-align: center;” height=”20″>HEADING</td> <td style=”background-image: url(‘bskin1_tr.gif’)” width=”15″></td> </tr><tr><td style=”background-color: #bed0ff”></td> <td style=”font-size: 8pt; text-align: justify; background-color: #bed0ff; padding-top: 10px; padding-bottom: 5px”>BODY CONTENT</td> <td style=”background-color: #bed0ff”></td></tr>tr>td colspan=”3″ style=”background-color: #779eff” height=”3″></td>/tr>/table> =================================================== The drawback of this table approach is the huge html code instead of the actual text. Using style sheet languag, we can separate the layout format with actual text. So if you are proficient in CSS and want to use style sheets then go ahead and upgrade your account by paying little amount to wordpress. I created these images using Paint.NET and it is my first test on image creation. There are some other round types are applied to other pages of my blog. But those images are grabbed from internet.

What happend to Krun.ch?

       Sometime back while googling i came across a post about krunch in downloadsquad. It is basically an online compression tool like zipmyfile. But the additional feature is you can zip any file from internet site. In my work place the download of .exe files are restricted but there is no restriction of downloading zip files. I was using this tool to download the .exe files whose absolute url is known to me [This is an advantage which many bloggers forget to mention in their posts]   Well done Kailash Nath, the creator of this great tool. Unfortunately for the last 1 month the site is down and the message shows that the account is suspended. I hope this site will come back soon. If comes back i have one feature request to Kailash.
There should be a provision to include a custom extension to the original file so that even .zip file down load is restricted then we can say download in file.exe.abc (just renaming to an extention) . How is it?
[If my admin restricts entire krunch site itself, then? ]