Bottle Brush Plant

Bottle Brush (Callistemon) are grown as shrubs / small trees. These are named after the shape of the flowers.
Bottlebrush plants need a very mild climate. These are grown outdoors in a sunny location. The bottle brush tree requires regular watering. It should be fertilized annually. 

Bottle Brush Plant in a pot

Bottle Brush Flower

My New Project: https://aangangarden.com

After working in software industry for 15 years, I have started a new project Aangan Garden Nursery, Indore. We intended to sell various plant we grow at our nursery (Directions) as well as online at https://aangangarden.com. To sell online we had options of: 

1. Selling at e-commerce sites like amazon.in and flipkart.com. 
2. Create our own online stite 
• using shopify.com. 
• CMS and host on Cloud.

We settled with using Opencart hosted on aws. Opencart proved to be very helpful for catalog management. Its written in PHP and I was easily able to update code to suit my requirements.

That's brief about my new beginning. If you want to know more, please ask in comments.

Do visit https://aangangarden.com to browse so many varities of plants and flowers.

Offline mode in GMail

Recently Google has added offline support to its popular service Gmail. Its really a nice feature which allows me to read and search email while travelling or when squirrel has cut my broadband connection's wire. While offline support is working fine in Chrome( google's own browser), my firefox started crashing with it. I predominantly use firefox so little disappointed that offline mode is not working with it. It is still in lab feature so may take some time to be fixed for firefox.

What has been your experience with offline mode in Gmail?

Always show folder list pane in windows explorer

There are many ways to go to windows explorer. you can press windows key+e, you can open My Computer,you can open my documents. In some of the cases folders list pane does not always show up. to do this follow the below steps:
1. Open a Explorer window.
2. Select Tools -> Folder Options -> File Types Tab
3. Scroll down to the Folder file type. It should be one of the top 10 entries with the extension (NONE).
4. Select the Folder item and click Advanced.
5. Select the explore option and click the Set Default button.
6. Click OK and you are done.

VirtualBox

These days I am hearing a lot about virtualization and how organizations are adopting to it for harware cost reductions. I knew about Virtual PC which is nice product from microsoft(as well as free too). Virtual PC is a nice option if you are going to use windows operating systems inside virtual machines.
But while trying running linux(ubuntu) inside virtual PC I faced lot of issues and even could not succeed in installing it.
Then I came to know about virtual box which is recently acquired by sun. I gave a try to install linux (ubuntu 8.04) and without any issues I was able to do that. So for trying linux as VM i prefer virtual box over virtual PC.
One of the drawback of virtual box is that I am not able to add existing machines although I can add existing hard disks. More over , enable undo disk ( a very helpful feature) seems to be missing.
I will further try and post more about it.

Hardy Heron (Ubuntu 8.04):Initial review

Recently ubuntu has released a newer version of ubuntu linux code name Hardy Heron. I have tried it for 2 days and it has really impressed me.
One thing that caused users most trouble in linux is its installation. but with introduction of wubi installation, that trouble has literally ended.
So, if you are a windows user and want to try Hardy Heron, its installation is as simple as any other program in windows. You put the CD/DVD and run ubmenu.exe from within the windows. You then select the drive where to install and the space to allocate for linux. I recommend 15 GB of space to be allocated. The you choose the user name and password for linux and click install. Thats it. There is no confusion over partitioning of hard disk.
One of the beauty of the ubuntu install is that you can continue to use your computer while linux is installing. Be it from within windows or a single install.
After install is finished, you reboot the machine and can choose to boot windows or ubuntu. Uninstall is also simple. you just select uninstall from add remove program and it is completely uninstalled.
Upto now I have just tried firefox with it. Browsing experience is ok except that I can't use google toolbar as shipped firefox is version3.
I will be trying different alternatives to windows applications in Ubuntu. So keep watch on my blog.

Bug in Vista explorer

Recently while working on my vista pc, i found an interesting bug. We can rename a file to have special character like #. What I was doing to rename a chm file and I put # in the file name. Windows did not give any error. But when I tried to open the file It was not displaying any content.
I wonder how I can submit this bug to microsoft?

INBOX.COM

There is one email service beyond gmail, yahoomail and hotmail and better than all of these. inbox.com. It has really features that can save lot of time.

What's good:
1. 5GB of space.
2. Folders as well as labels. cool!
3. Integrated storage with email space. You can attach files from you storage or you can save attachemnts to your storage.
4. Conversations like gmail. you can turn on or off this feature.
5. pop3 access for free.
6. A very nice contact manager.
7. Notes, calender.
8. No Ads. Wow!
9. less popular so you have high chance of getting desired email address. I got.

whats not so good:
1. no chat like gmail.
2. space is less than others emails like gmail or yahoo.

Its really worth a service to try. url is inbox.com.

HP Pavilion DV6703 TX Laptop

I was looking for new laptop and finally shortlisted two brands. DELL and HP. The problem with DELL was that I could not see it before buying altough I could customize it online. So I went for HP Pavilion DV6703 TX model.
It has Intel Core 2 Duo processor 1.67GHz, 2GB DDR2 SDRAM, NVIDIA graphics card with 256 MB dedicated memory, 160 GB SATA hard disk, 15.4" widescreen, lightscribe DVD writer, webcam, touch sensitive media buttons, windows vista home premium and etc. It costs around 49.5K INR in bangalore.
My experince till now is very good and did not face any major problems. It is recommended if you want a entertainment laptop along with windows OS. It comes with Quickplay software form HP which is very nice. It can play media without booting the entire OS itself. Windows vista home premium also provides a cool experince.
Few of its drawbacks are that somtimes speakers become noisy. For windows vista no DVD is provided. instead a recovery software is provided which eats up 10GB of harddisk space. And if you uninstall the recovery software, you loose the functionality of playing media without booting.
I can give it a rating of 4 out of five seeing the cost factor as well.

Face Recognition In Lenovo

Lenovo has launched notebooks which have face recognition feature. This feature enables you to login by just showing your face and does not nee typing the password.
When one of my friend bought lenono we were just experimenting with face recognition feature.
Suddenly i thought of an idea. Was it possible to login by just showing the face photograph of the registered user. Well, we went ahead and put the photograph of my friend in front of its camera. His face was registered in lenove face recognition software.
And we were surprised! yes we could login using the photograph. This makes me scared to use this feature at all.
What do you think? Maybe lenovo listenes and fixes this flaw in their algorithm.

Flaw in On Screen Keyboard provided on Bank Sites

There was one time when key-logging softwares were used to on public computers to steal bank account passwords. Now in order to provide security against keyloggers; banks have come up with the idea of on screen keyboards. These allows user to select the characters from on screen keyboard rather than typing them.
But I think that this new on screen keyboard scheme is more prone to attack as compared to keylogger.
How? Well. someone can install a camera. Or there are softwares which can record user activity in video file. Also when you select a character from a on screen keyboard, a sound is generated. A combination of video showing your mouse movements and click sounds can reveal your password.
So moral of the story is; never, never acces your bank's site on a public computer.

My First Post

Ok, I have created my blog and started writing. But what to wrote?
Well, I start with my introduction.
Name: Nikhil Gupta; Twenty Four year old! ohhh, more than 20 years passed but still feel childish.
My interests, computers, computers and computers.. I love to do experiments( most of them are just dumb) with my computer. But after each experiment, I definitely learn a thing or two. The primary purpose is to pass the time.
I wandered that this can be useful for others. So I have created my own blog to share my findings about softwares, phones and other web based services that I have tried, the problems i have faced.
If my posts prove helpful, my goal is achieved.
That's all for now. Keep visiting..........