Visual Studio and Visual SourceSafe Annoyances

Trying to find the SourceSafe history of the codebehind file is very annoying in the visual studio. Every time I hit that history button from the source control toolbar, it displays the history of the aspx file instead of codebehind vb or cs file. So, I have to open the Visual SourceSafe itself, find the codebehind file and do a ctrl+H to find the history of the file. Too much work.

After I add an existing file to my solution, it automatically checks out the file without asking me. So, I have to undo my checkout. As soon as I undo this checkout, the entire solution explorer bar goes up-and-down, up-and-down and up-and-down. I hope these things are corrected in the next versions.

Laurel MD Hindi Movie Theater

I keep losing the phone number of the Hindi Theater in Laurel, MD. The search engines don't help me when I try to find it on the internet. Once I post this, I hope people will be able to find this post from the search engines.

301-352-6987

This phone number usually has a voice recording telling people which bollywood movies the theater is currently playing. I believe the theater regularly shows south Indian movies too. The voice recording also lets you know the showtimes.

And this is the address of the Hindi movie theater in Laurel, MD if anyone needs it.

371 Armstrong Ave
LAUREL, MD 20707

See this Hindi Movie Theater on Google Maps.

If you go there and also want to buy some Indian groceries make sure to check out Eastern Bazaar. Eastern Bazaar is across the parking lot from the Indian movie theater, I believe it is probably quarter to half mile away from the theater. Eastern Bazaar is probably the best Indian grocery store I have seen in terms of big size and cleanliness. The store has an Indian travel agency next door and a movie rental sub-store.

The address of Eastern Bazaar is:

15101 Baltimore Ave Ste 100
Laurel, MD 20707-4661

See Eastern Bazaar on Google Maps

Used Car Values and Honda

When buying a new car:

"If you’re a short term owner (≤ 5 years) and the car has been redesigned for the new model year, then you’ll be better off paying a bit extra for the newer version.

If you’re a short term owner and the car hasn’t been redesigned, then you might come out ahead with the older model year, but only if you can get a really big discount.

If you’re a long term owner (≥ 5 years) and the car has been redesigned, then buy whichever one you happen to like better — the difference in resale value will be minimal by the time you finally get around to selling."

This all makes sense for every other car manufacturer except Honda. The used car prices on Hondas are ridiculous. They don't go down a bit after 2-3 years. I have seen 2-3 year old civics listed for $14,900. That is almost the same price you pay for a new civic. Where is the depreciation? You can buy used Camrys or Altimas at that price. Why people pay 14k for a used civic? This is beyond me.

Reliance India Call Experience

I have been using Reliance India Call for almost a year now. I used the free 15-minute call offered by Reliance in August of 2004 and immediately signed up for for the service in September. As long as I know, all of my family member uses this service to call their relatives in India. My extended family members have abandoned the use of traditional phone cards for the Reliance India Call.

Reliance offers two kinds of service: prepaid and pay-later service. If you use the first option you have to pay first and as you use the minutes, dollars are subtracted from your account based on the usage. The second service charges you every month based on the time you used to call India. I believe there is a monthly charge for using the pay-later service.

As far as call quality goes, I think this service is the best service you can get for spending 12.9 cents per minute. I have used other cards before, but I never had a better call quality.

What are your experiences with Reliance India Call? Leave a comment below and let me and everyone else know. Do you use any other service or calling card? Which card do you use? Do you make VOIP calls to India? How are the charges for VOIP calls compare to Reliance India Call?

Like Cricket, Love Baseball

Are you from England, Australia, India, or Pakistan? Do you like cricket? Did you used to watch and play cricket while you were in your native country? If you are currently living in United States, and if you have made an effort to learn the game of baseball, then what are your impressions of baseball?

I love baseball.

I used to die for cricket when I was in India. I used to watch entire test matches on TV regardless India was playing or not. After coming to United States, I started to learn baseball by watching it on TV. It took about 2-3 months to learn the game, but after that time I just fell in love with the game. Cricket seems boring and slow to me now.

I recommend that, if you have not already done so, try to learn some basic aspects of the baseball. I can say with confidence that if you liked cricket, you will love baseball.

Blogger Toolbar For Microsoft Word

Blogger recently announced a toolbar for Microsoft word. Many bloggers use Microsoft Word to create documents and then copy and paste into blogger to publish it. With this, Blogger Toolbar for Microsoft Word, publishing Microsoft Word documents will be very easy. I have already installed the toolbar and using it to post my writings.

There are a couple of things not supported by this toolbar: images and tables. I cannot post this document through blogger toolbar because it contains an image. The image itself shows the error message I got when I tried to post a document with a table in it.

Indian Aviation Industry

From the latest buzz coming out of India, it sounds like that the Indian Aviation Industry is growing by leaps and bounds. If we want to set aside a moment as a “big bang” for the expansion of the “Indian Aviation Universe” than we can set the last day of the Paris Air Show of the 2005 as the moment. On that day, Indian Aviation Industry came to life with bountiful airplane orders for Boeing and Airbus. Boeing and Airbus now considers India as a prime market for many years to come. I am sure that both airplane manufacturers will deploy their marketing and sales team in India to outsell each other in coming months.

Here is the order summary:

• A new startup airline called Indigo ordered 100 planes from Airbus.
• Jet Airways split its order and bought planes from Boeing and Airbus.
• Kingfisher added five jumbo A380s to its fleet. (It will be interesting to see where Kingfisher airline flies these planes. Major airport infrastructure overhaul may be needed to land this aircraft.)
• A few months earlier Air India ordered about 50 planes from Boeing.

Carnival of Personal Finance

Carnival of Personal Finance is a collection of the entries of the personal finance articles from various financial sites. Good insightful information can be found on these carnivals. Please check it out or bookmark this page to visit the carnivals later.

Date	Carnival Location
June 20	Consumerism Commentary
June 27	Blueprint for Financial Prosperity
July 5	AllThingsFinancial
July 11	Smart Money Daily
July 18	I Will Teach You To Be Rich
July 25	Free Money Finance
August 1	In Cash Flow We Trust
August 8	Consumerism Commentary
August 15	Blueprint for Financial Prosperity

Search Engine Blogs

Google, Yahoo and MSN Search blogs link to each other. Check for yourself by clicking on the links below.

• Google Blog
• Yahoo Search Blog
• MSN Search Weblog

Did search engine spam and scrapper sites brought them together?

Customs At Ahmedabad Airport

Is Customs at Ahmedabad Airport bad? It depends; on your expectations of how it will go. Prepare for the worst and you will roll through without any problems. If you expect it to go as easy as the US customs then you will be disappointed.

I went to Ahmedabad from USA twice in the last year. I flew Air-India both times. Before I landed, I geared up my mind to expect the worst behavior from the staff at the airport. To my surprise, I found less haggling with the customs proceedings now than before. It may have to do with the time my plane reached the airport. Both times, I landed at 3 o’clock at night and got my customs done between 4 and 5 in the morning. If you are flying Air-India, then your plane might also land at the Ahmedabad airport at 3 o'clock at the night. The airport staff must have been tired by then.

After landing, they put us on a bus and the bus drove us to the “terminal”. The bags started to twirl on the tiny belt in a few minutes. I took my belongings and went to the x-ray machine to get them checked. There was an employee of the airport who was putting the luggage from the cart into the x-ray machine for the passengers. He wanted to get some money from me. I said no. He came back to load my trolley again once my luggage came through the x-ray machine. He again pleaded with me for some money. I told him that I do not have any rupees. He insisted for a few dollars. I just rolled out of the airport with my trolley ignoring him. That’s it. It was easy.

What was your experience at Ahmedabad airport? Did you fly Air-India when you went to Ahmedabad? Tell me about it by adding a comment below.

Using Technorati for Product Reviews

Do you do a Technorati search before buying a product? People usually do Google, Yahoo or MSN search for product information. These search engines return the online retailers as the top results most of the time. If you want to know the opinions of other people who have already bought the product in concern than I believe a Technorati search is the best bet. If you want to know what a Jane Doe or John Doe is thinking about a product or what kind of experiences he or she is having with the product than searching blogs is the easiest way to find out product reviews. With Technorati, you bypass the retailer websites and go directly to the opinions/reviews.

Google Sitemap Accepts Atom Feed From Blogger Blogs

Google accepts Atom feed from blogger as sitemap xml. Today, I submitted Atom feed of this blog to the Google Sitemaps. To my surprise, after 3 hours I got an OK message in the sitemap tool. Looks like Google has accepted this feed and may have crawled the website today. I will keep a close eye on the cache dates of my site and post if Google crawls the site in the next couple of days.

I am expecting a deep crawl this time around. I hope all my individual pages get crawled and indexed so they can appear in the search engine results page.

Last year, Google came up with rel=”nofollow” tag to counter the increasing amount of link spamming done by bloggers. Now, Google needs webmasters to point out the pages it needs to crawl. There is also a speculation floating around that Google is using humans to evaluate the search results. What is going on? Is Algorithm is not doing its job correctly? Are Google engineers losing the battle against black hat SEO tactics? Time will tell.

Anyways, news of the day is that Google Sitemaps accept the Atom feeds from the blogger blogs hosted at blogspot.com.

Blogger Blogs And Search Engine Rankings

Does blogger blogs ever rank well on the search engines? I have seen many blogs show up on the search engine results page, but most of those blogs are hosted on the personal web sites. I have also noticed that these blogs are created using Wordpress, Movable Type or Typepad. The blog you are currently reading is on blogger and I hardly get any visitors from Google or Yahoo. Searching the Google with my blog’s title brings my blog at the bottom of the first page, but not all of the post pages are individually indexed in Google. I can see the URL of the individual post pages in the Google results page but I don't see any title or description of the page, which indicates that Google knows about these pages and it has spidered the pages but somehow decided not to index them.

If you do site:discretelife.blogspot.com in google, it brings up all the pages in my site. But, many of these pages are listed URL only. No title and description is shown on the search engine results page. Only a few pages are listed with their respective title and description. If this continues for a long time, then it is worthless. The title only pages have less chance of getting visitors from search engines.

It may be that Google applies some kind of ranking penalty to the free blogs hosted at blogger. This makes me wonder that if I ever want to put up high quality, researched articles on the web than blogger is not the right choice for me. I should buy my own domain name and host my blog on my own web hosting account.

Blog XML Feeds Are Bad For Your Blog

• If you publish high quality, thoroughly researched articles in a blog then publishing XML feed is bad!
• If you want your site to disappear from the Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines then do not publish your content through the feed!!

What are you talking about? The XML, RSS, and Atom are the new buzzwords of the year and these things are hot. Why are you saying they are bad?

This is bad because when you publish your site in XML format, other people can scrap and copy your content, and make money of your hard work.

There are hundreds and hundreds of scrapper sites out there whose webmasters find XML feeds from various blogs, and display that entire original content without any regard to copyright laws. They put Google Adsense ads around these content and make the buck easy way. Some scrappers are so bad that they don’t even put the link to the original site from their copycat site.

One other thing concerns me here is the “Duplicate Content Penalty” imposed by Google and possible other search engines. When the bots of different search engines crawl the web, they also notice the number of sites with the identical content. If these bots find the same identical content on more than one site it may apply ranking penalty to the sites in question. This will bring the search engine ranking down for the original blog, and search engine traffic will slowly dissipate reducing the total number of visitor to the blog. See, the search engine bots do not know which site is original and which site is copycat.

So, what a publisher can do to protect his or her original content?
Well, there are not a lot of things someone can do. Entirely stopping the feed publishing is an option, but I guess not the smartest one. I believe, the XML feed should only consist of the partial content; the title of the post and a little snippet of the post. I believe the snippet should be less than 100 characters or first couple of sentences.

The scrappers can still come to your blog and copy and paste your content to their sites, but at least they are not getting free lunch with XML feeds.

Sandy Point State Park

I visited Sandy Point State Park on Chesapeake Bay last weekend. I thoroughly enjoyed my one-day visit to the “beach”. The Sandy Point State Park is located on the western end of the bay bridge, which connects the eastern shore of the Maryland to the “main” Maryland. Going eastbound towards bridge on Route 50, the park is the last exit before the bay bridge.

The main attraction of the park is the mini beach it contains on the shore of Chesapeake Bay. The beach is about a mile long. As the name suggests the beach is mostly “sandy” with some “stoney” patches mixed in. There are areas for swimming and fishing designated and separated from each other. The park also has boat-launching ramps. I saw many people launching their private boats in the Chesapeake Bay from these ramps. Rowboats and motorboats are also available for renting from within the park. There are benches and tables scattered throughout the park for dining purposes.

The atmosphere was family friendly at the Sandy Point State Park. There were lots of families with children enjoying the summer sun and a dip in the beach.

I liked the park a lot and will be visiting many times in the future.

Air-India is expanding rapidly

Air-India has just announced that it will start a daily service from India to Los Angeles. There will be seven weekly flights; 3 from Delhi, and 4 from Mumbai. The flights will do a stopover at Frankfurt, Germany and will not require a change of aircraft for passengers. Air-India also announced that it is trying to start a daily service to Chicago as well.

After establishing daily service to Chicago, Air-India will have daily services to four US destinations: New York (JFK), Newark (EWR), Los Angeles (LAX), Chicago (ORD).

Trip to Ahmedabad, India

I just came back from my journey to Ahmedabad, India from Washington DC. I chose to fly Air-India from Newark Liberty International Airport. From Washington DC to Newark, I flew Continental Airlines. I will be posting details of this brief (8 days long) journey very soon. Stay tuned.

MSN Search Ignoring Blogger Blogspot Sites?

I think so. I searched for the follwing term in Yahoo, Google and MSN search engines.

"blogspot.com"

MSN returned only 697,515 results for the term. Google came up with 4,170,000 sites contianing term "blogspot.com". Yahoo found the maximum number of results with 38,000,000.

Microsoft is at it again. It looks like that MSN Search is ignoring the sites run by rival companies. Blogger is owned by Google and it looks like MSN Search is not indexing these blogs as much as the rival search engines do. I can find my blog http://discretelife.blogspot.com/ on Yahoo and Google, but my blog is nowhere to be seen on MSN Search. What is going on? What happened to the idea of indexing the "information on the web" regardless the source of the information?

Dell Inspiron 8600

When I bought my dell inspiron 8600 laptop last month, it did not came with the "best" display setup for the screen. I have WSXGA+ screen and it came with 1680x1050 native resolution set by dell. Well, that was almost unreadable. I reduced the screen resolution to 1280x800 and used it for almost 3-4 weeks. It still felt odd every time I fired up my laptop.

Finally, yesterday I realized that there is 1280x768 option available. I promptly moved the cursor left and tested that resolution. It felt perfect with 96 dpi text settings.

This is great. Anyone who have 15.4 inch WSXGA+ widescreen should try 1280x768 resolution. This is the ideal resolution. I am loving my laptop now.

From USA to Ahmedabad

I finally bought my india bound tickets from the travel agent today. I opted to go with Air India from Newark Liberty International Airport to Ahmedabad. This flight will take me to Paris first, then Mumbai and finally land at Ahmedabad. I will fly Continental Airline from Washington DC to Newark.

I finally decided on this option after reading some dreadful experiences of other people on the internet. The following links will take you to some of these experiences and you let me know if you would try to go to Mumbai again. I am sure many Ahmedabad bound passengers now prefer Air India flights because there is no need to do customs in Mumbai. These passengers can get their customs done at Ahmedabad. There is less harrassments by airport staff at Ahmedabad compared to Mumbai airport.

• Mumbai Airport Experiences
• Some More Mumbai Airport Experiences
• Sleeping at Mumbai Airport (Some people dare try this!!)
• Mumbai Airport Blog
• Mumbai Travel Info

Here are the advantages of travelling Air India from USA for Ahmedabad passengers:

• You check in your luggage at your city and pick up your luggage at Ahmedabad. There is no hassle with the luggage at Newark or Mumbai. I will check in my luggage at Reagan National Airport (DCA) and collect my luggage at Ahmedabad.
• There is no terminal or airport change at Mumbai airport. They just let you out of the airplane and into the terminal for an hour while they clean the airplane for next journey. They promptly let you back in. Going from international terminal to domestic terminal in Mumbai with your luggage at 2 am could be a big hassle and risky.
• Coming back you check in my luggage at Ahmedabad and get it back at Newark. At Newark, you promptly give that luggage back to employees working at the "connecting flights" section. They will send you luggage at your final destination. In my case, Reagan National Airport in Washington DC.
• Travelling Air India is not bad now as it used to be. They are trying very hard to improve the service.
• From Newark it takes only 17-18 hours to get to Ahmedabad. If you live in New York area and want to go to Ahmedabad, this is the best option.
• For desi movie fans, you get to watch 2 desi movies in this 18 hours.
• The airplane Air India uses is Boeing 747 all the way to Ahmedabad. Four Jet engines on the plane makes me feel safer up in the air.