Came across a very interesting video trailer for Indian Fiction – The Immortals of Meluha. (Thanks to Reem Saied and Gayatri for posting it)

The Immortals of Meluha is – The Story of Shiva, the simple man, whose Karma recast him as our Mahadev. The [...]]]>

The Immortals of Meluha - Shiva Trilogy

Came across a very interesting video trailer for Indian Fiction – The Immortals of Meluha. (Thanks to Reem Saied and Gayatri for posting it)

The Immortals of Meluha is – The Story of Shiva, the simple man, whose Karma recast him as our Mahadev. The God of Gods.

‘The Immortals of Meluha’ is written by Amish Tripathi, 35 year old IIM (kolkata) grad  who works with IDBI as National Head Marketing & Product.

This book is the first in the trilogy he is writing.

Trilogy is as follows:

Book 1: “The Immortals of Meluha” – Released on 28′th Feb 2010

You can buy this book from FlipCart at 25% discount and free shipping here :  Buy the Immortals of Meluha

Book 2: “The Secret of the Nagas”

Book 3: “The Oath of the Vayuputras”

Check his website :  http://shivatrilogy.com/

Check the video trailer here :

I’ll be buying these books as I love fictions around Mythology.

I personally always believed in the theory of humans being treated as Gods.

Strongly believe Ram, Krishna were super human beings who by their Karma attained a state of God.

We shared around 120 saplings (Neem, Ashoka, Herbal Creepers) to friends who signed up, Housing Societies in Shivaji Park, General Public .

We also planted a few saplings at the Scouts Pavilion.

Would like to thank all the people both Online and Offline who [...]]]> We went live with our first Sapling Project distribution drive today at Shivaji Park.

We shared around 120 saplings (Neem, Ashoka, Herbal Creepers) to friends who signed up, Housing Societies in Shivaji Park, General Public .

We also planted a few saplings at the Scouts Pavilion.

Would like to thank all the people both Online and Offline who Tweeted , RT’d , Blogged, Invited others on the Facebook &  turned up for the cause and volunteered for  The Sapling Project.

Thanks to Neeraj, Priyanka, Raxit, Priti Special thanks to Maithili  & Shalaka.

A big thanks to all those who contributed in sponsoring the Saplings.

Sharing some Pics

More Pics  http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/thesaplingproject/

Today was just a start, we will take the movement further  and continue with regular sapling distribution drives in Bombay and other cities.

Coming Soon:-

Sapling project in Bangalore, Chennai & Delhi.

Photo Contest for people who planted sapling.

Sapling Van – Moving all across the city.

Thanks, Peace and Breathe Easy

I mean nothing is wrong with the photograph … the timing of putting it on website could be weird …

It could not be intentional [...]]]> Amidst the current problems faced by tiger woods in his personal life, last thing he could have expected accenture to do is put some really funny photograph of his on their homepage.

I mean nothing is wrong with the photograph … the timing of putting it on website could be weird …

It could not be intentional .. However tag line is absolutely apt : Opportunity isn’t always obvious

Opportunity isn't always obvious

Info for Sapling Sponsors  -

You can sponsor any amount (Cash, Cheque, Wire ) to the cause to either Ranjeet Walunj or Satish Vijaykumar or handover at the venue.

Do feel free to call us [...]]]> We are starting with Mumbai Chapter of The Sapling Project on 19′th December 2009.

Date: 19/12/2009 Time: 11 am Venue: Shivaji Park Dadar, Opp Barista, Mumbai.

Info for Sapling Sponsors  -

You can sponsor any amount (Cash, Cheque, Wire ) to the cause to either Ranjeet Walunj or Satish Vijaykumar or handover at the venue.

Do feel free to call us in case of anything.

Website : http://thesaplingproject.com/

Twitter : @bombaylives @ranjeet_walunj

Map : Barista, shivaji park

Me and Satish are doing a small campaign to plant and share saplings, free of cost to one and all in different parts of our city.

Do check out http://thesaplingproject.com/ for more details and to sign up for the saplings.

Hopefully if we manage to get more friends interested in the idea , we should be able to trigger similar endeavors in different cities [...]]]>

Me and Satish are doing a small campaign to plant and share saplings, free of cost to one and all in different parts of our city.

Do check out http://thesaplingproject.com/ for more details and to sign up for the saplings.

Hopefully if we manage to get more friends interested in the idea , we should be able to trigger similar endeavors in different cities all over India

Do lemme know your views/inputs .

Peace &  Breathe Easy

cforms is an awesome feature rich plugin for WordPress, offering convenient deployment of multiple Ajax driven contact forms throughout the website. Many wordpress based websites use cforms to capture and store form submissions on their site.

Recently came across a requirement where client is running his [...]]]> Many a times people configure and run their entire website using WordPress.

cforms is an awesome feature rich plugin for WordPress, offering convenient deployment of multiple Ajax driven contact forms throughout the website.
Many wordpress based websites use cforms to capture and store form submissions on their site.

Recently came across a requirement where client is running his website on wordpress and also using online marketing campaigns (google, adnetworks)  to drive traffic to his website.

Requirement was to track those custom variables (source, creative name) passed to his website.

Many analytics tools should be able to do this, however he wanted to store the data in surfer cforms submissions in database as well as take some action based on his submission.

This can be achieved using following Steps:

Step 1)   Edit header.php of your wordpress theme and add following lines at the start of the file

session_start();
$am_usrc=$_GET['source'];
$am_adunit=$_GET['adunit'];
if (isset($am_usrc)) {
$_SESSION["amSrc"] = $am_usrc;
$_SESSION["amUnit"] = $am_adunit;
}

Note the variable names and use them as per your variable names. Also you can store them in sessions/cookies/database as per your requirement.

Step 2) Now define the variable names in `lib_aux.php` file from plugins/cforms directory in following manner

### get variables from session and assign to your temp variables
$sessCampaignSRC = $_SESSION["amSrc"];
$sessCampaignAdUnit = $_SESSION["amUnit"];

$m  = str_replace( ‘{Referer}’,        $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'], $m );
$m  = str_replace( ‘{PostID}’,        $pid, $m );
$m     = str_replace( ‘{Form Name}’,    $cformsSettings['form'.$no]['cforms'.$no.'_fname'], $m );
$m     = str_replace( ‘{Page}’,        $page, $m );
$m     = str_replace( ‘{Date}’,        $date, $m );
$m     = str_replace( ‘{Author}’,        $find->display_name, $m );
$m     = str_replace( ‘{Time}’,        $time, $m );
$m     = str_replace( ‘{IP}’,            cf_getip(), $m );
$m     = str_replace( ‘{BLOGNAME}’,    get_option(‘blogname’), $m );

$m     = str_replace( ‘{CurUserID}’,    $CurrUser->ID, $m );
$m     = str_replace( ‘{CurUserName}’,    $CurrUser->display_name, $m );
$m     = str_replace( ‘{CurUserEmail}’,$CurrUser->user_email, $m );

$m     = str_replace( ‘{Permalink}’,    $permalink, $m );
$m     = str_replace( ‘{Title}’,        $find->post_title, $m );
$m     = str_replace( ‘{Excerpt}’,        $find->post_excerpt, $m );

### define your custome variables campaignSRC and campaignAdUnit to store the values from temporary variables
$m = str_replace( ‘{campaignSRC}’, $sessCampaignSRC, $m );
$m = str_replace( ‘{campaignAdUnit}’, $sessCampaignAdUnit, $m );

Note: the variable names and session retrieval … you can get them from cookies if you’ve stored them in cookie files
Also make sure variables used have unique names without conflicting with cforms variable names

Step 3) Use the above mentioned custom variable names in cforms while configuring hidden variables and their values.

{campaignSRC}
{campaignAdUnit}

Configure your form accordingly and insert into your normal post and you are done

Working example of the same can be found here on following two links

Sample Click through url : http://mayavi.info/?source=google&adunit=mayavi_ads

Form url :  http://mayavi.info/index.php/lamp/cforms-test.html

Check the view source of form page and you’ll be able to see the above two tracking parameters in your hidden variables.

cforms contact form by delicious:days

Rackspace has always tried to contribute to opensource in some or other manner. (e.g. Custom Nagios modules,  documenting various technologies used,  and many more ). Some may argue that [...]]]> Rackspace had launched their cloud computing, cloud hosting service Mosso last year. We are hosting at Rackspace for quite sometime, although haven’t been able to try out Mosso.

Rackspace has always tried to contribute to opensource in some or other manner. (e.g. Custom Nagios modules,  documenting various technologies used,  and many more ).
Some may argue that its their business … However contribution in any format is welcome

Rackspace Mosso has gone one step ahead and is offering to support Drizzle (A Lightweight SQL Database for cloud and Web) Development in their capacity. Mosso is willing to employ fulltime developers and let them completely work on Drizzle Database development.

Adrian Otto wrote on Drizzle mailing List:

” I was speaking with Eric Day at the developer conference, and I mentioned that Rackspace is wiling to employ full time developers for the specific purpose of furthering the Drizzle project’s mission. He suggested that I email you on this list becuase he expected there would be interest in this offer. If you work on the project now part time, and want to make it a full time job working exclusively on the Drizzle project, let me know. The Rackspcae Cloud believes in open source, and we want to do our part to make Drizzle a wild success.”

Personally even though I’ve been a big admirer and user of MySQL for the last +10 years, recent developments with MySQL are not looking great and sooner or later I’ll look for replacement.

Drizzle is looking very promising and its manifesto of keeping it “simple, reliable, fast and scalable Database” is wonderful for Web or Next generation Cloud Applications.

IMO Rackspace Mosso has got it right and is willing to put money on the future winning horse. (Drizzle is definitely looking very much future of lightweight Web/Cloud Database.)
It’s logical for cloud services to offer the best, fast and scalable options to its clients and Drizzle will no doubt cater to that specific need.

It looks like Mark Callaghan (Google) likes the idea, along with Jeremy Zawodny and Don MacAskill (SmugMug).

IMHO it will be difficult to pose threat to search engines however real time search results from twitter cannot be ignored certainly.

Especially when the real time news/discussions about events on [...]]]> Lots of people/blogs have discussed whether twitter’s search (Real time) can pose threat to Google or not.  I’ll not get into details of the same again.

IMHO it will be difficult to pose threat to search engines however real time search results from twitter cannot be ignored certainly.

Especially when the real time news/discussions about events on twitter are far much relevant than the indexed news from search engines.
(The news items will take a while to get indexed and appear on the front page.)

We have seen the power of twitter when terrorists attacked the Mumbai hotels. Lots of news channels combined were not able to provide actual happenings as twitter #mumbai was providing.

Mark Carey (@mthacks ) has written the cool greasemonkey script to show twitter search results along side Google results.

I’ve installed it and following is the sample results page

Twitter Search Alongside Google Results

Marc has written blogpost about the same :

http://mt-hacks.com/20090302-realtime-twitter-search-results-on-google.html

How to accomplish this ?

1) You would need Greasemonkey Add on for firefox  — Install from here (If you dont have it) and restart firefox

2) from Userscripts.com install `Twitter search results on google` script written by Marc Carey (@mthacks)

3) Above script loads 5 results from the google search results … However if you want 10 results and along side google search results then …

a) Edit above Greasemonkey script by accesing

Tools –> Greasemonkey –> Manage User Script –> Edit `Twitter Search Results on Google script`

Choose your favourite editor and replace this code with above script

4) Now Google search results will have twitter search along side it …

Please note :

Search engine results for facts/past events are far much superior to Twitter …

Whereas Twitter results may contain current action/buzz across world but can contain lot of noise also