Bharath's Tech Blog

Google allows multiple simultaneous login

2012-01-26T19:00:00.000+05:30

Google had recently introduces a very useful feature.
Most people had signed up separately for different Google services like Youtube, Orkut initially.
Ever since Google converted all accounts into Google accounts, simultaneously logging into those services became impossible and most users had to resort to using different browsers at the same time.
Youtube in Firefox, Gmail in IE etc became the norms to use multiple Google accounts simulaneously.
All these issues were solved, when Google introduced "Multiple Sign-in" feature.

When signed in into one account, the profile menu has the link to "Sign in into another account".

In above screenshot, both accounts are listed in the drop-down and the user can switch between the accounts seamlessly.

Best ipad music visualizer - Planetary

2011-12-25T09:46:00.000+05:30

Planetary is the most beautiful visualizer for ios devices. The visualization looks extremely crisp especially in ipad2, because of its large screen.
Here are some screenshots of my music library in planetary.

Planetary App Initialization Screenshot 1

Planetary App Initialization Screenshot 2

Planetary app - Galaxy View - ipad2

Planetary App - ipad 2- filtering by #

As evident from above screenshots, planetary's visualizations are unparallaled. Planetary is a must have app for ios users with iphone or ipad. The visualizations look stunning on the retina display of ipad.
Best of all, this cool app is free.
Get Planetary!

Find duplicate numbers in Nokia C6 address book

2011-11-08T22:30:00.000+05:30

Duplicate entries in mobile phone address book causes names not to be displayed and create unnecessary confusions.
Certain models of Samsung and Sony Ericsson phones avoid this by alerting whenever already exisitng number is saved into the address book.Unfortunately, most Nokia phones do not have this feature.
There arises a need to find duplicate entries in Nokia phone. This trick works only in Symbian phones since Symbian phones alone have the phone search feature.

To find duplicate contacts in Nokia phones, simply open the "Search" application and enter the number, the phone will display all names under which the number is saved.

Nokia Symbian c6 home screen with the "Search" shortcut

The "Search" application with the magnifying glass icon can be found within the "Application" folder within the main menu.

Nokia C6 Symbian V5 Search Application

Lets search for Batman...who's that "Bruce Wayne"?

Upon searching for the number within the "Search application", the phone numbers with the same number are displayed.

Visualising website keyword data

2011-11-04T01:53:00.000+05:30

Keyword data available in Google analytics can be visualized in many ways. The data must be first exported from Google Analytics in excel format.

Two such visualization platforms i tested are,
1. IBM Many Eyes
2. TagCrowd.com

IBM ManyEyes is a project by IBM.
There is a need to make a simple free signup at the ManyEyes project page in order to use it.
After signup, data needs to be copy/pasted from excel to the site.
I have copy/pasted the keyword data i extracted from Google Analytics and uploaded the data to IBM and created the following visualizations.

Word Tree Visualization of bharathtech.com's Keyword data in IBM Many Eyes project - Nokia keyword

Word Tree Visualization of bharathtech.com's Keyword data in IBM Many Eyes project - Play keyword

Tag Cloud Visualization of bharathtech.com's Keyword data in IBM Many Eyes project - sing;e keyword

Tag Cloud Visualization of bharathtech.com's Keyword data in IBM Many Eyes project - double keyword

Word Cloud Visualization of bharathtech.com's Keyword data in IBM Many Eyes project

IBM's Many Eyes project website.

TagCrowd.com is an independent website by Daniel Steinbock
Tag crowd requires no signup and can visualize text data alone.
Simply copy/paste the data and immediately the tag cloud appears as below.

Export as CSV for Excel bug in new Google Analytics

2011-10-30T00:48:00.000+05:30

Exporting data as "CSV for Excel" is providing data in improper format.
When opened in excel, the data shows up in single column like the below screenshot.

Notice how the data appears in a single column.
To fix this bug in Excel, select the column, then goto the Data tab.Then Click on the "Text to Columns" button as in screenshot.

Text to Columns feature in Excel for fixing the Google Analytics new version bug

Then follow the steps as in screenshots. Click Next on the first window.

Select comma as the delimiter and click Finish.
Select Ok in the confirmation box that opens.

The text will all be sorted out as in below screenshot.

Thats all.

For those who cannot follow all these steps, simply select "CSV" in the export option instead of "CSV for Excel". The CSV version does not club the columns in excel!

View and export more than 500 rows of data in Google Analytics

2011-10-30T00:22:00.001+05:30

Google Analytics provides a maximum of 500 rows of data per page. This applies to all data within Google Analytics, such as , keywords, referrers, content pages etc. Sometimes, the need comes to view and export more than 500 rows of data in a single page.

Google says that full data can be exported when we export as CSV.
But, sometimes, we need to see the maximum data in the web interface itself.

More than 500 rows can be fetched easily.Even Google officially recommends this for advanced users.
Remember that this trick no longer works in the older GA version. This will only work out in the newer GA version.
First,we need to get to the report page where we want more than 500 rows.Then change the row count from the default 10 to 500.

Screenshot of Google Analytics Keywords Page - Address bar parameter is highlighted in green

Notice the green highlighted area, it contains the parameter called explorer-table.rowCount%3D500

Change this 500 number to any number that is needed.Here, i am changing it into 600. You can change it into 6000, if your analytics profile has that much data.
Dont forget to press "Enter" after modifying this number.

Now, the page will display 600 rows, as in below screenshot.

Design update

2011-10-28T02:18:00.000+05:30

Today, Bharathtech.com gets its latest design update.
This is the latest design.

Latest (2011 October) design of bharathtech.com

Previous (2009 to 2011) design of bharathtech.com

Lets see how this site looked in earlier years.

2006 Design of bharathtech.com

2007 Design of bharathtech.com

2008 to 2009 design of bharathtech.com

Nokia Message icon flashing problem solved

2011-05-18T01:53:00.000+05:30

Recently, the Message alert icon on my C6-00 mobile started to blink, even when the inbox is empty.
This happened in my previous mobile N-73 when there is no space in phone memory to recieve new messages.
From the Nokia discussion forums, i learned that the message icon blinking/flashing is caused by SIM messages.
This is a screenshot of the flashing icon,

Goto Menu> Messaging> Options> Sim Messages, and delete all messages there. This solved my problem.

Solving 'classname' followed by 'int' is illegal (did you forget a ';'?) error in C++

2011-02-28T18:13:00.000+05:30

While doing class based programing in C++, the following error occurs.

'classname' followed by 'int' is illegal (did you forget a ';'?)

The error occurs if the class declaration is not terminated properly.
Class declarations should end with a semicolon.

In the above program, the class terminates near the yellow marking, but a semicolon is missing.
Remember that the same structure of a "struct" is used for classes too. Structures end with a semicolon,similarly classes should also end with a semicolon.

Images in addon domains not loading

2011-02-16T11:31:00.000+05:30

While hosting addon domains on hosting with Cpanel, the images in the addon domains may not load.This is due to configuration problems on the server. To fix this, just disable "Hot Link Protection" in Cpanel.
I discovered this solution while troubleshooting a problem for a friend.

A client's domain name, vasantravels.com was added as a addon domain to their primary hosting account that was bought with "square brothers". But, when the page was loaded, it looked like the image below, without any images.

After hanging around with the DNS settings and file names for few days, finally found out that "Hot link protection" is the culprit.
To disable "Hot link protection", goto domainname.com/cpanel and login with username and password.
Find the "Hot link protection" icon on the interface, as shown below.

After opening the "Hot link protection" page, disable the feature.

Finally, all is well, and the site loaded well.
Replicate this procedure if you were having trouble with images from add on domains not loading properly.

Turn off wifi in Nokia c6

2011-02-15T20:51:00.000+05:30

Nokia c6 (nokia 5800) and most symbian phones with WLAN (Wifi) capability connects to wifi automatically most of the time. This causes significant battery drain and reduces the standby time of the phone. The reason for nokia phones to connect to wifi all the time is because of the Email client int he phone.
By default, when we setup a Email profile, the settings are such that the phone connects to a wifi network whenever one is available and configured.
The phone connects again even if we disconnect manually in the settings menu.
Follow this procedure to turn off the wifi automatic connection and to preserve standby time.

Open the Email application, Goto Settings and select the profile name.

In Synchronisation, select "Retrieval days".

Deselect all the days and select OK.

Hereafter, the phone will not connect to wifi automatically. You can still retrieve the emails manually.Also, while sending an email, wifi will connect and send the mail ,then it will disconnect.

List of bugs in Nokia C6

2011-02-15T19:50:00.003+05:30

The purpose of this post is to list all the bugs that i have encountered in my Nokia C6 phone which i bought two months back. All these bugs are persistent and keep bugging me often.I have already installed all available firmware updates.

1. On startup, phone displays the error message "System Error". This error message occurs every time the phone is restarted.

2.When Maps is minimized and opened again, i get the error "Not enough memory to perform operation".

3.When maps is not properly closed,and i open it again, nothing happens. I have to restart the phone to fix this bug.

4.While composing and sending a message, when i click the Send button, the phone gives the error "Unable to send".This happens at least twice daily. If this error occurs, it is not possible to send the message again.Nothing happens if i send again.Phone just says "Sending" and does nothing.It is not even possible to save the typed message.If i save in drafts, it will be saved as an empty message only. The only option to save the typed data is to copy/paste from the message screen. This error is a very annoying one.

5.Wifi stays ON all the time wasting phone battery charge.Once i configure the wifi, it connects even if i manually go to Settings->Connectivity->WLAN->Wifi hotspot->Disconnect. I got tired of manually disconnecting, only to find that it connects after a few minutes again without my permission.There should be option to turn OFF wifi.

Nokia C6 always ON wifi

Update: This problem was due to a configuration error.See this article, Turn off wifi in Nokia phone.

6. Sometimes, while making a call from the inbox by selecting a message and clicking the green call button, phone says "Call not allowed".If this happens, the only way to recover from this error is to restart the phone, otherwise it keeps on giving the same error message.

7. GPS fails to connect most of the times. Only after repeated attempts at restarting and reopening Maps, GPS connects.

//Screenshots not available for all bugs since they are not easy to replicate.

With Nokia favoring Windows platform, it remains to be seen whether the already neglected Symbian platform will get any attention, if at all , from Nokia.

LiveScience.com appears to be hacked and taken down for maintenance

2011-01-15T19:36:00.003+05:30

7:00 PM 1/15/2011 Indian Standard Time
Was trying to visit livescience.com to catch up some interesting science news.
The site said it was down for maintenance!

No one takes a complete website offline for maintenance, atleast they will supply a cached copy online while major maintenance is done in the back end.

So, i googled livescience.com and got into the recent version of the site on Google's cache.
None of the links worked.All turned up 404.Something's fishy here.
Visiting livescience.com/technology provides this,

Lets confirm the 404 from another proxy.

I googled the links rather than visiting the 404 pages.
Google tells that the links may harm my computer.

That's all the evidence.
Now,lets jump to conclusion.

Livescience.com may have been a target of malware infection ,which could have occurred by tapping into vulnerabilities like XSS or any other hacking method.
Then livescience could have started to distribute malware,which maybe the only reason for the "harmful site" warning by google.
Then livescience might have noticed this infection and immediately taken their site completely offline to avoid infecting their visitors.

As we speak,err,type, people at livescience could be working hard to clean up the infection and bring up the site back online.

Thought of covering this story since this news isn't on any other website.
Will report as soon as livescience is back.

More information about livescience:
Alexa ranking:
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/livescience.com
Wayback machine listing:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://livescience.com
Most recent snapshot at wayback machine:
http://web.archive.org/web/20091027230625/http://www.livescience.com/

Update 1:
Its been 9 hours since this story is posted. Its 2:48AM.
LiveScience is Down now.

Final update: Livescience.com is up and running as of now. (Jan 17, 5PM IST)

Online FTP Manager for quick ftp access

2010-12-18T04:19:00.000+05:30

For webmasters, FTP is the way to move files between the server and local development system. There are many useful clients for FTP, such as FireFTP plugin for Firefox.
Even then, there are certain circumstances in which there is a need to manipulate the FTP contents when a FTP client is not available.
Online FTP clients come handy in such situations.
http://www.net2ftp.com/ is one web based FTP client.
It supports the following functions, described in the screenshot.

Pregnancy period of different animals

2010-11-27T02:18:00.000+05:30

The bar chart gives the maximum pregnancy(also called gestation) period of animals including humans.It is interesting to note that the pregnancy period of the animals increase with their size.Small rats have minimum pregnancy period whereas elephants have the largest pregancy periods.

The pregnancy period of various animals in days (click on the image to view larger size)

The data for this visualization is taken from wikipedia, here , and visualization created with MS Excel '07.

On a related note, the gestation period of animals with the same body size vary depending upon the placenta. BBC article here.

Growing cocoa trees in tamil nadu

2010-11-20T17:17:00.001+05:30

Worldwide, there is a huge demand for cocoa and this demand is going to explode in the coming years.
Dr shapiro of IBM research labs says,(BBC ink)

"In late 2007, it became very apparent to me that we would not have a continuous supply of cocoa going into the future if we did not intervene on a massive scale to secure our supply chain."

Vietnamese farmers' success story with the Cocoa plant. (link)

Almost ripe cocoa beans on a 3 year old tree. Persistent international demand has pushed up prices, and farmers are increasingly relying on the crop.
“A 1000 dollar investment in cocoa saplings can gain a yield for the farmers after 2-3 years of 6000 dollars”

Cocoa cultivating farmer testimonial from tamilnadu, video link.

The tamilnadu agriculture minister stated this in 2009,(The Hindu article link)

“The State produces just 200 kg of cocoa seeds per annum while the neighbouring states such as Karnataka (8,000 tonnes), Kerala (7,000) and Andhra Pradesh (2,500) produce much more. We need to improve this,” he insisted.

Mr. Arumugam said that cocoa could generate revenue of Rs. 1.10 lakh per hectare per annum for which the expenditure was Rs. 15,000.

This page provides the list of nurseries in Tamilnadu, some of them may sell cocoa seeds for planting.

Moreover, TN govt has signed up an MOU with Cadbury to distribute seeds to farmers at very affordable price and also provide technical assistance to the growers.That means Cadbury themselves would buy the produced seeds from the farmers. (Article link)

All these mean that TN farmers can grow cocoa plants within coconut farms and arcanut farms.

This government website provides complete details about planting and maintenance stuff.

Please share more details you may have in comments below.

Nokia c6 review: c6 switches off automatically

2010-10-09T01:33:00.003+05:30

Just bought this Nokia c6 phone few days back,at Chennai,India for 14,000 INR.
Its got good features.
Symbian,Touch screen,5MP camera,WIFI,GPS,3G,front camera for video call, S60 v5,sliding QWERTY keyboard.All is well.
But its too buggy to use.
Infact, the phone got switched off automatically in the phone shop itself.
Those sales people told that its because of low battery charge.
But,the phone continues to shut down by itself every 1hour or so even in battery is fully charged.
Been using this phone for few days and the problem persists.
The only option to restart the phone is to remove the battery and then insert and start.
Its most likely that its a software error(or a hardware bug) that prevents the mobile from a soft restart.
There are no available software updates to fix this issue.
Its very unpleasant to note that this problem ooccured out of the box.One has to wonder about the Quality control within Nokia.
The last option is to take this to the nokia service center.
Will update this post after taking this issue up with Nokia care.

Update 1:
Been to the service center,they flashed the phone and returned it in a day.But the problem persists.Again took the mobile to Nokia care,this time they asked that the mobile be kept in observation for two days.
To be updated soon.
Update:
Apparently, this bug affects many people as well.
Here's lots of people complaining about the mobile at Nokia Forums.

Final Update :
Nokia replaced the motherboard of the mobile after a week and the problem is fixed now. C6 is now running perfectly for nearly a month.

Finding disappeared files and folders after virus infection of pen drive

2010-10-04T01:14:00.000+05:30

Some viruses and worms makes the folders disappear and replaces them with applications or shortcuts to applications that are virulent in nature.
The good side of some of the viruses is that they dont delete the actual contents of the infected system.
For example,in pen drives they hide the files and folders.
Normally, these hidden files and folders can be unhidden by utilizing the "Folder Options" menu in the Tools menu of Windows explorer.
But,most viruses delete the "Folder options" menu and "Task Manager" as well.
One solution is to unhide the files and folders from the command prompt.
To do this,
1.Goto Run (Windows+R)
2.Open Command prompt by typing cmd and press "Enter"
3.Navigate to the pendrive by typing its appropriate drive letter(like E: )
4.Type the following command to unhide the files

attrib -s -h *.*

attrib -s -h *
attrib -s -h /d /s

Now your files will be visible.

Make sure to keep the antivirus up-to-date to prevent viruses.

Unfair "Fair usage policy" from Airtel

2010-08-27T14:13:00.000+05:30

Airtel reduces Fair usage policy limit to 8GB for 512kbps unlimited users on its wired broadband segment.This limit is too low and can be exceeded by downloading large files for 24hours.
The reason people go for unlimited plans is to get more data from the internet.
Whats the use of unlimited plans if they come with such abysimally low fair usage limits?

New plan details from Airtel,as recieved in email. (click to enlarge)

Airtel fair usage policy is unfair.

Petrol prices in different countries of the world

2010-07-06T23:33:00.004+05:30

Petrol prices in different counties of the world.
(click on images to enlarge)

(selected countries)

Venezeula has the lowest price per litre for petrol since it is a petroleum producing country.
Eritrea,a country on the horn of africa is has the highest price for petroleum.
India is in the middle,with the world average.

Country Name	Price in rupees
Venezuela, RB	0.93
Saudi Arabia	7.47
United Arab Emirates	17.28
Myanmar	20.08
Egypt, Arab Rep.	22.88
Iran, Islamic Rep.	24.75
Malaysia	24.75
United States	26.15
Australia	34.55
Mexico	34.55
Canada	35.49
Korea, Dem. Rep.	35.49
Argentina	36.42
Pakistan	39.22
South Africa	40.62
Russian Federation	41.56
Bhutan	42.49
Chile	44.36
China	46.23
Afghanistan	49.03
Singapore	49.96
India	50.90
World Average	51.83
Nepal	52.76
Iceland	53.70
Bangladesh	54.63
Kenya	56.03
Spain	57.43
Costa Rica	57.90
Brazil	58.83
Switzerland	60.70
Zimbabwe	60.70
Austria	63.97
Sweden	64.44
Poland	66.77
Sri Lanka	66.77
United Kingdom	67.24
Belgium	70.04
France	70.97
Denmark	71.91
Germany	72.84
Italy	73.31
Norway	76.11
Cuba	77.98
Japan	81.25
Eritrea	118.14

(above figure in tabulation form)

(Complete list of countries)

*Source data from World bank statistics as of 2008.
Assuming that the price increase would be uniform throughout the world,price positions would be same for 2010.(World bank statistics haven't yet updated 2009 statistics)
Older post about the same topic in 2007 available here.

Take screenshots of mobile screen in Nokia s60v3 phones like N73

2010-06-16T16:35:00.000+05:30

It is possible to take screenshots of the mobile screen of s60 devices and save them as a image.
The screenshots come handy in several situations.One example is that when we want to post the screenshots on the web as part of a tutorial or a review.
There is one open source software available for this.
It can be downloaded here: Screenshot for S60v3 (N73)

Developers can access the source code for this screenshot application here.

Fix "Expired certificate" error in Nokia symbian phones

2010-06-16T15:54:00.001+05:30

Sometimes while installing symbian applications, "Expired Certificate" error may occur.

This is because the certicates are issued for certain time periods,and wont work if many years have expired after the application was created.
For solving this error, change the mobile date to some date in 2007.
This solves the "certificate expired" error and the application will install smoothly.
After finishing installation,change the date back to the current date.

Fix Nokia N73 "Not enough memory to perform operation" error

2010-06-16T15:35:00.002+05:30

Nokia N73 phone sometimes gives the error "Not enough memory to perform operations","close some applications and try again".
This error may occur even if the user doesn't store any data on the phone memory.
This is caused by one application called "LifeBlog".
LifeBlog is an application that tracks everything that goes on inside the N73 mobile.
The reason is one file called "Lifeblog.db".This file's size occupies most of the phone memory and causes this error.
Deleting this file will free up the phone memory and causes the error to disappear and also improve the performance of the mobile.

For deleting this file,special file manager applications are necessary.System files and folders will not be listed within the default file manager.
Install Y-Browser,its a free application.
(Y-Browser may give "Expired Certificate" while installing,follow this simple step to stop that error)
Open the application,Browse into C:\Data\lifeblog\Database and delete Lifeblog.db

Then restart the phone,the database will be created again,but with very less space and the error will go away.

Connect two laptops in wireless LAN without using access point

2010-06-12T16:29:00.003+05:30

First of all, this works only with laptops using Windows 7.

The procedure listed here provides a method to establish wireless LAN connectivity between two laptops running Windows 7. This LAN can be used for file sharing /multiplayer games/internet sharing if internet connection is available in one of the systems.
Connectivity between two systems without using access points such as a switch/router is called as "adhoc" connection.
In this setup,one system acts as the access point and the other system connects to the access point.
One thing to be noted is that one laptop can act as an access point,in the mean time be connected to another access point.The advantage is that this laptop can act as a bridge between two networks.

Step 1: First we setup one laptop as access point
Open Control panel->Network and sharing center
Click on "Setup a new connection or network"

Step 2: Scroll down on the dialog box and Select "Setup a wireless ad hoc (computer-to-computer) network.Then click "Next".

Step 3: In the next window,provide a name for the network and a security key for the network

Then click "Next",if required click on "enable Internet connection sharing" in the next window.
Click "Close" to finish the setup.

Step 4: Now,for laptop-laptop or system-system connections, the IP address of the systems need to be setup accordingly. For normal LAN settings,we use 192.168.1.x addressing, but for adhoc connections,we have to use 192.168.0.x addressing as shown below.

For setting up the IP address,again goto Control panel->Network and sharing center.
Click on the "Change Adapter Settings" link on the left panel.

Step 5: Right click on your wireless network connection and select "Properties".Default name for the wireless adapter will be "Wireless Network Connection".
Select "Internet Protocol Version 4" and click on the "Configure" button.

Step 6: Fill the "IP address"and "Subnet mask" fields as below and then click "OK" to save the settings.

Now the access point is setup successfully.

Step 7: Connect the other laptop to the newly setup access point by using the usual procedure.(searching for wifi and connecting).
Then setup the IP address of this laptop to the 192.168.0.x format.

Now both laptops are in LAN.To play multiplayer games, add exceptions in firewall for the game executables or turn of the windows firewall temporarily.
For file sharing,the laptops can be accessed by their IP addresses or through the Network sharing center.
Internet connection sharing works by default.

Remove WGA error message

2010-06-11T20:21:00.001+05:30

Remove "You may be a victim of software counterfeiting" error message
Microsoft installs "Windows Genuine Advantage" on user's computers and displays annoying error messages to activate the copy.Its a sort of sneaky behavior to install that update without explicit user approval.

There are many removal tools for removing the WGA error message,but most of them are deemed illegal by microsoft.Here is one tool that does it legally.It just removes the update.Make sure not to download the WGA update again.If accidentally downloaded again, use the tool again.

The tool is available at Softpedia.
Here is a backup link,incase Softpedia link gets changed.