Nice Pic

Nice Pic

Beauty

Subtle difference in ZenCart and Cre Loaded

Oscommerce has two branches, the spiritually inclined Zen-Cart and commercially inclined Cre-Loaded.

Both use same codebase as osc and have a rich set of features. Cre has more intitutive and better looking admin as compared to zen cart and understandably so as CRE has a company behind it.

Altough both have pretty similar basic features there is a subtle difference in the way they treat categories/products.

In Zen-Cart I can disable the whole category and all subcategories/products inside it will get disabled, but it is not possible in cre-loaded. Cre does not support disabling the whole category as such though one can disable individual products.

But there is a flip side to it, in Zen-Cart, one cannot have both product and subcategory within a category, cre on other hand does not have such issue.

For my case I will go with Zen-Cart as disabling the whole category is quite an essential feature.

Magazine Circulation in India

Around 3,500 magazines are in circulation in India.

Source: Namaste London
The scene where Akshay Kumar give a patriotic speech to a firang on Indian Culture. He says 3.5k magazines are circulated in India.

Now how credible is that

Advance Tax

Payment Dates for Advance Tax:

14th September
14th December
14th March

Now what exactly is advance tax.

As the name suggests Advance Tax is basically the tax you pay in advance on the basis of your assessed income. For example I expect to earn 10 lakh in current financial year then I pay tax on this estimated income.

I can pay it on either of 3 dates.

Just wondering why do we need something like advance tax.

Thinking without Words!!

An interesting thought occurred to me recently, Can you think without words?? Almost all of our thinking is done in words and what if someone does not know any language, how would he think (if at all!!) I guess in that case mental processing will be done in form of images (imagination).
Infact there is experimental data suggesting it. (I am applying for next years nobel prize!)

Google Gears and Webaroo

Google is trying to make the web services work offline, and it launched Gears recently. It is a toolkit which developers can use to make their web services work without an internet connection. That is if rediff adds Gears support to their site I can browse rediff without an internet connection!!! And it will automatically sync up the content next time I connect to internet. No user intervention is required expect for downloading and installing a small plugin.

If enough web services add Gears support it could mean trouble for Webaroo, the webaroo people are focusing on providing web packs for offline browsing, for example I can download an India news pack on my computer and browse it offline. But what if all news sites add Gears support , I wont be needing the pack anymore, I will just surf the web as usual and gears will keep syncing content in the background.

I guess after the release of gears webaroo will seriously need to reconsider their strategy of creating and providing offline content, but having said that gears is in very early stage and will require lot of enhancements before it reaches mass adoption. But still I have a feeling webaroo could be in serious trouble.

The Great Indian Reservation Drama

The monster of reservation has taken the centre stage again, this time around gujjar people are protesting. They are blocking highways, burning buses, damaging rail tracks and even killing people!! Why? because they want goverment to grant them SC status!! They are already OBC but they want to be shifted to SC/ST status so that they can get more benefits.

I was just amazed at the intensity of the protest, sometime back YFE also staged protest against reservation but they were peaceful, they did not disrupt life and as a result goverment did'nt really notice them. This time around gujjar people who are mainly illetrate are staging the protest and look at their intensity, the whole state of rajasthan is in turmoil. The whole government has been shaken and nobody knows when things would return to normal.

Gandhian principle dont really hold any more(I cannot understand how he managed to liberate India using non-voilence, maybe his role is overrated?), if you want something, peaceful protest will do no good. If your protest does not disrupt people's life the chances are you will go unnoticed. YFE people made human chains, went on hunger strike etc. etc. and what happened? The goverment hurried and passed the reservation bill.

So YFE people take out your weapons, block roads , burn buses and demand goverment to reverse the reservation bill, but there is only one little problem, this kind of stuff requires lack of rational thinking, lack of education and lack of intelligence and the student community is far too educated and intelligent to engage into such kind of behavior.