Full stop for UNSOLICATED CALLS from Telemarketing companies(INDIA)

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Fed up with unsolicited calls pushing one product or the other? You will soon get relief from such unsolicited calls as you will instantly recognise them to be from telemarketing companies.





From 2011, mobile numbers of telemarketing will be assigned 700 as the first three of eight-digit numbers, this makes customers to know that the call is from telemarketing people. Cellphone users would have the freedom to entertain as well as block such calls.




Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has adopted a method to avoid the above listed problem. TRAI will replace Customer Call Preference Regulation(CCPR) with the existing National Do Not Call(NDNC) directory. Under the new system, subscribers will have to register their numbers with their respective operators. Unsolicited marketing calls will activate within seven days of registration.




If the telemarketer violates the rule and makes calls from numbers other than those beginning with 700, the company will be liable to pay a heavy penalty. If they violate it for the first time, then they will have to pay penalty but sixth violation will lead to an automatic disconnection of that number.




Under the NCDC system, the penalty amount on telemarketers who call numbers listed on the directory was a mere Rs.500 and Rs.1000 but now it is Rs.2lakhs to Rs.10lakhs.



Thank you for reading this article :)







Google's URL Shortener Goo.gl goes public

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Its a great news that goo.gl is now open for public. The much awaited goo.gl debuted in last december and was integrated in various google apps but was never out for public. Now Google has finally launched a website for people who're willing to shorten their URL.

The website goes by its name

goo.gl

and is going to compete with many other URL shorterners like bit.ly and TinyURL. Goo.gl promises security, stability and speed. It has an inbuilt spam detection and being a Google product, I'm sure the availability would be better than the others already in the market. Along comes the URL tracking feature which you can view if you're logged in to your google account. It gives you history of number of clicks, the browsers from where the clicks were made, the country and variety of details.

How to add Perl-CGI support to your apache web server in Ubuntu

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So I assume you've installed Apache(if not then click here to see how) and now you want to run some CGI scripts written in Perl. What I'm going to describe here is only a simple way of executing CGI Scripts. This has some serious security flaws and a pro may just break it in seconds. So if you're a network administrator trying to implement something for your server then this is definitely not where you should be.

I assume you've installed apache using the command "sudo apt-get install apache2".

Next thing you got to install is  this library module that links your webserver with the perl engine.
sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-perl2
Now you're ready to go. You must use this in your browser :
http://localhost/cgi-bin/programname.cgi

The CGI file programname.cgi is present in directory /usr/lib/cgi-bin/.

It is convenient to have a symbolic link to the cgi-bin directory from your /var/www/ directory. You can create one using the following command.

ln -s /usr/lib/cgi-bin/
Make sure the program has all the required permission.

Run PHP and CGI programs in Ubuntu

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You might have suffered from the problem of executing/running PHP or CGI programs in Ubuntu. For all your problems, here is the solution.


Steps to run php programs :--


  • Open terminal and type sudo chmod -R 777 /var/www



  • Now create a folder with the name php.



  • Place your html files in /var/www folder and php files in /var/www/php folder.



Steps to run CGI programs :--




  • Open terminal and type sudo chmod -R 777 /usr/lib/cgi-bin



  • Now place your .cgi or .pl files in cgi-bin folder.



  • Now open your browser and type http://localhost/cgi-bin/programname.cgi


Thank you :)


How to convert .deb packages to .rpm packages and vice versa

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Two mostly used Linux distributions are Ubuntu and the other, Fedora. Ubuntu uses .deb packages for installation while Fedora uses packages with .rpm extension. Problem arises when a person using Fedora gets a .deb package or when a person who uses Ubuntu gets a .rpm package. Here's a simple way to convert them between .rpm and .deb. The solution is the 'alien' command. If you don't have it, use

sudo apt-get install alien

will install alien on to your Ubuntu machine.

Now to convert rpm to debian use

alien rpm-package.rpm

where rpm-package.rpm is your rpm file. A .deb file with same name will be created.

And to convert .deb to .rpm use

alien -r deb-package.deb

where deb-package.deb is your .deb file. A .rpm file with the same name but .rpm extension will be generated.

The same command can be used to convert many other formats. To know more just use the man pages of your Ubuntu machine.

How to convert PDF documents to JPG/PNG files in Ubuntu

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PDFs are so famous that every document that we download now from the internet are in pdf formats. PDF readers are omnipresent that even most of the phones now come with. Whenever I have some document to send through mail I just send it as a pdf document. But there are times when you may want to put a pdf document on a website. The simplest way is to convert the pdf file into jpg/png file which can be easily uploaded to a website. Here's a simple way that converts pdf document to jpeg/png image files in less than 2 seconds.
You need to install imagemagick. On ubuntu, you can do it by typing this in your terminal.
sudo apt-get install imagemagick
Then its just a cake's walk. Execute the following in terminal.
To convert it to jpg image -
convert example.pdf example.jpeg
and if you want to convert it to png -
convert example.pdf example.png
If there are multiple pages in your pdf document then the files will automatically renamed to file-0.jpg file-1.jpg file2-jpg and so on.
Hope that comes in handy next time you want to put a pdf file on your website. 

Execute Perl programs from XAMPP in Windows

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Perl means Practical Extraction and Reporting Language.  Perl is flexible, powerful and widely used programming language.

To execute programs in Windows, follow these steps :-


  • Then browse to folder C:\xampp\xampp\cgi-bin and paste/write your .cgi or .pl scripts :)



  • Generally, you run perl programs is executed in Linux Platform and since we are writing and executing perl program in Windows, we have to change shebang line i.e #!/usr/bin/perl



  • To do above task, delete/replace the line #!/usr/bin/perl by  #!"C:\xampp\xampp\perl\bin\perl.exe"  (This is as per my installation directory).   If you find it difficult, then do not worry, open printenv.pl file where you can find cgi-bin directory and copy the first line of printenv.pl file and replace shebang line of your perl script.



  • Now open browser and type http://localhost/cgi-bin/program_name.cgi or http://localhost/cgi-bin/program_name.pl


Thank you for reading this post. Please do comments if you like this post. Any queries about this post is whole heartedly welcomed :) :)

Execute PHP and MYSQL programs in WINDOWS

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You might have executed php and mysql programs in Linux platform but you can execute those programs in WINDOWS platform too :)

Steps to execute php and mysql programs in WINDOWS:-

  • Download XAMPP from here.



  • Now click on setup file and install XAMPP.



  • After installation, go to Start-->All programs-->XAMPP for Windows-->XAMPP Control Panel.



  • Left click on XAMPP tray icon next to the date(right bottom corner).



  • Now click on Start next to Apache and Mysql.





  • Place html files in htdocs folder(In my system, C:\xampp\xampp\htdocs).



  • Create folder with the name php in htdocs folder. Place your php files in php folder.



  • To create database, click on Shell(As you can see Shell Button in above snapshot) and type mysql -u root and other set of commands to create databases and tables as per your program.



  • Now go to browser and type http://localhost in address bar. Here, you can see XAMPP welcome page.





  • Now run your programs. For example http://localhost/example.html


Thank you for reading this article :)  Please do comments if you like this post and also if you have any doubts, please post it in comments panel :) :)

Ubuntu Coloured - Wallpaper collection

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One thing I love about Ubuntu is the huge support it gets for wallpapers. Open source Wallpapers, I call them. Here's one such a pack of beautiful coloured Wallpapers for Ubuntu.

Ubuntu Coloured

Is it raining in your city?

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What do you do when you want to see whether it's raining somewhere in some city? Don't go searching for weather reports and get yourself confused. Because here's a simple and straight forward site that helps you see whether its raining or not.


Best part is the way it is used. Just append the city name after a slash (/) to the site. Like if you want to see if it is raining in bangalore? then just type the following in the URL bar.


Some more examples are 


Answers are just one of the two. Yes or No. It also gives you some other weather conditions that you may find important. The website is inspired by is

GSpace - Use your gmail free space to store files

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Gmail gives me around 7GB of free space and I've realized lately that I hardly use 40% of it. Now I've found a way to make best use of the free space by storing my personal files in my Gmail free space. The solution is GSpace. Its a firefox plugin that helps you store files into your Gmail. It still constraints on the file size which is around 10MB but that's fine.

Installation is very simple. You can just find your way to the extension in your firefox extension gallery and install it. Otherwise download it from the gspace website which is very simple and described here.

With your firefox browser go to GSpace website. Go to their download page. And select your operating system. Confirm your installation and you're done and free to use the Gmail free memory as your personal stash for storing files. If your firefox fails to recognize your firefox plugin then just go to the downloaded file and open with firefox web browser. That should do.


How to extend sudo's timeout in Ubuntu

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If you're wondering what this is about, then here is the scenario.

You open your terminal and try to execute some privileged commands and you got to add sudo to it. Like, for example, when you have to change permissions you use 'sudo chmod 777 file.txt'. And then it asks for your password. But once you do it, it won't ask you for the password for the 'sudo' commands that you enter in the next 5 minutes. 5 minutes is the default timeout period for which time the terminal is going to remember your password. If you want to extend it then here's how.

You need to edit the sudoers.tmp file. For that, go to your terminal and type this :
gksudo gedit /etc/sudoers
Find the line that says :
Defaults evn_reset
Change it into
Defaults evn_reset , timestamp_timeout=x
where x is the timeout period in minutes.

If you want your terminal to remember your password for as long as you are not logged out or close window, then keep the value of x as -1.

Try Unity Desktop on Ubuntu 10.10 and 10.04

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Ubuntu has finally announced that it is going to end GNOME as Ubuntu's Default desktop environment and has also said that Ubuntu 11.04 will have Unity Desktop Environment which was default for the Ubuntu Netbook editions. I'm not really happy with this change. Unity is light weight, yes. But still not a good choice for a desktop version. Ubuntu is working on a better Unity version for desktop. Hope that would be better. If you want to try Unity Desktop Environment in your Ubuntu 10.04/10.10, then just log in to terminal and type the following code :

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-netbook

Post your views on this change.

Play huge games in LINUX platform

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Are you a LINUX user?


Are you fed up of searching games for LINUX platform?


Are you terribly frustrated by trying out some horrible steps to install good games in LINUX platform?


Then here is the solution for all your problems :)
You are only one click far from playing games in LINUX platform which you actually played in Microsoft Windows Platform.


Yes, we can play games which are specially built for Windows platform in LINUX platform too with a fabulous software named PlayOnLinux :)


PlayOnLinux is a piece of sofware which allows you to easily install and use numerous games and apps designed to run with Microsoft® Windows®.



What are the features of PlayOnLinux software?




  1. You don't have to own a Windows® license to use PlayOnLinux.

  2. PlayOnLinux is based on Wine, and so profits from all its features yet it keeps the user from having to deal with its complexity.

  3. PlayOnLinux is free software.

  4. PlayOnLinux uses Bash and Python.


Download this package from here.
Ubuntu users can download this package from here.


Thank you for read this post :)  Please do comment :)