Wisetechie Blog : Ctrl your Tech Life

Today in the morning dad asked me to pay the MCD Property house tax, its the one time in the year , dad gets hold of me to do the mind boggling calculations and all. Anyway, this year was much different, thanks to the e-governance initiatives of MCD, we were done in 15 minutes flat !

Although the e-governance initiative is commendable, the site claims to be in BETA, which is quite hilarious actually. Also the site claims to be usable only in Internet Explorer, Microsoft must be thanking MCD like anything.

But what got to me was the extra money charged as transaction fee by UTI Bank, as far as i know only the Railways and Petrol Pumps in India are allowed to ask for transaction fee on Credit Cards. So that means unless i am missing something big , UTI bank is openly flouting rules by asking for transaction fee on MCD House Tax payments on-line. VISA and Mastercard should look into the matter and BAN UTI bank gateways if its indeed true that they are fleecing people.

To pay your property tax online, log onto :: http://mcdpropertytax.in

Well the so called lean season was due to the fact that we were shifting servers and i was having problems adjusting to Cpanel 11 which was giving silly errors on adding an addon domain. Thankfully with help from some of the members at Zoomcities, thats solved. Now we are on an incredible server : Neutron and the DNS seems to have properly propagated.

So back to tech guys, expect some great reviews in the coming times , also there was a problem with the email configuration, that too has been sorted out so our email service will be OK again !

Do you think success gets to a person’s head ?

It does and here is proof. A company claiming to be competing against the services of Flickr sends Mike Arrington (Self crowned King of Web 2.0) a product to test. In the process they misspell Flickr as Flicker (once I was hosting a crossword and a team had misspelled it also :P) , I think I gave them the points.

Anyway he makes a big deal out of it, the product further stopped him from using Firefox 1.5.0.12 when it claims to allow all versions after 1.5.0.8

Big Deal, To all the bloggers out there, never let success get to your head and become as arrogant as this guy has become.

Yes folks, we have lots of Joost invites, and you just gotta follow 2 simple steps to get it, link to this blog from your blog and the joost invite shall be yours !

And expect a review of Joost soon !

The whole ask.com experience is now changed, the site has been made more aesthetic. The searches are slow though. Its more like Yahoo’s one search, displaying results from blogs, wikipedia, image search etc. all on a single page. It also gives suggestions to narrow down your search or to expand it.

You can even skin your interface from pre-designed skins.

Pidgin 2.0 is what was to be GAIM 2.0 , after a string of betas it was revealed that AOL was harassing their engineers. So they decided to change the name of the product in a  settlement with AOL.the new Pidgin is simple fast and effective and i am happy to state it was able to replace successfully MSN Messenger, Yahoo messenger and Gtalk, which are now no longer on my machine. It supports the following protocols 

AIM Bonjour Gadu-Gadu Google Talk Groupwise

ICQ IRC MSN QQ SILC

SIMPLE Sametime XMPP Yahoo! Zephyr

I also love their new mascot, they realise that cute is in !

Rating:

Think that now that you have Windows you don’t need DOS ? Well you aint a techie till you dont know these DOS Commands which make computing simpler and more enjoyable ! Firstly click on start and then type command to open command prompt.

=> DIR - Lists the files and directories.

=> Ping Address- Pings a remote machine or your own machine with data packets and calculates time taken to reply. The ping command will not work on most firewalled PCs these days, but servers usually allow these pings so that people can test connections.

Did you know that the word PING, comes from the sound made by a sonar !

e.g. ping 192.168.0.1 , this will ping the machine with the IP address 192.168.0.1

also ping www.google.com, the name will be resolved by Windows automatically.

=> Type Filename - Allows you to view the contents of any file in DOS itself, useful for txt files and programming documents.

=> Edit Filename - Allows you to edit the file.

=> Netstat - Allows you to view the sites you are currently connected to.

=> IPconfig - Displays your current IP configuration

=> CLS - clears the screen.

=> Tracert - To trace the path to a network node.

And If you keep exploring you will find a lot many more ! Also read about wildcards to make using the dir, copy,rename etc. commands much simpler.

I have said it before and i will say it again, The World Wide Web will continue to surprise you with new and innovative products and solutions. Behold IGotClocked , a great site for one of the most innovative Personal gift i have ever seen. What the service allows you to do is to place yourself, your pets, your loved ones on actual clocks so that you can make the perfect gift.

All orders receive an animated GIF of what their clock looks like within 36 hours of you placing your order on their website so that you know exactly what your clock will look like. Also they send your clock to your home within 3 weeks.

In my opinion this would be a great gift for your parents for their anniversaries, imagine a photo of them in the clock. So the next time you want to gift a personal gift to tell people you care, give IGotClocked.com a try.

Toondoo has this great utility which makes making comic strips extremely fun and easy. It has a nice collection of characters and props. A good number of backgrounds are also present, so anyone can publish their comic strip on the net. Here is my masterpiece

Our readers have often asked what is the difference between the 1800 numbers and the other numbers, the answer is simple. The 1800 numbers are toll free which means is that your telephone is not charged for calling them, instead the person receiving the call (in most cases a company) is charged for the call. All such numbers start with 1800 so as to have maximum awareness. Most good companies offer this service so as to satisfy customers better and to provide an easier way to reach them. Companies like Dominoes Pizza, DHL, MTNL provide toll free numbers to provide quality service to their customers. Companies such as Airtel too provide a toll free number for their customer care like most other telecom companies.

But certain organizations we observe could not care less about their customers. The prime example being Tata Sky. The fact is that they don’t even provide a normal number to call for consumers. I personally have to depend on STD calls to call the Tata Sky customer care in Chandigarh. My rent free government phone is not able to call their ’National Numbers’.  Hence before purchasing a service it is imperative to see if a company actually provides an easy way to reach them and our advice is dump companies which don’t offer you an easy way to reach them.

Tip : To know your MTNL bill in New Delhi, dial 1800-110-xxxx , where xxxx is your extension. For e.g. if your phone number starts with 2601 then you should dial 1800-110-2601, then follow the instructions and you will get to know your bill. Your phone must have tone dialing for this.

This definition is valid for India only