Date: 07/11/07     Keywords: no keywords

UATP, the airline-owned global corporate travel payment network, is helping to enable PayPal payments for online airline ticket purchases and has successfully launched PayPal payment for Southwest Airlines. Through the UATP network of over 220 airlines around the globe, PayPal is able to use the network to connect to the airlines and process payments. To make the [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/use-paypal-with-southwest-airlines-too/

Date: 07/11/07     Keywords: no keywords

MySpace has submitted another list of sex offenders to authorities. In response to a subpoena by New Jersey Attorney General, MySpace handed over information on sex offenders that joined since May 21st. This is in addition to 7000 sex offenders whose information was released around May 21st. It is expected that an investigation will commence [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/myspace-reports-more-sex-offenders/

Date: 07/11/07     Keywords: no keywords

Nielson / NetRatings, a leading online measurement service, will scrap rankings based on page views and begin tracking how long visitors spend at the sites. New technologies like AJAX, podcasting & online videos make page views less meaningful. How much time someone spends on the site is more reflective of its popularity than simply page views. I [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/nielson-ratings-scraps-web-page-view-rankings-to-accomodate-ajax/

Date: 07/10/07     Keywords: css

I am making some more changes to the site. Bear with my uglification / beautification (you decide) efforts. This is the first step before we move to full CSS based site. I too am joining bandwagon, finally. Every design needs to be changed with time. When I designed it several years ago, it served its purpose [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/uglifying-simple-thoughts-blog/

Date: 07/09/07     Keywords: google

It appears Google is heavily compensating for my increased traffic with significantly lower eCPM these days. It is about 60% of what it was a month or two back. Why does Google penalize for increased traffic? Any thoughts? Or does it expect us to give the traffic to someone else like YPN for example? Any ideas? My [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/why-is-my-google-adsense-ecpm-tanking/

Date: 07/09/07     Keywords: no keywords

After we complete an outsourcing effort for a F 500 and wrap up dispatching all the upgrades for Translator 5.0, we will collectively go for a period of “working vacation” lasting about 2 months or so. What is a “working vacation”? My definition of “working vacation” is when we tie all the loose ends, upgrade infrastructure, [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/time-for-working-vacation-random-thoughts-suggestions-please/

Date: 07/09/07     Keywords: tracker, google

Trackstick II Personal Tracker is a small GPS tracker which records its own location, time, date, speed, heading and altitude at preset intervals. It comes with 1MB Flash memory and downloads the data through USB port. The data can be easily imported to Google Earth to and includes GPX photo stamping feature for adding photos [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/review-trackstick-ii-gps-tracker-integrated-with-google-maps/

Date: 07/08/07     Keywords: no keywords

I am mesmerized by Tesla coils for a long time. My dream birthday present would be either a Tesla coil with at least 10 inch sparks or a show by Dr. Megavolt in my backyard. What would be your dream birthday present?

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/my-dream-birthday-present-whats-yours/

Date: 07/07/07     Keywords: no keywords

Waterlogged streets and flooded homes everywhere in Kolkata thanks to inept Kolkata Municipal Corporation and heavy rains last few days. Personally we haven’t suffered. BSNL Dataone Broadband is proving to the one hell of a crappy broadband provider and to boot it comes with virtually non-existent support. Last week including today my upload speed is [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/this-week-in-india-sorrow-and-joy/

Date: 07/06/07     Keywords: no keywords

A random quiz on a random site thinks I am an OS X What do you think? The weird part is that some of it actually matches! Or maybe I am just too tired and need a sleep. See ya all tomorrow.

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/am-i-an-os-x/

Date: 07/06/07     Keywords: css, html, java

If you thought HTML tables were passe, think again. Show me how you can draw the same picture using only CSS; I will then use it on my blog I think HTML tables are as useful as ever in representing tabular / spreadsheet type data. While recent Javascript libraries like YUI and Ext uses [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/how-to-draw-pretty-girls-with-html-table/

Date: 07/06/07     Keywords: no keywords

Note: This is for Indians who have to travel abroad on short business trips. Which overseas travel insurance company do you use for short trip? I used New India Assurance before, but I find their policy of payment after the expenses have been paid very inconvenient especially if you are for short periods and do not have [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/which-overseas-travel-insurance-to-use/

Date: 07/06/07     Keywords: software

Two good articles on coding standards and traits of good software developer which I think you will enjoy: 1. Top 10 Reasons Not To Use Coding Conventions / Standards 2. 5 Habits Of Best Software Developers

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/on-coding-standards-software-development/

Date: 07/06/07     Keywords: no keywords

All I really want is to store a very large Hashtable with more reads than writes. It should be able to deal with more than 8GB of data. The key will be a String of limited length. I want it to be extremely fast on read-access, stable with sudden shutdown and other issues beyond our [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/what-is-the-best-database-for-a-souped-up-hashtable/

Date: 07/06/07     Keywords: java

Java provides a super simple, yet hidden from plain view, way to do basic authentication of HttpURLConnection / URLConnection. Before making a connection add the following lines of code: final String login ="..."; final String password ="..."; Authenticator.setDefault(new Authenticator() { protected PasswordAuthentication getPasswordAuthentication() { return new PasswordAuthentication (login, password.toCharArray()); [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/java-tip-basic-authentication-with-httpurlconnection/

Date: 07/05/07     Keywords: no keywords

When I signed up for text-link-ads several months earlier, I meticulously read the terms and conditions. Nowhere was it mentioned that you couldn’t use nofollow on your links. As such I had signed up with text-link-ads and have used nofollow from the very beginning. I used to make under 400$ monthly. Few days back I [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/i-said-no-to-text-link-ads/

Date: 07/05/07     Keywords: microsoft

I tested several file compression programs like zip, gzip, arj, bzip2, jar etc for compressing big files. The corpus constituted 5 POI generated Microsoft Excel documents totaling 298.8 MB. And there is a clear winner! About the data The file excel documents were standard corporate data of a very big corporation (read Fortune 500). There is nothing [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/file-archivers-smackdown/

Date: 07/05/07     Keywords: no keywords

Monsoon is a feature of Indian sub-continent. The rainy season is upon us and with a vengeance this time. There are water-logged streets and homes everywhere, thanks to effective drainage management of Kolkata Municipal Corporation. Businesses, including IT, are being affected as employers cannot easily commute with public transport being almost down or minimally operating [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/monsoon-season-my-love/

Date: 07/03/07     Keywords: web, yahoo, google

Google and other major search engines (Yahoo, MSN Search etc.) which use back-links for importance calculation of a web page suffers from a fundamental flaw. Back-links can be manipulated and even purchased. While Matt Cutts claim that they can be easily identified manually, I think it is a hard problem to solve algorithmically and hence to [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/mega-challenge-for-google-search-engine-text-link-ads/

Date: 07/03/07     Keywords: css

My blog had this vexing problem where it used to render ugly, really ugly, as the stylesheet wasn’t being loaded on Firefox. However after a refresh everything was fine. Even the Alexa thumbnail displayed the front page in all its css-less ugliness. Initially I thought it was a temporary file loading error. I also reduced [...]

Source: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/solving-css-stylesheet-not-loading-rendering-error/