Install Spotify in Ubuntu

Spotify is a commercial music streaming service.

Follow the steps below to install Spotify client in your Ubuntu :)

# 1. Add this line to your list of repositories by
#    editing your /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://repository.spotify.com stable non-free

# 2. If you want to verify the downloaded packages,
#    you will need to add our public key
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 94558F59

# 3. Run apt-get update
sudo apt-get update

# 4. Install spotify!
sudo apt-get install spotify-client

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Why buying smartphone on EMIs is not a wise idea

For a country like India where average salaries are low compared to other developed/developing economies, we tend to spend too much on buying the latest electronic gadgets. This trend of splurging on electronic gadgets is observed more in the new generation because of lifestyle reasons.

Considering that the average life of a smartphone is about one year, we have to ask the question whether buying a smart phone on EMI is really a wise decision. As it is we as a society are very profligate with our money and now the mobile phone companies want us to spend more on buying their expensive and much-hyped devices. Should we take the bait and buy these devices on EMIs? The prudent answer is a vehement “no”!
Though it is a lifestyle choice and up to individuals to choose the type of phone they want to use, this decision has a significant impact on the personal finance of an individual. Every personal financial decision, no matter how big or small, has an impact on the overall finances of the individual. With the current trend of zero per cent interest rate on EMIs (with hidden processing fee) and no down payment, the smartphone business is booming for mobile phone manufacturers, banks and telecom operators (higher ARPU). On the face of it, the EMI option appears attractive to individuals who cannot afford a high-end phone but would like to own one. At a deeper level, individuals usually fall for such offers because they are looking for instant gratification. This nature of ours makes us susceptible to such offers over the savings route.
Opportunity cost
Let us consider an example where an individual who can afford to buy a smartphone worth Rs. 12,000 gets lured by the zero per cent interest, zero down payment bait of buying a smartphone of Rs. 36,000 on EMIs. This individual ends up paying an excess of Rs. 24,000 beyond his means. However, a prudent individual would choose to buy the smart phone that costs Rs. 12,000 and invest the excess amount of Rs. 24,000 in a systematic plan. Considering that he invests Rs. 2,000 per month for a period of 12 months at a 10 per cent annual rate of return, he would accumulate Rs. 25,281 at the end of the year. The same amount would be worth around Rs. 62,093.37 in 10 years. Not to mention that the same individual over the period of 10 years would change at least five smart phones, getting lured into more expensive upgrades every year.
Conclusion
In the era where marketing mavens drive social frenzy around the mobile phones, it is necessary that we do not succumb to the temptation of spending more than what we can afford. The money thus saved should be prudently invested to achieve more important and essential goals.

Source : http://www.desidime.com/forums/dost-and-dimes/topics/why-buying-smartphone-on-emis-is-not-a-wise-idea

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Port Glance

How many ports did you know ??

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How to Enable Java script in your Browser

 

Internet Explorer 6 and above

• 1. Select Internet Options from the Tools menu.
• 2. In Internet Options dialog box select the Security tab.
• 3. Click the Custom Level... button. The Security Settings dialog box will pop up.
• 4. Under Scripting category enable Active scripting.
• 5. Click OK twice to close out.
• 6. Click Refresh.

Mozilla 3.6.X and above

• 1. Select Options from the Tools Menu
• 2. Select Content tab
• 3. Make sure Enable JavaScript is checked

Google Chrome

• 1. Click the settings next to Address bar.
• 2. Click Settings.
• 3. Click on Show advanced settings...
• 4. Click on Content Settings under Privacy.
• 5. Check Allow all sites to run JavaScript (recommended) under Javascript.
• 6. Click OK.

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Free Website Monitoring with SMS and Tweet alerts

The one big advantage with Google Docs is that it can be configured to check your website status every minute and thus you’ll instantly know if your site is down. And it’s free.

The Google Docs sheet will monitor your website in the background at all times and will send an email alert whenever it has trouble accessing the website. If the issue is resolved, you’ll get another notification saying “all’s well.” If you are a tech genius you can also make a twitter account to alert you which will enable you to monitor the downtime history.

If you want to configure this for your server you can do it in 4 easy steps.
You can find the steps here.

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Best BSNL Broadband Plans

Searching for BSNL broadband plans is a pain in the ass. Here is a quick and easy way to access the BSNL plans according to your region.

Click here for more details.

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Why some resumes get shortlisted and some do not

What does your resume say about you?

The first step is to state the objective of your resume which should be to showcase your skills and search for a job. This simple yet essential step outlines the purpose of your resume. The proactive resume needs to bring out important information about your skills both as keywords and as action words.

A resume delivers in two parts:

• It gets you a meeting (the interview) with a recruiter or the hiring manager (your future boss)
• Having achieved step 1, it forms the basis for a decision on your selection.

A few tips for your resume:
It is a good thing to choose a resume from the internet to create your resume. When selecting a template remember that the resume should:

• Not be distractingly louder than your capability and skills
• Be relevant to the industry - job position

Avoid this:

• Senior level data administration professional
• Expert in database management
• Implemented creative solutions to produce fast results
• At home with analytics, data structures
• Comfortable with all aspects of enterprise grade database management

Go for this:

• Skill: Database management
• Expert in: Normalisation, Indexing, Warehousing, Analytics, Stored procedures, Data arrays
• Handled large database tables with up to 5 million records
• Retrieved data in 30 milli seconds using performance optimisation
• Optimised database that did not report any down time in two years

Job hunters, especially at the early part of their careers, tend to write long lists of seemingly meaningless things about their professional personality: team worker, problem solver, hard working, creative, disciplined, never say die attitude, excellent communicator, result oriented are commonly found phrases in resumes. Most recruiters have read these phrases too many times and instantly feel bored. Instead, describe your qualities and strengths in a manner that the resume is true to your personality. Always remember, you are working on a resume, and that is your resume. So make it cautiously.

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Tatkal Timings to be Changed.

After months and years of trolling Indian railway and tatkal booking system, a new timing and conditions favoring passengers are coming. This will come to effect from 10th July as an experiment from Indian railways, until further notice.

"With a view to further improve the delivery of Tatkal tickets to passengers, the Ministry of Railways has decided that with effect from 10.07.2012 booking of Tatkal ticket will start at 1000 hours on the previous day of journey from train originating station instead of 0800 hours at present. No authorised agents, including agents of IRCTC and RTSAs/RTAs will be allowed to book Tatkal tickets from 1000 hours to 1200 hours.

The existing restriction of not allowing these agents booking of general tickets on the opening day from 0800 hours to 1000 hours will also continue," said a Railway Ministry press release.
Source

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Fifa 12 Lagg / Stuck on PC

I am an online Fifa player and my game started lagging from yesterday. I checked and all my other games had no issues. I tried lowering my graphics settings but still it was lagging. I confirmed that it was a bug of Fifa 12 because I could play Battlefield 3 in ultra high settings. After searching around the internet I found that this issue occurs randomly with people having AMD/ATI graphics card.

Please follow the steps below for the fix:

1. Download & Install Latest version of Riva Tuner : download from Guru3D.com
2. Run D3DOverrider.
3. Force VSync & Tripple Buffering OFF.
4. Open My Documents > FIFA 12 > fifasetup.ini & Add this line SCREEN_SLEEP=0 & save. [YES 0 not 16 as you are using D3DOverrider]
5. Run fifaconfig.exe and turn OFF VSync.
6. From ATI Catalyst turn OFF Vsync & Tripple Buffering.
That should remove the LAG & Micro Stuttering if you are using an ATI Card

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Amazon EC2 goes down and drowns Netflix,Instagram and Pinterest along woth it.

Popular web services Netflix , Instagram and Pinterest all suffered downtime on Friday night thanks to an Amazon cloud server outage. Parts of the Amazon EC2 server, which hosts an alarmingly high percentage of the internet's top content, went down in Virginia, United States, due to severe thunderstorms in the area.
The outage was first acknowledged by the cloud provider at 11:21pm EST when, hopefully, most Brits would be unknowingly and comfortably snoozing the problem away.

However, by 1:15am EST Amazon said it had resolved the issue: "EC2 and EBS APIs are once again operating normally. We are continuing to recover impacted instances and volumes," said a statement from Amazon Web Services.
Back online for Saturday loafing Netflix came back online shortly after, while social networking site Pinterest and retro photo-sharing site Instagram also reappeared. So, if you're a Statesider whose Friday night
usually involves watching Arrested Development re-runs and taking filtered photos and uploading them to Facebook, last night wasn't your night. The outage raises questions over the reliability of the servers, given that it was taken down by a little thunder and lightning, but let's hope for better weather in North Virginia for the rest of the weekend.
Via: Forbes

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smartphone from facebook ?

We all use the facebook app in our mobile phones but soon we will be using facebook's own smart-phone. A big part of facebooks traffic is coming from Mobile phones.

During the 1st quarter this year Facebook had 901 million users and in those 500 million of those used their mobiles to access facebook. The migration of web users to smart-phones and tablets was named in Facebook’s regulatory filings for its recent flotation as one of the main threats facing it as a business. It currently makes no meaningful revenue from mobile app users, who are growing in number more rapidly than traditional website users.
It quoted a Facebook employee as saying the site's founder Mark Zuckerberg was "worried that if he doesn't create a mobile phone in the near future... Facebook will simply become an app on other mobile platforms".

To improve its fortunes, the social networking giant is planning to release a smartphone by next year and has picked up former Apple engineers who had earlier worked with the development of i phones and i pad to help with the effort.

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Mobile Advertising From Airtel

The recent deal with Airtel and Qualcom will help Airtel strengthen its 4G mobile service plans in India, with a followup of mobile advertising along with it. The mobile advertising platform will help business reach all corners of the world especially rural areas.

Advertisers can choose from a selection of platform which includes Mobile Internet, Messaging and Airtel direct to Home services. This will help advertises to reach the target audience.

This is an introduction to mobile advertising in India, with am emerging economy and large population its going to be a success. This type of advertising will be an efficient medium says Bharti. Airtel believes mobile ads revenues will grow 40 percent over the coming few years.

Bharti hasn’t revealed whether the mobile advertising services will be expanded overseas. As well as being India’s biggest operator, it operates in 20 countries worldwide, with more than 50 million customers in Africa.

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India Impact On Dell

The computer giant DELL always had a good market in India. With the evolution of many more laptop brands in India, DELL suffered a big dip in sales compared to the last 3-4 years in the 1st quarter.

As a matter of fact the demand was not only down in India for Dell but it was noticed globally which made the revenue fall by 4%. The 4% which is approx $14.4 billion. The first quarter profit compared to last year saw a decline by 33%. The decline in figures is from $945 million in 1st quarter last year to $635 this year.

This shift is trend in my opinion is because of the lack of interest in laptops. People are moving to tabs and smart-phones rather than carry around a laptop. Also the boom of many low end laptops with similar configurations at a cheaper price hit Dell badly. There is clearly a shift in the market towards the low-end segment.

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Microsoft launches its own social network

Microsoft launched its own scoial networking site called So.cl (pronounced "social").

Its currently in its testing phase only accepting limited number of users.
It will be open to everyone very soon. It is believed to be focused towards Students.  It's different from Facebook and Google Plus in that it is focused around search. What students search for on So.cl is shared with other So.cl userss and it can be shared on other networks like Facebook. The idea is to give students a quick and easy way to share information found through searches. So.cl helps users find and share web pages of interest as students do when they work together, Microsoft said.
Below is the screenshot of what the page is like when we register and login:

The Original site is :  http://www.so.cl

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Samsung galaxy s3 pre booking india

You can pre-book your s3 here.
Samsung has announced that we can pre order Galaxy Samsung S III from their estore by paying a inital amount of Rs. 2000. The colour choices which are available now are Pebble Blue and Marble white. Samsung is also offering free bluetooth headset with every handset which is pre-booked.

Even though the price in India is not yet announced the launch price is expected to be Rs 35000. Currently Galaxy note is selling at price of Rs 32000 so we cannot expect to be price lesser than galaxy Note.
Reportedly the pre-orders have crossed 9 million in few days, worldwide.

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openssh-daemon is stopped

I created a new vps node installed with centos. Unfortunatly the sshd service was not starting. I checked the logs /var/log/messages and /var/log/secure but nothing realted to sshd was logged in it.

The service would start but the status was showing stopped as you can see below:

[root@hari ~]# /etc/init.d/sshd start
Starting sshd:                                             [  OK  ]
[root@hari ~]# /etc/init.d/sshd status
openssh-daemon is stopped

After searching across the internel found that /dev/null is a regular file in the node. /dev/null which is suppossed to be a proper character device and not a regular file.

Hence i decided to recreate the same as a charecter device.

[root@hari ~]# rm -f /dev/null
[root@hari ~]# mknod /dev/null c 1 3

After these the permission should look like these.

[root@hari ~]# ls -lh /dev/null
crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 1, 3 May 09 14:23 /dev/null

After praying to god that this should work i started the service again.

[root@hari ~]# /etc/init.d/sshd start
Starting sshd:                                             [  OK  ]
[root@hari ~]# /etc/init.d/sshd status
openssh-daemon (pid  14930) is running...

IT WORKED !!!

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Samsung Galaxy S3 --> London Olympics Official Phone

Reports have been appearing online that the Samsung Galaxy S III - to be unveiled in London on 3 May - will be the official handset of the 2012 Olympic Games. They point to the location of the Unpacked launch event and its timing (delayed from the universally expected date of February this year).

Pocket-lint has also had some indications that the new handset could well be stacked with exclusive Olympics content.
In June last year, during Samsung's Olympic campaign press conference, we were told by David Song, then managing director of UK and Ireland, that the company would be launching a special-edition Olympic Games handset - one that would be able to view live streams of the action.
"We are going to launch a smartphone that all the UK citizens can enjoy," Song teased. "Even if they are not in the stadiums, they will be able to see [the events] on their devices."
Additionally, Visa revealed at its own European security summit in Frankfurt that it was working with Samsung on an NFC-enabled device that would have "special Olympic content" and be an "iconic" Olympic phone. It also said the new device's "commercial availability" would be "global" - much like the latest reports of the Samsung Galaxy S III.
Added together, these statements suggest that the forthcoming Samsung Galaxy S III will come with both NFC and a special dedicated portal for London 2012 Olympics Games live footage.
What is highly unlikely, however, is that Samsung will create an Olympic Games branded edition of the much-anticipated phone. Not only will its shelf life be restricted to the event's duration, but who wants to carry around a top-of-the-range Android handset adorned with the London 2012 logo on it?
Thankfully, tech site BGR says its sources report there will be only two designs of the Samsung Galaxy S III - one in blue and black, the other in white. The site also says there will be 16GB and 32GB versions and a 1080p HD display.
One thing's for sure, we don't have too long a wait to find out.

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djbdns (TinyDns) not starting in Kloxo (Solved / fixed)

After switching from named to tinyDNS in kloxo. The djbdns is not working.
# /etc/init.d/djbdns restart
Stopping Djbdns:
Starting Djbdns:
# /etc/init.d/djbdns status
tinydns is stopped
Also tried to stop and start but still no luck.
 #service djbdns stop
Stopping Djbdns:
# service djbdns start
Starting Djbdns:
service djbdns status
tinydns is stopped

Check if the ip is entered correctly in the following file.
# echo "xxx.xxx.x.xx" >> /var/tinydns/env/IP; chattr +i /var/tinydns/env/IP
# cat /var/tinydns/env/IP
  xxx.xxx.x.xx

Also check if the path is correct in the files /usr/local/lxlabs/kloxo/file/djbdns.init and /etc/init.d/djbdns. Open each file and check the line
Qmailtcp=/usr/local/bin/tcpserver
In my case the location of tcpserver was /usr/bin/tcpserver. Hence i changed this to
Qmailtcp=/usr/bin/tcpserver
Note: Change this is both files.

Now login to kloxo and take Administration --> Servers --> localhost --> Services. Everything should be in green. :)

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Installing LAMP on Linux --> The easy way

What is LAMP? Its actually a short form the expansion of LAMP is
L --> Linux
A --> Apache
M --> Mysql
P --> Php {{ P can be perl or python too }}
These are the basic things which are needed for a web server to work. The steps for installation are for red hat flavoured Linux systems or servers.
Login as root to the server where LAMP is to be installed.

• APACHE

# yum install httpd httpd-devel
# /etc/init.d/httpd start
Now the apache will be installed and its running. You can verify the installation by giving the command.
# telnet localhost 80 which should give the output silimilar to this
--------------------------------------------------------------
telnet localhost 80
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost (127.0.0.1).
Escape character is '^]'.
--------------------------------------------------------------
To configure apache you will have to edit the configuration file /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf. Please make sure to restart apache after editing configuration file for changes to take effect.
#/etc/init.d/httpd restart

• MYSQL

# yum install mysql mysql-server mysql-devel
# /etc/init.d/mysqld start
Now Mysql is started. We will perform a quick basic setup of mysql now.
Note: For fedora 16/17 users
systemctl start mysqld.service
systemctl enable mysqld.service
# mysql
Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 349034 to server version: 4.1.22-standard
Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer.
mysql>
Set the mysql root password now:
mysql>USE mysql;
(Replace 'yourpass with your required password' in the command below)
mysql> UPDATE user SET Password=PASSWORD('yourpass') WHERE user='root';
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
mysql> quit
Bye
Now to login with new details:
mysql -u root -p
Enter Password:

• PHP

# yum install php php-mysql php-common php-gd php-mbstring php-mcrypt php-devel php-xml
# /etc/init.d/httpd restart
To verify the php installation type the command below:
# php -v
We can also create a php info page to test this.

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Playing With ISO File

An ISO file, often called an ISO image is an "image" of an entire CD, DVD, or BD. The entire contents of a disc can be perfectly represented in a single ISO file. An ISO image is an archive file of an optical disc, composed of the data contents of every written sector of an optical disc, including the optical disc file system. When using an ISO file you have three options:

Copy it to a CD/DVD
Mount it to a 'Virtual CD/DVD Drive'
Extract the contents of it to your hard-drive

In this post, i will show how to create an iso of a CD/DVD rom and also to burn a CD/DVD using an ISO image in linux.

CREATE AN ISO OF A CD OR DVD.

Insert the CD or DVD whose image is to be taken.
Do not mount the CD/DVD. You can check if its already mounted using the command mount. Som linux versions have auto mount which automatically mounts CD/DVD.
# mount

If the CD is mounted please unmount it.

# umount /dev/cd--rom  or  # umount /mount/cdrom

Now the final step, create iso by using the dd command.

# dd if=/dev/cd--rom of=/tmp/cdimage.iso

In the above command,

if=source --> /dev/xxx

of=destination  --> file name of ISO

                                                                                     

BURN ISO TO CD.

Requirement: Need a cd rom attached to the system and a plain cd .. lol

First step is to find the inquiry strings of the CD ROM. You can find it by giving the command below:

# cdrecord -scanbus

From the output of the above command find the line similar to this. This depends on the type of cd rom attached your pc.

1,0,0 100) 'LG' 'CD-Writer' '1.0g'

Hence the inquiry string of your device is 1,0,0.

Now we can use the cdrecord command to burn the disk.

# cdrecord -v -dao dev=1,0,0 file.iso

If you need to specify the burning speed then modeify the above command.

# cdrecord -v -dao dev=1,0,0 speed=16 file.iso

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