Sunil Varma

I’ve been using the Office 2010 beta ever since it came out in November last year and I should say it’s the best thing to happen to Microsoft Office since I don’t know when.

The new Office will be available to purchase starting next month and if you are a student, here’s how you can own the latest and greatest Office suite for $60!

Microsoft has been offering Office 2007 Ultimate at $60 for students for a while now. Combine that with Office 2010’s Technology Guarantee, and you’ll be eligible to upgrade to Office 2010 Professional free of charge.

Follow the above link and buy Office 2007 (you need a valid .edu email address – that’s the only catch!), activate it before September 30th. Then, you can use your activated product ID to download Office 2010 Professional when it’s made available for download.

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I am preparing to take the GRE next month so I thought of adding some kind of vocabulary help on my blog.

So I coded this little hack which shows a random word and its meaning in the blog sidebar. A new word loads every time you navigate to a different page or refresh the page.

Let me know your views about this. The word is right below the blogroll on the right sidebar.

I wanted to make it more advanced, like showing the word’s definition, synonyms, antonyms etc. but I don’t have time for this now. I will definitely make it feature-rich in the weeks to come.

Apple seems to be trying too hard to promote their iPhone. They have gone as far as reporting false specs about their competitors’ phones.

Today, Apple put up a page on their site with a couple of images comparing the battery life of the preliminary and production iPhone versions. There is another image comparing the specs of iPhone with the Nokia N95, Samsung Blackjack, Blackberry Curve 8300, and Palm Treo 750.

The image shows that the Nokia N95 doesn’t have WiFi but actually it does have WiFi! They say that the source of this information is the respective manufacturer’s websites. But the N95 page on Nokia’s website clearly states the presence of WiFi.

This is not good on Apple’s part to state false information for the sake of promoting their products.

Actually, a deeper iPhone vs N95 comparision reveals some interesting facts. The camera on the N95 is a 5 Megapixel one where as the iPhone’s camera is only 2 Megapixel. N95 has 3G, UMTS and HSPDA which the iPhone doesn’t support.

Then comes the internal GPS receiver on the N95 which the iPhone lacks. N95 also allows users to install a wide range of 3rd party applications and themes which gives the user the power to customize just about everything!

(You should have understood by now, I am a great Nokia fan!)

UPDATE: They seem to have fixed it now. Atleast, Apple is fast enough to correct their mistakes!!

I was burning a CD earlier today and I popped in a CD-RW disc, opened up “My Computer”, and selected the drive.

What I saw surprised me… See it for yourself…

View Image

An 8TB Disc – Another of those harmless bugs in Windows?!

UPDATE

FYI, I was using a Sony DRU-820A DVD Burner and a Sony 700MB 1x-4x CD-RW Disc.

As a few of you may know, it is pretty easy to encrypt plain text using MD5. It can be acheived just by calling the function md5(“plaintext”).

But when I recently started working on a Java-based web application, I realised that its not as easy to do it in JSP. So after a bit of research and looking around, I found a cool, simple solution to this problem. Here is the sample code which you can use in your JSP file or a Bean to do the encryption. (You need to import java.security.MessageDigest for this to work.)

String plainText = “root”;
MessageDigest md = MessageDigest.getInstance(“MD5″);
md.update(plainText.getBytes());

byte[] digest = md.digest();
StringBuffer hexString = new StringBuffer();

for (int i = 0; i < digest.length; i++) {
plainText = Integer.toHexString(0xFF & digest[i]);

if (plainText.length() < 2) {
plainText = “0″ + plainText;
}

hexString.append(plainText);
}

out.print(hexString.toString());

This can be a very effective way to encrypt passwords (after accepting them with the FORM POST method) before storing them in the database. Hope this little script will help at least a few.

I saw a blog in which they showed a bus with a firefox logo on it. I dont feel that image looks as genuine as the ones i posted below.

these pics are of a bus in Hyderabad (Andhra Pradesh, India). I see this bus everyday when I go to college. There are actually two of them but today I sighted only this one.

I managed to talk to the driver of the bus and when asked about the logo on the bus, he said he didnt have any idea about that logo and who painted it.

so here are the pics. click on the links for the pics.

Have your say on this.

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