I knew that Citibank credit cards provide the "Virtual Account Number" option (also called "Controlled Payment Number" or "One-Time-Use Credit Card"). But I never used this feature previously. I tried out this feature today and was pleasantly surprised.
Image Courtesy: Citibank
Virtual Account Numbers are credit card numbers which are generated on the fly and can be used for online transactions. This is very helpful if you do not want to reveal your actual credit card number for online transactions. I always assumed that these numbers are one-time use only. But with the Citibank Virtual Account Numbers, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that you can set up the numbers to be multiple use and also specify limits and expiration dates (up to 12 months in the future). Bank of America credit cards also have this feature but I have not used it.
The "Virtual Account Number" is a great feature for credit card companies who constantly aspire to be "first in wallet".
Update (7/2/2008): Bank of America's one-time-use credit card feature is called ShopSafe.
Related Links:
- Citibank Virtual Account Numbers FAQs
- Controlled Payment Number - Wikipedia
- Orbiscom - the company which developed the technology
An insightful article and a good read. Highlights the ever widening gap between the growing Indian upper middle class and the poor who live next door.
Image Courtesy: NY Times
"These enclaves have emerged on the outskirts of prospering, overburdened cities, from this frontier town next to the capital to the edges of seam-splitting Bangalore. They allow their residents to buy their way out of the hardships that afflict vast multitudes in this country of more than one billion. And they reflect the desires of India's small but growing ranks of wealthy professionals, giving them Western amenities along with Indian indulgences: an army of maids and chauffeurs live in a vast shantytown across the street."
Read the article: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/09/world/asia/09gated.html
- Virgle - Google Main Page | Hoax page | Google Blog
- GDay - Google Australia | Hoax page
- Custom Time - Gmail | Hoax page
To protect a folder in Unix/Linux using .htaccess and .htpasswd, use the following steps:
[1] Go to folder you wish to protect and create a file called .htaccess with the following info:
AuthUserFile /home/your_username/.htpasswd
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
AuthName "Restricted Area"
AuthType Basic<Limit GET POST PUT>
require user admin
</Limit>
[2] Go to the location for your .htpasswd file (typically should be in your home area outside of the public_html folder). If the .htpasswd file does not exist, create it using the following syntax. Enter the password when asked for.
> cd /home/your_username/
> htpasswd -c .htpasswd admin
[3] Make sure your .htpasswd file is readable from the web - chmod it to 644.
> chmod 644 .htpasswd
[4] If additional users need to be allowed access to the same folder,
[4.1] add the users to the .htaccess file (edit the file mentioned in step 1):
require user admin user2 user3
[4.2] add the users to the .htpasswd file (update the file mentioned in step 3). Note that the "-c" option in step 3 is not used here. The "-c" is only used when creating the .htaccess file:
> htpasswd .htpasswd user2
> htpasswd .htpasswd user3
An excellent and easy tutorial is at: http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/docs/tutorials/user.html. A cached copy is here.
I heard this word a couple of days back and I was wondering what it is. So, I finally googled for it. It means "interchangeable".
Definition in Finance:
Interchangeable. The term is often used to apply to financial instruments which are identical in specifications. For example, options and futures contracts are highly fungible, since they are highly standardized arrangements. On the other hand, forwards and swaps are not, since they are customized arrangements. Instruments that are highly fungible tend to be very liquid, and so transaction costs tend to be low.
www.investorwords.com/2132/fungible.html
Definition in the Oil Industry:
Literally means "interchangeable in trade." Commonly used to denote products which are suitable for transmission by pipeline. Ethanol is not considered fungible in this sense, in that it would absorb any water accumulating in pockets in a pipeline.
www.ethanol-gec.org/clean/cf13.htm
Related links:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungibility
- www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=define:fungible
I noticed today that Excel does not allow more than 15 digits in a cell. If you a type a number with more than 15 digits into an excel cell, the digits after the first 15 get replaced by zeroes. I had a hard time trying to figure out how to fix this. You can make the cell accept more than 15 digits by:
[1] pre-formatting the cells as text fields BEFORE pasting the values
or
[2] by start the number with an apostrophe i.e. '
From Microsoft Knowledge Base 269370:
"CAUSE
Excel follows the IEEE 754 specification on how to store and calculate floating-point numbers. Excel therefore stores only 15 significant digits in a number, and changes digits after the fifteenth place to zeroes.WORKAROUND
To work around this behavior, format the cell as text. The cell can then display up to 1,024 characters."
Related Links:
- http://support.microsoft.com/kb/269370
- http://www.mrexcel.com/archive/Formatting/20648.html
"LONDON, England (CNN) -- Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, who left office last June, has taken up a part-time job with a Wall Street bank on an estimated $1 million salary.
Blair will work with JP Morgan Chase, a firm with assets of $1.5 trillion and operations in more than 50 countries. He will advise the bank on global political and strategic issues, a company statement said."
I figured out today that the label "important" is not allowed in Gmail. I thought it was a problem only with my account. But then I tried in some other gmail accounts that I have and I found that you cannot name a label "important". I get the error message: The label name "important" is invalid. I did have a label named "important" a couple of weeks back and one fine day it stopped working and I had to rename it to "important2" :).
I wonder if it is a Gmail bug or if it is on purpose. If it is on purpose/by design, the only reason I can think of is privacy issues. If you flag emails with the "important" label, most probably it is important and might contain banking or other sensitive information, maybe that's why Gmail does not allow its labels to be named "important" to avoid potential privacy issues.
Let me know if anybody else has the same issue.
Related links:
- Gmail Help - Using labels
p.s. Today is Dec 12, hence the 12/12 in the blog post title :)
The Black Friday Deals for major stores are available at the following links:
This year, I don't plan to wait from 4 am outside a store to get a good Black Friday deal. I will pay a couple of dollars more and instead buy it online.
And if you do not know what Black Friday is, it is the day after Thanksgiving (Nov 22 this year) when all major stores have major sales and discounts. This is when the shopping season actually starts and the shopping season continues till Christmas upto the New Year. The "black" part comes from the fact that companies went into the black (i.e. profitable) after being red (i.e. not profitable) due to the large Black Friday sales. More info about Black Friday is available on this Wikipedia page.
Came across this website. Looks useful, because sometimes 1-800 numbers are often hard to find.
To convert a PowerPoint SlideShow file (.pps) to a regular PowerPoint file, just rename the file extension from .pps to .ppt. That's it! This works the other way round too i.e. from .ppt to .pps.
I checked with multiple .pps and .ppt files and they were exactly the same after conversion, even the file size. I did not realize that it was this simple. I thought PowerPoint does some kind of conversion when saving a .ppt file as .pps. But apparently, it just renames/changes the file extension.
More info: http://www.pptfaq.com/FAQ00185.htm
I had to send an urgent fax today and did not have access to a fax machine. I signed up first for eFax. Then I realized that I could not send faxes without paying a monthly subscription. I then went to this Wikipedia page and looked at the list of online fax providers. I finally decided on FaxItNice.
The nice part about FaxItNice is that you have the option of not paying a monthly fee. And the credits do not expire. This served me well because I do not send faxes regularly. And I do not want to pay a monthly fee for something I will not use regularly. I uploaded 2 word files and 1 excel file and there were no issues sending them. I went for their Sending Only Plan which costs 18 cents per page to send faxes to the US.
Bottomline: Definitely recommended for people who want to have the ability to send faxes online.
Link: www.FaxItNice.com
Upgraded to Movable Type 4 today. The upgrade process was pretty straightforward for the first part. However, I really got stuck in one area - in the archives templates section. My archive pages were not getting generated at all. I struggled with it and I realized later that I have to map the archives.
I will write a detailed review later but here are my tips if you want to install MT 4.
1. Don't forget to back up your old blog and the database.
2. Read the "Archive Mapping" and the "Archive File Path Specifiers" help pages.
3. The MT 4 default templates are here.
4. If you want to start from the new templates totally, use the "Refresh Templates" feature which is explained well on this page.
5. If you are having a lot of issues, try the Dynamic Publishing option discussed on this page.
6. Check out the MT news blog.
The new version is totally different and much much better. There are a lot of new features but these are the ones which really impressed me.
1. It is very easy to switch between templates now, similar to the template switching in Wordpress
2. The dynamic publishing is awesome. Maybe it is not suitable for very large sites but I was blown away by it.
3. Better editor and totally new interface.
Little more rambling about the coolness of dynamically generated pages and archive mapping :). I have always statically generated my pages till now. And maybe dynamic generation existed in previous versions of MT but I did not realize it. For example, my post about Bourne Ultimatum can be accessed at both http://blog.maisnam.com/archives/000218.php and http://blog.maisnam.com/archives/2007/08/bourne-ultimatu.php. However, here is the cool part. None of those pages exist. In fact, none of the pages in my /archives folder exist. Even though the user feels that they are actual pages, they are actually dynamically generated in real time. If you knew all about this and feel that it was something very simple everyone should know, so be it. But I am enjoying my new enlightenment :).
Have fun, everybody.
Time flies...
8802288075
Bourne Ultimatum was released in the US today. Just came back after watching the movie. Loved it. I had been waiting for this movie for about 2 or 3 months now. If you have seen Bourne Identity and Bourne Supremacy and enjoyed those movies, and you love action movies, this movie will not disappoint you. Action - oh yeah, you will get a lot of it :). However, be prepared for some shaky camera movement. Overall, a must-see movie. Absolutely recommended.
Reviews and Links:
- Entertainment Weekly
- Official Website
- Yahoo Movies
- NY Times
- IMDB
- Rotten Tomatoes
I bought my silver Toyota Camry 2007 LE automatic yesterday (July 16, 2007). In addition to the standard features, I got a moonroof, a JBL 6-CD changer sound system w/mp3/bluetooth, 16" alloy wheels and a remote start option. The car is awesome! :)
Side view
Top view
Side by side with my old 1992 Camry LE :)
To reduce the size of the desktop icons in Windows Vista, right click and choose "View" > "Classic Icons"
I could not figure this out myself and so I thought this information might be useful for someone. The default Windows Vista icons are too big for me.
I was having a hard time figuring out how to set paragraph indentations in Powerpoint. For some reason, Powerpoint does not have the "Format > Paragraph > Special" option like Word does. I was working on a Powerpoint template which had the first paragraph set to "Hanging" (i.e. the first line of the paragraph is more left indented than the other lines in the paragraph). The trick is to set the indents using the ruler (View > Ruler).
More details are here:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/powerpoint/HP051952391033.aspx?pid=CH063500521033
The only drawback with the above approach is that when you want to make the line a bullet, the bullet is too near the text. In such a case, you can adjust the bullet settings by dragging the ruler indent marker again. The other way (which is quicker) is to click once on the numbered list icon and then again on the bulleted list icon.
To copy entire directories in MS-DOS, use the XCOPY command. For example, the following command
XCOPY c:\photos d:\ /s /e /c /h
will copy the "photos" directory from C drive to D drive. The nice part about the "/c" option is that it will keep copying the files even if some of them are corrupted. Please see the links below for detailed information about the options:
- Microsoft TechNet
- Wikipedia
The reason I searched for the XCOPY command is that I was backing up files from one network drive to another. And I realized that using the Windows based copy command was cumbersome because several of the files I was copying were corrupted. As a result, I was having to manually examine which files were not copied and copy them again. This was consuming a lot of time for me. The XCOPY syntax given above worked like a breeze. It copied the entire folder and ignored the files which were corrupted. In Unix/Linux, you would achieve the same by using the "cp -ap" command. More Unix/Linux commands are here.
I came across an ad today which mentioned that Macedonia is the first country in the world to have country-wide Wi-Fi network coverage. I was amazed and I searched a bit and found out that this is indeed the case. The coverage was possible due to a project called "Macedonia Connects" which was funded by the USAID.
Macedonia has a total area of 25,333 square kilometers - similar to the size of my home state Manipur i.e. roughly 0.8% of the size of India or 0.3% of the size of the U.S.
Image Courtesy: David Liuzzo/Wikipedia
Sometime back, I remembered reading something about Philadelphia going to be the first Wi-Fi enabled city in the U.S. But I am not sure if the project has been fully implemented yet. Currently, Corpus Christi, TX seems to be the only U.S. city which has full Wi-Fi access. Please correct me if I am wrong. Also, c|net has a list of municipal broadband network projects in the US.
Related Links:
- Official Macedonian Govt. website
- Wi-Fi Planet article (12/22/2006)
- Financial Times article (3/28/2006)
- BBC article (11/11/2005)
- Macedonia - Wikipedia
