Amit has written a detailed Satellite TV (DTH) Guide and Comparison about the scene in India. He compares the various players that are operating right now and gives suggestions on what should one look at while choosing out of all the available operators. If you are confused about what the advent of all these different names like Tata Sky (Tata), Big TV (Reliance) and Airtel Digital TV (Bharti) means for you, then do take a look at it.

If you are a student (this works for non-students as well but I expect you to be honest ;) ), you can download a whole bunch of software for free. How? Well, all you need is to become an ACM student member, and join the MSDN AA (Microsoft Developer Network Academic Alliance) ACM Student Benefit Program.

Normally it takes around 19$ for you to become a student member but you can do it for free for a limited time by going to http://campus.acm.org/icpc/

Just came across this very cool online emulator that lets you get a first hand experience of how the Google Android based phone T-Mobile G1 (aka HTC Dream) will look and behave like. The sliding notification mechanisms look cool, few of the things aren’t working but still a good thing to check out. However, I don’t know if this is an official site by T-Mobile or not.

Linky: http://tmobile.modeaondemand.com/htc/g1/

I updated my project splert to version 0.03 today.For those who don’t know splert is a tool that lets you convert the multi-client instant messenger pidgin (connects to gtalk, msn, yahoo, jabber, etc) into a full blown answering machine and much more.

The main changes are:

1. Now you can use other 3rd party twitter bots with it to get updates through twitter since the official twitter bot is down since a long time and there are no chances of coming back soon.

Recently I wrote a small autoreply-answering-machine app for pidgin with a simple premise. Send custom automatic replies to different people when they message you and came across a strange bug. It never sent the reply when you received the first message from someone. I was using the “ReceivedImMessage” signal over d-bus (or “received-im-message” for the plugin writers). What I found initially looked to be a gross and basic error by pidgin developers, but later found that it is indeed a good design and thought that I’ll make a post about it for the benefit of fellow pidgin plugin/app developers.