Back Again - After 3 years!

Wow - its been 3 years since my last blog post. Wasn't expecting a wait this long :)

Mostly its been a bit difficult to find things to write about and considering a lot of what you do at a big company is confidential I could use that as an excuse to say I couldn't speak - but then some of the things I worked on have gone Open Source so can't really take that excuse. I guess mostly the reason was I switced to using FB and Twitter and there just wasnt a reason to blog anymore.

My dad recently go onto FB and I setup a blog for him. Check it out here: http://arvind.vashisht.net. For a while I had replaced the G+ comments on his blog with FB comments (so my dad is a registered developer now - Ha Ha. Stupid FB only allows FB comments on a blog if you register it as a Application) That made me think of my own long forgotten blog.

So I recently switched to a Mac at work and since I want to keep track of everything I am doing to solve issues, here goes my first entry in 3+ years :)

Getting Tata Photon Working

• Download the drivers from here: http://www.tatadocomo.com/tata-photon-download-dialer.aspx
• See this post here for more details: https://discussions.apple.com/message/18139781#18139781

Keyboard Shortcuts

Some useful links

• http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1343
• http://www.danrodney.com/mac/index.html
• http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/Site/System%20Bindings.html
• http://guides.macrumors.com/Keyboard_shortcuts

Setup Windows File Transfer

So Mac OSX Lion has replaced Samba with their own implementation. Also for some reason IT hates domain users sharing files. The solution - create a new user, with Sharing Only privileges. Add a group for the new user and add yourself and the new user to that group. Grant the new group access to your home folder (use the Gear Icon in Finder's Info box to add permissions to subfolders also) and then share away. I have found OSX is quite slow while transferring files. The solution: http://www.digitalgatehouse.com/speed-up-your-mac-os-x-with-smbwindows-servers-255

Outlook on Mac

Now this thing is amazingly painful. Outlook on Mac is general 70% functional. You can't insert tables in EMails - pretty much every advanced action requires you to edit in Word and then Share as HTML EMail. I also hate Outlook reminders, so I sync the Outlook calendar with the system calendar via Outlook Sync Services. One thing I found to be more powerful than Outlook on Windows is the search capability. Outlook is integrated with Spotlight search on Mac. This means you can find all sorts of useful metadata tags on messages. Open the Search Menu, select Advanced > Raw Query and you can enter all sorts of queries. For e.g this one finds all pending meeting invites:

com_microsoft_outlook_has_reminder = 1 && com_microsoft_outlook_author_email_addresses != *_YOUR_EXCHANGE_ID_@* && com_microsoft_outlook_recpient_email_addresses = *_YOUR_EXCHANGE_ID_@* && kMDItemDisplayName != Accepted:* && kMDItemDisplayName != Declined:* && kMDItemDisplayName != *Notification:*

Some useful links:

• http://verveguy.blogspot.in/2013/02/outlook-2011-mac-smart-folders.html
• http://blog.stevex.net/2011/03/outlook-2011-smart-folder-with-raw-query/
• http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/mac/forum/macoffice2011-macoutlook/outlook-2011-raw-query-syntax-question/5148b454-38d5-481f-bc6c-dbd19948c6ed?msgId=b8ee2e62-bac5-4c1d-922c-f61f4e0205c4
• https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Carbon/Reference/MDItemRef/Reference/reference.html

Disabling Message Recall in Outlook

Converted from a Google Wave to normal HTML since Wave is shutting down...

Blog Post - 27 May 2010
So this is a test of embedding a Wave in my blog. I have wanted to try to embed a Wave inside my blog for quite some time - lets see how it goes!

Recently someone at work sent a stinker on a group with a large number of people. When he realized his mistake, he recalled it - it didn't go away from some of my friends' inboxes, but it did go away from mine. Usually, a message is recalled for one of two reasons

• Unintentional Transmission - Someone sent off a message to you when they didn't want to
• Post-Stinker Regret - Someone sent of a stinker, then had a moment of panic when his anger subsided

In either case, a recall attempt is usually a source of hilarity - even if its momentary.

Only thing is, if the admin has enabled recalls on the exchange server, it is not possible for you to disable recalls from inside of Outlook. This has happened to me several times and I really don't like people deleting mails that have reached my inbox without my permission - thanks for this Super Creepy "feature" M$! After a bit of research, I found this page which defines the rules of recall.

What this page basically says is that if you disable "Process Requests and Responses on Arrival", Outlook will no longer automatically delete messages on recall. If you just preview mails (in the preview pane), rather than double-clicking to open them, no deletes will happen. Recall requests will show up as a message. If you open the newer message first, the older one - the one with all the content will be deleted. However, it also says that if the recall and the original message end up in different folders, a could not recall message will be sent to the original sender. So now we just need some difference between the recall and a normal message to allow us to distinguish between them. One obvious difference is that the message begin with the String "Recall". However, a perfectly valid message may begin with that. On looking at the headers of the message however, another difference emerges: Recall messages have the phrase "iso-8859-1" in the Subject header.

This gives us the basis of disabling message recall on Outlook. Follow the steps below and message recalls will no longer work:
1. Inside Outlook, Go to Tools>Options. Click on the Email Options button. Click on the Tracking Options button
2. Uncheck the Process Request and Respones on arrival checkbox, click on the Ok buttons till all the dialogs close
3. Go to Tool>Rules and Alerts
4. Create a new Rule. Select "Move messages with specific words in the Subject to a folder".
5. Tick the With Specific Words in the message header checkbox. In the Subject field, add "Recall:". In the header field, add "iso-8859-1"
6. Click Next, Tick the "Stop Processing more rules" checkbox. Set the "specified folder" to Deleted Items
7. Click Next, Next, Finish

At the end of it, the rule should look like this:
Rule Screenshot


That's it, recall will no longer work in your Oulook, even if the administrator allows it and the original sender tries it. The Recall message will end up in the deleted items folder and even if you double click it, will only send a failure message to the original sender.

Wave evaluation: Still not ready for big time! No numbered lists (WTF), no "publish" option, doesn't work in IE6, I am not sure if Google indexes it - overall, useless! Also, the embed JS doesn't work Out Of the Box with Blogger - Blogger keeps inserting <br/>
tags for returns, so I had to convert it to a single line JS!

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Original Post Below

I was trying out embedding a Wave in my blog. It really sucks! If you are lucky, you should see the Wave below. If not, Google Wave Sucks! Try this link instead.

Egypt Photos

Egypt photos are now up.

This time I took some time properly captioning, geo-tagging and touching them up...

My Final Fantasy XIII Themed PS3

I was trying to buy Final Fantasy XIII for my PS3 when what should I find - a Final Fantasy XIII skin for my PS3. The seller (intencity.in) seemed to have a lot of these for sale - I confirmed that it would fit on my "phat" PS3 and placed on order. Four days later, I had a nice high resolution skin for my PS3

Installing it was a bit more tedious - its a sticker and if you don't install it carefully, you'll end up with air bubbles. Still, I managed to get it installed and the results are pretty cool - check out the photos!

Binsar Photos

Photos from my Binsar trip are now up

Not too many photos once again - the trip got cut short due to Holi. We were initially planning to return on Holi day. However, it seems pahadi people like Holi a bit too much - we were warned against traveling on Holi so we ended up returning a day early. Still we managed to visit the Jageshwar temples at least :)