I wanted to write about my recent experiences with this highly dangerous company. I don’t think they can operate with such fraud intentions within the US. But they still are. I need some tips on how to report such companies.

Here are the events that happened:

July 8: A marketing person from Mpingi calls me stating that they have this wonderful phone plan for $35 a month which has unlimited local calls and unlimited calls to a chosen number in India. He said that I could try this service free for a month and use these unlimited minutes.
This person takes my credit card and stores it in his database saying that once you cross this month, you will be charged the regular monthly fee of $35.

July 8: A second person calls to confirm my details and states that you have 250 minutes to use in your first month and did not mention anything about what will happen if you cross this.

July 26: The device for voip is delivered.

Aug 14: I try to contact customer service. I get to hear music from their toll free number for an hour for 3 days. I try to get the support online and finally get them through after this 3 days.

Aug 17: The guy at Mpingi states that if I cancel, I have to pay the 1st month’s service plus some additional charges. Total would be $46. The guy at Mpingi convinces me that the support problems were temporary and I can continue with their service. Unfortunately, I get convinced.

Aug 17: I cannot make any calls from the Mpingi phone. I cannot get customer support online again.

Aug 19: Finally get to talk to customer support and request service cancellation. This time, they say, I will have to pay around $80 for cancellation. Also, that I have to send back the equipment within 7 days. I sent it to them in a expedited post that weekend.

Aug 29: I receive a mail from Mpingi with a return label to use to return the equipment. It is also stated that if things are not done as mentioned, they would consider this equipment sold to us at $99.

You can see clearly all through this how Mpingi has beed clearly changing the amount I owe, not being honest.

PLEASE NEVER FALL FOR THIS COMPANY. THEY ARE A BIG FRAUD COMPANY.

You can see many more reports on the following websites of how people have been defrauded by them.
http://www.asteriskguru.com/tutorials/grandstream_handytone_486.html

http://www.mouthshut.com/review/General_Advice_on_Long_Distance_Telephone_Carriers-139156-1.html

http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/0/303/RipOff0303628.htmколи под наем

htaccess files are optional configuration files used in Apache web servers that can be used to control the directories they are placed in and also the sub directories.

If your host allows .htaccess files, you may want to read the below articles and use the powerful techniques explained.

http://perishablepress.com/press/2006/01/10/stupid-htaccess-tricks/

http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/apache-htaccess.html

Try searching for .htaccess and there are tons of articles you will come across.

Believe me, you will be surprised at the numerous tricks that can be done using .htaccess files.

Some tips from the below link to read your apache log files using the simple grep command.
http://immike.net/blog/2007/07/12/grepping-your-web-logs/

Here are some quotes from the article:

Here’s what a line from an Apache log file looks like:
71.206.3.109 - - [12/Jul/2007:09:16:31 -0500] “GET / HTTP/1.1″ 200 33545 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/419 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/419.3″

For a quick feel for how many visitors I’ve received for the day I use grep to find all of today’s requests, awk to extract the IP address, then sort and uniq to eliminate duplicate IPs (sort is necessary because uniq only works with sorted input). Piping the result through wc results in the number of unique IP addresses that have made requests:

# grep “12/Jul” immike.net-access.log | awk ‘{print $1}’ | sort | uniq | wc -l
1188

For a bit more detail, the following command will determine the 10 most requested pages (excluding css, js, gif, ico, png, and jpg files) and list them in order:

# awk ‘{print $7}’ immike.net-access.log |
> grep -ivE ‘(.gif|.jpg|.png|.ico|.css|.js)’ |
> sed ’s//$//g’ | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -10

I read this interesting and very simple tip on how to convert your linux bash prompt to look like a dos prompt.

Here is the link to the original article.
http://www.linuxhaxor.net/2008/07/18/make-your-bash-prompt-look-like-dos-prompt/

Quote from the article:

Add this line to your .bashrc: PS1=’C:${PWD////}>’
This basically changes the format of your prompt, to look like a dos prompt.

I came across this good article recently. Please consider reading the whole article at the below link:
http://thinksimplenow.com/clarity/find-clarity-in-one-day

I am not a believer on meditation. That would be the only point I would not accept from the article.

The author begins the article this way:

Do you ever get so busy with the details of your life and the countless things you need to complete, that you end up feeling exhausted and disconnected?

The result: Your mind becomes clouded and unable to focus and you start to make poor decisions regarding your priorities. You end up working hard instead of working smart.

How to start:

Set aside quality time to enjoy and do the things you love to do, simple things like walking, hiking, watch people etc. Main point is to turn off all distractions like phone and especially all media. Enjoy everything that you are doing as you are doing it.

Ideas from the author:

• Brain dump: writing all your random thoughts down
• Hiking
• Biking
• Working out
• Book store (no magazines)
• Listen to music
• Watch people
• Sit on your patio
• Take 100 photos

I have tried atleast 40-45 distributions and wanted to write atleast 1 line about the below ones. The list is sorted based on the popularity as mentioned on http://distrowatch.com at the time of writing.

1. Ubuntu: Very stable and the most popular version. But since it is purely open source, the codecs required to play dvd’s, and some formats need to be additionally installed.
2. OpenSuse: Is very popular, but on my laptop, did not do a good job.
3. Fedora: Almost similar as OpenSuse. Codecs need to be installed.
4. Mint: This is Ubuntu with all required codecs and libraries and it is beautiful with Compiz working by default.
5. PCLinuxOS: This is based on Mandriva and has excellent hardware recognition.
6. Madriva: Additional codecs need to be installed. But works pretty well.
7. Dreamlinux: Had difficulty working on my wireless. Is beautiful though.
8. FreeBSD: Not Linux, but is very stable and popular as a server.
9. Puppy: My favorite distribution. Extremely light, Superfast and fully functional. Most friendly linux community.
10. Zenwalk: Worked okay on my laptop. But wireless did not work.
11. Slax: Lightweight and easily customizable. This started me off into Linux.
12. PC-BSD: User friendly version of FreeBSD. Worked well on my laptop.
13. gOS: Again a beautiful version of Ubuntu. Compiz and AWN is installed by default.
14. Elive: Most popular distro that uses Enlightenment as the window manager. My wireless did not work. Is a beautiful version.
15. TinyMe: Very lightweight version of PCLinuxOS.
16. OpenBSD: Claimed to be the most secure OS. But is not user friendly for the end user.
17. Kiwi: Ubuntu with all codecs and libraries.
18. Slitaz: Smallest, beautiful distro (under 30 MB now). Lacks wireless modules, extra codecs etc. Codecs/Flash can be easily installed.

Last but not least, here is a version I created based on Puppy Linux (my favorite).

• Macpup: This is a beautiful remaster of Puppy Linux.

If you would like to try out Linux, here are my recommendations:

• Macpup or Puppy: Actually, if you want to see the beauty and speed of Linux, try this.
• Kiwi or Mint: Stability of Ubuntu, with all required codecs, flash and libraries pre-installed.

One best part about the linux versions are that most of them have Livecd versions. You can boot using this CD into the OS and test it out. There is no need of an installation to test. Also, Puppy Linux (or Macpup), can be run from a livecd always, with your personal settings saved to the hard disk.

I came across this wonderful and thought provoking article today. Really made me think.

Here is the link to the article. I would recommend reading the full article on this link.
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article4362950.ece

This might be a long post as I am trying to quote the important statements from the article.

In particular, there is the great myth of multitasking. No human being, he says, can effectively write an e-mail and speak on the telephone. Both activities use language and the language channel in the brain can’t cope. Multitaskers fool themselves by rapidly switching attention and, as a result, their output deteriorates.

One American study found that interruptions take up 2.1 hours of the average knowledge worker’s day. This, it was estimated, cost the US economy $588 billion a year.

Television was the first culprit. Tests clearly show that a switched-on television reduces the quality and quantity of interaction between children and their parents. The internet multiplies the effect a thousandfold. Paradoxically, the supreme information provider also has the effect of reducing information intake.

Now teenagers just go to their laptops on coming home from school and sink into their online cocoon. But this isn’t the informational paradise dreamt of by Bill Gates and Google: 90% of sites visited by teenagers are social networks. They are immersed not in knowledge but in “gossip and social banter”.

Teenagers are being groomed to think others can be picked up on a whim and dropped because of a mood or some slight offence. The fear is that the idea of sticking with another through thick and thin – the very essence of friendship and love – will come to seem absurd, uncool, meaningless.

They have all noted – either in themselves or in others – diminishing attention spans, inability to focus, a loss of the meditative mode. “I can’t read War and Peace any more,” confessed one of Carr’s friends. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

So what is the solution?

The brain is malleable. Just as it can be trained to be distracted, so it can be trained to pay attention. Education and work can be restructured to teach and propagate the skills of concentration and focus. People can be taught to turn off, to ignore the beep and the ping.

• Enjoy the simple things in life
• Read books once in a while
• Avoid multi tasking
• Stop listening to your ipod always

I already mentioned this in the last post. But thought of having a separate post for this as I love this application.

This is a free file synchronization software available from the below link:
http://allwaysync.com/

Here is a statement from their website:

Allway Sync is free file and folder synchronization software for Windows.
Allway Sync uses innovative synchronization algorithms to synchronize your data between desktop PCs, laptops, USB drives and more. Allway Sync combines bulletproof reliability with an extremely easy-to-use interface.

There are multiple versions available. If you are using this on a USB or using portable apps version, make sure you download the appropriate version from their website.

You can create multiple jobs to synchronize multiple directories. This is the easiest way to keep your computers at two different locations in sync.

You might have noticed that some USB sticks come with a menu similar to your start menu and also applications. I have a Sandisk U3 cruzer USB drive and this has an application called U3 that enables this kind of menu and many applications can be installed onto this.

There is another way you can achieve the same. You can download Portable apps from the below link.
http://portableapps.com/

Here is a statement from their website:
Now you can carry your favorite computer programs along with all of your bookmarks, settings, email and more with you. Use them on any Windows computer. All without leaving any personal data behind.

Once you have installed the portable apps suite, you can select various portable versions of applications like:
- Mozilla Firefox
- Opera
- Filezilla

There are SSH, Anti virus, directory sync, music players, chat clients etc available as portable apps. This is very interesting and useful.

One portable app I love is called Alway Sync. This is a free program that can be used to keep directories in sync.

The default behavior of websites is that if you dont have index.html, index.php or a similar index page, then it just displays a list of files in the directory on the website.

There are some hosting companies that disable this for security reasons, which is good. But in some cases, you just want to give the list of files to visitors for download or viewing.

Here are 2 very good and easy scripts that I have found to be useful with this.

1 - PHP Directory listing from Evoluted.net:
This is a very straight forward and simple directory script written in PHP. You can see it in action on their website too.

2 - Relay Ajax file manager:
This script requires MySQL installed on the server. This indexes all the files in the directory and its subdirectories in MySQL. This provides search feature, optional uploading, access restriction, users, virtual directory support. Also, this has a good ajax interface.