UEFA Champions League 2014 – Quarter Final Draw

Well, it has been quite a while since I’ve done this. Not following the draw but actually writing about it on the blog. As it is, I have some time to kill and why not just post the draw again…hours after it concluded and with almost every other footballing site & blog having already posted it!

Here is the draw for the Quarter Finals stage of the UEFA Champions League 2014:

First legs of the quarter finals will be played on 1st & 2nd April with the return legs scheduled on 8th & 9th April.

Of course the stand out draw is Manchester United versus Bayern Munich. The team toiling in seventh position in the Premier League against the runaway leaders in the Bundesliga. A manager who has won just one Community Shield against a manager who has a grand total of 13 major honours in club football. A midfield of Michael Carrick, Marouane Fellaini  & Tom Cleverley against the likes of Bastian Schweinsteiger, Toni Kroos & Mario Gotze. Fullbacks Rafael and Alex Buttner against the flying wingers Arjen Robben and Franck Ribery.

Only advantage as I see it – Wayne Rooney, Danny Welbeck & Robin Van Persie against Dante, David Alaba & Jerome Boateng.

Bring it on!

How to activate Partial DND & receive SMS from selected categories

Starting September 27th, the Do Not Disturb (DND) regulations from TRAI will kick-in, meaning mobile users who have subscribed to the National Do Not Call Registry will stop receiving unsolicited SMS or Calls from telemarketers, financial institutions, advertisers and any other pesky services that harangue users by sending such messages.

While this is a good (and long overdue) move by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India which will guarantee some peace of mind to consumers, there is a flipside to it as well. Mobile users will also not receive “informational” messages from various services providers or institutions. For example, you will receive (not sure though) any SMS about the call taxi that you had just booked or the confirmation SMS from an eCommerce site that you made a purchase on.

Though the unsolicited messages menace is a genuine one, there are some messages that users will actually need and await for. How to address that, you might ask.

Well, there is a way to implement Partial DND i.e. selectively activate the do not disturb services for a particular category. Details below:

What’s Up?

This:

Firefox 5’s Here. Already.

It feels just like yesterday that Mozilla released the major-est version of their Firefox browser – Firefox 4, with various enhancements. Both within & without, especially in the GUI/look-and-feel department. I’ve never liked the tabs-on-top feature and the disappearing status bar either so I’d tweaked it to look as similar to 3.6 as possible. Well, except the orange menu button – looks nice.

And now hot on the heels, Firefox 5 is upon us. Mozilla had earlier announced that they were ditching the old numbering system and instead focusing on rapid releases and hence we don’t see many 4.x versions. After having been in beta for a couple of weeks, Firefox 5 is available for public download via your browser’s built-in update or from getfirefox.com

And I thought Chrome’s versions were too quick for my liking*!

P.S: * coz I’m a tester and compatibility testing with so many versions is a PITA 👿

30th October 2011 – F1 Indian Grand Prix

The FIA, Formula One racing’s governing body,has released the calendar for the 2011 F1 World Championship and the all-important date is 30th October 2011. Well, the three days of 28th, 29th and 30th October are all important, as the F1 spectacle (circus is such a crude word, no?) comes to the Indian shores.

 

The Jaypee Group Circuit will host the inaugural Indian Grand Prix and is set to the 18th race in a 20-race calendar. Remember what happened in the last-but-second race of this year at Korea? The championship standings were shaken up with the Red Bulls losing out and the Scarlet Ferrari of Fernando Alonso emerging victorious. Imagine something similar happening next year…and will be all the more exhilarating if I was there!

Now, which of my friends stays in/near Noida?

We can haz Reblog! (via WordPress.com News)

Tired of copy-pasting or including a link to a blogpost you liked and wanted to share with your own readers? Ever thought of a process by which you can share some amazing content with others with just a few clicks? And not simply via, ahem, a cumbersome *Retweet* button?

Fret not. The folks at WP have extended this awesomeness into a feature called “Reblog”. This, my friends is the “Retweet” of WordPress. “Reblog”. How original, huh!

Have you ever come across a blog post that you enjoyed so much you wanted to easily share it with the readers of your own blog? Sure, you can copy and paste the link and perhaps even a snippet of text with your own comments, but overall it’s not a particularly enjoyable experience. We wanted to change this and make sharing other posts with your readers as easy as posting to your blog. Today we’re introducing a new like and reblog feature enabled … Read More

via WordPress.com News

Each Chrome extension has its own process?

After an initial dislike, I started using Google Chrome again on my notebook, but to my chagrin found that it was an even bigger memory hog than the trusty ol’ Firefox! Whilst with 3 of my oft-used sites open in Firefox it was at 96k of memory, Chrome with just the one tab open had 8 different chrome.exe processes in the task manager, with a combined memory footprint of 118k 👿

Now I know Chrome creates a separate process for each tab but with only 1 tab, why 8 processes? I started killing the processes, starting with the least memory usage first and look what I noticed:

Each Chrome Extension creates its own process! And each Chrome Plugin creates its own process! What the…

I don’t know if the multi-process architecture is the inherent “good stuff” about Chrome but yes, that does help in keeping the browser running even though a related extension or plugin or tab has crashed. But that comes at what price? What if it were an older PC with just the 512 MB of RAM and a not-so-fast processor? Chrome would just C(h)rawl!

[Update]

Found this page at Chromium.org that says:

Chromium extensions will follow a multi-process architecture to share the same kind of stability and security that regular web pages have in Chromium.  All of an extension’s code runs in a single process, separate from the browser

Good idea but dunno how useful it’ll be with older and slower pc’s.

3G Spectrum Auctions Done – Vodafone doesn’t get AP

The auctions for the 3G Spectrum across the various telecom circles in India concluded today with the Government garnering a whopping ~70,000 Crores in bids. A total of nine companies participated in the bidding for 3G spectrum – all of the biggies and the wannabes in the scorchingly growing Indian Telecom Market. But only seven came away with a grin, and a huge bill to foot!

A clutch of 13 circles were bagged by Bharti Airtel and Aircel whereas 12 circles went to Reliance Communications. Idea Cellular got 10 circles, Vodafone and Tata Teleservices 9 each whilst STel got 3 circles. Etisalat DB and Videocon were left empty-handed.

However, due to the extremely high-profile nature of the circles it bagged, Bharti would have to shell out nearly Rs 12,300 crore for the 13 circles whereas Aircel, which also got 13 circles owes only around Rs 6,500 crore. Vodafone would pay approx. Rs 11,600 crore, Reliance Communications approx Rs 8,600 crore, Tata Teleservices approx. Rs 5,900 crore and Idea Rs 5,800 crore to pick up the 3G spectrum.