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2100 AD:Mumbai, an underwater story

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Category : green

TimesofIndia had an article today on a research result revealed by climate expert and professor from the humanities department of IIT Chennai, Sudhir Chella Rajan. Here’s an excerpt.

The Gateway of India will be wiped off the Mumbai skyline. Bhelpuri at Chowpatty will become the stuff of grandmother’s tales.
No flights will take off from Chhatrapati Shivaji airport. No couple will canoodle at the Marine Drive promenade and even heirs to the bungalow of Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan will not be able to resist being evicted from their home.

Ninety-two years from now, all these landmarks of Mumbai will be underwater. That’s the apocalypse scenario drawn up in a report titled ‘Climate Migrants in South Asia: Estimates and Solutions’ that has been commissioned by Greenpeace, a non-government organization.

The current climate change trends have been predicted to raise the average global temperature by 4 to 5 degrees centigrade and this will in turn cause the sea level to increase by 4 to 5 metres in the coming 90 years. The worst hit areas will be the coastal areas and cities which have concrete jungles built only at a mere height of a few metres above sea level. Mumbai is not the only place which will be a victim of this climate change, but it will include other major cities in India like Kolkata and Chennai. The resultant will be a ‘climate migration’ which will render millions homeless and billions of Rupees of property lost. Other global cities will also face the danger of getting submerged. These include London, Tokyo and New York among others.

Considering all these hazards and environmental issues surrounding the major cities of the world, how far do you think will the real-estate boom in these cities remain? Moreover, is the common man aware of these hazards, specially in a country like India where corporates and industries are busy churning money at the cost of the environment, and the common man is busy traveling from one train station to another. The time to wake up has long gone. It is now time to undo the harm.

Links for 2008-03-31

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Category : links

KK.org: 21st century Vinyl

Dosh Dosh: Darkroom: A Text Editor That Helped Me to Write Better Content

Google OS:Not Your Ordinary Google Interface

WordPress 2.5 Has Left The Building

Twitter’s First Marriage and all that lands up on Techmeme

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Category : twitter, web 2.0

TechmemeI really couldn’t care less. I use Techmeme to see the upcoming headlines in the world of Technology. Not to be fed to some dumb tabloid-ish ‘news’. This incident happened on the 21st of March, and it has taken me some time to write about it. It was quite disturbing that even online journalism has become prey to that damned thing called dumbing down. C’mon. What difference does it make if it was the first marriage proposal or the second or the 658th? Apparently there are discussions all across, and by that I mean respectable blogs we read – Wired and Mashable to name a few. Discussions over the authenticity of the marriage or it being just a publicity stunt, or even the authenticity of it being the very FIRST one.
TwitterFirst things first. SHUT UP. Let’s move ahead from the Twitter jungle and the low lives who feel it’s cool to propose the love of your ‘Virtual’ Life on a Social Networking Tool. Is that how Life has shaped up. Are we moving ahead in a direction where proposing via SMS would become a norm. For the non-starters, here’s what actually got delivered. For the 140 character limit, the message had to crisp, sweet and precisely accurate without omitting any necessary emotions.

The message read: “To @emilychang – After fifteen years of blissful happiness I would like to ask for your hand in marriage?”

The reply, within a minute: “@maxkiesler – yes, i do.” Of course you do.!!!!

My question is to Techmeme. Is this what is meant by Tech-headlines? Lemme try create something more explosive and probably my blog could get bloated up in terms of incoming links from Techmeme. Here’s one for starters: Techmeme bashed by Techkeyla. Please oh Please try and avoid these stupid news and let them remain buried in the world of underground blogosphere.

P.S. Do read the comments on the post on Wired.com. It’s a whole set of geeks talking of how they proposed by writing a UNIX main page so on and so forth. I predict that by the time the couple decides to split, Twitter will be acquired by either Microsoft or Google. But given, Google already own Jaiku, chances are that Microsoft might head for Twitter, or may be not.

Free FTP Client for Firefox: FireFTP

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Category : firefox

FireFTP

I know there are quite a lot of browser add-ons when it comes to Firefox, and this might just be yet another add-on. Or is it? FireFTP is a free FTP client for your Firefox browser and is available for download here.Now, is there any  extra advantage of using a browser based FTP Client, when you can use your friendly neighborhood Filezilla which also comes for free and is jampacked with every FTP powerful feature you can ever think of. I think the major advantage is that with your Firefox browser being (almost) always open , you need not go and open another FTP Client.

Let’s discuss the features. Like every other Firefox add-on, this one comes for FREE. It’s cross platform and so works on Windows, Mac ,Linux. Just needs your browser. So there’s one advantage over Filezilla. For security, it uses SSL/TLS support ,the same encryption used by online banking websites. It has automatic reconnect and resume transfer options.Other options  include Export/Import account, File Hashing, Drag n Drop, TimeStamp Synchronization and Proxy Support.  For the full list of features go here.

Bundled with Tutorials and help files and IPv6 support, FireFTP seems to be a god alternative FTP client. And above all it’s OPENSOURCE.

Language translation in Gmail and GTalk

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Category : google

GMail

Talk about integration. Google is bringing its translation tool into its Mail service and GTalk so says, Computerworld. There are already bots available to facilitate this service. However, there is a fair chance of the translation service being inaccurate similar to its translation tool, but while talking to a person with no common language of communication, this addition might actually help a lot in getting a fair idea of the conversation.

Google’s Matt Glotzbach said:-

What you need for real-time automated machine translation is large amounts of compute power, which we have, and large amounts of data, which we have. Imagine a system that can do on-the-fly translation of things like e-mail, documents and IM chat. That’s a feature you can see on the horizon,

There are still a lot to go for GTalk and GMail’s integrated chat as far as the features that other IM clients offer, We are yet to see a Webcam facility on GTalk, Chatrooms and of course call facility in Gmail and perhaps Skype-style phone calls in GTalk. Google is also working towards providing a cheaper solution to the present pricey options for videoconferencing. Are we looking at the dawn of a Big Goog Communication Expo soon?

Image Courtesy:autodafe0728

Links for 2008-03-28

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Category : links

Nothing is actually special about today. Just another day at work. And I am just whiling away my time reading posts from Bloglines and my Stumble Upon Toolbar. Nevertheless, I am doing some good for the blogging world by contributing my links for the day. So here they are.

Techcrunch: The Music Industry’s New Extortion Scheme

Search Engine Land: Drilling Into Google’s Decline In Paid Clicks

Copywrite Link: Reading Minds: Neuro Persuasion

Torrentfreak: TorrentSpy Shuts Down

Up-Start Blogger: The Rise and Fall of the A-List Bloggers

Ostatic: Yahoo is the Reason for Microsoft’s New Open Source Stance

Ars Technica: Online safety begins with parents, not laws and government

A List Apart: Sign Up Forms Must Die

Coding Horror: The First Rule of Programming: It’s Always Your Fault

I am sorry that I couldn’t post my links for the day due to unavailability of my website. I hope to be more regular from now on. My laptop arrives in two days So wish me luck!! Happy readig Techkeyla. Cheers!!!

Things to Remember while Backing up Wordpress

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Category : blogging, techkeyla

WordpressYes, I ran into troubled water yet again. My webmaster decided to shift my server to a new one, and hence had to go through the process of backing up my blogs, and getting them up again from scratch. It is indeed a pain, at least it was for me. I made a whole list of blunders and I screwed up badly. The result, my blog went offline for a whole 3 days. How frustrating it is to find your blog’s main page set to a white background displaying “Error in establishing database connection”. So this is what you should actually do when you backup your Wordpress, and get ready for setting your blog on a new server.

Things to remember:

Have your wp-content folder in wordpress backed up , including your uploads, images, plugins and themes. I forgot to do it, and my last minute panic was a definite qualifier for the YouTube humor Video Awards. If you DON’t do this, what you’ll end up seeing is your lovely blog set to the default Wordpress Classic theme. Trust me, it HURTS.

(I am not mentioning the other details involved with shifting of the DNS or namespaces etc. My assumption is, that you have your URL ready and directed to the server where you are about to setup your already existing blog.)

So, here we go. First, as mentioned in my previous post, have your backup database ready. Ensure that it has been properly downloaded and that the file isn’t corrupt. Try opening the SQL file in a text editor like Notepad or Wordpad and you should be able to read the contents. The SQL contains your DB Name. Remember this is the DB name which you are gonna use.

Links for 2008-03-21

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Category : links

It’s Holi today, a traditional color-fest where countless hues mingle and people rejoice. A celebration this colorful is totally unmatched. So, Happy Holi to all my readers. And here we go, here are today’s links.

Mashable: Yahoo’s Answer plus Twitter

Jason Falls-SME: Role of Anonymity in Social Media

Dosh Dosh:12 Must have tools for active Diggers

10e20:Confessions of a Search Addict

Valleywag: Google is your new GOD

Chris Brogan: How I tamed my Inbox

Gigaom: Introducing OStatic;the opensource blog