bangalore delhi calcutta mumbai chennai

Above is the snapshot of Google Trends for Bangalore, Delhi, Calcutta, Mumbai and Chennai

As you can see, Delhi dominates the search volumes with Mumbai and Bangalore fighting it out for the second place. Chennai is fourth and Calcutta finishes last.

In news reference volume, Delhi is a clear winner, followed by Mumbai and then rest of the cities. Delhi being the political center is it understandable that it will have high news references.

You can use Google Trends page to discover hottest search terms for any day and do interesting comparisons like the one above.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Robert Alan Soloway, one of the world’s most prolific spammer, who was once on the Spamhaus Project list of top 10 spammers, has been arrested (More about Robert Alan Soloway)

This does not mean the end of spam. According to IronPort, the spam volume has been unchanged since his arrest and is around 70 billion messages per 24 hours, up from 36 billion a day last year.

Spamhaus project says:

Up to 80% of spam targeted at Internet users in North America and Europe is generated by a hard-core group of around 200 known professional spam gangs whose names, aliases and operations are documented in Spamhaus’ Register Of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO) database.

The Spamhaus maintains a real time block list of IP addresses of known spam-sources, including known spammers, spam gangs, spam operations and spam support services. The list is called SBL (Spamhaus Block List).

The Spamhaus Block List (”SBL”) can be used by almost all modern mail servers, by setting your mail server’s anti-spam “Blacklist DNS Servers” to query sbl.spamhaus.org (there might be some license restrictions on this service)

Daily Spam Outbreak (12 months view)

Top 10 Spam-Sending Domains (I was surprised to see Gmail at the second spot but then I get so many spam emails on my Gmail)

Top Spam-Sending Countries

Commtouch from where I got the above charts has a tool to tell you how much the spam costs your organization. You need to feed in: number of employees, average annual salary, average annual daily email per recipient, average % of spam from total email. you will get the total annual cost in dollars with a detailed breakup.

About Robert Alan Soloway  | The 10 Worst Spammers | The 10 Worst Spam Service ISPs | The 10 Worst Spam Origin Countries | Tool to Calculate Spam Cost To An Organization

Popularity: 2% [?]

Web site stats tracking tool StatCounter now allows free users to increase their log size from 100 to 500!

To increase your log size,

• Log into StatCounter
• Click the wrench icon beside your project
• Click ‘Adjust Log Size’, and enter 500 in the box.
• Click ‘Adjust Project Log’ and you’re done!

This will enable you to see the last 500 pageloads for your sites.

If you are new to StatCounter, try it out, it is free and very easy to configure.

Popularity: 4% [?]

It is always frustrating to call the railways enquiry number to get information about train arrival as no one picks the phone. After having similar experience yesterday, I started looking for any websites which provided an updated status information on trains in India.

The quest led me to this page: http://www.trainenquiry.com

The site asks you some basic information about your train number or you can even enter the train name and soon you know the upto date information about that train.

Here is a snapshot of the application:

the site has been developed and is maintained by CENTRE FOR RAILWAY INFORMATION SYSTEMS (CRIS). Besides this they have several other project running:

• Passenger Reservation System (PRS)

• Alpha Migration

• Internet Enquiries

• Booking of Tickets on Internet

• Unreserved Ticketing System (UTS)

Popularity: 3% [?]

I was experimenting with my Windows Vista based Ferrari 5000 laptop when I ran across this site: Windows Marketplace

They have a huge archive of games for download, some paid but lot of them are free! you can sort by price to get the free ones come up on the top.

I downloaded my childhood favorite game: Mario Bros and am enjoying it on my laptop.

Popularity: 6% [?]

There has been a steady stream of sites coming up with online classes for the public which spread awareness around PC, technology, web, electronics etc.

The ones that I have come across and have found useful are:

• CNET: It provides online courses on topics related to technology and electronics. They have a team of SME (Subject Matter Experts) which answers questions in the online classrooms. The questions are more in the comments format with the comments available publicly to view. You need to create a free account with them to undertake the courses but the login helps you keep track of courses you enrolled in. Some of the categories in which they have courses are:
• At Work
• Digital Camera and Design
• Home Entertainment
• Mobile
• Home PC
• Software
• HP Online Learning Center: This learning center from HP provides free online courses in the following areas:
• Software and technology
• IT Professionals
• In-house marketing
• Business skills

With a free account you can keep track of your courses.

• Microsoft ELearning: 24/7 online courses are available and lot of them are absolutely free. This is obviously dedicated to Microsoft technologies but has some cutting edge stuff.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Having problems with Windows Vista and/or Windows XP? Do not know what to do? Try Tech Support Guy Forums where you get free help for Windows Vista, XP and much more.

It is a forum where you can register for free and post your troubleshooting or general question(s) and get answers for free. The quality of answers is pretty good.

You can also browse the Microsoft Vista Support Forums for answers to your questions or post your questions. Assisted vista support from Microsoft (email, chat, phone) is also available, some of which might be free depending on your Vista license and when it was purchased. They have a tool which takes the product identification number of your OS and tells you if you qualify for free support.

Popularity: 3% [?]

I had a huge collection of books (had because I had to sell and donate most of them when I moved from US to India) and I had to sell them off on a very short notice.

I went through the pains to create a an excel sheet with the ISBN numbers of all the books I had. This helped me a lot as most of the used book sites accept a list of ISBN numbers (An ISBN is an International Standard Book Number. Every book sold anywhere in the world should have a unique ISBN, meaning you can find any book in the world simply with that one number. This number can be generally found at the end cover page of any book).

Some of the sites which I decided to use are:

• Barnes and Noble Sell Used Text Books: This is the best site (rate wise) but you have to enter ISBN numbers one by one. Another problem is that they accept very few books. Try this site for your important books. For the ones it does not accept, try other sites. Free shipping by media mail is provided. They send the check in mail on book delivery.
• Cash4Books.net: they gave me a decent rate and free shipping by media mail. They pay you by PayPal or check (I prefer PayPal)
• Some others I looked at: http://www.abebooks.com/, http://www.ecampus.com/buyback.asp (you have to manually enter each isbn and does not accept a list of ISBNs)

You can always sell your books and get best value on amazon and half.com but then you have to wait for someone to come buy from you. The above mentioned sites give you immediate price quote and buy from you (so you don’t have to wait).

Good luck selling your books!

Popularity: 3% [?]