Kudos to Flipkart

Flipkart.com is my favourite online store to buy books, I have even bought a digital camera from Flipkart. Last week, my best friend told she'll be leaving for London and I wanted to send her some books, I ordered them on Flipkart and request them to deliver it within 2 days and to my surprise they delivered it they very next day, wow! Thank you Flipkart.

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Leaves & Dussehra

Yesterday my best friend asked me why I didn't give her leaves on Dusshera, for a moment I thought I heard her wrong, then I asked her, "What leaf? Why?". She told me that there is a custom where people exchange leaves and receiving these leaves was considered to be lucky. Well, I didn't know any of this till now, so I did some research to find out about the custom.

Primarily, there are two tree leaves that are used, one is Apta/Apati & Shammi. Also, there are two legends surrounding the custom, one related to the Ramayana & other to Mahabharata.

Shammi leaves

One legend has it a young man named Kautsa in Ayodhya after attaining his education from his guru Varatantu offered him Gurudakshina (Gurudakshina refers to the tradition of repaying one's teacher or guru after a period of study or the completion of formal education) which he declined to accept, but when Kautsa insisted Guru Varatantu asked for 14 crore gold coins. Kautsa approached Lord Ram for help, and Lord Ram promised to help him and asked him to wait near the Shammi & Apta tree in his village. In 2 days time, Lord Ram with the help of Lord Kuber - Lord of wealth - showered gold coins from the leaves of Shanu and Apati Tree and the leaves of the trees became gold coins. Kautsa collected the coins and gave 140 million gold coins to Guru Varatantu. The rest of coins were distributed to the needy by Kautsa. This happened on a Dussehra day. To commemorate this event people collect leaves of Apta tree and present it as sona or gold.

Apta leaf exchange on Dussehra

Another legend says it is believed that in the Mahabharata, the Pandavas after wandering in the forest for 12 years, hung their weapons on a Shammi tree before entering the court of king Virat to spend the last one year undercover. After the completion on the day of Dussehra, they brought down the weapons from the tree and declared their true identity. Since that time the exchange of Shami leaves on Dussehra day became a symbol of goodwill and victory.

Apta tree, Bauhinia Racemosa, is also known as 'Sonpatta', being considered to be as valuable as gold for its medicinal value. Apta is used as a cure for digestive diseases such as diarrhoea and dysentery & it has anti-tumour qualities and is used to treat the first stages of cancer.

There might be numerous stories associated with the distribution of these leaves, but one thing is that people are always seen to be wishing the good of the other while giving them the leaves.

Newest EditPlus 3.30

EditPlus was released with some amazing features Tortoise SVN integration, support for SFTP authentication using Pagent, virtual space & lot's of new feature. Here's a screenshot.

How To Use The New Rupee Symbol In Your Documents

It's really nice that Indians now have their own currency symbol, but it is still to come up in common fonts available on our PC, so for the time being we need to use an additional font. Here's how you can install the font on your PC and use it.

First download the font Rupee Foradian.

(Windows Users)

Open C:\Windows\Fonts and copy the downloaded file there.

Windows 7 users please check here how to install the font.

(Linux Users)

Copy the downloaded font to /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ ; create the directory if required.

Now, start your favourite word processor software and use ` (back-tick) to use rupee symbol by selecting the newly installed font.

Enjoy using the new font.

Programming Fonts

I was getting bored with the same font in my EditPlus editor which I use daily for developement purposes. EditPlus is very good, simple, has syntax highlighting, etc. I wanted to try some different font tried the usual monospaced fonts Fixedsys, Courier, etc. but wasn't quite satisfied with them. After some 'googling' I found a post by Keith Devens listing a good no. of fonts that are suitable for programming, some are even designed for the programming community. Some are free, while a few cost money. Keith has very well explained the need for a specific font for programming and I totally agree with him.

I liked Monaco, installed it, and I'm lovin' it ;-)
Here's a screenshot of my code using that font.

Click to enlarge

India Get It's Own Currency Symbol

My First Smartphone - HTC Legend

I had been following Android news for sometime now, I really liked the concept of an open-source mobile OS and the features provided by the Android OS and it was time I got a new mobile phone because I had cracked the screen of my faithful, 4-year old Sony Ericsson W700i a few months back. So, last week after doing some research on low-budget Android-based mobile phones I finally chose Samsung Galaxy Spica which costs around INR 12,000 but unfortunately Spica wasn't available in Kolkata, so I went ahead with HTC Legend which costed me more than double the price of Spica, but it surely is worth the money.

The HTC Legend sports an aluminum unibody casing, AMOLED capacitive touch screen, 600Mhz processor, 5 megapixel camera with auto-focus, Wi-fi, Bluetooth, 3G-ready , HTC Sense UI & Android 2.1 (Eclair). The customization HTC given to UI is really nice. Played with it a bit, installed a few apps, I'm lovin it :-)

Here are a few drawbacks of the phone I think are important,

• Internal memory is less.
• Applications can't be installed on the SD card ( will be solved to some extent when updated to Android 2.2 aka FroYo )
• Front buttons' build quality & feel could have been better.
• Option to customize unlock button ( currently it's the power button )

Here are a 2 pictures of the phone & at the end of the post some links to HTC Legend reviews.

Links to some reviews:

• GSMArena
• Engadget

After some more tinkering with the phone, I plan to post about some useful apps for Android phones.