Beautiful moment captured when I went to the sea with two of my bong friends. It’s wonderful. The whole atmosphere and the sea was calm and serene.
The POLI'TECH'AL
Some thoughts which I wanted to share with this world...
A view from the sea of this magnificent architecture built in 1911 AD.
Absolute 2.1
India as of we all know is a secular, democratic and a republic country. Actually India till date has been an idol for other nations when there are talks of Unity in Diversity. But have we ever asked ourselves, is it really so? But naturally there is an oft quoted saying in Hindi “दूर के ढोल सुहावने”(Duur ke dhol suhawne)- Something like “All that Glitters is Not Gold”. Obviously, India as a country to a foreigner is different but we being Indians are assumed to know the apparent current situation prevailing in our so called motherland.
There was a time when India was dominated by the backward regionalism, casteism and apartheid. Back then, people never realised that India is a such a vast country and that however long they might travel(on foot) but they are one nation. That time people were more concerned about their region & religion and not the country as a whole. Mughals and Local Kings used to rule different parts of India and hence for obvious reasons were concerned about their own territory.
Then the Britishers came and played the most easiest game ever. In a country where illiteracy was predominant, they chose “Divide and Rule” to be their strongest weapon. Slowly their East India Company from a trading company started to expand and interfere in local politics and wars of the region. They became advisors/supporters of many local Kings and helped them in their expansion of territory. Later on as their power and influence in the country increased, they started dominating them. A time came when we were no more than slaves to them and were treated even worse than the animals. Public hoardings used to bear notices like “Dogs and Indians are not allowed inside“. Such utter disgrace. And thus we were ruled over by them for almost more than 200 odd yrs.
Then came the Freedom movement, where few people overcame the basic Indian instinct of regionalism. And thus on 15th Aug, 1947 we gained Independence. But still do we ever think on what cost did the freedom come? At the cost of a separate nation of Pakistan being created where our own Muslim brothers went and thus started a new era of regional politics in South East Asia. But even after 66 yrs of independence, can we say that we have now overcome the barriers of regionalism, casteism ? Well … One does try to boast that we are one nation now but the actual truth is that we have just overcome the physical boundaries not the mental boundaries. Deep within we still think, “This is mine, and that is yours.” This feeling for some runs in their bloodstream. For them existence doesn’t mean much beside this separatist idealism. One may choose to disagree with me, but how can you erase the burning pages of history? How can you ignore the recent turmoils going on in the country? If you do ignore and still claim that nothing is wrong, probably you are an ignorant soul and I personally feel pity for you.
We all know about the Kashmiri Pandits issue. They were tortured, raped, butchered and were forced to leave Kashmir, which once used to be their dear home. One can’t just realise how painful it must have been for them to leave their ancestral property. But as we say “जान है तो जाहान है”( Jaan hai to Jahan hai) – meaning “You will remain alive, only then can you see this world”. So life is more important than the ancestral property I guess. Hence they had to flee away from their own homes. More recently, the clashes in Assam causing widespread chaos, murder, rapes and people leaving their homes for saving their lives, did show that we still believe “This is mine and that is yours.”
The whole world doesn’t know that in India even for pursuing your dream career, you have to face fierce competition. While one may argue that it’s the basic norm everywhere, one cannot overlook that India witnesses the most cutthroat competitions among all other nations in the world. And this is chiefly because of Caste based reservations of seats in coveted colleges like the IITs , IIMs and various Medical Institutions in India. What I don’t understand is that how long does these caste based reservations need to be prevalent? Even after 66 yrs of our independence do we still need them? Well, the govt thinks so. And we all know why they think so, just because of the sheer fact that the minority community forms a huge vote bank during the elections. But what they forget is that for mere personal gains, they are ruining the career of some brilliant minds who would have laid a helping hand in nation building later on.
There are various regional separatist mentality people living among us, who are brainwashing the young minds and diverting the youth energy for a futile purpose. I am not arguing baselessly here. Take the events of demands of a separate Telangana state in Andhra Pradesh or be it the Bodoland vs Gorkhaland issue in Darjeeling. These facts will scream loud and clear that we are no more than selfish animals for whom regionalism holds utmost importance than the interests of the whole country. If these were not enough, then one of our well known Politicians Mayawati demands that Uttar Pradesh should be divided into “four separate states”. Yes some may think she is nuts and the government won’t agree to this ever. But, to my astonishment, the Home Ministry received many such requests and if each one is catered, India may well be having upto 50 different states!! Isn’t this strange? Does it still feel like living in the same country for the freedom of which patriotic legends like M.K. Gandhi, Bhagat Singh and many more laid down their lives? This is one question we need to ask ourselves. It seriously questions your character and patriotism. People may argue that why demanding a separate state is questioning their patriotism but to them my answer would be ‘when you have things like that to do in your life, what is the importance of your existence? What good are you doing to your country by dividing her more?’
People never realise that even a single person’s individual action finally has a more broader outcome which affects the whole country. When we came together for Delhi Rape case victim it showed our unity, solidarity and the will to stand against crime. But what we are doing now is making the world laugh at our idiocy. One might argue that “मेरा क्या जाता है?”(Mera kya jata hai?) i.e. How am I at loss? It’s true that you won’t be affected directly but in the long run , your country will suffer because it’s difficult to run a more divided country. And hence you are bound to be affected indirectly. Already we have seen what good has the current rule party(govt) has done to India. On top of it, this new separate states and regional petty politics will be instrumental in the long term detrimental state of the country.
Anyways, these were the few things that made me to stop and think that in what direction my country is headed. It’s citizen seem to be too engrossed in their own personal gains and this forgetting the broader benefit of the whole nation. You as a reader can think too and come to a conclusion as to what good you are doing for your country. We have a very short life. Do something good for yourself and others which shall make your life worth lived.
India is burning and what matters is whether we come to her rescue or we cook our food on those flames!!
With this I sign off. Do comment as to what your thoughts are about this article and this debatable topic.
Hello friends, I recently launched my custom url shortener abhis.hk which represents my original website abhishek.ro
Today in this post I’ll try to make you understand the steps of setting up your own custom url shortener. I am myself a layman when it comes up to tech stuff so I understand that there are a lot of people out there who face the same problem what I faced. Everything seems new and alien but trust me its not that difficult. So lets begin.
What is an url shortener?
- An url shortener as the name suggests shortens long and ugly url and does it in such a way that even when you click on the shortened url, it takes you to the same long url for which it was created. For eg. if I want to go to a long web address, typing the while address could be quite cumbersome. So I can create a shortened version of the same url which saves my time and energy in typing the whole thing.
Why shortening is important?
- Twitter is one of the most popular social media out there today. But as we all know there are some restrictions. It allows us to write a tweet only upto 140 characters. Now twitter is all about sharing interesting contents on the web. So say if you want to share a particular article on the web but somehow the url address of the post is way too long, sometimes it might reach upto 100 characters, then majority of the tweet space is consumed by the link itself. So little is left for you to write something with the link( like what is the link all about, or may be a brief title of the blog post whose link you are sharing). This is where an url shortener comes to your rescue.Its gives you the same link but at the same time since it is so small, it’ll give you a lot of space to add additional content to your tweet.
- Besides, a long url looks very ugly and may contain a lot of special symbols too which ultimately looks bad when you share it. On the other hand, the shortened url looks neat and chic. So thereby making your tweet less cluttered too.
How to shorten the desired urls?
- There are a lot of famous url shortening services out there in the market like bit.ly, su.pr, goo.gl, is.gd, Tinyurl to name a few. There are a lot more if you google them. Almost all of them are free to use. You can simply go to their site, and there will be options to paste your long original link to obtain the shortened link. But if you want to track your links as to who is clicking over to your links, where does maximum traffic comes from etc then some of the services like bit.ly do offer a free account to create too. After you create an account, you have your own API key generated which you can use along with your username, to let your bit.ly account to be used by 3rd party apps to generate links for you ( of course the condition is that the 3rd party app must support bit.ly accounts for that)
What is a custom url shortener?
- Now suppose if you don’t want to use general url shortening services like bit.ly or goo.gl as your links you can have a custom domain url shortener. To make it easier to understand, lets put it this way- generally if one uses bit.ly to shorten his links the resulting shortened link would be like bit.ly/xxxxxx but if you use a custom url it will look like yourdomain.com/xxxxxx where yourdomain.com is the domain that you have purchased and want to use for url shortening. Many famous websites have custom url shorteners like nytimes.com uses nyti.ms, mashable.com uses on.mash.to, techcrunch.com uses tcrn.ch.
Whether to go for a custom url shortener or not?
This is a very debatable topic. People on both side of the fence have strong reasons as to go or not to go for the custom url shortener. I’ll ask you a few questions-
- Do you have extra bucks to pay for the domain name that you are planning to use as your url shortener? This is very important because to get a proper short domain of your choice you often have to shell out a lot of cash. My acquisition costs me a whooping $57.95 /yr over and above all my other costs just to retain this short url. And a price anywhere below $60 is considered to be cheap.
- Are you very active on twitter? The whole thing revolves around the fact that it is because of twitter which restricts your tweet to 140 characters is the first and foremost reason of you using an url shortener on the first place.
- Does it actually matter to you? Are you so conscious about how everything related to your site looks,so much so that you keep track of even the minutest details(url shortener) and want it to be personalised too?
- Are you ready to be a bit tech-inclined and take the pain of running this like forever?
If the answer to all these questions are “yes” then my suggestion will be to go for it!!
So lets begin to learn the steps of using a custom url shortener through “bit.ly”!
- Many of you may be surprised to know that “bit.ly” do provide an option to use your custom domain name as your url shortener.
- The best part is ,they provide this service for free. Yes you read it correct. It lets you personalise your url shortener at no extra cost.
- The only thing you require to begin with is a desired domain name. So the best place to find out a nice short domain is to visit Domai.nr or 101Domain.com. There are many more like GoDaddy, NameCheap, BigRock etc.
- Once you get your desired domain name, you should now move to bitly.com After that you have sign up for a free account.
- Now once you have done that, head over to “settings” and from there to “Advanced”
- On the screen shot you can see the “default short domain for your bitmarks” is set to “bit.ly”. Just below it there is a text in blue which says “Add a custom short domain”. You have to click on this. It will then take you to the following screen.
- Here in the space provided,you have to write your domain name without using any “www” or “http” etc. For eg. if your domain name is “xyz.com” then in the space provided just write xyz.com and press the “add” button. No sooner do you do that, you will see that a “verify” button apprears.
- On the right hand side of the above screen shot you can see that “bit.ly” wants you to prove the ownership of the domain by changing its “A record” and redirecting it towards bit.ly.
- So in order to do that, go to your domain registrar. Login to your account, then go to your DNS settings. Make sure you delete all the existing records if present,as this has to be a dedicated domain to be used only for url shortening purposes. So you cannot use it for anything else.
- Now create an A record and point it to 69.58.188.49 as directed on bit.ly’s site.
- Once you are done here ,you have to wait for the DNS settings to propagate globally which might take upto 24-48hrs but generally takes place in a few hours. You can check where the changes have taken place successfully or not by visiting your bit.ly account and from there clicking in the “verify” button. If the changes have taken place, you will see that your url shortener is now your domain name in place of bitly.
- Thats it friends. You are now done creating your custom url shortener. Every time you enter into your account and try to shorten a long link,bitly will do it for you by using your custom url.
- Now if you want to use your bitly account to shorten urls in third party apps, just know your username and get the API key from below on the same page. Press the text written ” Show legacy API”.
- On pressing that, it will reveal your current API key and the reset button which can be used to change it any moment you want. Just copy paste that API into any third party apps as and when asked. You will be amazed to see that all urls are shortened by your custom domain automatically in all the 3rd party apps where you use bitly accounts.
I hope I have been successful in showing you this interesting stuff. If you face any problem do ask your doubts in comments below.
Some people say India is the next superpower of the world. Some say India is the next knowledge hub of the world. Some people say India is currently the largest consumer market in the world after China and is expected to surpass it in near future. But amidst all these, we sometimes if not often, tend to deliberately (I am using this word because I have done this many times myself and I know there are many people like me) ignore when someone says “India is a poor country”. Why do I say so?? Well..when we ask that question, we actually are behaving like escapist who are trying to avoid this obvious brutal fact. Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the new India where on one side there are billionaires like AMBANIs, TATAs, BIRLAs and on the other side there are people like Karthika and her mother whom we better know as the BPL(below poverty line) population, who earn a meagre $2-3/wk and strive hard for their very existence every single day of their lives
I came to know about Karthika and her family through a TV show. It’s not that I didn’t know people exist even this way in India, it’s just that we tend to ignore these people sometimes. Because somehow I used to think these people put a big question mark over the progress of a nation like India. But when the story of this girl and her mother came to my notice, I couldn’t stop myself from saluting the duo. This is about a visionary mother who dared to look beyond the ugly shackles of the Society. It’s a story about a mother who was determined to make her daughter have a much better future than what was normally expected. It’s a story about a girl who at a very early age had to stay away from her mother just so that she can be what her mother wants her to be, she did it for respecting all what her mother had sacrificed for her. It’s a short story but it does teach us a few stellar facts.
Karthika’s family is very very poor. I stressed on this because indeed where there are billionaires in this country there are also people like Karthika’s mother who just earn $2-3 a week which roughly converts to around Rs100-150/week. It might seem strange but this is how life is in some parts of India. So Karthika’s mother works at a quarry breaking rocks to support her family and thus earns a meagre living. Most of the days she doesn’t get to eat properly and sleeps empty stomach.
Her family is of backward caste called Dalits(Untouchables) here in India and when she tried to send Karthika to Shanti Bhavan – an English medium school in Salt Lake City, Kolkata..she was thrown numerous tantrums by her neighbours and relatives. Its true that you need to show immense courage to go against the society and I think Karthika’s mother had plenty of it. So beyond all odds she sent her daughter far off from her to study in a good school. She had so less money that she could only manage to pay a visit to her daughter once a year. Karthika was small, thought her mother abandoned her,but little did she understand what amount of sacrifice her mother had made for her.
As time passed on, Karthika grew up. Teachers at Shanti Bhavan took great care and nurtured the talent in her quite gracefully. It was in 7th class when Karthika thought of making a career in law. But she finally gave it a serious thought while she was in her 10th standard. With sheer determination, focus and exceptional will power Karthika did what people can just dream of. She got admission into one of the country’s most prestigious law school- National University of Jurisdical Sciences(NUJS), Kolkata. Her mother still breaks rocks and earns her living. Karthika says she’ll work hard to graduate with flying colours and give her mother a much better life. She deserves that.
So this short story really makes me think one thing. I was not as unfortunate as Karthika. I was way better than her. When she can do big in life, why can’t I? Its but obvious that no one is a born genious. But one can get to the epitome of success only after rising through the ladder of hard work. I salute the spirit in Karthika and her wonderful mother.
Is there anyone who spends 5mins a day on internet doesn’t know about the word Twitter? Well the answer is NO. Twitter today valued at approx $11Bn has become synonymous with social networking in our lives. Be it celebrities, sportstars, startups, companies, media, news channels…you name it and you are sure to find a twitter handle on their behalf present right there.
Any one who uses twitter quite often would know that twitter is easier to use through Twitter clients. Twitter itself provides twitter clients for different platforms, be it Android, iOS, iPad etc. But certainly we all agree they don’t provide the supreme experience. Thats why everyone who loves Twitter run towards 3rd party twitter clients. Its was the latter who played a pivotal role in making what twitter is today. I must admit that users like me came running back to Twitter only and only due to 3rd party apps. And there are millions like me who won’t shy away from acknowledging this. Every thing was working just fine when in August twitter announced a tight set of rules and changed their API 1 to API 1.1. With API 1.1 there came stricter guidelines about app development ,design and limitations. You can know all about the changes here.
But the one thing which worried every one in the developer community was 100,000 token limits for new apps. According to this rule, twitter had the right to delete or stop the app from adding further once it reached this many tokens. Back then no one knew what would actually happen if an app does reach the stated limit. And then after a few months we first saw what everyone feared. Tweetro (now Tweetro+) a beautiful Windows 8 Twitter client suddenly was rendered entirely crippled and non functional. Even after repeated efforts of the developer Atta Elayyan, to somehow reach Twitter for a possible explanation, nothing happened. Twitter was just cold and silent and perhaps chuckled while everyone who used the app suffered. Finally, tweetro had to be completely pulled off and from being a free app its now a paid app.
The story doesn’t end here, within a few months of its inception a relatively popular twitter client called Falcon Pro on Android met the same fate. Its developer Joaquim Vergès, started an online petition but there are very narrow chances of it doing any good. But it might be interesting to note that two very popular FREE 3rd party clients Carbon and Tweedle have gone way past the 100K mark. Carbon’s developer M.Saleh Esmaeili himself announced that he has gone above 100K but he too seemed baffled as to why the app still hasn’t been blocked by Twitter. Same is the case with Tweedle when they agreed that they are close to 500K installations but yet to be non functional.
Twitter is really throttling the neck of all the devs out there. The issue is not just that they want the users to use their own app & the website,as this issue might have been easily addressed by the 3rd party devs had Twitter’s ads API been open. They would have made the developers make users see what Twitter wanted. Instead they chose a more radical approach. One reason may also be that they don’t want 3rd party devs and companies to rise to fame & earn at the cost of Twitter. Perhaps this is another way of saying “We want the cut from your profit”! Who knows. Eventually Twitter might give certain exclusive access to devs who are paying Twitter annually a cut of their profit. This might just work somehow like App.net which allows developer tools at the cost of a premium. In a nutshell it’s quite pathetic to see which way Twitter is headed.But someway or the other everyone out there fears that someday or the other their app may face the same fate what Falcon Pro and Tweetro underwent.
Having said that, there have been recent developments where in the devs of these Popular Clients have sort of agreed to put aside all their past differences if any and want to collaborate, discuss ideas and come up with a workaround this twitter tokens mess. Its really epic to see 3rd party developers now gearing up to not give up in front of twitter without a fight. As per their tweets it was agreed that they would discuss these matters in a Google Hangout. I wish them all the good luck so that they can some how get pass this tyranny of Twitter.
What are your thought about this issue?Do drop in your comments.
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