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I just recieved 998 invites from Joost. So anyone without an Joost invite just drop a comment and it would be sent to you. The email would contain the download link for Joost. After downloading and installing the software, you would be asked to create an account upon first run. Just make sure that you use the email address to which the invite was sent during registration.

I have got 3 Joost invites which has been lying around for some time. Joost invites are quite easy to get these days (Joost should go public in a few days). However, if you haven’t managed to get your hands on an invite yet, just drop a comment, and the invite would be emailed to you.

I have given away all invites (six) that I had.

Comments Closed.

Following India’s debacle at the World Cup tough measures were always on the card. BCCI President Sharad Pawar promised stern measures, and those measures were made public yesterday by the BCCI Working Committee. This is probably the biggest shake up ever in Indian cricket. India has performed poorly in the past, and tough measures have been promised before. But, most of the time they turned out to be regressive knee-jerk reactions which did little to improve Indian Cricket.
So, has BCCI learnt from its past mistakes? Will these measures herald a new era in Indian cricket? I shall analyse BCCI’s statement in detail and try to find the answer.

“The working committee appointed Ravi Shastri as Cricket Manager for the India’s tour to Bangladesh. It was further decided that Venkatesh Prasad will be the bowling coach and Robin Singh, the fielding coach for the tour.”

In my opinion appointment of specialist bowling and fielding coaches is probably the best news to have come out of the BCCI meeting. A bowling coach is necessary as its impossible for a Coach who was a batsman to help a bowler with the finer aspects of his game.
Over the past few years India has produced several promising bowlers who faded into the oblivion after an impressive beginning - Irfan Pathan being the latest of the lot. Perhaps this wouldn’t have happened if a bowling coach was there to assist these young fast bowlers.
Ravi Shastri has been appointed as a manager who would also fulfil responsibilities of a coach. My pick as a coach would have been Dav Whatmore. Whatmore has done wonders for Lancashire, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. But Shastri is a man with credential. It would be interesting to see how he performs if he is given the position of a permanent manager.

“The Working Committee has directed the Selection Committee to send a young team to Bangladesh under an experienced captain. The selection committee, after discussions has appointed Rahul Dravid as captain for India’s tour to Bangladesh, Ireland and England.”

Although Rahul Dravid has received a lot of flack for his captaincy, he is not the reason we performed poorly. He has been much criticised for the decision to bat first against Bangladesh - but I still believe that given the information he had he actually made the best decision. There is only one person in the team who can do a better job than Rahul Dravid - Saurav Ganguly. According to reports he himself isn’t too keen on a second innings as a captain. I am glad that BCCI didn’t commit the folly of sacking him, just for the sake of finding a scape goat.
However, I am disturbed by the fact that the Working Committee is interfering with team selection. The selectors must always pick the best team, irrespective of the age of the players. Yes young players must be provided adequate opportunities - but only if they deserve so. Indian cricket isn’t overflowing with talent, and unfortunately we dont have a young Michael Clarke or Kevin Pietersen. Since 2006-01-01 Kaif averaged 18.94 from 22 matches. In the same period Raina has played 10 matches and his avg is 16.37. I hope that young stars do get more opportunities but experienced and performing players shouldn’t be shunned either. Proper implementation of rotation policy is what is required.

“With a view to strengthening domestic cricket, efforts will be made to ensure that all Test / ODI Cricketers play Irani, Duleep, Challenger and some Ranji Trophy Matches. All the players will have to play a stipulated number of domestic matches when not playing for India”

Again, another very positive move. India’s domestic cricket has been languishing because top XV players are rarely available for domestic cricket matches. However, the BCCI on its part needs to schedule international carefully, so that it doesnt clash with important matches in domestic cricket. Since, schedules are decided far in advance, nothing much would change immediately. In my opinion there shouldnt be more than 80 days of international cricket in a year. Considering the financial implecations of cutting down on the number of matches played per year, I do have my doubts. The question is, how serious is BCCI about improving the level of domestic cricket?

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An Indian Software Developer has come up with a software, that promises to boost your download to upload ratio in private torrent trackers.
GreedyTorrent acts as a local proxy for the BitTorrent Protocol. To start using it, you need to change your clients proxy settings to localhost:3456 . You can find detailed step by step instructions for doing this here. Once your torrent downloader connects to the tracker, GreedyTorrent modifies the upload amount reported. It is a configure it once and forget it, kind of software. Once configured, it sits quietly in the system tray and makes sure that the desired upload ratio is maintained.

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DNS stands for Domain Name System. Essentially, Domain Name System (DNS) translates domain names (host names) into actual ip addresses. So whenever you type an url in your browser, it first sends a request to the DNS of your ISP which resolves the hostname. If your ISP has a poor domain name system, then a website would take longer to load due to the time taken by your ISP’s DNS to resolve the domain name. This is where OpenDNS come into the picture.

OpenDNS claims to have a super fast Domain Management System, that reduces the time taken to resolve a domain name. I had come across OpenDNS a few months back, but didn’t bother checking it out, as I didn’t believe it would do any good. But, after reading a bunch of positive testimonials in Neowin I decided to give it a go. Instantly I noticed an increase in speed, which was too large to be placebo effect. Its was very noticeable in Opera, as Opera browser has the ability to redraw pages instantly.
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“You have heard about it, now it’s your chance to catch this gripping series.”
The wait is finally over. Prison Break Season 1 is coming to India. It will make its debut on Star World in the month of March. This is a great opportunity for those of you who haven’t watched it yet.
Prison Break may be over the top and sometimes ridiculous twists and turns. But, that doesnt stop it from being my favourite television show. It’s packed with action and drama. Every episode is an adrenaline pumping, thrill-a-minute ride.
Don’t miss out on this experience. Here is a sneak peak at what you can expect in Season 1.

There is a top-shelf higher education resource that provides great information about school software, along with other meaty learning topics, such as how to pursue an online law degree and even how to afford those expensive schoolbooks. Click over to an enriching online education clearning house.

Hi there! Its time for another longish edition of Opera Bytes. I shall take you through all the hot news and scoops from world of Opera.
Yesterday, Johan Borg posted a rather poetic update in the Desktop Team Blog, regarding the future of Opera. Of course, like everything coming from Opera Soft. Developers, it was vague (and believe me very very vague). You can read his blog-post here. The main revelations were:

• A new (weekly build) build of Opera v9.20 with a new feature (never seen in a desktop browser before), will be unveiled later this month. Meanwhile, you can download the latest weekly build from here.
• The next major build of Opera - codenamed as Kestrel, will aim to further unify various builds of Opera for various platforms. A part from that it will also contain several rendering improvements.
• Kestrel will be followed by Peregrine. This will be a significant update. My guess is that Kestrel will be released as Opera v9.50, and Peregrine will be Opera v10. It will contain significant improvements in the user interface, improved standards support, improved performance, thousands of bug fixes and groundbreaking new functionality (any guesses? ).
• The much requested auto-updater is coming.
• Opera Mail (M2) will also be improved in Peregrine. Tim Altman revealed that one of the most-debated wish list items will finally appear. I am guessing that it may be support for html emails (just a guess). Besides that, the indexing back-end will be replaced, which will hopefully fix a long-standing and dreaded indexing corruption bug.
• David Storey has blogged about the logic behind the codenames. You can read his article here.

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One of my major grudges with Windows Vista has been the way it’s start menu works.

I am someone who regularly arranges the start menu entry into folder and subfolders. In this way, in spite of having a large number of applications instaled, whenever I want to launch a program I know exactly where to look. But in Windows Vista, Microsoft got rid of the old cascading style start menu. Now, the programs list shows up within the start menu itself (instead of popping out). This is convenient if you dont have a large number of start menu entries. However, if you have a large number of entries organised into folder and subfolders , you would need to click several times to just launch the program. The other option is to use the search feature, but its not very convinient to keep switching from mouse to keyboard everytime I need to launch some application.
Vista Start Menu solved my problems and did more.

Screenshot