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May be like most of you, I had not heard about Dr. E. Sreedharan until he was in news recently for his resignation as DMRC. After a couple of news clips I went on reading more about him in Wikipedia and then I was stunned. This is one of the very rare but real examples of Indians achieving accolades.

Not very often you will see such a talent and an achiever working in public sectors in India. We see all ambitious and creamy layer students taking up private sector jobs or going abroad for studies because most of them prejudge that they have to be corrupt to achieve something if they enter public sector. Some of them try for IAS, very few of them with an intention to serve people.

For those who are still sure of entering public sector in India and eyeing to achieve something by wiping out corruption then I would say Dr. E. Sreedharan is a model.

However, on the contrary, you will not be guaranteed of success even if you plan to do so. Because, I am sure and I know you are sure that there are a lot of talented people working in public sector who are struggling to swim across the sea of corruption in India.

Author: Yatish Hegde

Facebook has started a contest – ‘Facebook India Developer Contest’, asking Indian Developers to showcase their web development skills by creating applications and other interesting features, both in Hindi and English. There applications will later become a part of the social networking site.

There are two categories in the contest – Facebook Apps and Facebook Connect Integrations. The contest opened on July 2 and will be open till September 11. Anyone above the age of 16 residing in India and also having a valid Facebook account is eligible to take part in the contest. Originality of the concept, market potential and social aspects of the application are few of the criteria for winner selection.Prizes for the contest is said to be $4000, $2000 and $1000 in each of the two categories.

You can also check out the contest details and official contest rules.

Regular users of Twitter might have noticed quite a few changes being rolled out by Twitter regularly. Here is a list of a few changes done recently and might be helpful for newbies.

Follower and Following Page Improvements

When you visit your Follower of Following page, you can notice a few improvements which makes it much easier for users to manage the followers and also take some action like to send a reply or send a DM. There are two views available namely, the compact list and the expanded list. The ‘expanded’ list also shows the location of the tweep and the last tweet.

Hourly API Call Limits Increased

The hourly API call limits which was restricted to 100 is now said to be increased to 150. It is indeed a great news for those who use Third Party Apps to access twitter. It is also helpful for Twitter App developers.

Hashtag Hyperlinked

Twitter has started hyperlinking Hashtags. Hashtags as many regular twitter users know, is a tool used to organize your tweets. Appending a tweet with a hashtag makes it easier to find that topic in search. A few of the frequently used Hashtags these days are #FollowFriday and #IranElection. Now with the hyperlinking of Hashtags search and organising becomes even more easier.

Twitter Connect is a feature which would let third party services to allow you to use your Twitter ID as a Log In ID much like how Digg.com uses Facebook Connect. Going by Twitter’s exponential growth, this would be the right thing to do. Such a feature would be useful as it lets a visitor to use his Twitter Account instead of going through the rigorous process of creating a new profile.

This would let you tweet about whatever you are doing on the site. Twitter has quite a firece competition from Facebook, which also has a quite a lot of features. So why would one choose twitter over facebook? One reason is the simplicity which twitter offers. When compared with Facebook, Twitter is very simple and it is one of the prime reasons for its huge growth.

Twitter lacks behind a lot in terms of the number of users and that might be the only disadvantage now as developeres might opt for the service with a greater number of users.

Facebook has announced that it is testing a new option using which users can choose who can see their updates and posts. This facility though is still in testing stage, it is expected to be released for general use quite soon.Right now, it is available only to those who had earlier set their status updates and privacy setting to be visible to everyone.

Now it would be easy for Facebook users to post updates which is not just visible to their friends but also to the entire world. It provides the option to choose between Everyone, Friends, Friends of Friends, Friends and Network or Custom (where you can selectively choose your friends).

Twitter, the popular micro-blogging site is famous primarily because of its updates visible to everyone and this new step taken by Facebook is obviously aimed at Twitter. The main advantage which facebook now has is the per-item privacy control which twitter lacks. If a user wishes to post a public update like an interesting link or comments about a movie, he can do it in the public domain and if it is personal information he can choose it to be private.

It must be noted that facebook recently released an option using which users can select their own vanity urls. This would help Facebook a lot in Google search results.

Firefox Add-on

Twitterbar is a Firefox extension which allows you to post to twitter from Firefox Browser’s address bar. It enables you to post to twitter very easily. Though it doesn’t have the functionality to get tweets and display it is a great toolfor posting twitter updates.

Posting to Twitter

You can type your 140 character message in the address bar and then you can either type ‘–post’ or click on the twitter icon to post it to twitter. If you wish to tweet the URL of the page you are viewing then you can just click on the twitter icon and it gets posted along with a small message which you can edit in the settings of the add-on.

Real Time Search

This add-on comes with the ability to search in real time. You just type in your query and type ‘–search’ and you get OneRiot’s real time search results in your browser.

You can download the Twitterbar add-on for Firefox. You can visit the Official Homepage of Twitterbar if you have any doubts or queries.

It is a free flash game which enables you to play with what is called crayon physics.It enables the user to create shapes and lines with a mouse each of which would have some mass and everything is subject to the laws of gravity.It is surely an interesting game for those who love basic physics involving shapes.

The goal of the game is to vollect all rotating circles with the black ball. You can move the ball by drawing shapes with mouse. The ways of completing a level is only limited by your imagination. It consists of 24 levels of varying difficulty.

You can play the game at its official website. It is also available in various other sites.

If you are unable to find out the way to complete a level there are two videos (this and this) available in Youtube which would guide you in completing that.

A side which fell just short of the World Title in 2007, a side which has been under trouble a lot in the last year because of internal struggles, a side whose matches were cancelled, postponed and lacked much practice, has now been been able to lift the Trophy. It has won the ICC World Twenty20 by 8 wickets remaining.

Its a great moment for Pakistan cricket and will remain etched in Cricket history forever. Sri-Lanka performed well throughout the tournament but let it slip away in the last moment. All credit goes to the Pakistani Players who have done extremely well under pressure situations.

I feel the Indian team missed out due to too much of cricket. Yes. I now feel that the IPL has taken its toll on the players. Though it was a good tournament, it has made many of the players unfit for the world cup, which was a far more important tournament for them being the defending champion.

BillMonk is a free service offered by Obopay Inc. It is a way of recording bills shared by you and your friends. It makes life a lot easier, relieving you from making tough calculations on who owes you how much. Instead, you just have to enter the bill amount along with who paid how much and who is going to share the bill. BillMonk does the rest and shows you calculations. You can collect or payback the money as and when required.

Let me explain you with an example… If I owe you (assume you are my friend) $20, you can ask me to pay for your lunch tomorrow. This flow is founded on trust, and is not a legally binding guarantee. I pay today and record it in billmonk. You pay tomorrow and record that amount in billmonk. And once in a while, we can settle the difference with each other.

Money usually stresses friendships. “Neither a borrower nor a lender be, for loan oft loses both itself and friend.” BillMonk is here to defuse the financial tension between friends by providing us with a tool which manages money in a way that is easy and fair. If you need to track the money that you have borrowed from someone or the money which you owe to someone else, use Bill Monk and make it easier.

For more details about the site and the services they offer, you can check out their blog.

Bugatti Veyron

Cost: $1,700,000

This is the Most Expensive Car available in the market. It is the fastest accelerating car in production, reaching 100kmph in 2.5 seconds. Its fastest speed is 408.5 kmph (average).