Was supposed to return from Kihim last evening and all was well with the world. Then, a cursory call to the Mandwa jetty led to the realisation that all ferry services to the Gateway had been abruptly suspended. What should have been a peaceful 90 minute return home rapidly turned into a 5 hour nightmare… [...]
On Saturday, I went with clients to help them choose a site they had identified at the gated “Rustic Highlands” development in Khandala. The place itself was nice enough – although I dare say I’ve seen a lot better. What amazed us was that while people had built some massive homes there – many very [...]
I hate that I have to check for the “s” after http to make sure a site is secure. Firefox does show a blue colour behind the site’s icon but it’s hardly noticeable. That’s easily changed – have a look at what Amazon’s secure site now looks like to me. To see how it’s done, [...]
In an earlier post I talked about a formula that could be used in Ooo Calc or MS Excel to group numbers according to the Indian system of lakhs and crores. Now, Open Office 3.x has the possibility built into it. All you have to do is make sure your locale settings (in Ooo) refer [...]
Yesterday, while trying to update this WordPress installation things went crazy and the entire news section failed. Had to do a restore from backup this morning and, so far, everything seems to be back in place.
Of late, the “recommend this” script which I’d set up for the free Vastu book was getting hit in a big way by spambots. After much procrastination (and stupidly hoping they would just go away!) I finally pulled it down a couple of weekends ago. Now it’s back with some CAPTCHA protection. It’s based on [...]
It’s been ages since I started making changes to this site and finally, there is visible progress. Almost nothing of the old site remains apart from the Vastu Book and the now-slightly-outdated workshops. The design area has been revamped and a new section has been added on sustainability. Both still need a little fleshing out [...]
I can hardly believe it. This is what happens when IT is foisted upon hapless governmental organisations that don’t have a shred of tech-savvy. I visited the Bombay Electric Supply & Transport website to see if I could find a form for payment through the Electronic Clearing System, ECS. I found the download page easily [...]
This link was sent to me by a client of mine and has a bunch of books, in PDF format, not just about – and by – Laurie Baker but also on other subjects of interest like trees and ecological sanitation. Most books are in English but some are in Hindi or Marathi as well. [...]
Since I exclusively use Open Office, I had very little hope that this would work for me but it does without a hitch! I was able to create a number format that shows up as 12,34,56,789.00 instead of the western 123,456,789.00. The trick is to use a conditional format. On my system I’ve called it [...]