The current trend in India is e-commerce websites. MySmartPrice (a price comparison site for Indian e-commerce sites) compiled | a list of 343 websites (as of May 2012). There are more than 813 seller listings on Junglee.com. There are so many that are not listed
I found 24 websites(as of April 2013) which do the aggregation of prices from pretty old to the latest Indian e-commerce websites. I found all these through a quick 15 minute search. Well, Junglee is the most famous because its made by Amazon. A base for attracting customers towards amazon.in probably.
From my personal experiences of searching for books and buying in the last 2 months of around 10k spent in total.
Flipkart has a great service, Literally a 2-day delivery to Hyderabad. Though an incorrect pincode might lead it to a different city which you should ensure before clicking on ‘Order’.
SnapDeal spends a great fortune to speed up the site to everyone. Their customer service is a nightmare when you email them. They get back to you only after few days and they prefer to talk to you over phone for things that can be done on email. Adobe and Akamai services for their websites.
Infibeam still offers free shipping for any price and had a headstart on getting up 3rd party sellers.You cannot move an item from the cart to a wishlist.
BookAdda has a lot of books in stock which I needed (OReilly books and Pearson) for a fairly lower price tag and in availability. I had many bad experiences with the website like losing the items in the cart.
BuyThePrice was shutdown about a month ago.
Shroff Publishers displays the wishlist (w/o truncating it) and items in cart on each and every page. The shipping costs you about 30% more to the value of items in your cart. They use DTDC ( the not-so great courier company which takes 2 days to deliver a package that is < 1km away from the target). You can create a wishlist even though you are not logged in. ( No other site Indian e-commerce does that currently)
The
I have been planning since over an year to resume writing blog posts. Being too busy with work, I lost count on how many topics and how many times I wanted to put out something I learned.
Finally I am the proud owner of the awesome domain sairam.com. (yay! dot com, but just when ICANN started the new gTLD revolution) I set a higher priority for writing and reading now that my past work project Bookish was launched in early February 2013.
I have learned a great deal on things while working since the past 5 years in a product based multi national corporation and a service based company. (Past is past, I don’t want to get there now.) Starting March 2013, I have been experiencing rather an unexpected life experiences every day. Rather than a fairly straightforward job, looking forward to a new life as a freelancer :D
Let’s see how that goes!
Java is one of the most famous programming language. A plugin is an addon so that you can use the power one software from another. Well if they share functionality, they might as well share security issues.
This is the first post on Security. If you haven’t heard about a security breach or a botnet or a website or computer hacked, its time to know.
A website being hacked means extracting data illegally which could have been possible because of a bad configuration or the software not begin up to date.
A computer being hacked means an illegal user (who is supposed to be not be there) gained access to your computer and stealing information. ( You don’t want a stranger roaming in the house eating eggs from your refrigerator and using your money from your wallet). This usually happens via the browser or a local network or having physical access to the computer.
Configuring a browser
Coming back to configurations. There is a lot to configure in your browser where you might be reading this post. A browser has plugins and extensions. Java and Flash Plugins, Firefox and Chrome Extensions are the usual ones a normal user uses. The plugins have the ability to read / write to any where in your computer. Since the plugins run in the browser, the API they provide to the developers contain abstractions. Though some times the code has bugs. Researchers find bugs and report them in order to avoid exploitation of bugs before a bad guy finds them and uses them.
Don’t use if you don’t need it.
Its best if you disable the feature if you are not using it (assuming the software respects the configuration correctly). A Recent Java Bug for reference.
My personal experience is that I use the internet for at-least 10 hours a day and its hard to come across sites that use Java applets or SilverLight. Flash is a common one, but one can find the downward trend and because of the HTML5 standardisation. Also, it depends on the sites being browsed since if someone distributes illegal data, its possible that they are trying to get more from people who are accessing the sites.
A Botnet
By the way, a botnet is a network of such hacked computers working together to accomplish a task. Think what you can do if you have access to hundreds of machines across the world ?
Well, there is lot of traffic
Note: This post was moved from 5erver.in (spelled server.in)
Intro about 5erver.in
I want to write posts about resources and configurations I find when configuring websites to desktop software.
If you do rate habits, my best one is configuring stuff.
What does this site do ?
I plan to use this site to explain details of configurations and sites, and why I choose that way.
Why not use Tumblr like my other blogs ?
I am finally over my habit of using a rich text editor to write blogs.
What did you choose to blog ?
I chose Jekyll. Jekyll is a parsing engine bundled as a ruby gem used to build static websites from
dynamic components such as templates, partials, liquid code, markdown, etc. Jekyll is known as “a simple, blog aware, static site generator”.
You can as well use Ruhoh if you want to set it up faster than I did.
Why Jekyll ?
Its simple static site hosted on github. Github since anyone can just clone this repo
One could use Amazon AWS services (S3 or any CDN ) if they want to conceal the source of the software or if any customisations were made.
Why should I care ?
Since it could be too late when finding answers later than now. This is a reason dropbox always generates extra load to test their production servers .
The world has loads of free software, thanks to the Open Source Software movement.
The most important thing is to do it configure it. There are many aspects in the server and the client and everything between that can be configured.
I like giving analogies, here’s one
Would you use the first gear in the car when going at 50 mph ? (Ofcourse I am talking about a car with a manual gear system. In software world, you cannot assume anything since the dependencies are more than you think)
The same way, when you configure a system, you should not deploy software to production till you load test it and know the ins and outs of systems. Although it takes time, its worth the experience.
Can’t I use chef or puppet ?
Yes, if you want to use the base software or already configured software or if you want the vanilla configuration on tens of your servers, thats the way to go.
Yes, Contact me at sairam at kunala dot com
Can I contribute ?
Yes, send a github pull request or email me an markdown file with your details for reference.