RutSum

Getting Paid For Writing, With SocialSpark

I recently joined SocialSpark.com to earn some additional income from my blogs, apart from the earnings that I get from running Google AdSense. The concept of SocialSpark was the thing that attracted me the most – you get paid for what you love to do – blogging. However, even though the concept sounds amazing theoretically, but actually it loses it’s meaning if you are forced to write for money. That is what is happening at SocialSpark right now – because of lack of advertisers, bloggers are grabbing the very limited opportunities available, and are forced to write on topics they have no idea about. This results in disillusioned readers, who get confused about the topic/theme of your blog/website.

Take my example. I think that I would be more happy at SocialSpark if there would be more sponsored post opportunities related to my field on interest – Open Source, Technology, Internet Services, Gadgets, Movies, Rock/Metal Music and Education. However, I find that post opportunities related to these fields are very limited, obviously because the respective advertisers are either unaware of SocialSpark or are unwilling to put in their money on a relatively new network.

So this post is a request to all advertisers – come along and join SocialSpark! It has a lot of traffic and link popularity in store for you! Moreover, due to the wide variety of bloggers at SocialSpark (people with varied interests), you can look forward to get featured on websites which are related to your product and can therefore receive maximum targeted traffic.

The Ranks So Far - Waiting For DCE/NSIT/CEE 2008 Results

It’s been over two months now since I started giving the Indian Engineering Entrance Exams™, and thankfully, today was the last one - for Jamia Millia Islamia University. These two months truly deserve the title of being called the longest two months of my life, not because I spent them burning the midnight oil, but because I was just lying around doing some work that in totality amounted to absolutely nothing. Nevertheless, I am happy that this phase is over and the results of some of the exams have made it sure that I at least won’t have to ‘drop’ a year and do the same thing again, next year.

The first result that was out was that of VITEEE - 2008 (Pronounced as ‘witty’, do remember to pronounce it like that, or their spies/secret agents will put a bullet in your head). VIT was smart to release their results the earliest on 9th May, 2008 and to organise their counselling before all other big institutes. I got a rank of 7624 over here, which was 1624 ranks below the cut-off for the first counselling session. Today, I got another SMS notfication from VIT, informing me of the IInd phase of counselling which will begin from 26th June, 2008. To take part in the IInd phase, you have to send them an SMS confirming that you are interested in seeking admission to VIT. Though VIT is one of the last options I am considering for admission, I have still sent them the SMS to book a seat at their counselling for me.

The next result was the most awaited and biggest shocker - the results for the IIT JEE 2008. Here, I got a rank of 6512, unlike my expectations. I did not expect to even get a rank, as my total came up to to 169, whereas the expected cut-off was near 190-195. Even though my rank is supposedly no-good, but I am still proud of the fact that I qualified the IIT-JEE, one of the most difficult exams in the world. I will nevertheless attend the counselling and try to persuade them to give me some course at IT-BHU or ISMU Dhanbad. I am in no way expecting anything out of this rank at the 13 IITs.

On June 3rd, CBSE chose to give us an Ekta Kapoor style surprise and they released the AIEEE 2008 result without any prior notification, 4 days before the expected date. In the AIEEE, I got a decent rank of 5499. Though this rank isn’t good enough to get me into a ‘highly-demanded’ course at the NITs, but it can fetch me Mechanical Engineering at some of the reputed NITs, and Computer Science at Thapar University. Maybe I can get a good course at PEC too. Currently, getting a good college through my AIEEE rank is my first priority. One more thing that I’d like to mention over here is that Thapar promises to return all your cash back (except for a nominal Rs. 1000) to you in case you withdraw it BEFORE the second counselling schedule, which is a month after the first phase of counselling. I think this is a good thing considering that you can keep your options open without the fear of losing another due to clashing counselling schedules.

Then somewhere at the end of the first week of June, GGSIPU released their results for the B.Tech 2008-09 aspirants. Here I got a rank of 1166 which I feel is OK as a backup; IP was meant to be backup in the first place. I have no idea when the counselling is, but I sure will go over there and ensure that I get a seat in case I am left out by all other institutes.

Last but in no way the least, most of us Delhites are eagerly waiting for the CEE 2008 Result. It should’ve been out by now, because the Information Bulletin said that it would be out within 2 weeks from the date of the exam. I just hope that I get a good rank over here because then I can go to college from the comfort of my home and I won’t have to stay in a hostel. As soon as the results are out, I’ll ask Sneezy to post on the expected cut-offs for various courses.

Amarok 2 Adds Video Support - Only Music Videos, Though

I’m a little late this time. At the end of May, Mark Kretschmann, the lead developer of Amarok, gave us Amarok fans a little surprise by adding integrated support for playing music videos within the Amarok window. The video looks perfectly integrated thanks to Plasma, and now you can manage you music videos along with your music collection, and not as a separate tab/section. Giving us this new candy, Mark clearly mentions that this video support will remain minimalistic, so that Amarok remains a music player and does not become a video player. Therefore, it won’t be including features like full-screen mode or DVD playback.

Later, in the first week of June, Nikolaj Hald Nielsen, another Amarok developer gave us a bonus gift by adding video podcast support using Mark’s Plasma Video applet. So now, in addition to the awesome music podcast collection that Amarok already has, you can expect your favorite video podcasts to be included. I think they will include options for watching streaming music videos from YouTube too. Lets cross our fingers and hope that Amarok 2 will be worth the wait.

Aamir - The Movie

One of the most excellent, hard-hitting, vivid and real movies I have watched in recent times - Aamir, is an eye opener. I had chosen to watch this movie over the much hyped Sarkar Raj, for the sole reason that it was under Anurag Kashyap’s banner, whose earlier movie No Smoking was the first genre defying movie of Bollywood I had seen and reviewed.

Though Aamir comes across as a movie full of emotions; those of helplessness, despair, and the choices we have to make in difficult times, it also brings about a bigger question - the one of destiny. The tagline of the film - “Kaun kehta hai… aadmi apni kismat khud likhta hai?“, though sounds lame at first, but after you watch the movie, it forces you to think. The choices made by you and others in your surroundings - is that all that affects your life or do choices made by your civilisation as a whole affect you as an individual? Whatever may be the answer to that, I am still and existentialist and a firm atheist.

On the acting front, Rajeev Khandelwal has done an absolutely outstanding job. He doesn’t seem at all like a newcomer, but like the A-league actors of Bollywood - Aamir Khan, SRK. A natural/born actor, and he deserves to be appreciated.

The script, though, I feel is flawed and stretched unnecessarily. Also the timing - the points where the meaning of the whole movie is conveyed, are not spread out evenly. So the script is lacking, and some of the audience was starting to lose interest midway. The background score was OK, the music was limited to 2 tracks, which were well placed and suited the mood.

I would give the movie an 8 on 10, lesser than what I had expected from a movie by Anurag Kashyap (The director is Raj Kumar Gupta, Kashyap is the creative producer).

How To Get The Ownership Of Your Own USB Drive Back (On Linux)

So it happened that I gave away my USB drive to Vishal for a while, because I needed him to give me some of the awesome downloaded stuff that he has on his 250 Gb hard drive. He had a barely working Ubuntu installation on his PC which he was using to survive, because Windows XP had given up on his system after his graphic card died.

Anyway, I told him to remove the junk that has made a permanent place on my USB drive, and wipe it clean before he put in the new stuff. Sadly for me, Vishal is one of those guys who doesn’t use Shift+Delete, but uses Delete and then removes the stuff later on from the trash. A feature of Nautilus is that it doesn’t transfer your trash to the Trash folder, but instead transfers it to a folder called “.Trash-1000″ on the same partition.

Somehow, maybe because he forgot to unmount the drive before he pulled it out, the FAT filesystem on it got corrupted, and I lost control of my own drive. I could see all my old data inside the “.Trash-1000″ folder, but I couldn’t delete it. When I mounted it at my own place, it got mounted as a read-only medium, something like a CD drive. I couldn’t write to it, even as root.

As usual, I barged into the PCLinuxOS support forums. There, first I was told to do an fsck on the drive, which did not work, since it was a FAT filesystem. So I installed dosfstools first.

$ sudo apt-get install dosfstools

I then did a dosfsck on the drive, which returned a long list of errors.

Somebody told me that if I didn’t need the data on the drive, I should nuke it and start afresh. So I formatted the drive with the ext3 filesystem by using -

$ sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1

Well the “.Trash-1000″ folder was apparently gone, but the drive was still getting mounted as read-only for me. This time it was a permissions issue, that is, I could write to it as root, but not as the normal user. To get ownership of the mount point temporarily, I did -

$ sudo chown apoorv /media/disk

But this was not satisfactory as I would have to do this everytime for every new USB drive I mounted. To gain permanent write access, a chmod was necessary.

$ sudo chmod +t /media/

And that was it. Now all USB drives will be mounted in write mode, irrespective of their filesystem.