Design the symbol for the Indian Rupee

The Ministry of Finance, Government of India has an open competition to design a symbol for the Indian Rupee. Surprisingly the Indian Rupee does not have a symbol, on the lines of $ for the Dollar. The details of the competition can be found here. The contest closes on April 15th, so all you budding designers need to work fast. The winner gets Rs. 250,000 and the final five shortlisted participants get Rs. 25,000 each. Not bad money I must say!

Airtel Calling Card

Although my fellow blogger at ramakrompers beat me to this, I still think this is worth posting. Airtel is offering calling to India at 1 cent/min, which is ridiculously cheap. I currently use Reliable Calling, and pay 3.5 cent/min. The relevant fine print for the Airtel deal:

1. It costs the same to call either landlines or mobile phones.
2. Pay $10 and get 600 minutes talk time, because they charge $3.99 as rental fees. It works out to a little more than 1 cent/min, but it is still much cheaper than any other calling card.
3. The talk time expires in 30 days, so this would work mostly for people who call India every day and talk for hours at a stretch! Any unused credit at the end of 30 days is lost.
4. It costs more to call toll-free. The cheaper way is to use the local access number. Unfortunately Minneapolis does not have a local access number.

Let me know if there is any other catch, the offer sounds too good to be true!

Engineering Stimulus Packages

The makers of AutoCAD and SolidWorks, have each announced an "Engineering Stimulus Package", where free copies of AutoCAD and SolidWorks can be downloaded and installed for a period of 90 days. They also provide free online training tools and the opportunity to become certified users of these software, which implies that the user has attained a certain level of expertise with the software. This is a good opportunity for most engineers to get certified and add on their resumes.

The links are provided here:

SolidWorks 

AutoCAD

Cricket games online

Today I will deviate from my usual boring theme of "useful utilities", so here are a couple of cool websites to play flash based cricket online. The best of the lot in my opinion is Stick Cricket. Highly addictive, it has various game modes depending on how much time you have to waste! I strongly suggest creating a free login to track your progress. Another nice website with some cool flash based cricket games is Krish Cricket. The coolest part about this website is it also has a flash game for Book Cricket! I can't remember how many hours we have spent in school playing book cricket. I wonder who on earth came up with the game! For the uninitiated, here is good summary of the game.

Stroke It

In some sense, this is an addition to my earlier post about Mouse Gestures. Since I am quite addicted to mouse gestures, I wanted to find a program which can do the same thing on other programs, or applications such as Google Chrome, which does not have a mouse gestures add-on as of now. I found StrokeIt. Its a downloadable application, which runs in the background, and can mimic the actions of mouse gestures on Firefox. It can be customized for various applications, and the help on the website is fairly comprehensive for different applications. Let me know if anyone finds this useful.

Credit Reports & Score

The importance of good credit can not be over-emphasized in the American economy, particularly in the current economic climate. Everything from home loans to auto loans to credit card applications depend on your credit score. The credit score is a number based on statistical analysis of the credit reports, and gives an indication of how creditworthy a person is. Here are a couple of useful websites to keep track of your credit.

Every person with an SSN is eligible to receive a free credit report once in 12 months from the three major credit agencies - Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. According to the Federal Trade Comission website, the official website to obtain this is annualcreditreport.com. Other websites seemingly offering free credit reports, come with fine print requiring signing up for other services. I have not comprehensively reviewed all the other websites, but the website mentioned above is the best one to use.

By law, the above website does not have to provide a credit score. It only provides a comprehensive list of activities on your credit. A good website to get your credit score is creditkarma.com. Most other websites require payment for a credit score, but this website generates revenue through ads. After creating a profile, you can track changes in your credit score with time. It also provides a credit simulator to project changes in credit score with various actions such as taking a loan, getting a new credit card etc. It has a whole bunch of other nice features worth trying out.

Desktops

I recently wanted software to create multiple desktops, similar to an utility which exists on Linux machines. The reason I needed this was I was cluttering up my taskbar with too many programs, including programs which I wanted open, but wasn't actively using all the time (read as browser window with cricinfo.com refreshing the score!). I found this utility called Desktops by SysInternals. It looks like it is endorsed by Microsoft, so I'm quite confident about the reliability of the software. Its very simple to install and an icon in your system tray gives control over the 4 desktops. The other cool thing about the software is the ability to switch desktops using keyboard shortcuts, which I find easier than navigating to the system tray to change desktops. A must try for everyone who finds their screens too small, but can't afford to use multiple monitors.