Contact list in Gmail

When I click on it, I saw the gmail chat window appearing and it was a phone dialer. There was a link in the dialer saying I need to install the plugin of Google voice. I did it Restarted the browser, logged into Gmail again, and now after clicking on “Call Phone” I saw the dialer and dialed a Canadian number and talked to a senior brother of mine. The voice quality was even better than that of direct phone call and there was no lag.

Google Voice Dialer

You can make unlimited free phone calls to USA and Canada. You can even call other countries with a nominal call rate. Moreover your account comes with $.10 credit free of cost so that you can make a test call to other countries. The call rate for Bangladesh is $.10 per minutes. Therefore you’ll be able to call a Bangladeshi number and talk 1 minute using the free credit.

You can find the calling rate in this link:  Call Rate of Google Voice

You can deposit money using credit cards. Anyway, this will be a very good news for people whose relatives live in USA or Canada – Enjoy unlimited free calls.

]]> http://hasibul.info/blog/?feed=rss2&p=201 0 http://hasibul.info/blog/?p=193 http://hasibul.info/blog/?p=193#comments Mon, 29 Mar 2010 07:04:49 +0000 Hasib http://hasibul.info/blog/?p=193 Source:  The Financial Express

By:  Engr. Nurul Basher
Ex-Director (Microwave) BT&T

The government has been taking hard actions against some telecom operators who are purportedly using their internet facilitates for making international telephone calls. The operators are being fined millions of takas, their most valuable equipments are being confiscated and some are being banned from continuing such operations.

As a former Bangladesh Telegraph & Telephone Board (BT&T) official, I still do not understand as to why VOIP should be declared illegal in the first place. To put it simply, I understand VOIP is transmitting speech signal through the internet bandwidth. The operator is paying his rent for the internet band width. Also he is paying for the telephone line rent and call charges. Capability to transmit voice over internet band width is made possible through the advancement of signal processing technology. Why should someone be punished for using higher technology?

I recall when in the early 1980′s fax machine was introduced, BT&T used to charge an additional amount of Tk 10,000/- per fax machine. By then I left BT & T and used to have heated argument with my friends in the BT & T top management about the matter. They introduced this charging system only because they found an extra income source without contributing anything.

Today, VOIP is declared illegal as BT & T is being unable to provide cheap service which the IP service providers are contributing. If BT & T is loosing revenue because of VOIP use by the internet operators, then it is BT&T’s fault. It is like punishing a motor bike rider by a bullock cart driver as the latter cannot catch up with the former. It is single stupidity and wrongdoing by someone who is short of in knowledge. I like to ask the authorities concerned to come clean and prove that VOIP is illegal because it is harmful to the people in the way toxic drug import is illegal because it harmful to national health. Following a bad law, even if it is a law, is harmful to the nation in the long run.

I call for a national debate and let the authorities concerned defend themselves to prove what they are doing by declaring VOIP “illegal” is right.

But here I’m going to share a new thing with you. After you clear up the viruses, after you fix the “Show hidden Folder option”- you may face that you are unable to unhide the folders in the pendrive. Those files/folders will remain Hidden as many times as you want to unhide them. If that’s the case I simply copied the contents of all the hidden folders to my local drive and then format the Pendrive (Pretty simple solution). But recently I faced this problem with the pendrive like storage of my LG Arena Phone set. This phone has a 8 GB internal memory and I often use it as a pendrive. Unfortunately I plugged this phone into a virus infected PC and it got virus infected too. I cleared up the virus files, but was unable to unhide the folders. Now, here I can’t just format the whole storage as there were many other system folders for that phone. I started googling and found a pretty simple solution at kioskea website. The solution was something like this:

1. click start>>run>>type in “cmd”
2. type the location of your flash drive.. e.g. “d:”, “e:”, “f:”, etc..
3. type “dir /ah”
*you will now see the files/folders with hidden attributes
4. type “attrib [name of file/folder] -r -a -s -h”
*if you’re going to unhide files, you should type the whole name plus the extension (format).. example “attrib picture.jpg -r -a -s -h”
**if you have folders with 6 characters and above, type the first 6 characters then “~1″.. example for folder named “birthday”
“attrib birthd~1 -r -a -s -h”
5. you should repeatedly type dir /ah after unhiding some files/folders so you’ll know if they’re now working or not..
6. now check your flash drive.. it should be there..

I hope this will help you if you are facing the same problem as mine.

The good news is that qubee is offering more packages targeting new user groups like students. Their “Campus” package is a very good 1.




*Qubee Campus 128 package offers 128 kbps connectivity at 850 Taka (+VAT = 977.5 Taka).
*Qubee Campus 256 package offers 256 kbps connectivity at 850 Taka (+VAT = 977.5 Taka) but with a 5 GB Data transfer limitation.

I think these two packages are more vibrant and will attract many new users for them. BanglaLion also has offers at a very affordable rate, but they couldn’t yet cover a significant amount of geographic location with their network coverage, and thus can’t provide their services to mass people.

Source: Qubee website

Initially the packages seemed very lucrative to me compared to many other available options in the market. I became curious and called the qubee hotline to know more about it. I asked the qubee representative what actually they tried to mean by “Fair Usage Policy”. They answered me that If some one’s usage is very high, they are going to warn the user at a certain point. This means with 256/512 kbps speed, if someone downloads continuously qubee is  going to “WARN” you that your usage is violating “FAIR USAGE POLICY”. Then I asked whether they are going to impose any restriction if someone violates the Fair usage policy. They answered me that the packages offer unlimited usage and they are not going to impose any restriction. Then finally I asked them what if someone continues to download violating the fair usage policy and the warning? To be honest they didn’t answer this question of mine directly.

What this means is that they will probably reduce the bandwidth after some time. This is not an old practice in Bangladesh. We have seen GrameenPhone/Citycell offering unlimited internet packages and after few days their throughput (Speed) going down when the number of subscriber went high. This will probably happen to qubee customers also.  These ISPs are there for business. The cost of dedicated 256/512 kbps is way higher than what qubee offers. 512 kbps dedicated bandwidth (through submarine cable) costs 9 thousand taka (1 mbps = 18 thousand taka). Qubee is offering it with 2250 taka.  I’ll leave the rest to your understanding.

• 300tk activation fee applies (waive with 1 year sign up)
• Additional Usage Tk. 0.15/MB
• All charges are excluding VAT

Source: BanglaLion Website.

BanglaLion is offering three types of connectivity:

1. Connectivity through outdoor unit (costs 10000 taka, supports upto 6 users)
2. Connectivity through indoor unit (costs 7000 taka, supports upto 6 users)
3. Connectivity through WiMAX Dongle (A pen drive like device for single user)

Their offer’s are more diversified than Qubee. Currently they are offering 9 packages with different Bandwidth and download caps.

They are infact a step ahead than qubee by offering speeds upto 5 mbps. I hope BanglaLion’s entry will initiate a competition between the two operators and will ultimately bring out some really cool offers for their clients.

I am not sure how far BTRC can move, but publishers of these websites will definitely look for alternatives. May be some new beneficial groups will emerge in different forms.

Source: Qubee website

Even the modem price has gone down. This was required for them to compete against the existing wireless (or mobile) internet service providers. But they couldn’t get out of the volume based offers. Five (5) Gigabytes for 1250 taka is still high. If they want to get the attention of mass internet users they need to offer something for less than 700 taka with minimum 10 GB data transfer.

/administrator/components/com_virtuemart/virtuemart.cfg.php

The following two paths need to be changed with the new path:

1. define( ‘URL’, ‘http://demoserverURL/joomlafolder/’ );
2. define( ‘SECUREURL’, ‘http://demoserverURL/joomlafolder/‘ );

Instead of the “demoserverLink/joomlafolder” use your actual joomla folder link.

You might face a new problem while doing this. If you are using ftp to download the file “virtuemart.cfg.php” and re-upload it with the changed path, you may get an “Permission Denied” error. There is a good solution for this too. Install a joomla component named “Extplorer” or “JoomlaXplorer“. This component is a joomla admin panel component that gives you the power to upload/delete/edit files in the joomla site. After installing any one of these two components just browse through the file and edit the above mentioned two lines of the “virtuemart.cfg.php” file.

I could get rid of the problem this way, I hope the solution will be useful for anyone facing the same problem.