Happys the New Years! January 2, 2009

Can’t believe another year has gone by, although 2008 felt kinda slow and boring, inspite of a lot happening! 2008 has been a very mixed year for me personally and professionally and I should blog about it in another post.

I got the following image as part of a New Year greeting talking about being the change we wish to see and making a New Years resolution to try and do our bit for the environment and taking a stand on this issue. The image highlights some of the things we could do.

On this note, I wish you all a very happy, prosperous, safe, and not to forget cleaner and greener New Year 2009!

Seventymm review and the fight against piracy and terrorism December 25, 2008

2008 was a sad year in India with all these terror attacks and bomb blasts and the recent Mumbai attacks. It pains all of us to see such mindless death and destruction, but is there anything we can do about it? Well one of the first things we can do is check piracy. Some articles that I read in the papers and online about how buying that cheap CD/DVD from the streets or renting movies from the neighbourhood movie library (who buys the pirated movies) actually might be funding these terrorist organisations.

Below are some articles I could find online -

Piracy funds terrorism | http://www.window2india.com/cms/admin/article.jsp?aid=3810

Check piracy to defeat terrorism | http://www.samaylive.com/news/check-piracy-to-defeat-terrorism-says-nasheed/602463.html

Interpol Links Piracy To Terrorism Funding | http://www.allbusiness.com/retail-trade/miscellaneous-retail-retail-stores-not/4368051-1.html

This is seriously shocking stuff and I think we need to raise awareness of this and have enough self discipline to avoid going the cheap way, which could prove costly later.

After reading these articles I thought of doing a little myself and avoid buying or renting out pirated movies and got myself registered at seventymm.com – a one stop hangout for renting movies online. 

They carry this disclaimer about the legality of renting movies from them -

We carry all the movies which are legally released in India with a certification from the Censor Board of India. If a movie is not released by the studio or distributor for rental purposes, we won’t be able to provide it for rent to you. So if a movie is not legally available in India, we will also not have it.

I now rent out all my movies from seventymm and I must say the service is great. I’ve been a member for under a month now and have rented out 4 movies so far. I got some membership offer of Rs. 750 valid for 4 months and 24 movies (DVD or VCD). This roughly works out to around Rs. 31 per movie, which is great! My package lets me borrow one movie at a time, which is home delivered and picked up. They have other plans with different rates, where you can borrow unlimited movies at a time and keep them for as long as you wish.

Once you register on their site you can set up a movie queue. They have tons of movies to select from and you can add them and change the order around in your personal movie queue. You can request for a delivery, upon which the first available movie from your list is delivered to you and any previous movie that you might have borrowed is picked up (depending on your plan); you can also request for a pickup only, wherein the movie queue is not processed and only the previous movies are picked up.

The DVDs so far have all been of great quality and I haven’t faced any issues with the entire service. I’ve built up quite a nice movie list with lots of Tamil and some Malayalam movies as well to watch with the family. So now we even have regular movie sessions! :)

Delivery time wise I haven’t had an issue so far and usually within a day or maximum two after requesting for delivery the movie is delivered. One can even provide an alternate address (such as the office address) and request for them to come to the alternate address if unavailable at the home address.

The only drawback as such with Seventymm and my one-dvd-at-a-time rate plan is that if I don’t rent out 24 movies in 3 months, then I’d still end up paying Rs. 750/-, although they do have an option of ‘pausing’ your subscription, which can be done by calling the help-desk.

Some other alternates to Seventymm

- Big Flix | http://rental.bigflix.com/bigflix/Home

- CatchFlix | http://catchflix.com/index.php

Here’s hoping more people stop buying and renting out pirated movies.

Outlook VBA Code to Empty Deleted Items Folders December 23, 2008

I’ve been working and playing around quite a bit with MS Excel and MS Outlook VBA code and have written quite a few tools / add-ins / functionality / macro code that automates several manual processes. Will try and add as many of these up as possible over time, starting today.

I have multiple personal folders (PSTs) in my MS Outlook profile and have rules set up to automatically move the emails to appropriate folders. When I delete an email, it is sent to the corresponding personal folder’s Deleted Items folder.

Now, MS Outlook has an ‘Empty “Deleted Items” Folder’ menu option, but that only empties the Deleted Items folder in the default mailbox and not the other personal folders. To empty these folders, one manually needs to right-click on each Deleted Items folder and click the ‘Empty “Deleted Items” Folder’ option.

Therefore I wrote this MS Outlook VBA macro code that is used to empty all the Deleted Items folders with one click.

You can download the code here.

To use this in your MS Outlook: Press ALT-F11 in MS Outlook to open the Microsoft Visual Basic editor. Macros need to be enabled and if Macros have not been enabled when you pressed ALT-F11, you will get a prompt to enable the same.

In the Project explorer on the left, right-click on Modules and Insert a new Module. Open the  text file that you downloaded above and copy-paste the code in the module.

To customise the code for your requirements, firstly figure out how many Personal Folders you have and their names.

Add the following code as many times as there are Personal Folders in your outlook profile, and replace “Friends” with your Personal Folder name:

‘***Empty Personal Folders Deleted Items Folder
‘Change the current folder to the target personal folder / pst name
Set personalFolder = mNameSpace.Folders(“Friends”) ‘Friends is the name of the Personal Folder
Set objExpl.CurrentFolder = personalFolder.Folders(“Deleted Items”)
‘Select the target folder
objExpl.SelectFolder personalFolder.Folders(“Deleted Items”)
‘Get the Empty Deleted Items command = UID 1671
Set objCBB = objExpl.CommandBars.FindControl(, 1671)
‘Execute the command
objCBB.Execute

At present the code has details of two Personal Folders (Friends and Family)

To run the above code you can press ALT-F8 (or go to Tools -> Macro -> Macros) and then select EmptyDeletedItems and click Run.

You may also add a shortcut button to the Toolbar, so you can run the macro in one click. For this right-click on the Toolbar and click on Customize. Click on the Commands tab and then select Macros as the Category and then drag and drop the EmptyDeletedItems macro command to a location on the Toolbar.

Running the macro now empties all the Deleted Items folders, in all the Personal Folders and the default Mailbox.

Download the code here.