Blockade for "Save Perarivalan"

My post Save Perarivalan was sadly late, but one of the earlier posts written in English. I have also tried my best to translate popular conspiracy theories on Rajiv Gandhi assassination. Fortunately that seem to have worked well and the post got more attention -- especially news like this: The noose and their views [Mid Day, November 4, 2011] started to appear.

Recently I have noticed traffic to the page with referrer links http://x.x.x.x:15871/cgi-bin/blockOptions.cgi?ws-session=xxx -- meaning the page is blocked using Websense. When I resolved the IPs, shockingly they're from some big IT companies!

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Storing unicode texts in MySQL with phpMyAdmin

Today, I've received a personal mail/request from Sivanantham Hemamalini, working for IT leisure in Singapore. Since I was in company when received the mail, I couldn't answer immediately. If I understand the question right, it is about inputting Unicode texts especially Tamil in phpMyAdmin. PhpMyAdmin 's default characterset is iso-8859-1 and so if we enter anything in the form, browser will convert it into numerical html entities. Say for example, if we enter தமிழ் and submit the form, it will convert it to & #2980;& #2990;& #3007;& #2996;& #3021; . Because of this browser's behavior, it will be difficult to store the Unicode text as it is. Solutions Immediate solution I could think of is changing or forcing the browser's character encoding into utf-8. In Mozilla Firefox, it can be set via View -> Character Encoding -> Unicode (UTF-8) Another elegant solution might be changing the phpMyAdmin configurations so that it send...

Valen Smith, the English teacher videos are missing!

I vaguely remembered that sometimes around 2009, engVid on YouTube was very popular. I especially liked a teacher by name Valen Smith's videos. She was not only beautiful but also very good at explaining the English usage. I also vaguely remembered to check her channel ValenESL around 2015. But, not sure what happened to her or engVid, all her videos are sadly gone. I have also noted that many people on Twitter were asking the same. Not sure what happened. Some people seem to have reuploaded her videos and YouTube continuously removing them with a note "This video contains content from LearnVid, who has blocked it on copyright grounds." Strangely though, on Facebook, some people have managed to create a fake account using her old channel name ValenESL.

Amazon India Prime Offer - A scam or a bug?

TLDR; Amazon.in shows and sends me a Prime offer that I can't avail (it leads to an error message) I have escalated this issue to Amazon India through various means, but the team wants screenshots (even after sharing them through Twitter) and so here's the post explaining that... 1. Amazon India sends me an email: Your Prime membership ends soon - Renew early to lock in old price of ₹999 1499 for another year of Prime. The newsletter comes like this: Rajesh, Renew Prime early and save ₹500 Your Prime membership ends soon Renew today Expiring soon DON'T GO A DAY WITHOUT PRIME! Your Prime membership ends soon - Renew early to lock in old price of ₹999 1499 for another year of Prime. Continue enjoying uninterrupted Prime benefits. Renew today Kindly ignore if you have already availed this offer. Please note that pro...