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Know your Name from PAN card Number

It will be surprising for you to know that your name printed on PAN card will be stored differently in Income – Tax department database sometimes. While trying to find out actual PAN card details, using the link Know your PAN card Number you will be asked to give your surname and date of birth with optional first name and middle name.


It will loyally display the message ‘Results are not matching’ if your name or surname has been interchanged and stored in their database. Then how to find out your name present in IT department records?

Here is the work around,




a) Provide your PAN card number and date of birth

b) Your name present with IT department PAN card database will be displayed along with the details of Jurisdiction 

This helps only if you want to know your name having your PAN card number with you. Also, this would be helpful if you forget what name you have given while filling up PAN card application form.

Bathukamma Festival Celebration, Hyderabad

Dasara is one of the popular celebrations in Andhra Pradesh especially in Telangana region. Bathukamma is celebrated by the women worshipping the nature to bless them with health and wealth. Bathukamma celebrations will start on the initial day of Navarathri and end two days before Dasara.

Bathukamma is made making a stack of flowers. Seven different kinds of flowers will be arranged one above the other in seven steps. Depending on the interest and availability of flowers, size of Bathukamma stack varies. Even few decorate with more flowers and perfumes making it more attractive. Women from all streams of society involve in making Bathukamma irrespective of their creed.
Bathukamma flower stack with Pumpkin flower on top of it

Bathukamma flower stack will be prepared from the afternoon and once it is done, it will be carried to a prominent place in village where all can meet. In cities usually gathering will be in front of house or with neighbors in the nearby vacant place or on roads. The place will be cleaned, rangoli will be put and Bathukamma will be placed on that.
women dancing around Bathukamma

Women will dance around it singing folk songs praying Nature for prosperity, songs are so melodious that even though you won’t understand telugu also you will feel some sort of happiness in that. The simultaneous hand movement of all women is visually appealing to see. Women will be dressed in traditional silk sarees and teen age girls will be in half-sarees. Dandiya will also be played at few places.

Bathukamma set to float

Once the offering of prayers is done, Bathukamma will be set to float in the nearby lake or water sources. Similar to Ganesha festival but here Bathukamma will not be immersed, they will be set to float.

Mapping IP Address to Domain Name

Computers connected to Internet will be identified with the help of Numbers assigned to them (IP address) at the back end. When a user sends request to access some resources (say Gmail) present in the set of computers, the destination computer will be identified by decoding of these numbers. It will be difficult to remember all the numbers as address, to overcome that domain names are introduced.

When you enter gmail.com in the web browser, the name gmail.com will be converted into its equivalent IP address and then it will be decoded to locate the address of gmail servers to further access the resources. IP address will be assigned to any computer connected to Internet (obviously without which internet connection will not be possible)

It so happen so that you purchase domain form one registrar and the hosting package form other, may be for various reasons. In such cases mapping of domain name with IP address will make your domain name to point to the hosting provider’s IP address.

Login to your domain registrar, all the domain name registrars and sellers provide it to customers.

Look for ‘A record’ entries in your domain control panel, in that add A record with IP address provided by your hosting provider. Save the file. It will map your IP address to the domain name.

Click on ‘CNAME records’ it will be for aliasing your domain name. In that add a record with name as ‘www’ (if required) and with IP address provided by hosting provider. Save the file. CNAME records will be helpful to forward request to your website when website name is entered without ‘www’. ‘A record’ IP address and ‘CNAME’ IP addresses are same.

One more step, change your default name servers name record to the ones of hosting provider. The hosting providers will have different ‘NS records’ add them according to your hosting provider. Usually two address of ‘NS records’ are mandatory and remaining are optional. This may take 24 to 74 hours and remember if this change in 'NS records' is not done then Domain Mapping is impossible.

By making the above changes your domain name will be mapped to IP address, whenever your domain name is given it will redirect to the mapped IP address.

Wordpress hosting on Rackspace Cloud Servers

Wordpress can be hosted on Cloud Server. If you are a newbie and want to host your Wordpress blog on good hosting provider with very less downtime, then this post will be of help. Cloud hosting provides unlimited bandwidth and supports very high traffic at times. But the cost is too high. Alternate will be to rent on cloud OS and host Wordpress on it as similar it as done at local machine. 

I tried to do Wordpress hosting on few shared hosting providers, the feedback and reviews about them was not so satisfactory. Checked with few cloud hosting providers cost was too high. I feel that is quite ok with websites receiving high traffic. But for a newbie website cost was very high more than $150/month. Looking for alternatives I got to know that cloud server can be rented and Wordpress can be hosted on it. I somehow didn’t like to look for other options except Rackspace.

I tried few options but couldn’t know how to host Wordpress, looking for tutorials didn’t help much. Rackspace support responded very well and gave link to deployitron.com, using which Wordpress can be built easily by providing user-name, password of Rackspace and API keys. API keys can be got in the login page of Rackspace in the drop down menu accessible clicking on user-name. Copy them to deployitron.com. Deploy-itron can be used to build Wordpress, Drupal and Magneto on Rackspace cloud servers.

Within few minutes OS will be created, Wordpress will be installed and will be ready to use. Just give basic mandatory details, your Wordpress site will be ready to use. You can use Wordpress as easily as hosted on any other webhost. Only limitation is Wordpress will be created on Red Hat or CentOS Linux flavors using Deploy-itron.

Bhuvanagiri (Bhongir) Fort

Bhuvanagiri is also known as Bhongir in local language. May be the impatience or difficulty in pronouncing whole word, Bhuvanagiri has been morphed into Bhongir. Bhuvanagiri is 40 KM from Uppal towards Warangal highway. After crossing Ghatkesar no traffic jam or narrow roads are present, so one can easily reach Bhuvanagiri. Before entering Bhongir itself one can have the view of large monolithic stone on the road side. There is fort on top of the stone maintained by monuments and museums department.
Bhuvanagiri fort on the top of the Monolithic rock

Even though there is no large fort or structure is found on the monolithic stone, only few remains are present and I that we can easily make out the plastering made using cement concrete. Fort will be open from morning 9:00 AM to evening 5:00 Pm but I found that no strict timings will be observed as many will go to see either the sun-rise or sun-set. Bird’s view of Bhongir town can be enjoyed while climbing. I suggest one can visit this fort either in morning or in the evening as the rock will heat up soon and emit heat which makes more tired.
Bhongir rock on which fort is present

on the way up

inside Bhuvanagiri fort 

side view of fort

ground floor

sunset and the city of Bhongir

statue of Sardar Sarvai Papanna 

On a historical note, the fort was once ruled by Sardar Sarvai Papanna before it was conquered by Mughal emperors. Mughal emperors tried to give Islamic style to the architecture. Since no effort has been made to preserve the fort and also its presence on the top of the rock, might have resulted in early degradation of walls and architecture. Don’t forget to wear shoes while climbing as few places are steep and slippery. Also, one can go to the roof of building by the beautiful circular fashioned steps.

Kollur Mookambika Temple

Kollur is a temple town very near the famous Kodachadri hills of Western Ghats. Trekkers not willing to stay on Kodachadri hills or nearby home stays prefer Kollur as this temple town is having many guest houses owned by Temple authority and others. Guest Houses owned by the Temple takes nominal fare for providing accommodation. Even though Kollur is in Karnataka, most of its visitors are from Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Kollur is also having direct buses from many cities of Kerala and Tamil Nadu.

Kollur is having Mookambika temple. Goddess Mookambika is believed to manifestation of Shakti, Saraswathi and Mahalakshmi. It is also believed that the Goddess in Kollur is in the form of Jyotir-Lingam formed by the incorporation both Shiva and Shakti. Kollur Mookambika Devi is popularly known as ‘Moogambigai’ in Tamil Nadu and ‘Mookambi’ in Kerala.

Kollur Mookambika Temple entrance

According to Hindu Mythology, this place is where the Devi Mookambika was installed by Adi Shankaracharya. Adi Shankaracharya meditated at Kodachadri Hills and when Devi appeared before him asking for his wish. Shankaracharya expressed his wish to install her at a place in Kerala, Devi Mookambika agreed to it on a condition that she will be following Shankaracharya wish and Shankaracharya should not turn back till they reach destination, if he does so she will be installed at that spot itself. To check Shankaracharya, Devi stopped the sound coming out of her anklets and Shankaracharya turned back to see Devi, as put forth in the condition Devi installed at Kollur itself. The Panchaloha (alloy of five metals) image of Goddess was made on Shree Chakra by Adi Shankaracharya itself while installing Devi Vigraha at Kollur. (As evidence to this fact, there exists the Shankara Peetam on the top of Kodachadri Hills where it is believed that Shankaracharya did meditation)

inside the Temple premises

There is some interesting story behind the name Mookambika. Adi Shakti got the name Mookambika by killing the demon Mookasura. Kola Maharshi did penance in order to praise Lord Shiva and at the same time there was a demon doing penance to please Lord Shiva. When Lord Shiva appeared before demon, he could not ask for anything as he was made dumb (mooka) by Adi Shakti. Later the dumb demon (Mooka = dumb, Asura = demon) was killed by Adi Shakti.

Souparnika River also flows through Kollur and the water of this river is believed to cure all sorts of diseases as it absorbs various natural elements along its flow.

Dasara and Janmastami are celebrated grandly at Kollur. Kollur is well connected by road and railways.

Recommender Systems: Pros and Cons

I was searching information about particular products in various E-Commerce websites and after a couple of searches, I could notice a side bar recommending some products based on the search I made. The product list was comprising similar products so that of I searched. Looking at how these kind of recommendations are done, got to know that it is an another world full of algorithms.

The recommendation is done based on some set of machine learning algorithms to make the life simple. The machine learning algorithms makes use of information such as products searched, country where the customer lives in etc., In sophisticated E-Commerce systems having option of user registration will consider the facts such as user age group, gender of user. In simple, a set of algorithms will gather information based on the search history of user, analyze the gathered information and then recommend products to the user, such type of recommending mechanism is called as Recommender Systems.

Recommender systems is an emerging field even though conventional method of suggesting a product either positively or negatively do exists from quite a long time. (Best example is recommending friends for a movie!)

Pros:

1) Easy recommendations make less searchs and some times end up un good deals

2) User eviews will give accurate information, this is also an advantae if you purchase online as you can see other reviews too, most of the times honest

3) Speed up the process of decision and purchase based on the previous statistics

Cons:

1) If the system recomends products with bias, then customer wil be landing into wrong deals

2) Chances are that some websites may suggest products wrongly based on analysis of little information gathered