Today, I got this e-mail from PayPal.

PayPal

Dear Shobhit Prabhakar,

We have been diligently working with the RBI and our business
partners to resume Indian bank withdrawals for the thousands
of Indian businesses who depend on PayPal to sell their goods
or services in the global marketplace.

Today, we are happy to announce that the RBI has allowed us
to continue local bank withdrawals for settlements for exports
of goods and services. We are currently making changes to
comply with Indian regulations for settlements for exports of
goods and services, and we anticipate that, as of Wednesday,
March 3rd, customers will be able to use our
bank withdrawal service.

As part of the changes, you will be required to fill out a
new field entitled ‘Export Code’ when you request a withdrawal.
This information is required under the current laws of India in
order to identify the nature of cross-border merchant transactions.

On Monday, March 1st, we will be back in touch with specific
instructions on how you can move your money into your bank account.

Moving forward, the RBI has told us that PayPal needs specific
approvals to allow personal remittances to India, which we
currently do not have. Until we get these approvals, personal
payments into India will remain suspended. However, if you are
an exporter, you will continue to be able to use the PayPal
service for payments of goods and services. In fact, with the
changes we are making to our system, PayPal is now set to be a
more powerful engine for exporters in India. With purpose codes
for export transactions and FIRCs (Foreign Inward Remittance
Certificates), you should now be able to get the export
related benefits you seek.

You can check the PayPal blog for additional updates.

www.thepaypalblog.com

We thank you for your business and for your patience during
the past few weeks.

Sincerely,

PayPal

This might bring some relief to Indian exporters with valid IEC (Import Export Code), but the rest of the service providers like us will have to first get Export code, which in itself a troublesome task in India. Also there might be some tough time ahead for PayPal after this, as RBI will be keeping an eye on PayPal’s operations.
I guess I’ll be going with some other Payment processor until PayPal becomes fully functional and convenient again.

They accept payment/cash from individuals, as well as keep it without giving any interest and also they transfer it into cash in foreign countries. They are actually breaking laws, but they are still in business.

In India the conditions are changing, the RBI(Reserve Bank of India) wants the banks to monitor and report every suspicious banking activities to them, on the other hand the PayPal can’t actually report or give details of every transaction before it can control person to person transactions, and that is what they have done. I have come to know from a lot of sources(specially the DigitalPoint Forum) that PayPal is returning/refunding payments made to/form Indian PayPal accounts. From now on only Business/Service related transactions are allowed and personal transactions to and from India PayPal accounts are disabled. This is all due to RBI restrictions. Keep in mind that a lot of PayPal transactions are related to Indian users.

With increasing competition and tough rules I am unsure about the future of eBay India as well.

Another thing is: as USD/INR forex rates are fluctuating, they find themselves in a bit trouble to keep up their services in India. I am sure how they can handle the differences, but it would require some preparation on their side. The paypal to bank withdrawals are being delayed in India, I also initiated a withdrawal on 31st January 2010 and still waiting for the money. It has been over 7 days and usually PayPal funds are deposited in Bank accounts in 24 hours, I guess they will find a way to complete the due transactions in short time. I am not like Uncle Scrooge, but I Love my money.

I like PayPal for being a good and simple alternative to other expensive payment processors online, But they need to change the way they serve their users, specially in India.

Update(10th February 2010): In pretty unprofessional manner, today paypal refunded my money back to my PayPal account without even giving any reason or notification. They should at least inform the users if they are having some kind of problem. Anyway, now I am going back to xoom.com to withdraw my paypal balance. Let’s see what’s their response. If you would like to use xoom, you can use following xoom coupon code for 100% fee waiver: XOOMONETIMER

Nick Vujicic is a differently-abled brave young man suffering from rare Tetra-amelia disorder. He has no limbs yet he lives his life independently and gives inspirational speeches to people all over the world.

He believes that anyone can overcome any situation if he/she does not stop trying, No failure is ultimate, and with courage and continuous efforts all the problems in life can be solved.

Are You Going to Finish Strong?

For more information please visit – Life Without Limbs.

After clean installing Windows 7, I wondered if it was possible to install XP as well in the same PC in dual boot mode. Dual booting is possible, but like in previous situation, It is required to clean install XP first than install the Windows 7 in a separate drive. If you wish to dual boot XP OR Vista with Windows 7 then you can get detailed help from this page: http://lifehacker.com/5126781/how-to-dual-boot-windows-7-with-xp-or-vista

Anyway, as I had to do random weird things and didn’t wanted to spend time and get bored while installing XP and Windows 7 again, I decided to use Virtual PC solution. Microsoft is providing beta(now RC) version of Windows Virtual PC with Windows XP Mode add-on. Actually Microsoft Virtual PC is stripped down in features and it is now only possible to load Windows XP into the Virtual PC. Edit: You can load other OS too in the Windows Virtual PC, but so far I haven’t found another compatible one.

It is pretty simple and straight forward, it requires two files to be downloaded and a reboot.

Here is how you can do it.

Step 1: Go to Windows Virtual PC download page and select appropriate Windows 7 version (32 bit or 64 bit) and select the language.

Step 2: Download Windows Virtual PC and install it. It is required to reboot the PC after this feature upgrade.

Step 3: Download Windows XP Mode and install.

That’s it. Now you can run the XP mode Virtual PC by going to Start -> All Programs -> Windows Virtual PC -> Windows XP Mode.

Here is the screenshot of Windows XP running inside Windows 7.

Action menu allows you to option to view it in Full Screen mode, Put it to sleep, Restart and Close the Virtual PC.

You can adjust the size of RAM allocated to the Virtual PC(by default it is 256 MB), manage HDD etc by going to Tools -> Settings.

You can also load other USB devices such as web cam and printer etc by clicking on USB -> { appropriate device name }.

Windows XP running inside Windows 7.

Here are few tips you can follow when you face such situations:

Regedit Method:

-run “regedit” command
-find “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/System/Control/StorageDevicePolicies/
-Double click at “Write Protect”
-Change the value to “0″

_________________

HP Drive Key Boot Utility Method:

Download and Install HP Drive Key Boot Utility : http://snipurl.com/hpbootutil

It should work for most brands of flash drives.

_________________

Also check if your drive has write protect notch some where, toggle it then try to format it again.

I hope this would solve your problem.

Aw, Snap!

Today while I was doing some weired experiemts on a site I found that in Chrome pasting a special ASCII character [ALT+0173] twice in any text box instantly crashes that browser instance as well as its parent tab(if you’ve opened that new page by clicking on a link on another page then its parent would be that link holder page.).

The bug has been reported to Google and hopefully new version will be free from this bug.

By the way, if you’ve found a bug in Google Chrome and want to report it to Google simply follow the instructions here: http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=95760

(Saint) Valentine’s Day is a holiday celebrated on February 14 by many people throughout the world. In the West, it is the traditional day on which lovers express their love for each other by sending Valentine’s cards, presenting flowers, or offering confectionery.
…
…
The U.S. Greeting Card Association estimates that approximately one billion valentines are sent each year worldwide, making the day the second largest card-sending holiday of the year, behind Christmas. The association estimates that, in the US, men spend on average twice as much money as women.

It is obvious that few business owners are making a lot of money by motivating young people to spend money on useless things on this day. I believe Love knows no barrier. Time itself has no importance in love.
If two individuals love each other then there is no need to express it on a specific day by buying gifts and cards. I think every day of the year is equal for expressing the Love. So, friends I hope you would not disrespect the real love and try to exploit someone’s feeling by using the name of St. Valentine.

Have fun and enjoy each and every day of your life with your true Love.

Now it turned out that a single ‘/’ character caused this worldwide confusion. Here is the explanation from google’s official blog:

What happened? Very simply, human error. Google flags search results with the message “This site may harm your computer” if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously. We do this to protect our users against visiting sites that could harm their computers. We work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to get our list of URLs. StopBadware carefully researches each consumer complaint to decide fairly whether that URL belongs on the list. Since each case needs to be individually researched, this list is maintained by humans, not algorithms.

We periodically receive updates to that list and received one such update to release on the site this morning. Unfortunately (and here’s the human error), the URL of ‘/’ was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and ‘/’ expands to all URLs. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file. Since we push these updates in a staggered and rolling fashion, the errors began appearing between 6:27 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. and began disappearing between 7:10 and 7:25 a.m., so the duration of the problem for any particular user was approximately 40 minutes.

Now, I hope it wont happen again soon. Best of Luck Google!!!

Here are the screenshots:

I am yet unsure if it is Google’s problem or there is something weired happening on my system, I’ll updates after quick investigation. Till than if you are facing the same problem, please let me know.

Update: I just found out that I am not the only one facing this problem, actually every Google user is getting the same response for every site on the net. I guess Google malware filter has got some bug. It is a really bad news for Google. Google’s stock (GOOG) have already started to fall since this started.

Update 2: Looks like Google has fixed the problem now.