1. ITA Software Trip Planner A great money saving resource for finding reasonable fares. Final itineraries will have to be sent to a travel agent to purchase ticket.

2. SeatGuru The ultimate source for airplane seating, in-flight amenities and airline information

3. FlyerTalk features discussions and chat boards that covers the most up-to-date traveler information.

via Amit, a frequent flying friend.

Even though cricket is known as the gentleman’s game, there are enough controversies in cricket to prove otherwise. Form match fixing to sledging, there are plenty of examples of cricket not being as clean as it is made out to be. But it’s also a game where great players have set extraordinary examples of sportsmanship, the famous of which being when Courtney Walsh gave Salim Jaffer a second chance.

Today’s Australian victory against India in the second test at Sydney has taken cricket to a new low. Here a few thing I noticed and my thoughts:

Umpiring
First thing which stood out was how horrible umpiring has gotten in cricket. There are umpiring errors in any sport, but from Tennis to cricket, technology is used to not only minimize umpiring errors, but also to improve the accuracy of umpiring. But, cricket seems to have a very vague protocol for the use of technology in terms of the third umpire. It has come to a point where an umpire asks a fielder if they caught the ball, that’s like asking a thief if he robbed! Why the BCCI does not take a stronger stance against this is baffling?! The whole Test Match was lost because of this.

Sportsmanship
The second thing which stood out was the lack of sportsmanship. Now, my initial reaction was to blame Australia for bad sportsmanship, but then given some thought, it occurred to me that good sportsmanship is no easy feat. It’s a rarity in any sport, because good sportsmanship can get in the way of victory, which is the only goal in any sport.

Australia’s hunger for success is a stronger force than the desire of other teams to deny them that success
BBC Sport’s Oliver Brett

Even though India came out looking the better team in terms of playing with the spirit of the game, Australia came out looking the smarter team. However bad it might look, the Australian’s took advantage of the flaws in the game to carve themselves a nice record setting victory. Australia also played to win, while India played to draw, that kind of attitude difference can impact gameplay tremendously. One plays aggressively while the other plays passively. In this case, aggression won.

Sledging and Racism
The verbal exchange between Andrew Symonds of Australia and Harbhajan Singh of India, resulted in the Australian team lodging a complaint of racism against Harbhajan Singh. Well, the verdict is out, Harbhajan Singh is banned for 3 tests for calling Andrew Symonds a “Monkey”. Evolutionarily speaking, what’s wrong with one monkey calling another monkey, “monkey”?! Now, what I am interested in is what did Andrew Symond’s say to provoke such a reaction from Harbhajan Singh?

Joking aside, sledging and racist comments are seriously out of control in cricket and I am sure far worse things than calling someone a monkey is said on the field. It is time cricket introduced on field penalties, like having players sit out in a penalty box for smaller incidents, and expelled from the match for more serious incidents. Unless there are more immediate in match penalties, sledging is both going to go on, and get worse.

In the end, the rivalry between Australia and India is growing, and probably will soon trump the India-Pakistan rivalry. This is good for cricket, and like the test match in Sydney, it makes for entertaining cricket, and can only make it more popular.

Sibling Excess, a great article on Tehelka which takes a look at how the sibling rivalry between the Ambhani Brothers, Anil and Mukesh, has hurt no one, and how it has benefited both investors and India.

Who cares if the brothers are fighting, the markets are growing because the two are trying to outdo each other.
Finance Minister P. Chidambaram

Due to a small act by my mom, I have a great example of this turn around of the Reliance empire. So this is how the story goes. My grandfather, a freedom fighter and an INA soldier, used to get a substantial pension from both the Central Government of India, and Kerala State Government. Back in 1992, he was bedridden after suffering from a stroke, and my mom used to take care of him, and manage his pension. It was also the year I turned 18, and as an 18th birthday gift from my grandfather and her, she bought some Reliance stock in my name for Rs. 6000, which was money left over after expenses, from my grandfather’s pension.

A year and half back, when Reliance was split up between the two brothers, all those Reliance shares got converted into stocks for each of the companies created at the time of the split. Today, I still have those stocks, and they are worth over Rs. 86,000. That’s approximately an amazing 1300% gain, with most of the gain coming in just the last two years.

With India still growing economically, this sibling rivalry is no where from over, and there is still a lot more to come. So, as an experiment, I am going to hold on to my Reliance shares longer, and post it’s performance every few months.

Apple retail stores provide a very convenient feature by automatically emailing the invoice after a purchase from the store. Yesterday, this simple feature came to the rescue when an invoice was required for product warranty confirmation. My wife had recently purchased a pair of Bose Triport Headphones from the Apple retail store in Salt Lake City, Utah, and during our travel to Dubai, the cheap connector on the headphones came apart. Not what one would expect from a $192 pair of headphones, and so my wife was really pissed off.

Since she wanted the headphones for her trip back to US and the product was still under warranty, we decided to try the Bose service center in Dubai to see if they could provide a replacement connector. After a couple of calls, and callbacks, we finally found the Bose service center, which is located opposite Cars Garage in Dubai. So, yesterday we headed there, and the service technician was able to get us a replacement connector. However, without the invoice the connector was going to cost us about $16.

There was no way I was going to pay $16 for a connector still under warranty, so the quick thinking geek and miser in me, quickly spotted the pc at the service center, and once internet access was confirmed, I got on Gmail, did a search for the keyword “Apple”, downloaded the pdf invoice of the purchase, and walked out with the free connector. As simple as that, it felt great, and kudos to Apple for thinking up such a convenient feature.

Even though that ended great, the service center technician still had to print out the invoice, which I felt was unnecessary. I guess old habits die hard; the entire process could have been digital with a simple forward of the invoice from my email to the service centers email.

Web scraping is a very common process which constantly gathers content from web pages, and is then either put to good use as in search engines or bad uses, such as stealing content. It’s mostly a server side process, where bots and crawlers visit pages, parse content using various pattern matching, string comparison, and regular expression based techniques.

But today, with the popularity of JavaScript, flexible access to the DOM structure, and availability of libraries such as jQuery, page scraping can be approached differently, with less code, and less intrusively using JavaScript. So, I decided to give it a try, using a well structured site like Digg as an example, and build a page scrapper using JavaScript.

DiggStripper is the result of this experiment. The functionality is simple, it takes the Digg home page, traverses the DOM structure, and extracts stories, and builds a JSON object containing the extracted stories. Now, Digg does provide an API to access its information, so there is probably not much use for this page scraper, other than to serve as an example of page scrapping using JavaScript, or to get around any limits set by the Digg API.

The DiggStripper code is available as open source under MIT License, so feel free to download it, and do provide your feedback and ideas for taking it to levels I have not thought of yet.