Apollo music app's temporary demise from Google play store

Yes, you read correctly.

This app was in Google play store for exactly 4 days and was gathering huge praises and marketing momentum. It was sadly pulled out of Google play store, citing copyright infringement.

This afternoon, its flounder oops err..founder, Andrew Neal, quoted in his micro blogging, about the untimely temporary demise, stating that there exists an issue with the way the lyrics being fetched, according to the copyright infringement act filed by a company called Musixmatch.

We understand that this surprise act of Google was to reassure its stakeholders about its new found stringent standards of Google play store.

Well, we wish all the very best for Andrew for the quick recovery to be quick for his brain child, Apollo. That's what a wishful thinking all about, I guess.

Are you being exiled, Tablet PC makers?

This morning, I was reading a continuous bad set of news from prominant Tablet PC makers. One being Amazon on trying to break even for their Kindle Fire HD as they are selling the units for $199 where as the production cost itself was $174 excluding marketing and other misc charges. Another being the the biggest Tech Flop of 2011, HP TouchPad story.

Gone are the days of the glory of Tablet PC manufacturers? Some one said, Desktop PCs are Titanic and Tablet PCs are icebergs. Are these icrebergs melting already due to their pricing and other dispositions? Let us see in detail...

Note taking software - Microsoft OneNote Vs.EverNote

Today I got into one of the biggest dilemma on choosing to continue with note taking software that I currently have Microsoft OneNote Vs. EverNote.

As most of my day dwelve upon the meetings, it is essential for me to take meeting minutes and action items for my meetings to follow up and track with.

Primary Criteria for the selection was to have my notes available in all of my gadgets, blackberry official phone, iPhone personal phone, Blackberry playbook tablet, WhiteBerry Android Tablet, my laptop, PC and the cloud, sky and beyond the milky way if possible.

With such criterions, I could ONLY filter out Microsoft OneNote and EverNote in what is available in the market.

With this backdrop, I am writing this serious of posts to lists down the pros and cons, though I have chosen what I wanted to pursue with.

The winner is .....


The winner is ....EverNote and you got to wait till tomorrow to know the reasons one by one.

 Don't jump ahead with MS oneNote license just yet.

Pattern matching in Excel

Today I have encountered a big confusion on building my annual goals spreadsheet review where some of the goals I have used SMART method of saying "This goal BY 21st JUNE 2012". As usual, some of these were missed out the deadline of the goals and caught up with the goal review.

I wanted to remove this "BY 21st JUNE 2012" as it was rekindling the guilty conscious in me of NOT completing them on time. Using my programmer brain, I obviously wanted to clear these "by.." goals (71 of them) at one go instead of manual editing. Obviously the Pattern Matching functionality came into my mind to perform the same.

In my perl and shell scripting background, I would have used "BY (.*) 2012" to do this simple change. However, the excel spit up the error when I used the same construct in the find and replace box. In my google search on the context, I saw the TILDE (~) symbol being used as "finding the next literal" and with that I have resorted into "BY (~*) 2012" but it did NOT work. With my extensive trial and error, I found the solution and felt stupid to have missed it.

What was the solution with fixed my issue?