Best cash back credit card in india

I am currently doing some research to find out the best cash-back credit card in India.

So far, I have discovered that ABN AMRO's ONE credit card fits my needs best.

It does charge an annual fee of INR 600 but it gives an average return of >1.5% in solid cash for about first INR 29000/month you will spend on anything (a total of INR 6000 every year). Plus, there is no surcharge at any petrol punps !!

Is there anything better out there? Am I missing something in its fine print? Please feel free to comment.

Why i moved back from iPhone to Blackberry

After trying iPhone for about 2 months, I am finally going back to my Blackberry Pearl.
I gave iPhone a shot but even though its awesome, it is still not ready for corporate users.

Here are the issues that were deal breaker for me:

• No Support for syncing notes: I was used to taking my notes on my blackberry. I had a lot of lists and misc notes on my Pearl that I synced with Yojimbo on my laptop. If a friend recommended a good movie - it went on my list. My boss suggested something new in the hallway - it was on my list. With iPhone the whole concept does not exist !!
• International Coverage is clumsy (and expensive): I travel a lot to other countries and I was used to just having my blackberry work everywhere !! There was nothing to configure. No APN settings to messs around with. No extra charges. I land in a new country and my email just arrives as it always does. It just worked. Not so with iPhone.
  

There are a few other issues with iPhone that were not exactly deal breaker but irked me a lot anyways.

• Mail client is clumsy on iPhone: On Blackberry, it takes one click to read email or to compose one. On iPhone you click on email icon, then you click on your account's name and then you choose your inbox (3 clicks). It takes 1 more click (a total of 4) to compose a mail. This is frustrating as many corporate people live and die by their emails. Adding 2 extra clicks to my email check is like adding an extra 500 clicks to my work week if I am traveling. Totally not cool.
• There is no way to search your contacts on iPhone: This is pretty lame on Apple's part. First of all it takes 2 clicks to reach your contact list from the main screen (every phone I have used in my life does this job in 1 click - and blackberry takes zero clicks). Once you are on your contact list, there is no way to search for contacts !! I did not believe it when I first noticed it. Do they really expect me to BROWSE thru my 600 contacts to find the one I want to dial?
  
• No support for task syncing: Just like notes there is no way to sync tasks from my iPhone back to my laptop. If there was a good note syncing application - I probably wont miss it so much. But without it - this annoyed me a lot.
• No blinking light for new mails: My Blackberry blinks an LED when it has a new email. Nothing too disturbing - just a subtle way of letting me know that there is new email waiting for me and if I want I can get to it (just like my email client does). I searched very hard but could not find a way for my iPhone to do the same.
• Exchange issue has been beaten to death so I wont harp too much about it. Basically, you get Exchange over IMAP. With iPhone, you do not get over-the-air syncing of calendar, tasks or contacts that you get with BES.
  
• Blackberry is smart with email: There are other ways in which Blackberry does a better job with email. If I get a big PDF from my sales guy on blackberry which I need to forward to my boss - I do not need to wait for the entire 1 MB thing to download before I can forward it. I can just look at the header (or the body of the email) and forward it. Blackberry does all the heavy lifting server side. There are other similar smart things that Blackberry does with email which will take Apple quite some time to catch up with.
  
• Other misc issues: I also did not like a few other things. iPhone is a tad heavier than my Pearl. There is a distinct lack of choice for carriers for iPhone (its not even legally available in most of our international office locations). There is no support to view PPT files attached with mails.

I must say, iPhone does have many impressive features:

• The quality of the video on this thing is amazing and even though my Pearl can play music there is a huge difference in the quality of the two
• The way Apple has integrated with iTunes and YouTube is also very apt. I found myself watching a lot more YouTube because of my iPhone.
  
• The browser is a lot more useful with its finger-gestures and better support for javascript and portrait mode.
  
• And, yes, overall, iPhone is a very finished and good-looking product.

However, I do not think its ready for the business market just yet.

Don't get me wrong. I do think iPhone is a game-changing product. It has redefined not just the bar but the rules by which mobile phone industry measures itself. The list of innovations that have gone into this small product is astonishing.

In the next 2 years, I will not be surprised if we see many more phones (some from Apple and some from other vendors) raising the bar even further and adding even more features. Perhaps, some of them will take good care of business users as well.

Throttling bandwidth usage for Miro (formerly Democray Player)

Miro is a great software. Unfortunately, there are still some bugs to be ironed out and it can quickly become a bandwidth hog.

Sometimes, it hogs so much bandwidth on my macbook that I cannot browse the net or download my email.

Hence, I wrote this small script thats uses ipfw and dummynet features of BSD (and OS X Tiger) to throttle bandwidth to ports used by Miro:

#sudo ipfw pipe 1 config bw 24Kbit/s
#sudo ipfw queue 1 config pipe 1 weight 1
#sudo ipfw queue 2 config pipe 1 weight 3
#sudo ipfw add 10 queue 1 ip from `hostname` to any src-port 8500-8600
#sudo ipfw add 20 queue 2 ip from any 1024-65535 to `hostname`

Now, verify that your Miro bandwidth usage goes down in the real-time !!

If something is wrong, then type "sudo ipfw flush" and start over.

This will not survive a reboot. This will only work for OS X 10.4