Prakash Advani’s Blog

Todays computer have more power than what is required by a single users. Thanks to the Gigahertz race, processors are getting faster and faster. The result is that an average Joe uses only 10% of the processing.

The best way to harness this underutilised power is to get multiple users to share the resources of the same computer.

One way is Utilise NComputing device or to setup a dual-head display on your computer and follow this howto.

Nokia has developed a phone that charges itself using microwaves. It picks up waves from TV signals, radio and other mobile phones.

So finally all the rations that’s been cooking our brains is finally being put to some good use.

Olympus just released its Micro Four Thirds camera the Olympus E-P1. It was Panasonic which introduced this concept by doing away with the Prism, thereby reducing the size of the camera and now Olympus is following suit.

Enough of technology, what does all this mean?

This means that you can have a small camera with inter-changeable lenses.

Whats I like about this camera:

• 12 MP Camera
• 3 inches LCD screen
• High Definition video recording with stereo sound
• Built in Image Stabilisation
• HDMI port
• Support for SD Memory, makes it easy to swap memory with other consumer devices. Thank god the xD format is gone
• Adaptor for four third and older Olympus lenses, so you can use your existing lenses
• Support upto 30 min exposure for those long exposures
• Metalic Body
• Good quality lenses
• Dust reduction system
• Audio recording to have your notes narrations

What I don’t like:

No Viewfinder? Come on Olympus, you know photographers better than anyone else. I like using the LCD but in certain conditions, such as when there is too much light, the LCD can’t be seen and thats when the viewfinder comes to your rescue.

However there is an optional viewfinder available if you must.

No Built In Flash. Which means you can’t use it for indoor evening parties. You do have optional flashes at additional costs. However you can’t use flash and optical finder at same time, as they both sit into the same slot.

Comparison with Panasonic GH1

Olympus Advantage

• Image Stabilisation
• Metalic Body

Panasonic Advantage

• Electronic View Finder
• Built in Flash
• Faster Auto Focus
• Vari-angle LCD, which means the LCD can be moved around to take the difficult shots.
• 1080p video recording vs 720p of Olympus

Here is more stuff from DPReview.

43rumors was the first to report this camera, and has lots of more information.

Amazon has released the source code for its e-book reader Kindle.

And guess what it runs Linux.

Have a look if you are interested in the source.

Way to go Amazon!

When I boot up my Ubuntu system, it often says Routine check of drives and takes forever to boot up.

This is because the routine check is set to a number which is not very high if you don’t reboot often Which may be the case in a server but for a Desktop its an overkill, specially if you boot up a couple of times a day.

With a small change, you can boot up quicker and save time as well.

So here is the solution:

sudo tune2fs -c 100 /dev/sda5

Where

100 is the number of counts after which it should do a routine check.

/dev/sda5 is my ex3 file system, replace this with whatever is your partition number.

If you have more than one, you need to do this for all your ext3 partitions.

Read More if you need more details.

I recently received a phishing email which was suppose to do all kinds of funny things. When I clicked on it, it got blocked and this is the message I got, thanks to the Netcraft Toolbar on Firefox.

MIT Media labs is working on a Sixth Sense technology, amazing stuff.

Check out this video.

Jackalope is finally released in the wild.

The best way to get it by torrent as the download mirrors are going to be busy.

Torrent Link for CD releases:

Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope i386 (32-Bit).

Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope AMD64 (64-Bit).

Rest of the torrents if you are looking for other releases.

Download Link. Please use the mirrors In case you can’t use torrent for some reason.

If you are already running Ubuntu and want to upgrade, just type.

Press Alt+F2 and type in “update-manager -d” (without the quotes).

If you want to get faster downloads, you can update using P2P (peer to peer). Read this article for more details.

What’s new in the release:

• Cool new notification system improves usablity.
• Faster boot time, no more waiting for it to boot up.
• Open Office 3.0, provides better compatibility with MS Office documents and also has other enhancements.

Whenever you avail of any service which sends you an SMS alert,  be aware, there is nothing which prevents the service provide from using your number to spam you.

They keep spamming you with all their new offerings even if you haven’t asked for it. This in in spite of subscribing for DND services.

I have thought of a way around this.

• Go to the service provider’s web site and find their toll free number. If its not listed on the site, just google for it:)
• Call them on their toll free number so you don’t pay for the call.
• Explain to them, taking as much time as you need that you don’t want to receive their SMSes.

Now if they understand simple economics, they will stop the SMSes. If they don’t understand, they will anyways be out of business.Here is how:

Its very cheap for them to send a million SMS but it will be very expensive for them if only 1 percent of these start calling them.

1 Million SMS costs less than Rs 100,000 (at Rs. 0.10 per SMS for bulk SMSes)

10,000 people calling cost Rs. 1,000,000 (even if you take Rs. 100 per call)

The service provide would soon realise that more customers are calling them to complain, the service provider is paying for the call and the service provider’s agents are busy attending to them rather than attending to customers wanting to buy their product and services. They would also lose business as potential customers wouldn’t be able to get through and would be on long holds.

You can’t imagine the effect of team work. If all of us do this, we can bring the biggest spammer to listen to us.

Have started a India Anti Spam Action Group on Facebook, please join if you are interested.

Its been raining high speed internet in India. Tata, Reliance and BSNL have started offering 3G USB Data Cards which offer high speed internet. Tata and Reliance claim 3.1 MBps speeds while BSNL claims 7.2 Mbps.

I have tested both Tata Indicom Photon+ and Reliance NetConnect Broadband+ on Ubuntu 8.10. I didn’t get much time to test everything but this is my initial feedback.

They claim to offer 3 Mbps but in reality I got 300-700Kbps download speeds. Which is still not bad.

Note: Even if you take the unlimited plan, you are still limited to 10GB of download per month as there is a fine print of fair use policy. This is an  irritant for people who do lots of downloads.

Tata Indicom Photon+ offer Huawei

Reliance Netconnect Broadband+ offers a choice of  Huawei and ZTE.

Reliance Huawei was the only one that works out of the box on Ubuntu and gets detected as  /dev/ttyUSB0.

After that you can edit /etc/wvdial.conf and put the following lines.

[Dialer Defaults]
Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0
Username = yournumber
Phone = #777
Password = yournumber
New PPPD = yes
Stupid mode = yes

Replace yournumber with your number (provided at the back of the box).

ZTE didn’t even get detected,  and strangely enough there was no message on dmesg either.

lsusb shows: Bus 005 Device 002: ID 19d2:fff6

Tata Indicom Photon+ (Huawei based) also didn’t get detected.

lsusb shows:

Bus 005 Device 009: ID 12d1:140b Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.

Moz has tried this and has got this working using the following steps.

$ sudo modprobe usbserial vendor=0×12d1 product=0×140b
$ sudo mknod /dev/ttyUSB0 c 188 0
$ sudo mknod /dev/ttyUSB1 c 188 1

Add the following lines to the /etc/wvdial.conf, customise phone number, username and password as per advise of TataIndicomm.

[Dialer Defaults]
Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0
Init1 = ATZ
Phone = #777
Username = cdma
Password = cdma
New PPPD = yes
Stupid Mode = 1

Try connecting with sudo wvdial

If you want a graphical dialer, install gnome-ppp

Go into setup, select your modem as /dev/ttyUSB0

Put your login/password depending on the service provider. Put the number as #777 and you are ready to connect.

Links to tariffs/plans:

Reliance

Tata Indicom

The currently global economy seems to be getting better for Open Source. After enterprises adopting Open Source now software outsourcing Major says:

“We won’t have as much work for all our employees right now, so we’re encouraging them to contribute to projects on open source and do more innovative work,”

Nandan Nilekan, Co-Founder, Co-Chairman and CEO Infosys.

This is a great way to polish their employees programming skills at the same time keep them busy.

Read More.

The BJP, India’s biggest opposition party has released its IT vision which states that they will use Open Source and follow Open Standards.

They also plan to give 10 Million Laptops loaded with Linux and Open Source for Rs. 10,000 US$200.

Their IT vision is very impressive and looks like its well thought out strategy talking about local hosting, higher broadband speeds, lower PC costs, single Identity and many more.

If you are interested, download the IT Vision (3.5 MB download, not a worry if you are already on Broadband

Simple business model:

• Make your product/technology popular.
• Let people start using and depending on it.
• Now extract money by suing them.
• Profit!

This is exactly what is happening with Patents, its becoming a way to extract money.

And Microsoft is using it to fight Linux.

Patents were designed to protect the innovator. But deals in the recent past prove otherwise. They are primarly used by the Big Boys to get money from the small guys or make them do things which actually prevents innovations.

Read this article to get an understanding.

This time, the lucky donor of cash for secrets is Brother, which will now be allowed to use Microsoft patents to make printers. As Microsoft doesn’t make printers–indeed, doesn’t even make printer drivers–it is an interesting exercise to try and guess what’s actually happened. It’s fruitless to ask either of the companies–and we did try. In cases like this, as in the best gangster movies, nobody ain’t sayin’ nothin’.

Thomas Edison’s teachers said he was “too stupid to learn anything.” He was fired from his first two jobs for being “non productive.” As an inventor, Edison made 1,000 unsuccessful attempts at inventing the light bulb. When a reporter asked, “How did it feel to fail 1,000 times?”
Edison replied, “I didn’t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.”

I have a nice feeling of gratitude towards Thomas Edison for inventing technology thats lighting up our homes everyday.

French fighter planes were unable to take off after military computers which were running Windows were infected by a computer virus.

France is a big user of Linux. The French police and the French Parliament is already using it, so now the military should also switch.

This is an interesting article comparing various features of Ubuntu with Vista and Windows 7.

It covers the following:

• How long does each operating system take to install?
• How much disk space was used in the standard install?
• How long does boot up and shutdown take?
• How long does it take to copy files from USB to HD, and from HD to HD?
• How fast can it execute the Richards benchmark?

Read the whole article.

Internet Explorer has been loosing market share to Firefox. This is now old news but we now have stats to prove.

Internet Explorer has lost more than 7% market share, it has gone from 74.80% to  67.55% market share. Note to Indian websites, can you now please make your web site work on Firefox? You are loosing the customers who don’t use Internet Explorer.

Read More

Ext4 is here and it rocks! It a faster file system and expect it to show up in upcoming distros such as Ubuntu 9;04. Finally we have a file system that gives faster performance and is widely accepted. ReiserFS had good performance and I have used it in the past, but today is not been used widely. Ext4 should fill in the void pretty well.

Read this article for more details.

While we are still struggling with a few Kbps speeds, which we call Broadband in India. Korea is already rolling out 1Gbps broadband by investing US$24 Billion.

Most of the internet plans available in India, have a download limits of 1GB and speeds are 256/512Mbps.This defeats the whole purpose of having high speed internet when the moment you start using it, you end up paying for every MB of download.

Airtel which is offering the highest speeds for home use of 8Mbps, has  a cap of 4GB, which you can easily use up in about an hour! And BTW Airtel service is available in only select cities and locations, so you are out of luck.

What India needs:

• Active peering between ISPs, most local ISPs don’t connect to each other, so traffic has to go around the world to reach them.
• Fireup the unused fiber.  Only 3% of fiber optic cables are actually being used, the rest are sitting idle. Create a law to force people to put this to use within a time frame, else this fiber becomes public property.
• Currently its more expensive to host sites in India, than in the US, because of which most Indian companies have web sites situated in the US. First reduce the cost of hosting in India and second give tax incentive for businesses to host web sites in India.
• Also ISP shouldn’t charge for downloads, if the downloads are from an Indian server. This will encourage people to download from a local server.
• Setup  local mirrors of popular software such as Linux flavours.