Tue 29 Apr 2008
Albert Einstein Quote
Posted by Prakash under Quotes
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“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.”
-Albert Einstein
Tue 29 Apr 2008
Posted by Prakash under Quotes
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“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.”
-Albert Einstein
Thu 24 Apr 2008
Posted by Prakash under Linux
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The much awaited Ubuntu 8.04 aka Hardy is finally released. Go ahead and download using your favourate bittorrent client.
Torrent is the most efficient way to download as it doesn’t depend on the infrastructure of the central server and each download PC also becomes a host.
If you don’t already have a torrent client and want to quickly get started, try µTorrent the smallest Bittorrent client (just 214KB) .
Tue 15 Apr 2008
Posted by Prakash under Cars
[4] Comments
Now first thank you Hyundai for launching the i10 first in India. In fact the car is also completely designed in India and manufactured too. What this means is that the customer in India gets a world class product.
Whats good:
Looks good, better than most hatchbacks in the same category.
Its a 1.1 engine which it shares with the Santro and the Getz Prime 1.1.
It has tubeless tyres. Now its easy to get tubeless types repaired and they are convenient so you don’t get stuck in the middle of the highway with a flat tyre.
Option of sunroof, not much use when its hot, but some people fancy it.
Motor Driven Power Steering, better than Santros Hydraulic Power Steering.
Tilt Steering: You can adjust the steering wheel. A boon for tall/well built people.
Good driver legroom.
High scores on safety:
Option for ABS and airbags.
Whats Not good:
Front seat headrests are not adjustable.
No high seating like the Santro, which is a boon to people with knee problems.
Safety features: Airbags and ABS are optional, why not make them standard?
Now the car didn’t take away all the awards just like that? It was the Car of the Year of most of the Auto magazines in India. Its likely to replace the Santro at some point of time but Santro buyers/users need not worry. From what I have heard, the sales of Santro is very good today and is not likely to be discontinued anytime soon.
Related Articles:
Tata Nano: 1 Lakh Rupees ($2500) Car
Maruti Suzuki Swift Vs. Hyundai Getz
Hyundai Santro Vs. Maruti Suzuki Wagon-R
Mon 7 Apr 2008
Posted by Prakash under Linux
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After hitting the 500 million download milestone, here is another feather in the cap for Firefox.
Mozilla Firefox’s share of the enterprise desktop market has reached 18 percent, according to a new Forrester report.
Fri 4 Apr 2008
Posted by Prakash under Quotes
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Interesting quote from Michael Dell in his book Direct from Dell.
“Sometimes it better not to ask-or to listen-when people tell you something can’t be done. I didn’t ask for permission or approval. I just went ahead and did it.”
Wed 2 Apr 2008
Posted by Prakash under India
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India is soon going to be the second largest mobile market in the world ahead of the United States.
Currently India has 250 million mobile subscribers as per last count and will be 300 million by end of April 2008.
US has 260 million and China is at 550 million.
Way to go!
Tue 18 Mar 2008
There are a lot of good reasons for moving to Linux on the desktop, primary amongst them that is is more secure, it doesn’t have the virus problems that Windows has and of course you can save tons of money on licenses.For the IT department, once a Linux system is set up, it is very easy to manage and requires very little maintenance. Many IT administrator have found that they never have to attend to a Linux desktop, or reformat the machine every couple of months, or spend sleepless nights cleaning the viruses and wiping spyware.
But before you make the move, here are a few suggestions on the best practices to be followed before moving to Linux on the desktop.
Organisations have already saved a fortune by moving to OpenOffice alone. Ninety percent of users in any organisation need only ten percent of the functionality and OpenOffice today has most of the functionality an average user would use and a lot more. In fact today OpenOffice has many nice features such as export to PDF, native support for OpenDoc Format (ODF) and support for Microsoft file formats. It can also export presentations to Macromedia Flash.
In addition to the office suite, Mozilla Firefox is an excellent browser. It is the fastest growing browser, it is secure and there are lots of extensions with which you can enhance the browser for your requirements. Removing the fees for MS Office in your company and introducing open source applications is a great way to break down resistance in organisations to making the leap to Linux on the desktop.
See below for Some Open Source alternatives to popular applications
| Windows Applications | Open Source Alternatives (These run on Both Windows and Linux) |
| MS Office | OpenOffice.org |
| Outlook Express | Mozilla Thunderbird |
| Internet Explorer | Mozilla Firefox |
| Photoshop | Gimp |
| MSN/Yahoo Messenger/ICQ Chat Client | Pidgin |
| Windows Media Player | VLC Media Player |
Wed 5 Mar 2008
Posted by Prakash under Quotes
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“The HAPPIEST people DONOT necessarily have the BEST of all.
They simply APPRECIATE what they find on their way.”
Fri 29 Feb 2008
Posted by Prakash under Gadgets and Deals, General
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What happens when a relatively small company launches a low cost notebook? A device that doesn’t do everything but does all the basic computing: email,browsing and wordprocessing and is available at half the cost!
From this article:
Sony: “If (the Eee PC from) Asus starts to do well, we are all in trouble.”
You better be
. Its high time customers stop paying a thousand dollars for typing emails, which be done as well on a $100 PC running Linux.
Tue 26 Feb 2008
The excellent Mozilla Firefox browser now had more than 500 million downloads! Thats excellent news and is perhaps the most popular open source application even more than Linux!
Join the celebrations:
In honor of the 500 million download mark we’re celebrating by raising 500,000,000 grains of rice in one day to help feed the world’s poor. Since we have reached the milestone, it is time to flock to freerice.com and attempt to push the days total over 1/2 billion. This is just a foreshadow to where one day Firefox will be. Food for thought, uh, better yet, Food for Lives; if we reach 500 million grains of rice, that’s a direct contribution in feeding 25,000 people for one day! Donate now, http://freerice.com
Now if only all the Indian sites can be Firefox compatible:
Related posts:
Firefox now has 25% browser market share
Protecting yourself from phishing sites
Another reason to use Mozilla Firefox as the browser.
Sun 24 Feb 2008
Posted by Prakash under India, Quotes
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“If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered on the greatest problems of life, and has found solutions, I should point to India.”
Max Mueller, German scholar.
Tue 19 Feb 2008
Posted by Prakash under Gadgets and Deals, Linux
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Configuring this with wireless printing and scanning Ubuntu Linux 7.10
Whats good about this printer:
Wireless Printing: So your printer/scanner need not to be physically connected to the PC/Laptop and can be anywhere on the Network.
Memory Card Reader: Remove your memory card from your digital camera, insert into the printer and print your photos directly.
LCD Display: It has a nice LCD display which displays the status.
Photo quality: The printer is designed to print photo quality prints, I haven’t compared the quality, but its a nice feature to have
Flat bed scanner: So you can scan documents and books.
Copier: You can take photocopies without using a computer. Directly like a photocopy machine.
What I don’t like:
Single colour cartridge: No separate cartridge for each colour so you need to replace the whole cartridge even if you run out of one colour. What a waste!
Also be careful when you run the printer for the first time. It takes a test print and asks you to scan the page. If you don’t wait for the ink to dry up, your scanner will have ink smudged all over! Wonder why don’t ask you to wait.
Now the meat:
Note: Please read the section on HPLIP below, before you start.
Configuring the printer on Ubuntu is a breeze. Just plug in the USB cable and the printer gets detected and configured. It uses the C4200 drivers which work fine.
To configure wireless, you need to run the setup utility the first time on Windows. This will activate the wireless printing.
Once that is done, from Linux, change the print port from USB to jetdirect and give the IP address. The printer IP address can be found through the router. Once you know the IP, just ping to check if its accessible.
If you can’t figure out the IP, you can force your router to assign a specific IP address to the MAC address and then use that IP address.
If I look into /etc/cups/printers.conf this is what I see:
DeviceURI hp:/net/Photosmart_C4380_series?ip=192.168.0.11
Where 192.168.0.11 is the Printer IP address.
HPLIP
To get the scanner working. I had to install the HP utility from HPLIP Site. This was a bit tricky to install. When it was trying to install the necessary packages, it gave me some strange errors.
Package install command failed with error: 100
To fix that I had to manually install the required packages and then it worked fine.
This utility also doesn’t work with the drivers bundled with Ubuntu and those drivers needs to be uninstalled.
Once this was installed, I was able to print and scan wirelessly!
To scan use xsane or xscanimage
Also refer to this article for more information.
Wed 13 Feb 2008
Posted by Prakash under Quotes
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Like this one:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less travelled by, and
that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost
Mon 11 Feb 2008
Posted by Prakash under General
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Sun 20 Jan 2008
Posted by Prakash under Quotes
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From Robert Kyosaki’s book: Rich Dad Poor Dad.
Found it very inspiring:
Most of the time , life does not talk to you. It just sort of pushes you around. Each push is life saying, “Wake up. There’s something I want you to learn.”
If you learn life’s lesson, you will do well. If not, life will just continue to push you around. People do two things. Some just let life push them around. Others get angry and push back. But they push back against their boss, or their job, or their husband or wife. They do not know it’s life that’s pushing.”
Life pushes all of us around. Some give up. Others fight. A few learn the lesson and move on. They welcome life pushing them around. To these few people, it means they need and want to learn something. They learn and move on. Most quit, and a few like you fight.
Thu 17 Jan 2008
“What we focus on, we empower and enlarge. Good multiplies when focused upon. Negativity multiplies when focused upon. The choice is ours: Which do we want more of?”
Sun 13 Jan 2008
Posted by Prakash under India, Quotes
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“India conquered and dominated China culturally for 20 centuries without ever having to send a single soldier across her border.”
Hu Shih, former Ambassador of China to USA
Fri 11 Jan 2008
Posted by Prakash under Gadgets and Deals
[3] Comments
When was the last time you dated a woman who was nice and sexy and at the same time intelligent too? Welcome to the iPhone. Steve Jobs magic is working.
The iPhone is not only a sexy phone but extremely intelligent. Once you use it, you would find other phones are so dumb!
I tried a Windows mobile phone. While talking it would blank out the screen. Which is a good way to save power but…. during a call if I had to wake up the screen, I had to tap the screen. While doing that, some other button would get accidently activated and the call would get disconnected or go on hold.
Similarly on many touch screen phones, you would find that while talking, when the ear touches the screen, it activates some button that you didn’t wanted it to.
How does iPhone manage this? It has a proximity sensor. The proximity sensor switches off the touch screen when you take the phone close to your ear, and turns it back on when you take it off. Simple technology but extremely practical.
The iPhone interface is also the best I have seen. Very easy to use and intuitive. It hides all the complexity that a normal user wouldn’t use.
What Apple is missing in the iPhone that they are not trying to make it a replacement for a computer. It still requires the computer and iTunes to sync music, pod casts, etc. You also can’t sync your address book with Yahoo or Gmail directly, this again requires iTunes.
What more I like about the iPhone:
Now what I don’t like about the phone:
The iPhone’s SMS is very poor, perhaps because SMS is not big in the US but it surely is in India and other countries. Hope Apple fixes it before they want to sell it to Europe and Asia.
Conclusion:
For me the iPhone is the smartest device I have ever used. And if you don’t mind some of the limitations mentioned about, its definitely worthy the try.
PS: If Steve Jobs is reading this, good work! But keep it open
Read Earlier post:
Thu 10 Jan 2008
Posted by Prakash under Cars, India
[3] Comments
Tata has gone where no other car company has gone before. They have release the cheapest car in the World.
This car has huge potential to provide basic automobile to the 3rd world countries at an affordable cost.
Vital Stats:
Engine: The three cylinder 624 cc four stroke petrol to develop 33 bhp.
Mileage: 50 miles to the gallon or 20 kilometres to the litre.
Some pics..



Related articles:
Maruti Suzuki Swift Vs. Hyundai Getz
Hyundai Santro Vs. Maruti Suzuki Wagon-R
Tue 8 Jan 2008
Posted by Prakash under Linux
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When men were men and wrote their own device drivers - Linus Torvalds
Here are all the photos of the men
Kernel Summit 2007 group photo