Prakash Advani's Blog

I have been using Thunderbird 2 for more than 2 years now, I recently upgraded to Thunderbird 3 and found it very well designed. Here is what I liked:

• Has an attachment reminder, so if you write “please see the attached… ” and then forgot to attach, it reminds you. Neat!
• Tabbed emails. Used to tabbed browsing? welcome to tabbed email. Allows you to open emails and mail folders into different tabs.
• Powerful search. You can type a search string, and it will find that string in inbox, sent box, subject. This is quite useful if you are looking for something but don’t know where it could be.
• It also has smart folders and and archive folders.
• Addon manager to manage all your addons.

Here is a complete list of features.

Ubuntu 10.04 scheduled to be released on April 29,2010 already bundles Thunderbird 3.

For Ubuntu 9.10, there are ready packages available. To Install Thunderbird 3 on Ubuntu 9.10 read this documentation on how to add the repository.

Use this link to Download Thunderbird  for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Linus Torvalds has purchased a Google Android based Nexus One cellphone.

But I have to admit, the Nexus One is a winner. I wasn’t enthusiastic about buying a phone on the internet sight unseen, but the day it was reported that it finally had the pinch-to-zoom thing enabled, I decided to take the plunge. I’ve wanted to have a GPS unit for my car anyway, and I thought that google navigation might finally make a phone useful.

Read 10 reasons why eWeek believes that it could affect iPhone Sales.

After clocking 10,000 + Units of the Plug Computer, Marvell is releasing Plug Computer 3.0.

For those who came in late, Plug is a small lower powered computer which can do those nightly downloads, uploads, data captures, image captures from web cams and more.

What new?

• 2.0 GHz
• 1 Watt power consumption
• Gigabit Ethernet
• Wifi
• Bluetooh
• SD Card
• eSata
• Runs Linux

Read More.

LORD MACAULAY’S ADDRESS TO THE BRITISH PARLIAMENT, 2 FEBRUARY, 1835

I have travelled across the length and breadth of India and I have not seen one person who is a beggar, who is a thief. Such wealth I have seen in this country, such high moral values, people of such calibre, that I do not think we would ever conquer this country, unless we break the very backbone of this nation, which is her spiritual and cultural heritage, and, therefore, I propose that we replace her old and ancient education system, her culture, for if the Indians think that all that is foreign and English is good and greater than their own, they will lose their self-esteem, their native culture and they will become what we want them, a truly dominated nation.

This not only tells you what India was in 1835 but how British managed to rule over India.

If your work required very high megapixel camera, this is for you. And yes it costs an arm and a leg – 25,000 dollars! Check out more.

Hasselblad H3D II 50 Digital Camera 50MP

Fight global terrorism with Rats, the bomb squad is here!

Rats, which many people dislike are being trained to find explosives. They are used to find Landmine’s and are saving lives.

They are suitable for this, as they have a keen sense of smell. They are also being used to screen for diseases and are found to be faster and cheaper than normal lab tests.

Read More about APOPO the NGO behind one. Want to adopt one?

Olympus and Fuji have both released 30X optical zoom cameras. This is amazing amount of zoom for those wildlife enthusiasts

Here is a comparison between the two:

Features	Olympus SP-800UZ	FinePix HS10
Optical Zoom	30X	30X
Digital Zoom	5X	2X
Megapixel	14	10
Image Stabilisation	Dual	Triple
Display	3″ LCD	3″ Tilting LCD
Movie Recording	High Definition	High Definition
High Speed Movie	10 fps	1000 fps
HDMI	Yes	Yes
ISO	Upto 10,000	Upto 6,400
Raw support	No	Yes
Internal Memory	2048 MB (2GB)	54 MB
Battery	Lithium Ion	AA or Lithium Ion (not included)
Weight	435g	636g
Aperture	F2.8-F5.6	F 2.8-F11
Pricing	US$ 349	US$ 499
Support this site.	Buy Olympus SP-800UZ	Buy Fujifilm FinePix HS10

Olympus has been bringing Micro Four-Third cameras to the market faster that expected. After the E-P1 and E-P2, they have now released E-PL1 which is cheaper by US$ 200.

Here are the specs.

• Kit includes 14-42 Zoom lens
• 12 MegaPixel
• 2.7″ LCD
• HD Video support
• List price US$ 599

E-PL1 has a few advantages over E-P2:

• Dedicated REC button
• Magnified live view button
• Up to 14x live view magnification
• Lighter low-pass filter
• Built-in flash

E-P2 advantages over E-PL1:

• Two control dials
• More direct-access buttons (including ISO and white balance)
• Superior image stabilization system
• AE/AF lock button
• Orientation sensor
• Larger, 3.0″ LCD
• More substantial construction
• 1/180 sec flash sync speed (rather than 1/160)
• Maximum shutter speed of 1/4000 sec (rather than 1/2000)
• Maximum ISO of 6400
• Virtual level display
• Built-in stereo mics/speakers
• Optional wireless remote
• Electronic View Finder (EVF) bundled, in EPL-1 it is optional

Detailed comparison of all the three models at DP Review.

WebmasterPro has an interesting way to calculate the percentage of people using OpenOffice.

Poland & Czech Republic lead in OO usage and have 22 percent people using OpenOffice.

Germany 21 percent and France 19.

UK/US at 9 percent.

India is low at 5 percent.

See more at WebMasterPro.


USB 3 devices have finally started showing up in the US and expect them to be more widely available everywhere else in the world, later this year.

USB 2 has been around, but with serious bottlenecks. Its slow and gets slower when you connect multiple peripherals. Is USB 3 going to solve the problem? It looks promising. What is USB 3 all about?

• 10 times faster than USB 2.0 with 5Gbps.
• USB 3 is bi-directional so its much faster. In USB 2 data can flow only in one direction at a time.
• Realistically you should get 3 times faster transfer speeds for external drives.
• Backward compatible with USB 2. If you connect to older systems, you will still be able to use, but at slower speeds.
• More power. Since more and more devices are being powered by USB, USB3 provides more power to adequately power those external hard drives.
• Linux is the first operating system to support USB 3, and yes Microsoft has followed by including support in Windows 7.

The first place where USB 3 has started showing up is in external hard drives. If you are looking for one, you should consider USB 3. To get USB 3 performance, you will need USB 3 port on your computer, which is lacking in most of the PCs/Laptops sold today. However you can buy a hard drive with a card for your PC/Laptop.

From Amazon: 1 TB USB 3 external desktop hard drive with PCIe USB 3 adaptor.

USB 3.0 Expresscard for your laptop.

What common between Avtar, King Kong, Lord of the Rings, Fantastic Four, X-Men, i-Robot? They were all created at Weta Digital in New Zealand.

Now some vital stats:

• 2 Petabyte disk array
• 10gbps networking
• 10 TB Ram
• 35,000 cores (4,000+ blades)
• Ubuntu

Here is a nice article posted in New York Times written by a former Microsoft Vice President.

“Microsoft has become a clumsy, uncompetitive innovator. Its products are lampooned, often unfairly but sometimes with good reason.

Microsoft never developed a true system for innovation. Some of my former colleagues argue that it actually developed a system to thwart innovation. Despite having one of the largest and best corporate laboratories in the world, and the luxury of not one but three chief technology officers, the company routinely manages to frustrate the efforts of its visionary thinkers.”

Microsoft should open source the projects which got killed and will never see the light of the day.

After Google Android, now Symbian has decided to go Open Source. Since Android is Linux based and this had a good chance of Linux becoming the de facto operating system in Cellphone too. So Symbian reacted and released all its source code too, in the hope that their customers don’t switch to Linux and they are able to retain their 46 percent market share in smartphones.

It remains to be seen weather cellphone manufacturers decide to use Linux or continue to use Symbian, however this is great news as Symbian as this will only improve Symbian. Expect stability improvements, as more people can now see the bugs.

Get the code, if you interested. And yes you can use the code to build your own phone without any licensing costs.

Is there still a market for proprietary operating systems? The game is changing and this will create enough competition for Apple/Microsoft to release their code. Show me the code!

Now that the dust has unsettled on the iPad and more anxiety is being generated , I decided to write my two cents.

Apple is known to be an innovative company and they have done exactly that with this device, however they could do better. What they seems to have done is just zoomed up the iPhone , guess Mr. Jobs is getting old .

Apple realised that people liked the iPhone but found the screen size too small, so why not make it bigger while everything else remains the same.  Good strategy because you can use all your iPhone apps, bad one because it still has the limitations of the iPhone.

Here is what I liked:

• Nice 10 inch Screen which is sufficient for most work and entertainment.
• 1024X768 resolution which is decent for all apps.
• Slim .5″ and light weight 1.5 Pounds (700 grams).
• Option for WiFi or 3G (3G may be locked to service providers as this is common Apple Strategy.)
• Huge collection of applications, as all iPhone apps work.
• 10 Hours of Battery life.
• Flash storage (SSD).
• eBook reader, so you can use it as a ebook reading device, however dedicated eBook readers are easier to read because they don’t emit light.
• Orientation sensor, so you can use it vertically or horizontally.

What I don’t like:

• No expandable storage, as there is no memory card slot.
• No USB either so you cant add any peripherals or storage either. You need to purchase additional accessory (Camera Connection Kit).
• No Phone, who would want a 10 inch phone? But we also don’t want to carry so many devices. So phone capablity via bluetooth would be nice.
• No Camera? you got to be kidding. How the hell are we going to use this for our our Skype Videos? Note: Apple has filed a patent for in-screen camera, so this may show up in iPad v2.

Pricing:

This is attractive and offers a good alternative to Netbooks.

Full specifications:

Size and weight

• Height: 9.56 inches (242.8 mm)
• Width: 7.47 inches (189.7 mm)
• Depth: 0.5 inch (13.4 mm)
• Weight: 1.5 pounds (.68 kg) Wi-Fi model; 1.6 pounds (.73 kg) Wi-Fi + 3G model

Display

• 9.7-inch (diagonal) LED-backlit glossy widescreen Multi-Touch display with IPS technology
• 1024-by-768-pixel resolution at 132 pixels per inch (ppi)
• Fingerprint-resistant oleophobic coating
• Support for display of multiple languages and characters simultaneously

Wi-Fi model

• Wi-Fi (802.11 a/b/g/n)
• Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR technology

Wi-Fi + 3G model

• UMTS/HSDPA (850, 1900, 2100 MHz)
• GSM/EDGE (850, 900,1800, 1900 MHz)
• Data only2
• Wi-Fi (802.11 a/b/g/n)
• Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR technology

Location Service

• Wi-Fi
• Digital compass
• Assisted GPS (Wi-Fi + 3G model)
• Cellular (Wi-Fi + 3G model)

Other features:

• 30-pin Dock connector (same as iPod and iPhone)
• 10-hours of battery life (Over one month standby time)’
• Full capacitive multi-touch interface
• 16-64GB of Flash memory storage
• 1 GHz Apple-branded A4 chip (developed in-house)
• Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR
• 802.11n WiFi
• Built-in Speaker
• Built-in Microphone

There is surely a market for devices between a phone and a laptop. The phone has a tiny screen, while the laptop is too big to carry around, so the iPad fills the space well. This will trigger many other OEMs to come up with similar devices, (Dell/HP/Acer are you listening?).  The competition should give us more choices and yes similar functionality can easily be achieved on a Linux platform.

Here is a photo taken during a sunrise in Mumbai. Have fun!

This is awesome News.

Skype is planning to open source its Linux client.

The current Skype client on Linux is functional but buggy and it lags behind the Windows version in terms of features.

Now if Skype opens up, it will make the client development go faster, people will be able to fix bugs faster and add more feature.

Waiting for this to happen.

“There are at least 142 vulnerabilities in IE6, 22 of which are not yet patched.”

Read more.

If you are still using IE, time to switch to Google Crome or Firefox. I have been using Firefox for a while now, find it very good. Off late I have been trying out Crome and find it faster  because most websites today make heavy use javascripts and Crome is fast at rendering them.

I was comparing the pricing of External drives and here are the results. Its Amazing to see how we used to talk in MBs, then GBs and now TBs.

The cost per GB for two 1TB is the same as one 2TB. Unless you need more than 1TB which is a lot, I would buy a 1TB drive and keep the budget for another drive in the future. Who knows by the time you run out of your 1TB, you could get another 2TB a the same price.

The bottle neck will now be the data transfer, USB 2.0 is just not fast enough.. so look for eSATA. Your PC/Notebook should also have an eSATA port. A NAS box with Gigabit Ethernet would also be fast, provided your network card and your network is 1GBps.

Olympus  has launched the E-P2 soon after they launched the E-P1. E-P2 has an electronic view finder which was absent in the E-P1.

Rest of the specs remain more or less the same as the E-p1.

Here is a tip to save time while sending emails using Mozilla Thunderbird.

If you compose an email with Thunderbird, you do not come back to the inbox immediately, unless the email is sent which take a few minutes.

A solution to this is to use the add-on Sendtools. Once you install this, your emails are sent in the background and you are immediately returned back to your inbox.

This also allows you to schedule sending emails at a specific time.

Note: I have tested this with the latest Mozilla 2.0 but sendtools wouldn’t install as it checks for version compatibility and doesn’t install if you have a newer version.

Here is a fix. After you download sendtools, you will find a .XPI file.

Right click on the .XPI, this will open in your archive/zip application.

Now you will see a install.rdf, open this file with any text editor.
Change the max-version to 2.0.*
Save and close the file.
Save and close the archive.

Now install sendtools, it should work correctly.