Prakash Advani's Blog

In a recent speach which Sir APJ Abdul Kalam, President of India, gave while inaugurating International Institute of Information Technology, in Pune.

He said:

“Think different

I would like to narrate an event that took place in Rashtrapati Bhavan a few months back when I met Bill Gates, the CEO of Microsoft. While walking in the Mughal garden, we were discussing the future challenges in Information Technology including the issues related to software security. I made a point that we look for open source codes so that we can easily introduce the users built security algorithms. Our discussions became difficult since our views were different. The most unfortunate thing is that India still seems to believe in proprietary solutions. Further spread of IT which is influencing the daily life of individuals would have a devastating effect on the lives of society due to any small shift in the business practice involving these proprietary solutions. It is precisely for these reasons open source software need to be built which would be cost effective for the entire society. In India, open source code software will have to come and stay in a big way for the benefit of our billion people. I2IT has to play a major role in this national mission. ”

Thank you Mr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam for embracing open source. We welcome you in the community.

Bombay, now know as Mumbai, was a cluster of 7 Islands more than a 150 years ago. Then Mumbai was not beyond Mahim and neither was the western surburbs, where most of the population (including me) lives today. There was no bridge to connect Mahim with Sion. The cost of building this was estimated to be Rs.100,000. A lot of money then and the government didn’t have that kind of budget. When Lady Avabai Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy, wife of the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy heard about this, she felt this was needed. 150 Years ago she had the vision that Mumbai would be beyond Mahim where more than 10 million people live today.

To fulfill her vision, she donated the entire sum from her personal wealth. The only condition was that no toll would be charged to citizens for its use by the government. Initially the cost was estimated at Rs.100,000 but as the work commenced in 1842 the cost escalated. When the initial sum was exhausted and the work was about to stop, she extended her gesture of goodwill by donating an additional Rs.57,000.

One visionary I must say, I have great respect for people like her who do things for others without expecting things in return. A lot of people may have the money and the capacity to do such things but how many can leave behind their selfish desires and do things for the society?

Exactly 30 years ago on this day, Ethernet Was born and 31 years ago I was. Thank you Bob Metcalfe for giving us this wonderful technology which connect most of us today. Ethernet was inferior to other technologies such as Token Ring at that time but became sucessful because it was an open standard. Bob calls these other technologies “Godzillas” in an Interview.

For a technology to succeed its not necessary to be the best, its is important for it to follow open standards and being adopted by the Industry as well as the consumers. Take the example of Linux too, it is giving a lot of Unix companies a run for their money and Bill Gates sleepless nights.

Microsoft has developed an Operating System which powers the BMW Cars. And this is what happens when you drive cars powered by Microsoft Software.

Govt. Official Trapped in Car After Computer Fails
Mon May 12, 2003 07:08 AM ET
BANGKOK (Reuters) – Security guards smashed their way into an official limousine with sledgehammers on Monday to rescue Thailand’s finance minister after his car’s computer failed.

Suchart Jaovisidha and his driver were trapped inside the BMW for more than 10 minutes before guards broke a window. All doors and windows had locked automatically when the computer crashed, and the air conditioning stopped, officials said.

“We could hardly breathe for over 10 minutes,” Suchart told reporters. “It took my guard a long time to realize that we really wanted the window smashed so that we could crawl out. It was a harrowing experience.”

Do you want to get trapped?

I ready today on Slashdot about the Electrolux Robot Vacuum Cleaner. This is a cordless battery powered device that goes around and vacuum cleans the house. If its battery gets discharged, then it finds the charger and charges itself and resumes the cleaning. Sounds like a pretty good idea and despite its limitations someday it will get more popular and cheaper. Technology excites me and I would surely buy these gadgets but…

In India where I come from, maid servants do all the house hold work. Appliances such as washing machines, dish washers and vaccum cleaners are a threat to their livelyhood. They are generally not educated or skilled enough to do other high skilled jobs. The last time I spoke to my maid servant and asked her what she spends her earning on. Apart from food, etc., she spends a considerable amount on her children’s education. Thats important, to ensure that her children get the education, can do more skilled jobs, earn more and improve their quality of life. I hope people realise that and think before they replace their maids with vaccum cleaners.

A duck’s quack doesn’t echo, and no one knows why.

Elephants are the only animals that can’t jump.

It’s possible to lead a cow upstairs … but not downstairs.

Women blink nearly twice as much as men.

It’s physically impossible for you to lick your elbow.

The Main Library at Indiana University sinks over an inch every year because when it was built, engineers failed to take into account the weight of all the books that would occupy the building. (Just for your information: The Hopkins Library has a three-storeyed basement

A snail can sleep for three years.

No word in the English language rhymes with “MONTH.”

Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing. SCARY!!!

The electric chair was invented by a dentist. More scared ??

In ancient Egypt, priests plucked EVERY hair from their bodies, including their eyebrows and eyelashes.

An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain.

TYPEWRITER is the longest word that can be made using the letters only on one row of the keyboard.

“Go,” is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.

The cigarette lighter was invented before the match.

Americans on average eat 18 acres of pizza every day.

Almost everyone who reads this email will try to lick their elbow

Some interesting numbers from the processor market.

” In the past 16 years, AMD has had eight profitable years and eight in the red. Total net earnings since the end of 1986, including acquisitions and sell-offs, comes to around $350 million, about the same as Intel earns in six weeks.”

Read the Full article on news.com.

Market Share:
AMD’s: 16.6 percent
Intel: 81.7 percent
Others (Via Technologies and Transmeta): 1.7 percent

Read the Full article on news.com.

Spam is the killer application since it kills your mail box by flooding it. If you publish your email address then you get so many unsolicited emails that you won’t be able to distinquish your geniune emails from junk. If you don’t publish, then people won’t know how to contact you.

One of my mail boxes gets a lot of spam, since I used to write online articles where that email address was the published address. Recently the hosting company which is hosting that website enabled Spamassassin on the site. Spam assassin is able to identify more than 99% of the spam mails correctly. It does a very intelligent scanning, gives points for each of the criteria of a SPAM mail. When a mail exceed a certain points, it gets marked as a SPAM. Its totally flexible where you can define the number of points as well as define your own criteria or ask it to ignore some. It also puts **SPAM** in the subject line so you can configure your mail client filter out emails if the subject has **SPAM**

So far this is working well, better than I expected. I don’t even wait for my mail client to catch it, I log in to the Web based front and delete all mails marked as spam. If this works well, I hope to get this working on all my mail boxes so I have a spam free world. Good bye spam for now.

I have been using Knoppix as my primary Linux distribution since a month now. I think its the best distribution I have used and highly recommended for a newbie since it can be run from a CD as well installed on the hard disk. I also wrote an article on Knoppix installation tips. This covers tips on installing Knoppix on the hard disk.

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
- Mark Twain

Mark Twain on India

Mark Twain’s Quote on reading

Recently SCO has been accusing Unix code being copied into Linux. AT&T has the license to Unix, which was acquired by Novell and transformed into UnixWare, which was then acquired by SCO and then SCO was aquired by Caldera (a Linux vendor) which was later renamed back as SCO. NOw it appears that people are not happy with SCO’s move, who would be. SCO’s website was hacked. I hope SCO doesn’t play nasty which it can if it wants to. And right now it looks like it wants to. I used to be a SCO Unix administrator and I must say that their product sucked big time, thats when I got my hands on Linux and found it way better and easier to use/administer than SCO. Since then I dumped SCO and have been using Linux.

Has anyone thought why SCO must be doing this? Microsoft has a stake in SCO if thats anything to do with this.

From Express Computer article:

Prakash Advani, co-founder of IndLinux.org said that the organisation has been working on localising the GNU/Linux operating system to Hindi for the last three years. Localisation involves changing the menus and other elements of the graphic user interface from English to Hindi.

“Hindi is the third largest language in the world, yet there are no operating systems available in this language. IndLinux.org therefore decided to make Hindi support available for free to create a revolution in Indian language computing,” said Advani.

Soon after the worldwide launch, AMD Opteron was Launched in India on April 30, 2003. I was invited for that. After attending the presentations, I think AMD has a solid 64-Bit strategy. They plan to launch Athlon-64 in September which would the the first 64-Bit processor for the desktop.

Opteron outperformed all the 32-Bit as well as the 64-Bit processors of Intel in running 32-Bit applications. And thats important, since right now there are hardly any 64-Bit applications but in the years there would be. It doesn’t hurt to have a 64-Bit ready system specially because AMD’s pricing its 64-Bit processor the same as Intels 32-Bit.

My guess is that AMD will kill its 32-Bit processor line and replace them with 64-Bit. Intel will definitely feel the heat, if they do that because
1) Intel doesn’t have a 64-Bit processor which runs 32-Bit applications well. Itanium is slow at running 32-Bit applications.
2) Intel doesn’t have any immediate plans to have a 64-Bit desktop processor.

AMD’s strategy is pretty well thought out provided they can convince the customers about the benefits of 64-Bit and why they should be 64-Bit ready.

I finally I have a blog Lots of friends, colleagues and business contacts have been asking if I have a blog and I have been saying NO! Finally I decided to have a blog! Wish me Happy Blogging!!