Prakash Advani's Blog

From CIOL’s article.

Talking to Cyber Media News on the sidelines of the SUSE 10 road-show in Chennai, Prakash Advani, Linux Practice Head, Indian Subcontinent, said that the latest offering was part of the ‘Better Desktop’ project, and the suite contains various performance-enhancing features such as the Beagle – desktop search, apart from the Novell version of Open office with words, spreadsheet, photo editing, database application etc.,

Interesting article on things to check before buying a digital camera.

Top three things that I liked the most:

Don’t Get Caught Up in Mega-pixels – just because the camera is higher Mega-pixel, doesn’t mean its better. 4/5 Mega-pixels is more than enough for every day use unless you want to take very large (poster size) prints.

Ignore Digital Zoom and check the Optical Zoom.

Be Careful When Buying Package Deals – Its often cheaper to buy the memory separately from another reseller and camera from a camera shop.

Also cameras don’t bundle any useful memory, so you always need to add the cost of memory. If the camera takes AA batteries, then you need to add the cost of rechargeable AA + charger.

Things to add to this list:

If you need more than 6X optical Zoom, make sure that the camera has Image Stabilisation.

If you select a camera which takes AA batteries, then you can use rechargeable batteries and when you run out of them, you can always buy regular AA batteries and use them, although you may not get lots of shots there. But the non-AA cameras which have Lithium Ion batteries typically have longer battery life, so that may be a consideration.

Some cameras such as Sony use proprietary memory. This means that every memory that you buy is more expensive and only works with Sony products. If you camera/ mobile phone/other devices use standard memory such as SD Memory, you can interchange the memory. This is big plus. When I am traveling and run out of memory on my Camera, I plug out the memory from my mobile phone and stick it in.

After having used both Canon S2 and Konica Minolta Z6, here is my feedback.

Note: Canon S3 is a 6 Mega Pixel while S2 is 5. Other than that I haven’t noticed much of a difference.

Features which are common to both the models:

6 Mega Pixel
12 X Optical Zoom
4AA Batteries
Image Stabilisation

Picture quality of both are similar.

Advantages of Canon S2/S3.

The camera has more intelligence. For example if you take a vertical photo, the camera will put a rotate tag in the image. When you view the picture in a viewer, it will turn the picture and show you the right orientation.

The camera also has good support for panoramic photos which makes it easy to take panoramic photos.

The LCD is vari-angle which means it can be twisted around to get those difficult shots.

Z6 doesn’t have these features.

Advantage of Konica Minolta Z6

Cheaper than Canon
Weight is a bit lighter, advantage is that its easier to click photos with one hand.

Final impressions.

The Canon S2/S3 is a better buy overall. It looks better as well. If you are on a budget or don’t want a heavy camera, the Z6 may be better. One thing to consider is that Konica Minolta has sold off its Digital Camera business to Sony so getting support later may be a challenge.

Also since Canon has launched S3, the S2 has become cheaper. S2 which is 5 Mega Pixel is good enough unless you want to take very large prints. So you could get a good deal on the Canon S2.

Sample photos:

Canon S2

Konica Minolta Z6

See previous related post.

From Moneycontrol.com article.

Linux Practice Head at Novell, Prakash Advani told moneycontrol, “The SUSE Linux Desktop 10 makes sure that along with being user-friendly and having better features, it provides complete inter-operability to its users. So, never again would you face a problem when operating on 10 different applications or windows at the same time.”

Mind mapping software caught my fancy a little while ago when I tried out Freemind.

Now I came across another one KDissert – Which seems to be better.

Check out the flash demo.

I have been looking for tools which allows you to create cross platform applications as well as be able to host the same application on the Web.

I came across XAMPP which run on Linux, Mac, Windows and even Solaris!

Its a bundle of Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl and other goodies to all these platforms. If you can do with Web based apps this would work. You can always use AJAX if you need more rich client experience.

This can be used to host applications which can be developed in PHP or Perl.

A big advantage of this is that you can use several of open source applications written for the LAMP stack such as Media Wiki, Drupal, etc. which can be used for creating intranets.

Disadvantage would be that this may not as portable as Java or Mono.

Check it out. – XAMPP.

From Network Computing article:

Virtualisation is the abstracting of the software from the underlying implementation. Server virtualisation has been around for decades now, and it is a mature technology,” comments Prakash Advani, Linux Practice Head, Novell India.