Prakash Advani's Blog

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=0x12d1 product=0x140b
$ 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