Prakash Advani's Blog

Do not lose hold of your dreams or aspirations. For if you do, you may still exist but you have ceased to live.

- Henry David Thoreau

FujiFilm has launched a 3D camera which has two lenses and two sensors. One captures the foreground and the other the background.

To actually get a 3D picture, you need to send the photo to a special lab to process and send the photos back to you.

Looks innovative, initial pricing seems to be high, expect it to get more competitive.

Read More.

It was Firefox which popularised the concept of plugins and now OpenOffice too has come up with nice extensions. With the OpenOffice extensions, OpenOffice.org has an edge over MS Office.

Here are some nice extensions that I liked.

Sun PDF Import Extension : To edit PDFs.

Sun Presenter Console : Makes it very easy to do presentations.

Sun Wiki Publisher : Allows you to publish directly to Wiki.

OpenOffice.org2GoogleDocs : Export your OpenOffice docs to google docs.

Get Stock Price : Pulls stock price data in realitime from yahoo finance, wonderful tool to calcuate your portfolio value in realtime.

It also has various dictionaries and more.

Download Link for all the extension.

Some time back, I read an article in the Hindustan time about a person spending Rs. 45,000 flowers on 14 foot bouquet for Valentines Day and the article title “In times of meltdown, a Rs 45,000 bouquet” sounded like it was criminal to spend so much money in Economic Downturn.

First I would like to remind you that Love is blind. Love knows no boundaries, love doesn’t care about cost and if a person is truly in love he can spend all his fortune not just Rs. 45,000. As the saying goes love can make the world go around. We have forgotten to love, all we care is the cost. If everyone was in love in the world, there was no conflicts, wars and terrorism.

The second thing is the media is over using the word Economic
Downturn. India’s GDP will grow at 7% this year  instead of 9% last year. Does the word grow mean something? It says grow !! Not Downturn. So India is not affected by the downturn for the following reasons:

1. India’s GDP dependency on exports is not as high as China. For example India’s exports are actually less than the imports.
2. Indians haven’t lost as many jobs, most indians are still very much employed. Chinese lost 20 million jobs!
3. You keep hearing the pilots have been asked to take a salary cut, I don’t think that’s a bad thing, its good for the airlines. The airlines have been facing heavy losses, if they can trim some costs (pilots earn 4.5 lakhs a month!), then they can be profitable and most importantly these people will continue to be employed. Its better to have a job with a salary cut then to have no job at all.
4. Hey guess what the last time I went to Delhi and most of the star hotels were sold out!
   So what economic downturn?
5. And most importantly we are a nation of savings, we save for the rainy day, unlike the west, which is a credit economy, so there is nothing to worry, trust me!

Economics depends on Consumption, and people will continue to use their phones, buy grocery, travel for work. Yes what has changed is that people planning on bigger expenses like buying a car are delaying the purchases. Not that they don’t have the money but because of the fear of the unknown. And thanks to the media hype that has been created and they saying “Economic Downturn”, people are not spending on big expenses.

If the media screams, “Economic Downturn doesn’t affect India”, you would be surprised that people will start feeling normal as if nothing has changed. Which is what is happening currently, as the stock market is going up, people are feeling happy. So the downturn is more of a perception than a reality.

“You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.”

- Albert Einstein

If you thought PDFs are read only, guess what you can edit them.

To edit PDFs, install this plugin in Openoffice: Sun PDF Import Extension

Once installed, you can open .PDF files in OpenOffice Draw, edit and export back as PDF.

Before the British left India, they created the Hindu-Muslim divide in India. Unfortunately this divide still exists.

Governor-General Lord Canning wrote to Vernon Smith, President of the Board of Control, on November 21, 1857: “As we must rule 150 million of people by a handful … of Englishmen, let us do it in a manner best calculated to leave them divided (as in religion and national feeling they already are) and to inspire them with the greatest possible awe of our power and with the least possible suspicion of our motives.”

Read More.

My friend Ramnath Shenoy, pointed me to this excellent Ubuntu guide for beginners.

Its quite detailed and covers a lot of what the beginners would needs to know.

Check it out.

Google has announced a new opeating system: Crome OS. The interesting bits.

- Open Source

- Linux based

- Free of cost

- Working with various partners for bundling

- Designed for Google Crome Browser

Read the rest of the announcement