Prakash Advani's Blog

Smooth-Stone, a chip startup company is coming up with low powered ARM processors to power servers.  ARM processors have been very successful in smart phones consuming less than 1 watt at its peak and still running at upto 1 GHz. They have now started moving into tablets (iPad), Netbooks, Plug Computers, personal servers and more. It is interesting to see how  they stackup in terms of processing power per watt.

The news was that Facebook is  planning to use this in their upcoming data center which Facebook denied, however low powered server  is still interesting.  Good news for the environment.

Consumer companies have successfully launched micro products to reach out to Indian customers by having Shampoo sachets. The advantage of this that people who cannot or do not want to invest in the whole bottle , can buy a small sachet for 1% of the cost of a bottle.

The end result is more volume of Shampoo is being sold through the sachets rather than bottles and this is hugely successful in the rural India.

Now Insurance company Allianz has taken the same route to launch Micro Insurance.

This today has 3.8 Million customers: Most sold in India and balance 600,000 sold Outside of India.

Alliance earned 30 Million Euros in Premiums. Here is the maths.

If unclaimed, the entire deposit with interest after 5 years. Here is the full story.

Similarly Indian companies have launched $40 cellphones in India with 30 days battery life (stand by). They have taken away 14 percent market share. Nokia the incumbent player in India which had 64 percent market share has dropped to 52 percent market-share.

After  the HTC Desire, HTC has announced the HTC Desire HD. Here are the specs:

• 4.3 inch LCD screen: Thats big!
• 8 Megapixel Camera
• 1 GHz Processor (same as HTC Desire)
• 720p High Definition Video Capture
• HD Video Playback
• DivX playback
• Surround sound.
• 4 GB Internal Memory: Nice but more the better.
• Android 2.2.: Will also be available on HTC Desire, Wildfire and Legend.

If you are looking for a Qwerty phone, wait for the HTC Desire Z, which has a qwerty or look at Motorola Backflip.

These phones are expected to hit the market by the end of the year/Early Next year.

98 percent of people surveyed out of a total of 75,000 users, confirm that they use Open Source. If you still fall under the 2 percent that doesn’t, please do the honours of telling us why.

In fact 48 percent says there is no reason not to use Open Source.

Reason for using Open Source:

• Flexibility
• Lower Cost
• Quality
• Ease to Deploy
• Source Code

Read more on TechEye.

If you wish to automatically cache all you Ubuntu/Debian updates on one computer, you can use Squid-deb-proxy. This is useful if you have multiple Ubuntu/Debian clients in your network and they all download the updates. Instead of each system connecting to the internet to get the updates, it will get the updates from the caching server.

The advantage of caching:

• Save on bandwidth
• Get updates faster
• Can be more secured, only the caching server needs to have direct internet connection.

The advantage of using this package is as follows.

• No complicated configurations
• No client configuration (just install the client)
• Gets the updates from the caching server when available and automatically switches to direct connection when caching server is not available

To install this on Ubuntu, use the Ubuntu Software Center (or using your favourite package management tool) .

Install these two packages on the system that will act as a server.

squid-deb-proxy

squid-deb-proxy-client

Install this package on each of the client systems.

squid-deb-proxy-client

Bingo, you are now ready to go. Every file that is downloaded on the client system, will also be automatically cached on the server.

squid-deb-proxy is the server. squid-deb-proxy-client is the client, which you should also install on the server, so that it caches all the updates on the server as well.

Additional notes for customising your configuration/debugging.

This folder contains all your configuration information:

/etc/squid-deb-proxy

in this folder:

This is the file where you can add additional mirrors.

mirror-dstdomain.acl

The first few times, you should monitor your logs, to ensure it is working as desired.

This folder contains all the log files.

/var/log/squid-deb-proxy

Happy Hacking! Or Should I say happy caching?

Linux powered devices are experiencing an exponential growth. E-book readers are gaining popularity because they can carry huge volumes of books, are environmental friendly and can do other things amongst being a book reader like listen to music or run apps.

I didn’t realise that so many of the popular e-book readers run Linux:

• Amazon Kindle DX
• Sony Reader PRS-900
• Spring Design Alex
• enTourage eDGe
• PocketBook 302

I find the enTourage very interesting. which is a dual screen one is e-ink based (easy for reading) and another is a LCD.

Read More.