Prakash Advani's Blog

“In terms of sales, smartphones powered by Android are expected to surpass these of Symbian as early as 2012,” he said, reports the Telegraph.

Its time Nokia considers offering Android based phone.

“If Nokia joins the Android party, the support of this eco-system by all key players could help the mobile smartphone industry to potentially commoditise its software business much like what Microsoft did in the PC world,” he said.

If Nokia continues in its current strategy, it would be addressing “niche markets,” Kamal-Saadi added.

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Canon has announced the SX30 at Photokina 2010. This is new addition to the super zoom family. Earlier Canon was still limited to 20X while competition had gone to 30X. With this release canon has now beaten most of the competition by releasing a 35X Optical Zoom.

Here are some cool features.

• 14 Megapixel
• HD Movie Recording (Upto 1280×720)
• 2.7″ Vari Angle Lens.
• Optical Image Stabilisation
• HDMI mini-port to connect to High Definition TVs
• Memory card support: SD, SDHC, SDXC, MMC, MMCplus, HCMMCplus
• Weight: 601g (a bit heavy)
• Rechargeable battery
• Full Manual Controls

Broadcom which until now refused to open their Wi-Fi  drivers, has released their Linux WiFi Drivers under Open Source.

This is great for Linux users, as Broadcom was one of the few chipsets for which there were no open source drivers. While you could use Windows drivers on Linux using NDIS wrapper, it had its share of problems.

This should also help Broadcom as people can improve their drivers and fix bugs as well.

Two of the other major Wi-Fi chipsets: Atheros and Intel are already WiFi. Also most of the hardware today works out of the box with Linux. As far as graphics is concerned, Intel and ATI (AMD) have both open sourced their graphic drivers well. NVIDIA has good Linux drivers, however they are proprietary. Looking forward to them opening up next.

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I was  trying to find the IP address of a device which was connected to the network and had secured the IP address using DHCP.

The easiest way to check was to look for the DHCP Server logs, but since that was not possible I did a port scan. Here are the simple steps on Ubuntu.

This will only work if you know that the particular PC has certain services running such as SSH, only then will this step work as you can search for devices with a particular port open.

First insall nmap, which is a port scanning utility. You can either use Ubuntu Software Software or type apt-get install nmap

Now go to Applications-Accessories-Terminal and type this.

nmap -v -p22 192.168.1.1-255  | grep open

This showed me all devices where port 22 was open.

-p = Port

22 = Port number, 22 is for ssh, 80 for http and so on. 

No spaces between -p and the port number.

If you don’t know which port to scan, this command will give you a list of services and port numbers:  cat /etc/services

192.168.1.1-255 is the range of IP addresses so this will scan all IPs  from 192.168.1.1 to 192.168.1.255

Note: This may show more than one device if there are other devices with similar ports open, so you would need to know which one you are looking for.

I came across an interesting article on how to  convert your Ubuntu Notebook  into a WiFi Hotspot  so that you can connect other devices to your Ubuntu Notebook for sharing the internet connectivity.

You don’t need to install any fancy software, in fact the functionality is built into Network Manager itself. Its very easy and I tried it and it works well.

Here is the article if you need.

I have been using Siemens Gigaset A580IP for couple of months now. I find it works well with Nonoh.net, Voipbuster.com and Asterisks based system. Here is my brief review.

• Excellent voice quality.
• has both VOIP and land line option.
• Connects to multiple VOIP service providers (upto 6).
• Can easily switch VOIP provider.
• Can connect to corporate VOIP system based on Asterisks or other open standard based solution
• In expensive
• Runs Linux inside

What I don’t like:

• Setup take time initially, primarily because its slow to respond. But once its setup it works beautifully.
• You can’t dial another VOIP service provider directly, for example you can’t dial anyone on username@serviceprovider, you can only dial numbers. How ever you can receive calls if someone calls your username@gigaset.net
• Cant connect to Skype, primarily because Skype uses a propriety protocol.
• Not a replacement for Skype video as it doesn’t do video.