Prakash Advani's Blog

Nice Quote:

“The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he’s always doing both.”

– James A. Michener

The Hi-Tech city of Banglore has a parking meter at Brigade Road. The funny part is its a manned by a person who puts the coins. So why have a parking meter in the first place? Its better to have a person writing a receipt.

The problem is that people want to get Hi-Tech but not everyone knows how to use it. And when the parking meter was installed, people didn’t have the coins and also people didn’t know how long they are going to park. If they don’t know how long they are going to park, they don’t know how much money to put in.

We have a similar situations with the vending machines. I think India is the only country where we have vending machines operated by humans then why have vending machines in the first place?

MIT has been working on a US$ 100 computer for the developing countries such as India. Here are some photos.

The design looks quite functional.

As per an Intel engineer, Intel dual-core is a rushed job to beat AMD.

Read more here.

AMD has already been ahead of Intel in terms of technology, and Intel is doing catching up.

OpenLaszlo is an easy way to create rich internet applications, that can be played on any platform with any browser.

The platform is now open source and competes with Macromedia’s Flex platform. With simple scripting you can create very powerful web applications.

Check out the impressive demos.

The world is moving to Wide Screen Laptops, now Samsung has release the World’s First 19” Laptop. The beauty of this laptop is that the screen can be detached and also used as an external monitor. Expect to see more 19″ wonders from other manufacturers too.

Related Posts:

Toshiba Qosmio

Wide Screen Notebooks/Laptops comparison

We often find there are people who always seems to be in a hurry. It may appear that they are hard working since they are trying to squeeze maximium out of time, but in reality they may be inefficient and may be cutting it too close!.

Seth Godin’s blog has an interesting post:

There are two ways to catch a plane. The first, which happens to be the most common, is to leave on time, do your best to park nearby, repeatedly glance at your watch, and then start moving faster and faster. By the time you get to security, you realize that you’re quite late, so you cut the line (“My plane leaves in 10 minutes!” you shout). You walk fast. As you get closer to your gate, you realize that walking fast isn’t going to work, so you start to jog. Three gates away, you break into a run, and if you’re lucky, you barely make the flight.

The second way is to leave for the airport 10 minutes early.

So don’t always be in a hurry, and don’t take the stress! Murphy’s law: If anything can go wrong, it will.

Interesting story that I came across..

This Is Good

An old story is told of a king in Africa who had a close friend with whom he grew up. The friend had a habit of looking at every situation that ever occurred in his life (positive or negative) and remarking, This is good!

One day the king and his friend were out on a hunting expedition. The friend would load and prepare the guns for the king. The friend had apparently done something wrong in preparing one of the guns, for after taking the gun from his friend, the king fired it and his thumb was blown off. Examining the situation the friend remarked as usual, This is good! To which the king
replied, No, this is NOT good! and proceeded to send his friend to jail.

About a year later, the king was hunting in an area that he should have known to stay clear of. Cannibals captured him and took him to their village. They tied his hands, stacked some wood, set up a stake and bound him to the stake.

As they came near to set fire to the wood, they noticed that the king was missing a thumb. Being superstitious, they never ate anyone that was less than whole. So untying the king, they sent him on his way. As he returned home, he was reminded of the event that had taken his thumb and felt remorse for his treatment of his friend. He went immediately to the jail to speak with his friend. You were right, he said, it was good that my thumb was blown off. And he proceeded to tell the friend all that had just happened.

And so I am very sorry for sending you to jail for so long. It was bad for me to do this.

No, his friend replied, This is good!

What do you mean,’This is good’ How could it be good that I sent my friend to jail for a year

If I had NOT been in jail, I would have been with you.

del.icio.us is an online bookmarking services. Its easy to use and has a simple interface. It is the best way to have your bookmarks accessible from anywhere. You can also see other’s bookmarks and others can see yours too.

Check out my bookmarks.

Wikipedia is the World’s biggest encyclopedia. Anyone can edit or contribute articles.

Articles are under GNU Free Documentation License.

As of now:

It has over 16,00,000 articles
12,00,000 visitors
It has editions in about 200 different languages
There are 26,000 contributors and most contributors are anonymous

If you are looking at buyging a SD memory card which is a standard memory used by most digital cameras, then SanDisk Ultra II SD Plus is an interesting product. It is a standard SD Card but also has a USB port. So it can be directly connected to the PC to transfer images, without requiring an adaptor.

It can also double up a a USB pen/thumb drive.



See a bigger picture here.

If you need to test if your boadband connection is really broadband then Cnet Bandwidth testing is a good tool to use.

It will ask you for a zip code, if you not in the US, just put any zip code and that should work.

My home connections shows a decent 25 KBps.

Is Microsoft a leader or a follower? They are just doing what Google is doing.

Microsoft got into search to compete with Google.
Google started Gmail with 1 GB email (now 2 GB and still growing!), so Microsoft’s Hotmail also announced that they are also going to offer 1 GB email. Earlier Hotmail users were still struggling with 3 MB email.
Hotmail is also being re-vamped to compete with Gmail’s cool interface.
Recently Google launched Google Earth, Microsoft followed with MSN Virtual Earth. They even copied the Name!

Sometimes leaders also become followers when they are worried about competition. Way to go Google! Our email accounts have gone up by nearly 1000 times! and Gmail interface rocks. Competition always benefits the customers.

A 10 Year Old girl from Pakistan has become the youngest Microsoft Certified Professional.

Read the complete article, she met up with Bill Gates and asked him some good questions.

Way to go Arfa Karim Randhawa and all the young geeks.

Toshiba Qosmio looks interesting.

Its a widescreen notebook, TV, PVR (can record TV programs to the Hard Disk), has good speakers and DVD writer.

This one notebook can replace your PC, Notebook, TV and Audio system.

The price is bit expensive: 17″ costs US$ 3000 (Street price around US$2000).

It runs Windows Media Center, now only if we could replace that with Linux, it would be even better 🙂

Linux runs on it but getting the TV functions to work may be problem.

Necessity is the mother of all inventions. A smart person – Paul Rademacher has combined the online housing classified site – Craiglist and Google Maps. This shows the house on the map and locating it becomes easier.

Check it out – http://paulrademacher.com/housing/.

This is currently limited to North America.

The Register has an interesting article where the CTO of Opera Software (Of the Opera Browser) questions Microsoft’s new interest in interoperability.

Microsoft has always done thing to break interoperability and standards and comeup with their own incompatible standards. This is to create a lock-in so that customers do not switch to an alternate standard complaint and better product.

Friends and Colleagues have been coaxing me into buying a new cellphone. Although I am not in any desperate need to get one but I still looked around. After searching around, I didn’t find any model which fits my needs perfect. Here is my wish list.

– EDGE support for faster data connection over GSM
– Bluetooth
– Push2Talk
– MP3 Playback
– Option to Extend Memory using Non-proprietary memory

And most important it shouldn’t cost more than Rs. 10,000 (US$ 200). If its a smart phone with PDA capabilities then I may be willing to spend Rs. 15-20,000 (US$300-400).

One thing is for sure, it won’t be a Nokia, my experience with Nokia’s service has been terrible and don’t want to deal with that again.

I went for Mumbai Motor Show, it was a let down since most of the car manufacturers were not participating. There wasn’t much to see other than some nice Vintage cars – which I can’t own and Chevrolet’s – Which I can’t afford 🙂

See the photos.

I went to watch the Mumbai Marathon 2005. It was a happening event, almost everyone that matters was there! Right from the dabbawala to top industrialists and movie stars, they all were there. Never seen so much of excitement.

I managed to click quite a few photos with my Digital Camera. Check them out:

http://www.cityblogger.com/photos/marathon