Prakash Advani's Blog

Recently I was getting a lot of Spam (unsolicited) comments on my blog. After spamming mailboxes, people have written spam bots to post their ads as comments on blogs. After unsuccessfully trying many things. I came across a simple plugin called Spam Stopgap.

Download it, install as a plugin and just enable it.

So far my blog has been spam free!

AMD has launched a low cost PC targeted at markets such at India.

We have to wait and watch to see at what price this will be launched in India. Prices are likely to go down as volumes Increase.

This device runs Windows CE, if they used Linux instead, they could have reduced prices even further.

I have been using Mozilla Firefox for a while now, its a great browser and blocks all the unwanted popups.

I now don’t even see any of the ads, most of them are distracting and also consume bandwidth.

Once you have Firefox, install the adblocking code and see the difference.

Cornell University has a study comparing LCD Monitors vs. CRT.

The productivity of a person is higher when using LCD monitors.

I have been thinking of how to put Linux to more use at home. Currently its been used as a Desktop and does everything that a typical Desktop is suppose to do but can it do more?

It can be used for home security too. Here is an article which explains how to do that.

I wonder if it would be possible to do this much cheaper using cheaper Non-IP based cameras.

Dr. Clayton Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor in an Interview:
A disruptive innovation brings to market a product not as good as the products in the current market, and so it cannot be sold to the mainstream customers. But it is simple and it is more affordable. It takes root in an undemanding portion of the market, then improves from that simple beginning to intercept with the needs of customers in the mainstream later.

As per The Register Google is in the process of builing a browser. I just hope that they use Mozilla Firefox as the base, enhance it and give their enhancements back to the community.

Also from the article:

Longer term, the firm could be looking at building a stack of applications that would mirror Larry Ellison’s network computer model – an online resource accessed by a browser and a very simple PC.

This seems interesting, who needs a 3 GHz system just for WordProcessing. My first PC (286 – 25 MHz ) could do that too and I don’t use any significant feature that I would miss or a low end system wouldn’t be able to handle.

Businessweek has an article about Linux in Cellphones.

It says.. NTT DoCoMo declared that all its future 3G phones would use either Symbian or Linux.

This in interesting because of two reasons. First DoCoMo has always been ahead in terms of technology by launching the latest mobile technologies in Japan much ahead of the rest of the world.

Second, the one company that out is Microsoft!

Hoping to see Linux cellphones being adopted by the masses.

The last time I bought a hard disk, I was offered a 3 year for some extra bucks. Now Seagate has announced a 5 year warranty! Which is a must have..

In the past Samsung and IBM hard disks have failed on me. Lets hope Seagate is more reliable.

Without much fanfare, Intel has released Celeron M which is based on the Centrino (Pentium M) core. It runs much cooler than the Pentium 4 Core based systems.

As per Tom’s Hardware guide:

This is good enough of most users and you can save a few hundred dollars.

I have been looking at Wide Screen Notebooks as a desktop replacement. Here is a comparison.

Notes:

My personal comments:

17″ Makes a better option than the 15.4.

Pentium M is preferred over Pentium 4 as it runs cooler and has better battery life.

Celeron M processor gives adequate amount of processing power for average desktop user and would save a few hundred dollars too!

512 MB RAM should be the bare minimum.

1680×1050 or higher resolution display is something that people should consider specially if you are going to use the notebook to watch DVDs. These higher resolution displays also have better viewing angle and higher brightness.

HP ZD7000 with the 1680×1050 seems like a best deal. The price isn’t too expensive and support too is decent. The only problem with this model is that its based on a Pentium 4 processor and the system tends to get hot as well as the battery life is low. This model is also very popular.

The Sony A170 has a better display than the Sony and run on the Pentium M processor so should run cooler than the HP ZD7000 but the is expensive and haven’t read much reviews about it.

The HP ZT3000 and Compaq X1000 are very similar to each other and good buy if you are looking for a 15.4″. In some markets one would be cheaper than the other.

The Toshiba/Acer have average reviews from most web sites have rated the HP and Dell higher. Both of these also don’t have an option for higher resolution screens which may be a consideration.

From this article:

Australian Democrats IT spokesperson Brian Greig has lashed out at Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates over local charity contributions Gates announced as part of his visit to Australia yesterday.

Interesting Part:

OSIA alleged that Gates, in addressing the question of software piracy in China, said:

“As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade”.

First it was Google offering 1GB, then it was Yahoo offering 100 MB.

Now rediff too is offering 1 GB Email 🙂

If you trying to figure out which blogging tool to use, there is a nice chart which lets you compare all the available tools.

Unlike Service Pack1 for Windows XP, Service Pack 2 will be allowed to be installed on both licensed as well as pirated copies of Windows.

I guess they didn’t have a choice. SP2 is very important security fix to prevent all the viruses from affecting other Windows machines. So they want even the systems which run pirated copies to be protected from viruses so that they don’t infect the systems running license copies!

With Google announcing 1 GB of Free email, what do we expect next? Spammers will be able to send videos with ads embedded in them!

Google is surely an innovative company and their Gmail interface beats every other web based email hollow including paid ones.

What we also need is an innovation in spam control to go with the new direction.

Thanks to Carthik A Sharma, I was able to migrate from Live Journal (Free/Unpaid account) to Word Press.

What I did was export from Live Journal to XML, send it to Carthik, he converted it to Movable Type format. After that I ran his import script to import it into Word Press.

Note: Word Press also provides import-mt.php, rename that to something else and use the modified script mentioned above. This works better as you can specify the author name to import as.

Next is to try tweaking wordpress to my liking.

From Om Malik’s Blog, its seems that Apple had outsourced the mp3 encoder and controller chip of the IPod to PortalPlayer which has a huge development center in India.

India is not only a destination for doing cheap outsourcing but also innovation is happen!

Striking the roots of Corruption is important.

– There is no Accountability. If a person’s car or a citizen gets hurt
because the road are not proper, no one is held responsible. If the
citizen walking on th road who is being affected or the car owner who
has paid road tax, can hold the agency responsible then someone is
accountable.

– Today a government job is considered to be very stable job. You often
hear that someone got suspended or transfered due to corruption. You
never hear someone lost his job. There is no fear about anything since
they know no one or nothing can take away the jobs.

– Most of the systems that still exists were designed by the British and
they continue to be so. The British were ruling India so they always
looked at Indian with suspicions. Government employees were paid
salaries based on how many mistakes/defaulters they found.

This attitude remains today, income tax officials look upon tax paying
citizen’s like all of them are evading taxes. They don’t look at the
people who don’t file returns at all. If their attitude towards tax
paying citizens is that they are contributing, which is helping the
country and paying their salaries too, then things will change.

– Reduce complexity. Like Dr. Nani Palkhiwala had said “We need a
Ministry of Simplicity” . Look at ways on how to simplify things rather
than complicate things.

An example: I was one caught by a Traffic Police for missing a signal. I
accepted my mistake but refused to bribe, and was willing to pay the
fine. He refused to take the fine, said I have to go 5 Kms away to the
Traffic Police booth and pay the fine. The fine couldn’t be paid the same
day too. It had to paid anytime after the next day and within 15 days.
It had to be paid between 12 Noon and 5 PM, which means I have take
leave from work or send someone to go and pay the fine.

It easy to pay the bribe and so difficult to pay the fine!

Wall Street Journal had an interesting article.

It says:

Excluding labor and shipping, and leaving out the costs of a monitor, keyboard or mouse, the typical desktop PC these days costs the Dells or the H-Ps of the world roughly $437 in parts.

The biggest portion of that — 30%, or $134 — goes to Intel for a Pentium processor. The disk drives, including whatever CD or DVD is installed, cost around $104; the RAM memory is $54; and the remaining hardware items — power supply, case, circuit boards — total $100.

The final 10%, or $45, goes to Microsoft for the Windows operating system.