thecruisemaniac.com

Visitors to the blog would first notice the theme change that has happened.  Yesterday night, i upgraded my WP installation from 2.5 to 2.5.1 as there was supposedly a security patch that was coming through with the upgrade.

As usual, wordpress blazed through the upgrade with no hiccups whatsoever and I was done with ftp-upload, upgrade, one-click, all that in under 5 minutes.  And then When I looked at the website I realised that I’ve been using the black-gold theme for quite some time now.  So here goes, a quick theme change.  The current one is called Brilliance by Jai Nischal Varma of Blog-Oh-Blog.  He has a wide array of really good looking widget-ready and browser-agnostic themes on his site and Brilliance was the one I picked up to use for a temporary period of time.  Till Navjot and I are through with designing our own theme.

The design-a-theme-in-12-hours thingy never went anywhere beyond 4 hours… navjot got busy, I got sleepy, but the theme is coming along good… and we’re both learning and enjoying the theme creation process.

That theme will be put up on this site once its done and production capable! Thats a term I pickedup from work

Till then, Chao…

This is my first blog post from the ever-awesome BCB6.  And on Day 2, I’m at a session by @braindead_in.

The first point mentioned by Rajiv is thus: Incoming VOIP termination call into a PSTN / PLMN network is not permitted by TRAI.

Rajiv is proposing a VOIP group mailing list which can probably list possible solutions.  This is turning out to a very interesting discussion.

Pradeep asked a lovely question: Whats the penalty of making an PSTN terminated VOIP call.  How many days in jail, how much fine et. al.

The basic reason for this issue is the safety / security of the money in the hands of the officials.

And as yet, yes, VOIP is a multi-billion dollar jackpot in the waiting and its sad that we’re sitting on a goldmine and are not interested in making it more worthy!!!

I went on to upgrade my blog to wordpress 2.5 yesterday night and I really seem to like it now. The most evident of changes is to the admin dashboard which is really neat and clean and much more organised… It does scroll more than before but then WTH… its cool. And I’m choosing to leave the default blue colours on. They are definitely refreshing everytime I look at them…

The upgrade as the Wordpress team puts it, its just a 5 minute process…

1. Backup your database in-case things might go wrong… (Believe me, they wont!!! )
2. Deactivate all plugins from the admin panel so that they might not create problems!!!
3. Fire up FileZilla, traverse to your wordpress directory, delete wp-admin and wp-include folders.
4. Upload the new wp-admin and wp-include folders and continue overwriting the other files…
5. Take care as to what you’re overwriting from the wp-content folder… You might want to save the settings for the older plugins / themes / etc…
6. Assuming your blog is at abc.com/blog, point your browser to abc.com/blog/upgrade.php to migrate your wordpress mysql database to suit the new 2.5 version.
7. And you are done…

There are some things I noticed that’ve given me a lot of ease in handling my blog:

1. The Plugins section can now not only point to newer versions of plugins but also update them in one click… No more downloading the plugin from a 3rd party website, unzip, ftp upload, detect, activate… W00t!!!
2. Lots of Ajaxy goodness!!!
3. Widgets support built-in… No more hunting for specific Widget-enabled themes…
4. All my old themes seem to work… No breakages so far!!!
5. Multi-file uploader… And its flash javascript, I-Frame based!!! Looks cool! And the progress bar is live… Double W00t!!!
6. This is a guess: Because the wp-core has been tweaked well, as I read on other forums, it must be giving much faster page loads for the viewers… You peeps temme about this. The cache is being built with every ping… And i guess it’s gonna be waaay faster once the cache starts spitting pages!!!

The Wordpress team has done an amazing job with Wordpress 2.5. Congrats guys!!!

Catchup with life post…  Lotsa things… quick entries on all those!!!

Lots of things in the last 2 months… the most nerve wrecking thing being the loss of my mom… Something that none of us have been able to come out of…  It so happens that when someone shares a relationship with you thats deeper than being a friend, and suddenly, that person gets sucked out… the void is too hard to handle… neways life moves on… and so do have us…

The next topic of the post: the ever lovely and awesome BCB a.k.a. BarCampBangalore is back!!!  BCB-6 summer edition is happening on april 19th and 20th… The venue is IIM-Bangalore… Be there!!! I’ll be running around fixing up wifi for you peeps… Tats for sure…

The next most important topic of the post: Moto-dead… I’ve spoken about this for a very long time… And mentioned in my blog a couple of times too… This was bound to happen… Motorola Handsets Division being royally kicked out of the Motorola stable… atleast that’s how I choose to see it…

You cant be a blood-sucking leech in this age… you have to contribute or else you cease to exist.  I’d go by Motorola’s top brass’ move to do this… but it could have completely been averted.  They didn’t have to screw up. And screw up with so much perfection that nothing can correct it ever again…

Motorola is perhaps the only company thats been practising the jack of all trades in the mobile segment for quite a while. And guess what! It BACKFIRED!!! What else would you expect??? I may not be Trump but I can see through the lining to say that in today’s age where competing takes balls of steel, you had better not be playing around on the highway!!! You’d definitely get run over!!! Many a time..

And I’d say this with a lot of sadness that a Mobile giant simply went ahead and committed suicide!!! RIP Moto!!! The Razr was an awesome show… nothing else after that… Not one single mobile after that was even worth picking up and holding in my hands…

Coming to the next important topic, my conversation has actually changed places… Keeping in touch with poeple on twitter has become the in thing and the easiest thing in life now… A conversation, although asynchronous, is definitely conversation worth it when the whole discussion is available anywhere and althemore better when the participatory limits dont exist!

Twitter just takes chit-chat to the next level… The erstwhile Yahoo chat rooms concept with a bling from technology… converse from anywhere… anyhow…  Follow me on twitter to know more…

And there ends my hiatus…  Chao…

Google’s native Search application for Nokia devices is out… And it is plain Uber-Kewl!!! Sense and Sensibility! With a couple of questions from my side!!! B-) The application needs to be downloaded from mobile.google.com.

I pulled it up and gave it a test run on my mobile and here are the screen-shots:

The app loads automatically and displays this beautiful image on the screen… Aaaah! bliss!!!

It opens up to the Ctrl key on the E61i / Pencil key on other S60 3rd edition devices.

By the time you enter the search text, the internet connection is initiated in the background. More on this later…

And voila! The search results are displayed using the S60 OSS web browser!

Local Cinema search too!!! We cant book tickets using google yet!

The app integrates maps too…

Driving directions dint work for me though…

 Now that the screen-shots are done, I have my set of questions that I want answers for…

1. The Google search application selects my internet access point all by itself.  It does not have any settings… and the application does not ask me about the access point.  How does it know that I use Mobile Office???
2. Adding to point number 1, the search application basically opens the browser with a parameter being google.com/search?q=’search string‘.  Why does it need to have gprs / wifi running in the background???  The browser on opening proceeds to ask the user about the access point all again…
3. Currently the google search app only searches google.com.  Is in-device search in the pipe???

With that ends a nice blog post after quite some time!!!…

Due credit to bhuwan for the info…  Thanx pal!

Banner for BCB5! Uber kewl!!!

The big guy there is opening up the curtains very very soon… 56 hours, 20 minutes to go and counting down as I type in this post!!! Is this the sweet N82??? Or is it some new new thingy???

2 more days to go for another biggie in the phone industry eh???

Engedget has the coverage of the news here…

Tags: Series60, Symbian, Engadget, NSeries, Nokia

This blog is slowly but steadily turning into a Nokia and Symbian cult blog…  But then hey!!!  It’s Nokia!!! And its Symbian!!!

Getting ahead, ARM, one of Nokia and Symbian’s longest standing partners (A partnership of over 10 years) recently announced their Multi-core Processor chains to be released in the near future.  Called the ARM® Cortex™-A9 MP™Core, this processor is intended to provide the much needed extra juice to rocket nokia mobiles ahead of the other guys in the race.  And, not to mention, enable the user with a truly richer experience of TV, games, entertainment, 3D, music, internet and more…

Symbian is apparently beginning to rework their kernels and other allied software to enable the required multi-core support for the new Cortex series of ARM processors. 

Talking of the actual technology behind the Multi-Core thingy, it goes thus:

In traditional mobile phones, the Application Core is usually one ARM processor handling the heavy-duty data crunching.  And all these days, the core was single but continuously getting powerful.  Starting off from a paltry 65MHz to a trailblazing 369MHz in the recent days…

To take it to the next level, the Cortex series aims to achieve much higher performance by integrating multiple cores into the application processor and enable the OS to control the processors in an On Demand mode.  So, putting it, Symbian would now be able to extract power from the processor whenever it has the need to.  And this leads to heavy duty performance ondemand.  And when we talk of a multi-core CPU, we can imagine Nokia coming up with ads which show mobiles doing stuff similar to what the intel core2Duo ad shows ;)  But then yeah, talking of the actual news, Symbian says that these mobiles are due in 2010…  Pretty much the roadmap when Nokia is planning to come out with their Symbian 9.5 based devices…

 I’m waiting for 2010…  This is gonna be a hell of a device when it hits the market…  Multicore CPU, newer Communication technologies read Super3g, Wi-Max and what all and what not…, demand paging, true seamless mobility (talk to me… i’ve seen people create this!!!), and then yeah, also a phone… that can call and do sms… if sms technology is still alive!!!

I’m waiting Nokia, I’m Waiting…  Hit me!!!  The future is coming… Run!!! Competition… Run for Cover…

Vinay has a detailed description of the stuff here…

Tags: Nokia, Symbian, ARM, Cortex, Multicore, Demand+Paging, Symmetric+Multiprocessing

Nokia just launched their 8GB loaded N81 at London today. And guess what, it’s got the click-wheel equivalent of Apple’s iPhone called navi™Wheel. And, to add more, they have a touch screen with Tactile Feedback… Sounds very “iPhoney“!!!

But then, yeah… This is Kickass stuff… Nokia’s own patent this… The naviWheel is manufactured by Synaptics… And that means it’s gonna be really sleeky and perfect in operation… Nice to know about it…

Other features on the phone are the sweet Symbian 9.2 with Series60 3rd Edition FP1, a fireblazing 369MHz Arm 11 core, and all the usual goodies of BlueTooth, stereo speakers, dedicated music keys, et. al…

But coming back to the main focus of the post, Nokia is taking on Apple seriously, much similar to the way it attacked Microsoft when MS came out with it’s Windows Mobile 6.0 OS. And yes, the dent has been made in Microsoft’s Smartphone market share with the new E-Series phones coming out. Now, Nokia seems to be gearing up for war against the big Pirates!!! Apple!!! 8GB storage with music, with touch screen, with tactile feedback, sounds exactly like the iphone…

Nokia Rocks!!! Vinay has more on that here…

And, on that note, I delved into the act of getting myself an E61i!!! A little late in the race because of my pockets, but then, hey, I got the coolest latest colour in town!!! Shiny Black!!! And it simply Rocks!!!

Image Copyright e-series.org

Tags: Nokia, Touch+Screen, Tactile+Feedback, Apple, iPhone, E61i, N81

And finally… the Phase - I of my project at Symbian ends today… The last few mails flying to and fro before the final sign-off and acceptance.

The last one month has perhaps settled my score for action that I’ve missed in the last 10 months at my job.  And it has been a massive learning phase for all of us.  Some of them, perhaps the most crucial learnings for our team have been thus:

1. Work only when ‘you‘ want to.  Not when you have to… And this is a gospel at Symbian.  Two hours of working with commitment produces a far more gratifying result than 2 weeks of bitching around because you are asked to.  This is an absolute maverick style compared to the way people work back at my company!!! True freedom…
2. Document the code: I REPEAT WITH A LOT OF COMMITMENT!!! DOCUMENT THE CODE!!!  People here dont write separate documentation.  Tools like doxygen pick up the documentation in the source code and convert into the SDK documentation that we see as reference manuals. (More on this in a dedicated post).  This process maybe quite time consuming, but nevertheless saves time on the overall project deadlines…  I have seen people here documenting a function for about 10-15 lines before they even write the function signature.  It’s part of their culture… Not their process…
3. I had to mention this… NOKIA IS GOD!!!!  No one can, will and I repeat further again, ever will shake NOKIA from the top!!!  The reasons are perhaps very evident and simple -  Having gotten to see the source-code that the people at Nokia have written, I have no reasons and needs to substantiate the statement.  The coding is perfect.  The technique a.k.a. approach to design and architecture is absolutely immaculate… and the guys out there are definitely waaaaaay more committed than we are… (We as in, atleast us that have looked at their source-code)
4. And I have the answer to why the Symbian documentation still sucks…  We can discuss this in greater detail sometime later…

As of now, one more debrief meeting and then we’re off…  And we’re just keeping our fingers crossed and praying that Symbian let us do the second phase of their project from the Symbian dev-center…  Wish me luck!!!

Chao… and out…