Archive for the ‘Tech Zone’ Category

iNokia???

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

Phase-I of my project ends today…

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…

Battery Recall - Nokia

After the battery recall fiascos by Sony and Dell, its Mobile giant Nokia’s turn to play the game…

The BL-5C battery which is installed in a massively huge number of models of Nokia mobile phones have been found defective. This battery has been manufactured by Matsushita Electric. The details are put up on the Nokia website here.

And from what I hear, the recommendations are that you stop using the battery immediately… Which kinda sounds silly as you were using the battery till Nokia came forward and said it is defective and my educated guesses are that people would continue using it had nokia not informed the ‘junta‘…

Getting back to the actual news, now that Nokia has mentioned it, get your battery to a Nokia service centre and have it replaced. The website mentioned in the post also checks your battery serial number to see if your BL-5C battery falls into the set of defective batteries to be replaced… Mine is a BL-5C and does not need to be replaced…

So… Kewl there!!!

Tags: Nokia, Battery, Recall, Defective, BL-5C

Less than 24hrs for BCB4!!!

Just a quickie… Less than 24 hrs and then its 2 full days of heavy-duty unconferencing… The frenzy is building up… JUST BE THERE!!!

Dont die a loser!!!

Tags: bcb4, iim-b

Barcamp Bangalore 4: The Collectives Edition

Be there!!! 28th and 29th of this month, IIM - B. The Collectives edition… Crowd, Gangs, Ideas, Topics, Hacknight, Gaming, Talks, Pitches, Discussions, Brawls, IT DOES NOT GET BETTER THAN THIS!!!

I’ll be at the Startups and Bloggers Collectives… Completing one full year at the BCB edition, and my personal Hat-trick with BCB’s.

I was mentioning to people at the Blog’a'loreans meet last saturday that I wouldn’t be able to make it because of commitments for corporate camps with NisargaIndia. And well, waddaya know… circumstances said otherwise… And now… Me @ BCB!!!

I’ll be talking about Wings @ the Bloggers Collective… And will be assisting Himanshu with the Startups Collective… And yeah, we’re (Himanshu and I) gonna have our own pitch at the startups collective too…

So, be there!!!

Update: Politics involved here… I’ve removed the lines regarding the scenario there!!! Apologies… to the readers of course!!!

Tags: bcb4

The whole iPhone thingy!!!

Amazing launch of the iPhone last friday… 2 days of queuing up… 500, 000 or more units speculated to be sold over the weekend…

Thats about the only thing on the news these days… The Master Magician a.k.a. Steve Jobs has done it yet again… in royal style…

I would definitely agree on the statement: “No phone has ever been given this kind of a super star status and hype in the history of mobile communication!”.

But, under the covers, does the iPhone really stand up to the hype??? I personally feel it doesnt… Lets face it, Quad band, Edge, Safari on Mobile, AJAX, li’l bit of AJAX enabled tracking apps, a sleazy UI, 2MP cam, music, youtube video, iTunes Sync, a MAC OS X build sizing a whopping 700MB of 8GB available memory and that’s it. Yeah, I forgot, you lose data on the phone if you remove the battery!!! This is 2007!!! The iPhone doesnt have non-volatile memory??? Whats with this???

(I was told I was wrong on this point!!!  Apologies on the error!!!)

Lets put that on par with a Nokia N95 here… Quad band, 3G, GPS, AJAX (yeah AJAX here too. The Core engines of the browsers on both the mobiles is the same!!!), music, 5MP camera, Hi-quality video recording, IM, dual camera (I mean Video Conferencing), Internet radio, internet video, Video Out, expandable memory, applications developed by a fervent community, and the list is endless…

The smartphones that people think of being capable of doing a-z of things you want can be brought out only by GODS!!!

However, I do accept the fervour that comes in when The Magician is brought into the scene… nevertheless, hands down, except for the stylish UI and the apple branding, the nokias and sony ericssons still lead the wars on the smartphones segment…

Lets look at this issue with a pinch of salt. When it comes to a smartphone, the phone a.k.a. hardware is still more or less the same. You still have an APP processor, a Baseband processor and maybe a Media accelerator and other peripheral hardware… That exists in similar configurations on all the phones on the planet…

The true potential of this hardware is unleashed when a powerful and a fully capable OS sits on top of it. And, a huge team of Godsend geeks churn out application code to squeeze the living daylights out of the hardware…

The iPhone sincerely needs to come up to this level and then think of taking on giants like NOKIA, SE, Symbian and the like…

I had somewhere down in my previous posts mentioned thus:

“You cant do everything you think you can… You have to be the GOD there… NOKIA is GOD!!! No one is spared!!!”

Vinay had this interesting pic on his blog:

Tags: Nokia, Smart+Phones, iPhone, Apple

Opera 4 beta “Dimension” - The Test Drive

I’ve been running around with Opera 4 beta on my Nokia 6630 since it launched yesterday. I must definitely have been in the first few hundred of the lot to have downloaded it…

And boy, Am I pleased!!! The feature set is awesome, the app is very lightweight compared to its predecessor the Opera Mini and has a kewl set of features. In this post I try to review the product and look at how it fits to the “running-around-a-lot-with-my-smartphone” kind of a user.

To start off, the Opera 4 beta will be referred to as O4 through the rest of this post.

O4 beta is a J2ME application just like the mini. It installs alongside the existing J2ME version without disturbing it at all. But nevertheless, I definitely have to mention that it is WAAAAY lighter than the previous versions. On that note, I will however contradict my statement with an addition that you still cant run heavyduty Symbian apps or J2ME apps with this guy running on the phone…

Mp3 works after an initial stutter, video doesnt. Otherwise, it is still definitely lighter than the previous version. Faster startup and shutdown times are also to be noted.

Now, coming to the feature set of the O4 “Dimension”, this application has a few wannabe features that people have always wanted on mobile browsers:

• Zoom in browsing: This is the feature that S60 3rd edition browsers have. Look at a page, from the birds eye view, choose a section to zoom in, and move into the section and do your work. “5″ is the key that does the job. Now, this feature on every S60 mobile capable of MIDP2.0… which is almost every damn smarty in the market…
• Mouse cursor: Long time never see pal… The cursor is finally there on non S60-3rd Edition phones. This is a real boon for people who browse the net on the move. As simple as Point and click. Now, My 6630 can do pretty much what the Symbian 9.x phones can…
• Fast Panning of a page: Keys 2, 4, 6 and 8 allow fast panning in the top, left, right and bottom directions respectively. The pan is amazingly smooth and slides like nothing else… This is a very good feature to use when in the Zoom-in mode where the whole page is not in view.
• Integrated Yahoo Live OneSearch: Quite good. But I would presonally prefer Google. The Symbian version gives you google by default.
• Bookmarks: This still stays from the previous versions sans the RSS. The Add / Edit / Delete a.k.a. Bookmark Management feature is smooth and Fast.
• Pagination / Scrolling: Everything scrolls across smoothly. Any window transition is a scroll. And it is really smooth, which makes my mobile look space age…
• And then theres all the old features carried over… with more speed of-course!!!

What the O4 Dimension misses out:

• Still No Password saving: Hope they bring in this feature like the Symbian counterpart. The password saving feature would be a real boon.
• RSS Feeds: Where did they go??? Are they leaving it out or would they put it into the final release is a question I’m awaiting an answer for. I really loved that feature. Your personal pocket based RSS feed reader… Kewl enough to catch up on news!!!
• Image Quality: The O4 gives an option to increase image quality. This has to however be manually activated. In as-much-as I do appreciate Opera’s quest for browsing speed, I strongly feel that the compromise on the image quality has taken a bad beating. The image quality could be marginally improved.
• No Flash Yet: This is a feature that is still expected on Symbian. So, I guess the Mini series would never have it in the near future…
• Skinning: Will this be integrated in the Final release??? Opera, please answer this. I prefer the black skin to the wine-red!

There are still some more add-ons I guess have to be added. Like figuring out how Opera behaves with Orkut. Noting the fact that Orkut opens in the O4 Dimension with absolute ease. The scrap / more friends / et. al. links which are actually images are not recognized by this guy…

In conclusion to this rather long post, “Two Thumbs Up! ” for this amazing piece of software. One instance where J2ME beat Symbian in the race to User Interfaces and User Interaction… Way to go guys… Opera Still Rocks…

And I’m waiting for the final release of this bad boy!!! Definitely worth investing in GPRS in India when you have O4 around!!! This is the new Dimension to browsing.

This is what mobiles have become!!!

Update: Correction for mentioning Yahoo OneSearch as Yahoo LiveSearch. Thanks to Daniel from Opera for the mention… And yeah, his comment down below states all the hotties in the next package… I’m waiting!!!

Tags: OperaMini, Dimension, Beta, Symbian, Series60, Nokia, 6630, Review

BlogCamp Pune - A Showbiz event…

This post comes 2 days after BlogCamp pune…

The venue was Symbiosis Infotech Campus, Hinjewadi… A lovely place where wi-fi dint work… Now, I’m not being critical, I’m being candid… First unconference where I could not live-blog… But then yeah, it was interesting in a kind of a way…

Rediff was one of the big stars of the event… They launched a service called Rediff BlogShowCase… which was kinda over-hyped by the media to an extent that was way beyond proportions… Simple RSS Aggregator with a voting and ranking feature… Sounds familiar doesnt it??? It’s called Digg!!! And Digg podcasts!!! Absolut old wine - new bottle stuff… But hey! They’re Rediff.com!!!

So you have StarTV, NDTV, CNN-IBN, CNBC, TechTree, Mid-Day, Financial Express, and what-not and what-all of the media fraternity here… And then, there was Sakshi Juneja - who is Rakhi Sawant’s unofficial PR! Caught up with Rajiv Dhingra and team from WATBlog / WATConsult.

The sessions were mostly marketing stuff. By PurpleNova, PooraPoona, Sulekha, Rediff of-course and some others. Some of the interesting sessions were however the ones on Blog Traffic building and Blogging for learners… which were both interesting and interactive. So, I caught up with that…

And then the personal high of the event, I got covered by CNBC for being a blogger and my experiences on blogging and for the fact that I’ve been blogging since 2004… which apparently puts me in the previliged league of veteran bloggers…

Did a huge pitch for NisargaIndia there. A lot of people were interested in the part that there were wildlife-conservation and naturalist activities in India AND I was not associated with WWF AND that my organization was a privately held one, not an NGO AND that we actually had a perfectly fine and successfully working business model to round it all off…

So thats that about BlogCamp pune. The trip was however lovely… Met up with all my roomies there, my gud old friends, my managers in my old-organization, lunches, dinner, party, disc… whoa… Lovely saturday nite… And now, it’s back to life… and reality!!!

And yeah, is it something about me flying??? Everytime I’m on a trip, on the return flight back home, the flight attendant has to spill something on a passenger… 3rd occurrence today… This time it was however lemonade… and not boiling coffee… Read up my older posts for that incident…

So long…

Tags: blogcamppune, rediff, blogshowcase, SCIT, pune, blogging, media, hype, NisargaIndia

BlogCampPune

A lot of things that have been done. And with a sense of satisfaction that I’ve completed the tasks I was assigned, I’m now heading off to pune for BlogCamp.

Everything in the last minute is how this was arranged. And the basic truth that I forgot I had this website… Himanshu had me running for cover when he said: “Dude… You have a blog… did u give it up or something???”

Neways, so much so for that. Now its 3 days at good ol’ pune… Back to a familiar place… All those haunts and joints… Yippeeeeee…

And yeah, I’m gonna be trying to get some good videos of the camp… And Tarun and I are planning to set up livecast of the show… Fingers crossed…

Tags: Barcamp, Pune, BlogCamp

Social Networking and Cyber Crime

The internet is a very very vast place. And a lot of people are online… All the time… And the catch-phrase of the day for all of us: “Orkut“.

I’ll scrap you later is the lingo common to almost everyone. My mom has been dying to catch up with her schoolmates on orkut… But yeah, the story is not about Orkut…

The story is about the umbrella in itself… The world of Social Networking. The world of Socializing on the internet… The number of websites where people hang out these days is innumerable. Orkut, Facebook, MySpace, MingleBox, Yaari, and a whole lot more…

The most basic factor in all these websites is that people get online with the intention of meeting people, making friends, carving out relationships. Atleast, this is what the sites intend to provide you as their USP’s.

In layman terms, it’s the opening up of the self and providing information for the world to see. Free information is the keyword of the day… But, unfortunately, a lot of people take things to the next step… Infringement of the freely provided information and harassment. Shridhar Rao has a post here about a girl who committed suicide because someone took her fotos from her profile online and threatened to put them onto porn sites…

As a blogger and a person who is into a strongly built social network, I set my thoughts on what can be done for this kind of a menace… I’d like to add to the points shridhar has already written on his post… I guess these would go out especially to women…

Anonymity:
Try to keep anonymity online. This is one of the best defences that is possible… Try not to post all your colours online… Consciously realise that Adobe Photoshop is an extremely powerful tool… “I” can personally turn into Tom Cruise in a couple of minutes…

Help / Police:
Incase someone does still choose to put up their personal data online, and get called by a person who feels that you have to be put up on a porn website, DO NOT PANIC! Get the source of the call / sms / e-mail and immediately alert the nearest police station. The Cyber Crime Branch in any country is faster than any other sect of the police department around. They are “atleast” linux geeks!

The Cyber-crime branch police stations in various cities are listed here. Get the data across to these people. Proof is of utmost importance. I’ve personally seen this in a case I know, where the lady chose to delete the sleazy sms’es she had been receiving coz she thought they were dirty, disgusting and shameful. Evidence people!! Evidence… The cyber-crime team generally wont go on a hearsay piece of information.

Website Gurus:
It’s us dev guys that make the internet the place it is. Whether your site is just a mashup or a full blown enterprise thingy, HAVE LOGGING ENABLED!!! This ought to be made gospel! Log every bit of activity a user performs on your domain. Do not give website performance as a reason for disabling logs. All of the languages used for web programming have powerful threading models. They can definitely handle a couple of extra function calls.

This is mandatory for the most obvious of reasons. A person may choose to harass a victim and then delete the instances as a cover up. If logging is enabled, the database would have an image of his activity and this person can actually be framed. Get as much data as possible from the user activity. The IP, is byfar the most important piece of information. An IP trace can easily reveal almost everything about a user. Even if it is a dynamic IP, the ISP and the city is listed.

As a footnote, perhaps the only statement I can make on the whole issue is this: “We’re bound to be responsible individuals. If there IS a person who chooses to f&^k around, he / she is to be taken to the task immediately. And for that, we do need to stay together as a team. And be alert!”

Rightly mentioned Shridhar, and may she rest in peace…

Over and out…

Tags: Internet, Cyber+Crime, Social+Networking

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