Prakash Advani's Web log

I have moved :)

Thu, 22 Apr 2004 06:56:23 GMT

I have moved to a new hosting with blog, posts and photos. So if you are looking for me here .. go to http://www.cityblogger.com

Checking for devices supported under Linux

Tue, 16 Mar 2004 06:37:18 GMT

Before buying any USB device you can check if your device is supported on Linux. Found this site quite useful and information is nicely classified.

Corruption: the root causes

Fri, 12 Mar 2004 11:42:30 GMT

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 Palkiwala 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!

10% of PC costs goes towards Windows

Wed, 10 Mar 2004 05:10:59 GMT

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.

Kodak isn't going anywhere

Mon, 23 Feb 2004 10:39:37 GMT

This is something that I have been saying for a while "Kodak isn't going anywhere". I read an article on Wired which re-iterates that. Recently when I bought a digital camera, I didn't even consider a Kodak. My older Film camera also gives me better results with a Fuji Film.

Being an old economy company, its too focused on Film Roll where they have a near monopoly, they need to re-invent itself as a digital camera company by producing better cameras. Or they should focus on providing Digital Camera related accessories such as Memory, prints, web site, etc.

Alternatives to Windows applications

Fri, 20 Feb 2004 05:55:54 GMT

This Site has a nice list of Linux equivalents for common Windows applications. The only problem is for each Windows application there are average 5 Linux applications to choose from!

How do you expect a newbie to decide which one he/she should choose?

Spam Free Email box

Sun, 15 Feb 2004 06:10:50 GMT

Finally I have a Spam free (nearly) mailbox. I tried this utility DisSpam. What this does is as follows.

- It connects to a pop mailbox.
- Checks for spam emails by comparing with Spam Assassin (the best spam control tool).
- Deletes the spam mail from the server.
- Then you start your mail client and download only the clean messages.

To increase the effectiveness you can also train spamassassin in case it didn't identified some mails as spam.

I also use another tool: popcheck which shows all your email header and lets you delete directly from the server.

Is digital camera more expensive than film?

Sat, 07 Feb 2004 09:34:30 GMT

I came across this article - Why Bother with a Digital Camera?

I had similar thinking while deciding on buying a Digital Camera and I am still not completely convinces about the costs.

The cost of buying a new digital camera is more than my photography bill for 10 years! So cost isn't really a good argument, yes convenience is, specially if you need to publish the photos on a Web site quickly or need to email them.

Linux isn't affected by Viruses

Fri, 06 Feb 2004 12:20:33 GMT

I have been screaming that since a long time but finally there is a good article that explains this well.

Buying things online

Sun, 01 Feb 2004 16:39:09 GMT

I recently purchased a Canon Digital Camera SD100 online. It was really simple, here are some links which others may find useful.

Site to check prices:

Pricegrabber.com

Cnet-Shopper

Pricewatch.com

some of these sites have reviews too, the end customer reviewers very quite helpful and accurate.

Happy Shopping :)

I want a Linux phone!

Thu, 18 Dec 2003 05:18:25 GMT

There seems to be a Linux phone boom! First it was Motorola to announce to Linux, then it was E28 a chinese company to follow suit and now Samsung too had released a Linux phone. On a seperate development NTT DoCoMo Japanese leading mobile provider had said they would go the Linux way.

Whats driving these companies towards Linux? There are couple of reasons.

- They don't have to pay License fees
- Provides them with lots of flexiblity
- Lets face it, Linux is good :)

Most of the phones choosing to use Linux are for smart phone with PDA, camera, MP3 and other facilities.

Novell acquires SuSE

Tue, 04 Nov 2003 17:44:08 GMT

Novell Announced today that it is acquiring SuSE. This seems to be interesting, SuSE is one of the best distributions and Novell has a very large customer base. Novell also recently acquired another Linux company - Ximian.

Lets see how Novell integrates all this and provides a good distribution for us to use. Its also important to see how much Novell gives back to the community.

In India SuSE has very little market share but Novell has lots of customers. Novell now has a strong product now to offer to their existing customers.

If I could re-write Linux

Mon, 27 Oct 2003 11:56:21 GMT

I wrote an article titled If I could re-write Linux for Newsforge. The response was overwhelming, over a 100 comments and most of them negative! Rather than being critical, I would have appreciated if people said how they would re-write if they had too.

Portable DVD Player

Sun, 19 Oct 2003 11:39:02 GMT

I have been considering buying a portable DVD player and I came across the BenQ DVDGem. What I like about it is:

- Its small and portable, so can be lugged around.
- It can be used as a stand alone DVD player, so it can hook up to a TV directly.
- It can also be used as a DVD ROM drive, through USB so can be used with the PC.
- It doubles up as an MP3 player so if I put all my MP3's on a DVD-R thats about 1000 songs!

Now how do you get this in India? since it is not available in the market.

GPRS Connection

Tue, 14 Oct 2003 16:15:34 GMT

I recently enabled GPRS connection on my new phone. Its just Rs. 99 per month by Orange if I don't want to connect it to a PC. Speed isn't anything spectacular but its a good way to catchup on reading while traveling or look up important things.

But all websites are not WAP enabled, however there are ways around.

- Use google, to search for the site, and google will convert that to WAP though their wap proxy and display it to you. That works reasonably well, you can read all the text but the graphics is lost.

- Info Aggregrator which is developed by Netcore, where I work can convert my RSS feeds to WAP. I talked the developers into doing it and they got pretty excited about it. So now I can get any RSS feed converted to WAP.

Happy Wapping if you are like me :)

My New Phone - Nokia 3100

Sat, 04 Oct 2003 17:06:12 GMT

My older Sendo phone which I got for free under a plan from Orange, gave me lots of problems. It just gets hung at times and the battery dies abruptly. So I decided to go back to a Nokia.

I got my self Nokia 3100. Here is my brief overview.

The features I liked:
- Easy to use. Like all the Nokia phones I have used in the past, this too is very easy to use.
-Small and Light. That makes it easy to handle but chances of loosing it a small size phone is higher.
- Color Display. This is restricted to 4000 colors which is a limitation of all Nokia Phones currently available. It Looks good but not as sharp as some of the 65,000 color display phones.
- GPRS - How much that will be of use, I am doubtful since now I have cable Internet at home! May be while traveling I could make some use of it. I am anyways getting it enabled and will test it out.
- MMS - Multimedia Messaging, not many people use it now but could get popular at some point of time.
- Polyphonic ring tones - I really like this features, sounds a lot better than a normal ring tone.
- Tri-band - Wonder when I am going to use that but a nice feature to have. Now need to travel to the US to test it :)
- Java - Have to yet test this.
- Speaker Phone - This is nice to use and better that using a hands free kit.
- Flashing Light - The screen, keypad flash when the phone rings. This works nicely with polyphonic ring tones, it dances to the tune! I wonder how long I would fancy this but right now its cool :)
- xHTML browser - it has a newer brower, have to check this out.

What I dislike
The phone gets hot if you speak for a long time! If the speaker phone wouldn't be there to save my ears! either I would have had fried them by now or dumped the phone!

I guess this is a problem with a few of the new small nokia phones which are high on features. Eg. 6610.

Now I need to find a data cable for the phone so I can dump some of my favourite Midi/Kar files to the phone :)

My Dream PC

Fri, 26 Sep 2003 06:27:05 GMT

A friend recently asked me what would be my Dream PC, so here are some thoughts.

- All hardware should be Linux compatible.
- CPU should be preferable AMD Athlon 64 (64-Bit) or Intel P4 Hyper Threading.
- 800 FSB along with DDR 400 Memory.
- Display card should be Nvidia high end graphic card. If the card is on-board there should be an AGP 8X slot also available.
- Hard disk should be Serial ATA with 7200 RPM speed. - Raid controller would be nice to have.
- DVD ROM with CD writer or better still DVD writer. I have found Plextor to be a very good and reliable CD Writer, Pioneer is suppose to be the best in DVD players.
- 100 Mbps LAN on board.
- Mimimum 4 USB 2.0 ports 2 in the front and 2 behind.
- 15/17" LCD Monitor.
- 3 Button or Scroll Mouse.
- Cabinet should be as small as possible preferably like Mini-ITX.
- Low Noise. System should be as low noise as possible.

Broad Band

Wed, 24 Sep 2003 16:14:52 GMT

I recently got a Hathway Cable Internet at home. Its 64 K, definitely faster than the Dial-up that I used to use before but not very fast. I get a maximum download speed of 7 K.

Incidentally it works faster on Linux, I wonder why but its good :)

Email Attachments - Did you ever forget to attach?

Mon, 22 Sep 2003 06:52:13 GMT

I often find, people (including me) forget to attach files in their emails. This happens if you think you will first finish writing the email and then attach at the end. Invariably you forget to do do that before you hit the send button. Your reflex action is trained to hit the send button after composing. What I have started doing is that if I am composing an email, and I need to attach something, I stop midway, attach the file and then continue writing.

If you happen to be a person who reads each of your emails once again before sending them then you wont face such a problem.

My article in Economic Times today

Thu, 18 Sep 2003 12:34:38 GMT

My article titled 'Better features, and cheaper too' got published in Economic Times today. The article is to urge people to move to Open Office and Mozilla on Windows as the first step. The next step of course is to replace the underlying OS with Linux :)

How rich are you?

Wed, 17 Sep 2003 16:37:10 GMT

www.globalrichlist.com is a site where you input your annual income in US$ and it tells you how rich you as compared to the rest of the world.

After seeing the results, I have less reasons to crib :)

Proud of being an Indian

Sat, 13 Sep 2003 05:03:57 GMT

A friend of mine, sent me this.

1* The number of companies listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange, at more than 6,000, is second only to NYSE.
2* Four out of 10 Silicon Valley startups are run by Indians.
3* With 800 movies per year, India's film industry overshadows Hollywood.
4* The organised lottery market in India is US$7bn (2% of GDP).
5* India consumes a fifth of the world's gold output.
6* Indians account for 45% of H1-B visas issued by the US every year.
7* Growing at 6%, in 25 years Indian GDP (on a PPP basis) will be at the same level the US is at today.
8* Six Indian ladies have won Miss Universe/Miss World titles over the past 10 years. No other country has won more than twice.
9* Bank deposits in India roughly equal 50% of its GDP OE again,among the
highest in the world.
10* Indian Railways is the largest railway network in the world under single management.
11* India has the third-largest army in the world, nearly 1.5 million strong.
12* India is the largest producer and consumer of tea in the world,
accounting for more than 30% of global production and 25% of consumption.
13* India is the world's premier center for diamond cutting and polishing.
Nine out of every 10 stones sold in the world pass through India.
14* India has the highest number of annual bulk drugs filings (77) with
USFDA.
15* India is home to the largest number of pharmaceutical plants (61)
approved by USFDA outside the US.
16* India's Hero Honda is the world's largest motorcycle manufacturer, with 2002 production of 1.7m units.
17* Other than US and Japan, India is the only country to have built a
super computer indigenously.
18* Indian Railways is the largest employer in the world, with a staff of
1.6 million people.
19* It is the second-largest cement-producing country in the world,
producing more than 110m tonnes.
20* Of the Fortune 500 companies, 220 outsource their software-related work to India.
21* There are 8,500 Indian restaurants in the UK, 15% of the country's
total dining-out establishments.
22* India is the largest democracy in the world, with nearly 400m voting in the last national elections.
23* India has the second-largest pool of scientists and engineers in the world. 24* India has the third-largest investor base in the world.
25* According to the Gemological Institute of America, up until 1896, India was the only source of diamonds.
26* The Kumbh Mela festival, held every 12 years in the city of Allahabad,
attracts 25 million people OE more than the population of 185 of the 227
countries in the world.
27* The Indian city of Varanasi, also known as Benares, is the oldest,
continuously inhabited city in the world today.
28* There are 3.22 million Indians in the US.
29* Indians are the richest immigrant class in the US, with nearly 200,000 millionaires.
30* India is ranked the sixth country in the world in terms of satellite launches.
31* There are over 70,000 bank branches in India - among the highest in the world.

Sounds nice so I posted it but what is important to note is that we have a long way to go.

Interview with Morphix founder

Mon, 01 Sep 2003 10:51:03 GMT

I enjoyed playing with Knoppix and now I have installed it on my hard disk. Its my desktop now both at home and office. I also liked Morphix since it offers more flexibility to build your own Knoppix like CD. I recently interviewed the founder of Morphix for Newsforge.

In the midst of the SCO-Linux controversy

Thu, 07 Aug 2003 06:27:21 GMT

The SCO-Linux controversy, has taken a twist where Ransom Love, Former CEO of Caldera (Now SCO), admitted that they assisted in make Linux work better on IA-64. The IA-64 code is what SCO claims IBM copied from Unix to Linux.

Newsforge has the details about this Q&A session after the Linux World 2000 and I was the one who asked the question to him.

Meditation in the Work Space

Wed, 06 Aug 2003 05:43:38 GMT

Business Week has a good article on the benefits of meditation in the workplace. I agree with this and urge all the organisations to try it out and see the benefits. You would notice increase in productivity due to reduction in work related stress.

I have been doing Vipassana Meditation for the past 6 years and Netcore the company I work for encourages it too by giving 5 days of paid leave to people who go for a 10 day Vipassana course.