noname01.com

Don’t worry… I am not going to talk about politics and elections.. I am going to make a few changes here.

A new customised theme.. designed by yours truly. I was never happy with the themes I found.

Instead of many small posts, I will have one nice big write up once a week or so.

I will add more “static” information about me here.

You must have noticed the new chat widget on the right.. this is much better than the google talk one. And it feels amazing to chat to someone who is on your website reading your posts.. much better than comments!
I will write a short review on Digsby soon.. that’s the new chat application I use which provided that widget.

Be back soon!

I just installed Ubuntu 8.04. Installed using WUBI and everything working perfectly on my HP Pavilion dv6750ee laptop apart from the Wifi adapter. Anyway, there is a fix online which solves this problem.

But there is one very interesting bug.. When I open firefox and try to surf to Ubuntuguide.org, Ubuntu crashes! Well, technically, X restarts and you have to login again. But isn’t it ironic? Ubuntuguide.org crashes your Ubuntu installation! This doesn’t seem to happen on other mediawiki sites.

Bug confirmed here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg/+bug/223607

I just installed the Flixster movies application in my orkut profile. When I click on the application link on the left, it shows flixster’s loading animation for a few seconds and then shows a blank page.

EDIT: Its the flixster movies application that doesn’t work. I tried iLike and its working fine

Another interesting thing I noticed recently..I just made a Myspace account encouraged by their recent “Indian launch” (what did they do apart from creating a special Indian regional domain for advertising??).

One of the ways you can find and add friends is to directly import them from orkut! Import your social network into another network!

There was another thing I noticed about Myspace. It’s interface is terribly ugly! I have heard of lot about the largest social network but I didn’t expect this!

I guess I will stick to Facebook for keeping in touch with friends and applications, and Orkut for the Bangalore community! Yes, that is the only reason why I still use orkut!

One month since I posted something here. Reason: I started playing World of Warcraft, and now, all the free time I get is spent in the world of Azeroth and Outland. My character is already level 60! Yes, I am now officially jobless.
Anyway, few things of point out:
My blog was offline for a week because there was an update on my host.
I am attending BarCamp Bangalore 6 (http://www.barcampbangalore.org) I and Jagtesh will give a short introduction to application development in Symfony. The event is taking place in April 19 and 20 in IIM Bangalore campus. To attend this event, you have to contribute in some way (give a talk, volunteer to help, suggest a talk idea). For those of you are new to Barcamps, check out http://www.barcamp.org and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcamp.
BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from participants.
Looking forward to meeting you guys there. For those of you who are into PHP development, I *highly* recommend you guys to attend my talk on Symfony.

EDIT: If anyone was looking for me, I am sorry I couldn’t attend. Some urgent college work came up in the last minute. Hopefully, I will attend the next time.

God bless Airtel for their Mobile Office plan. Gone are the days when they used to cut your balance and leave you unactivated. In the recent times, the speed and connectivity has really increased. Browsing and small downloads are really comfortable now.

However, now there is another reasonable option. BSNL wireless internet service. They give laptop datacards and USB modems. Currently they are on CDMA2000 network and you get speeds up to 144kbps. The good news is that they are planning to start EVDO soon, which will give speeds upto 2.4 MBps!

The bad news: One guy in my hostel got it and it was brilliant. Five more got encouraged by this brilliant service and got it too. And now the speeds are terribly slow!

Airtel, on the other hand, greatly improved their service and connectivity and service after many users joined in. Two years ago when there were fewer subscribers around the hostel, the speeds were not half as good as this.
And lets not forget one very important thing: You need a computer to surf! With Airtel Mobile office, you can chat with your friends or fire up google maps when you are on the move, right from your phone!
Like I said, God bless Airtel! Mobile Office is their gift to mankind!

For those poor souls who are not acquainted with this brilliant service, its an EDGE (or enhanced gprs) internet service which allows you to surf from your gprs enabled phone. If your phone supports Edge, you will get better speeds. You can connect your phone to your computer via data cable or bluetooth and surf too. In Karnataka, you pay Rs 20 to surf unlimited till the next day 10AM or Rs 100 for a week. All unlimited! This has been my primary internet connection for the past 2 years(no I am not cheap. I live in a hostel where I am not allowed to get wired lines from outside.) If you want a How-To for connecting your phone to your computer, you can request it in a comment and I will post one soon!

I just browsing through Airtel’s website and I found 2 really interesting things:

• They have not mentioned their Rs 100 per week (or Rs 20 a day) mobile office plan anywhere in their website. Instead, they have this: http://www.airtel.in/Level2_t3_services.aspx?path=1/6/6/3/6 which is truly scary. These are the same rates as their data card plans!
• You can now register for the Do Not Disturb registery! http://www.airtel.in/Common.aspx?path=0/30 For prepaid mobile, all you have to do is to enter your number and click Submit. They say all those promotional calls will end within 48 hours.. lets hope they do! UPDATE: For some reason, Airtel has removed the DND registration form from this page! Don’t know what’s going on. You can try calling the customer care service. Okay, its back online!

While we are on the subject of internet access through mobile, I was wondering if it was possible to connect to a dial up ISP using your mobile as a modem. I know that GPRS/EDGE is clearly a better option, but I want wireless internet access in Oman, and I don’t want to take a postpaid Nawras connection considering the fact that I am in Muscat for around 45 days every year. If I could somehow dial up Omantel 1311 using my username and password from my cell, it would be nice.

I got a forward with 10 pics of the Dubai Metro under construction. Its looks so beautiful, its hard to imagine that this place was practically nothing but a desert only a couple of decades ago.

And lets not forget the tallest building in the world Burj Dubai! And all those artificial islands, including those 3 palms, the world map, and the solar system! (Yeah these are all artificial islands coming up off the coast of dubai, infact I think 2-3 of them are already ready!) Its makes me feel proud to be a resident of the gulf, even though I am not exactly in Dubai itself!

EDIT: Okay… supposedly the forward wasn’t entirely genuine. These pics are of the new A380 extension of the Emirates terminal in Dubai Airport.

Update 18/03/2008: I found some nice pics and a lot of articles in the Gulf News website. They have an entire section dedicated to the Metro. Here

How many website accounts do you have? Here is a list of mine:
GMail
Google Reader
Del.icio.us
Stumblupon
Digg
Reddit
Feedburner
Facebook
Orkut
Consumating
Twitter
MyBlogLog
Technorati
Wordpress.com
Yahoo!
Windows Live
Those are 16 which I can recall now, but I am sure there are a few more. I started using internet about 6 years ago, and now I can’t imagine living without it for a single day. A month ago when my PC’s monitor stopped working, I was on my phone’s Opera mini browser the whole day and I still felt restless so I got a new one as soon as possible. When I go to Bhatkal(my hometown), I walk one to two kilometers to the nearest internet cafe to surf! When I was in Bangalore airport waiting for my flight to Muscat and I had a couple of hours to kill, I opened up Nimbuzz on my phone and started chatting. Infact I feel a bit weird nowadays for not being able to use internet on my phone. I use Nawras over here and they have some brilliant 3.75G services, but GPRS is just too expensive if you are on prepaid.
Everyday, I go online atleast thrice and I check atleast 7 of the above accounts everyday.. And this when I am in Muscat using Omantel’s freakishly expensive dial up. When I am Bangalore, I probably spend more time online than eating or maybe even sleeping. Probably Airtel’s unlimited GPRS internet Mobile Office is to blame
Whatever, the fact is that I am hooked on! Its becoming an unhealthy addiction! Sometimes, when I am connected and I have nothing to do, I feel this restless urge to just open some page on the internet and do something, even if I really don’t feel like it!
And if you actually think about it, do we really need so many services on the internet? According to my understanding, anyone who spends more than hour on the internet everyday and not earning from it(including office work), they are wasting their time! Sounds reasonable enough, doesn’t it? Even I have finally decided to monetize this blog in the near future as there has been a BIG increase in the number of viewers I get in recent times.
But then, what would happen if I was disconnected for a couple of days? Remember the recent FLAG telecom cable cuts in the Mediterranean? It seems the outsourcing business went for a toss for a day or two before Reliance Communications got extra connectivity from elsewhere (Oman Telecommunications too!!). How can they allow some careless ship or whatever to break internet connectivity for nearly the entire country? Optical fiber cables are very fragile, and they must put in that much extra security to make sure nothing happens.
Anyway I think we have become too dependent on the internet nowadays. I am sure we can carry on working for atleast one day if we are not connected, excluding internet based businesses ofcourse. I am planning to experiment living without internet for a couple of days and see how it works out!
PS: I know that is no excuse for not posting anything here.. Sorry, was just too busy at times, and bored at other times. When something interesting happened in the Tech world or the general media, I thought of writing about them but I waited for too long and then it just became too late to comment on something that happened a month ago!
PS part 2: Do you read Techbol? We have started posting some stuff there. Do drop by sometime. I will be posting there very often now.

I have been doing some thinking lately. Ever wondered why it is still so hard to get a good job in India and unemployment is so high? Also, why is this trend changing so rapidly in the recent times?
I may know nothing about economics, but here is my opinion on the subject. What you will listen from the media and other blabber mouths is that India’s population was too large and hence jobs were hard to find, and the recent change is due to IT boom, economic growth and what not.
But you just have to look past these factors and the news and simply analyze the mindset of the people and this country in general to come up with one simple answer.
The main reason why we it is (or was) hard to get a good job here is simply because too many people were just looking for a job. Yes, that’s it. Simple. For many reasons which are linked to our traditional practices, Indians like a sense of security of a monthly paycheck and don’t want to risk starting a new business or a start up. People still get married quite early here(though this is rapidly changing) and it helps to have safety and security for the family. Hence you didn’t have much growth and job creation. Hence, no jobs. Its like a feedback cycle. Sounds ironic, but if you analyze it, it makes perfect sense.
And the second question, why this trend has changed recently? To analyse this, you have to look at the reasons behind the growth of companies like Infosys and Wipro, and Reliance. There are countless of other new companies which provide jobs to the people, which you probably won’t read in the headlines, just because there are too many and its not considered that big a deal. The simple reason is that more people have become entrepreneurs and started their own business, which hire employees.
You might be wondering why I am talking about this subject all of a sudden, after all the crap I write on this blog! If I look at the students in my college and other so called “engineering” colleges in the country, 95% just want to settle for a job. Placements! Its probably the worst thing in an engineering college! Bigshot companies come and hire mass labor for  cheap. They take advantage of the fact that its not easy for freshers to get a job. The kind of placements that an average Bangalore student gets actually cheapens the so called engineering degree. Software testing and support. Building a simple UI for a database. No, I am not kidding. There are a few who want to go for higher studies, but ultimately they just want a high paying job. I mean… Why?
I know I am more lazier than the average 20 year old, but how can so many people actually like the idea of going to office every day at 8AM and work their asses off for someone else? I am sure most, if not all, people DON’T enjoy their work. Once again, its the safety of an assured check of Rs 30k per month that they are looking forward to. I am not saying that everyone should be an entrepreneur (where will we get employees from?) but I have seen smart, intelligent, creative students who are just too scared to take this option. There are still far too few people going for entrepreneurship and business.
And this is the message I want to convey to these guys: Look, we are like 22 years old. Do you want to spend the rest of your productive life stuck in a office like this? You don’t need security until you are like 28-30 and you are married and have kids. Come up with an idea.. Its not hard to think of something which you can improve and what people will want. (NO I am not talking about technology and Internet start-ups only… I am talking about every sector out there.) Of course, it is hard to do business and be successful and make money, but its not impossible. And certainly, its much better than taking a job, even a high paying one. You may not earn the same amount in the first few years, but you will be doing something you love. You will be working for yourself. To all the students out there, just think about it. That’s all I am asking for.
And yeah, there is a nice collection of essays and articles by Technology entrepreneur Paul Graham here. They are really worth reading, even if you are not into the Technology sector.

Just after using my new host for 3 days, it stopped serving this site for some unknown reasons, so, for the second time in a month, I shifted my blog to yet another free host. One of these days, I am going to start paying for hosting, but I don’t think that day is very near Usual visitors must have noticed the damage done, one post missing: “A prayer for 2008″. From now onwards, I will take a Wordpress backup after every new post. And I also discovered that the Wordpress backup file doesn’t restore Tags effectively. It just converted them to numbers!I should have left them as categories for backup. For now, no more tagging on my posts.

Last month saw a significant increase in the pageviews of this blog, thanks to stumbleupon and reddit, and some new friends in the blogosphere. If you write a good post, a sureshot way to get a lot of visitors is to post in on a bookmarking site!

Exams are going on, and just like every other exam, I am hardly interested in studying for the papers Infact, its probably got worse this semester! I am going to Muscat on January 25, 2 weeks late because of some quick work before the beta launch. (If you don’t know what I am talking about, don’t bother asking!)

My interest in desktop applications have been strangely rekindled, and I was thinking of different ways to develop a cross platform application, mainly for windows and linux. One friend of mine suggests .net with gtk#, and another one suggests I start learning Qt. At the moment, both look interesting even though they are essentially two very different approaches to the problem, and for now, I will look into both of them before choosing what to stick to. On the web development front, I have been doing a lot of work on symfony (a php framework) recently, and I think I will write an introductory post on TechBol soon.

Since I was getting tired of playing Texas Hold’em poker on facebook and I didn’t want to boot into Windows and extert my poor graphics card without a fan, I downloaded a few games for Ubuntu. I had mastered Tetravex and Mahjongg can get boring if you are not in the mood for it. I downloaded Kolf. I don’t know, but there is something very interesting about those complex courses.

And ofcourse, my all time favourite OpenTTD, the opensource clone of Transport Tycoon Deluxe. Even now, this game is under very active development. Those who like this game never get bored of it. It has a sort of cult fan following of geeks and programmers who love building extensive rail networks! It also supports multiplayer gameplay on the internet, but something strange happens when I try to connect to a server.. It disconnects my bluetooth internet connection and I get an “Error in connection” message on my phone! Just hope they fix this in the next release, or I might as well get a datacable. Bluetooth disconnects so frequently, I can’t keep something big for download for a long time.

Anyway, I must get back to Microprocessors. Uggh I mean, I have nothing agaisnt Microprocessors and I think they are the greatest inventions in the history of electrical and electronic engineering, but I don’t want to learn about them for an exam. Leave it to the more hardware oriented or EC branch chaps, and gurus in Intel and AMD. Its not for me!