Picasa3 Photo Viewer

The Picasa 3 has a nifty new feature called the Photo Viewer. Click on any image and this is what it will look like. Its got a very cool effect to it and looks rather snazzy.

My Google Chrome posting

This is my first post on wordpress. i was inspired to write a full technical themed blog based on the response i got to my post on Google Chrome. It was just a one paragraph writeup about google chrome and im getting thousands of hits for the last couple of days. A far cry from a montly average of 500 hits per month on my other blog here

BSNL Broadband, Wireless Issues with Huawei and DNS address

I have had trouble this month connecting to the BSNL broadband service. On a particular weekend, i just couldnt connect to the internet. I called up the customer care at 1500 and they told me they were experiencing server problems. Again last weekend, i faced similar issues. i finally decided to check if there was something i could learn by logging on to my wireless router (Huawei).
I logged in and it showed me as connected. I then checked the system logs but dint see them too well. A little later i figured out the logs showed the complete bootup of the router and it did show 2 DNS address which i wasnt using in my network configuration. I used a static ip actually and have not enabled DHCP. The new addresses were 218.248.240.24 and 218.248.240.208. These were different from the 61.1.96.69/71 addresses i was using earlier. I used these new addresses and well i was able to browse without issues.

Another peculiar problem im facing is my laptop doesnt work with the huawei wireless router at home. Im wireless all the while at office and so it definitely is a problem with the router at home. I chan check my ralink wireless utility and it shows the wireless signal going off and on every 5-10 seconds or so. i now need to investigate this in greater detail, maybe first with google and them later again with the utilities available on the router.

Nokia Morph Concept

The Nokia Morph concept looks so very interesting. The promise that nano technology holds is mind boggling. Have a look at the concept here http://www.nokia.com/A4852062 and the video @ http://www.nokia.com/A4879144

Yahoo Maps in India

I found the Yahoo Maps feature for India very promising. Now that one of my friends is actually working in Yahoo, its easier for me giving feedback as well. For example, i wanted driving directions from Madivala (In Bangalore) to Kamat Yatri Nivas on the road to mysore (About 60 Km away from Bangalore city) and currently yahoo maps doesn’t help me. It does show me the road to the Kamat YatriNivas in Gandhinagar or National Market. The send to SMS feature works and is really useful. Should explore more of this and actually try out the routes mentioned to see if they really are the logical and faster ones.

HP’s snapfish in India

HP has started their India specific Snapfish website. This is nice!! Helps you share and print photos online. They have some cool features like printing on T shirts, mugs, key chains etc. The calendar option costs about 800/= for a period of 12 months. Everything looks OK priced and im just waiting to upload my first album soon. Seems like the first 20 prints are free, but havent yet checked the disclaimer.

The website is http://www4.snapfish.co.in/login

Dia’s pics – updated

Taken in our Balacony in the morning, when Diya is usually in her best mood. All smiles,
very playful and very naughty.

maybe she is interested in finance!! already reading the economic time )

Ubuntu 6.06 on my laptop

I had ordered the Ubuntu 6.06 CD’s in early June and I got them today. I immediately took the PC edition of Ubuntu and set about installing it on my laptop (WLG 22200).

The Ubuntu CD is both a live/install CD. You first boot into the Lice CD and login with a user name you provide while the Live CD boots into the GNOME desktop environment. Once you are on the desktop, you can click the ‘install’ icon and set about installing Ubuntu on your PC/Laptop.

Ubuntu is debian based and my recent foray with trying to install Debian turned out to be fiasco.

The install process is kept very simple. All you need to provide are details like
1) timezone
2) keyboard layout
3) partitioning information (I used the manual option here) etc.

There are about 5-6 steps and the installation time is neat, less than 20m i believe. Hmm so that set me wondering if i would get the software i wanted. I did not find an option of custom installation of packages/features. Meanwhile the installation was done with and it was time to reboot and get into Ubuntu.

I must say, The look and feel of Ubuntu is real cool. Its neat and its polished. Windows now really Beware!! Ubuntu is getting there for sure

I booted into Ubuntu and as i booted i realized that
1) The 915 chipset drivers were ‘in’ and hence i got a good resolution straightaway.
2) the sound subsystem was up and running

After logging in, i opened the terminal and tried gcc. Hmm!! It wasn’t installed.
I then used system->administration->networking to setup my Ethernet connection. No problems there. Don’t have a wireless network to test with in my office, hence i decided to test it with my Huawei wireless router/modem (BSNL) the moment i got home.

Other things i noticed while i was logged on was that the firefox version was 1.5.0.3 and that the ‘check for updates’ in the menu was disabled.

As i left office for home, i put the Ubuntu Sticker on my laptop. Its a neat sticker which i placed just below the ‘Designed for Windows XP’ sticker.

Once home, as i booted into Ubuntu again, i realized that the 3rd party drivers were ‘in’ which probably meant that the wireless firmware was also taken care of!! SuSe/Fedora (in my earlier post) dint have the firmware. Of course there is a lot of debate on including 3rd party driver binaries/blobs, but that’s an issue that’s more to do with GPL/philosophy/Morals than user experience.

Again back to system->administration->networking to setup my wireless. Added the BSNL DNS address and 5 seconds later, i could open my router admin page and google.com. wow!! That’s really seamless wireless networking for you!! Ubuntu is cool!! Way to go!!!

More updates with Ubuntu in more posts later. I guess I’m going to stick with Ubuntu for some time now (next week or so ) ). Have had 3 flavors FC5/SuSe 10.1/Ubuntu 6.06 and the ‘feel better’ experience has been in exactly the same order of my installation experiences.

SuSE Linux 10.1 on my laptop

One of my friends downloaded the 5 CD’s of SuSE Linux 10.1. He has a Rs 900/- plan with BSNL which permits unlimited downloads (this is a *big* deal in India). I couldn’t resist the thought of installing SuSE on my Wipro LG 2200 laptop. I have hardly used a SuSE Linux distribution. My first choice has usually been Redhat and now the Fedora Core series. So i set about installing SuSE.

Well i did have initial problems with the installation. I first got an error of one of the font packages not being found on the CD1. I tried out the skip/retry/ignore option presented. But none of these worked and i ended up with a text based menu from where i could restart the installation. Now this is at least better than the Fedora installation coz while installing in Fedora one *has* to reboot and has no other option if one of the packages is not found or is corrupt. I realized that the CD1 was corrupt and had to wait till i got a new CD burnt again.

One of the great things about the SuSE distribution is that it has the Reiser Filesystem. Now this is *cool* coz i have had some experience benchmarking ext2/ext3/Reiser and Resier comes out on top. The installation otherwise was a breeze. I dint have to use expert setting to repartition. I used the suggested partition table and continued with the installation.

Well once the CD1 installation was done, i had to reboot and then it set about installing the remaining CD’s. Another good feature here which i believe is not available in Fedora is that once the basic installation is done, you have a bootable Linux OS. If your CD2 turns out bad, in Fedora you have to abort your changes and have to start all over again. This is not the case in SuSE, i could boot into SuSE in a ‘distressing’ resolution and with the minimum of tools. Once in, i could use YaST to go ahead with the updates in CD2/3/4/5.

Well, i managed to install packages from CD1/2/3 and then go about completing the installation.
Once the installation was complete, i booted for the first time into SuSE and used the GNOME desktop.

I have a Intel 915 chipset and SuSE had no problems there. Its has a 2.6.16 kernel which is just fine . I got a 1024*768 resolution and i was pretty pleased that i dint have to break my head over the display. With the look and feel working out of the box, i set about testing the rest of the available stuff.

These are some of the features/tools/packages that i set about testing

1) Software Suspend
With a lot of pessimism, i used the suspend option. swsusp started the suspend and wow! it did go to the suspended state. I pressed the power button again to get it out of hibernation (is that a windows word?:) ), and well it did come out of suspend. This is really beautiful!!:)

2) Browser
Firefox 1.5+. Hmm impressive and it loaded up real fast. This is something that i noticed with great surprise. Things load up much faster than they do in Fedora or for that matter Windows.
This is true with Firefox/Ethereal/consoles.

3) Display
Works out of the box. Has drivers for the 915 chipset and provides me with a decent 1024*768 resolution

4) Sound
Works out of the box. Had no issues here as well

5) Network

Ethernet: Works out of the box.

Wireless: Now this was the pain area. I have spent about 20 minutes but haven’t yet got the wireless working. The firmware is not available. Once i download and install it, i should update this blog. Bear with me till then!!

6) NTFS support
The installation gives a default NTFS support (unlike Fedora i believe) and it mounted my Windows partitions without problems. This is a *good* feature to have.

7) Virtualisation
It provides XEN which i havent used as yet. I have been using vmplayer all along on both Linux/Windows. Will try out Xen and update this blog at a later point in time.

Well there are many more things to play around with, but the experience has so far been fruitful. SuSE seems to be slicker than Fedora.

Shipping embedded boards from the US to India

I sent an enquiry mail to one of the embedded board manufacturers that make “way small” boards (http://www.gumstix.com/) . I wanted to order one of their basic boards and to my surprise i received a mail from telling that they *dont* ship to India currently. The explanation given was that India was listed in “Tier 3″ (not 1 not 2, but 3 !!!) by the US Commerce department. They also mentioned that the process to put India in their shipping list was in progress.

Now what is amazing to me is that India is listed in the “Tier 3″. Why? Isnt that a barrier to trade?
Now, is that an export control regulation on India? Guess what!!! Googling with “export controls + tier 3 + india” shows India listed in tier 3 along with Pakistan, Russia, Middle East etc. Guess these restrictions came about after India had their ‘peaceful’ nuclear explosion some years back. Subsequently the US put an embargo banning the export of “Dual Use” technology.
Huh!! All with with my Dad/FIL/MIL being Scientists working in the Dept of Atomic Energy. )

But then i guess US is working towards removing that embargo and allowing exports of arms and “Dual use” technology.