Suramya’s Blog

Steve Jobs was in news a few days ago for his comment stating that Kindle will fail because Americans don’t read anymore. Well.. If that was true it would cause a decline in sales but as Jobs apparently forgot there are a lot of other countries in the world and some of them contain people who do read a lot. Even if 1% of the world wide population bought the Kindle it would make it a smashing success. Which if I remember correctly Kindle is.

The other point is that the people who do read, read a lot. I have been a member of the Book forum the past few days and most of the members over there are people who read atleast a book a week, some like me read a book a day. Just to give you an idea of what quantities of books I am talking about here’s an example: since 26th Nov 2007 I have read 74 novels. This doesn’t include the comics & magazines that I have read. and there are other people who read like this at this forum.

I know that some of the kids nowadays think that reading books is not cool. But you only have to see the line of people waiting to purchase the latest Harry Potter book to see the number of people who do read. Whatever else I may say about the hype for Harry Potter it has made kids interested in reading. So no I don’t think reading is a dying art. I usually do my level best to encourage kids to read and my favorite gift (both to give and receive) is a book.

Though I am not a fan of the Kindle system. Its is a DRM laden system that could have been a lot better without it. I would rather get a PDA and use that to read books as I don’t see the point of buying a device just for reading books and have another device for your general computing needs. I would much rather have one device that does both. On that front I finally found a good e-book reader software for my phone. The screen size is small but it is sufficient to read a book one para at a time which is perfect for when I am stuck somewhere without a book to read and need to pass time. Mostly when I am stuck in traffic or waiting for someone.

Ok, its late at night and I am tired so I will stop rambling now…

- Suramya

The net connection was down the past two days so I caught up on some of the shows I wanted to watch and found this Gem. It is a British comedy that ran from 1990 to 1994. Its based in an old people home where Diana Trent and Tom Ballard are the major characters. Diana is an old “spinster’ (in her words) who complains about everything and makes the life of the manager of the old folks home very difficult with her sarcastic comments where as Tom is a kind person who is always cheerful and spends most of his time dreaming about adventures.

Together the both of them form an unlikely friendship and they constantly wreak havoc amongst the younger staff and management in the home. In one of the episodes the take off for a ride in Diana’s niece’s Farari and send the whole home in a panic while they are trying to locate them.

Much of the humour is derived from how the elderly are expected to behave in their old age and how many of the residents don’t want to settle down and Diana’s sarcastic comments which usually go something like the following:

Jane (One of the staff): What a beautiful day it is…
Diana: Its been raining for 5 hours straight… Whats so beautiful about that?

Or

Tom is talking about God to Diana
Diana: Whenever you talk about God why do you look at the tree tops? Is God a squirrel that lives on the top of the tree?

I like comedies like this where there is no slapstick humor (movies like American Pie) or stupidity so I usually can’t watch more than 10 mins of the so called comedy shows that are currently on TV. No one can be that dumb. Other Comedy shows which I liked are Mind your language, Yes Prime Minister, Jaban Sambhal ke (Hindi version of Mind your language), I Dream of Jeannie and similar shows…

Anyways if you get the chance do watch the show. You might like it. More information on the show is available at the show’s Wikipedia page.

- Suramya

A little while ago the iPhone was released with a lot of fanfare for a very limited audience located in the US who would agree to be locked in an AT&T contract for two years. Almost as soon as it was released hackers everywhere starting taking it apart to get it to work with other carriers. After a lot of trial and error a method was found that didn’t require taking the phone apart and a lot of people installed it. If I had an iPhone I would have installed it, just so that I could use *MY* phone as and when I wanted to.

Then Apple went ahead and released a patch that turned the hacked iPhones (and a lot of unhacked ones) into bricks or very expensive paperwieghts. It may be legal for them to do this because of the User Agreement that people signed when they bought the phone but it sure isn’t ethical. They are now under a bunch of lawsuits because of this and if the courts agree it was wrong of them to brick the iPhones then and only then can the users expect to be reimbursed.

iPhoneSIMFree, the first company that offered an unlocking tool, has released a paid upgrade that resolves the issue and unlocks the iPhone once again but even this is a hack which uses a buffer overflow bug in Safari to run the fix. This lets the users use their iPhones but users of the fix should beware that at any time Apple might fix this issue and include the fix in the next mandatory patch that they push out, converting the phones into expensive paperweights once again…

Now, you might ask how does open source come into the picture? Well, if the iPhone OS was open source this would have never happened. Anyone and everyone would have the right to install whatever Apps they wanted and use it wherever they want.

This risk is there in any closed system. Whats stopping Microsoft from deciding that your data needs to be tracked and installing a patch on your system that lets them do just that? Infact a few weeks ago they installed an updated version of the Windows Update Service on computers that had the updates disabled. What is to stop them for doing it again and how many more of these backdoors are there?

In an Open OS like Linux or Open Solaris, a lot of people look at the code and at some time or other every line of the code has been looked at. This makes it a lot harder to hide backdoors in the OS itself (not impossible. Just very hard), which is not the case with Windows and iPhones. You have to do it the hard way and reverse engineer the system (which is against the law BTW)

Google is rumored to be working on an Open Source OS for the Phones, even Nokia and Samsung are working on an Open Mobile OS. So open systems are the way to go.

If you are looking for alternatives to the iPhone check out this article from Tech republic where they list out the top 10 alternatives to the iPhone. I am drooling over the Nokia N99 (16 GB of internal memory, a 3.2-inch screen, a 9-way joystick control, GPS, WLAN, and a 7.2-megapixel camera that lets you shoot DVD quality movies) right now. That will probably be my next phone. There are a couple of Linux phones out there too but most are still in the development stage… Lets see when they come out.

Well this is all for now. Will post more later.

- Suramya

Vinit and Surabhi were in town the past few days and they brought their Wii with them to play with and I tried it out for the first time. Its a cool system and its fun actually swinging the controller instead of pressing a button to swing a bat. But (Yeah there’s always a but) I don’t think I will be buying one. I played with it for about 1/2 hour in the past 3 days and I think I have had enough.

This could be an effect of the games that they had which were really kiddish, so that could be a reason. But overall I don’t think so ’cause I am not a very big gaming fan; the only games I like playing a lot are Warcraft II, and Diablo (both of them) and Decent II. Doom , Duke 3d and Halo were good for wasting a little time and other than Warcraft & Diablo I haven’t spent a lot of time playing games.

So I am not going to be buying a Wii.

- Suramya

Windows XP is one of the most stable versions of Windows currently out there but it can also get to be very annoying especially to a Linux user. Things that are a snap in Linux are a pain to accomplish in XP and some things are just plain annoying. Below is a list of things that I find annoying in XP, if anyone knows a solution for any of them let me know.

1. Folder sorting doesn’t work if you add a new folder: I like my directories and files to be listed in alphabetical order sorted by file type so I have the ‘Auto Arrange’ checked with the system set to arrange icons by type. Now if I add a new folder/file to this directory it should automatically arrange the listing so that the listing is sorted, but that doesn’t happen. The file/directory ends up in the end of the directory listing. Refreshing the listing doesn’t help, I have to right click and choose ‘Arrange icongs by type’ before it sorts it correctly. This is damm annoying. In Linux (KDE) this happens automatically, at worst I have to hit F5 to refresh the screen to get the sorted listing.

2. Files/Directories get locked for no reason: I hit this one a lot. For some reason Windows randomly decides that a particular directory or file is in use (even though its not) and refuses to let me delete/rename it. It only releases the lock if I reboot the system. Which I don’t like to do often.

3. The auto-update doesn’t have a pause option: If you have Windows set for auto-updates and it decides to download a patch then you can’t pause it or cancel the download if you happen to need the bandwidth for other uses. Hit this a couple of times when Mom’s computer was downloading Windows updates and I needed to download a file on my laptop, the update was using up most of the bandwidth and my download was going really really slow but I couldn’t cancel the update.

4. The constant reboots: Windows needs to reboot for every little update that gets installed. Yesterday I switched on my mom’s computer and as soon as it started up and I logged in I got a message “An update has been installed that needs you to reboot the computer to take effect” (Don’t remember the exact words but it was something to this effect). How about that… I started up the system and it wanted me to reboot. I upgraded the Antivirus and installed the Windows updates on the system and it took a total of 7 reboots for it to make all the changes.

5. The virtual memory requirements: My laptop has a gig of RAM and usually I don’t run more than 3-4 programs at the same time (Editplus, Firefox and Thunderbird) though sometimes I also run Visual Studio and MS SQL server. invariably every few weeks I get a message stating that Windows is running out of virtual memory and is increasing the paging/virtual memory(?). I have gotten this message even when I was just running Firefox and Thunderbird. How can windows run out of a GIG of RAM when I am not running many programs? On my Linux box I run a lot more programs on a system with less RAM and still haven’t had any problems so far. I have burned DVD’s, watched a movie with 3-4 programs running at the same time without issues. Don’t dare do that on my XP system.

Ah well. Nothing is perfect. But atleast XP doesn’t crash often. I go for weeks at a time without having to reboot. Linux has its own set of annoyances but thats a story for another day/post.

Well this is all for now. Will post more later.

- Suramya

The US Navy apparently has too much money because it can now afford to spend money on rebuilding perfectly good buildings that happen to look like a swastika from air.

Few symbols are as well known in the world today as the swastika and while it is common perception that the swastika is a German Nazi Party symbol, it is in fact far older that the Nazi Party. The Swastika dates over 3000 years which makes it older than the ancient Egyptian symbol for life, the Ankh and the Christian Cross. The most ancient Swastikas have been discovered in Susa in Persia, Mohenjodaro and Harappa in Pakistan and Sammarra in Mesopotamia. It was also used frequently by the Greek and the ancient Indian’s. Infact the German’s actually modified the Swastik before using it.

In Hinduism (especially in AryaSamaj, which is the branch that I somewhat follow) the swastika is one of the most holy symbols after the Om symbol and is used everywhere, in Temples, Houses (My house has a couple), weddings.

Just because the Nazi’s used it doesn’t mean it should be banned. If thats the case then we should also ban the cross as its used by Neo Nazi’s, White Supremacists and Skin heads (Some info here); the celtic Cross (Also used by White Supremacists). In fact every major religious symbol has been used by hate groups. So why aren’t the rest banned? They should be if the follow the same logic that we use to ban the Swastika.

Yes, they should ban it where its being used to spread neo-nazi propaganda but stuff like this doesn’t make sense. There are better ways to spend money.

Source: The Raw Feed: Google Earth Forces Navy to Fix Swastika Buildings

- Suramya

Mom is starting a NGO (Non Government Organization) for charity work and watching her has been an educational experience. I never realized how much work setting up and organizing an NGO takes.

An NGO is somewhat of a incorrect characterization because all private companies can technically also fall under the NGO banner, but in India the term NGO refers specifically to organizations dedicated to social welfare/charity work that are not affiliated with the government.

Setting an NGO up requires that you have members from atleast 7 states in India and these members (called the founding members) can’t be blood relations. This is to prevent a group of friends or relatives deciding to start a NGO to get grant money and then disappearing with the money. It also shows that you have the capacity to work all over India. You can focus on a specific region but should have the capacity for broader work.

If you are wondering how I know so much, I have been proofreading the Rules and Memorandum for the NGO mom is setting up so got to know a lot from that, which was followed up with a lot of questions to mom. I will be designing and registering a website one as soon as the name is registered which should be sometime in October.

If any of you are interested in working in the NGO or want to donate money for charity work let me know and I will pass the word on. I can personally guaranty that the money won’t be misappropriated as I know most of the people who are going to be in the executive council of the NGO and they are honest people who want to work for the people. The regular memberships are not that expensive and I will let you know the pricing as soon as the fee structure has been finalized. (I have seen the drafts, but don’t want to commit incase it changes before finalization)

I won’t be active as a worker (Going out in the field) in the NGO (Lack of time) but am definetley going to be a member plus I will be the one maintaining the website and the mail servers etc.

I think its about time for me to start giving something back to the society and start helping people. This is one option that I will have.

Well this is all for now. Will post more later.

- Suramya

Just finished reading ‘Star Flight’ which is an Omnibus edition containing ‘The Stars are Ours’ and ‘Star Born’ both written by Andre Norton in the 50’s. Baen released the omnibus as an ebook this month so I grabbed a copy and I liked it. The plot of the book is not very complicated but is interesting. In the first book, scientific thinking has been banned on earth (by the Pax) after an attack that destroyed most of the life on earth which was blamed on the Scientists. Now its death to be a thinker and any scientific knowledge is now taboo. But a handful of scientists are holding out and are secretly building a spaceship that would allow them to travel intergalactically under while the humans hibernate.

The person who developed the cold sleep is killed during a raid and only his brother knew the formula that he had developed. The book basically follows him and his niece as they try to join up with the scientists and then prepare the ship for flight. They make it to a planet that they call Astra after a few centuries of flight and settle happily over there.

In the second book, Centuries after the desperate flight from Earth, Pax has been overthrown on earth and humanity again reaches for the stars. A spaceship reaches the planet Astra, not knowing that the planet already has a colony established centuries ago by the fugitive humans from Earth . . . and that the apparently friendly natives of the planet are actually malevolent invaders from elsewhere, who are plotting to eliminate all humans from Astra, both the recent arrivals and the star born colonists.

I liked the first book better than the second one. A point which really bugged me was that when the colonists landed on Astra they didn’t face any major problems. All the food was edible, there were no surprises and everything was like it seemed. the only things that were different in the new planet were the colors and a couple of the plant life. The colonists had no trouble eating the native food and they pretty much faced no hardships. After reading books that portray landings on alien planets more realistically (At least to me) I thought that these guys had it really easy. The second one was better in this regard with the new guys getting pulled into an ongoing war without realizing that they were helping the wrong people.

Another issue I had with the book was all the spelling/proofing errors in the book. I have been proofing a lot of documents over the last few weeks so it really bugged me to find errors in the book. I guess they didn’t proof read it well enough when it was initially published.

In all the book was a good read. It didn’t require a lot of brain-power to follow the plot lines etc, good for light reading. When I want to do heavy reading I will read my programming text-books or Lord of the Rings (Which always puts me to sleep).

Now reading ‘Wolf Who Rules’ by Wen Spencer. Had read the eARC (electronic Advance Reader Copy) earlier and finally got my hands on the actual released version. There are not that many changes in the book (at least that I found so far) compared to the final released version.

This is all for now. Will post more later.

- Suramya

I have spoken a bit about the Vista WOW factor in a previous post and in my last post I had mentioned that I had the opportunity to play some more with Vista on Gaurang’s laptop and had promised to log my ‘WOW’ experience in another post… So here it is. Without any further ado the Vista ‘WOW’ factor.

Gaurang had bought a new Sony Vaio laptop with is almost the top of the line, dual core, 2GB RAM and looks great. Unfortunately he got it with Vista pre-installed. I had mentioned the issues I had with Vista to him so he told me that it works ok and the automatic trouble shooter works great. According to him if a program crashed it would connect to the internet and would find a solution for the crash. So his Vista install was supposed to be very stable…. Yeah Right.

We wanted to share files between our computers so I enabled SAMBA on my Linux system and shared the folder in XP on my Laptop. I could share files without any issues between both my computers and the connection was pretty fast too. (We were both on a LAN) When I connected to my Linux box using its IP address I would get the password prompt within 2-3 seconds on Vista it would take almost 20 seconds for the password prompt to show up. WOW!

Then once he finally connected he started to copy files over but accidentally selected the wrong set so I asked him to cancel the copy and start again. It refused to cancel the copy. Once we clicked on cancel It said ‘Canceling Copy’ and sat like that for almost 5 mins… (This happened to us multiple times.) We tried killing the process but that killed explorer and we had to log out and back in so that we could see the Desktop again.

Then it kept freezing a lot. In the 1 1/2 days he was here we had to forcfully reboot his system about 10 times (Maybe more). When we applied patches and it asked us to reboot, Gaurang’s comment was “This is the first time today that I am rebooting the system normally” (This was after we had rebooted the box 5-6 times already). WOW!

Vista takes forever to reconnect to the net if you accidentally unplug the network cable. Noticed this because we had cables running all over the place and invariably one of us would pull the wrong cable and disconnect one of the laptop’s. On XP if you unplug the LAN cable and then replug it, it connects back to the net immediately. If the system is set for a dynamic IP it usually gets it within a few seconds. But Vista… If you unplug it, it took it atleast 10-15 seconds to get back on the net and this is not that we unplugged the wire and waited a min and then plugged it back it, It was me tripping on the cable and pulling it out for 1 or 2 seconds max. Talk about annoying.

Also Bit defender is one of the most annoying software ever made. Its like the Bonsai Buddy. Keeps popping up everytime making a nuisance of itself.

The best part was that my laptop is older than his, and is slower with less RAM but it is more responsive compared to his. On Vista without him running any additional programs (Except Antivirus and Firewalls) his system was using ~ 850 - 900 MB of RAM. On my system with me running 4-5 programs together the RAM usage was aprox 400 - 500 MB of RAM.

So after using it for a day I have decided that I am very Happy with Linux and if I have to use Windows I would rather use XP instead of driving myself nuts by trying to use Vista.

Have any of you had any similar experiences with Vista? Do share.

Well this is all for now. Will post more later.

Cya,
Suramya

Kiva.org is a website that connects you to small businesses in the developing world and lets you give them loans for a short period of time. This loan can be as small as $25 and over a period of time (usually 6-12 months) your loan is repaid.

Usually giving loans requires a lot of money and contributing to charity is an iffy proposition, you don’t know how much of that money is actually being spent on the cause and how much is being pocketed. But this looks like a good compromise. For a small amount of money you are helping someone gain financial independence.

Check it out.

Kiva.org - Loans that change lives

From their site:

Kiva lets you connect with and loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world. By choosing a business on Kiva.org, you can “sponsor a business” and help the world’s working poor make great strides towards economic independence. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates from the business you’ve sponsored. As loans are repaid, you get your loan money back.

- Suramya