Indian Mobile scene and future ....

As you know the growth of mobile is one of BIG discussion point of any technology seminar or talk show you attend today. Everybody already predicting more and more people will use mobile to access internet/information/e-commerce compared to traditional desktop or laptop. And in a country like India there will be lots of users who will be "on-line" for the first time  and they will directly use a smart phone bypassing key-board and mice altogether, in numbers they might be larger than some European country.

Till date good mobile  phones used to cost an arm & leg. And if you like Apple it still does in India as we have to buy the device upfront. But  things are changing and changing fast. Starting with Moto-G we are now seeing great phones (only androids) coming to Indian market for $15K INR ( $250) . And now with Asus, Xiaomi coming it looks every one is going to feel the pinch where people are very sensitive to price  but looks for best ROI. News channel reported Asus sold 40K ZenPhone phone in 4 days.

It may be a great time for on-line retailers like Amazon, Myntra, Flipkart who are seeing high  growth in this country. I am sure the outcome  will be unknown may be at last we will have more non-cash transaction in India.  Any one having the crystal ball Still I recollect those hotted discussion had with my friends  about 1Mp and 2 MP digital camera and we never though companies like Kodak will be out of business  today and we will have 20MP camera in our phone.

Any company needs to have offering in HTML5 or native android to achieve significant market share of new and upcoming mobile users in these part of Asia. I know iPhone5 sold 20% more than the last one but the number we are taking here is huge. And HTML5 and hybrid model is better as every Android has different screen size.

Google Page Test, CloudFlare and W3 total Cache

Installed all these three on pamela.santm.com and blog.santm.com which are running on wordpress 3.6 trunk. moved the dns details to cloudflare. While Pamela's hobby site did very well Google page test result our blog result was not great. Looks like the culprit is inbuilt gallery of wordpress which is re-sizing images and seving them on fly causing high server time. the command that helped me a lot is "mogrify -strip *.jpg" which is part of imagemagick tool kit and removes exif data from images.

Page Speed - Web site broken

Playing with Google lab and its "Page speed".  Hope things gets fixed soon.

McAfee antivirus program freezes PCs

After starting my office laptop it goes for freeze within 5 minutes. I was very worried what went wrong;   my current laptop is cranky and that is why ordered a new one which was delivered yesterday. The  new laptop is getting build by the IT Team as I write this post.  But i was worried that I will lost all my data like a horror movie where every thing you do goes wrong.   Any way after trying Ctrl+Del+Shift many times I just pulled the power and removed the battery with a quick prayer. Well my Outlook In-box was corrupted as a result but it was fixed post reboot and I am back in action.  I saw a small pop-up about McAfee when it was frozen but could not make out what went wrong. But then I saw this news looks like I am not the only one who had this problem.

One thing for sure some how Microsoft delivered Winows-XP as robust desktop platform compared to those Win'98 and win-2k and that is a reason such small hitch are totally unexpected  as a end user.

New widget with Media RSS

It was a long time I played with new technology and changed any the way the this blog looks to you. Liked few themes and tried to put them in my own taste before I found the current one. But some how those themes really did not looks so cool to and attractive to me at the end. So I went with the current one and did not did not did much changes.

I was looking for a widget on on the sidebar for photo stream (the most used on the net is the flickr one). I am not very happy with their account policy so do have a a pro account.  as i was looking around I found that the coolest solution for my need. I used Coolaris with Media RSS to stream photo on the sidebar.   Gallery2 does not come with Media RSS by default but as I am running Gallery3 Beta for a while I am using the same. This means I  did changes  any major scripts and got this cool widget.

At last I got sifr for titles does not they looks right ?

Gallerry 3 sneak peak

Gallery 3 is going to a big change from current gallery 2 and initial alpha release did not have any migration path from gallery2. It was pushed to Beta release after 2 alpha releases. but to my surprise I found it was implemented in alpha 4 and here is the test result of a new neat code. I am really liking the new compact code making gallery 3 faster and lean compared to its predecessor. Similar, to WordPress new theme development is easy no more smarty - thank God I never really mastered those PERL look alike. Now it is simple PHP and CSS. Another core feature is Akismet which does a fantastic job of filtering spam comments. I was able to import 3000+ images in 200+ albums without any problem. There are few things which needs to be ironed before I can put the same in production.

ZoneAlarm Patch Tuesday Promotion

Get yourself a free copy of Zone Alarm Firewall completely free for one year. The offer is valid for one PC per e-mail id. The offer just started at 6AM PST and will be there for next 24 hours. So do not waste your time and rush to get a free copy. If you are not sure what Zone Alarm is and why you need one copy or a similar product for your PC I am sure there are zillion of web pages to guide you.

Rejuvenating old I-Pod

Our old faithful I-pod’s battery died last year; nothing to complain about the same. We have used it enough and did not have any complain. Only thing that happened is the battery started to loose charge more often and at the end it stopped charging altogether. Just after I got this I-Pod, Apple had to settle a lawsuit for low quality batteries. That way I must say I am happy to survive for 3 years with one battery.

I was not looking at spending 4,000 INR (100 USD) to replace the battery by Apple. The thing I do not like about this program is - Apple does not return your own I-Pod rather they give you a similar one from their stock. So I opted for changing the battery myself. It cost only 20 USD to get the new battery and after spending 15 minutes I was able to hit the road again.

The kit contains two plastic openers without which opening the case is almost impossible. The demo video included in the kit is informative; if they had shown how to create the first opening in slow motion and in closeup it would have been much better. As this was my first time I cut my finger with one of those plastic hinge openers. You really need to be careful with these tools. I had to use a small metal screwdriver to widen the gap between front and back case. After opening the case, removing the hard-drive and replacing the battery was very easy for me. I was very careful to make sure all connections were correct particularly for hard-drive and docking station. I did not have to open the case again as all the connections were perfect.

Wordpress 2.6

Just upgraded to Wordpress 2.6 for both blog.santm.com and pamela.santm.com without any hitch :) Upgraded few plugins as well and so far so good.

Free Theme

I just found out d-atmosphere.com is holding a competition where they are offering a free wordpress theme called WP Remix. It’s a very nice theme with loads of features.

The rule is simple - just write about the competition in your blog and post your link back in the comments on the contest page.

The winner will be announced on March 1st.

Got G(oogle)-Phone

Well downloaded G-Phone application from Google. on my Blackberry. All I needed was data access enabled phone to download G-phone. The speculation was running high about a new hardware from Google in lots of web sites. Lets see how these applications (Gmail, Google maps, Google news, Google search, Gtalk, Google calender) will work on a normal phone where the display is not as big as Blackberry and you do not have full keyboard or track wheel. Any feedback on that, have you tried already ?

Skittlish Theme with Silk Icons for Wordpress

Trying to jazz up skittlish theme of wordpress with silk icon sets from famfamfam.com. In recent time there is new version of skittlish supporting widgets so I thought it might be a god starting ground. Best part - for few colors (red, orange, green & blue) there are icons available for tag, user (author). But for rest there is none. As I am not a graphic person not sure how should I go forward. Any expert out there to help me ;). Plan to release my best by next week.

Wordpress Bleeding 2.2 and TAG

Just upgraded to the latest beta trunk of wordpress 2.2(bleeding) and found myself with unrecoverable errors. Realized wordpress incorporated tagging within the core but the old faithful Ultimate Tag Warrior does not work any more :(
Found another bug-hunt has started and hope for tag import from (UTW) till then …… have to live with out tags Sigh!

Micro$oft Launch @ Mumbai

Micro$oft is doing a round of business and technical launch show around India. The products are Exchange 2007, Office 2007 and Vista. I attended only a brief session @ Hyatt.

Well, somehow my name was not there even though I registered 10 days before the event.

And my business card with orange and blue dots did not help much to get attention from those desk people. Anyway, it was solid 40 minutes of work for me – replied emails, chat with business contact got updates from their team – thanks to CDMA mobile card. This picture of Mumbai’s famous "dabbawalla" got my attention which is installed in the down-stair lobby as an object of art.

Well lots of promises about security from Micro$oft, but I got bit scary about the new “Office Groove 2007” as it seems it uses port 80 to connect and update sharepoint server. I think I need to know more before I make my final take. A new mantra was “blog” as speakers were mentioning new search capabilities; and used internet and blog as two different things. Sorry could not follow - does not blog stands for “Web-Log” in short.

Well it is M$ at the end of the day – every time they promise – “We are more OPEN with our new version of software so your heterogeneous network components can work seamlessly.” But then they redefine new standard for their implementation of “OPEN” standard. And people in the technological world have to take two steps back with one step forward. Leave apart, let’s not get into those details.

I might miss a good lunch to rush back to work. Goodies are welcome M$: D

Zooomr Pro

After trying my luck with flickr I figured out that I have to look for alternative. With Yahoo! there is nothing for free. Almost certainly they will follow suit when someone else win in their own game like gmail vs yahoo-mail. So trying my luck for Zooomr pro now.

P.S. I got the pro account :D

Another weekend

Well another day! Some techie note ; upgraded the web site to the latest beta release of Wordpress. And I found some strange behaviour. This is what I put forward to the mailing list. But with few minute of research found the root cause.

load cpu & memory shell script c program for quick and dirty benchmark

This script is a simple empty while loop which will load or increase the usage of your cpu.
a good way to test your cpu check for different monitoring tool

while :
> do :
> done

/home/sanmisra>more memory.c

main ()
{
while ( 1 ) {
malloc (10240) ;
}
}

add new administrator and management post for smartdashboard firewall-1

1. 1.Add the user in the system password file for *nix it will be in /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow
   


2. 2. Add his host(PC) to /etc/hosts
   



3. 3. Use cpconfig ( /opt/CPshrd-53/bin/) in case of Solaris
   
   

Rest is menu driven

Home Network ADSL-Network-Phone

I just wanted to share my home network. It is not a state of technologies with the latest & greatest wireless or wired network with complex router and switches. I did it in old school way with a single long CAT5 Ethernet Cable. I have a FreeBox which is an ADSL2 router connecting to the main phone jack. The output from the FreeBox connects my PC, Television and Phone. Now all these components are connected with the single wire as I mentioned before. It takes benefit of the fact out of 8 wires in an Ethernet cable only 4 are used for network; the pins 1-2 and 3-6 of RJ45 are used. The connection is simple, wire from pin 1 to pin 1 of the other side and like wise.Similarly, I use the other two pairs for telephone and ADSL.

So here is the basic block diagram as picture can express more

The input of ADSL router is a simple RJ11 connecting with 2 wires.The connection between PC and router is 4 wires with RJ45 (2 pairs, one pair for transmit and other for receive). The phone needs only one pair RJ11.

These pictures show RJ45 connections in detail and also a picture of backside of freebox.

The success of doing this by oneself depends on one's skill of how good one is with crimp tool as the connections sometimes are not proper and one has to repeat the whole process right from the start. Doing a search for making rj45 cable connections on web will lead to more details. Need any more tips on the same please drop me a line.

create typewriter effect with ming php for flash (swf) movie

This is nice and simple code it creates the simple effect which you might have seen in lots of web sites. As it is PHP you can use the same from your own news reader to database.

setBackground(0x00,0x00,0x00);// SM - This is very important as it set sets the speed of the movie// SM - Higher the number faster the typing will appear$movie->setRate(3);// SM - This one will depends upon you$movie->setDimension(600,40);$movie->setFrames(31);$movie->nextFrame();// Define your String here $str = 'Miing Typewriter Effect'; /* SM - As you note The space between character if not fixed SM - due to font width so you have to figure out your own SM - Now we split our string and make an array with the same */ $chars = preg_split('//', $str, -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);// print_r($chars);$inc = 0 ;for($i=0;$isetFont($myFont); $myText->setColor(255,255,255); $myText->SetHeight(30); $myText->addString($chars[$i]); echo ("$chars[$i] \n") ; $firstText=$movie->add($myText); $firstText->moveTo($inc,30); $inc = $inc + 18; // SM - this is very critical as you need to add this extra frame to make this effect of some typewriter $movie->nextframe(); // SM - This helps to determine the width of the movie // SM - turn only if you need the same // echo "inc is $inc \n" ; } // SM - we do not want to loop this movie// $movie->add(new SWFAction("stop();")); // SM - Save the movie $movie->save("/tmp/banner.swf",9);?>