Unleashing the Geek Within

Smartphone comparison

November 1st, 2009

raseel

iPhone 3GS ? Motorola Droid ? Palm Pre ? HTC Touch ?

For those of you who are quite unable to make your mind on which Smartphone to go for, here’s a detailed chart listing the features and cost for the top Smartphones currently in the market.

Thanks to Bill Shrink for producing this chart

It is interesting to see that three out of these four smartphones are based on Open Source technologies.

However, the iPhone has about 100K, that’s right… a Hundred thousand applications (on last count) available for download at the app store. This phenomenon is again a testimony to the superlative marketing skills by Apple. Although the number of developers for the iPhone must surely be far less compared to all the open source developers out there, the Applications for the iPhone beat those for the open source Android platform in an almost 10:1 ratio.

What I would like to see is, with Giants like Google and Nokia backing open source mobile platforms like Android and Maemo respectively, will the iPhone be able to sustain it’s top spot in the Smartphone market ?

Android 2.0 : The Eclair Release

October 31st, 2009

raseel

With Verizon’s Droid all slated for a release next month, it will be releases with the latest Android Release, “Eclair“.

Going with their tradition of naming their major Release after pastries, Android 2.0 seems to be feature filled.

Some of the interesting features I feel are as follows :

Microsoft Exchange support
Digital Zoom and In-build Flash support in the Camera
Support for HTML5 in the browser
Bluetooth 2.1
Several new developer APIs.

You read more about the 2.0 SDK and how to sync it with your current SDK here.

A complete list of features is also present here.

WifiDirect for peer-to-peer communication

October 22nd, 2009

raseel

The Wifi Alliance, the international Wireless LAN standards body has announced work on a specification titles “Wifi Direct“ or “Wifi peer-to-peer“, that will allow devices to connect to each other as a Wifi network without the need of an Access Point (AP).

Traditionally, an AP is used to broadcast the SSID of a Wifi network, which is used by Wireless Clients like Mobile phones, Laptops, etc. to connect to that network (provided they have the required credentials). The AP thus forms an important component in the Wifi network environment.

However, with the new announcement from the Wifi Alliance, the Wifi devices will be able to connect to each other directly using the same Wifi technology. Thus two laptops or mobile phones can be connected to each other wirelessly without the need of an AP in between them.

This is a tremendously advantageous situation as it eliminates the “middle-man” (AP) and lets the devices talk to each other directly. This will be similar to connecting two laptops via a single Ethernet cable, except, there will be NO CABLE !!!

Now, there already existed a couple of ways to do this earlier.

One way was to configure the Wifi driver in “Ad-hoc” mode as opposed to the “Infrastructure” mode. This meant that two laptops could connect to each other wirelessly. However, this mode was not present in all devices. As a result, a laptop and mobile phone , or a network printer could not directly talk to each other. Besides, most people are unaware of such a mode and not all wifi configuration interfaces in all the devices exposed this mode. Finally, this mode allows one two laptops to connect to each other. With Wifi Direct, the number of Wifi devices can connect simultaneously to form a single network.

The second method does not serve the same purpose, i.e., it is not used to connect two devices for data transfer amongst them. It is called Wireless Mesh networks. With Wifi Mesh networks, a client is converted into a partial AP, which is able to connect to a AP on the upstream and able to let other clients connect to it in the downstream. Again, this required a speical Wifi mode to be configured in the driver called Wireless Distributed Systems or WDS. One major drawback of this is reduced bandwidth due to the “sharing” nature of the network. With Wifi Direct, the bandwidth remains intact.

Wifi Direct or peer-to-peer technology would come as a direct competition to other industry standard, viz, Bluetooth 3.0, which utilizes the Bluetooth technology for connecting the devices and the 802.11 protocol for data transfer thereby increasing the bandwidth of bluetooth transfers considerably.

With devices recieving certification for this technology sometime in mid-2010, the Wifi Alliance promises to announce the specification as soon as possible “upon completion”.

Personally I think this was long expected. I would have thought peer-to-peer would have been a part of the original 802.11 standards. Oh well ! Better late than never !!

Technorati Blog Claiming

September 29th, 2009

raseel

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Blogging for the Bloggers

August 19th, 2009

raseel

I have started making frequent and regular posts.
Maybe not on my own blog here, but that’s besides the point

Ashish Sinha from Pluggd.in and Kiethh Dsouza from Techie-buzz.com had sent out a call for Authors for their excellent and growing blogs. I applied to both the blogs and to my genuine surprise both of them readily accepted. Interestingly enough, I was following both Ashish and Kieth on Twitter since quite some time now.

I am a very frequent visitor of Pluggd.in, a regular commentor there and also have a had a chance to communicate with Ashish on a couple of occasions earlier. Pluggd.in mainly covers entrepreneurial and start-up related stories and news. I have joined in to add some geekiness to the blog. Starting with introducing the readers with various concepts of the open source world, I eventually plan to start interviewing prominent Indian personalities from the Open Source world, some major Developers and possibly even start-ups who are making their mark either by leveraging the Open Source power or actually deploying an open source service or product.

Take a look at a few of the recent posts I have contributed to at Pluggd.in :

Techie-Buzz.com is a fun site. It has tips, quick How-Tos, news and sundry other stuff for all kinds of technologies, ranging from Linux to Windows to the Web to Social Media and Networking. I used to often end-up on Techie-buzz whilst finding some peculiar problem I was encountering with my Windows setup. At Techie-buzz.com , I plan to write about a wider range of topics ranging for Linux and Open Source softwares, iPhone , Hacking firmwares, etc. I just have a couple of posts out with a lot more half-drafted :

Wifi Demystified : Part 1
Wifi Demystified : Part 2

Let me know if you guys like what you see. Feel free to comment on the articles and definitely subscribe to their RSS feeds or sign-up for their Email Newsletters.
Also, I’d love to know what kind of posts would you like to hear in this space , over and above the topics I have mentioned above ? Any other suggestions and/or tips for a budding blogger ?

Ubuntu 9.04 Upgrade : The Screenshot tour

May 5th, 2009

raseel

I have been upgrading my work Laptop (a Dell D630) since Ubuntu 7.04.
The first couple of times there were a few glitches, nothing a few Google searches and “sudo apt-get install”s couldn’t fix.
However, the process is getting increasingly reliable and I urge users to go this route.

For upgrading from Ubuntu 8.10, Intrepid Ibex to 9.04, Jaunty Jackalope, I decided to use the Alternate CD.
The Ubuntu Alternate CDs are released alongwith the Desktop and Server versions for that release and are basically text-based installers.
Confession time : I did not know that one could upgrade using the Alternate CD. I always did it over the Internet. That shows you how much of a Ubuntu geek I really am

The only command you need to execute to begin the installation is :

$ sudo update-manager -d

That’s it !! Just keep on “Next” ing and in about 2 hours you should be done !!

And …. Voila !!!

No breaks, no crashes, no glitches !!!

All my drivers are working, my Ethernet, WiFi, my Audio, my X Server, my Touch-pad, my Mouse …. my EVERYTHING works out-of-the-box !

And Man is this Release FAST !!

So just take the jump guys and upgrade to the Jaunty Jackalope.

Ubuntu on Windows

May 5th, 2009

raseel

Ubuntu Linux has opened a lot of doors for open source developers.

The real enthusiasts, the midnight oil burner are coming up with some AMAZING applications.

One such KICK-ASS app is the Portable Ubuntu, although I think the name of the project is a misnomer.

Portable Linux installs a Windows app that emulates Ubuntu Linux. In fact, it IS Ubuntu Linux modified and dressed up to run on top of Windows.

That is why I think the name’s a misnomer. It should have been simply “Ubuntu on Windows” or something like that.

Portable Ubuntu is the result of a magic conjured up from Colinux Kernel : which in itself is a very interesting Project to run Linux on Windows, X-Ming : which is the X Server for Windows and Pulseaudio : which is a cross-platform sound server.

As soon as I learnt about this project I knew I had to install it and without further ado, I promptly did.

Here’s what a Vista Desktop would look like with Portable Linux running :

Portable Ubuntu screenshot

I love it !!

For years I’ve been running Windows apps on Linux using Wine.

Now it’s time to do otherwise !!!

Apart from Portable Linux, there is another app which has a Ubuntu-Windows connection.

It’s called Wubi (Now THAT’s a name ), but I’ll be talking about it in more detail and screenshots in a later post.

The Portable Ubuntu image is quite large, about 700MB, but to all the Ubuntu fans out there,you HAVE TO try it out.

In fact, I did it just for Spite !!!

Dell XPS M1530 and the Ubuntu ride

April 2nd, 2009

raseel

Disclaimer : This was a blog I wrote after I bought my Dell and had most things working on it on Ubuntu.I just found this one lying around in my drafts and decided to post it anyways.

I bought my Dell just over a couple of months ago. I was considering buying a Macbook, but after I saw the specs on this baby, I knew I was left with no choice. I got further bargain, after a little bit of haggling with the Dell Rep, of a total of 4 Gig RAM and the Audigy Sound Software at no extra cost.
Well, anyways, as soon as a couple of days passed with me showing it off to my colleagues and family, I decided to get down to business. I erased the complete hard-disk using the mighty parted and re-partitioned it to have a Windows partition (20Gigs) , a Dell partition (auto-created by Dell , Mental Note: Think about getting rid of this) , a 10 Gig Mac OS X partition (oh yeah … you read that right. More on this later) and finally a huge Extended drive, which hosts 2 of my Data paritions , a swap partitions and last but definitely not the least, my Ubuntu partition.

My Dell started it’s life (the one which counts anyway), with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Hardy Heron. The only trouble it gave me was my touchpad wasn’t working properly. The mouse pointer was behaving as if it had a mind of it’s own. But I fixed it by adding “i8042.nomux=1″ line at the end of the “kernel” line in Grub. I had to also alter my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file to have optimal performace from it.
Thankfully, Intel’s iwl4695 driver does not give any issues and I was able to run it without any issues from day one.
That apart, the only other thing that did not work out of the box was the finger print reader. But it was a matter of time, or rather overcoming my laziness, before I got it working too.

I was running the Heron happily for quite some time, during which I got compiz (use Envy for a hassle-free experience), my build-environment, VPN (both PPTP as well as Cisco vpn), Firefox 3 updates and Flash, 3-D games, working without problems.
I have a habit of installing all the Ubuntu updates as soon as I see the update-manager working and before I knew it , I was riding on 8.04.1
Again, no issues and the ride still going nice and smooth.

I saw the Ubuntu 8.10 Aplha releases coming out and was itching to upgrade my laptop with it , but my work load prevernted me from doing it.
But finally, two days ago I ran the update manager with :
$sudo update-manager -d
and upgrade to 8.10 Inrepid Ibex Beta

Here I had a few hiccups.

For starters, my wireless was not working. Thankfully, this was not a major issue but required a simple re-entering my WPA2 key. But before that I saw that my Network Manager did not show any Wireless networks and I had to kill it from the shell and restart it.
Then there was the problem of the touchpad. But this time I has to append the “i8042.nomux=1″ on the Grub “kernel” line, as well as make sure that I used my older xorg.conf file (the upgrade process intuitively backed my old file). But for optimum performance, I actually the xorg.conf file and let the new X server detect everything on its own and this worked like a charm.

The Wifi is working great, but one thing I noticed that my wireless drivers seemed to have changed. My lsmod output is as follows :
raseel@raseel-xps:~$ lsmod | grep iwl
iwlagn              99588 0
iwlcore             92740 1 iwlagn
rfkill                 17048   2   iwlcore
led_class          12164 1    iwlcore
mac80211      216820 2 iwlagn,iwlcore
cfg80211         32392 3    iwlagn,iwlcore,mac80211

That’s about it. I did not have to do ANYTHING more after the upgrade.

As I used The 8.10 Beta, I’m yet to be disappointed on any front.

7 Linux Distros reviewed

February 18th, 2009

raseel

I’m a little late in posting this article, since most of the Distros mentioned here are out with newer versions.

But since it was so informative, I thought I’d post it anyways.

I thought I was the only jobless person interested in trying out Linux Distros on my VirtualBox or sometimes triple booting. But it turns out there are actually others who do 7 of ‘em at a time and, as if that wasn’t enough, they make it a point to document it too.

Cool !!

The folks at Informationweek have done a Shootout of 7 popular Linux Distros. They did it on 5 different machines as if to prove a point or something.

Does it live a lot to be desired ? Have they left some very notable cadidates like the fanatically followed Kubuntu or the geeky Gentoo ? Did they miss out on a coupla hundred tests ?

There are obvious answers to the above questions, but that’s not the point.

The point is, Ubuntu is arguably the best Ditro around and I use it !!!

Help to Spec Regression Testing for Ubuntu Apps

November 4th, 2008

raseel

As any software engineer worth his salt knows, Regression , especially after an upgrade, is one of the most important aspects to take care of.

Professionally, I have taken care of a LOT of upgrade bugs and I so I have felt, first-hand, the pain caused by Regression Bugs.

I work on a tightly integrated embedded system firmware which is of the order of a few megabytes. Even then I woe and cry when confronted with Regression issues. So I can only imagine what the Ubuntu developers must be going through after each Release cycle !! Hats Off to you, brave souls !!!

In order to help these Nobel Knights, Mackenzie has proposed that we try and spec out some common Regression tests for some common software included in the Ubuntu-family of Distros.

To this end, she has created a page on the Ubuntu Wiki for Application Testing. She has included some of the more commonly used applications and anyone is free to add more to the list.

As of writing of this article, only the SeaHorse application has a few test cases.

Hope people will start adding more soon.

I will , hopefully, be contributing to the following Apps :

Pidgin
gnome-terminal
Firefox
NetworkManager
Tomboy

These are the aboslute few that I cannot live without. But if I actually do end up adding to the above , I’ll add more later.

Hope people start contributing here since it does not take too much time and you need not be a Triager or a Tester , let alone a Developer , to add your contribution…. Just a user of the App.

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