Techno Mime « Ramblings of an Eccentric Soul…

Google Wave: Marketed to perfection

October 3, 2009 by RR 8 Comments

Harini Saladi mentioned something in passing today

Google needs to be commented commended on how well they have marketed Google Wave to the geeks. They have done a tremendous job in positioning themselves properly.

I completely agree with her. I think Google has done a phenomenal job in marketing Wave to the geeks, who by and large would be the early adopters of such a technology.

The wave is a paradigm shifting technology. The early adopters have mixed reviews of the same, which is to be expected. More than the product, what really fascinates me is how Google has managed to generate, manipulate and manage the hype around Wave. They have reused a gimmick they learned from GMail and used it in perfection with Wave – create exclusivity.

Exclusivity mixed with cool new technology from Google makes for a potent marketing mix raising hype and buzz to astronomical proportions. The reasons are evident. It’s been trending consistently high in twitterverse and the blogverse.

Kudos on an amazing campaign Google.

Filed under Babble me more, Management fundoo, Opines of mine, Ramblings, Techno Mime

Guitar Hero in India

April 30, 2009 by RR 1 Comment

During this trimester, I had the chance to do some awesome projects. This is something that I am very proud of.

Front page

We made a marketing plan for Guitar Hero to be launched in India during 2009. I thoroughly enjoyed the research, analysis and recommendations. Way to go Jed (my partner in crime)

Filed under Babble me more, Heavy Metal, I read here..., Life, Musings, Opines of mine, Ramblings, Techno Mime, life@thunderbird

A Reinstall Later…

March 28, 2008 by RR Leave a Comment

Of late, OS X just didn’t work on my MacBook. The keyboard used to stop responding and only the applications currently running used to respond. No Application used to launch. I tried going through many forums, but in vain. The problem was unique and from my Windows experience, I did what I think would work best – REINSTALL.

Well, I was dreading the fact that I would have to reinstall everything from scratch and well even more worried that some of the applications, which came bundled would be a pain to port to Leopard, considering that I got a Tiger DVD with the laptop.

However, much to my surprise, the whole process was a breeze. I reinstalled Leopard from scratch on the MacBook. OS X itself took about 20 minutes to install. Another 10-15 minutes for the bundled package of iLife and iWork and Office from the original set of DVDs. Pack it up with software updates that I had already downloaded off the net (else it’s going to take a humongous amount of time, considering the speeds of broad band in India).

The process started yesterday evening and with Time Machine backups (yeah I regularly backed up my Mac), the transition is done and I am back to working and with 100% efficiency. No late night sleep loss, no need to sit and install every single driver for every single component in the computer and most importantly, I am not back to the same problem that I wanted to get rid off.

There are somethings that Mac OS X does right, but at the same time, like the problem I faced earlier, when things take a bad turn, they are going down the wrong wrong wrong lane!!

Filed under Babble me more, I read here..., Life, Musings, Opines of mine, Ramblings, Techno Mime, apple Tagged with easy, leopard, osx, reinstall

Spokeo: Your answer to keep informed

December 11, 2007 by RR Leave a Comment

18+ social networks, Flickr, Zoomr, Picasa, GMail, the list goes on. If you are like me and have decent cyber-social life (apart from a real-social life), then there is a very good chance that you lose track of what your friends are up2 among these networks…

In comes Spokeo to the rescue. They will take your email address and search for your contacts across the very many networks which are spread across the cyberspace and give you an update anytime, there’s an update on your friends across these networks!!

The folks @ Spokeo have done an impressive job. Their list of supported networks is impressive, covering the basic social networks, Flickr, Youtube, the new Friendster and the list continues!! All you do is register with a valid email address from GMail, Yahoo or the likes and in a very little amount of time, Spokeo finds out where your friends have registered themselves and give you an update on their actions!

One of the coolest things about the site is that you can keep browsing through the website, learning its features, while Spokeo does its thing of searching for your friends’ activities in the background. The site is very responsive and is really well setup as far as the layout is concerned. It’s decently intuitive!!

The positives:
+ Excellent setup method
+ Intuitive interface
+ Easy sorting
+ Will help you shave off some browsing time going through each of the networks and addresses
+ Doubles up as an RSS reader

The negatives:
- Conspicuously misses orkut and del.icio.us

Spokeo
Cross posted @ http://scribez.com/2007/12/11/spokeo-your-answer-to-keep-informed/

Blogged with Flock

Tags: friends, photo-sharing, social-networks, spokeo, video-sharing

Filed under Babble me more, I read here..., Life, Opines of mine, Ramblings, Techno Mime

Flock 0.9.0 installation for Linux

July 10, 2007 by RR 8 Comments

Flock Logo Yup, Flock 0.9.0 is released! Yup, even for Linux. I admire the people @ Flock for releasing a browser in all 3 platforms with all functionalities present in all 3 flavors. [Yes Firefox, you are still waaaayy up there. We are not comparing both of you. Flock is nothing but a son of yours...]

Before we start:

I used Ubuntu Feisty while installation.
The same should work on all Ubuntu installations
The same should work also on all other Linux distributions. [Users remember to replace sudo with the corresponding root user rights command / run as root =)

So getting down and dirty - Flock itself gives a brief [an exaggeration] of how to install on Linux running machines. But, I found that hardly usable, especially for migrators[I don't think such a word exists - so I call it]. So here’re the instructions for running Flock on Linux =)

Download the installer of Flock for Linux – here

Note: Download it to a folder you would remember to navigate to via the command line!

Untar [Extract] the Flock Installer

Go to the command line and type the following command

sudo tar -C /opt -zxvf flock-*.linux-i686.tar.gz

Test your Flock

Now just to make sure that Flock has extracted properly – type this in your command line [Note: This will present you with the option to import your settings from Firefox as well]

/opt/flock/flock

Create a link

A link is a more powerful shortcut, which the user can place so that the program can be accessed without having to type the previous command all the time =)!

sudo ln -s /opt/flock/flock /usr/bin/flock

Now that would create a link for Flock in the /usr/bin folder, which contains more programs, which can be used!

Create an Application Menu Entry

Note: This is specific to Gnome!

Type this in your terminal

sudo gedit /usr/share/applications/Flock.desktop

and paste the next lines into the Edit window, which pops up
[Desktop Entry] Comment=Flock Web Browser Exec=flock GenericName=Flock Web Browser Icon=/opt/flock/icons/mozicon128.png Name=Flock Path= StartupNotify=true Terminal=0 TerminalOptions= Type=Application X-KDE-SubstituteUID=false X-KDE-Username= Categories=Network;Application;

Refresh the Gnome-Panel!

To see the entry you just made, you need to type this into the terminal

killall gnome-panel

And ta-da. Now, you can add an entry into the gnome-button list by just adding the launcher =)! Woozzaah!!

Filed under Babble me more, I read here..., Life, Opines of mine, Ramblings, Techno Mime

Opening and closing ports in Linux…

June 7, 2007 by RR 8 Comments

I have recently shifted to Ubuntu 24/7, when I am not in office and was setting it up for Bittorrent to work. Linux is awesome because it’s closed most of the time. Consequently to set up and run Bittorrent files, you need to have the torrent ports – [6881-6999] open.

So, what do you do to make sure that they are open when you require them to be and closed when you don’t want them to be. Of course, you don’t need to open all the ports as well.

You need to go to IPTABLES and give this particular command

sudo iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 6881 -j ACCEPT

This means – Append a line for the option INPUT, for the protocol [-p] tc for the destination port [--dport] 6881. Accept the packet that is coming from there.

And to close the port -

sudo iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 6881 -j DROP

Now, if you wanna download a couple of torrent files, you need to keep at least 5-10 ports open as torrent clients check for the ports 6881-6999 in the increasing order.

I typically keep 6881-6999 open when I wanna download torrents.

So, that would mean typing the aforementioned code 10 times and to close the ports when not needed [i.e.] another 10 times.

Here in comes the beauty of shell script and attached here – are 2 shell scripts that I use to open and close the ports when I wanna download the torrents and then block them!

Accept_Torrent_Ports
# Shell script to accept Torrent Ports from 6881 to 6889 # Author: Guru Panguji # Date: 03-June-2007 clear echo "Will open Torrent Ports from 6881-6889" echo "Use ./Drop_Torrent_Ports to close the Ports" sudo iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 6881 -j ACCEPT sudo iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 6882 -j ACCEPT sudo iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 6883 -j ACCEPT sudo iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 6884 -j ACCEPT sudo iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 6885 -j ACCEPT sudo iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 6886 -j ACCEPT sudo iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 6887 -j ACCEPT sudo iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 6888 -j ACCEPT sudo iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 6889 -j ACCEPT
Drop Torrent Ports
# Shell script to accept Torrent Ports from 6881 to 6889 # Author: Guru Panguji # Date: 03-June-2007 # clear echo "Will close Torrent Ports from 6881-6889" echo "Use ./Accept_Torrent_Ports to open the Ports" sudo iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 6881 -j DROP sudo iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 6882 -j DROP sudo iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 6883 -j DROP sudo iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 6884 -j DROP sudo iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 6885 -j DROP sudo iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 6886 -j DROP sudo iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 6887 -j DROP sudo iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 6888 -j DROP sudo iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 6889 -j DROP

Filed under Babble me more, I read here..., Techno Mime

Gear up for Google Gears…

June 1, 2007 by RR 1 Comment

I know there are a lot of people out there, like your truly, who cannot live without GMail! GMail is what I would term as one of the shining examples of an Internet application. If I make a list of awesomeness of GMail, they would go something like this

Sense of cleanliness
Ease of use
Ease of learning
Shortcut keys
Labels
Firefox extensions =D

However, there’s one thing that GMail lacks – a desktop client. I am from India – the land of amazing culture, gorgeous places and amazing people. However, broadband has still not pervaded India. At least not something that comes under the definition of broadband. Furthermore, “broadband” service providers don’t maintain anything remotely close to ZERO DOWNTIME…

So, GMail is not always on for another at least 1-2 million people [just in India]. Consequently, offline emails [a big part of today's productivity boosters] is non-existent when it comes to GMail. =( So, I personally used to use Thunderbird to synch.

Whilst there are a number of reasons as to why desktop e-mail won’t die, there is ONE thing that holds good. GMail is NOT designed in mind for the non-connected. This is the place where there are a lot of people still stick true to their Thunderbirds, Windows Live! Mail Desktop, and of course Microsoft’s Outlook Express and Outlook itself.

However, I hear bells of change – in the distance, but not too far away.

Google announced a week back [almost] of Google Gears or as I like to call it Kick-in-the-crotch-to-M$. Why you may ask?

Lemme explain [or at least try to]

The desktop has long been the personal property of Microsoft. Comon 90% [on last count] of the world’s computers still run on Windows. [Note: these may not be (f)actual numbers]. There was a time when Internet Explorer ruled the web and a time when Outlook Express and Microsoft Outlook kicked @$$ and held everyone spellbound.

Microsoft has always managed to hold its position not only in the computing world, but also in the stock market with “the desktop”.

Web 2.0 came along and with AJAX and social services + the proliferation of broadband services, Microsoft got a kick in the shin as people started using these “Web Apps”. GMail – since its launch has definitely been one of the most innovative email clients. Not just Gmail, a lot of these web-apps really do kick-@$$.

However, Microsoft still could sell Outlook Express [part of Windows] and Outlook coz well, not everybody is always on. Furthermore, one of the major productivity boosts / points that run especially for Outlook is that you can reply and also manage all your emails – OFFLINE!! Now, that’s definitely something everyone would love to do. Furthermore, as much as Gmail is an awesome web-application, it is NOT available offline.

So, with Google Mail and Google Calendar, you can manage your tasks and email, however if and only if you are connected to the internet. This still got a lot of people still working with Outlook [which I must say is definitely one of the better applications that Microsoft has provided].

However, with Google Gears, this can change. With offline access, and then synching this back online, when you get connected, all you ever need to install in your computer is “something” that is safe and secure and that can run a browser.

Google Gears [once the issues are ironed out and the developers have gone freaky] could single handedly bring GMail, GCal, and even GMaps onto your desktop “sans” the internet.

What’s awesome about it – it’s entering your desktop not with any other download, but your web-browser. =)!

Oooh I can see some hurt in M$s eyes… Comon Microsoft, time to buck up and come up with something totally rad – I agree Surface rocks btw!!

Filed under Babble me more, I read here..., Inspirations Atop (A) Pot, Life, Microsoft, Musings, Opines of mine, Ramblings, Techno Mime

Wow – we Indians know how to bargain…

May 5, 2007 by RR 4 Comments

We are famous for our bargaining skills and well here’s a sample =)! The OLPC – One Laptop Per Child, which promises a fully functional educational laptop for the price tag of $100 has been rejected by the Indian HRD Ministry, who think they can bring the price down for the same to $10.

http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/31906/118/

Now, I do not know this with absolute confidence, but here’s what I think happened…

[Begin Scene]

Earlier that morning.

Indian HRD person in the fish market: How much does that cost me?
Fisherwoman [not generalizing... hehe ok I am generalizing here ]: That’s 50 Rupees
IHRD Person: What? 50 Rupees, this is daylight robbery. I am not going to give you more than 5 Rupees, although I know that it would have cost you a total of at least 20 Rupees to get the fish till here.
Fisherwoman: Amazing choice of fresh expletives and a slap
IHRD Person: Ok, that’s good. I will catch my own fish. [Moves on the vegetable section.]

Situation replace with vegetable vendor.

Rinse.

Repeat.

Later that day

OLPC Rep: Hello Sir. We have this awesome initiative where in we offer each laptop for $100. Think about the pervasion of Information Technology in India. It’s just $100 per laptop, which is 1/10th or at least 1/7th the price of a decently configured laptop from other vendors, which does a similar job
IHRD Person: I will give $10 for it… We already know that manufacturing costs are down to $47

[End Scene]

We actually are amazing @ bargaining. There’s nothing wrong with that either. =D! However, seriously $10, when we know that it’s not the actual value of the laptop that we should be considering but more along the lines of how fast it reaches our people.Anyhoo, we have another 2 years to get everything working now don’t we?

Filed under Babble me more, I read here..., Musings, Opines of mine, Ramblings, Rantings, Techno Mime

India’s first commercial rocket – a success

April 24, 2007 by RR 5 Comments

I remember being highly into the Indian Space Program as a kid. Well, had my dad as a rocket scientist to my advantage, however, one of his dreams @ that point was to enable the Indian Space Program as a world class leader in commercial satellite launches and well, here’s one of his dreams come true =)!

PSLV – with 4 development launches – and 2 failures if I remember right, has finally lifted off as a commercial success!

Here’s to the Indian Space Research Organization – at least some tax money went well!!

Filed under Babble me more, I read here..., News, Opines of mine, Ramblings, Techno Mime

A Week of Announcements

September 17, 2006 by RR 16 Comments

This week has been full of activity, considering the amount of roll outs of new gadgets and their related services. The consumer market is going to go crazy with all the new options coming out !

Apple, came out with their “It’s Showtime” on the 12-Sep-2006. They announced

The 5.5G iPod featuring brighter screen, an 80GB version, games support
The Rainbow iPod Nano featuring a new design and various colors [Hmmm clip on covers next??]
The “Smallest Mp3 player” iPod shuffle featuring Clip and go and 2GB of memory with an aluminium casing
iTV – Apples entry into the Set Top Box, which is becoming huge in the US market
And to support all this – the iTunes 7

Close behind, y’day Microsoft has finally announced their entry into Apple’s dominant market – Mobile media players – and media service itself with Zune. Status has finally changed from Coming Zune !

They announced their first Zune player – available in White, Black and Brown [why didn't Apple think of that??]
The Zune media marketplace – or something like that, which I never bothered to check

More Zune pics

Zune package

The Harddisks turned 50, celebrating their golden jubilee in many blogs around the world. Surprising that none of the hard disk manufacturing companies came out with any interesting hard-disks!! Hmmm.. anyhoo, the event wasn’t publicized anywhere other than Engadget and some other blog news sites.

Microsoft Hardware came out with some real sexy peripherals for the “live” world of Microsoft.
Microsoft peripherals

Microsoft, again announced some more Vista RC1 Preview licenses and I managed to get hold of one and I have dowloaded the RC1 DVD ISO. I need to burn it and give the OS a whirl. !

All in all, an amazing week, I must say! !

Filed under Babble me more, I read here..., Life, Microsoft, Musings, News, Opines of mine, Ramblings, Techno Mime, apple

Flock and the increasing MBs

September 5, 2006 by RR 6 Comments

I have been using Flock ever since I put up the post and well, a scary thing I came to notice was that the more websites you viewed, the slower your computer became. I have a machine with a GB of RAM and about 1533MB of Virtual Memory! If your system has to become sluggish, it obviously means two things
- some process is eating up CPU cycles, possibly on a lock
- you are runing outta memory!

I immediately pulled up taskmanager to find out a scary number, which I see normally only in office, where in I am running frameworks after frameworks of code running on my development machine. Flock was holding about 1.5GB of virtual memory!

I am hazarding a few guesses
- Flock is actually holding the website content you are viewing through the web and all the book-keeping related to it in its memory cache?
- Flock is having a serious memory leak

Will do more testing on this. And also make an obeservations to the folks over @ Flock about this. It’s still crazy if your web-browser is holding about 500MB of your precious RAM and 1.5GB of your virtual memory space. Sooper scary!! !! What’s happening to the world where in you could easiy browse comfortably and blog with just a 512MB machine, the RAM essentially required for your OS rather than the webbrowser!

Filed under Babble me more, I read here..., Opines of mine, Ramblings, Reviews, Techno Mime

Performancing vs Flock Blog Editor

September 1, 2006 by RR 2 Comments

After Flock’s Blog Editor problems such as always on top, and some related freak bugs, I decided to take Scribez advice and test out Performancing, which is supposed to have a lot more features than our Deepest Sender rip off within Flock.

I was told exactly this…

Performancing is far more advanced than What Flock has.

And I can confirm that’s true. Performancing has far more text formatting options, performance metric analysis, technorati search, and del.icio.us connection all built into the plugin. As a blogging tool, it would probably and I guess it does, rate EXTREMELY High! You can do whatever you want from within that. Add it to Flock with the Flickr support and it becomes quite the handy blogging tool you need. !!

One of the best features I liked about it was the integration of it into the current window you are viewing. Plus the resizing ability. It’s so helpful when you wanna view something while blogging as most often is the case, like that link you wanted to remember, or the photo link you were planning to post of… etc.

However geek or no geek, blogger or no blogger, the interface for Performancing SUCKS big time. The colors are nothing but yucky! The font is drab. They should have put in some customizable template thingy man. It would have been so much better, if you can make it look like your Flock/Deepest Sender editor and inside the window u are working on.

Feature	Flock Blog Editor	Performancing	Deepest Sender
Basic text formatting	Yes	Yes	Yes
Advanced text formatting – Font increase/decrease etc.	No	Yes	Yes, but no strikethrough option
Views – Type/Source/Preview	Preview not present	Yes	Yes
Tags present in the blog	Yes	Yes	Yes altho cumbersome
Metrics	No	Yes	No
Look n Feel	Flock look n feel	Crappy (acc to me)	Decent takes look n feel of current Windows/Firefox theme
Customizable fonts	Nopes	Nopes	Nopes (unless you customize the Windows fonts)
Page Tools	Nopes	Yes	Nopes
Bookmarks	Nopes	Yup	Nopes
History – previous posts editing	Nopes	Yup	Yup – but limited number

Final Ratings

Flock Blog Editor:

[+] Integrated and easy to use
[+] Nice look n feel like Flock
[+] Lovely font to type with [personal choice]

[-] Always is “On Top”
[-] Irritating when at times you can’t reduce the size of the fonts and all
[-] No preview option

Performancing:

[+] Amazing array of features
[+] Metrics, Bookmarks
[+] More text formatting options

[-] Looks crappy
[-] Connects to the web for most of the things, when u wanna work offline, it’s tough
[-] Looks TERRIBLE [I can't get it outta my system sorry ]

Deepest Sender:

[+] Light weight
[+] Standard interface
[+] Cutomizable with Windows/Firefox theme

[-] Not advanced enough
[-] Cumbersome way of attaching categories

Man, I have some ideas for them, and as usual, I still consider that I should have been a consultant in Product Management.

Anyhoo, as an offtrack information, Flock is behaving weirder day by day and with the Blog Editor, open implies, sometimes even managing to go crazy trying to find the Download Window as somehow the context is held by Blog Editor

Filed under Babble me more, I read here..., Life, Musings, Opines of mine, Ramblings, Reviews, Techno Mime, Wordpress

Revamping your Windows XP Desktop!

August 16, 2006 by RR 4 Comments

Well, I have always been a sucker for modding your desktop to look unique. When you get your XP system, it comes with two themes. The Windows XP theme and Windows Classic themes. Both boring for the simple fact that they have been there for a long long time now. So, about 3 years ago, I spent quite a stint at modding my desktop trying various shells like Aston, LiteStep, etc. I finally decided that they were either too cumbersome to setup with very many text editing to make it look good [Read: LiteStep] or were just too complex a desktop [Read: Aston]. I mean they looked cool, but were too cumbersome to setup for a normal user. Furthermore, with my penchance for a clean install once in a while to remove the junk that I keep testing, they took way too much time to actually setup!

It was during one of these searches for the best desktop modding tools that I came across StyleXP, by TGTSoft. It was a very easy to use and powerful tool. Their GUI was very intuitive in setting up my visual styles and themes. But, the best part was the easy to install setup. Just one double click and your computer is ready to be modded with the very many visual styles available. And with StyleBuilder, you can even customize an available Visual Style or start one from scratch.

Since then, I have had Style XP as part of my regular updates and Re-install essentials. Have come across very a many Visual Styles and themes and there are some I like! What however, prompted me to write this was a very interesting theming tool called the Vista Transformation Pack. I came across surfing through MajorGeeks.com. This awesome executable by Mr. X sets up your system to look like the Vista Aero look coming soon with the Windows Vista release. With Vista taking some time to actually materialize in the market, he has managed to come up with some look alikes, which you can setup with StyleXP running on your system.

I thought that I mite as well, write a small tutorial for those who are interested in modding their desktop. So, here goes…

***WARNING***
Disclaimer: What I have tried and tested comes with very many warnings and risks. There are many risks involved in setting this up, apart from getting the Style XP software. The required licenses are to be acquired by the user and will not be provided. Furthermore, I will not take any responsibility if your system behaves weird or crazy after trying this thing out.

Now, that the disclaimer is outta the way, let’s get going!!

Things you need:
- StyleXP – licensed version if you wanna run this look on your system for more than a month
- Vista Transformation Pack – downloadable for free.
- Basic knowhow of editing files
- Ability to take a risk and basic knowledge of how to get your system up and running in case there are any clashes with the software and your system
- Windows XP with SP2 running on your system [it's a prerequisite of even StyleXP!]
- Window Blinds – to put the transparency Glassy aero skin, which is considered better, but then I haven’t tried it, and am quite happy with the Style XP visual styles.

Preventing any sorta clashes with your current settings:
- NVidia Desktop Enhancements and Effects: If you have an nVidia card, you may be familiar with the transparency effects you can attribute to your windows and the taskbar. Personally, I’d suggest disabling these effects to get a better feel of the Glass2k software bundled with the Vista Transformation Pack
- Style XP transparency settings: Remove all these settings, to get a better feel and prevent any clashes of the Glass2k software bundled with the Vista Transformation Pack

Installing Style XP!
Download the setup from TGTSoft website or any of the many links available if you search for Style XP in Google. After downloading the Style XP installation file, double click on the setup. It will automatically install and will ask you to apply the Panther style to check if it’s been installed properly. If your XP look and feel changes automatically after a “Please Wait” dialog, and a Mac look and feel is applied to your windows, then you are set to go. [You mite wanna put in your registration code and get your StyleXP a registered copy only after a restart, as I have encountered some problems while entering the registration code immediately after the install]

Restart your system and put in your registration code. You can tweak your StyleXP later [Instructions provided at the end of the tutorial]

Installing and setting up the Vista look and feel
Download the Vista Transformation Pack [vtp4.zip when I last checked it] from MajorGeeks.com->Appearance [Link to be posted]. Unzip and run the .exe! Mr X will take you through the setup process after quite a lotta disclaimers, which need to be read and paid heed to.

You also need to decide, which of the XP features would you like modded? For e.g. even the taskbar clock can be modded with a software called LClock, that can be installed with the software. It’s up to you, which all you wanna choose. Personally, I chose everything except for the boot up screen, having quite some trouble with that earlier. It may have been resolved these days, but then I don’t have the liberty or the time to go for a repair and a reinstall [mite be necessary]. So, I unchecked the boot screen and checked the remaining options.

Once the installation is done, your computer will be prompted for a restart. Here, if you have installed Style XP, then you get to choose the Visual Style you wanna put. Choose the necessary. I chose the Aero Longhorn – Beta 1 – Dark Thin Taskbar option. [having a thing for thin taskbars]. Choose to your liking and then you can later experiment as well.

And you are all set to enjoy the look and feel of Windows Vista/Aero in your system. It’s not the real thing, but is one of the closest things I have liked.

StyleXP tweaks:
If you’d like StyleXP to take minimal resources, then check on the “Use No Resources” option present in the “Options” page.

Note: Never again blog about such boring topics, just because you have to blog!!

Note 2: Put in screenshots of the desktop modded with the transparency effect!

Filed under Babble me more, I read here..., Musings, News, Opines of mine, Ramblings, Reviews, Techno Mime

Writer’s block? Me?

August 15, 2006 by RR 8 Comments

Until now, I was wondering as to what was wrong and that I was faced with a writer’s block. Well, I was wrong. How can I of all the people be faced with a writer’s block? There are quite a few things I wanna write about. To start off, lemme list ém down so that i remember to work on them!!

First of all
- the Big HR scandal that’s going on in the software corporates these days
- Why Indians badmouth India when they are abroad?
- Installing Fedora Core 5 for the laptop, after completing the installation
- How to get Hindi movies on your laptop for watching? From Youtube and Peekvid.

With so many things to write about, how come I am not writing anything? Well, the reason is simple. I am connected to the net and hence life. I mean Till about 12am, I am here chatting with people in India. That is 3:30am IST! Morons and monkeys are awake to gimme company and a nice lovely chat !!

So, I promise I will complete at least one article from the afore mentioned four by Tuesday so that I can post on Wednesday!! !!

Meanwhile, check out this site. It’s an absolutely adorable time pass Uncyclopedia!! Like Wikipedia, this one lets you write crap about any topic!! Awesome read !!

Filed under Babble me more, Creative lyric, I read here..., Life, Life in Deutschland, Musings, News, Opines of mine, Ramblings, Techno Mime

FSC Amilo Pi1556

August 7, 2006 by RR 43 Comments

Well, they say that I am generally impulsive on many things, and well I never deny the fact as well. You guys are now looking at the proud owner of a Fujitsu Siemens Computers Amilo Pi1556 laptop. It’s an awesome laptop that’s and easy to use. Well, it has to be easy to use as I am working on a German Operating System as of now. Have to wait until Monday to call them up and find out how to change the language if at all possible. Else, I am hooking it up with Fedora Core 5!! Muahahaha!!

After many deliberations and discussions with “The Overclocked Fragger”, I had decided to go in for an Acer Aspire 5672WLMi or an Acer Aspire 5652AWLMi. However, on Friday, when I had called up the centre to find out about the servicing and warranty and revoking [aka returning the laptop in case I am unhappy with it], I realised that Acer sucked and also puffed hard. Hmm, so the “search for a laptop” finally comes to an end.

So, what’s the config of my baby?
FSC Amilo Pi1556 config

During the process of hunting for the laptop, I managed to notice quite a few things as far as buying a laptop is concerned. It’s NOT as simple as buying a desktop/configuring a desktop. There, the components will work as they are supposed to, most of the times, the form factor being more manageable and testable, and the components, being loosely coupled, in the most loose definition of the term. In the case of a notebook however, the components are far to tightly coupled, and it often depends upon the manufacturer that the notebook will last/not!

Furthermore, in a desktop, you can keep adding/subtracting things at a later time from your initial configuration, the liberty for which is not all that present in a laptop! Consequently, there are few things you NEED to keep in notice before buying a laptop. You also need to have a very clear idea of what you really are expecting from your notebook. I started out with absolutely no clue at the beginning of the venture, and slowly progressed, with the help of “The Overclocked Fragger” to finally settle down for what I really expected off my notebook!!

I started out from Finding a Good Laptop in Germany and went through a lot of changes as far as my requirements went. In the middle, I had also decided to forego a medium performer laptop to go for an entry level and then went back to the good performer laptop, with some basic customizable and configurable and upgradeable options!

So, if you are indeed going for a laptop, your first question to yourself should be – where are you going to use your laptop? Is it at home, probably moving it around from room to room, and rarely take it outside the house? Or are you in the frequent fliers list and you wanna take your laptop along with you? Coz, it’s very important that you decide!! Portability and performance are usually at two ends of the spectrum! Yes, the manufacturers are getting better at it, slowly, and they are picking up pace to bridge the gap, slowly!

Yes, there are some awesome laptops there that are portable, cool, look rad, and are power packed with performance and features, however, they come at a high cost. Consequently, unless you have infinite resources in front of you, you need to fix your budget as well.

My budget was Euro 1200.00 all inclusive, i.e. delivery charges as well and I wanted to limit myself to getting the laptop from a particular website called http://notebooksbilliger.de/, as I heard that their service is awesome, which is wrong information btw. The laptop manufacturer is the only one providing the service. Then, there was a search for which laptop manufacturer provided the best service in Germany, and also some form of service once I get to India.

The first on the list at that point was of course, Dell. However, there is not too much difference in price for a Dell Laptop between Germany and India. IOW, too expensive for just the service factor. You should also consider the build quality and the performance aspects. For the 1200 Euros, all that you could get was probably just about a souped up Dell Inspiron 6400, which was certainly not what I was looking for.

So, what was I looking for? As I already told you, it pretty much took a full circle, before I decided on the final config and laptop. =D!

The FSC Amilo Pi1556 made its mark on my mind and also on Fragger’s mind ever since we saw it and found that it had a MXM nVidia Geforce Go 7600 [it can be upgraded for the uninitiated]. It had an Intel Duo Core T2400 processor, which was definitely in our wanted list, being powerful enough and for not being a battery hogger. It also had a 2MB cache being shared across the 2 cores, therefore giving a performance increase even in single threaded applications. Consequently, your daily routines would also get done faster, not to mention your games just zooming way faster. It had a GIG of RAM, which should do fine until I really have to work and play together. The framework I work alone, when in full flow would automatically consume, without even running any applcation about 300MB of memory after boot up!! ! So, I needed upgradeable RAM. Well, this one can upgrade only to 2048MB RAM, whereas the Acer Aspire models could easily upgrade to 4096MB! However, those were heat generators. And they were 60Euros more costlier. Now, not that I don’t mind paying more to get my balls warmed up, but definitely this is NOT the way I’d like ‘em warmed up!! ! Anyhoo, this has one less USB port, owing to the MIni USB connectivity option. This also does not feature two separate Monitor Connectivities. It has one DVI port and they have coupled it with a DVI to VGA Adapter. Well, I like my laptop sides to be as bare as possible, and this fellow was indeed giving me that. The Acer models looked overloaded to me as far as the sides and the front were concerned. This baby also has almost nothing in the front, pretty much the way I like it. [Ewwwing at the Dell E1505 with the media control buttons in the front ]

[Note to self: Put in the pics of the laptop]

Now, I will be running the benchmarks and all soon enough and that would mean Monday, when I can download the same from the net. I am waiting also to test out the wireless, which will be delivered with my DSL connection sometime this week. Once that is done, I myself would be connected from home on a 2MBPS download and 512KBPS upload rates. Waiting to also test out the 3DMark’03 and ’05 benchmarks and demos on the laptop. Speakers: I am not very happy about the laptop speakers, actually is/was terribly disappointing. Almost made me change the laptop to the ruddy Acer ones, but then I had to weigh down the fact about the servicing. Coz, I have to pack it and send it for any kinda service. They only have ONE, I repeat, ONE Service Centre for the whole of Germany. FSC – Fujitsu Siemens Corporation, on the other hand, will come up to my house, pick it up, and will return it back to me at the end of service. Now, that definitely outweighs the tinny speakers part. I can always carry around a pair of headphones, which when adorned, definitely increases the sound quality, and it is quite close to what I have in office as well, which again is a Fujitsu Siemens Computers machine.

So, what have I been doing with the machine? Well, watching movies… ! I finished watching The Lion King, The Usual Suspects, Nottting Hill, The Recruit! Well, the widescreen with its glossy finish definitely calls for a nice movie watching experience. But, it also is a lovely screen to type and set all my different vector wallpapers on. ! I have kinda made it look like a Mac now! Yes, the German keyboard, actually looks a bit hatke, which will work well for me, coz I like things a bit hatke !

So, I also saw Timeline today. Man, that movie is a grave injustice for the book. The book was really nice when I read it. I feel like reading it again now. The movie sucked big time, especially the actors were definitely not who I had in mind when I read the book. They have some not-so-popular actors. I mean, if the “Vertical Limit” actor is playing the professor’s son, CHEAP!! !!

Hmm, apart from the speakers, the laptop is indeed an awesome laptop to have. It’s 0.1kg more than the Acer Aspire 5672WLMi and the 0.2kgs more than the Acer Aspire 5652AWLMi, and it only has a 6Cell LiOn as compared to the 8Cells provided with the Acer models, but it comes 100Euros cheaper and it has an MXM option. Else, it’s got the same Motherboard and a better processor than the Acer Aspire models. And it’s also got the same options for connectivity. There’s no bluetooth connectivity tho, which mite be a bad thing, considering that my phone is one of the better models with bluetooth out there with an option to control your computer through it as well!

There’s a nice little feature on the laptop, which I haven’t noticed till now, which is to lock the touchpad, when you are typing. There’s a small button presented, which when enabled would lock the touchpad, allowing you to type really fast without having to bother about your hands accidently touching the pad and making your mouse and the cursor move to another position !

So, here are my overall ratings as far as the groupings go
- Display – 4.0/5 [They could have increased the resolution to a WSXGA+ screen with such a nice graphics card on board]
- Keyboard – 4.5/5
- Graphics – 4.0/5 [Still to be tested for reliability and any crappy wakey effects to be present and the performance with the current configuration]
- HDD – 4.0/5 [With the 7200RPM on the prowl, even the extra bit of space in the harddisk mite be a detterent as far as performance goes, but it's silent, very very silent]
- Portabiliy – 3.0/5 [6Cell battery with about 2 hours of charge, and the 3.1kgs, and the heating up on the hands resting doesn't really make this guy a swell portable option]
- Performance – 4.5/5 [The T2400 Intel Core Duo definitely provides what it promises. I may have got this baby for a cheaper price if I had waited till Christmas, but then I _had_ to go for a laptop asap with a DSL connection to be delivered later this week]
- Looks and style + comfort [4.0/5] Not very sleek, but it has the features of a laptop with a full blown keyboard and the aluminium casing
- Build Quality – 4.0/5 – [Well, they could have done better as far as the DVD Writer goes. They have bundled an NEC option, which ain't all that great. They have gone for the cheapest option with a Slot Loading DVD option]

Overall rating of the laptop = 3.90/5!!

Note: I am still to test its looks and display outside in the sun, where I have heard that the glossy screen is not something you’d desire. !

The pics have been uploaded here!

Filed under Babble me more, I read here..., Life, Life in Deutschland, News, Opines of mine, Ramblings, Reviews, Techno Mime

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