Life and Updates….

It has been a while since I last decided to test my typing skills out here. Surprisingly, I have managed to keep myself busy and occupied with lots of stuff…

• I had a nice trip to various places in south India with my family. It was brilliant and a well-deserved break from all the boredom of work-life. Will write about this in some other post.
• Got an admit a few days ago and got a reject just an hour back…. a little bit of    and a little bit of 
• I have been doing a lot of reading up on photography. And I must admit, I am enjoying every bit of it. Trying out new stuff, doing some crazy experiments with my PowerShot G7 camera (atleast to the extent that I can).
• Still reading Shantaram and a couple of other technical books.
• Work with the Krex is finally drawing to a close. Thanks to all those who helped me out. Special thanks to my prof from college Mr. Shivshankar and also my guidelight for this project, Partha. All the slog in the last year has been totally worth it. Finally, this baby is ready to rock !! (Sorry if I am being a bit cryptic here, but I promised to myself that I will keep this under the wraps until the right time comes).

I finally got the Tata WiMax broadband connection at home. It was a tough choice but it was also my only option since both the Airtel and the Hathway broadband cables were not available at this place. So far I have no major complaints with the WiMax connection.The connection is actually based on the Telsima WiMax solution. Enjoying excellent speeds mainly because the Thippasandra base station is at exact LOS from my house. Couldn’t have asked for a perfect place for this connection. The antenna is a flat variant with good directionality. Not sure how it compares to the traditional Yagi-Uda antenna though. This one has four different sectors and each time it contacts the base station to fetch a IP  for that particular sector. If that fails for some reason, the antenna switches over to the next sector and tries to acquire the IP again. Interesting stuff ! Something about which I need to read up more. A simple diagram explaining how WiMax works for those of you who are interested.

I have also been reading up about the Android SDK. Managed to get the Hello World App up and running. For those of you who are interested, this is a very nice walk through to help you build your Hello World App. Download the SDK and the other required packages and try it out today!

Also planning to go down to the Aero India show on Saturday. Got a free entry for the air show but did not manage to get passes for the exhibition. What the hey…I can see the air show for free at least!

More later.

Current Music : Socha Hai from Rock On!!

Current Mood : Sleepy!

RockBox 3.0 released

Yup. RockBox 3.0 was released recently. You can check out the release notes to know more.

I am still a little disappointed though that RockBox does not run on mY 6th generation Ipod classic.

First impressions : VLC 0.92 “Grishenko”

Video LAN finally released VLC media player 0.92 (named “Grishenko”) after nearly two years of development. Here is a quick review of this media player:

1. There are noticeable changes done to the player’s UI. The playlist, for a change. looks lot more livelier with album art support. What is also noticeable is the additonal Last.FM support ala Amarok.
2. I was a little disappointed that VLC still does not support playback of Real media files.
3. Quite a lot of changes have gone into the decoder, demuxers and the filters. I tried out the spatializer audio filter and it sounded great to be honest !
4. There are many options available to the user to play around with under the ‘Preferences’ option. It is going to take a long time to review each one of them in detail.
5. Unfortunately, the player seems to be crashing quite a lot already, and I installed this just this morning!

You can check out the release notes on the Video LAN site for more details regarding new features and bug fixes that have gone into this release. Just a warning though, this player does not seem to be that stable despite some nice new features being added to it.

VLC 0.9.2 is out!!

As I am writing this, the download stats on the Video Lan site read a whopping 100 thousand downloads for Windows alone!!

Download using this link. Enjoy!!

KDE 4.1 review

Let me be honest. On the very first look, KDE 4.1 is a like a cold breeze on a hot,muggy day (GNOME). Unfortunately, that is about as far as I can go with regard to positives. About three and half days of KDE and I have enough content to write for a review.

1. Prasanna made this point on hig blog and I agree with him. The windows look sad, in particular the toolbar and especially the titlebar. This is a huge disappointment in comparision to the desktop which looks great.
2. I like the idea about making the desktop widgetized. The default widgets that are available to the user are limited in number. But thats okay. Nothing much to complain here too. But, somehow, the whole idea of being able to change the wallpaper when th widgets are locked, seemed pointless. Logically, I would have arranged the widgets in such a manner that they go with my wallpaper. So I would like to lock the wallpaper too when I the lock all the widgets. This is not a bug really. But this is some sort of an enhancement.
3. Now comes the real dirt. I tried playing some audio files using Amarok and I discovered that the audio gets muted after every 30 seconds?!! WTF! I tried looking at the audio configuration and it seemed to be fine. I checked this on GNOME (using Amarok again) and playback was fine here. I checked this out in some forums and people did actually complain about this problem albeit in different ways.  Some guys had problem muting the sound. Some had the sound muted the whole time. These guys had tried installing KDE on Hardy Heron. After some serious checking and experimentation, I was able to get the playback working on KDE again! But as far as the whole experience is concerned, this is really a show stopper!
4. I don’t like the application launcher that KDE offers. Actually cant blame anyone here. After using Launchy, every other application launcher looks stupid !
5. Dolphin, KDE’s file manager, can be pretty irritating at times.
6. Moving the widgets on the main panel can be a pain.

I am sure that I have faced more issues than the ones that I have mentioned. Overall, KDE is not for me. I will still be using it for a while before I move over to GNOME. GNOME might look sad, but it is a lot more stable right now and that is more important at the end of the day, as compared to a flashy looking desktop with bugs.

Update: Just discovered that Synaptic Package Manager also crashes with KDE. After installing your packages, if any, the details window is expanded even though you did not ask for it. The remedy is simple: Just kill the process ’synaptic’ using its process id (you have to use sudo as this can be done only as a super-user). Cheers!

KDE 4.1

Prasanna’s post on KDE 4.1 motivated me to try out the installation on my system.I was kinda bored with the GNOME desktop experience that Hardy Heron was offering. To be honest, initially I was not really sure if I could get KDE 4 running on Hardy Heron. Especially because the site clearly mentions that the platform is unstable for debian based systems(link). But this link on softpedia was just what I was looking for.

I will write a more detailed review on this after I have played around enough with this KDE release.

For now though, the desktop looks kewl!