Ubergizmo

Apple Inc. has managed to make every mobile phone maker go back to their drawing board ever since Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone (2G) in his key note in 2007. Now the iPhone, 3G, the ubergizmo that comes with everything you can think of plus the kitchen sink has landed in India. Many love it, some hate it, but almost no one can resist not to tinker on it.


Nokia and other brands being in the mobile business for the last 15+ years are now atleast 2 years away from embracing some of the features that's in iPhone right now! Wanna bet? Check this video "iPhone magic"





Still ain't convinced? Read on...


If the first generation mobile phones were inspired by Star Trek TOS, then the iPhone is surely inspired by the "all touch tablet PC" shown in Star Trek TNG and Voyager (during the late 80s). For the uninitiated, find details on Star Trek here (Or contact me if you are really enthu, I will convert you in to a Trekkie in no time)

iPhone = Mac PC running OS X for mobile edition + iPod Touch + Internet browser (supporting wifi, 3G and Edge) + last but not least the phone :)

This means it has lot of potential, which needs to be unleashed by 3rd party developers. Luckily Apple released iPhone SDK this year and all the enthusiastic developer are writing applications for the iPhone.

Anyway, let's quickly run in to some of the cool features/applications that iPhone has -


Games - There are tons of them and they can give Xbox, PS2, Sony PSP, Nintendo Wii run for their money. Games are mostly "all touch" and "gravity defying" (read accelerometer).

Check out Star Wars unleashed running on my iPhone



Stocks - Yep, you can get the current stock prices and also get an historical data rendered as a chart. This built-in application pretty much covers all the stocks from almost all the stock exchanges around the globe (Yahoo Finance!)





Mails - Work seamlessly with any POP3 or MS Exchanger server account. Trust me, the way you handle mailbox in the iPhone, you will stop using Outlook. Basically you use your fingers to scroll through the mails and when you want to delete them, just run your finger across a mail, this triggers a 'delete' button to popup on top of the mail.


Safari Browser - Simply brilliant! I have never been impressed about browsing world wide web until the experience with Safari on iPhone.


Music / Movies - What can I say? iPod has made Sony walkman to be kept in a museum


Skeptics - There are lot of sites which bashes out at the iPhone, let's see what are the so called features that are missing from iPhone

• FM Radio - Err, grow up guys, do you really listen to FM, especially in Bangalore?
• 2 MP camera - Those who are really in to photography never compromise on anything less than a SLR. Camera phones are for the school going kids.
• No Java support - Well, this could be officially added by Apple anytime, but for the "hackers" read this read this
• Can't share any music - There is a good reason behind this and it has been so with iPod's, but again there is "a way" to get around this problem
• No physical keyboard - Trust me, you will never need one. Virtual key simply rocks
• No copy and paste - Well, we are not using Windows, are we?
• Completely tied to iTunes - You are joking? (clue - look for T-PoT)
• No external storage - 8 GB / 16 GB ain't enough?
• Apps/music/video only from Apple store - You are making me laugh! (Google "jail break")
• No MMS - yep, that's true. But MMS is for college kids or bollywood actors, innit?
• Can't share any mp3, video, image using bluetooth - Apple philosophy, which can be over ridden
• Cannot insert any other SIM card - You can as long as you are with the same carrier. But this can be "unlocked"

Verdict

Nothing is perfect in this world, so iPhone does have its downs, but what the heck, the whole experience of using this mobile is so unique that you forget everything else. Suddenly there is a plethora of mobile devices announced by Nokia and HTC, but none of these can come close to iPhone in the near future. iPhone clicked because of MAC OS X. Symbian is an infant compared to the OS X. Windows 7 looks like it has a big hang over from OS X.

Check this video of the early version of Windows 7 (Windows Surface, anyone?)

So if you really want a cool gadget to satisfy your geek instincts, then go ahead and pick an iPhone. But do it from the Apple store, they know what they are selling unlike Airtel and Vodafone.

Jail broken!

Yep, I have done it. My iPhone 2.1 is now jail broken and ready to be loaded with cracked 3rd party apps. Please note that jail breaking does not void any waranty, however is still illeagal as people install 3rd party applications from internet instead of actually buying them from iStore, ouch!
How to do this? Well, google it and you can find upteen number of sites talking about this. I plan to put down a step by step guide as it took me a while figure out the best way to get this done.

The Ubergizmo

Finally, I have it in my hands. I am now the proud owner of the iPhone that made me go head over heals! The phone has set me back with a cool 31, 600 Rs for which I had to sell one of my kidney, but it's worth it!

Project Management

It has been a while since I blogged! Can't help it, I am now at a stage where lot of people look at me to answer them. There is my wife and son, who are a priority. Then while at office, I need to make sure that I keep my clients and managers updated with daily activities of my team handle a team of programmers and last but not least code in .NET!

But that's how it is supposed to be, so I have no complaints, except for a wish, if only days were longer than 24 hours or if human body did not need any sleep or may be I could create my clone(s)!

It has been 2 busy weekends, attending PMP training. But on the whole, it was a good exercise, I came across people from different walks of life, most of them much senior to me. Training itself was exhaustive and I realized some of the best practices followed by Project Managers around the world.

End of the day, I am still a software geek so I am looking around for Project Management Software Tools, which I will try to list down -

DotProject- This is one of the first tools I had come across, Deepak Shenoy introduce me to this tool and made me use effectively for my team at WNS WT. Best thing about this tool is that its quite feature rich and is open source.

Project .Net - I haven't had any experience with this tool yet, but as I browsed through the website, it looked very promising. Project .Net is a commercial open source, web based enterprise project management. It is very rich in terms of features, check this out - Dashboards (personal, project and business), collaboration tools like discussion groups, document management, templates, work flow management, scheduling - simply awesome. By the way, Project .Net is written in Java and has nothing to do with Microsoft .NET framework!

Microsoft Project 2007 - Probably one of the first (yes it existed from DOS days) and most widely used desktop based project management tool, what more do I say. I have heard rumours that the next version of the Project will adorn the ribbon style UI interface, which was made "popular" by MS Office 2007.

Mingle - This tool stands apart as its meant for the Agile practitioners. Mingle is developed by ThoughtWorks Inc. which is a big time Agile practitioner and is available for Windows, Mac and Linux, that's a beauty. I have not downloaded this tool yet, but intend to evaluate it soon.

Pocket Manage - Well, its not exactly called pocket manage, but its an application that runs on Nokia Communicator or any PDAs with support to MS Project 2007 format support. Real life saver for project managers who attend lot of meetings but hate to take their laptop along with them!

That's it folks, for now. Here is a complete list of project management tools listed out by wikipedia

Indiana and other sequels

I am a big fan of Indiana Jones series, 'Raiders of the lost ark' and 'Last Crusade' are perhaps the best action-adventure movies of all time. These movies, released in the late 80's before CGI and "blue screen" existed, had a cult of followers. Of course, I was a kid back in those days and used to watch the movies at home on the VHS as we hardly went out for an English movie with parents (Yes, India has come a long way since those days, kids now a days can just pop in @ a mall and buy a ticket to watch a movie which was released in the US the same week!)

Anyway, Indy 4 was rumoured since the late 90's when Lucas started resurrecting the Star War saga with it's prequels. But it took Lucas another 10 years to make the announcement about the 4th part in the adventure series.

Sadly, the 'Crystal Skulls', does not live up to it's fans expectations, specially the 2nd half of the movie. The idea about the aliens and the story elements are borrowed from 'Tintin - Flight 714', which is very surprising as both Spielberg and Lucas have proven time and again that they are the best story tellers in Hollywood.

There is a lot of emphasis on action, but hardly any interaction between the characters, I really looked forward to see a lot of tension between Indy and Marion or 'Henry the 3rd' for that matter. But, there was hardly any! May be I am getting old and the movies are being made for the "Grand Theft Auto 4" generation! (Bu hey, I do play GT games and love them :) )

Also as a fan of the 'Last Crusade', I would have loved to see both Sean Connery and Harrison Ford together in this movie. Both are such fine actors and had great roles for them. But....

I hope Hollywood moves on and stops making all the classic remakes or sequels. I would rather watch the old movies again and again than watch the new sequels which have no story element in it.

I always longed for the sequel of Back to the future, but now I really hope, no one makes it. Paramount is re-launching 'TOS' in Star Trek 11 with an all new crew! But will they ever be to create the magic what William Shatner and other did in the 60s? I have my doubts...

ASP .NET in Delphi 2007

I am about to venture on to a new territory. Though I have developed ASP .NET based websites before, they were all done with Visual Studio 2003/5 using C#. Now for the first time I have been asked to use Delphi or RAD Studio 2007.
From what I gather, it's not so bad, but the biggest problem I forsee is the lack of code samples or help in Delphi. Not a problem for me as I can read / code in C#, but it could be for my team mates, who are new to C#.
As for me, I might actually end up writing lot of code in C#, only to realise that I am actually supposed to write the logic in Delphi!
Watch this space for more, I will share my ASP .NET experience in Delphi here soon.

Photography

Here it is! The Adobe Photoshop Express (BETA) - an online image editor and photo sharing web site. And here is my album for C&C
http://reflexion.photoshop.com/

WNS WT Chaps

Here it is, just caught these boys post lunch outside WNS WT building.

Beware : IE8 Beta is buggy

I know it's in BETA 1, but can you expect your older IE7 installation to go kaput once you use "restore point" in Windows XP to revert back? Welcome to Microsoft's yet another crappy offer - IE8.
First of all IE8 copies host of features straight from it's competitors FireFox and Opera - stuff like "Sessions" has finally made it in to IE in it's 8th reincarnation! I wonder why can't MS allow both IE7 and IE8 to co-exists? I have Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 Beta 4 installed side by side and no complaints! I think adding this feature will be more challenging to programmers at MS than rendering "You have opened a new tab" on a newly opened tab!

First test for me was to check if my yahoo mail works in it's new layout. As I expected it didn't, yahoo showed a message that it's not compatible with this version of IE. Thanks to some one at MS, there is a button on the tool bar called "Emulate IE7", which when clicked fools the websites that user is using IE7 and I just did that, which worked.
Let's see how it all goes, I now have IE8 Beta , FireFox 2 and FireFox 3 Beta 4 - among all these I found FireFox 3 Beta 4 really fast, website loading and rendering was much faster than IE8.

No Events tab for WPF controls

Ouch! I thought as I kick started dabbling with WPF and VS 2008. Luckily I found a way to get around this issue. If you go to the XAML pane and just after your control declaration hit space key on the keyboard, VS would show you a list of properties for that control and in this list the events are shown marked with a lightning bolt symbol. Hit tab twice and VS declares the event handler in the code behind file. Not bad, its nifty way of getting around the problem.

Is God an alien? - Part 1

During the world war 2, an American pilot crash landed in a remote african jungle. The natives of this forest, who were a bunch of isolated tribes, declared him God for the modern day gadgets he carried were totally alien to them. And ofcourse, for them he had landed from the sky. So they elavated him to the position of "God" and built a new religion around him. To date, they worship the left overs, which include a broken cigerate lighter, parts of the fighter plane that had crashed and a rusted knife.
Could this have happened with the ancient cave men on earth. Some one from a distant planet have had visited Earth one of their journey through space. Cave men took them for Gods and started worshipping.
Erich von Daniken in his famous book, "Charriots of the Gods", coined this idea and made us think in this direction pragmatically. Star Trek - TOS, dealt with this idea throught it's 3 season's. But when TNG aired in the 80s they tried not to venture in to it, by forcing "Prime Directive" (by which, humans, do not reveal their presence to a non space travelling race) in to their scripts.
If one looks at the history of mankind, from what we have discovered so far, man lived in caves primitively for centuries and then suddenly one could see the birth of civilizations and structures such as Pyramids, Sphinx, Machu Picchu, whose architectures are difficult to explain even with modern science. So we see a gap between the cave men and the civilizations? Did we get visited by aliens and did they transfer inteligence by which mankind could build cities and eventually build the wonders of ancient civilizations?
Well, we don't have the answers at the moment, modern science is still in its infant stage to explain all this. Only time would tell us.

To be continued....

Disclaimer - I am not proving / disproving the existence of God, and I am not an atheist. But I merely am trying to think about the concept of God from another dimension. Having said this, I truly believe in 'Universal Consciousness’.

Nikon D60 - Is it worth it?

Of late, I have been reading up a lot about photography and DSLR in particular. Having zeroed on to Nikon D40, I now wait for my bonus money to splurge on this gadget. Meanwhile, Nikon discontinued it's Nikon D40X series and has introduced a Nikon D60 at the PMA 2008. Is it worth buying a D60 over D40? I personally don't think so. Why? Well for starter, the price is about 60 % more for very less features.
What's new with D60? Well, you can read all the technical details here. But in a nutshell, these are the new features and what I think of them compared to a cheaper D40 -

Price - This is the deciding factor for an Indian buyer. D40 is selling at about 470$ vs D60 debuing at 750$ (60 % expensive)
Integrated Dust Reduction System - Hmm, Nikon has come out with a feature that Canon had in it's camera for years. Well to be honest, I would rather not pay to Nikon instead spend about 10 $ on a blower and clean the prism when really needed
Active D-Lighting for smoother gradation - Well, this seems like a marketing gimmick
Eye Sensor and orientation - Now these 2 are the most useful feature that I think an amateur would want. Eye sensor would swtich off the LCD when I try to look through the view finder. And the orientation of the menu is a concept copied from iPhone, which also would be very nice to have.
But 60% on a camera which essentially is Nikon D40? Well, not really worth it. Eventually, Nikon would probably phase out the Nikon D40s and make D60 as the entry level with prices dropped. But for now, it makes one wiser to go for Nikon D40 and save up that extra money for better use.

Please read Nikon site here for more details

Remake

A rehashed version of one of the photos I had taken years back, in the good old days of Film SLRs -

here is the original photo

Reliance Timeout and Digital Store

Yet another Mall / Super store was added to the ever changing landscape of Bangalore city. This time it was was by Mukesh Ambani's RIL, India's largest private sector firm.

"Reliance Timeout and Reliance Digital" is bang at the center of the city, Cunningham road. They managed to get my attention by an advertisement in the TOI which had a 1 GB Pen Drive being sold at a mere 300 bucks! That plus the New Year holiday, made me visit the mall, only to figure out that 1 GB Pen Drives were sold out!

Reliance Timeout store features Books, Music, Stationery, Toys and Gifts. They claimed they have 30000 titles of books and 12000 titles of music and movie DVDs. They also have a Karaoke Studio where the customer can sing along with a song of their choice and record it in a professional quality-recording studio. There was a coffee shop too, which I could not access since my kid wanted to hang out at the kiddy corner they had. All in all, very impressive and a great hangout place. Will I buy any titles from this shop? Well, I did pick up a few titles, but I think I can get better discounts with shops like Strand, Blossoms. For instance the Asterix comics was being sold at 365 / book, the price of the same book at Strand is 225 Rs!

On the upper floor of the same mall, they had Reliance Digital store that offers LCD TVs, Laptops, Refrigerators, Mobiles, Home Appliances and their accessories.

Again the question comes, will I ever buy from this store? Not really, if you are smart buyer and want to save your hard earned money, then watch out for some fabulous offers by shops such as Viveks, Pai, Girias during festival seasons.

Of course that's just me, an average IT Professional, I am sure the Indian Economy has quite a bunch of "High net worth Individuals" with high disposable income who would close their eyes and buy stuff without checking out prices at other shops. This store is for such individuals, not to mention for those who are looking at unwinding after a busy week at work.

All in all, very impressive store and I expect Reliance stock to appreciate over time with RIL getting in to so many ventures.

Happy New Year 2008

Wish you all a very happy and a prosperous New Year. This year I intend to be a wisor investor than I was last year. Hopefully I will learn from all the mistakes I did last year. I am starting the new year with an investment in selected Mutual Fund. Reasons? Well, for starters SEBI has removed the entry load if one invests directly via the AMC. Secondly markets are showing exuberance but at the same time they are very volatile. I think at the moment I am better off with putting the analysis burden on a professional manager than doing it by myself.

I am a happy customer of Bajaj Capital, though I seldom take their advices. I consult them primarily because they offer a "one shop" solution and make life bit easier. But now that SEBI has removed the entry load, I think I am better off by directly contacting the AMC and save some moolah.

How much would you then save? Let's see, most of the funds have 2.25% entry load, so on an investment of 1 lakh you would save 2,250 Rs. Not a bad deal. Let's see how it goes, as I have never contacted an AMC directly before and yet to see their services. Bajaj Capital on the other hand has been offering their client the best service by attending to all customer queries.

This is applicable from January 4th 2008, so let's see how it works out and how investors & brokers react to it. Meanwhile, if you try to exercise this option then make sure you do your research on a fund before doing the investment. Check out Mutual Funds India and Value Research Online.