Am alive

Been months since i logged into wordpress.So what was keeping me busy? Well a lot of things. Work got tighter on and off, forcing to stretch for project deliveries.But a lot of other activities also took my time. Playing TT at office in the evenings was a great exercise and stress buster.

I typed the above sometime in July and i stopped it and didnt publish that time.So what else is keeping me going? Justifying that i was busy at work all along the year will be a lie, though it can attribute to 50%. So what are the other acitivities that i did? Apart from work, been doing quite few things that bring in some satisfaction. Be it hanging around with busroutes.in guys and making some tiny contribution in python/php/testing or literally roaming around the streets for mapping e-city / hosur or attending the Wikipedia Meetup 3 and getting hooked into it or making my first article appear on the DYK section of the main page or participating in Wikipedia takes Chennai, it was all pure fun and learning. Came across a bunch of awesome people in the process of doing these things. Been to college couple of times during the alumni meet and then for software freedom day, it was just refreshing to breathe the “old air”. So stressed office schedules + Parallel activities like above + travelling home twice a month leaves no time for blogging. I have been tweeting heavily though for quite sometime now. Follow me there. Hope i will update this blog soon and will not keep it idle for a year.

My 1 month old Nokia E51

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Nokia E51

When all the buzz is on iPhone, its really a cool mobile from Nokia having all the equivalent features and a more simplistic form factor and ‘more like a cell phone’ makes it feel the owner ‘being home’ instead of carrying a big jumbo without compramising on the feature set. You can read the specs by clicking above pic.

7 daysA month into it, what am i upto. Well firstly its been a hectic week since i got this phone, so really not much of time to get used to it. Just uploaded few mp3s, activated GPRS and downloaded few apps.Lot more can be done. One striking feature this mobile with which i was very much impressed was (No its not aGPS, not WiFi, not 3G). Its a very good feature supporting accessibility for visual impaired. Yes text to speech / Voice Aid.If this feature gets into basic mobiles technology will truely empower those people and transform thier lives.Also this features helps us too when it announces the caller name at the start of ring tone, so that we can know who the caller is even when the phone is inside our pockets. Just checked that this feature is also present in Nokia N73(which share a lot of things in common).

Coming to the features, 3G is absolutely useless as of now in india unless spectrum allocation is done for which atleast it may take a year or 2 hopefully. Sooner the better for me

WiFi is good, but havent tested as all the signals i recieved so far are encrypted corporate networks.Will try out soon in some CCDay.Also planning to get got a Wireless router and using WiFi at home.Seems good EDGE / GPRS is fine but airtels rate is costly for 140 per week.(Though cheaper option if am roaming for a week without a computer, i get a complete substitute for 20 per day which anyway i will spend for cafe).

Built in radio,music player,real player(though havent tried a single video yet) tries to satisfy entertainment needs.Integerated Email with push mail support, office docs,pdf viewer/editor,WiFi it has all thats needed for a miniature substitute for a laptop for a person who always needs to be upto date.

Applications currently installed :-

1. GMail – Obvious
2. GMaps – aGPS works great, maps even remote places like ‘Vengambakkam’ near Kalpakkam.I was surprised.
3. Google search
4. Fring — Skype + Gtalk voice calls free decent chat interface.
5. Watrpad — Supposed to be a book reader.
6. Teashark — browser based on the same engine used by safari.(Yes you got it. No Opera)
7. mChek, ngPay — mcommerce.
8. mundu Radio. Finally i get to listen some free tamil radio in bangalore for free.
9. Others arent worth mentioning after trying.

Photo clarity is fine.

Overall totally using it.(One more long time draft coming out )

Testing Moblogging Clients

First Excuses to my feed subscribers. They may have got spammed by this time. Im analyzing different moblogging clients.

JWordPress doesnt seem to work and development is not active (and no developer doc in english).

Testing a Photo Moblogging client by blogplanet. Its posting but without Titles for the posts. Seeing all this, im seriously thinking of writing a moblogging client in J2ME (Though i dont know J2ME, development shouldnt take more than a couple of weeks.) XMLRPC rocks!!

And I found twibble for mobile, and guess i will start twittering often.

Using the full power of my Nokia 6021 bought 2 years back with GPRS,J2ME support for 7k that time.Now that GPRS is cheap(15p for 10KB is cheap and with no rentals) ,i browse occasionally on Opera Mini,using MoneyManager to track expenses, and started exploring on Mo(micro)blogging. Have to look into lot of other interesting apps. I gotto get one dictionary too.

Once again apologies to feed subscribers.You may recieve some more in the days to come.

Be Carefull — Installing Twitter App on Facebook

I recently tried facebook and found it cool (though i dint have many people there)[Orkut still rules India].One of the best feature in facebook is installing user apps and connecting to other social networks or any site for that matter. I just got back to twittering after the seeing the popularity of it in Microblogging session at BCB4(post to be written soon, after uploading pics).So I thought of installing twitter app on my facebook,To my shock i found this screen in which twitter password field was a plain text box and displayed my password.So be careful if you going to install this app on your facebook.Twitter guys what happened to you??

Orkut adds RSS feeds

Orkut has added feeds into it. One can now add their blog/photo album/video channel or even news  feeds into their profiles with ease.This will increase the number of people who view those sites.Here is my profile

So go and add yours!!!

PS : Lot of orkut related posts coming soon.watch out.Im just lazy to edit and post.