Amazing Ordeals and Worst Ideas

Comparing Roomba and Neato

noreply@blogger.com (Medhavi) — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 03:04:00 +0000

Giving up on something is usually not a happy moment. But when it comes to cleaning and vacuuming, it may very well be. So we bought our first Roomba (530). Nice, round and graceful white. Then we thought that we will use it for our lower floor and buy Neato. There was a nice deal on Woot.com for a Neato XV-12. I read the reviews and researched since this was going to be an additional $300 investment.

Initial reviews indicated that Neato was a much smarter robot which could pretty much memorize your entire room layout, had an on screen display and a voice with a built in scheduler. I agree with all this stuff - except it sucks at cleaning. Roomba 530 may seem a bit Neanderthal in front of a Neato XV-12 but it is definitely more effective at its main job. The two key parts of a Roomba which make it more effective are a lower brush and the sidesweep. These two more than make up for the lost time wandering around in circles. It also makes way less noise than Neato. The battery also holds charge for much longer.

What the Neato does good is to be able to find its charger on its own (if you didnt ever pick it up and move around).

Comparing Jawbone ICON, Blue Ant T1 and Jabra EASYGO

noreply@blogger.com (Medhavi) — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 16:29:00 +0000

In the past year I have cycled through the ICON, Blue Ant T1 and JABRA EASYGO - quite popular headsets. My experience has been sometimes quite painful where either the headset had a tragic ending or I had an mutilating accident. Frankly I havent still found that perfect headset for my not so perfect ears ;)

ICON: The Jawbone icon is perhaps the most feature rich headset with the ability to load a large variety of preconfigured voices, notifications etc. It is small and very elegant. Supports A2DP which is needed to listen to songs or other kinds of media from your device.It had a hard time sticking to my ear though. Eventually it met its fate in the driveway.

Jabra EASYGO: This headset was perhaps the cheapest of the three that I bought on a Black Friday sale and has been the best investment. Excellent voice quality. No A2DP though. It also stays comfortably only my ear all day long without bothering or even me noticing it. The looks are also elegant. Overall if it supported A2DP, it would be the best headset.

Blue Ant T1: This is perhaps the worst headset I tried. I still use it but only for A2DP connections. The voice quality is good if you are sitting or walking. The headset is unusable in my car though when driving at 60+. No one can hear me. I change the headset to Jabra and voila - problem is fixed. It also has a hard time staying connected to my phone all the time. I see a lot of drops. Suddenly the connection would die and then few minutes later it would connect again to my HTC. This problem doesnt happen with the Jabra. On top of this, this headset is huge and has a hard time staying put on the ear. It rarely is stable, but when it is, it is comfortable. Works when I am listening to a presentation or songs on my phone.

Setting up SVN on Windows

noreply@blogger.com (Medhavi) — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 21:40:00 +0000

I get asked this question a lot by Windows users who are using Source Safe and want to try one of the common open source tools like Subversion. There seems to be a lot of information about this on the web so I have often redirected them to Google the subject. Often I was surprised by the end result. For example - while they got SVN to work on the system, they have multiple apache servers running on the box - one for SVN, another for bugzilla etc. The ideal environment for this setup as I would expect is as follows:

1) There should be a single instance of apache server, mysql, PHP and Active Perl on the machine.
2) You should integrate SVN with the windows domain controller in your network. Creating users and passwords in SVN does not scale very well, especially when the system is fully operational and you are involved with hundreds of other tasks.
3) You need to integrate SVN with bugzilla using SCMBug. That really helps when you are trying to build patches and allows you to squeeze as much possible from bugzilla.
4) With bugzilla you need to use Mediawiki and the bugzilla reports module which comes with it. It allows you to build a Scrum dashboard you can use next or do reporting, release management, to-do lists, milestones, deadlines etc. It makes everything very visual for people who are not continuously using the bug system. And visual is very empowering in the organization.

So you should set up SVN with all these requirements in mind. Eventually you may be doing a lot with this setup.I will be posting some details on this setup in the Turngeek blog.

Flash mob robs wisteria 7-11!

noreply@blogger.com (Medhavi) — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 01:45:00 +0000

I heard today from a friend that a flash mob organized over the internet using tweets robbed a Maryland 7-11. This seems really a dumb thing to do considering all of these folks are caught on video. I am not sure what signal are they trying to send here... Check this out -

This happened on the Maryland/DC Metro Line

noreply@blogger.com (Medhavi) — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 03:29:00 +0000

This is the metro line I take everyday. Usually it ends up being a boring, unhappening ride but occasionally a drunk or psycho gets on the train and entertains everyone. Unfortunately (or fortunately) I missed this particular service. Check out the video.

Fluent News: Best free News app on the iPhone

noreply@blogger.com (Medhavi) — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 02:26:00 +0000

I have tried several free news apps on the iPhone. The USA Today application was definitely the pioneer among the news apps which a lot of applications have copied or adapted from. The other onesI tried: Fox, ABC, NPR and a no brand version - Fluent News. The last one has turned out to be the best one for the following reasons: it collects the stories from multiple sources (so it has the most content of any other apps), the editor puts all the related stories together and sometimes when I want to find more, I click on those and the app downloads the news stories upfront which means after the application is loaded, it still operates after internet access is gone (which is why I love to read it on the train)...

OS4 and iPhone 3G

noreply@blogger.com (Medhavi) — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 02:19:00 +0000

My experience with OS4 upgrade on the iPhone 3G has been devastating so far. I think with this upgrade Apple may have released something which users can misconfigure in a way that makes the applications really slow. Most of the time I am reading news or mail, my phone has now become unresponsive. Several clicks or attempts to scroll the window down are met with tough resistance almost as though the screen has become insensitive to my touch. I am planning to spend some time tomorrow to find out what kind of tuning I can do on the phone to make it faster and more responsive...

Can't install new software on windows due to "Installation in progress"?

noreply@blogger.com (Medhavi) — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 21:14:00 +0000

Frustrated as I was, I happened to kill some installation process on my PC. Unfortunately this sent Windows into a death spiral as after that it refused to install or uninstall anything else. So much for concurrency. I guess I had a "feature lock up" scenario. Googling on this gave me 20 different answers for a variety of instances when this happens with Office and versions of MS operating systems. Finally what worked was this. Open up the services and then disable the Windows installer service and enable it again. That did the trick. It didnt make any sense to me since I had already cleaned up a registry entry for "In Progress" for the installer, but it did work...

Trojan.BHO - whew!

noreply@blogger.com (Medhavi) — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 21:09:00 +0000

Over the July 4th weekend, my computer got infected with this spyware/virus. The behavior was interesting. It indicated that my computer was infected and that Add/Remove programs was disabled. Then it prompted me to buy Anti Virus software called AV Security Suite. When it repeatedly did so and I couldn't get rid of the messages, something was clearly up and this time it was different. There were numerous issues in all:

I couldn't run the Remove Applications tool from the Control Panel.
On clicking on any google or yahoo results, my browser would be taken to an unsolicited (but respectable :) website. Typically these sites would list the AV Security Suite solution as something I should buy.

Now its been few hours and I think I have successfully eliminated all the files related to this attack. I have some notes here which could help anyone else having this issue.

The first phase of fixes made by Malwarebytes Anti-Malware software worked really well: it deleted most of the major Trojan files on the first run. However the second and third runs revealed more files to delete. This was quite odd since it seemed like the virus was self-generating or something. Eventually I was still left with a sporadic redirection problem: Both Yahoo and Google search results would get redirected to arbitrary sites. Now these would be random sites. And the problem would kick in every now and then. It seemed like there was something slithery still sneaking around on the computer.

Then I tried a whole bunch of other software:

CCleaner: This cleaned up my entire PC, my Startup Menu etc., Everything except my Desktop I think. It didnt help with the virus at all. However it did leave me feeling clean on the PC ;)
Spybot Search & Destroy: Again, this software found some low risk cookies and files. No big deal. I am sure by tomorrow these files would find their way into my PC by tomorrow.
Super AntiSpyware. Again same results as the Spybot.
HijackThis. This was the tool which did it and I found that a normal user may find it very hard to use. In just a few seconds, it exposed a few settings for the BHO registry entries that were causing my browser to behave as it was. And deleting them was a quick snap as well. None of the other tools found/exposed what HijackThis (made by TrendMicro) did. Good job!

Overall the experience was eye-opening. My PC came with Vipre Enterprise software suite and that also was not any help at all. It couldnt find the bad registry entries and it was not able to detect/delete a lot of the files found by the other tools.

I feel that since my last dealing with a computer virus, nothing has really changed. Its only the players which has changed. The state of the industry is still the same - there is no single fix-all as maybe the viruses keep evolving...

Update: Unfortunately my fixes didn't fix it all! The PC is still suffering from tabs or redirects at random to unsolicited websites. This affects only searches done on yahoo and google. On clicking on a search result, sometimes (like the third or fourth time) I would be redirected to a bunch of websites opening one after another. Luckily none of them are offensive. Pure junk and inconvenient.

Tried the following today:

Microsoft Security Essentials: Piece of junk. Just like other microsoft software, this one is buggy and has its own problems. Couldnt even connect and download its database from microsoft website.
Prevx. This has seemed to work and it did detect a virus (and it was the only one) when my browser was opening random websites. It immediately killed my firefox and said it cleaned my hosts file. I havent had the problem since. Lets see. My fingers and everything else I can cross is crossed ;)

Jawbone Icon -- kool or what?

noreply@blogger.com (Medhavi) — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 20:16:00 +0000

After doing a research on a lot of Bluetooth headsets for my phone, I finally picked the Icon and have been testing it out past week. At this point, it still is standing out as the best gadget I bought in the past few months. If you too are looking for a bluetooth headset with A2DP support, please need to read on...

The Jawbone Icon is one of the newer headsets in the Jawbone family and it comes with support for listening music as well - and it is very convenient and easy to wear. When you look at other options to hear music you come across a lot of headsets offering stereo option. If you need superior quality music you may be better off with a wired headset. Bluetooth may not be for you. Among the Bluetooth headsets there are a few stereo options as well with a detachable second headset.If you follow the keep it simple philosophy, the Jawbone offers a pretty good option. Couple of cool features attracted me to Jawbone -- its option to have voice announcements, easy redial, uploading new firmware (which is how I got the A2DP version on it). It fits great in my ear and has probably 6-8 different fitting options. The music quality is also pretty good so overall its a good package.

What's in a job...

noreply@blogger.com (Medhavi) — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 04:26:00 +0000

If you read Andy Grove's article in the recent issue of Business Week, he does leave you wondering about what is going to happen to America's superiority in the area of innovation. I think most of what he says is right. But maybe not all of it. For example, the U.S still reigns supreme in design innovation. The iPhone is one example. I can probably say the same for a lot of software products. However the U.S has lost significant speed in terms of implementation (and manufacturing industry as Andy claims in his article). I feel the science of implementation is being perfected in Asia beyond what it ever was in the U.S. Scaling and Quality share the same commentary. The U.S has become a land of ideas. However we must remember that ideas are dime a dozen and easy to copy. One out of thousand ideas ever succeed in the marketplace and ideas by themselves never are a competitive advantage. In fact most simple ideas are improvements thought upon current technology and are built on the foundation of knowing the implementation or manufacturing side of the equation. In the near future, most of this innovation is going to come from outside since nothing is made here in the U.S except needles and specialty screws...

What do you hate the iPhone for?

noreply@blogger.com (Medhavi) — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 04:10:00 +0000

I have begun to hate my iPhone. At least one in a while. It seems to mimic my Windows PC at least a few times a day - fails to deliver when I most need it or depend on it once held the promise to. Have your iPhone made it harder for you to make that phone call or receive one? Mine has. Perhaps when it is downloading email at the time an incoming call is coming. I try to pick up the call and cannot. The new OS4 on my second generation iPhone has made is very slow I think.Its possible that just like a windows PC, it allows users to trip and make mistakes which they come to regret big time.

I think even some apps on the iPhone are sooo slow - not sure how they got to be approved. Try using the redbox application on the iPhone. It takes so long to start that I can almost whiz past 2-3 redbox locations and be home.

I can probably learn and tweak my iPhone config or unload some apps or decrease the frequency at which my apps fetch data but given we are dealing with Apple here - I question why do we need to do it? Why is it that the user interface cannot prioritize where and what I am clicking on v/s what is running in the background on the iPhone?

It all seems so Windows to me. All over again. So stupid ... ;)

Is Chrome OS going to be supported by IT folks?

noreply@blogger.com (Medhavi) — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 07:15:00 +0000

Just a random thought I had - you must have heard that the open source Chrome OS (based on linux kernel) is going to make the web live waay too much easy. Its targeted towards the Windows users. I believe most users if given a choice would dump Windows OS. However most IT folks would not. I am sure that Chrome would be very good at handling web security but it may still create a havoc on enterprise security policies. If Google really wants to help users, then it first needs to enroll the IT teams at enterprises...

Finally cleaned up my twitter account

noreply@blogger.com (Medhavi) — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 04:12:00 +0000

For the whole last year my twitter account got accidentally linked to one of the websites we were working on. Using the twitter API, each headline post on the site was popping up on my twitter account. I didnt notice until I had like 800 posts. To clean it up I discovered lots of APIs and quick frameworks which required download, compile etc.

This one was a complete program which did the job in 5 minutes. Oh, I am so grateful there is software to kill other software :).

One of the weird things I noticed was that while cleaning up you could see that the program would clean up all the posts and then some remining ones would appear in few seconds on the twitter page as I was refreshing it. Very clever indeed twitter...!

Sharepoint Wiki

noreply@blogger.com (Medhavi) — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 03:57:00 +0000

I had the recent distasteful experiencing of using Sharepoint Wiki after having a good time with mediawiki installs for a long time. I must say Windows XP and the Wiki act together like "Thing 1" and "Thing 2" in Dr Suess's Cat in the Hat! After a few mistrials I found that the Sharepoint wiki only worked on IE, similar to Exchange's Online access. For example I couldn't get the WYSIWYG editor to work with Chrome - which is blazingly fast compared to IE. Even basic editing didnt work and introduced some confusing letter overwring issue when you went back into the textboxes. Meanwhile on every second day these days it seems XP downloads a "reboot required" update from Microsoft.

I must say when is this mess going to end and we put a lock on or tame the Microsoft craziness?

A review of Xobni

noreply@blogger.com (Medhavi) — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 02:10:00 +0000

After having fully converted from Outlook to a Gmail user (where I started receiving corporate email as well) I had the misfortune of using MS Outlook again. To my surprise after 3 years, MS Outlook had not changed much - same old and still hard to use. The parts which appeared to have even become worse were searching through emails and typing in the email addresses in the To/Cc fields. After having used Gmail exclusively for 3 years I had been thoroughly pampered.

I figure when I use Outlook my time is probably split as follows: creating new mail (25%), reading mail (25%) and searching for something in the mails (50%). I was delighted to find that a new tool called Xobni was recently released and it made search blazingly fast and easy to use. It installs itself in the right hand side panel of Outlook and provides a whole bunch of features out of which I found searching through my emails to be the most useful.

A review of Flypaper

noreply@blogger.com (Medhavi) — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 02:01:00 +0000

I recently tried out Flypaper, a service for doing interactive flash presentations. My goal was to get a web demo together and I was exploring all kinds of things: tools like Camtasia, Demobuilder to people providing the complete package including the creatives and graphics. The demo was supposed to be 4-5 minutes long and in this case it was not a software product or web based service. So I quickly discovered that while Camtasia and other flash building options could be part of the solution, they would not be enough. I needed something which could do the old and familiar powerpoint effects like blurring, animation, movement etc and have voice over it. Flypaper would have been ideal: it is designed to target exactly what I need. However, I found the service less than expected. This is probably due to the fact that it is still fairly new. I found that only a small number of powerpoint effects were captured. The software was based on .NET. The company needs to consider a technology like Adobe AIR now. The download was fairly lengthy: .NET 3.5 was around 35 MB or so and this was followed by the Flypaper software. Animation was also not up to par. Overall, I still need to figure out how to do my demo, but it seems that software to convert powerpoint to flash exists and there is a way to get my audio embedded in the slide transitions as well. In fact Camtasia does it I think. I would look at Flypaper again in next few months - there is some promise there, but it is all about what direction the product takes since its still fairly primitive.

Is India the next hot destination for Telecom?

noreply@blogger.com (Medhavi) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 19:29:00 +0000

If this was not already true, it is now inevitable. TRAI (equivalent of FCC in India) has now opened up how VoIP based products and services can be sold to the Indian consumers. We should see the emergence of an Indian version of Vonage, the need for VoIP related CALEA products, E911, SBCs and other security products already built and made popular in the U.S market. This is a boon for the telecom market which is out of breadth these days. Checkout the article here.

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fōneathon™ - Campaigns by communities

noreply@blogger.com (Medhavi) — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 03:27:00 +0000

Getting campaigns off the ground could not be more easier. Checkout foneathon - an online subscription service which make campaign management and calling dirt cheap and simple. Community volunteers can log on from their homes (consider the hot weather and high gas prices as the incentive) and collaborate in a managed campaign to collect donations or get people out to vote. The foneathon service is powered by 3CLogic's TAG technology (note that I am involved with that company) and comes with full reporting and power/auto dialing features. TAGs are the new way to do telephony and other real time apps without heavy duty and expensive server resources in the network. The same technology is also used to power the Obelyx solution targeted towards more traditional contact center solutions available on a subscription model.

Update: Full Press Release is online now.

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3CLogic Powers KCG Call Centers with Predictive Dialing

noreply@blogger.com (Medhavi) — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 03:31:00 +0000

This press release went out today regarding the Obelyx service which is powered by 3CLogic's TAG technology. KCG was able to go live using the Obelyx on demand service for several of its campaigns without an infrastructural changes. Obelyx comes bundled with standard expected features like leads management, analytics etc, but delivered in a more Web 2.0 model. For example, all reports are built using Adobe Flex real time charts. All agent nodes are configurable in real time from a management account which can be operated from anywhere by signing on to an online account. Call dialing performs much better since it minimizes unnecessary call transfers, clicks and call holds which irritate customers.

Here is the press release

The fate of RIAs

noreply@blogger.com (Medhavi) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 05:30:00 +0000

RIA or Rich Internet Apps is another name for Web based applications delivered over the browser or stand alone applications which are cross platform much like today's browsers are. The technology wars are beginning to rage now in this area with big giants like Adobe, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft each coming out with their products and packages to solve this problem. First of all I think in this war users are the ones to benefit at all times. Chances are more than one technology will emerge as winner here as it frequently happens over the web. Interperability is less of a concern here since it involves mostly front end technologies which do not have too much of a back end integration and almost all use web services (XML/SOAP) on the back. Lets take a look at what the players are here and then look at the main differences in the approaches and current capabilities:

1) Adobe Flash/AIR
2) Google Gears
3) Yahoo! BrowserPlus
4) Microsoft Silverlight
5) SproutCore

There are a couple of comparison points to use: the technology they use, penetration potential, multimedia capabilities. Lets start with the big points first: SproutCore - a relatively unknown framework is now backed by Apple who want to use it on the iPhone . It is an open source framework which uses javascript. There are few other javascript frameworks used to deliver web 2.0 apps which are quite popular as well (like prototype, Scriptaculous etc) but SproutCore is the only one on par with RIAs it seems. From a support standpoint, any Javascript framework is already highly penetrated since it is supported by today's browsers and could possibly enjoy the same success as Flash if they deliver on features. Note that SproutCore competes more with Flash than Google Gears which is also open source and based on javascript. The main difference is that Gears installs SQLite (which allows it to work offline). This makes its application space similar to Adobe AIR instead of Adobe Flash. AIR is a separate runtime which uses SQLite as well. Microsoft Silverlight is a plugin on the other hand, competing more with Flash than with AIR or Gears. However it is proprietary, requires a download and possibly will have huge penetration issues. It also doesn't compete well with Flash when it comes to features. For example, Flash 9 supports H.264 and Flash 10 supports speex (open source voice codec) which I believe will enormously increase the number of applications built with Flash. A company called Ribbit builds a cool Flash based phone which integrates with their back end infrastructure as well. Real time voice is not possible with any of the other Flash alternatives to this day. Another great example is recording your video from the PCs embedded camera directly from the browser - that's possible only with Flash today I believe (requires MX server). All this is bound to change this year. I think Flash will face stiff competition from SproutCore, especially on the iPhone. Silverlight and Yahoo! Browser plus technologies may fade away or evolve into AIR competitors but they need to move fast.

Comparing Video Monetization startups

noreply@blogger.com (Medhavi) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 05:21:00 +0000

In the past 1-2 years, quite a few companies have started in the valley targeting monetization of Internet Videos. I am not talking about destination sites like YouTube here, but companies which are building technology or services for other destination sites having video content which they wish to monetize. Few examples I looked at (there are many more including Maven which was acquired by Yahoo in the beginning part of the year): Brightcove, Ooyala, Delve and Move. It is worthwhile to investigate how these companies are each solving the problem with a different solution twist.

First, lets see what is important to the customers (Content sites). A content site wants to see its users become repeat users and it wants to be able to monetize the visits. Everything else is simply an unnecessary detail in this equation. For users to become repeat visitors, it is all about experience and the quality of the content. Assuming the latter is not in question, there is still a lot to be figured out in giving the best possible experience to the end user. This experience depends on the media player and the network over which media delivered to the user (which determines buffering, bandwidth, resolution etc). Move Networks has taken an interesting approach here by building their own player and possibly choosing a player platform different from what the majority of web uses (Flash). Brightcove, the one which is the most advanced of these four appears to hasve reinvented itself a few times it seems but they have a feature rich platform. Both Brightcove and Move have taken huge investments as well (about 100M each). Ooyala and Delve on the other hand are more nimble and flexible (with less money gone in as well < 10M). Ooyala intends to revolutionize how and what kinds of ads are shown to the users while Delve's focus is to try look inside the video's audio part for rich information which can be matched to the ads. Both models try to get the user engaged before showing a relevant ad - something which Move and Brightcove don't do it seems.

More later.

A Microsoft without Gates

noreply@blogger.com (Medhavi) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 03:51:00 +0000

I think Bill Gate's departure from Microsoft into the world of Philanthropy has become a much talked about topic today. Some very smart decisions made by Gates at the forming stages of the company gave shape to how Microsoft has evolved in the last ten years or so. Unfortunately (or fortunately) Gates proved to be too slow for the "internet bulldozer" which continues to make more inroads and forays into Microsoft's plush green lawns.

My prediction is that Gate's is just taking a break. Microsoft is going to continue to stumble and give it five or at most ten years, Gates will be back at its helm and this time he will open source windows ;)

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SeeqPod - one of the best media search engines

noreply@blogger.com (Medhavi) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 03:40:00 +0000

If you haven't understood the power of media search engines, try out SeeqPod and you will understand. I think with the explosion of content on the internet, it is no longer the case that a search engine like Google which mixes textual search results with media works. If I am searching for an audio or video, I want something specialized like SeeqPod. With the widespread penetration of Broadband, multimedia phones and Flash technology, video is now the new king of the internet.

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OpenTable

noreply@blogger.com (Medhavi) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 15:44:00 +0000

If you are a frequent visitor to restaurants taking reservations, OpenTable might be of interest to you. Techcrunch recently reported on this briefly - the site seems to have taken 70M reservations on 8000 restaurants which is pretty impressive. I visited the site and briefly browsed through it. It seemed to me that what it needs is a widget instead of being a sole destination site. The widget would allow OpenTable to offer reservation services on popular review sites like Washingtonion or Restaurants.com. The problem of course is that not all restaurants support the OpenTable integration, but that should be easy to check in software and collect data on rather than skip as a service. Overall, I think this can grow very fast in metro areas and depending on ease of use this can even rake in new users who traditionally are not used to making reservations before they go and restaurants who traditionally have shunned the idea of allowing reservations. To prevent users from misusing or abusing the service, the restaurants should be able to give some kind of rating back to the user which can help in raising the comfort level of restaurants who are not part of the OpenTable system.

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