Just Me & Myself

Android stuff

2011-05-06T21:25:00.000-05:00

Install DroidXBootstrap.apk
http://code.google.com/p/xdroidx/downloads/detail?name=DroidXBootstrap.apk

How to create a backup of your Droid
http://www.simplehelp.net/2011/01/06/how-to-create-full-backups-of-your-droid-x/

How to restore Droid using a backup
http://www.simplehelp.net/2011/01/15/how-to-restore-a-backup-of-your-droid-x/

Unbricking your droid phone
http://www.droidxforums.com/forum/droid-x-rs-guides/22394-sbf-detailed-guide-success-windows-7-a.html

The above link also has drivers for rsd lite and motorola drivers

Unless you have the drivers installed, rsd lite cannot unbrick your phone.

Mad Men streaming exclusively on Netflix

2011-04-08T21:09:00.002-05:00

WSJ is reporting Netflix bagged the rights to exclusively stream Mad Men. This is great news.

Mad Men is a critically acclaimed series. I have not watched one episode so far but I know I am going to watch all seasons when they come on Netflix. It was the same case with Weeds.

Apparently Netflix stocks took a nose dive after the deal was announced. For once, I am really happy that someone at a big company actually cares about customers and not the stock holders. I admire Netflix for having the guts to do what is best for customers and not the investors.

I have always believed the first and foremost concern for any company should be customers, followed by employees and last comes investors. These days, it seems to be the other way around. Companies only care for their stock price (investors, stock holders), then maybe customers and absolutely last is the employees. Such is the sad state of companies these days. How can one forget the age old driving principle - customer first. Your company is in the shape it is today because the customers patronage and because of the hard work of your employees. Any how, I am digressing.

I hope Netflix continues to be the great company that it is today and keeps it focus on doing what it wants to do. It is amazing the kind of focus they have. They dont want to be a VOD service, they dont want to sell discs, they dont want to do something else. I wish more companies were like them and they continue to be like them when they stop growing and start to taper off.

The information seem to suggest Mad Men will be available for streaming starting July 1st.

Have fun with those mad men

Mad Men streaming exclusively on Netflix

2011-04-08T21:09:00.000-05:00

iTerm2

2011-04-08T10:27:00.000-05:00

Having moved recently to Mac, less than a year now, I am still discovering what works for me and what doesn't. Frankly, I dont see whats the fuss about macs. I dont know if being a lifetime Windows user has biased me for ever or if there is really nothing appealing to me in a mac. Well, thats the topic for some other post.

One of the first things that I was not very happy about on the mac was the built in terminal. Coming from years of Linux & Solaris use, the mac terminal was just not enough. It fell short in a number of ways. It does support tabs, which is great. I am a heavy user of Ctrl+PageUp, Ctrl+home, Ctrl+arrows etc on the PC platform. As many know, the default key board on the Mac does not provide those keys. That was my first annoyance. It took a while to figure out what keys to use instead and till this day, almost a year after I started using it, I am not yet comfortable. Maybe its just me.

Another I found lacking was the support for profiles. Although the terminal does support multiple color profiles, there is no way to save multiple machine profiles.

And this is coming from someone who was very happy with Putty. Go figure.

So I was searching for a better terminal application for Mac. I came across a number of recommendations:

Visor - A "hack" to the built in terminal.app to make it more useful
Coda - This app is not specifically designed to be a terminal emulator. It is more directed towards a holistic web development tool.
iTerm2 - A separate app for terminal emulation
Terminator - JAVA based terminal emulator

The following may also be considered alternatives:

Screen for mac - Type screen in your terminal
Terminator - Not sure if this is available for mac

Given the choices, I decided to try iTerm2.

It lets you create multiple login/machine profiles, multiple color profiles and lets you remap keys. To be fair, Terminal.app also lets you remap keys.

Please note, iTerm2 is still in Alpha but do not let that scare you. It is very usable and the developers are very prompt and responsive to any issues you let them know about. I filed two issues and both were answered within a couple of hours. Being a Alpha stage code, it is surprisingly stable and slick.

Highly recommended.

Britney new music video Till the wold ends premiere

2011-04-06T11:18:00.000-05:00

Britney released her new video Till the World Ends.

Watch it right here

Britney Spears - Till The World Ends

Its pretty awesome and continues to impress just as most of Britney Spears's videos do.

I did not care much for her performance on GMA a few days ago. It was a bit lethargic and failed to impress. I did not care much for her Hold It Against Me video as well. It is such an awesome energetic beat but the video seemed like an ad for sony, perfumes, dating site and the like. The lyrics and beat should make it an awesome club scene video with her trying to woo a guy across the dance floor .. but the video turned out to be her standing in a long dress and promoting products. Or maybe I am just too dumb to understand the creativity in that video, who knows. The only upside was the Britney fights Britney clip.

But Till the World Ends, delivers and its very impressive.

First Impressions: Crackle

2011-04-02T17:00:00.021-05:00

Summary: Dont plan on discontinuing any of your existing services yet. Highly buggy, unpolished and very unusable.

As posted earlier, I eagerly went home and hooked up my laptop to the flat panel and fired up my browser to watch Seinfeld on Crackle.

Apart from the annoying startup clip about Crackle, it started up alright. So far so good.

Like on TV, it stopped right after the clip of Seinfeld's stand up sequence and an ad came up. Ok ... not even 30 seconds in to the playback and I am seeing two ads (Crackle, some thing else). Interesting to note, adblock plus was not able to block the ads on this site.

This episode is one of my favorites, The Chinese Restaurant. The playback continued after the ad. Went on for 15 enjoyable minutes. At that point, it stopped and played another ad. Playback resumed and abruptly stopped after few minutes and declared

"You have been watching The Chinese Restaurant". "Next up ..."

Seems to me this should show up AFTER the episode finished. Before I could act on it, it started the next episode in my queue. I attempted several times to complete the previous episode but was not successful.

The default resolution for the playback is 360p. You are offered the choice to switch to 480p. But I was not successful in watching 480p playback. The playback would just freeze when 480p is selected. I have a high speed connection from cable company (12 Mbps), so bandwidth is probably not the issue.

So, being a good user, I tried to provide a bug report of all these issues using their "Have Feedback?" link. I diligently filled up everything and hit continue. Nothing happens. I try again, nothing happens. Cool, even the bug reporting system is not working. The bug reporting system is handled by GetSatisfaction and I have had amazingly good experience with that system having used it before on other services. But apparently on Crackle, even that doesnt work.

They certainly do have a great collection of movies and TV series. But the overall user experience is terrible. Yes, the site is brand new and they need to polish it up, but this feels more like an engineering sample than something that is suitable for mass consumption by early adopters. And they definitely need to get rid of the very annoying clip at the start of the playback. I think I watch that clip more than any content.

Crackle is a direct competitor to Hulu rather than Amazon VOD or Netflix.

Here is my suspicion - Crackle wants to make the online / streaming viewing experience so bad that customers will stick to traditional means of delivery.

Unfortunately for them, Netflix offers an amazing online viewing experience. Of course, everyone is slowly starting to choke Netflix access to content. Lets see how this plays out.

With that, I say goodbye to Crackle for at least a couple of months. Sitting back and enjoying Trial and Error on Netflix.

Google April Fool Pranks

2011-04-02T11:30:00.000-05:00

If you haven't noticed already, here is this years Aprils Fools Day prank from Google

Gmail Motion

And here is the one from Linkedin

Happy Aprils Fools everyone.

Seinfeld available on Crackle

2011-04-01T19:30:00.000-05:00

Crackle is a new service offering free streaming movies and TV series. However, the streams are not ad-free. Your viewing experience will be like that of TV with ads every 15 minutes or so.

However, todays announcement is that Seinfeld, the most popular show about nothing is now available on Crackle. They are starting with 10 iconic episodes that include

The chinese restaurant
The bubble boy
The pick
The junior mint
The puffy shirt
The marine biologist
The hamptons
The soup nazi
The bizarro Jerry
The yada yada

I love Seinfeld. And I love that it is streaming on crackle. This is probably what I will be doing this weekend.

If you like to purchase disc versions of Seinfeld, here it is with all 180 episodes

What to watch on Netflix tonight?

2011-04-01T14:26:00.000-05:00

If you are looking forward to a relaxing night at home, cuddled up with some warm soup or a cold beer and enjoy something on Netflix instant, here are some recommendations:

Old is gold (Relatively old movies)

Drama: Leaving Las Vegas
Thriller: Shattered
Comedy: Risky Business

Foregin

No One Killed Jessica

New Movies:

Eat Pray Love

Grab a glass of wine or a cold one and kick back. Have fun and enjoy your weekend!

If you are looking for a Netflix player, Roku is a great choice. If you already own a PS3, you already have the best Netlifx player available.

Dinner and a movie

2011-03-29T22:35:00.002-05:00

Today we settled in for a good home cooked dinner and a relaxing movie. I love Indian dishes and today was Bisi Beli Bath, its a dish from southern India. Its made of pulses (lentils), rice and vegetables. The spice level can be customized to your taste and its packed with flavor, proteins and loads of good stuff for your body. Here is a sample recipe.

And for the movie, picked a recent romantic comedy - Life as we know it. Its a pretty light hearted movie perfect for relaxing evenings.

My rating: *** 3 stars

Here is a link if you are interested in the movie
Video on Demand
Blu-ray disc

Installing Firefox v4.0 on Mac OS X

2011-03-24T20:37:00.000-05:00

Summary instructions to install Firefox 4.0 on Mac OS X:

Download Firefox v4.0
Quit any open windows of Firefox 3.x
Open a terminal
Type
sudo rm /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/*.dylib
Open finder window and go to the Downloads folder
Double click the downloaded Firefox disk image (dmg file)
Click on the Firefox image and drag it to the Applications folder
Click on "Replace" when the installer asks if you want to replace existing package
Eject the Firefox disk image by clicking eject in the finder window
Open Firefox from applications folder
Enjoy Firefox 4.0

Errors encountered:

This operation cannot be completed because the item "libsmine3.dylib" is in use
This operation cannot be completed because the item "libplds4.dylib" is in use
Culprit: Cisco AnyConnect VPN

The release that everyone was anxiously waiting for, Firefox 4.0, is available now.

I had the Firefox home page open and it was announcing proudly and calling to me in bold colors "Download now".

Anxiously, I fired up Firfox 3.6 and hit Help->Check Updates.

Seconds seemed minutes as I restlessly tapped my fingers waiting for the progress bar to reach 100% and show me that it is now ready to download v4.0. Finally, the update check completed and stared blankly at me saying there were no new releases. I quickly dismissed it as server overload and clicked check updates again. No luck again. I gave up and clicked on the big green graphic on Firefox home page and waited for the Mac OS X disk image bundle to download.

Already irritated with Firefox 3.6 for failing to automatically update to 4.0, I mounted the freshly downloaded dmg file and dragged the icon to Applications folder to install. But my joy was short lived. Mac OS X now took the turn to dampen my excitement and complained

The operation cannot be completed because the item "libsmime3.dylib" is in use.

I tried again completely quitting Firefox 3.6 and everything else I could think of. No luck. Angered by the endless roadblocks, I fired up the mac terminal and tried to find out which application was using the libsmime3.dylib file.

The command lsof - list open files, commonly found on all Unix based systems (UNIX, AIX, SOLARIS, Linux, BSD and of course, Mac OS X).

sudo lsof -V | grep -i mime

showed that a service related to Cisco AnyConnect VPN client was the root cause. Cisco VPN client is a commonly used software to remotely establish secure connections to work place, also called a virtual private networking client software. This is very common and popular way to secure connections from anywhere in the world to work places.

I tried killing the process with kill -9 and killall. But the process respawned immediately. There was no way I was going to kill this process with any success.

Typically if an application has a file open, it is not possible to move or remove that file due to lock issues. But since there were no other options and I did not know of any limited service mode in Mac OS X, like safe mode in Windows or single user mode in Linux, I tried to delete the files held open by the Cisco AnyConnect Client (vpnagentd)

sudo rm /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/*.dylib

I tried installing again by dragging the icon to Applications folder. Lo, Behlod! it worked.

For some reason, Cisco AnyConnect VPN service (vpnagentd) is holding open several dylib files in Firefox folder.

There you go, simple steps to work around Firefix installer errors.

Welcome to my world

2011-03-24T14:31:00.001-05:00

So, I join millions of others to express my thoughts and opinions through my own personal blog. Exciting!

This is by no means my first attempt at blogging. I started out with MSN/Live spaces, blogged for a little while and then abandoned it. It only remains to be seen how much I will devote myself to this blog.

I live in Central Illinois, moved here only recently. So there will be some posts about politics, life and events from this area.

I also hope to pen down some posts about technology, energy conservation, health, food etc. Hopefully you will find it entertaining, informative and engaging.

I enabled ads on my blog. You are free to block them using excellent ad-blockers available for every browser, my favorite being Adblock Plus. It is very effective at blocking ads, especially text and banner ads.