Gautam's World

Gautam @ Tumblr

2011-03-16T22:28:37Z

Visit my Tumblr page for some additional stuff.

http://edged.tumblr.com/

URL:http://www.gautamsworld.com/?p=104001

It's been 3 years ...

2010-09-18T21:33:02Z

Well looks like its been almost 3 years since my last post. That seems pretty long right? As Douglas Adams said - "Time is an illusion. Lunch time doubly so."

So what would I have loved to blog about in the past 3 years? Here's a short list of topics:

The rise of Twitter and Facebook
The iPad and the arrival of the tablet era
The Wii and the revolution in game controllers
Boxee and connected TVs
Our leaking tubes - WikiLeaks
WebKit, HTML5 and Google Chrome
Google App Engine
iPhone and iOS

But clinging to the past is not really my style and so onwards in to the future! I hope to share some more stuff with you all soon.

P.S. - The blog is now running on App Engine using micolog. It imported most of the content from Wordpress but not the comments (for unknown reasons) and I haven't gotten around to restoring those yet.

URL:http://www.gautamsworld.com/?p=75001

My iPhone lives!

2007-11-18T17:18:58Z

I've been playing with my iPhone for about a week now, and let me just say this and get it over with. This is the best phone I have ever used. Also for those of you reading this in India, the iPhone works perfectly here. Unlocking it takes about 20 mins and a WiFi network connected to the Internet. It was a great relief to see "INA Airtel" on the screen for the first time! This is an amazing device, especially considering that it is the very first phone made by Apple. Most of the features are implemented really well. The major complaints are regarding the features they left out. Some of which are:

Bluetooth is restricted to only headsets. No file transfer, Bluetooth GPS etc.
It doesn't shoot any video.
It doesn't mount as a disk and so you can't store your files on it. Hacks are available to do this. You can of course, sync your video, audio and image files as long as they are in the standard iPod formats.
The browser does not have the Flash plug-in. I didn't think I could really browse the web on a mobile device until the iPhone. I've tried the browsers on the Sony Ericsson P1i, Nokia N95 and Opera Mini 3 and 4 on various JavaME phones. The iPhone is a class apart. Flash support would make the experience complete.
No MMS. I personally don't mind this a whole lot since I've almost never used this feature anyway. Email is the way to go on the iPhone.

Now all of the above features can probably be coming in a software update in the near future. With the iPhone SDK being released in February, we should also be able to get some great third-party applications to fill in the remaining gaps. The iPhone may never be as open as a phone with Google's Android Mobile OS, but its probably the best we have for now. Besides the brilliant user interface and software in general, there are some small things that are really nice to have.

You can open and read all kind of mail attachments including PDF, Excel and Word files.
Even my grandmother can happily flick through a bunch of photos. Its amazing how easy and how much fun that is.
The SMS interface is displayed like a chat or IM conversation. This is much more natural than the kind of Email displays in all phones.
The iPhone charging dock comes with a line-out which you can connect to an amplifier or music system. Enjoy your tunes on the big speakers which watching the album art on your iPhone.

The first gadget I used to head for every morning was my laptop. Well now its in second place. :-)

URL:http://www.gautamsworld.com/2007/11/18/my-iphone-lives.html

Read Write NTFS for Mac OS X

2007-11-15T09:15:42Z

With Bootcamp and large hard drives, there is now a good chance that you need to access NTFS partitions on your Mac quite often. Now Mac OS does allow you to read files from NTFS partitions, but if you need to add, change or remove files, you're out of luck. Well thanks to some great open source projects, namely Fuse and NTFS-3G, we can now do all the writing we need. You need the following packages to make this all work.

Get MacFuse. The latest version while I write this is MacFUSE 10.5-1.1.1.
Get the NTFS-3G Mac DMG package. The latest version while I write this is NTFS-3G 1.1104.
Get iMountIt. This allows you to easily choose and remount a NTFS partition. The latest version while I write this was iMountIt 12 Sep, 2007.

Install the MacFuse and NTFS-3G packages. You should restart your system after this. Unpack iMountIt and drag it into your Applications folder. Run iMountIt and remount your NTFS partition. You should now have read/write access to your NTFS partition! You can confirm that your drive is mounted with NTFS-3G by opening up Disk Utility and clicking on the NTFS partition. The bottom of the dialog should read something like the screenshot below. Credit goes to daysofourmacbooks for getting me started.

Mac OS X Leopard

URL:http://www.gautamsworld.com/2007/11/15/read-write-ntfs-from-mac-os-x.html

Mac OS X Leopard

2007-11-07T10:02:18Z

It has been quite nice to upgrade to a new OS and see an increase in performance on the same hardware! I can't remember the last time I saw something like that. Leopard impresses right from the introduction video. Spotlight, Mail, Safari and the Finder are all noticeably faster. Most things in the OS have been improved, polished or cleaned up. All except the Dock I guess, which seems to have taken a step backward. The Stacks feature is not really fun to use since the icon keeps changing to reflect the contents of the folders. This means you can never make out what is what. The Dock can be fixed though. You don't have to use the Stacks, just drag them out of the dock. If you don't like the glassy 3D dock background, well there are plenty of options to change it at LeopardDocks.com. You can also remove the 3D background totally by using the following commands in the Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
killall Dock

Most of us would have already read about the big features - Time Machine, Quick Look, Boot Camp, Spaces etc. There are however, plenty of other smaller features that I really like in Leopard. Some of them are:

Folder view options ("Show View Options" Cmd-J) now allows you to configure grid spacing which can help you move your icons closer together. Any one else thinks that Apple's default spacing between icons is too wide?
Disk Utility can now resize partitions (without data loss) graphically. You could do this via the command line but just being able to click and drag is just soooo much nicer.
Sharing folders over SMB is much easier now with the new Sharing options in the System Preferences. Just add the folder you want to share, hit the "Options" button and check SMB (and AFP and FTP if you like). I used SharePoints earlier for this same job -- not needed anymore.
Expose works across Spaces. Try having a lot of windows open across many spaces. Hit F8 and then F9. Voila!
Leopard comes with gcc 4, apache 2, php 5 and ruby 1.8. All the latest stuff built-in is more than welcome for developers.
Web Clip in Safari (scissor icon in the toolbar) is really fun, easy and useful. Very hard to get all those is one feature.
Terminal now has tabs and other new features. Bye bye, iTerm!
Quick Look is awesome. Space bar, you're reading -- another space bar hit and its gone! It doesn't even keep focus, so you can use the arrow keys on the Finder window behind and the previews keep changing.
Preview can now add remove pages from a PDF file with total ease. Just drag and drop to add and move pages.

I would also like to mention that Apple Mail is now my primary mail client. Slick, fast, feature rich and coupled with Gmail IMAP it makes for one hell of a mail client.

Read Write NTFS for Mac OS X

URL:http://www.gautamsworld.com/2007/11/7/mac-os-x-leopard.html

Gmail now has free IMAP support!

2007-10-24T13:57:01Z

Google's Gmail now supports the IMAP protocol -- for free! For more information on how to set it up, visit their help pages. For those who don't know what IMAP is, read the Wikipedia article. For those who think this is a really big thing (like me), scream out, "I am a geek!" Basically, IMAP works like Microsoft's Exchange system, delivering e-mails instantly (push mail) and keeping your mail synchronized across different machines. With loads of e-mail space, the use of secure protocols (SSL), e-mails at your own domain name and now IMAP, this service is now very compelling for businesses. Now if only it wouldn't take this long to sync all these e-mails.

Google SEO Sex iPhone Osama

URL:http://www.gautamsworld.com/2007/10/24/gmail-now-has-free-imap-support.html

Google SEO Sex iPhone Osama

2007-10-21T19:18:50Z

Sorry about the stupid title, but this is exactly the kind of thing that excites search engines. Choosing the right title for a page can seriously impact the number of people hitting your site through Google. It can also however, seriously impact the quality of your site -- the title of this blog post serving as an example. Read Alex Bosworth's post on the subject titled, "Google is destroying the web and you don't even know it" to get a better idea of this phenomenon.

URL:http://www.gautamsworld.com/2007/10/21/google-seo-sex-iphone-osama.html

The web advertising story

2007-10-17T12:28:41Z

Well we all know how successful Google has been with their advertising models with majority of their revenue coming from their ad platform. While getting an AdSense account from Google for my blog, I decided to find out more about the way Pay-per-click and AdWords works. Well, going through some Wikipedia articles, I got to the following story: "Google, Yahoo bury the legal hatchet". Apparently, Yahoo holds patents on both pay-per-click and keyword bidding systems and they sued Google over their advertising model. Google agreed to give Yahoo, 2.7 million shares of its stock to settle the issue and get a perpetual license to the patents. Interesting eh? So when exactly did Yahoo file these patents? Well, turns out they didn't. The company behind patenting and making the web advertising model is Overture (formerly GoTo.com). Yahoo acquired them in 2003 for $1.7 billion. Looking at Google's share price today, it looks like a pretty good investment! Google launched their advertising model in the year 2000. At this point, GoTo.com had already been in operation for 2 years with a similar model! And although Google is a household name today, they may never have made it without Overture's advertising model and the subsequent revenues they got from it.

URL:http://www.gautamsworld.com/2007/10/17/the-web-advertising-story.html

Desktop Tower Defense

2007-10-16T12:32:07Z

I was surprised to find that a lot of my friends had not even heard of Tower Defense, let alone played it! Its a Flash game that runs within the browser itself, so there is no software to install. As you can probably guess, I've definitely been playing it for a while now. If you've never played before, I recommend going through the quick start guide first. I mostly play the medium level and can beat the game most times now. The challenge is in getting the score up as much as possible! The game has a group score concept, so if you'd like to compare scores with me, try entering the group name "Gatuam", once you complete the game. Be warned, the game is very addictive! Go ahead and waste a few hours. :-)

URL:http://www.gautamsworld.com/2007/10/16/desktop-tower-defense.html

Maximizing your laptop battery life

2007-10-15T08:22:14Z

Does your laptop give you low battery warnings after just a half hour of use? Took just 6-8 months of heavy use to get to this stage? Looks like you might need to calibrate your laptop battery! Battery calibration is typically done to prolong the life of your battery. Eventually every battery will die and you will need to replace it with a new one. But while they are still alive, calibration can help your laptop batteries run to their full capacity for as long as possible. Now, before we get into how to calibrate, a simple tip: "Don't keep your laptop connected to power all day long." The best way to use your laptop is to charge it all the way to 100% and then unplug it. Now keep the laptop running on the battery until its ready to die. At this point, start charging it again. So how do you calibrate a laptop battery? The following is from an article in the NY Times.

... the calibration process basically involves first turning off your screensaver and other power management settings that put the computer to sleep. Then fully charge the laptop before letting it run all the way down until the computer shuts off automatically. Once the battery has fully drained, you can charge it back up again and restore your screensaver and power management settings. If you have calibrated your battery and find it still runs out of power far too soon, it may be time to replace it ...

And here is something from Apple's website specific to a Macbook or Macbook Pro.

Plug in the MagSafe power adapter and fully charge the MacBook or MacBook Pro battery until the light on the MagSafe connector changes to green and the Battery icon in the menu bar indicates that the battery is fully charged.

Allow the battery to rest in the fully charged state for two hours or longer. You may use your computer during this time as long as the power adapter is plugged in.

Disconnect the power adapter with the computer on and start using it with battery power. When the battery's charge gets low, you'll see the low battery warning dialog on the screen.

Continue to keep your computer turned on until it goes to sleep. Save your work and close all applications when the battery's charge gets low and before the computer goes to sleep.

Turn off the computer or allow it to sleep for five hours or longer.

Reconnect the power adapter and leave it connected until the battery is fully charged. You may use your computer during this time.

I've personally had pretty good results with such techniques over the years. Let me know how it works out for you.

URL:http://www.gautamsworld.com/2007/10/15/maximizing-your-laptop-battery-life.html

Gautam's World

Gautam @ Tumblr

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