Entries from November 2007 ↓

I was training the google mobile maps yesterday at various places in cochin and everything was smooth and ok until today morning. I am now on my way back to Trivandrum in a train and I decided to train the maps along the way. Now it seems there is a small bug.

I pressed the mylocation button [0] at north station and it was perfect. The blue dot that indicates my location was upon North station itself. Now the train started moving and it reached South Station. Then again I pressed the my location button. But the map started scrolling and ended up in some place near Munnar. I tried again and again and the same result. Now munnar is more than 200 Kilo meters from this place. Is this a bug ? If anyone from google is seeing this, please report.

Now as the train started moving again the app is saying that your location is not currently available.

Then I reached Kollam, and the location started saying I somewhere in London.  Ahhh this is making me crazy.

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Google launched their V 2.0 of google maps mobile and its super cool. It can find your approximate location with out using GPS. It now uses tower location information for this purpose. Try it now.

Download the app on your mobile from www.google.com/gmm

Now this is not a new idea. There are similar applications available that continuously learns from the tower data. The google video about google mobile maps 2.0 says that your location sensing capabilities increases as you use it more often. Im wondering how they are doing this ?

I downloaded the application on an N93 and Its has improved a lot form the previous version. The navigation has become smoother. I also felt that the maps are loading much faster. So I recommend everyone to download this and give it a try.

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Evangelists. I hate them, cos I had only seen Christian Evangelists who shout and sing and do all sorts of silly stuff in the name of God. Its only been 2 years since I found out that there are other kinds of evangelists also. The first one I met was Kiran Patel. She was a technology evangelist for SUN.

Ever since I started blogging, I wanted to become a blogging evangelist. I have inspired many to start blogs. I took 3 seminars for college students to start blogs. Even my mom started blogging. www.marializa.com

I really dont know why I want everyone to be blogging. But to me blogging is really a pleasure, it helps me organize myself, improve my communication skills and communicate with the world. Its really enjoyable to wake up every morning and check the traffic stats for your blog and to see its climbing.

Now, Like one of slides in the presentation that I give college students, every blogger has an excuse for blogging. If you start blogging you also will find a reason to blog.

Now I am working on a plan to make blogging really popular among college students and it needs some funding. So I am looking for some sponsors who is interested to reach the youth through a blogging platform that I plan to create. Any one interested ???

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In my last post I talked about Thin Clients. This is a Do It Yourself instruction manual to make your thin clients using Linux and basic computer hardware.

You will require the following:

1. A PC with Small Form Factor casing, uATX Motherboard (Onboard - sound/VGA/LAN/USB), Memory(256MB is more than enough), Processor (Any Low end processor is good enough) {with a monitor the total cost should come to less than Rs. 10,000)

2. 1GB Flash Disk Drive (Thumb Drive)

3. Knoppix (you can also use DSL - damm small linux, but is does not have the looks and the extra SW that Knoppix comes with), Syslinux (download the zip version)

Knoppix comes as a ISO image for a CD. You have to extract all the files from the image (Try winrar or ISO buster). Copy all the contents of the CD to your formated flash disk drive. Once you are done copying run the following commands under DOS. Please note that the commands should be run when you are inside the drive. For example if the your flash disk drive is i: then you should run this command under i: in DOS.

copy boot\isolinux *.*
del isolinux.bin
ren isolinux.cfg syslinux.cfg

These commands will basically copy the boot files from /boot directory to the root directory. Delete the isolinux.bin and then rename isolinu.cfg to syslinux.cfg

Once you are done with the above - extract the contents from the ZIP files for syslinux into your hard drive. After extracting the contents, go into DOS mode and and change your current Directory into the directory that you extracted the contents of the ZIP file. There will be a directory called win32 inside that directory, change your current directory to the win32 dir. There is an exe file inside called syslinux.exe. Run the executable file and as parameters give the drive name of the flash disk drive (if your flash disk drive is i: then type: “syslinux.exe i:” and press enter. This should make your flash disk drive bootable.

Now stick in the flash memory into the USB ports of the new PC without Hard Drive. Boot it, go into the BIOS and change the first boot device to USB FDD, save and reboot. Now the PC will boot into Knoppix Linux. The good part is that linux mounts the flash disk as read only, so the end used no will not be able to change any settings and mess it around (Just like the embedded OS inside thin clients.

Knoppix comes bundled with applications like Openoffice and Gimp and also Terminal server client, in case you want to configure it to run remote desktop over the network.

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I am very much interested in the opensocial APIs promoted by the google. The moment I heard about it, 100s of ideas started forming in my mind. And I got one of them materialized the day itself. Check out the mobshare open social application.

I had been promoting the stuff a lot also, and thats when I had a chat with Vishnu about opensocial, and he pointed towards a possible problem, a problem that now J2me is also facing.

for an opensocial application to be effective we will have to customize if for every container that we want our application to run. Orkut needs its own look, we cant use the same design for myspace or linkedin.

Also most of these social networks will have its own cool features, for which they will develop additional APIs, extending the opensocial api. Now this has become like different KVM enhancements on various phones. Each phone manufacturer supports his own cool features.

Now this is a developers nightmare. Write applications and customize them for each and every container. I know every J2me developer has faced this problem. So will open social also end up like this. ?

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