Switching form Ubuntu to Windows Vista! (...installing Vista on HCL MiLeap-L)

I never thought that anybody will ever write such a post! And I would have considered myself to be the last person to ever think of making the switch.

But it happened. I have been using Windows Vista Home Basic on my HCL MiLeap-L, which originally came loaded with Ubuntu 7.10 which I had upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 very recently. The switch was not a single day decision. I was using Ubuntu on my MiLeap of quite a time, in fact ever since I purchased it, thats about six months ago. Over the time I realised that I was spending more and more time configuring and fine tuning the Ubuntu installation than actually getting any real work done. True, I learned (majority of the times re-learned) many a things, but I just felt that all this was a complete waste of time. The Ububtu updates are one of the most horrid experiences; they can come any time (unlike scheduled release of Windows updates) and they are big all the time (10s or 100s or MBs!). Then as I mentioned in this post, that I had to recompile the rt73 drivers for appropriately supporting wi-fi ad-hoc mode... this resulted in another pain, every time there is a kernel version change, I had to recompile these drivers. And after I updated to Ubuntu 8.04 there have been at least a dozen of these updates. All this made me think hard and finally I switched over to Vista.

I have installed a Windows Vista Home Basic edition on MiLeap, as this is the only edition which is fit for the kind of hardware that is there on my laptop. I chose Vista instead of XP because I have been using Vista on primary desktop and my experience with it has been a far better environment than XP.

It took about 2hrs to completely install Vista and get the desktop. The drivers for my Wi-Fi and Sound were missing in the default install. Which were easy to obtain from Windows update ( I connected to the net using the Ethernet port on my laptop). I also quickly updated to SP1. Overall the amount of download was about 300 MB. This was far better than Ubuntu, where I am sure that I have done more than 2GB updates.

So what do I miss from Ubuntu world?

If I forget about the philosophical reason for using Ubuntu, which anyway a user hardly cares (a user psychology is always to get her task done, and very rarely how the task is done)... I only miss one thing: the gcc compiler package. That said, I rarely used it on my laptop, as most of the time I accessed it from either my VirtualBox installation or my old and well configured FC6 linux box. There was obviously no problem in installing Python and Java on my laptop, that I frequently use (need)...Python for trying out s/t quickly and Java ofcourse for MeTA Studio :)

Other things that I generally use on my laptop: OpenOffice, LaTeX, Media player and Browser are there in Vista. OpenOffice and LaTeX of course had to be installed. But the Windows Media player and IE7 are just great. I hardly used Firefox in Ubuntu (when I had it installed), but rather used Opera as it was better and faster. But on Vista I am sticking to IE7 for the time being, for some strange reasons like this and this [links to previous post].

The new Windows media player has a simple but amazing feature, that allows you to share your playlist to other Windows media player capable devices.. and you can guess what I do with my desktop and laptop ;)

Next, I used to use Gizmo to make voice calls to my GTalk mates... now with GTalk available natively, I am evidently not missing it.

Next, my laptop has a strange screen resolution: 800x480. Ubuntu had always trouble with this, most of the dialogs never fitted properly in the display area, even after I did a lot of tweaking. Vista was not without problems though. The first time I started it, it went to a virtual 1024x768 resolution and gave me a scrollable desktop! But after I changed the resolution appropriately, all most all the dialogs I have encountered are fitted properly in the display area... which is sorta great considering that Vista was never made for such a low powered ULCPCs.

Boot up time of Vista is about same as Ubuntu, provided AVG is not installed. In any case I installed and uninstalled AVG which I found to really slow down my laptop to make it almost unusable. So, for the moment I rely on Vista's "strong" security features and windows defender to protect me against malicious attacks.

Though battery times are almost equal for both Vista and Ubuntu, I find Vista does a better job in handling the "sleep" mode. For me the sleep and the hibernate feature never worked on the Ubuntu setup. But it has worked out-of-box for the Vista installation. And now, I never shutdown my laptop ... I just put it to sleep :-) Putting it in sleep mode has obvious advantage of getting the desktop back in under 20sec (max), as against about 2mins required to boot up the whole stuff. My desktop though boots in less than 20 secs, and wakes up from a sleep in about 5 secs ... owing obviously to quite high end hardware specs. 

So whats not well with Vista?

Well the general answer to this Q is, nothing so far ;)

But there are a few things that are not smooth. One of the prime things is the support for Bluetooth dongles. While on Linux I found that most of the dongles work properly without a hassle, this is not true with Vista, forget about earlier versions of Windows. I simply do not understand why this area is so neglected in Windows.

In Ubuntu, when running on battery mode, the GNOME applet always used to display the amount of time the battery will last. But in Vista so far what I get the the % amount of battery remaining, this to me is actually not so helpful. Till now I have not found a way to change this.

And what about Vista ratings?

aka. Windows Experience Index. Here is it:

evidently, the very basic stuff, if you compare it with my dekstop:

PS: This post was written on my MiLeap running on Vista Home Basic using Windows Live Writer.

PPS: I am in no way advocating the use of Vista. I am just telling my experience. Its for each user to decide what is best for him/her. I am no way related to Microsoft and this post is not endrosed by them either.

virtualization using java!

I have been using virtualization technologies on my Vista machine, but was surprised to find that there is a purely Java based virtualization tool exists.. and what a fun it runs on my Nokia E51 too, allowing me to boot FreeDOS on my mobile!

My New Laptop ;)

 

... so soon expect some updates to application written by me on S60 (2nd ed) phones (http://tovganesh.googlepages.com/s60) ;-)

MeTA Studio updates: new graphics pipeline, federation updates

This MeTA Studio update brings in an assortment of changes... especially to the backend graphics pipeline. The graphics pipeline has be rewritten (but all the public APIs preserved) so that external dependencies (like Java3D) are differed till they are acutally requested for. This makes using MeTA.jar to construct applets a simpler task and now only requires this file for all the default graphics applications. For an example take a look at: http://chem.unipune.ernet.in/~tcg/MeTAppletAdapter/MeTAppletAdapter.html
I will further update and release the source of the above link in comming days.

The new binary distro also include two files in scripts directory that give example on using the federation framework for building simple distributed applications: testfedconsumer.bsh and testfedservice.bsh ... more on this soon ;)

In the mean time get the latest from: http://code.google.com/p/metastudio/

... no source updates yet but expect that soon :)

UPDATE:
The applet adapter source is posted at: http://tovganesh.googlepages.com/MeTAppletAdapter.zip
The HTML/Javascript stuff seem to work well in Firefox, however there are some problems with IE. Didn't have time to look into it. Any help in this regard is appreciated!
This new interface is now used in WebProp.

When Operating System = Browser

I primarily use my desktop running on Vista UE and my MiLeap running on Ubuntu 8.04 for work and fun. As most of the real work that I do (read programming) is on my Vista machine, I many a times need access to Ubuntu to get some stuff checked in the Linux world for which I find using VirtualBox as the best solution. I had tried Virtual PC before, but I find VirtualBox to be much better product.

When I started using VirtualBox, I had installed Ubuntu 7.04 and later upgraded to 7.10. At the same time my MiLeap came bundled with 7.10 which I quickly upgraded to 8.04 as I badly need a lots of new stuff that was in 8.04 but not in 7.10. Was thinking of doing the same thing with my VirtualBox installation, but then something strange happened. My VirtualBox hardware emulation is actually pretty minimal for Ubuntu installation: 5GB HDD and 256MB RAM. I though for myself, I have the required gcc/g++ (which for my work has not changed much from the 7.10 to 8.04) and the only other thing I occasionally use is Browser aka Firefox. Now the only thing I really care about is a better web experience inside my VirtaulBox Ubuntu installation whenever I need it. I actually do not use any thing else than that: compiler and Firefox. So I merely upgraded to Firefox 3.0 and just forgot about what version of Ubuntu I was using. Later on I started jotting this down in the blog, from Firefox 3.0 on my VirtualBox Ubuntu (which version? what hardware?)

The above was just a description of what I had experienced in the VirtualBox environment. But lets take this further to real (yet mock) usage scenarios. User Joe buys a computer. Joe doesn't care about what kind of processor and stuff like that, the marketing guy on the counter manages to convince him that he has got the best deal. Jeo uses GMail for mail, PicasaWeb for photos, YouTube for videos, Google Docs for docs, spreadsheet and creating presentations and thats it. Jeo needs only these every day. He uses his favorite browser (the one that came with the OS) to access these services (to him they really are applications). Some day he discovers that there are alternative browsers and then installs one of the popular ones. After a few years Ubuntu and Microsoft come up with brand new OSs with tonnes of features and ever increasing hardware requirements. Joe doesn't see why he needs all that, stops buying (or using) new hardware and new OS, and just upgrades himself to the new version of the browser that was just released.

If this is how it works out for majority of users, Ubuntu and Microsoft will have tough time convincing users to try out their next best offering... of course this has a caveat that your favorite browser might stop supporting previous OS releases. As it happened with IE and Firefox 3 (no support for my old Windows 98 machine!).

Leaves me wondering about this cloud computing scenario. It looks to be an interesting perspective. Something that can't exist without the current client OS but soon these will be a thing of past when they will be accessed through low cost devices like ULCPCs... where only a browser upgrade will enhance the user experience. The applications keep improving on the sever side .. no need to purchase/download/install them locally. You only need a fat pipe, and that is becoming cheaper by the day. Sun Microsystem always says "The Network is the Computer"... looks like we are sooner or later headed that way.

On the developer front, this is gonna be another interesting stuff. Google is already providing a lot of APIs to access and build applications for its cloud computing resources. Note that you are here not developing on a isolated machine anymore, you are using a huge computing resource .. and the possibilities are limitless.

PicLens: something fantastic and worth trying

 

PicLens is a browser add-in for IE, firefox and Safari provides an immersive 3D experience for searching though various video, tv and photo sites. Highly recommended for Vista and Mac users. You can download it from here: http://www.piclens.com .

Internet connection sharing from Vista

I have a broadband connection on my main desktop that runs Vista, which has an ethernet port and a usb WiFi dongle. And I have HCL MiLeap-L that comes with WiFi on board. I always wanted to have internet connection sharing setup on my Vista machine so that I can access Internet anywhere from my house using MiLeap-L. Until recently, I could not figure out why the ad-hoc network created from Vista was not getting configured from the default NetworkManager applet of Ubuntu (MiLeap-L runs 8.04).

It turned out that this the problem with the default Ubuntu driver for the WiFi chipset on MiLeap-L. The default driver (supposedly a newer version) called rt73usb has buggy support for ad-hoc mode operation. So after googling around a bit I found that you need to use the legacy drivers rt73 and blacklist the newer ones to get it working. Moreover the older version is not compatible with the NetworkManager applet and you have to use its own GUI called rtutilt. So here is what I did to get stuff working:

1) I already have latest kernel update with the requisite build tools and kernel headers. If you don't you will have to get that using apt-get install kernel* build-essential.

2) Get the latest rt73 source from http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/rt73-cvs-daily.tar.gz

Do the following using root (sudo -s) credentials:
3) unpack, change to Module directory. Then make and make install.

4) Remove previous module: rmmod rt73usb

5) add:
blacklist rt73usb
blacklist rt2500usb

at the end of /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

6) modprob rt73
depsmod -a

7) Install rtutilt using synaptic manager (u may have to enable extra repos)

8) disable NeworkManager applet from Main Menu->System->Preferences->Sessions

9) reboot and use Main Menu -> Internet -> RutilT WAN Manager to discover and connect to access point or ad-hoc network.

Note: If at any point of time you need to upgrade the kernel, you will have to most likely recompile rt73 drivers.

On Vista:
Its straight forward here.

1) First enable Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) on interface to which broadband is connected, in my case this is the LAN. This automatically assigns 192.168.0.1 then to the WiFi interface. The required gateway and other settings are also automatically made.

2) Then setup a ad-hoc connection using the Connection wizard in which can be initiated by clicking the Network icon on the task bar... or better still use the Instant search!

3) Thats it!

Hope this is useful to other HCL MiLeap users who want to try similar setup.

PS: when you need to use WiFi from any other source, you need to use the RutilT GUI now instead of the NetworkManager applet in Ubuntu.

PPS: This whole stuff was written on my MiLeap-L and posted using the connection that I set up as described above :)

Tried Opera too!

Tried the latest Opera 9.5 on Vista, though it looked great, I eventually uninstalled it as I faced similar Tablet PC integration problems. Is it the problem of the browser code, or MS didn't expose these APIs propertly?

Btw I installed Opera 9.5 on my HCL MiLeap (which runs on Ubuntu 8.04) and have instantly replaced Firefox 3 as my default browser. I find Opera 9.5 to be far superior and loads a lot faster than Firefox 3.

Flipflop: Firefox3 and now back to IE7

thats on vista. But had no other choice after I discovered that my favorite browsing tool, the Tablet PC components don't work great with Firefox. Apart from the address bar completion not working properly, it had one major issues with password fields. That the password would show up in the screen, plaintext!!

Now waiting for IE8 beta2. May try Opera meanwhile.

MeTA Studio update: do more with Find, changed Federation protocol

A new version of MeTA Studio with updated source is available from the usual place at: http://code.google.com/p/metastudio/.

This version includes an assortment of changes:
a) The federation discovery protocol has changed, and is incompatible with the previous version. No further changes with this protocol will be made in future that will break existing clients. However you will have to update to the current version if you are using an older release.
b) Numerous Find tools have been added in the MoleculeViewer, see docs for details. Will post more details, along with long promised examples of using Federation APIs.
c) Java3d/2d renderer has been improved for performance.
d) number of bug fixes and additional sample plugins and widgets are also added.

You are invited to check the features. If you have any issues, suggestions or would like to contribute to the project kindly post it at: http://code.google.com/p/metastudio/issues/list

Have fun!

Firefox 3: gonna miss the world record?

Microsoft and HCL: Worlds cheapest windows laptop!

Was hoping that this was a april fool's prank...
But if this is true, its not really gud for adoption of Ubuntu (Linux) based laptops (such as HCLs own MiLeap L). All this means that there has been a great demand for Windows based low cost laptops (even ASUS is releasing Eee with WinXP preloaded), and these people will eventually move to Vista (MS is smart in seeing this). So all the bashing and FUD for Vista will have no effect after all. People who use unrealistic reasons for adopting OSS are any way going to fail because customers do genuinely see the benefits in Windows... and Vista is definitely a superior OS.

But in other ways its good that its creating a new market and new opportunities.

Only it would now be tougher for me to convince my uncle to use Ubuntu on MiLeap L that i got for him :(

Upgadre experience: Vista SP1 and Ubuntu 8.04

Have recently upgraded my Dell Dekstop to Vista SP1. Well as with all other windows upgrade this turned out to be a breeze, after the initial hitch over my audio driver got resolved thanks to the wonderful free help from Microsoft tech support :) Had to download 69MB of updates, which turned out to be pretty fast on my broadband. After the updates surely SP1 is far more snappier than its predecessor. Also all the promised performance improvements in Vista seem to be working well.

Next I upgraded my MiLeap L from Ubuntu 7.10 to recently released 8.04 LTS. Obvious reason for upgrade was that its an LTS and more over its got some cool new features. This update turned out to be a big 701MB! So far the new Ubuntu experience looks great :)

While Vista upgrade to SP1 was over in under 40 minutes, Ubuntu upgrade took more than 5 hours! Well to be fair this cant be really compared as hardware base was totally different: Vista running on modern Core 2 Duo (1.86 GHz) while Ubuntu on a Celeron M ULV (900 MHz) processor.

Though technically speaking the Ubuntu upgrade was actually a new OS, while for Vista it was just a service pack, but there is a huge difference in upgrade sizes. And this is the reason for my worry. Vista uses what it calls a Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) to just transfer the set of bits that have changed form what is installed on the current machine, for all the windows based updates/ upgrades. Ubuntu on the other hand downloads complete set of packages (.deb files) even when it is simply updating and not upgrading. Is there no technology simiar to BITS in Linux? If no it would be interesting to develop such a stuff for Linux update/upgrade services.

MeTA Studio updates

Updated MeTA Studio after a long time... Here are some updates

1) Firstly not anything to do with this update... but moved all my development environment to Vista (which was recently updated to SP1)... long set of reasons for that a discussion on a separate post.

2) A number of bug fixes, see http://code.google.com/p/metastudio/issues/list for the complete list.

3) New set of federation APIs to help build distributed applications over MeTA Studio framework. This includes sendXXX() and receiveXXX() methods in FederationRequest class. Look back at this space for examples on using this API.

The latest bins are available from the usual place: http://code.google.com/p/metastudio/, source package is not yet updated to reflect new changes, but will do it as indicated on the site.

WebProp usage

A few months ago, I had co-developed a web interface (and its backend) for performing ab inito one electron calculations on small to medium sized molecules. This is currently hosted at http://chem.unipune.ernet.in/~tcg/webprop/ and is also available through MeTA Studio widget found at: http://chem.unipune.ernet.in/~tcg/webprop/webpropWidget.bsh.

We have even published a report describing the functionality of this tool in J. Comput. Chem. (click for abstract).

After months of monitoring the service, I find that the usage of this tool outside our group is pretty low, which is a bit disappointing. Though a niche area (ab inito quantum chemistry, to be specific), I would like to encourage educators, researchers or all the people to try out this unique tool for their needs.

If you have any queries on how WebProp will be useful (for educating, research etc.) kindly mail us at: webprop -at- chem.unipune.ernet.in

The above address is a mailing list, and the mail is forwarded to all people of WebProp development team, who would be more than happy to address your queries on using WebProp and its interface. We also welcome, your suggestions and critiques on WebProp.

Is Mobilis dead?

Short answer is a big YES. Long answer is, unless Encore Software (who makes Mobilis) is able to reduce the price of the device to around 5000 INR, it simply won't have any takers. This is not the only way of revival though, there are many more steps that need to be taken and I am enlisting them here.

The first thing to note is a comparison of Mobilis with other contenders of low cost laptops in the current market. I have just compared with what I have with me (HCL MiLeap L and Mobilis). I have not put up the other contender, ASUS Eee PC partly because I myself have not used it personally and partly because specs wise its comparison with Mobilis will look even worse ;) [because of accessories like integrated web cam].

Comparison Chart:

	HCL MiLeap L	Mobilis (basic model)
Processor	Intel Celeron M ULV @ 900 MHz	Intel XScale @ 400 MHz
Architecture	x86	ARM
Cooling Fan	Yes	No
Memory	512 MB (DDR2)	128 MB
Storage	30 GB HDD	128 MB Flash
Ethernet	Yes (In built)	No (USB based can be used) *
WiFi	Yes (In built)	No (USB based can be used) *
Bluetooth	No (USB based can be used)	No
Screen (size, resolution, touch)	7", 800 x 480, no touch screen	7.5", 800 x 600, touch screen
Touchpad	Yes, pretty usable	No, not required
Keypad	Yes, pretty usable	Yes, hopeless design
Battery	About 4 hrs 30 mins	About 6 hrs
Weight	1.44 Kg	about 600 grams
OS	Linux (Ubuntu)	Embedded Linux (Montavista)
Price (INR)	17,000	20,000 +

* Not every USB device can be used. The driver support on the installed OS is very bad.

 

The first thing one notices from the above comparison chart is that for less, you are basically getting more in case of MiLeap! Granted that Mobilis sports a fantastic touch screen, with a slightly larger screen and resolution. But then MiLeap has 512 MB RAM and 30 GB storage as compared to paltry 128 MB each of RAM and Flash storage!

 

What else is wrong?

• The price needs to be competitive (it should be priced around 5000 INR, any thing above is expensive for this device) with other ultraportables that have come up in market. What I think Encore should be doing is build a reference design and then sell the design to OEM manufactures and charge them some percent for each unit that is sold. This way the OEMs do not have to pay a hefty amount at the beginning (as in the case of simputer), and Encore will also be benefited in long run.
• On board flash memory needs to be redesigned so that it is expandable easily.
• OS used is another major issue. Montavista is actually a commercial vendor and you pay up a lot for their licensing fees which adds up to the total cost of the device. The development toolchain for OS is also not free, it costs another 5000 INR! And I have no idea why the old 2.4.x kernel is still being used on the device. Driver support from Motavista is absolutely useless, as compared to any modern Linux distribution. I guess Encore should look at some community supported OS like Ubuntu mobile and port it on their platform instead of using Montavista, which just adds up to the total cost of the device, and also provides a very crippled environment.
• The worst design in the whole Mobilis tablet is the keypad. It is simply not usable. It has to be redesigned, and should look attractive and easy for a user to use it.
• WiFi and Ethernet port should be inbuilt, and should not cost another 5000 INR to get them fitted!

 

I guess, I have made my point. Good luck Mobilis.

 

PS: If anyone at Encore Software does read this, I at least hope that they take this post seriously as I still use my Mobilis!

All the fuss about Windows Vista

Ever since the release of the much delayed OS from Microsoft, it never seems to be on the correct side of the news reported world around. I beg to differ and through this post I would like to tell my experience of using Windows Vista for more than 8 months now.

 

Setup that I use daily

I do most of my work on GNU/ Linux. At work, all my machines (development, clusters and word processing) use either Fedora 8 or Ubuntu 7.10. For  home and personal use I have two old desktop machines, one new DELL machine (preloaded with Windows Vista Ultimate edition) and two ultra mobiles: Mobilis (reviewed here) and HCL MiLeap -L (reviewed here). Of the two desktop machines one is fairly new and has Fedora 6 loaded on it. The other is about 8 years old and came preloaded with Windows 98 (HP Pavilion 6615).

Of all the machines at home, I have been using the Fedora 6 machine for all my day-today activities till I got the DELL machine. Now I use the Fedora 6 machine mostly for programming and rarely for watching DVDs. When I am on move or bored sitting in front of my desktops I use my ultra mobiles.

Well to be very complete I also own a Nokia 6600, but use it rarely ever since I got the two ultra portables.

In terms of expenses I did for my personal set up, the Windows machines were about 8 times as expensive! That's because my Linux machine was a second hand buy (but of COMPAQ evo brand).

Finally no hurting the feelings of Mac people but I never owned a Mac and probably will never because I always have a feeling that they are too closed source people even if their base kernel and development tools are all GNU based.

 

Vista: An OS that serves me and my parents well

Let us first see the things in the perspective of my parents. They always need a way to communicate using the Internet and easily access many stuffs like photos, videos, watch movies and many a times catchup with the TV shows. Being a media centre computer with Windows Media centre installed, they find the machine relatively easy to use. They also find using IE7 easy (I don't have FireFox installed currently). GTalk and Skype are other applications they use and are relatively mature on Windows than other OS. As far as advanced features of Vista are concerned I do not believe that they are directly useful for them. But features like "sleep" are better implemented in Vista than in XP, in the later case I had constantly observed freezes of my machine. On Vista however this problem seems to have disappeared all together. Another feature my parents had to frequently deal with earlier version of Windows was the "blue screen of death", I have not encountered a single instance of this on my Vista machine to date, despite a number of hardware changes that I did over the original setup.

The Instant Search and the inbuilt voice recognition tools are also frequently used and most loved tools (especially by me). For me the Instant Search is in many ways better than other similar tools provided on other OSes. The voice recognition on the other hand seems to be an unique feature in Vista.

Going into more technicality, my basic needs from an OS are: Good development tools, rich media and Internet experience, devices should just work, be secure to a large extent, and an intuitive user experience. Before using Vista I have used all previous versions of Windows form Windows 3.1. I have also regularly used Linux distributions from Red Hat 6 to Caldera to SusE, PC Quest and Ubuntu (from 6.10). It has always been hard to figure out how to get a particular device work under Linux; which has never been the case with Windows. People would argue that this problem is mainly for devices or peripherals who do not open up their proprietary hardware to Linux developers. This may be partially true, but when I look from a users perspective it comes to choosing between one of the "better" OS, the one on which devices just work. Further, installation of a driver under Linux can simply be not done by an average computer user. You should have fair amount of idea of what a kernel is and what a compiler is, which my parents simply can't cope with! well all that for support of Windows:) But what makes Vista stand out from previous version of Windows is a feature in the Windows update that automatically comes back to you incase no appropriate drivers are found (which I myself experienced with Logitech Quickcam webcam).

Vista also comes with a assortment of development tools, many of which can be downloaded for free from Microsoft's site. Many of the tools can be used to build applications for older version of Windows too. The tools provided with Visual Studio Express edition are just enough for my work. Though I have also installed the Windows SDK as some of the programs I compile require core Win32 libraries.

I regularly use Virtual PC 2007 and VirtualBox for virtualization environment and find both of these to work without any hitch on my Vista machine. I frequently need Linux environment to test a lot of stuff so I have installed Ubuntu with all required compilers in VirtualBox and find its performance under Vista (even when running media center and recording the current TV show) very smooth.

UAC of Vista had been a big topic of debate, but I find it to be pretty usable and worth the hassle. Moreover, it is how it works out in the Linux world (sudo!).

 

Some things are a problem though

I have been wanting to program with the CUDA system from NVidia since a long time, but its drivers for Vista have simply not been available to date :(

 

Finally

In short, after more 8 months of using Vista, I find it to be a fantastic and rock solid product, which makes it worth to invest in a bit of new hardware too.

NB: This full review was written with Windows Live Writer using the iBall pen tablet ( reviewed here).

This review is not endorsed by Microsoft and are my personal views.

Review of HCL MiLeap-L

Recently HCL India released a series of ultraportables branded as MiLeap series. The cheapest one of these is a flash based (2GB), Intel class mate PC style, MiLeap X series. I purchased a slightly higher version of these machines called MiLeap L series that instead comes with a 30GB HDD. This review is on MiLeap L series, though I also intend to buy the flash based version of this device for my uncle for reasons given below ;)

Hardware Specs
This is an ultraportable with following main specs:
- Intel Celeron M ULV (ultra low voltage) processor @ 900 MHz
- 512 MB DDR2 RAM
- WiFi, 10/100 ethernet
- 2 USB ports
- 1 SD Card reader
- Inbuilt Mic and Speakers
- Audio out and in jacks
- Touchpad
- 7 inch TFT screen with 800x480 as max res
- Battery Backup: ~4Hrs
- Total weight (including battery): 1.44 Kg

General feel, usability...
I just love this piece :) HCL has done a nice thing in packaging this little laptop not only on the hardware front but on the preinstalled Ubuntu distribution. The preinstalled Ubuntu takes up about 3GB of disk (so i am not sure what the flash version is bundled with). As against a standard install this comes with all the required apps (OpenOffice, Gimp, a series of media players and best of all with all required codes) out of box. The only thing that I didn't like was a 8GB partition on which FreeDOS was installed (presumably for those who want to switch over to windows), which i immediately reformatted as ext3 :)

Ubuntu is quite usable on this little laptop. Word processing and all other apps open without much fuz and seems quite fast for me. The boot time is a bit slow, but thats mostly as a result of using a bit slower processor. Network configuration, WiFi to be specific is just a breeze and worked great for me.

All other usability features of Ubuntu works great, and I feel that this pretty good for people looking for office related tasks and also for surfing.

The most wonderful aspect of the whole thing is the preinstalled gcc compiler set, which just worked out of box. I feel with the price tag (17000 INR) this is a pretty good buy for students learning programming. Though vi is preinstalled, you need to download vim and emacs if you really intend to do serious programming. I also installed the latest JRE and was pleased to see that MeTA Studio ran effortlessly of it ;)

The keypad and the touchpad are also nicely designed and are pretty much usable. There was one small problem though, that I found when using vi, that there is only one SHIFT key, but with a small form factor like that it would be difficult to fit in any extra key.

Overall the battery backup is pretty good and goes well beyond 4 hrs if you use the screen with reduced brightness. With standard brightness too, the battery pack gives at least 4hrs backup.

On heating issue, this heats up as much as my Mobilis, so I think that there is not much of a problem with it. I have continuously used the machine for about 4 hours and find it okay. Some times the base gets heated up a bit, and so its advised not to keep it on your lap for along time ;)

Final thoughts
I think HCL and Intel have finally begun to introduce to Indian market of what I had said earlier in my blogs. I have used Mobilis from Encore and after nearly an year after I tried using it I find it a highly restrictive device that is overpriced (the only thing on which it scores over MiLeap is a battery backup of about 6hrs). I would highly recommend this (and other MiLeap series too) if you are on a lookout for an affordable ultraportable, or even a second computing device.

NB: The whole review was written and published from my MiLeap L :)

Update: About the sound, its pretty good for the form factor.
About the heating issue, I think the use of flash drive will drastically reduce the heat generation. Also the flash drive is more rugged with no moving parts and hence the reason I will be buying it (MiLeap X) for my uncle ;)

Update 2: Aniruddha had written in to ask if VGA connecter is available from MiLeap L, short answer is NO. Check comments for more info.

updates to MeTA Studio

New MeTA Studio builds are available and includes a number of new features and UI:
1) more streamlined UI when viewing molecule object.
2) integrated talk interface
3) few additional scripts to show off scripting powers in MeTA Studio







Of the few scripts included the most notable one is a script (freq.bsh) that computes frequencies from a energy Hessian matrix of a molecular system. I will shortly blog in more detail about these and more scripts.

the code is available from the usual place: http://code.google.com/p/metastudio/

Who "learns" APIs anyway?

This is a sort of after thought and comment on my previous post where I "complained" about learning a new API.

Most of my experience with Java has been not in developing application but rather designing APIs and programming platform (for instance MeTA Studio http://code.google.com/p/metastudio/). Where as, whenever I had used other languages (C, C++, Fortran, Python...) it was mostly for application development. Developing good and usable APIs do require fair amount of thinking and design tactics to be put in. Developing pure application on the other hand is, many a times more faster and easier job. A good API need not be "learned", rather it is apparent form it as to what you can do with it. You do not "learn" a good API, rather you cleverly "use" them to build applications.

In that sense probably Android APIs are "pretty good".

Android is out: But am a bit disappointed.

This is a follow up on my earlier article "speculating on Android". Google has finally released the SDK for Android platform and with a first look at the APIs I am not too happy. Not because my main assumption of inclusion of a scripting interface went entirely for a toss, but because Android has a whole new set of Java libraries (APIs) rather than adopting a standard set of Java APIs. Another claim was that development on Android platform would be easy and fast. But with my experience of using Java from mobile to desktop to server has it that a very strong design and object orientation skills have to go in to develop flexible and robust applications. When you have a "good enough" and many times an evolving design it is not really RAD. RAD is what is been offered by initiatives like, pys60 (python on Nokia S60 phones).

After a bit of pondering over the APIs it does some how feel that many of those are needed but are in no way available in Standard Java libraries. One of such aspects is the touch APIs (http://code.google.com/android/samples/ApiDemos/src/com/google/android/samples/graphics/TouchPaint.html).

But here again I fail to understand as to why the standard Java graphics libraries are not used and instead Android's own libraries are used. This to me feels like introducing more confusion than "helping " the people who develop on Java platform. In essence, I simply do not understand the necessity of learning completely new set of APIs for programming on Android and that too in a "write once and run every where" language.

Mobilis Crashed!

After months of almost daily use of Mobilis, it has crashed and simply refuses to power on :( Have contacted the Encore staff, but will have to wait till trow for their reply.

Tried to open it up and check for any burned stuff .. but have found nothing that "looks bad". Hope that I am able to get it back working soon...

Speculating on Android Platform

Google and a group of 34 other companies announced the Open Handheld alliance this week (http://www.openembedded.org/). They also announced that a SDK for the "open" platform named Android would be made public on Nov 12,2007. I am just trying to speculate what all this platform might constitute:

1. An embedded Linux kernel, probably built and hardened by Google engineers.

2. A scripting language like Python as an interface for programming. other scripting language that would be included is JavaScript. To Some extent this would be like PyS60 (Nokia's Python implementation for S60 phones - http://wiki.opensource.nokia.com/projects/PyS60), however I feel that this will be the primary mechanism of programming on Android platform. I am not sure it they would provide any native programming support; primarily because of two reasons : cross compiling is difficult and time consuming secondly native code is always a security risk.

3. Large set of APIs for supporting Web 2.0 applications. It will probably support all Google data APIs, however I feel that the platform will it self support integration of other Web 2.0 (or 3.0...) apps. This is what I mean by "open'', and not closed to only Google services.

4. Would have some seamless mechanism to access Internet from all kind of networks supported by the device. This is mostly a hardware feature, but felt like mentioning it.

So these are my speculations! Let us see, what Google and its alliance have out of their hats next week. Turn back to this space to see how poorly I faired ;)

(update: Just forgot to mention in point 2 that Java and JavaFX are also strong contenders here, but with Sun Microsystems currently not officially part of the consortium I wonder whether this is really the central part of the platform).

OS X Leopard and IPhone Touch

I had a firsthand feel of the new OS from Apple and IPhone touch interface during a visit to apple exclusive showroom. The store called Imagine and is located in Ad Labs mall in Kalayani nagar in Pune. The IPhone  on demo had access to a working Wi-Fi connection that made it possible to check the Safari web browser and the you tube video feature. I was also pleasantly surprised to seethe latest Mac OS which the sure guys had just installed on a big screen Mac. Could also check out other products from Apple, and overall it was a fun experience. This was the first time I ever visited an apple exclusive showroom and frankly I was impressed with the way the store guys allowed to experiment with everything there on display. Only my friend had to pay a price to get in there - Rs. 10 for parking! ...and i am still to get over the hangover of using the Touch interface ;)

Trying to capture moon

After a long time had some stint with photography. These shots were taken during 25/26 th night. I attached my small telescope's (30x magnification) eyepiece to camera lens (with another 3x magnification) to get these photos. Are not really good ones as there is lot of chromatic aberration in these images - Must learn how to correct these. In the last photo there is a strange black spot, that kept on moving in my subsequent shots... looks like some moon satellite ;)

spider!

One more kind of spider found in Pune University campus.

MeTA Studio update

Update to MeTA Studio is now available with the usual assortment of bug fixes and a few new feature additions. Most notable of the addition is ability to do function interrogation by mouse click when u visualize a scalar field.

I am also formally starting the Issue tracking list at http://code.google.com/p/metastudio/issues/list where you can post Bugs, Issues and Suggestions about MeTA Studio interface and its APIs.

The new version can be downloaded from the usual place at: http://code.google.com/p/metastudio/

My first ink blog!

Apple iPhone and HTC Touch

This is being written on the background of using my pen for quite some time now. I have neither used iPhone or HTC touch. So my thoughts may be bit biased. At first thoughts, I had thought iPhone to be a wonderful product with on screen QWERTY keypad. But it now appears to me that typing long text is really problematic and if there would be a stylus with equivalent handwriting recognizing software on HTC it would be really wonderful and easy. If Microsoft can include their handwriting recognizer in Windows Mobile OS, they simply have a killer product. As you can do a lot more with HTC mobile than the Apple's phone. More over HTC is available here in India today at a somewhat affordable price of 14k. And it Microsoft can quickly add some localization support they would land up with something very useful to be used by general public rather than a jazzed up mp3 player.

Quick Review of iBall Pen Tablet with Vista

Lately I have been bored of using a keypad for entering text so finally got an Ball Pen Tablet. One of the first advantages being the product worked on my machine ( Windows Vista UE) without the need to install any additional software. With a bit of configuration I was up and running and writing this review with the pen. One great advantage of using the pen being that, I need not use mouse or keypad fordoing most of the tasks like clicking and entering prose text. Further, the tablet Input panel provided by Vista is really fantastic in handwriting recognition. It also sports a automated spellchecker. I also used the system with GTalk and had no problem text chatting with it. So far have only one complaint about the writing recognition Software, which is not really able to distinguish my I and J properly. In any case its a big boon for papa who are not really comfortable using a keypad. However if you use a Keypad and are good at typing then you may find any the Pen a bit cumbersome at first, but will definitely enjoy using it. Deleting text is as simple as striking off the word. And using it to Paint Some Stuff is another pleasant job. In all I find this product really useful for people with slow typing speed.  And I must also mention that the Vista's inbuilt handwriting recognition is d really fascinating and enjoying tool to use. Which to some extent is not good as even if you have a bad handwriting (like mine) , the Vista tool recognizes the stuff and you hardly try to improve! 

Digital Library of India

Every one has heard about Google Book and many use it frequently.
The Gov. of India in collaboration with many Institutions is building up a digital library in India http://www.new.dli.ernet.in/ primarily to preserver old manuscripts and make available a number of books (whose copyrights have expired) to the general public.

Only complain i have about the site is that the books are mostly in TIFF format and is not very easy to read. Google Book interface is in contrast searchable and more accessible. For example a search on Astadhyayi on Google books returns many interesting results, but the DLI doesn't return any, though there are atleast two books on DLI on Astadhyayi.

Apple iPod touch

Though I am not a major fan of apple, largely because of its price factor, I almost always am awe with the kind of products it releases.

When iPhone was released, it was really a WOW product, execpt for the fact that it was tied to a particular operator and a particular country (US...). And the only thing that I didnot like about it was that it would not be available in India for a long, undecided time.

But, now Apple is introducing iPod touch (http://www.apple.com/ipodtouch/) with all the technologies borrowed from iPhone, except you can't do a phone call. The WiFi access is a cool option, but remains to be seen if i can access gtalk or skype on it. I guess with this Apple has really beaten MS's Zune, though the later was never quite near the competetion.

And I see no reason why iPod touch should be available in India as soon as its released in US :)

Widgets in MeTA Studio

Using the MeTA Studio and Java APIs, RK came up with some cool simple widgets (http://chem.unipune.ernet.in/~tcg/members/ritwik.html)

For those of you who had gone through the widgets/ directory in MeTA Studio, you will already have an idea of how to create your own widgets. I give a small description using RKs, Flakes Widget (http://chem.unipune.ernet.in/~tcg/codes/flakes.bsh)

1. Each Widget should have a unique file and function name in a given MeTA Studio installation. In this case it is flakes.bsh and the function name is flakes().

2. The first thing done by the widgets function is to get a shared instance of widgets panel:
panel = getWidgetsPanel();

3. Next a widget is created with a unique string identifier for the widget:
flakes = widget("flakesWidget");

4. Now "flakes" is a panel (just like javax.swing.JPanel) to with components can be added.

5. At the end give a call to :
panel.addWidget(flakes);

is made to finally add the widget to the panel.

6. Finally at the end of this file you give a call to the flakes function:
flakes();


and well here are some cool screen shots taken directly RK's page:

Flakes:


and Plane angles:



Note: There will not be any updates to MeTA Studio in coming 2 weeks ...

bug fix release for MeTA Studio

a bug fix release with some small feature additions is available from the usual place:

http://code.google.com/p/metastudio/

small feature additions are:
- lots of beanshell wrapper functions to for UI programming and easier access to MeTA Studio APIs
- the windows installer now includes sample scripts and widgets in the respective directories under the installation directory.

Note: To get a desktop shortcut for MeTA Studio under GNOME (under GNU/Linux, shd work for others too) u will need to create a file called meta.desktop in $HOME/Desktop directory and type:

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=MeTA Studio
Type=Application
Exec=/usr/java/jre1.6.0/bin/java -jar /home/ganesh/HotCoffee/meta/bin/MeTA.jar
Name[en_US]=MeTA Studio
GenericName[en_US]=


You will need to appropriately modify the Exec entry to suit your installation directory of JRE and metastudio.

Programming in and for Devanagari

Programming for Devenagari has been largely supported by mordern languages like Java.
However, I have never tried before to program in devanagari. Using the Google's Indic transliteration tool (http://www.google.com/transliterate/indic) and a modified BeanShell editor for MeTA Studio I had some fun (http://tovganesh.googlepages.com/ganak.bsh):


गणक(अ, ब) { print(अ + " और " + ब + " की गणना " + (अ + ब) + " है!"); }


now the function can be called as:

bsh% गणक(5, 6);

the result being:

5 और 6 की गणना 11 है

which was cool. I tried the same trick in JavaFX Pad with the following code (http://tovganesh.googlepages.com/om.fx):


import javafx.ui.*;

var नमो = "ॐ नमो भगवते वासुदेवाय";

Frame {
title: "Hello World JavaFX"
width: 200
height: 50
content: Label {
text: नमो
font: new Font("sans", "PLAIN", 22)
}
visible: true
}



and WOW it worked :)


now finally I used a unicode capable editor to key in the following Java snippet:

public class हेलो {
public static void main(String [] args) {
System.out.println("भो विशव \n");
}
}

and compiled and ran it as shown in the screen shot:


and as u see, this too worked . Only the output is a bit problematic because of some font problem with my Indic font installation on FC6. However, the same is not the case when the code is written in the modified BeanShell editor in MeTA Studio.

In any case I enjoyed this experiment and hope that one day I can write a whole useful software in Sanskrit :)

MeTA Studio updates

The latest version adds multi-view panel to the in-built viewer of MeTA Studio allowing you to have different views (camera views) of the same scene at the same time. Especially useful when handling large molecules and viewing properties. Other improvements include support for interpolaters (see Interpolation APIs in metastudio help) and a new "interp" keyword in Find dialog that allows you to intepolate currently loaded properties. To use this:

dx, dy, dz, prop-number, interp

here dx, dy and dz are values with which the current scalar fields grid step size is devided, prop-number is the index of the property (scalar field) you would like to modify. And also includes the usual list of small improvements and bug fixes ;)

Updated packages are available from the usual place: http://code.google.com/p/metastudio/

MeTA update and recreational programming ;)

New MeTA Studio updates are available at: http://code.google.com/p/metastudio/

Features include:
a) subvolume generation and saving
b) Support for Fuzzy Volume generation
c) function value interpolation APIs
d) lots of improvements to UI and standard set of bug fixes..


To get a break of what i generally do, i am (re) learning a bit of windows programming and with it am writing a small set of C++ APIs for doing windows programming on my old Win98 machine. Its called weon and is downloadable from http://tovganesh.googlepages.com/weon.tar.gz

To create and open a window its as simple as:

include "weon.h"

CWeonApp app;

WEON_APP_MAP(app)

weon is under development and right now you cant do much with it. but i promise to make it simple to read and use :)

And with the help of APR and RK we have written a small set of APIs for doing MPI style programming purely using Python. Called pimpi its available from: http://tovganesh.googlepages.com/pimpi.tar.gz


A small test program that uses pimpi looks like this:

import pimpi
import sys

pimpi.init(sys.argv)
noOfProcessors = pimpi.size()
myRank = pimpi.rank()

print "Total number of processors: ", noOfProcessors
print "My rank: ", myRank

if (myRank == 0):
   for i in range(1, noOfProcessors):
       pimpi.send(i, "hi")
else:
   print pimpi.recv()

data = pimpi.bcast(0, "bhello")

print data, myRank

data = pimpi.bcast(0, repr((1,2,3)))

print data, myRank

pimpi.finalize()

To run the above code you use:
python pimpiboot.py test.py

Note that pimpiboot.py reads a file called "node.list" that contains the nodes which you want to use in parallel. You need to setup your cluster environment for password less rsh/ssh access for pimpi to work correctly.

... look back here for more updates on these codes :)

JavaFX

Some time ago Sun Microsystems announced their plans for JavaFX and now they seem to have many of the tools ready (https://openjfx.dev.java.net/?intcmp=hp2007jul25_javafx_download#downloads). With this, I think Sun is on the verge of creating another revolution in application creation that spans multiple devices based on the same (now ubiquely available) Java platform. Hope I get some time off my writing to try out this new stuff :)

Bharat and India

A few days ago I had to travel by a crowed bus to Viman Nagar. As the bus starts of from Pune station I waited outside till the bus started to get on to it. My mind has already adjusted to the fact that I won't be having a smooth ride back home. And then something really nasty happened. One of the elderly passengers complained to the conductor of the bus that a person sitting on a seat reserved for the senior citizens was adamantly refusing to get up. To my utter surprise this conductor instead shot back to this elderly man and said that he can do nothing about it!! This really angered the elderly fellow and he directed the driver to go to the police station. This action angered the rest of the travellers, instead of expressing solidarity towards his action and his stance (which I rightly feel was 100% correct). Any way I didn't express any great action by the police. By the time the police came the adamant man in question merely got up and walked away from the bus. One of the police officials accompanied the elderly and merely made sure that he got the seat. He had no word of advice to either the conductor, driver or the commuters. And the most terrible part of all this was that I merely remained a mute spectator of the whole incident.

Later when the bus neared Viman Nagar and most of the in between passengers got down, by mere chance I got a seat next to this elderly man. I was just about to speak to him when I saw his trembling hand and could hear his bitter murmuring (surely about what all happened). This observation was so strong to me that I completely forgot as to what should I talk to this guy... was completely clueless and didn't open my mouth till we bot got down at the same stop. He joined his wife back to home. And I still kept wondering about the whole incident made my walk towards my home.

In retrospect, I felt so bad about this incident not because someone didn't get up to give a seat to an elderly person. But because we seem to have forgotten that to be a Bharateeya is to respect and elder. Because we do not seems to have inculcated this bharateeyaness in our new generation and because we are only worried about the economic growth of India and not maintaining Bharat's values and spirituality. And because we seem to be unaffected by suffering of fellow humans and often make fun or criticize those in trouble. And because I seem to have become a more Indian than a Bharateeya. 

Review of BenQ DeskSaver keyboard with Mobilis

Some time ago I had reviewed the Freedom mini keyboard which I use with my Nokia 6600. I find the form factor of that keyboard very well suited for ultra mobility and convenience. Some time ago I had also got an ultra compact device called the Mobilis and had commented that the inbuilt keypad on Mobilis was more or less useless. I could not use the Freedom mini keypad with this device as it did not have any kernel support for bluetooth and all my attempts to compile my own kernel for this device have not so far been successful. I had gone far to even load the compiled kernel on to Mobilis but alas could not make it run!

And well I connected it to Mobilis and fired up Abiword and was up writing this review :) At 800 INR the keypad seems to be a bit expensive. But its small tablet PC form factor and slim and sleek look appears to tone down the weight on your pockets. This is a full PC style keypad as opposed to a reduced version (QWERTY basic) Freedom mini keypad. Its definitely easier to work and type out documents with this "natural" PC style keypad. Almost all the keypad button except the one specific to Microsoft Windows are usable and work as advertised. Especially I find using the editor, bash terminal and vi was much easier with this keypad. I also found that using this keypad was much easier than using the keypad that comes with most of the laptops. Thus I find that the ergonomics of this keypad are nicely done.

To test out the usability of this device on a desktop PC (as it is marketed as a DeskSaver keyboard) I connected this keypad to my PC. This also allowed to test other keys which are of non usable on Mobilis. The special Windows keys works as expected. So does the shortcut keys for accessing Internet and Email as well as keys for controlling the volume (Note that you need to install the provided driver software for this to work properly). However, I find that this keypad is a bit constrained if you do heavy coding and would not really recommend it if you intend to replace your standard keyboard with this one. In fact the standard USB keypad that comes with today's branded PCs provide the same softkey experience as this keypad provides.

In conclusion I find that this keypad is only useful if you are looking into using this device in conjunction with a mobile device especially a tablet PC. It also works great with Mobilis, the only drawback being that its a bit bigger than the default carry case provided for Mobilis.

Core Aware MeTA Studio : Early Implementation

A new version of MeTA Studio is available for download. This is the first release of MeTA Studio where some algorithms have started taking advantage of multi core systems. Though MeTA Studio uses a lots of threads to do tasks in background, the multi core (or processor) functionality has never been earlier in algorithms that are compute intensive. As a first step the following algorithms in MeTA Studio use the multi core (processor) features of the system when available:
1) Building molecular connectivity graph.
2) One electron integral evaluation (quantumj implementation in MeTA Studio)
3) Two electron integral evaluation (quantumj implementation in MeTA Studio)

As always the updates are available from http://code.google.com/p/metastudio/

Check back as I add more features that take care of multi core features offered in todays multi core processors.

Other minor changes:
1) Bug fixes related to exporting .list and .key files
2) Updated Java3D system to 1.5.1 so that it works with Windows Vista.
3) And usual set of small bug fixes.

OpenMoko's first "open" mobile phone is up for sale

Yes! Finally OpenMoko has made available their first "open standards" based mobile phone available to be bought online at: https://direct.openmoko.com/ (Warning: if you are using some latest version of browser like IE7 or FireFox 2, you will get a warning on the certificate validity of the HTTPS site. I hope OpenMoko fixes this issue soon!).

From the site:

"OpenMoko is a GNU / Linux based open software development platform. Developers have full access to OpenMoko source and they can tailor their implementations to underlying hardware platforms. "

The current developer edition (Neo Base 1973) is costing 300 USD. The advanced developer edition comes for 100 USD more (which contains tools and stuff to open up the mobile physically).

There is a consumer edition slated to be released in October this year.

I am hopeful of this device, but as of now don't simply have the money to buy this cool stuff :(

OLPC and Classmate PC

Last week Intel announced that they are finally introducing their "version" of OLPC dubbed the Classmate PC in India for a price of about 10,000 INR. Though as always I take the price tag with a pinch of salt because as always this price appears to be one what is subsidized and not the retail price (as in you can't buy this from a third party vendor or a distribution outlet, at least at the price which is quoted for).

Though it is made to appear that the goals of OLPC and Classmate PC to make available computing resources for those underprivileged to have an access to a full blown desktop or laptop available today are altruistic on the part of the parent sponsoring companies and rivals at the same time (AMD and Intel respectively), I see more selfish motives. Even though it is the OLPC foundation that is spearheading the development of OLPC, Intel sees it as a competition from AMD. In an attempt to make available the computing power to the next billion, the companies (AMD, Intel and Microsoft alike) only seem to be in a mood to capture the larger market share.   

Classmate PC appears to me no different from the Mobilis developed by an Indian company called Encore Software Ltd. Both of these offer compact computing power within the form factor of a very light laptop computer. Even the OLPC project falls in the same category. The only difference that I see is the real hardware and the software combinations used. While Mobilis uses an Intel StrongARM processor with a commercial distribution of GNU/Linux called the MotaVista, Classmate PC uses an Intel Celeron-M processor and possibly Microsoft's $3 software (which is basically a cut down version of Windows and Office). OLPC on the other hand is developing their own version of Linux distribution derived from the Fedora project and uses an AMD processor. But I feel, that none of these "laptops" meant to basically address the larger issue of digital divide seems to serve the real purpose.

Firstly, the foremost criterion of bridging the digital divide is to break the price barrier of a computing device. Mobilis (and its earlier avatar of Simputer) when introduced was touted to be a sub 10K INR device; now it costs 20K INR + extra 2K if you need connectivity options. OLPC was supposed to be $100 device now that is already reached somewhere to $150 (or more?). I do not see a reason why Classmate PC will have the same problem.

Secondly, the basic idea of providing a portable computing device to bridge the digital divide at the cost that is substantially high is flawed. Yes 10K INR or $100 is very expensive for people who can't get even proper schooling, I am not counting the once who do not even manage to feed them properly as I feel that the the digital divide can only be broken in steps.

Thirdly, the idea of providing a portable computing device to a group of kids also seems to be flawed to me. When you have portable computing device, it becomes a personal object, you are tied to it, you start depending on it, you learn to use it and you customize it to your needs and taste. When such a device is used in a group it looses its sheer advantage and appeal. And I feel this is exactly the reason why the Simputer's target audience was a big mistake. You can't expect a PDA form factor device to be shared with the whole village community. You do not share a mobile phone, do you? You also do not share your laptop the same way!

Fourthly, who is responsible for repairing and supporting these devices. I see no indication on the part of the sponsors in this respect.   

Lastly, I feel the refurbished PCs should also be considered as a means to bridge the digital device, rather than generating new e-waste.

All this seriously makes me think hard as to whether there is a better solution to this so-called problem of "digital divide"? Can this be achieved via a community activity and not like what currently appears to be largely spearheaded by big corporations eager to get market share in the next billion? Could the price of a decent personal computing device with connectivity options (which may require un-conventional way of designing these devices) be brought down to 1K INR (roughly $25)? (The mobile phone industry has already come up with such options with Reliance Infocom introducing 770INR (roughly $20) mobile phone in Indian market, of course the goal of phone is different (or is it?) but that is exactly the kind of pricing required of a computing device to make it accessible to the larger lot of us.) And finally as the target is a large mass of people (not millions, but well over a billion), how do we make these computing devices greener?

If you, like me feel that these questions be addressed for a better "digital world" of tomorrow, I would like to know your opinion. And possibly come up with a viable practical "first step" solution...

Reviewing Windows Live Writer

I am using the Windows Live Writer on Windows Vista to post this blog entry to my blog. This the first time I am using an offline editor to post the entries on this blog. Though I have used Google Docs to publish entries on this blog, I am starting to love this application from Microsoft as it seems to offer support to a wide range of Weblog services. The one greatest advantage of using Windows Live Writer is editing the blog in a completely offline mode and the post it when ever you get online. Windows Live Writer automatically adapts to the current theme that you are using (including the background images, fonts etc.) so writing on to the blog also gives a different experience :)

using MeTA Studio APIs to construct new applications

As an example of using MeTA Studio API's I have written up an applet to interactively select a grid for scalar field calculations using WebProp.

The code is available from:
http://tovganesh.googlepages.com/MeTApplet.tar.gz

But be warned! it not at all documented ;) .. but i guess its simple enough to understand ;)

To know what is WebProp visit http://chem.unipune.ernet.in/~tcg/webprop/

playing with MeTA Studio renderer and water esp

Playing around with MeTA Studio renderer and water electro static potential (ESP) yields some stunning pictures ... all of these are textured planes of ESP computed using WebProp:

latest screen shots for MeTA Studio

Full Screen viewer with interactive grid generator.




Improved rendering via JRMan.




and watch the goodness as you fragment manually!

MeTA Studio windows installer

For those of who like the simplicity of installer to check out meta studio, i have built a windows installer using Null Soft installer, and is available at:
http://chem.unipune.ernet.in/~tcg/MeTAv2/MeTAStudioInstaller.exe

The installer needs an installation of JRE, which can be obtained from http://www.java.com, if u do not have it already installed.

I have tested the installer on Windows Vista Ultimate Edition (32-bit) and Windows XP Professional (32-bit) and it seems to work fine. I guess it should work on other versions of Windows too!

If you are looking of sample files to program in MeTA Studio, the scripts and widgets package is now available separately at:
http://chem.unipune.ernet.in/~tcg/MeTAv2/scriptsAndWidgets.tar.gz

revisiting olpc

Well not exactly, but this NY Times article on the schools in US abandoning the "one-to-one" computing programs as it hardly improves the learning abilities of the kids, is something that really needs to be thought about.

The article notes that in the seven or so years it was functional in many schools, the box has more served as distraction in the learning process.

Incidences like these should be taken seriously and probably we need to study a lot before blindly implementing a new technology driven learning scheme.

As of now India has taken a stand of opting out of the OLPC project, possibly because of these very worries?

Mobilis Review - Part I : The Hardware, Software and Device aspects

What is it?

A hand held device from Encore Software, Bangalore that was introduced in late 2005 by the Indian minister for Science and Technology, Kapil Sibbal, was dubbed as a sub 10K INR laptop for the masses with an aim to bridge the much debated digital divide. However, since its availability, the price of the device seems to be little over double the initial estimated cost. With most of the connectivity options (like WiFi, GPRS and USB Lan) needing extra money, the device at present seems no where near bridging the digital divide. But if we look closer, it might have some promise...

The Hardware

The Mobilis is based on an ARM architecture and uses an Intel PAX processor clocked at 400 MHz. A main memory of 128MB is fair enough to run a number of applications included. However, a flash memory of mere 128MB is just enough for the installed applications. If you want to store data or music it is advised to get a cheap USB pen drive or an MMC card. However make sure that the drive is formatted with FAT16 only as FAT32 seems not supported. I was successfully able to use my old 128MB Lexar pen drive as well as a new 2GB Transdent drive without much problems. But I find certain data integrity issues while using the 2GB drive, and would rather recommend not to use a higher capacity drive with this device. However, I have not been able to use the MMC card that came with my Nokia 6600 on the device.

On the display side, Mobilis comes with an impressive 800x640, 16bit clear TFT display that also acts as a touch screen. I found this screen as well as the touch screen fairly well made as compared to other competing products.

Another piece of hardware that I am currently using to key in the text for this review is the 56 key keyboard that is a bit cumbersome to use. In the small keypad form factor, I am a regular user of Freedom Mini keypad along with my Nokia 6600. I find the ergonomics of Freedom Mini keyboard far better than the one offered with Mobilis. One major complain that I have about the Mobilis keypad is the size of the individual keys is so small that a person with thick figures will have problem using the keys effectively.

Another piece of hardware is the stereo speakers attached to the device and are fairly good quality piezo electric gadget. The device also includes an inbuilt mic, though I found its quality and sensitivity not at par even with cheap microphones available in the market.

The Software

On the software end Mobilis uses a commercial grade MontaVista Linux distribution.The kernel version is fairly dated in the sense it is 2.4.x series. A uname -a indicates the following kernel version:

Linux Mobilis 2.4.20_mvl31_tft_mg1

Mobilis also includes a BuzyBox based shell ash, which provides most of the command line utilities available on a standard Linux distribution. Other productivity applications like E-mail client, Firefox browser, Abiword, Presentation viewer, VLC player (mp3 and video player) and Flash player are also present.

How does it compare with other offerings in the market?

By any means Mobilis was neither released too early in the market neither too late to be run over by its competing devices. As of now I see two major factors in keeping away general public from buying this device. Most of what this device can do can be performed by a high end Nokia smart phone (except of-course the screen form factor). Another feature that this device lacks is a camera, but I don't think the current design can accommodate a camera in it. When compared with other similar form factor devices like the Nokia Internet tablet, Mylo from Sony, I find that two major things are lacking: an out of box integrated WiFi or a bluetooth connectivity and support for VoIP clients like GTalk and Skype. Though one might argue that these are not real target areas for Mobilis, these features really do affect when people are looking out for the device. Another important area where Encore is missing out is marketing. Where as Nokia and Sony have a huge marketing force as well as get fair amount of third party review, the marketing by Encore is vastly limited and has also probably received far less reviews.

In conclusion I find that Mobilis has a great promise if Encore keeps developing and improving over the current design. It a pretty good start from Indian perspective of bridging the digital divide by reliable low powered computing devices.

In the next part of this review I will cover software and programming aspects of Mobilis in more detail.... so look back at this space.

Note: This review was entirely written using Abiword on Mobilis and then transferred to my PC using USB pen drive and finally uploaded to Google Docs and published to Blogger.