Thoughts of A Lively Mind

Wordpress.app on the iphone

Just got Wordpress.app for the iphone. Think it would inspire me to write more?

Great quote by Dr. Suess that was in October Special's header

There was this great quote from Dr. Suess in the October Special theme's header... “I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.” - Dr. Suess

India's economic growth also leads to significant growth in paper consumption

There's an article on The Economic Times from a couple of days ago that talks about how paper consumption in India is contributing significantly to the 12% growth rate in the manufacturing sectors.

Paper consumption set to double by 2015-Indicators-Economy-News-The Economic Times

Consumption of paper in India is set to double from the current 7 million tonnes per annum in the next eight years, according to Indian Paper Manufacturers Association (IPMA).

I'm concerned to see that while there have been so many initiatives to reduce paper consumption around the world (and encourage re-use through recycling), India is  expected to double its consumption in the next 8 years. Here's to hoping that the paper industry also considers the environmental impact of such actions and plans for a renewable means of sourcing raw materials (wood pulp, chemicals, etc.).

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Indian bloggers most active in APAC says The Hindu

The Hindu has an article up regarding statistics on blogging in India vs the rest of APAC. What interested me the most was this nugget:

The Hindu Business Line : Indians blog to motivate others: Survey

While Australians blog to keep in touch with friends, Chinese to share knowledge skills and store important information, Indians blog to motivate other people to action and make money.

Another one:

More than half of Indian blog readers have been influenced by blogs in experiencing a brand or service; the highest across all markets.

Technorati Tags: blogging in India, Internet, India, APAC

Outlook on the desktop

While I would love to be in an environment where I had to use only Macs, in the business world its rare to see that - especially in India (okay, the music and film community here is the major area where Macs are prevalent). So, I get to use a windows laptop and Outlook at work.

I found this tool called Outlook on the Desktop yesterday while going through my reading list of newsfeeds. Great for bringing outlook's calender right where it matters - on the desktop. Its already done wonders for my ability to stay organized in the one full working day I have used it. Lets hope this keeps up ;-)

Michael Scrivo's Personal Site - Outlook on the Desktop

Oulook Calendar is pinned to your desktop

Also here's a writeup on this product at Digital Inspiration: Turn Microsoft Outlook into an Interactive Desktop Wallpaper

Some feedback on the program: I have this possibly unique situation where I need to restart outlook if I leave the office and try to connect back in or if I used Outlook outside the office and am returning - has to do with Outlook's IP address cache not refreshing often enough. Would love for a programmatic way for this program to auto-launch (or re-launch) along with Outlook.

Technorati Tags: outlook desktop, outlook, microsoft

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2 Mbps Broadband in India - the start of the next growth spurt?

I was reading this blog post by Vijay Anand called The Truth Behind Indian Broadband yesterday and thought I should state a few of my thoughts on this subject here. Vijay leads into the argument with:

256Kbps. Thats what they seem to be calling as Broadband here. Actually, even 128kbps is sold in the broadband internet package. The cost, almost seems to be at par with what would cost a 2mbps line in North America. What's this all about?

The typical large service provider in India (the usual suspects: BSNL, MTNL, Airtel, Reliance Infocomm and Tatas) either have their own international networks or are in the process of acquiring them (by laying cables or leasing). So its not about the bandwidth not being available. These large providers are capable of servicing 2 Mbps or higher connections to subscribers without any problems. It has been avoided as there has been a lack of understanding on the need for 2 Mbps when even 256 kbps is high for checking email and browsing a few websites. Over the last year, since the adoption of broadband in India has witnessed a growth spurt and also the recent launch of IPTV by some select operators (MTNL and BSNL included) subscriber lines are already being provisioned for 1 or 2 Mbps. For those of us waiting for 2 Mbps connections to be available, the other shoe has dropped yesterday: the Minister for Communications has announced that BSNL will offer 2 Mbps connections to all customers with 256 kbps connections without any increase in price. I believe its only a matter of weeks to see Airtel and the others matching these rates and services. Now for the smaller ISPs: This marked change in the bandwidth of connections available will have a significant impact on the guys who just make money in reselling bandwidth but don't have scale and numbers. Without innovative features and captive portals that give advertising revenue or other revenue, the smaller ISPs will end up spending more money on bandwidth than they receive in revenue. Going back to Vijay's post, its quite likely that based on the announcement from the Minister (and more importantly its implementation by the service providers) the rates for a 2 Mbps connection in India will match the US before mid-2007. Technorati Tags: broadband bsnl india Airtel

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Moving into Wordpress on my own domain

I'm in the process of moving my blog over from Typepad to a Wordpress installation on my own domain. A Lively Mind - hosted by Dreamhost, I highly recommend them! While I'm setting things up, please bear with me if you see templates changing, various items appearing and disappearing from the view and default information from the templates not being updated with accurate info on this site. Also, you might notice references to Typepad from earlier posts. I shall at some point add updates to reflect the fact that the blog is no longer hosted at Typepad.

I guess I'm the last person to hear about Windows Live Writer!

I just started catching up with news from Monday morning and came across Windows Live Writer. Appears to be a well-designed app! There's already a couple of extensions/plugins built for it such as the Tag4Writer, Flicker4Writer and Currently Listening.

Amit Agarwal writes about this on his blog: Windows Live Writer Tips & Tricks.

I just noticed something, it actually picks up your browser URL history (Internet Explorer only of course) and offers it up when you begin typing in a URL to link - great integration efforts!

Now to find the trackback area... ah at the bottom of the Post area.... and here goes - or not - I cant find the trackback link on Amit Agarwal's blog. This is sad.

Lets not forget to tag this post - I agree with the comment on the tips & tricks post - this feature needs to be automated big-time.

tags: Windows+Live+Writer, Tag4Writer, Digital+Inspiration, Microsoft

Moving my iTunes library from XP to my new iMac 20“

I've finally documented how I moved my iTunes collection intact from Windows XP to the new iMac! Before blindly copying everything and ending up losing my song ratings and presets and playlists, etc for my gigantic 8600 song collection, I decided to RTFM first (one of those rare cases where its worth reading up before acting!). My music collection is split into two segments: 1. The real iTunes collection, imported and sorted by artist etc in iTunes. This has my purchases from the music store when I was in the US and all the CDs I have imported into iTunes. 2. The other music from before iTunes for Windows came out. This is sorted by Genre and stored in a separate folder that had been manually and painstakingly imported by dragging directory after directory into the iTunes Library. These are the steps I followed: 1. Using the backups I had created earlier (Backing up my data), I copied two folders over to the iMac (the iTunes Music and the other music). 2. I setup the iMac's sharing services to share my user directory on Samba. 3. I mounted my Mac user directory on the Windows PC as a separate drive (say Z:) 3. Now, I edited the “iTunes Music Library.xml” file on the Windows PC, using Find & Replace to redirect all directory references to the two folders in Z: This is the critical step, without this, iTunes will just over-write and ignore the changes made to the xml file! 4. I opened the “iTunes Library.itl” file (also on the Windows PC) and deleted its contents, then save. This file is a binary version of the xml file, derived and updated by iTunes every time changes are made to the library. The idea here is, Apple keeps a backup in the xml file, so the binary data can be derived at any time! 5. I then ran iTunes. As expected, it complained that the Library was corrupted and began re-constructing it from the xml file. This took ages as it had to run through all 8600 songs' data and verify their locations on the remote drive (Z:) 6. Once this was done, I now had an iTunes installation on Windows using music that was actually stored on the Mac! Final step! I was now content that I was almost done, and that I would now just have to copy the xml file to the iMac, find and replace Z: with the local path, delete the contents of the binary “iTunes Library.itl” and open iTunes. 7. I copied the two library files “iTunes Music Library.xml” and “iTunes Library.itl” to my iMac, and then, trusting one of the articles I had read earlier (referenced below), just took the chance and ran iTunes. And it worked! iTunes came up, said it was translating the library, and the entire song collection came up, with ratings, last played, # of times played, my precious playlists, the iPod settings, everything! There was just one hitch however, I had to re-signup for all the podcasts - somehow this transfer method does not retain he podcast subscriptions. References: iTunes library transfer · made in costa rica by josue salazar How to Safely Move Your iTunes Music Directory to a New Drive Google Search: transferring itunes library from windows Technorati Tags: Apple, backup, iMac, iTunes, Switcher

Backing up my data

As part of my series on switching to the Apple iMac, here's my piece on backing up data. I looked around for a good solution to store upwards of 300GB of data on a Firewire + USB2.0 external drive and came across the Maxtor OneTouch III Turbo Edition. This drive comes in two sizes, the 600 GB version has 2 x 300 GB drives in a RAID 0 configuration and the 1 TB version has 2 x 500 GB drives that are set in RAID 0 by default but can be changed to a RAID 1 setup via the included management program that's available on the cd that comes with the package. I however did not know of the limitation on the 600 GB drive until after I purchased it. So much for redundant backups! Guess I will change to that at some other point. The drive comes pre-formatted for Mac OS X (i.e. it has a single partition across both drives in HFS+). It was a simple plug & play job to get it working with my old Powerbook 800Mhz. Now, the logical step would be to run MacDrive 6 and connect up the Maxtor drive via USB 2.0 to my PC. Just my luck, this simply would not work. MacDrive never managed to detect and grant access to the Maxtor drive. So I was stuck backing up files via the network and the Powerbook. This was a few days effort of setting up a data transfer and leaving it to run while I went to work. After giving my network (driven by a great Linksys WRT54G running the DD-WRT release) a nice exercise, I had a backup of all my files, for use when the iMac arrived. Next up, setting up the iMac and transferring iTunes! Technorati Tags: Apple, backup, iMac, iTunes, Linksys, maxtor, DD-WRT, Switcher, WRT54G

Switching back to Apple!

After at least 2 years of using Windows and an AMD (Athlon XP 3200+) based system, and 4 years of having a Powerbook 800Mhz, I have finally taken the final plunge and converted to an all Apple world. I am now the proud owner of a 20“ iMac with an Intel Core Duo processor!

Technorati Tags: Apple, iMac, Switcher

Light Reading also covers UTStar @ Bharti (Airtel)

Light Reading - Video - Bharti Watches UTStarcom for IPTV - Telecom News Analysis

UTStarcom Inc. has got its foot in the door at Bharti Tele-Ventures Ltd. , which has ambitious plans to become India’s first IPTV provider.

Looks like Light Reading is also picking up this story on UTStar's on-going trial at Bharti Airtel. In other news, Bharti Tele-Ventures is changing its name to Bharti Airtel, bringing the Airtel brand into the name of the company.

Technorati Tags: iptv, utstar, airtel

Spring cleaning in December

Oh, forgot to mention, I am sure the few people (close to zero) visiting this blog noticed that I've changed things around... a good cleanup I hope, in anticipation that 2006 will be a good year for this place.

I am considering removing the Google AdSense section, considering that I doubt I am making any money from it anyway.

I've added my blogroll from work... this gives you a fair idea that I am in the communications technology business. Perhaps I will elaborate on this in a future post...

The Abundance Mentality - a potential remedy in the fight against procrastination

Found this through LifeHacker: The Abundance Mentality as a means to fight procrastination

With an abundance mentality you look at possibilities and opportunities rather than obstacles and problems meaning you don't have any reason to put it off, and a few good reasons to get on to it right away!

While the author of the article chose to call this a cure, I think its actually an apt medication, needed every day to fight procrastination. Over time, I am sure the fight against procrastination can be won solely that it doesn't need to take place in the conscious mind any longer, but give up even for a short while on the tools and medication, and you will find yourself back in the rut. Here's to winning the fight against procrastination in 2006.

You might notice, that in the previous line, I have nicely put off the fight until 2006, even though there is one night and a whole day between now and then :)

Hilarious info on EuroTelcoblog

James Enck of EuroTelcoblog has touched on this hilarious tidbit:

The floorspace occupied by VoIP, IPTV and telco triple play industry events exceeded the total surface area of Canada for the first time in history, and the delegates to these shows, marched side-by-side into the sea, would form a neverending column

The hype and craze for IPTV and triple play seems to have reached a crescendo this year. I remember the days at work a year and a half back when I had to explain the concept to customers. Now they are clamoring for it!

How real is the need for speed?

How real is the need for speed? Om Malik asked the question earlier this week and has some fascinating facts which show that beyond a certain connection speed, there is no perceptible difference in the experience. Of course, with applications like streaming video - IPTV or Video-on-demand - this would change, especially if these are adopted more as packetized realtime streaming formats, not the "file-download" or "partial-file-download" and playback methods adopted by most vendors today.

Here's a link to Om's article: Need For Speed... How Real?

As usual, Robert Scoble has his opinion on this as well and he points to TV over IP as the typical need: Om asks whether we really need the speed of broadband?

On a side-note, I'm publishing this via Performancing for Firefox. Its a great start, has a long way to go however on features.

Been away too long

• Well, I've finally managed to catchup with unread personal mail & unread news items on Bloglines
• The harddrive on my Powerbook 800Mhz crashed, taking some personal data with it exactly 24 hours AFTER I deleted the backup copy on my desktop thinking "I need the extra space"
• Got a nice Thinkpad R51 at work
• and I guess a lot more...

I'll be spending the next few days putting up stuff on this blog that I came across as I tried to catchup with the rest of the world...

Technorati Tags : blogging, random+thoughts

Michael Hyatt decides to switch!

Working Smart: I Finally Took the Plunge

Looks like Michael Hyatt decided to switch to the Mac. What I find intriguing is that within a few days, he’s found keyboard shortcuts I had no idea about

 – and I’ve been using a Powerbook G4 for over 2 years (albeit intermittently over the last 6 months).

I think this quote aptly summarizes the real reason why fans continue to buy Apple products, year after year:

The best part of the Mac experience so far is that the technology simply works. I have yet to experience software conflicts, viruses and spyware infections, and endless tinkering and tweaking. Installing a printer, an Apple Airport Express, or some other peripheral is easy and painless. The bottom line is that I am simply spending more time getting real work done. And that’s what I was hoping for by making the switch. – Michael Hyatt.

Google launches a Video seach beta

Google launches Video search beta! Robert Scoble notes that you can’t search for Channel 9 videos on Google Video yet. Google Video Search

Powerpoint's "Presenter View" with Office 2003 and Office 2004 for Mac OS X

Michael Hyatt wrote about PowerPoint’s “Presenter View” earlier this week. I’ve loved this feature and in fact enjoy using it more in Mac OS X than in Windows. This might have something to do with the fact that my laptop is a Powerbook G4

.

An entire session can be timed from the moment you start, comments from the audience can be noted directly, as well as prior notes displayed. Overall, the advantage of knowing what the next few slides cover keeps the momentum going and helps me make sure I don’t repeat the same statements over and over!

Now playing: Linkin Park - Forgotten from Hybrid Theory