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BSNL's free telephone service to employees and DOT staff

A reader of the Tribune, Chandigarh has written in to complain about free telephone service provided to employees and to staff...

BSNL provides this service to their current employees and staff at DOT (probably above a certain grade) and to retired staff from BSNL and DOT. However, the treatment of these subscribers - who often times pay a bill anyway as the free service is for a limited number of calls - is usually not even as good as for regular paying customers. I have frequently seen lines being left in an in-operable condition. So the problem is universal, when subscribers pay they should get the service they are paying for.

In general, what exasperates subscribers (including yours truly) the most is that to keep their numbers looking good, BSNL support staff regularly close complaints even if the underlying problem is not fixed. Subscribers waiting to hear back on their complaint find out a few days later that the "complaint was closed as the fault was rectified" and have to re-file their complaint to get it addressed.

The Tribune, Chandigarh, India - Himachal Pradesh Edition

It is also difficult to understand the rationale behind providing free services to employees of the Telecom Department when the BSNL fails to provide proper services to the people paying for them!

Technorati Tags: BSNL, DOT, India

More than four years with iTunes

I was reading this post written by a friend of mine regarding his decision to take the plunge and switch to iTunes and realized that its been such a while since I started using iTunes (over four years) but I still hadn't completely given it full reign over the music library folder. So, after seeing Ashwin's attempt work, I have also let iTunes consolidate the library - lets hope nothing breaks! Now's my chance to get rid of duplicates and see how much space that saves... Technorati tags: iTunes, mac, apple

Getting Mail.app to run faster

Hawk Wings » Blog Archive » A faster way to speed up Mail.app

Some anecdotal evidence suggests that POP users don’t see the same reductions. Can any POP user out here confirm this?

I'm running one IMAP and 2 POP3 accounts - The Envelope Index dropped from 22.9 MB to 1.3 MB in size after trying this procedure!

Technorati Tags: Mail.app, mac, apple, speed boost, pop3, imap

The problem with Voicemail in India

As I was catching up on my reading list of blogs, I noticed this post by Brian McConnell at Emerging Telephony:
A Poor Man's Hack For Improving Mobile Voicemail - O'Reilly Emerging Telephony

Reading the recent post about the poor state of voice mail, I realized that this is a perfect example of how bad the carriers are at innovation. This problem can be solved quite easily, without requiring a major overhaul of either voice mail systems or handsets.

There are several problems with voicemail, including:

• Voicemail access is currently sequential (remember the iPhone announcements from Steve regarding their breakthrough feature for random access to voicemails?)
• It is heavily dependent on Interactive Voice Response systems (IVRs)

Worse still, Indian service providers have major glitches in the way their systems are configured:

• BSNL (India's largest telecom company) Chennai's Voicemail system has been offline for over one year on their wireline network - no official reasons for why
  
• Airtel's voicemail system has a great feature where you get an sms with direct access to the voicemail in question. However, it has a retarded problem where when a caller attempts to leave a message, they hear: "after the beep <beep> thank you for using Airtel" - it doesn't even let you leave a message!!!
• Not yet sure about Hutch (soon to be Vodaphone), my voicemail service is yet to be activated
• Most of the service providers I have used (either as a customer or when leaving a message for one of their customers) have issues with the IVR system that handles voicemail being jammed

All this can be improved, with just a little bit of effort from the service provider:

• Use MMS to deliver the voicemail directly to the customer - no more IVR to retrieve voicemail - only for callers to leave messages
• Properly implement random access to voicemails via direct dialing to the voicemail in question
• Work with handset manufacturers (like the Apple - Cingular/AT&T effort) to integrate voicemail directly into the messaging interface

The benefits gained from acting on even one of these would be incredible! For one, I would stop ranting about this topic :)

Customers and callers would actually begin to use voicemail (specially in India where the population is averse to talking to a machine - they would much rather hang up or leave one of those famous "missed calls"). Also, IVR systems would not be jammed as much, reducing the cost impact of maintaining and upgrading them.

Technorati Tags: voicemail, ivr, cellphones, iphone, india

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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Steve Jobs announces the Apple phone - iphone?

Steve just announced the 4GB Apple iphone (?) at MacWorld today, with Cingular as the exclusive launch partner for the US. Looks like it won't be available until June 2007 in the US and it will be 2008 by the time it makes it here to Asia.

Both models have Quadband GSM, EDGE, Bluetooth and WiFi support + work as a widescreen iPod as well!

All the top mac sites have live coverage and photos, here are a couple from macrumorslive.com

Available with Bluetooth headset...

Technorati Tags: apple, iphone, bluetooth, edge, wifi

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More speculation on Parallels! Will it ship with Leopard?

There's more speculation on Parallels Desktop. This person thinks it possible that Apple might ship Parallels Desktop with Leopard (the next release of OS X).

Is Parallels Leopard’s Secret Feature? · cavemonkey50.com

If Apple has purchased Parallels, I think that explains why the Parallels team has been releasing features out the wazoo without charging for them. This won’t be the first time Apple has included third party software in one of their offerings, so I think this scenario is completely possible.

Technorati Tags: parallels, virtualization, apple, mac

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Parallels now supports "coherence mode" - windows programs can share the screen with mac programs!

Update: I forgot the release announcement on the Parallels site. The latest beta (mirror by uneasysilence.com)build of Parallels Desktop supports coexistence of windows & mac programs on the same screen, side by side. It also supports drag & drop of files and folders both ways (mac -> windows & back). Here is a cool screencast by Michael Verdi: MICHAEL VERDI : Parallels Screencast

The latest beta of Parallels Desktop for Mac is out and it’s super cool. Check out this screencast of some of the new features in action.

Technorati Tags: Parallels, virtualization, mac

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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

More on the move to the iMac

I'm gonna spend the next few days documenting my move to the iMac from Windows, including the following:
1. backing up data
2. transferring my iTunes Library intact without destroying my precious song ratings, # of played, last played and other meta-data that iTunes stores on my 8600 song, 48 Gig music collection
3. every day programs I now use on the mac
4. dealing with video

So! watch this blog to track my progress...

Technorati Tags: Apple, iMac, iTunes, Switcher

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

Missing the Mac Opportunity

In his latest article on the column Converge Sense at Business 2.0, Om Malik points out a very intriguing trend: while the startup buzz is back, entrepreneurs are neglecting a major platform with over 5 million ready users who are frequently early adopters – Apple’s Mac.

For greater insight on why entrepreneurs (or even developers) should consider the Mac as a platform to launch their product on, read Om’s article here: Startups Are Missing the Mac Opportunity.

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.

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

PalmSource adopting Linux!

PalmSource has announced that the next version of PalmOS will run on a Linux core with custom application extensions... kinda like Apple with Mac OS X and FreeBSD. Coverage on: The Register: PalmSource to build Palm OS on Linux and OSNews: PalmSource to build Palm OS on Linux Extract: "Like Apple with Mac OS X, PalmSource will keep all the top-layer code proprietary, but it will release any changes it makes to the underlying Linux code - for faster boot times and battery life preservation systems, for example - available to the open source community."

A MacGyver for the Third World

An MIT inventor bent on public service creates practical solutions to life-threatening problems around the world. Her approach: be a master of the obvious. Second in a series profiling this year's MacArthur 'genius award' winners. By Kari Lynn Dean.

Related...

[Wired News]

If more scientists are willing to think out-of-the-box like this, we would make giant strides in solving real, every-day problems. This can have a significant impact on global prosperity... and I'm not talking about just money here!

Spiral ring reveals ancient complex machines

New Scientist - Spiral ring reveals ancient complex machines Dual purpose in posting this article here: 1. Interesting that they're finding some evidence that contradicts what is currently known of ancient times - even if it is still circumstantial. 2. Why did it have to be SPIRALS??? [this one is specifically for Ashwin Shankar and Anant Pandey!]

Reason for my silence

I just realized that I haven't made a single post between mid-March and the couple of posts I made earlier today!!! Well, for the readers of this site (last time I checked this number was ZERO), here's my explanation: I have been in the process of relocating to Chennai, India, as part of my search for new job opportunities in the embedded systems industry. My specialization is in a field called M2M (Machine-to-machine) communications. I'm gonna be off for a couple of weeks meeting various companies around India, wish me luck!