The need for AOSP Android

I have a Note II. My wife gave it to me as a birthday gift. To be honest, I was so the one to suggest the Note II as the gift. But having used the original Galaxy S, the S2.... I was aware of what I was getting in to. I'm talking about TouchWiz. What Samsung were now referring to as the Nature UI was something that was smooth, not slick like stock Android, but pretty responsive nonetheless.

Since this was a present from my wife, I had to think twice before tinkering with the device. I am an ex phone flashing addict who would try out different ROMS on his devices and play with them for a while before moving on to something else. This habit had existed right from the days of my first Windows Phone, the Xperia X1.

So one fine morning, getting tired of all the videos of the stock Android on the Nexus 4, I dove in to flash Cyanogen Mod 10.1 onto the Note II. It had some graphics glitches which have been getting sorted out over the course of the last few months. I am a regular updates from the nightlies.

It happened that one of my friends, someone who usually enquires about any device I might have to sell off (since I'm buying a new device) asked me to suggest a new device with his budget around ₹25k. With friends in the UK soon heading down to India on holiday, I suggested that he have someone get the Nexus 4 for him. It would cost him ₹23k (based on the current exchange rate) and would fall well within his budget. The best part was that this was a device well worth the price and effort spent and getting it.
I met him yesterday, after our mutual friend had brought the device. I immediately fell in love with the Nexus 4. I was so excited that I even offered to exchange devices, with him getting my higher spec'd and costlier Note II and me getting his brand new Nexus 4. He said he would love it but he thought the Note II was an unwieldy device and thus the exchange was halted.

But come to think of it, the only thing he has in his favour is that he will get the next Google update when it becomes available. I'll have to wait for mine. Till then, I get the same performance, better pictures and damn good battery life.

I guess I am right to stick with this device and forego any device change till the next Nexus hits the stores.

You Only Live Once

Life is once!!!!!!!!Learn every moment and enjoy the same Everything happens for a reason. Nothing happens by chance or by means of good or bad luck. Illness, injury, love, lost moments of true greatness and sheer stupidity all occur to test the limits of your soul. Without these small tests, if they be events, illnesses or relationships, life would be like a smoothly paved, straight, flat road to nowhere. If someone hurts you, betrays you , or breaks you heart, forgive them. For they have helped you learn about trust and the importance of being cautious to who you open your heart to. If someone loves you, love them back unconditionally, not only because they love you, but because they are teaching you to love and opening your heart and eyes to things you would have never seen or felt without them. Make every day count. Appreciate every moment and take from it everything that you possibly can, for you may never be able to experience it again. Talk to people you have never talked to before, and actually listen. Hold your head up because you have every right to. Tell yourself you are a great individual and believe in yourself, for if you don't believe in yourself, no one else will believe in you either. You can make of your life anything you wish. Create your own life and then go out and live it. The dirt at home is there to build you, so allow it to do it's purpose because your wisdom grows from your past.

- A mail forward

How in IT we pitch to a client

 This one is from a forwarded mail: 

Programmer to Team Leader:

"We can't do this proposed project. **CAN NOT**. It will involve a major design change and no one in our team knows the design of this legacy system.

And above that, nobody in our company knows the language in which this application has been written. So even if somebody wants to work on it, they

can't. If you ask my personal opinion, the company should never take these

type of projects."

Team Leader to Project Manager :

"This project will involve a design change. Currently, we don't have any

staff that has experience in this type of work. Also, the language is

unfamiliar to us, so we will have to arrange for some training if we take

this project. In my personal opinion, we are not ready to take on a project

of this nature."

Project Manager to 1st Level Manager :

"This project involves a design change in the system and we don't have much

experience in that area. Also, not many people in our company are appropriately trained for it. In my personal opinion, we might be able to do the project but we would need more time than usual to complete it."

1st Level Manager to Senior Level Manager :

"This project involves design re-engineering. We have some people who have worked in this area and others who know the implementation language. So they can train other people. In my personal opinion we should take this project, but with caution."

Senior Level Manager to CEO :

"This project will demonstrate to the industry our capabilities in

remodeling the design of a complete legacy system. We have all the necessary skills and people to execute this project successfully. Some people have already given in house training in this area to other staff members. In my

personal opinion, we should not let this project slip by us under any

circumstances."

CEO to Client :

"This is the type of project in which our company specializes. We have

executed many projects of the same nature for many large clients. Trust me

when I say that we are the most competent firm in the industry for doing this kind of work. It is my personal opinion that we can execute this project successfully and well within the given time frame.

In the Club

So as I just sit around in the club, not even trying to enjoy myself, I can't help but wonder, why did I even cone here. The way the holiday season has panned out, this is probably the last weekend I get to go out with my colleagues. And after the multitudes of parties that I have attended over the last few days, I gotta say, I'm making the most of this last weekend. And by last weekend, I mean the last weekend in UK as I head back to India. So on the coming weekend, the Christmas weekend, I'll be busy packing my bags and clearing my stuff from the apartment.
It also is a testament to my time spent here in the UK, all this while I have been alone, roaming around uk, all alone, mostly by choice though. So now finally coming back to my question to myself, I guess I just wanted to see for one last time THE club scene in UK...  and as another Rihanna songs bellows from the speakers, I sign off. Hope my friends are as bored as I am.

Blogger and Google Plus integration

I am not an avid Blogger user. But have been using it pretty regularly for the last few months and am very much impressed by it. I also happen to be a Google plus user who usually posts pictures on his profile but no so much of good posts. These posts are something I reserve for my Blogger account. But, so it seems, I have a big enough audience on Google plus as well. So I was wondering why isn’t blogger and google plus thoroughly integrated.

Google Plus and Blogger are both Google products, though one was bought by Google and the other was created in-house. The kind of integration that I am expecting is that I want my blogger posts to be immediately posted on my Google plus page as well. I know, I can just copy the link of the blog and paste it on my timeline, or click the share button on the blog and share it here, or just copy the text from the blog post, right before I post it and put it on Google Plus. Well, I don’t mind doing all that but then when I want to post pictures, how do I exactly do that? Because posting picture on Blogger isn’t as easy as it is on Google plus. I know this is something that only a lazy person would want but it doesn’t make sense that something like this isn’t already there.

I love all the Google products and very much have all my internet history in them, somewhere or the other, so I would love the tight integration that most of them currently experience with each other to be present in Blogger, because it is such an awesome blogging service/tool. Just my 50 cents.

Linux Mint 12 - Lisa

Is photoshop available for Linux? Because if it is, I might as well move whole heartedly to Linux Mint, have completely fallen in love with the OS. It brings all the cool factors of the Gnome 3 desktop but keeps some of the saner things from the Gnome 2.4. This is probably the reason why I will stick to it rather than Fedora or Ubuntu as they just went a little gung ho with their presentations of the new Gnome desktop.

So far, I think that my laptop looks and performs a lot better under the new system. Even chromium looks and feels better, makes the perfect use of the full HD resolution screen. That is probably one of the reasons why I feel so comfortable with the OS. Anyways, I'll add some more later, now have to go play with the OS a bit.

Sunday Fixing

That would be the best and shortest way to describe my day. Right from 12:00 am in the morning, I have been fixing various issues with the devices I own. These include the new Dell Laptop, the Xoom tablet and the Galaxy S2. The galaxy S2 didn’t have any issues as such, but I was just trying out various different ROMS on the device and then pretty much lost it with the MIUI. Very very annoying and ugly interface for me, thankfully I had done a nandroid backup of the CM7.1 nightly I was running. So that was that. The SGS issues were at 4:00am.

Now coming to the windows installation on my machine, that is the new dell laptop, I had blown up the MBR. What happened was that I wanted to try out the MAC OSx on my laptop. But do go ahead with it, I first had to remove the linux installation on the machine and reclaim the drive space. Once that was done, it was all easy, atleast supposed to be easy to just boot into windows recovery using the Windows Home Premium boot disk that I had. But somehow it just wouldn’t boot into windows. I was quick to give up on it and downloaded an image from the web which could be made out to a Windows boot disk. Turns out, that image was only for installation of windows 7 and not for any recovery activities. Annoyed me a lot, but then, I had to go back to the earlier disk and it finally worked. So when all this was done, it was already 3:00am and so started playing with the Galaxy S2.

And finally, the Xoom. This was in the late afternoon today. I was using this tiamati Rom on it, which pretty much labelled the tablet as a Verizon Xoom and any update that Google pushed to it would brick it. So I just went back, i.e. tried to go back to the earlier stock build of Xoom which I had nandroided. I was in for a surprise when I did this, the wifi wouldn’t just start, let alone scan and connect. So I again went online to look for a stock rom. Found a rooted one, downloaded it but sadly, this one had another issue. Again it was with wifi, the drivers installed or something about the wifi module was so wrong that it would scan the networks but never accept any DHCP ip addresses and also wouldn’t let me set any on the tablet. So downloaded the retail copy of the ROM from the Motorola Dev site and then had to manually flash the system, boot and other images onto the Xoom using fastboot. Fortunately it worked alright.

So till the internet from plusnet is properly installed here, have to stick to the 3 unlimited internet plan. Bad weekend, but on the plus side, 28 more work days till I finally get to back HOME!