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!

Installing Mac OSX 10.8 Lion on my PC

These are not the instructions needed to install, but actually something that I wanted to do. Turns out, all the instructions which I read online were for installing the Mac OSX Snow Leopard on a PC. This was for dual booting the machine into Windows 7 (the existing installation) and Mac OSX. Turns out, since the Lion version of Mac is pretty new, the guys at Hackintosh are looking for ways to directly install from the thumb drive provided by Apple. Till then, we have to install Snow Leopard and then update to Lion as per the instructions given on the various site dedicated to this topic.

So to go ahead with this, I was facing a lot of issues. The main ones were that I already have Linux installed on a partition, which I wanted OSX to replace. But I have also managed to somehow install the Grub bootloader on the MBR rather than the linux drive itself and then use EasyBCD. So to fix this, I first had to fix the Master Boot records. But then again, couldn’t do that, because I needed a Windows boot drive for the same, something which I thought I had, only to realise that the installation drive had indeed gone corrupt. So now, I am downloading the Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit boot disk, using which I will fix my boot drive.

After that is done, I have to a lot of time installing Mac OSX snow leopard on the laptop, also probably increase the size of the partition to 60GB from 40 and then finally move on to installing Lion from the official media that I have bought. The wait is killing me…..

Saturation of the Mind

I have been planning to code and create a bittorrent client purely written in C# and .NET 4.0. I’ve pretty much set up machine as I it should be. All the required software has been downloaded and installed and all the updates too have been installed. The only trouble is that, for the last few days of this week, I have been super busy. This is due to the day job, the job that pays for all the gadget addictions.

There is this User Requirements that my one teammate was supposed to work on. Supposed to work on would be the wrong thing to say actually. He had completed the UR as per his understanding and as per the explanations met out to him by the tester who had written the user requirement. But, sadly, when the development was delivered, it was tested on some useless junk of data which we didn’t know so and now there have been a ton of defects. Now, usually it happens that whoever has done the development handles the defects and if needed guides the other members of the team in solving the defects. But as luck would have it, he is now in India, his assignment ended in the UK and now the people fixing the bugs are the ones who initially had no clue what the requirement was about. Its not like these other devs (which includes me) were sitting idle while he worked on this, they did have their own set of tasks to do and they did complete all of them. So all that’s left now is this one requirement, and its one of the most complex and vast requirements that have been delivered in a long time.

So the crux of the thing is that, every day, for the last 3 days, I’ve been coming home mentally exhausted! Its just that, I haven’t been that challenged at work recently and thus was starting this mini project of mine so as to keep me mentally active. But then, work is getting tedious. The trouble is that its not something that’s technically challenging. If it was, then it would’ve been fun. Its nothing but the functional bit which is draining me. So I was hoping it to be over by the end of the week but alas, that was not going to happen. Still have a few defects pending and to fix them, will have to spend most of my friggin weekend in the office. Also the testers are coming in to test their outstanding work and sadly we have to be there to help them technically as and when they need any help. Talk about baby-sitting, we’re doing some tester sitting.

So till the defects are all cleared out, I might as well get some light reading done about the bittorrent protocol. I need to understand it all first and then maybe I could start right from scratch. Its about time I got back to my roots!

Porting applications...

Regardless of what the open source community thinks about Microsoft, they do make some really awesome IDEs for software development for their platform. Granted, in the previous years, these IDEs were a costly affairs but lately, Microsoft have made many amends to their earlier offensive stand against the Open Source community. They have the website spark programme and the express editions of the development tools which are available for download free of cost. Also these IDEs are very intuitive in helping the developer with the development, he can now find references easily, even while debugging the code, just hovering over the object can tell you from which class its being inherited from. This was something very much evident in the recent porting of the application that I have been performing for my own understanding.

I found this application online which is a bit torrent client (as I had mentioned in a few of my earlier posts, btpeer is what I am talking about) made solely in VC++. So since I don’t have Visual Studio 6 (the project for which was made available), I just opened that project up in Visual Studio 2010 which I happen to have, and lo behold, the project was just converted to the new standards. I have to say that the OpenSSL errors were present but that was simply because it couldn’t resolve the dependencies. This, I solved by just downloading and installing OpenSSL, downloading the source code, adding the directories to the include and lib paths for Visual Studio and the program just compiles as it should.

Anyways, I’ll go off to work on it..

Popping sounds in XPS

I have recently blogged about how I wanted a new laptop, a laptop refresh if you will. I finally bought a Dell XPS 15, decently spec’d, got enough juice to last at least 5 hours and runs graphics and everything very well. Is a tad heavy but no build issues otherwise. So, I was surprised to find this laptop have some very awesome sounding laptop speakers, actually the most awesome speakers that I have seen in a laptop ever! I was very glad that the laptop had brought with it a very good surprise. But there was an underlying issue with this.

The woofer located at the bottom of the laptop would stutter while playing some music or even while doing some simple gaming. This soon became very annoying. So instead of calling up the Dell customer support, I started browsing their forums. Turns out, this is a very widespread issue. But I soon found out that this was a software issue and not a hardware one as most of the people on the site had fixed their popping issues by either removing some unwanted drivers, some Dell crapware and some other unwanted software. Some had a few cores disabled, enabling which fixed the issue. Some even suggested to stop/unisntall the Mcafee installation available with the laptop.

So obviously, I tried it all, apart from disabling the antivirus. I had all the latest drivers as listed on the Dell support site. But turns out, the best way ahead was to go to websites of the respective vendors and update the drivers from them directly rather than via Dell. This wasn’t something suggested on the forums. So the first site I checked was nVidia and boy was I lucky to find an update for the graphics card on my system – GT-540. After downloading and installing the app, things are looking great, its sounding great, even somehow better. Maybe its because of the HD audio driver that was installed along with the Nvidia driver update. Here is the link I found for the driver, its on the Nvidia servers.

http://www.nvidia.com/content/DriverDownload-March2009/confirmation.php?url=/Windows/285.62/285.62-notebook-win7-winvista-64bit-international-whql.exe&lang=us&type=GeForce%20M

Edit: Turns out, the issue with the popping sound was not to blame on the drivers. After a few days, the issue had arisen yet again. And this time I was at loss as to what to do. Again the search for the possible solution began and on one of the threads on the dell support forums, I found a suggested solution. This was with removing the bundled Mcafee anti-virus solution. I was initially a little sceptical but common sense kicked in, I did it, installed the Microsoft Software Essentials and now… no more cracking of the sound. The sub-woofer had never sounded better. Glad this is finally fixed now…

Yet Another Bittorent Client

So, I want to learn C#. I have access to the Visual Studio IDE for writing the code in C#. So I though, the best way to go about it is to start writing your own application, a windows installer, which will obviously be open source. Now I wasn’t sure what kind of an application should I create. Then I thought of using the most widely used application on my machine after iTunes. This would be the Bit Torrent client. This is the official client; which obviously follows the latest protocols and all. This isn’t open sourced. They stopped open sourcing their app after version 5 or so it seems. This I've read from Wikipedia.

So, to make my bit torrent client (which for now I would like to call Yet Another Bit torrent Client - YABC), I needed to first understand the architecture that is usually used by these apps, and most important of all, understand the bit torrent protocol. This wouldn’t be easy. So I had a better idea, I thought, rather than investing time in understand the protocol as of now, I might as well borrow the code for the protocol from some other app which is under FOSS. But then again I had a problem.

All the apps which are currently popular and available are all written in python. The trouble is that python is a language I am totally not familiar with as of now. Also, I was planning to make an app through and through in C# and .NET. So I just Googled the best I could and lo behold – I found this - http://www.alhem.net/project/btpeer/index.html. This is the btPeer client which is solely written in C++. Now the thing is, I work in C++ full time and know the language well enough to be able to port an application from it to C#. Another plus is that there is already a project readily available for Visual Studio, thus I will only have to port the application directly to VS2010; using which, when I build the project, I should have to project ready.

I will register the project at SourceForge or Google Code and also maybe github so that the configuration part of the project is handled well. More on this as things progress. Later.

The Indian Tech Journalist

I have been following the technology space for the last few years now. Mostly since I started working. The iPhone wasn't something I looked forward to, but was a fan of the major camera totting phones of the yesteryears. These were dumb phones (the Sony Ericsson ones), but then there were the Symbian handset from Nokia which always used to freezing at some point in their lives.

The blogs and tech news websites that I followed in those days were engadget and some other blogs from amteur Indian bloggers who mainly mimmicked the American blogs. At that moment in time, ZDNet was another well set up website. So I also started following them, but they mainly seemed to write about the Silicon Valley happenings, which was a good read, but I rarely knew what was happening around me, as in, in India. Soon I found out that techtree.in (then it was techtree.com) is a good site for such activities. This was mainly because my knowledge about the world technological happenings wasn't that great and thus I kept on following techtree and this other site - tech2.com which later became tech2.in. At this time, Joshua Topolsky was the editor at engadget.com and had a very good team of technology journalists as well, with the likes of Nilay Patel and Joanna Stern. So I could say, I pretty much grew my already bubbling interest in the world of gadgets reading to their articles. They all moved out of engadget and set up shop at theverge.com, which is now my goto site for all the tech information that i need.

My point being that India does not have any good tech websites/blogs that cater to the geeks of the country. The big two which i mentioned arent anywhere as good as engadget or theverge, even techcrunch for that matter. They still think that symbian phones are cool. That one statement pretty much digs a hole for them.

Just writing about this is a bit frustrating for me, because reading the pathetic articles on these sites makes my blood boil. Its not like India doesnt have any good technology observers. Its just that it hasnt been thought out as a very good idea yet. Techtree and Tech2 have had some really good articles on games and other things but the look and feel of their sites and the content otherwise is just disastrous. I think that there is a lot of room for improvement in the technology journalism space for this country.

Whom do I discuss phones with?

So I told a friend in India that the Samsung Galaxy S2 has the most amazing screen ever with the Super AMOLED plus working its magic and showing the colours as they should be seen.

He told me that his Nexus S, which as a SCLCD (i9023) has a better screen than the S2. He said that he would be sending a mail to me proving it to me that the SCLCD was better than the SAMOLED Plus. Being the bigger person that I am, I stopped arguing and said that I was looking forward to the "proof" he was presenting to back up his claims.

A few days later, I got a mail which had two screenshots of what looked like the same home screen. It was running launcher pro, same wallpaper, same set of widgets and shortcuts on the screen. To any eye, they were screenshots of the homescreen of the same device. The subject line of the mail just mentioned - see for yourself.

On questioning my friend as to what am I supposed to see in those two images, I was told that the one named 1.jpeg was the SAMOLED Plus and the 2.jpeg was the SCLCD and the SCLCD was the best one.

Don't expect everyone to get the joke.

Time for a Laptop Refresh?

I was and always have been fond of screen with high resolutions. So last year, when I spent about £611 on a Thinkpad Edge which I thought I had pimped out, I was somehow expecting a larger resolution screen. This wasn't because of any misinformation on the part of Lenovo, but it was due to my ignorance. I just assumed that the thinkpad will have a higher resolution that the HP laptop that I previously owned. The thinkpad edge laptops, regardless of the size of the screen, max out at 1366 X 768 pixels. Not my cup of tea. So after using the laptop for exactly a year, I am giving up on it. The thinkpad will be gone. Selling the damn thing off!

Thus, I need a new laptop, or maybe I tweaked the machine I had in India when I get back but till then use the existing thinkpad. I gave up on it. I thought, I'd rather use a new laptop than some old low resolution thinkpad, which, to be fair could handle a fair deal. CS5 ran very smooth on it. So now for the new laptop, my budget was teetering on £1200. It was a pretty string budget and many good laptops fell into this category.

I have always been fascinated by the MacBooks. I loved their sleek designs and the aesthetically pleasing looks and the always talked about fast performance on them. So I checked a few out, and on eBay, I found a few good deals. One of them was the latest 15incher with the 500GB HDD, i7 et all, for a reasonable £1299. It did overshoot my budget by a £99 but then I was very much for it. But then, I began thinking about the future prospects of owning a MacBook. I am a PC, through and through, and also the occasional Linux user, but never a Mac user. So, it was obvious that I would be bootcamping the MBP as soon as I got it. To do this, I would have to shell out a few more quid on the Windows DVD. Along with this, I would this I would also have to install the Visual Studio 2008 and loads of other software I need for my extra-curricular educational needs. Another factor in my waning interest in the MBP was the screen resolution. For a full HD resolution, I would have to pay a bomb and also buy via the Apple Store online, which is the costliest of the lot when buying MBPs. So I was very much in two minds about it all.

So I now started looking at the line from Dell. There were quite a few laptops available on the dell line which were well under my budget. I was exited by the Alienware series and almost bought one, but stopped short when I realised that the 14x doesn't have a 1080p screen nor does it have it as an upgrade. I also checked the line by Asus, the G53SW which looks really pretty to be fair, also the Dell Precision series but none were much  of any interest to me. So again I landed on the Dell website, and struck jackpot with the XPS 15 series. This is not the 15z, which was recently released but the XPS 15 which I literally pimped out as and then forgot to add the backlit keyboard but was finally able to get the laptop for £1089. I got a £405 discount on the laptop. The configuration of this new machine is as follows:


XPS 502x : 2nd generation Intel Core i7-2670QM processor 2.20 GHz with Turbo Boost up
to 3.10 GHz
Display : 15.6" FHD B+RGLED True-Life (1920x1080) with 2.0 Mega Pixel Integrated Camera 1 S
LCD Back Cover : Metalloid Aluminum (WLAN) L501X 1 S
Memory : 8192MB (2x4096) 1333MHz DDR3 Dual Channel
Hard Drive : 750GB Serial ATA (7200RPM) 1 S
Optical Drive : 8x DVD+/-RW Optical Drive 1 S
Battery : Primary 9-cell 90W/HR LI-ION 1 S
Graphics : 2GB NVIDIA GeForce GT 540M Graphics card

I'd say pretty sweet for £1089. Should be here with me by 16th of November.

The new Nigerian Scam - Bidding on eBay

This may not actually be a new thing, but it surely was the first time I experienced or even heard about it. It all happened to me when I listed my Nexus S for sale on eBay. My phone was "bought" in about 5 minutes after listing it. Immediately after, I got an eBay message asking for more pictures of my used Nexus S so as the buyer is sure that the device is actually in "pristine" condition as mentioned on the eBay listing.
So I, being overly involved in getting rid of the phone for the seemingly good selling price of £200, was very prompt in sending the pics. The mistake I did here was to mail them from the same email address as the one I use on eBay and PayPal. And I was happy to get another mail from the buyer telling me that she was happy with the condition of the device. So the next morning, I was dead surprised to get 3 mails telling me that I had been transferred £250 into my PayPal account but before it was to be credited to my account, I had to put in a shipping reference. This was the first time that I was selling anything in eBay and didn't know the exact procedure, so didn't make any effort to read the mails. Also got a personal mail from the buyer that i should send the device to Nigeria since she was buying it for her pastor son there. Also the buyer said that she was working in Syria ay the moment. I was touched by her deed of having a pastor son, So I was now in a hurry to ship the device asap,and get the amount credited to my account.
So that very day, I went ahead and posted it via DHL, spent £41 for it, with the to address in Nigeria. Only when I got back to my desk did I notice something fishy. The PayPal mail that I usually get from device@PayPal.co.uk was in reality from some mail address on the domain Europe.com. Sadly, till I realised that, I had already updated the eBay item with the shipping number thinking that it would finally have the amount credited to my account. And finally when I realised it, I immediately called the DHL center and asked them to return the device to the senders address. Sadly, the amount spent for sending the device is already gone, but a very good lesson learnt!.

Shopping with Pets

If you have a dog, and have to go shopping, in a shop where they do not allow dogs, what will you do? A thing I forgot to mention is that you seem to be a alone when you do your shopping, also none of your friends were free to be accompanying you with these chores. So you cannot just keep your dog at home, all alone, for the duration of your shopping chores. So you take him along, only to tie him/leave him outside the shop waiting for you. And this is just something that I see across the UK, it doesn't seem all that bad on the dog, I'm sure he/she wont mind some alone time, maybe see a few pretty dogs walk by as he waits.
Sadly, the dogs dearly miss their owners, I have many times seen them looking earnestly at the people coming out of the shops as if expecting them to be their owners but always looking away from them disappointed. I never had an issue seeing this outside as the owners usually got back from their shopping in around 10-15 mins and they were heading back. This is something usually outside Tesco and Sainsbury. The dogs themselves have been well behaved otherwise, not even barking or any trouble for that matter, but just waiting. So today while I was out in Bath, a historic city in SouthWest England, I saw something that just made me very sad.

This was right outside the M&S store on the high street. She was a very lovable one, just sitting there, those eyes were only looking for the owner who had one inside. She had a collar on her. Everytime some passerby ooh'd and aah'd at her and even pet her, she still kept staring inside the store. I was outside the store for about 30 mins waiting for my friends, so atleast she had some company. When my friends finally came, I told them I think I better go talk with the floor manager of M&S to check of the owner was in the store. But then when I finally got hold of one of the security guys and walked outside, she was gone, hopefully with her rightful owner. 

So coming to my point, my gripe.... I personally hate it when people do that with their dogs. No matter how patient their dogs are. I have been in the UK for the last 14 months now, originally from India, I have three labradors back home. And I would always have someone from my family with them if this kind of a scenario ever happened. It was either me. my sisters or either of my parents who stayed back to look back at the kids (as I refer to my pets). I know, the luxury that I have, of having atleast someone around to look after my pets when I am not around isnt something that all can have, but still, I would like to figure some way out so that any of the pets dont have to be left alone, even if it is for a little while. Pets are like kids, they are completely dependent on us. I know, many people will not agree with my take on this, but just saying that if I were in that position, I would make sure that my pet would be very happy always like all my loved ones.

I seriously miss my pets.....

My first great night shot...

In England, the weather isnt the best for some night time stars photography. This is because of the ever present cloud cover and the light after glow coming from the street lights, especially in small towns, like the one I live in. So instead of the stars, I thought I'll capture a satellite and thus I shot the moon. Now this shot wasn't as easy as the setting wasn't available to me directly, I had to stay up most of the night for the moon to come in the right place and then, without waking up my room-mate, take a snap. This is what I got:

The best part about this picture is that it is very much unaltered, it is as I had got it from the camera, just that I adjusted its sharpness a bit. The sharpness adjustment was required as this was a 1.5 sec exposure shot and I just about managed to stay still. I was too lazy to bring out the tripod. So coming back to the photo, I have to say, this is even more prettier than what I saw last night. Hopefully I can add on to this soon.

For more pics: http://techeretic.500px.com

My trysts with photography

Ever since I joined Google Plus, I have got to admit, my interest in photography has just skyrocketed. I did have my initial inclinations but then again, I wasn't that serious. So since the day I have been following the guys Thomas Hawk, Trey Ratcliffe and the dame Lotus Carrol on G+, I thought of making the most of my photo-clicking urges and bought myself a decent cam. Being a pretty impatient guy, I was very much looking forward to getting some instant results. But sadly, that is SO not the case with photography. One has to be patient, and willing to spend a lot of time playing with some bars and number in photoshop so that, that one pic you clicked actually seems worthwile.
So after getting myself some good photo-editing software, I was finally able to get some good results post processing. Anyways, my new portfolio can now be found at http://500px.com/techeretic.
Hopefully I'll be able to add to this soon...

How boring is the iPhone?

We have all at some point in our lives thought of buying ourselves the iPhone, or atleast wondered how it will be to have owned the 'Jesus' device. I too always wondered the same and thus was happy when about two months ago, I landed myself the iPhone 4. After the initial excitement had worn down, I kind of a truth dawned upon me.
"This iPhone with its iOS ecosystem is one boring place".
I browsed through the App Store with great difficulty, synced my music onto the device, listened to the music from the device, downloaded some games, played those games; still nothing, never felt any mojo. Apart from it's good looks and the great display, it has got nothing going for it in my very honest opinion, even with its arsenal of over 400k apps.
Well..... have to flash this device now and move the sim onto the Incredible S, this post will be continued....

Google+ - THE Social Network

Google+ or Google Plus has so far been the best online social experience of my life. No I didn’t meet some interesting people out there or saw some pictures I shouldnt have, its just the joy that I dont offend people by adding them to my circles and then just not share anything with them. This privacy feature is just the best of all the features that Google+ brings to the social networking front.

I wanted to start off with that, it so far has been my favourite feature on Google+. So, Google+ (G+) invaded my life about two weeks ago now, a time when i was pretty much whining why I didnt have the G+ invite yet, or if someone could send me and invite, it was just the elite club I wanted to get into. Google have been saying that they keep on doing these invites in batches so that the existing users on G+ dont suffer from any availability issues, i.e. their infrastructure is able to keep up with the demand. Now, let me tell you, when I first heard that, I was a bit annoyed, its just odd that a behemoth like Google is saying that one of it sites may face availability issues due to excess requests. But then after finally getting in, and after a few happy laps, I clicked on this green button, on the right pane of the page, ‘Start a Hangout’, and thats when it all made sense. Google knows that the privacy features are something that arent that difficult to deliver technically, but being able to provide lag-less stutter-free video conferencing via your browser does need some infrastructure behind the scenes. From what I’ve read, this is achieved via some codecs from Vidyo to help with this. This needs the Google chat plugin to be installed for the browser being used. Google does have plans to make it independent of plugins and will then use something called WebRTC which is currently supported but Mozilla and Opera. Either way, this, so far has been the most popular feature on G+.

So now coming back to me finally getting an invite, I was greeted with the welcome screen and then after filling up some very few details, I was shown this popup asking me if i wanted to link my Picasa account with this one. Since I really hadnt been using picasa much, but had a few pics there, I just complied and then under picture/photos, all my picasa albums were listed. Pretty cool I thought, but then FB doesnt have any uploading limit on my albums, but Picasa has a 1GB limit, after which I have to pay for excess storage. I didnt bother at the time as I was more involved in uploading some recent pics online and then setting up my profile pic. Soon I realised that, though Picasa always has a scale on the side of the page telling you how much MBs have you used till now from your designated 1024 Megs but nothing of the sort here. Turns out, there is actually unlimited storage available for uploading pictures and videos. Though I aint exactly sure about videos but the scoop about the pictures is spot on. Also, unlike FB, my pics were actually uploaded in the resolution they were clicked in, and are downloadable from Picasa.
So I thought, this was all there is to G+ when it comes to pictures, obviously the mobile upload would’ve been via the app, which I had downloaded pending an invite, so I wasnt expecting any surprises here.

The Instant Upload feature on the Google Plus app for Android was just something unlike I have seen. In a world where we had N8 like cameras on our android devices, Internet access available on out android device at all times, and no limit on the data upload, this would be a pretty amazing service. Though I dont have a good camera on either of my current two android devices, I do have a proper unlimited data plan and internet access for my android devices. Also being a big fan of being able to share pics the moment they were clicked, I was in love with this feature. I was pretty much clicking some random images, or rather anything I saw and then sharing it within minutes. For someone who travels a lot, and sees some amazing things, and has a good camera on his/her android device, this feature is a godsend. Though, do realise that the pics are not shared with the public the moment you click it, its just that they are uploaded to your profile and are available for you to share in a few clicks. But this too can be setup if you want to.

One thing about the way pictures are handled on G+ is that its said that Google uses some hardcore PNG compression technique for storing the images, which is pretty much lossless. Though this is something i would be worried about if and when I am uploading any quality pics, which as of now, i am not.

Now, after playing about with the Huddle, the pictures, and the various picture upload services and storage features, I went about taking a closer look at the privacy features, which I was adoring since I joined G+. The circles, or grouping is very well integrated within the entire site. Everything, from your Hangouts to Huddles to even the simple google chat, everything is governed by you, with the option to be available to which of your circles. This feature can also enable the entire G+ community to block someone out completely, with that person just being able to see whats being shared to public. This kinda works against the idea of a social network where you share some pictures and then have some really random people comment on it, maybe they were in your list of friends but that pic might not concern them. This is something that could result in starting new friendship from just mere acquaintances or rekindling some lost friendships. I guess, Facebook would be the kind of social network for that to be achieved. Though this is something you can also very well achieve by sharing your posts to the public, something that will spotted even in the Google Searches. So, I would say, this new privacy feature all depends on how you use it, its all in the hands of the end-user, the person to whom the profile belongs to, rather than Google. The only thing that Google wants to keep public about your profile is your name and gender.

You could keep a tab on any new features being doled out at http://twitter.com/#!/Google_Plus apart from Google Blog. From what I’ve read, expect to see some core blogger and picasa integration in the coming months. Apart from that, I’d expect some subtle UI changes, adding Hangouts with video on Android, the much awaited iOS app for G+. Something I would like to see more of, is the integration of Google Docs and G+, something I see missing, imaginge collaborating on a document while hanging out. Pretty much takes care of handling college projects unless there is some hardware related work to be done. The possibilities are all there, just have to wait and see what Google ushers towards us, at a brisk pace.