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We knew mobile and smartphones (particularly smartphones) are taking over the world; much faster than other connected devices like laptops, notebooks, ultra-notebooks, tablets. But didn't knew how fast they are growing.

Well, Benedict Evan has mentioned in his blog post: Mobile is eating the world (along with SlidShare presentation) with excellent data and charts.

Phising scammers are now sending emails pretending to be from IncomeTaxIndia website. Beware!

#security #phishing #scam

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

An excellent video of what might the future holds.

[ Via Engadget ]

KOffice 2.1 has released and with it comes the ability to run natively on Nokia N900

The support for N900 is still experimental, but the direction in which the development is going is promising. Imagine opening and editing Word, Excel and OpenDocument (ODF) files on your mobile phone (... err Mobile PC).

Menq is a Chinese manufacturer of digital products. They have come out with the Easy PC E790 having a Samsung ARM @ 400/533 Mhz processor, with 7" screen 128GB RAM and running Windows CE, and can possible run Android too! And best of all its only USD $80.00

Check out the video below!

[Via Engadget]

Watch what happens to water bubbles in Zero Gravity.

This is an amazing ad by HP creating using the tilt shift effect.

Update: It seems, the video has been taken down by Vimeo!

Update: A YouTube version is now available.

Update: Even YouTube video has been removed. :(

Ishikawa Komuro Lab's high-speed robot hand performing impressive acts of dexterity and skillful manipulation.
More Information

Google sent out initial 100,000 invites to Google Wave yesterday. To those lucky ones, would you please advice whether you have the ability to invite other members a.l.a when Gmail was initially launched. If so would you so please send me one too. Pleeease ...

Feeling like the world is becoming less friendly? Social theorist Jonathan Zittrain begs to difffer. The Internet, he suggests, is made up of millions of disinterested acts of kindness, curiosity and trust.
Jonathan Zittrain: The Web as random acts of kindness

BMW have made a prototype car called BMW 's GINA concept. The one outstanding feature of this care is that it can change its shape depending upon driving condition or at driver's will.

Watch the video and be amazed!

I know it is still a prototype and a work in progress, but damn I want one!

Folding @ Home has crossed the 1 petaFlop mark. That is pretty awesome. Much of it is being helped by the PS3.

View the Folding @ Home client stats by OS.

A petaflop equals one quadrillion floating point operations per second (FLOPS). If you'd like to imagine this enormous computation capacity, think about calculating a tip on a restaurant bill, now do that for 75,000 different bills, now do that every second, and lastly, imagine everybody on the planet is doing those calculations at the same second- this is a petaflop calculation. Now you see why I say say enormous ...

[Via PlayStation Blog]

"British inventor Michael Pritchard has developed a small self-contained filter system that instantly cleans water, removing all particles larger than 15nm. He said that he was inspired after seeing the effects of Hurricane Katrina and the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004; people had to wait for many days to get fresh water and many died from drinking contaminated water. The filter is so effective that it can purify dirty river water and even fecal matter. His bottle will shortly be available for sale from Lifesaver Systems at an expected cost of GBP 190 (approx. $385)."

[Via Telegraph]

Imagine what it can do to the rural India where there is a shortage of the clean drinking water. Albeit the price is reduced to more affordable range.

Techcrunch has screen shots and feature list of the upcoming Delicious 2.0. They are going for delicious.com

Looks nice with news features including the much sort after "Bulk Edit". I will wait for the Firefox extension though! Nah just kidding.

Last week I wrote about the Content Aware Image Resizing which showed the video of image scaling/resizing which is content aware.

Now this week we have bare minimum demo in form of a flash version created by third party available of the same technology. It works with the photos which don't have people and faces. Basically with in-animate objects as of now.

Hoping to see a full fledged working demonstration in the future

Phew! I am back ....

I have been offline for almost a year now ... Yeah I know ...

How did this happen ? I don't know ... I have just been so busy lately and just say that this is not my best year ... (I don't want to get into the reasons)

Anyways just wanted to let you know that I will be posting some catch up posts and lets see where can go from there ...

I remember this CA (Charted Accountant) friend of mine was hassled because he wasn't able to run the old (only DOS) version of Tally 4.5 on Windows XP. (Those of it who don't what is Tally; It is a very popular accounting software.)

And he had asked me look into finding solutions for it. So I start looking for ways to do it. And found that using a virtualization to be the easiest way to go about. I had tried other virtual PC emulators like Qemu and VMware Player but I found that Microsoft's Virtual PC to be the most easily (for the normal computer user) method to do this.

Now that Virtual PC 2007 is free, we can do this without buying one.

To get started:

Download, Install:

• Download the free Virtual PC from the Microsoft's site.
• Download the Win98 Bootdisk ISO image from AllBootDisks.
• Install the Virtual PC 2004 on to your system.
• After installation, start the program and start by creating a new Virtual Machine by using the Virtual Machine Wizard, name this "MS DOS Machine" or "Tally Machine". Select OS as "MS DOS".
• During the process, the Wizard will ask whether you want an existing virtual hard disk, or a new virtual hard disk. Select "new virtual hard disk". Enter a name for the file, something like "Tally.vfd".
• Save the settings.

Format, Prepare and Get ready:

• Start this newly created virtual machine by selecting it and clicking Start button. After few seconds of bios output, the screen will say unable to find a bootable device. This is normal, since we haven't made our virtual hard disk bootable.
• Now click on CD menu and select the "Capture ISO image ..." option. This will popup a file selection dialong box. Select the ISO image that we have downloaded from AllBootDisks.
• Now restart the virtual machine by selecting the Action menu and select the "Ctrl+Alt+Del". After restart the VM (virtual machine) will boot using the Windows 98 boot disk ISO we just loaded and come to A:> prompt.
• Now run the FDISK program and create the "Primary DOS partition" on the drive. After exiting FDISK, restart the VM and again boot from the CD again.
• Now when at the A:> prompt, issue a format command with parameters something like this: format c:/u/s/v:TALLY
• After the format is complete, switch to C: drive, create a directory by the name of DOS, by issuing the command MD C:\DOS
• Now copy all the files from the A: drive or the bootable CD drive to the C:\DOS directory.
• Select the "Release CD" from the CD menu and restart the VM.
• Now the machine would have booted from the C drive and come to a C:> prompt.
• Now select the "Capture Floppy Disk Image" option from the Floppy menu. This would open up a file selection dialog box. Goto the directory where you had installed the Virtual PC. Should be something like this C:\Program Files\Microsoft Virtual PC; Now in this directory there should be directory by the name Virtual Machine Additions; Select this and then select the file with the name of DOS Virtual Machine Additions.vfd; You have just loaded a virtual floppy.
• Switch to A:> drive. And run the command DOSADD.BAT. This will add the required additional features like folder share, etc to this Dos VM.
• Select the "Release Floppy" from the Floppy menu and restart the VM.

Installing and Running Tally:

• After the restart, the DOS will load additional programs. After the booting is done; right-click the "Folder Icon" on the bottom status bar and select "Share Folder" option. Select the folder in which your tally installation or installed folder is and select the drive letter as Z.
• Copy the data from the Z drive to the C drive by creating appropriate folder; After its done, switch to the C:\TALLY folder and start tally and viola, you are done.

Updates:

If you have copied the data / folder from your old set, you can specify the direct path in the command line, for e.g. if your data is stored in C:\TALLY\DATA, you can specify the command C:\>TALLY C:\TALLY\DATA to run tally and look in C:\TALLY\DATA for the data instead of specified in the tally configuration file.

When Meebo came out with its Online IM service integrating Yahoo, MSN, ICQ and AOL, Jabber or GTalk; everybody said " ... oye, Why didn't I think of it ?". It was simple, easy and everybody (well atleast I did!) needed it for one of those times when you didn't have access to your IM program or were accessing it from a cyber cafe.

It seems Meebo has competition, we have another online instant messenger up called Kool IM. Seems to work like Meebo. So try it out now.

This if really funny. ROTFLOL.

Last.fm is an interesting site. Its a part social networking, part music profiling, part discovering music. And its neat (and free too!).

Ok, here is how it works, you start by signing up and creating a unique username for yourself. Then you download plugin for your favourite music player, be it Winamp, Windows Media Player, iTunes, Yahoo Music Engine (and even more). And you are done! (Well atleast your part is done.)

What now ?

So whenever you listen to your favourite song, Last.fm plugin uploads the Artist name and Song Title to its website. This starts building your music profile or as we say "whats your noise". In due time, this becomes a bit comprehensive and the system will start recommending artists, other users, books, etc that match your music taste and profile. It even recommends radio stations which are playing music to your taste.

You can also look at what others are listening categoried by artist, country, genre and tags. So if you want to find out what songs people are listening in USA or UK or India, you can! You can also find out which are the favourite songs of the legends like Mukesh, Kishore Kumar, Jagjit Singh or Lata Mangeshkar.

So, get start now! And don't forget to look at what I listen to ... and do recommend some of what you are listening too!

Wishing you and loved ones a very prosperous and joyous * Happy New Year *.

I have been using digg for couple of months now. And I guess I must mention something about it here. If you haven't heard of digg till now, we read on ...

What is digg?
Digg is a technology news website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allow an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do.

P.S: You can view my digg-ed pages here.

On December 15, 2005, Dr. Curtis Cooper and Dr. Steven Boone, professors at Central Missouri State University, discovered the 43^rd Mersenne Prime, 2^30,402,457-1. The CMSU team is the most prolific contributor to the GIMPS project. The discovery is the largest known prime number.

The new prime is 9,152,052 digits long. This means the Electronic Frontier Foundation $100,000 award for the discovery of the first 10 million digit prime is still up for grabs! So join the GIMPS today and help find the next largest prime number.

Paul Neave has integrated the Google Maps and Virtual Earth into flash and made Flash Earth.

The implementation is nice and slick.!

P.S: Paul also has some other flash goodies at his site. Feel free to view them too!

DeviantArt is 5 years old today! yipeeee

What a ride it has been .... What an achievement ....

P.S: DevinatArt has now staggaringly 14 million deviations. Kool!

Artlebedev is showcasing a design for Optimus Keyboard which has its keys as individual oled display and each key displays what command it is configured for.

A very interesting design (and functional too). Well lets hope it comes out to the market soon, and it would soon change the face of keyboards, that has remain unchanged for so long.

You must have read in online news site, newspapers and many blogs that Apple would be switching to Intel chips from late next year. Although most of the business analyst have been saying this for years that it would help Apple to switch to Intel, but still the timing of this was a little surprise.

But I guess I have commend Steve Jobs for laying the transition roadmap from IBM to Intel both a clear and well in advance, which would a clarity for both the apple customers and the developers. Taking up the case for the consumers, it is good for customers that Apple has come out well in advance, which would prepare 'psychological' shift in customer. Some analyst do feel in short term the sales of apple may be affected because it would create a confusion in customer whether to buy now or wait till next year. Well, I say if you need it now, get it now. Its not like that Apple will stop supporting the old plateform once the new plateform is out. PCs usually have a shelf life 3~5 years (atleast in my view) and you have to upgrade it once in 2 years or so to keep up with the current hardware. But current processors have reached a limit in terms of the MHz or GHz they can reach in one core (I mean producing commerically viable manufacturing solutions), that is why chip companies are moving towards the dual-core or multi-core processors, as it is much more commerically viable to manufactures these multi-core technologies using the current manufacturing faciities.

So, if you need a Mac, go and buy it now, because it will last you 3 years, that is if you want to keep it for that long. As far as memory, hard disk and other components are concerned, you can upgrade them later on.

Then there are blogs coming out as to what was the real reason to switch from IBM to Intel. One of them is an article from ArsTechnia: Inside the big switch: the iPod and the future of Apple Computer.

What about IBM ? How would this effect the IBM processor line ?
Well I don't see any major effect on the IBM processor line in medium to long term, as their chips in their server line and super computers have more than satisfied the tech requirement of the customers and enterprises. From next year IBM probably have a very negligble market share of the desktop PCs. To offset this they are already working on with a combination of PowerPC chips and Linux OS in countries like China where prices dictate the volume and piracy is rampant.

On the bright side, IBM is developing the 'Cell' processor to be used in next gen PS3 and other applicances from Sony, etc. This would fill the gap left by Apple processors. It would not only fill the gap but would also provide them much larger volumes (if you have a look at the response to already successful PS2) than Apple could have given them in long run!

If you ever wondered how a chess program figures out a move or "thinks" a move, have a look at this site: Chess Game.

It actually shows you what the program (computer) is thinking in terms of the move. Pretty Awesome!

eBay India has finally come to domain near you.

eBay.in is now the official face of ebay in India. Till now it was bazee.com.

I needed to convert the the filesystem of one of friends old system from FAT32 to NTFS. So I fired up the command:

If you look at the command, I had given the -v switch, which basically convert in verbose mode. To my discomfort, this one little switch had cost me 3 hours.

Normally a conversion usually takes anywhere between 5 to 15 min for a normal (10 ~ 20 GB partition) but it took almost 3 hours to finish this conversion. Because the utility was outputting the filename of each and every file on the partition.

During this conversion, I found out that there were 144,000 files in the System Restore Folder of that partition, even though the space taken was not much.

This prompted me to recover this space from the system restore. After searching for a while, I found that to remove the files in your system restore folder, all you have to do is switch off the system restore on that drive / partition. You can switch it on after few minutes.

So the morale of the story is make sure you clean up your system restore folder before doing any sort of conversion, and do not use the verbose option.

I haven't been blogging much for a while coz I have been pretty busy.

Things are now getting normal, and will keep updating the blog more often ...

Wishing you and your family a Happy and Prosperous Diwali

Having a look at mirror of my site. You can have a mirror of any site like Google, Yahoo ...

Have fun!

Via Slashdot post: There is an excellent paper at Microsoft Typography which provides an insight into how we recognize words.

Although the paper is about the English language, but I strongly recommend you to read this if you ever wanted to know about how we recognize words and languages.

deviantArt is now 4 years old. And what a journey it has been.

For those of you, who don't know about deviantArt. It is a domain about art! (period). I should rather say, kingdom of art, digital art especially. With over 7.2 million submissions and 8 millions hits a day, it is the place for ART and artists!

P.S.: It was too hard for me to resist and I got an account at deviantArt finally. Visit it here: digitalAmit

As you can see, the site has been redesigned!

I am sure I may have missed a couple of pages or something here and there. So please tell me if I have missed any thing.

I would love to have your feedback regarding the new design.

I have been experienced a surge in the number of email address with viruses. Is it my email address or is everybody is experiencing the same thing ?

Whether you are for or against outsourcing, you should read this essay The Micro-Multinational at Wired. It has a very interesting twist and 'll enlighten you on another aspect of outsourcing.

P.S. I am from India too! So are you ready to outsource your job to me ? :)

In response to the Google's GMail offering of the 1GB account, major email providers like Yahoo, Rediff and now Hotmail has followed suit.

Yahoo was the first to counter-offer 100MB for free account, and 2GB for paid one. Then we had Rediff offering 1GB for free email. And now we have Microsoft's Hotmail offering 250 MB for free account and 2GB for paid one. Microsoft will offer these from first week of july.

This makes storage space a non-issue. Then what is going to be the issue ?

Search, usability and features

With all this space at your disposal, you would want a searching and indexing service to go through all this mail. Plus you would also need a more usable interface to work your way through all that email. Google has already excellent search feature with GMail. However other features need improvements. Yahoo! and Hotmail will have to improve their search and interface to allow users to get maximum benefit from the use of increase space.

So, who will win ?

We, the users or customers will win. All this increased mail space means more emails and large attachments. And ofcourse, less of mail boucing because of the mailbox filling very fast. That would happen less frequently.

Who else ?

Harddisk manufacturers like Segate, Samsung, Maxtor and the likes will also benefit from this battle, because for them, this is what this war is about ? Storage space!

Music and Video Piracy ?

Large attachments also mean that you will be able to send your music (mp3) and video (mpg and divx) files to your friends without any problem. Imaging sending and receiving your favourites mp3s to your friends. (Well this has been happening through the P2P networks like Kazaa, etc. And is now possible through your email.

This would make RIAA look to webmail service providers too and filter their attachments for any audio and video files. But I think it would take while before RIAA moves toward in this direction.

SpaceShipOne, piloted by Mike Melvill (62 yr old) reached an altitude of at least 62 miles (100 kilometers), the internationally recognized boundary of outer space. And this was the first private space flight. This makes it the strongest contender for the X Prize.

Did you notice, Mike is 62 and went 62 miles high. I guess this is better then lighting 62 candles on his birthday. Next year he may go upto 63 years ...

Well, this makes me wonder when can I buy my ticket for the next flight to space ?

I just got an invitation for my very own Google's Gmail account :).

So I am off to see what is all this fuss about the Gmail account, besides having a 1GB to park your email.

So, if you want to send me an email at my new gmail account, you can send it digitalamit at gmail dot com.

Quoting GIMPS " ... The new number, expressed as 2 to the 24,036,583th power minus 1, has 7,235,733 decimal digits and was discovered May 15th. It is nearly a million digits larger than the previous largest known prime number, and belongs to a special class of rare prime numbers called Mersenne primes." You can read all about it in their press release.

As a active member of the project, I wanted to be the one to find the next Mersenne Prime. Ah! Well there is always a bigger primr to find than the last one. I guess should get back to work. I think I have to find more computers to run the GIMPS client under my name.