Mobile and Internet in India

Mobiles are something which we now take for granted to call anyone. I remember the days when I thought who the heck will pay  Rs300+ rental and then Rs16 /min for receiving or making calls as airtime charges. Obviously the call charges were separate. Who thought that things will reach this far that at Rs175 rentals, you would get 300 mins calling free. Its truly amazing.

Another thought that I had not very long back actually was that I had written on how my mobile should look like here. There were a few people who thought that its entirely impossible to achieve what I was wanting. But then today there was this story on CNET that talked about Toshiba coming out with an amazingly fast 1GHz smartphone. Well, I am not surprised by it. But what I am surprised at is that it runs the crappy Windows Mobile. It sure could have done better with Android or Symbian. Windows Mobile, duh. Dude I would need multi-touch, just to make sure I can give the three finger salute of Ctrl+Alt+Del.

So I have a significantly fast processor on the mobile, an 800 x 480 resistive touch screen is also there for u to have fun with. I am sure this is just the beginning and I have great faith in Android and probably that would be the choice of platform which will achieve what I dreamt of some years back

Some tips and learning from cycling to work

For the past some days I have been cycling to work and overall its been a pleasant experience as yet. I thought I would share some of the learnings with this post. So here it goes in no particular order

1. Make sure your tyres have enough pressure in them. If it gets low, it will become difficult to ride it.

2. Make the seat position such that you can peddle on the full. It gives you more power and also prevents what’s called Biker’s Knee. By instinct we would like it such that our feet reach the ground easily. Never go by that.

3. Cycle fearlessly. Be on the left side of the road as much and possible, but never go to the extreme left. It might land you in trouble. You can surely take minor panga from the faster automobile users.

4. If in places like Bangalore, where you have too much ups and downs, keep trying different alternate routes so that you can take maximum advantage of the slope.

5. Dont wear headphone. You might not find out whats happening on the road. Sometimes I feel like the low sound making cars are better than ultra silent cars. You atleast realise if there one coming from behind.

6. In normal cycle brakes, sudden braking does not work well. It makes sense to gradually slow downhill by applying pulses of brakes rather than a constant one.

7. Cycle only if you are having fun doing it else it may become a burden on you.

Enjoy and happy cycling.

Nothing special out in this post

Well as the title says, nothing special to talk about here. I wanted you to know that I have decided to make my tumblog as the place where I will put pics from my cell cam and quotes that I find really interesting. My tumblr blog is at http://the100rabh.tumblr.com .

Enjoy :-)

Damn Small Media Player – My tiny Mp3 player for all platforms

Well building on my knowledge of WxWidgets and frustration with ever growing size of music players like Winamp or Windows Media Player, I decided that did not need those many features most of the time.

So what was that I was looking for
1. Play Mp3s
2. Have a playlists, retain it and ability to add all files to the player at once.
3. Mp3 tags are mostly useless, filenames make more sense
4. Shortcuts should be simple and also alternative global keys
5. Small size, preferably below 2MB.
6. Multi-platform code.
7. Playlist Queue

This was my priority, in no particular order, while I was designing this Mp3 player. But then I got some feedback from friends who wanted search feature as well. So there it was. All done and over. But then again most my friends and me felt that the UI sucked. Well it continues to. I am not good as styling so still looking for help from friends to make a better looking UI

So now its a 716Kb file which you need to download and there you go. No installation, no setup. Its all in that 716Kb. Just download, Add mp3 files and run. You are all set to hear music.

If you are trying(development) it on Windows you will need WxWidgets library. For development you can also use wxDev-Cpp IDE . To reduce size further I have used UPX which is pretty cool and is also available for Linux too.

So how can you help ? Well I have no clue on how to write a makefile on linux. So any help in that direction is also appreciated. The code is hosted at http://code.google.com/p/dsmp/ for you to take a good look at it. The code is very simple. Well obviously I am still looking for someone to help me design a better UI with some styling.

Bill for Prevention of Moral Policing

I now try to introduce this Bill for Prevention of Moral Policing. Now the most obvious question is that why? Well moral policing is becoming a menacing problem in India now. We need to create some sort of a law for prevention of this menace. But then isnt it that nothing is going to change if I put this Bill in here. Well that anyways happens, look at Women Reservation Bill for starters, its pending since eternity now.

So here I present the Bill for you.

By this Act, every citizen of India is given the right to dress, act and speak as he/she wishes to unless he violates any of the laws of the Indian Constitution. Any act by a person/group/organisation to forecfully stop or intimidate any person or group from acting according to his/her will be punishable under this act. Any such action would lead to the group/person/organisation being declared guilty and would be punishable with minimum 6years to maximum of 14 years of rigorous imprisonment and/or fine upto Rs 50lakhs or actual damages. Incase its a group/organisation the person leading it would be held directly responsible for the act of would be punishable under this law.

 

PS: I am no lawyer/politician but I hope someone actually made this law so that people the Muthalik and the Mullas who have no job but to issue fatwas for how one dresses, would be brought into reigns. They equally damaging as were the 26/11 terrorists.