The upgrade page at Amazon describes the process in very simple and easy to follow steps. The easiest option of course is to just do the over-the-air upgrade, but I was not sure if I wanted the extra charge on my Amazon account. I decided to go the route of downloading the upgrade file instead. The back of the Kindle shows which version you own. It turns out I own a  Global Wireless edition. Downloaded the file and transferred it to the Kindle and started the process.

The process was quite smooth really. The settings menu now showed an “update” option so I just clicked that and it did the rest all on its own.

The upgrade was successful and the device just rebooted itself. Very neat indeed, no tense moments of being “bricked”. Now to explore the new features.

Font: The first thing you notice, is the font, it suddenly looks a lot crisper and sharper and more readable. The font key (Aa) also shows more sizes available so you can go much smaller and much bigger than the earlier options.

Collections: Something I was missing on the Kindle. Since I use Calibre to manage most of my content, having an option to create a collection on the device was a feature I wanted. Easy to use, Menu -> Create Collection once you have a collection, just add the books to it. Select the book to add -> toggle right on book -> add to collection-> select collection -> Done.

The rest of the new stuff seems to be hidden in the “Settings” menu.

Popular Highlights: Turned on by default, this lets you browse what the rest of the Kindle community is saying about the book that you are currently reading. Since I am currently reading “What the Dog Saw: and Other Adventures” by Malcolm Gladwell the popular highlights for this were several and it was fun browsing through them. This feature came under some flak from a lot of users for they did not really want their highlights shared without permission. I don’t recall the last status of this, but with amount of noise on “privacy” issues on the net these days I am sure it will be dealt with appropriately.

Social Networks: Now this had to happen. The Kindle now lets you Twitter or connect with Facebook account. Once you link your accounts, you can highlight a passage from the book you are reading and it share via these networks. Pretty decent I thought.

Some of the features I have not yet bothered to check, but will in the next couple of days:

PDF Pan and zoom: PDFs on the Kindle have been something that has had a lot of people excited. I have not really bothered much with PDFs since I prefer stuff to be in either text, html or mobi formats. Much lighter and easier to read in any case. But now you can pan and zoom on a PDF, allowing you to easily view smaller text, tables or graphics.

Two of the other features from the update include, Annotations Backup and Device Password. As of now I am not interested in locking the device but it could be a useful feature. Annotations on the other hand were being stored in a text file which could be transferred to the PC in any case and edited or backed up there. Not in a hurry to use that either, but will certainly keep it in mind.

Now while Brazil scores two goals, I am back to watching the match and single-tasking. In the meantime, if you have a Kindle, I’d certainly recommend the upgrade. Well worth it.

Cheers…Kishore
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What I am going to talk about is how virtual machines are critical for a host of features. From simply trying out a different operating system to actually running multiple servers and services on a single physical computer to end-user support.

A few weeks ago, I got a panic call from a friend. She had bought a new phone and wanted to do the simple and logical thing, transfer her contacts from the old phone to the new one. Simple? Well it should be, however while trying to do this over the phone, I kept hitting stumbling block after stumbling block. Not only because I was not familiar with the OS running on her laptop, but more from the point that there seemed to be many critical components of software missing.

I suggested she come over with her laptop, old phone and new phone. We started by looking at what was installed and what was missing from her laptop. It was running Vista and no amount of trying made it work with my hidden WiFi so could not get it on the Net to install the missing components. I decided to fire up my Windows XP Virtual machine. Literally, a few minutes later I had the old phone all synced and backed up to my virtual machine. A few minutes more and I had all the contacts nicely synced to the new phone. Done in 20 minutes. I wasted more time trying to do this over the phone the previous evening and the time to trying to configure the WiFi.

At a recently concluded workshop for a client, I needed to demonstrate setting up a WordPress site. While I could have done this very easily directly on the net, I decided to give the participants a virtual machine on the wokshop CD so that they could actually try before they buy. I used the ready-made VM from TurnKey Linux fired up the VM on my machine and a few minutes later we were adding themes, plugins and had a good site running. the participants were amazed when they logged into the site from their own machines. All this over a small WiFi network that was running there. Totally rocked!

On a side note, the session I had was post-lunch and I had the mandate of keeping the participants awake. One of the organisers mentioned how everyone seemed alert and attributed it to my voice or rather the sound levels. Promptly, led me to introduce the session as “loud” computing

If you are not using virtualisation in any form, I’d suggest don’t shy away. Your computer is definitely capable of doing more and you’ll be happy with what you can do with virtual machines. Who knows it could save the day for you sometime.

Cheers…Kishore

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The post is brought to you by lekhonee-gnome v0.9 (from a Virtual Fedora)

My recent problem however, is that there are some places where I manage to find myself and not find a LAN or any form of connectivity. Its rare but it does happen. One such place is our little apartment in Goa. No wired broadband in our area, so no wired connectivity. Its for situations like this that I have my data card. I have been using a Reliance Broadband Netconnect for quite a while and have generally been happy with it. The thing I dislike the most about it, is no “unlimited” scheme. At least, not an affordable one. On my last few visits to Goa, I used the older Reliance data card and cried at its performance, but when I was there recently, I was pleasantly surprised to find the new broadband ones working fine and fairly decent speed as well.

But this brings me back to why I have a router in my bag. Hmmm…let me see how many devices do I carry which have WiFi and need access to the Internet? My notebook, one sometimes two phones, a Nokia N810 Tablet and a Palm TX. Now thats just me, when I add Jyoti’s devices — a netbook, a smartphone and an iPod touch, and then add Kabir as well, fortunately at this stage only an iPod touch. It all adds up. A minimum of nine devices all wanting Internet access.

I could very easily share my connection from my notebook, but it creates a dependence on my machine having to be on and the router all the time. Not that it ever gets switched off, but all the same. I started the hunt for a router which would be small, allow a wired connection but more importantly allow a 3g (EVDO) modem to be used as well.

Anindya Roy, ex PC-Quest told me he was using such a device, in fact, he even mentioned that he was able to listen to Internet Radio while driving around. On checking what he had, I found he was using a HAME – HM433R+ I promptly went out looking for it and managed to get one very efficiently delivered home.

EK Wireless seems to have several products that do stuff like what I wanted and dealing with Elliot Stechman has been a real pleasure. Two quick messages exchanged, bank information was provided, money transferred and device delivered. Came in from Mumbai to Gurgaon with no issues at all.

Setup of the device was trivial, took less than 2 minutes to have the device up and running and connected to the Net. Simple web-interface the only additional information it needed was my Reliance number/password. I am yet to test the router out with my Airtel wired broadband.  Sadly, I do know that it is an either or. It will not bond and balance both a wired and 3G connection. However, Elliot did mention that some of the other products they have do support multiple connections. Including, multiple 3G modems.

In the meantime, I know my next holiday in Goa is not going to be a complete holiday! With connectivity easily available its going to be a shift from home base Gurgaon to home base Goa! As a quick test this afternoon I had at least five devices connected and happily using the Net in no time at all.

Happy Surfing!

Cheers…Kishore
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PS: Did I mention, they shipped a car adapter as well as a USB power adapter.

This is about domain name servers or the lack of them. A few days ago I noticed that my IP Phone was no longer registered and hence would not receive any calls. I wondered what happened to it and promptly started poking around to see if some settings had changed. Nothing had changed at all. I went as far as resetting passwords only to discover that while my IP phone could not connect to its server, my cellphone which has a SIP stack and is configured with the same credentials and service was happily able to register. This got me thinking. A little later I started getting random calls from friends and clients asking if there was an issue with “name your favourite site here”. Mail was not working for some, SMTP not working for some, certain sites not opening at all but the rest seemed OK.

Very strange indeed.

Since most everything was working on my notebook, I decided to just change the DNS servers for my IP Phone and Voila! everything worked again.

Now for all the people calling me, I recommended the same change. Suddenly, everyone was a happy puppy again.

The magic – Simple. I changed from Airtel’s DNS to Google’s DNS. The Google DNS servers have easy to remember numbers. The primary one is 8.8.8.8 and the secondary is 8.8.4.4 so things were back to normal again. Of course, that would not keep me satisfied or happy for long, I did want to get to the bottom of this. I asked casually on Twitter if anyone else had issues and got a flurry of responses. One of them was really nice, a user wrote back to say Airtel customer care actually called him and told him that there is going to be a change in DNS zone-wise and he is not affected by the change as yet. The rest of us seem to be lesser mortals, for the change affects us and we are not told or informed. Not wanting to get into an endless loop, I never bothered calling customer care.

Still not totally satisfied with my solution, I decided to check out namebench. Its an interesting little open-source DNS benchmarking tool. It tells you the fastest DNS available to you and if you change to their recommendations, you would generally experience a faster Internet. Download it, install it and keep it for a rainy day. Useful little utility, available for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. Would be nice to see this on some phones as well since all the “smart” ones have WiFi anyway.

If you need to change your DNS and are clueless, check the Google Public DNS site instructions are fairly clear. My recommendation, leave the setting for “Obtain IP Address” to automatically but manually set the DNS entries. This way no matter where you go, what network you join, you always get the DNS of your choice.

Google Public DNS
Primary – 8.8.8.8
Secondary – 8.8.4.4

And if you are averse to all things Google, then here is an alternative.

OpenDNS
Primary – 208.67.222.222
Secondary – 208.67.220.220

In an unrelated incident, for some reason I only seem to encounter the Bloglines Plumber. Been happening since last night. Adds colour to the post. Enjoy!

Cheers…Kishore
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The plan was very simple, a few of us were invited by the Guru Nanak Dev Engineering College, Ludhiana to conduct some FOSS awareness. Sudev, Tirveni, Gora and I decided rather than take the train (Shatabdi) to Ludhiana, it would be more fun to drive. Of course, definition of FUN here is subject to interpretation. Everyone I spoke with said that Ludhiana is a seven-hour drive, Sudev insisted it was five! Considering, he is a rally driver, he had us a little worried but then he is an experienced driver and is totally in command of his machine (a Grand Vitara).

The drive was surprisingly smooth, there were a few moments of anxiousness but Sudev is really in complete control on the road and as he promised he had us in Ludhiana before noon.

Poster outside the college

Its funny how some colleges and students have no idea of the FOSS community and start by wanting to formally greet them, and escort them around. We managed to bypass all that and soon found ourselves outside the main auditorium. However, we did have to wait our turn to takeover. But I must say the organisers both students and faculty took good care of us.

I gave about a forty-five minute talk which the students seemed to have enjoyed, several came up to me later to tell me that. Always feels good helping and talking to students. I had a great time.

Next up was Sudev, he gave a very informative talk on FOSS resources. Again highly appreciated by the students.

We broke for a late lunch and post-lunch went straight to the computer labs for some workshops. One room with a programming workshop conducted by Gora and the other room with Tirveni doing a systems administration and some basic command-line stuff on Linux.

Both workshops were well attended and equally enjoyed by presenters and participants.

On the way back from Ludhiana, we were tempted to swing by Chandigarh for OSSCamps, but sadly we could not and headed straight back home. Including our dinner break. back at Kundli border in exactly five and a half hours as promised by Sudev.

In all a great visit and all seemed to have enjoyed it.

Some photos of the event on my flickr gallery. A special thanks to Pushkar, Samir, Prof. HS Rai and all the students who were brave enough to stay with us the whole day and listen to us attentively.

Cheers…Kishore
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My ears were paying close attention towards the public address system for flight announcement. However, the wait seemed endless. The display board continued to show a status of “delayed” and the ETD as 1735 despite the fact that it was now 1740. Anxious to board and leave, I once again searched for the ground crew. To my horror, I was mockingly informed that the flight had just taken off!

Surprisingly, before I could even begin to register what had just happened. The crew took my boarding pass, scampered off to the check-in counter and promptly returned with a fresh boarding pass for the next flight.

I now had an additional 45 minutes before the next flight. I curiously inquired as to how it was possible for a flight to depart with a passenger missing, and yet no announcement or page from the airlines. The lame excuse I got was *we are aware that announcements cannot be heard in the lounge”. This is really weird, I had twittered a while ago that I heard a paging announcement for Shiv Khera and was wondering if it was the famous management guru being paged. The area I was sitting in I could very clearly hear all the announcements, and I surely never heard my name being paged or an announcement for my flight. The second statement was, there were 145 passengers for the flight and 144 boarded. I really find that hard to believe. In fact, I have a feeling I saw several passengers who were at the check-in counter with me.

Anyway, I decided as long as they put me on the next flight, I should just move on. In order to not miss my next flight I decided I may as well make my way down to the gates and wait there. The new airport is great, but when it comes to managing seating areas, there still seems to be a shortage. Despite the fact that the travel boom is sort of on the slow-down, there is just very little place to sit at the airport. And absolutely none at the GATES.

I waited patiently at Gate 13, and even when it came to the flight being board, a) there was no announcement and b) the display board kept showing the GMR logo rather than the flight details. In fact, after approximately 15 minutes the display finally showed the flight details and several people left the queue after realising that they were not headed to Bangalore but to another city all together.

I just can’t understand how between the airport authorities and the airlines they can have such a lax approach. IMHO, the fact that I missed my first flight, I feel that was a serious security lapse. If I had checked-in baggage it would have been totally chaotic.

Finally, I am not sure what to say about the airlines, they handled the situation smoothly. Deprived me of ranting, raving and a good fight, by putting me on the next flight. But at the same time, excessively lazy ground crew, which mocks passengers and was rather inattentive. JetLite and DIAL, get your act together please!

In contrast, the return was so much smoother. As I twittered – Blissfully uneventful, brutally efficient and fanatically on-time! BIAL and INDIGO, thanks for a pleasant return journey.

Cheers…Kishore
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Starting with the purchase process. After having read about netbooks and gotten first hand experience and reactions from several users, one thing that was clear was that although pretty much every brand has stepped into making them, ASUS stands out as the leader, in terms of features, build quality and most importantly battery-life.

After having made several inquiries on various models, we thought it best to go and see some in real life and actually touch and feel and see some of the differences. We must have seen at least 7 brands that I can recall.

We started with the Samsung NC-10, which has a very good spec, but in appearance for some strange reason they have a chrome lined body, made the machine look quite tacky. From what I have read and heard the NC-10 is actually a very good machine, if Samsung decides to change the look a bit, who knows it may be a killer product. At Nehru Place it was selling for about Rs.24,000/- including a free Samsung cellphone. In fact, we were asked if we wanted the price with the free phone or just the netbook.

Moving on, we went around several shops in Nehru Place and saw, an Acer Aspire (had to walk out of the showroom since the sales people were just not interested in talking to us), Dell, HP-Mininote (which for some reason was in a box, and the sales person refused to open it till we bought it??), LG and finally the Lenovo IdeaPad S2. All of them seemed to have some minor issue or the other, but the common factor on all was the fact that they all had only 4-cell or lower battery packs.

Finally, we quietly went back into our favourite little hardware store (an authorised AMD shop) and asked for the EEE-PC 1000H. Tax included it came to Rs.20,400/- this was for an atom processor based, 1GB RAM, 80GB HDD and most importantly a 6-cell battery. Of course, we got the unwanted Windows XP-Home (at least, I did not want it). But overall I was happy with ASUS and our dealer since I knew I would get some form of support. The warranty on these netbooks seems to be one year, so knowing your dealer or knowing a good dealer may help.

I should have probably taken some unboxing photos, but what came out of the little box was quite impressive. There was the netbook of course, then a tiny little power supply and power cord, a nice little neoprene case, a recovery DVD (which I needed sooner rather than later) but unfortunately no “online” storage. Apparently, ASUS provides upto 10GB of online storage along with many of their models but no confirmations if this is available in India. Sad, a 10GB online storage would have have been kind of nice, specially to transition from a desktop.

Now for the real fun part, here I thought, the ASUS netbooks are well tested with Linux and it would take at most 2-3 hours to just put in Ubuntu, leave the XP home as is and carry on with data migration and help Jyoti transition into using some FOSS!

Well, it was not to be, first of all Ubuntu went and totally screwed up the boot sector, leaving me with a dead XP (somehow it did not matter to me). Now we couldn’t have that could we. Even if the XP never gets used, it should at least be in working condition. XP came pre-installed with all drivers for all the devices including the webcam, WiFi, audio and everything worked, it also had “Star Office” and Microsoft Works installed which was quite surprising. Now I was faced with a real problem, blow the whole machine out and start over or try and fix it. Of course, I tried to fix it. I tried every trick in the book but I just could not get XP to boot again.

I then decided may as well do a fresh install of XP, that way I could also control the disk space used and the partitions, I would have to install all the drivers and software again, but that would not be too hard if I shared the DVD on the network or better still copied it to a USB drive. I hunted for methods to install XP via USB, came across several posts and the comments on most of those which lead to better solutions. One of the first posts I came across was from Roderick van Domburg’s Cache He does mention that the article was written in 2006 and that there may be better or easier options. To me it seemed very clear and precise and was easy to follow. However, while reading one of the comments, I saw a link which headed off to one of the EEE-PC guides and thought that one might be more relevant. It actually worked quite well, I had a working bootable USB in less than 20 minutes.

Booting with XP on the USB threw up an interesting option, since it detected the presence of an existing installation, it offered choices for fixing it. Nothing really fixed it but I was able to boot into the dead XP.

I finally gave up and got hold of an external DVD drive, booted off the rescue disk and ran a factory restore. That was really easy, it worked like a charm and in about an hours time I had restored the netbook to its original state.

In the meantime, I also started looking for what might be an ideal distro for the netbook. It seems that Ubuntu is a good choice, but there were many variations out there based on Ubuntu. One of them was called eeebuntu and the other that I finally used was called “easy peasy“. Essentially, they are Ubuntu with a a few critical modifications, the first of which is the replacement of the linux-generic kernel with the “array” kernel. It is possible to just install a regular Ubuntu and then replace the kernel, add a few tweaks like the “net book remix” and you’d basically be at the same point as easy peasy, so I took the easy peasy way out.

This time round, gparted, did not mess up the boot sector and installation was quite smooth, I installed easy peasy from a USB key. Several methods of making a bootable USB key with a linux distro on it and well documented at pendrivelinux.com. I used a simpler method since I have a running Ubuntu, System -> Administration -> Create USB startup disk, just point it to the where you have the ISO and creates a bootable distro in a matter of minutes.

After the install, a quick reboot showed me that XP survived and I now had a dual-boot EEE-PC.

The storeee does not end here, I then needed to migrate and transition data from a Windows desktop. The browser was easy, Internet Explorer was replaced with Firefox, all bookmarks duly imported and no issues there. The bulk of the data, documents and spreadsheets all work fine with OpenOffice.org, but the killer was going to be email! Jyoti was using Outlook so I had to get the data out of there and preferably into Evolution and not Thunderbird since it would look and feel a little closer to Outlook and would also have synchronisation with a Palm T5.

Its a three step process and a tedious one at that, first get the data out of Outlook by installing Thunderbird on the Windows machine and importing everything into it, mail and contacts. Next find and move the data to the Linux machine, the data hides in “Documents and Settings\Username\Application Data\Thunderbird” grab this folder and move it to an external storage or directly onto the netbook. Final step and the most painful of the lot, import the messages into Evolution, this has to be done folder by folder and Evolution doesn’t know about existing folder names so you have to create those as you go along. The nice thing is that since both Thunderbird and Evolution use the mbox format its not really a big worry.

I did come across a package called Outport but was not too happy with what it gave me at the end. I did use it to convert the calendar entries which it handled well. But I still have not been able to export all the notes and there are many of them.

In the end, everything seems to work and we have a happy customer. Interestingly enough, all the work I did to save and recreate the XP partition, currently seems to be wasted and I am hoping it stays that way, Jyoti has not even booted once into the XP partition. If we keep doing this, I think we can convert several more people to Linux without too much problem, that is if we really wanted to do that. I personally don’t convert anyone, but leave the choice to them, after educating them.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that my 80+ Dad got quite excited about netbooks, notebooks and Ubuntu, he even took a CD back to Bangalore to install on his desktop. I can feel a few support calls coming my way, but I’d be glad to take them!

Cheers…Kishore
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We ended with some family joining in for a short burst of colour.

Overall, it was fun.

Here are some photos:

http://kishorebhargava.com/v/Friends/holi2009/

Cheers…Kishore

Under normal circumstances, watching cricket while having a few beers with friends, is not an issue at all. In fact, it can be quite enjoyable. But put together a bunch of opensource geeks, add some good old classic rock and some good beer, then the last thing you want is to be constantly distracted by the cricket. If you can hear yourself, you’d rather be talking tech than watching cricket.

So maybe the venue needed to be reconsidered, except all of us are ardent beer-drinkers and very definitely wanted to check the place out.

The beer was not just good it was great, the only issue and a real disappointment was the fact that they only had one brew for most of the evening. Something they called “Yorker” which was a light lager. Fresh and light is how I would describe it. The pitchers disappeared at a rapid rate, I guess everyone found the beer light. Our server appeared with a sample of the other beer (don’t remember the name) for the evening, but the difference in taste was so subtle that we just stuck with Yorker. The big disappointment was also in the fact that there were no dark beers. We were assured that this was essentially due to the cricket season and the fact that the dark beers are so popular that they were just completely sold out. A brew called “Bouncer” was mentioned a few times but was not available.

I guess thats a good reason to go back sometime. A few more critical details, a pitcher of beer (1.5 ltrs) is just under Rs.300/- plus taxes, food is good but expensive and we mainly stuck with snacks. We also got a free tour of the place which was quite nice, we got to see the beer making process though rather briefly, some avid cricket fans were getting quite irritated at people blocking their screens at critical moments talking about beer and how its made!

In all if you are in or around Gurgaon, then do drop in to Howzatt!

Cheers…Kishore
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Once I was sure my data was secure, I could start playing with the machine again. First thing I did was to try out Ubuntu as a live CD. Of course, after a while the ability to save stuff, specially settings was sorely missed and I decied to use a pendrive to store the settings.

While that works fine, it would be even more fun to just boot of the pendrive instead. So I rushed over to http://pendrivelinux.com and did a quick read on the options I had. While there were several methods of creating a persistent USB based distro, the one that seemed easiest was to use Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) with its built-in option for “Create a USB startup disk” in System menu. It was really quite straight-forward. Just select the option, specify the drive to be used and look carefully for the option of how much space to reserve for settings etc. And thats it. A few minutes later you’ll have a working USB with the ability to store data and settings. Trivial really. For a detailed explanation look at the following article.

I managed to use the machine in this state for quite a few days. In fact, pretty much till I bought a new notebook. Trusty old notebook became a good netbook.

A few days ago, Jyoti said she felt the need for a good netbook, so I pulled out the T42 and decided to tweak it a little further. I was curious to see what the Ubuntu Netbook Remix was all about. The following article on Maximum PC seemed to be a really good guide. All that I needed to do was add two repos to the current list and install via aptitude two little packages.

The interface that showed up was quite amazing. I don’t think I would ever use it, but for a new user or a lighter powered machine its quite a snappy and bold interface best described by this screenshot:

Ubuntu Netbook Remix

All this was done on a 2GB Transcend USB pendrive. Jyoti is now a little more serious about using this machine, so I shall be using a 4GB pendrive instead and see if I can transfer her email from the desktop and a bunch of critical documents. Should be a fun project, specially transferring the email

Before you get the idea, that I am some major Ubuntu fanboy, let me tell you that  I am not. I am currently stuck with it. Things work, its easy to manage, it looks slick but somehow at the back of my mind I am not convinced. I will run it a while longer and when I have the courage to redo my notebook, I’ll probably give Fedora another shot. If that fails, then it may just be Debian next.

Till then life goes on.

Cheers…Kishore
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