2006 November archive at LinOSX TechnoMash

Archive for November, 2006

Nov

FOSS.IN Begins

By Pankaj Comments

Categories: Bangalore and India

I’m at FOSS.IN at the National Science Symposium Centre in Bangalore. Mr Atul Chitnis will be giving the keynote in just a few minutes, kicking off this year’s event.

FOSS.IN is one of the largest conferences of its kind in the world. “This is an event for the community, by the community”. The event started in 2001 and today 30% of the attendees are outside of Bangalore.

There’s no keynote speaker at FOSS.IN. Instead, there’s a sampling of attendees (7) that are called up onto stage. Each of them will share the lighting of the traditional Diya to mark the inauguration of this year’s FOSS.IN

Nov

The Knowledge Society

By Pankaj Comments

Categories: India

Here’s a great article by Venkatesh Hariharan. He examines India’s tradition of knowledge sharing and how the subversion of this knowledge sharing has left repurcussions still being felt today. This is a must read article for anyone, especially those you believe that intellectual property must be protected and hoarded or it will be detrimental to the IP creator’s existence. As Mr. Hariharan noted, “Though no one has a proprietary lock on yoga, it is still a thriving $30 billion business in the United States.”

redhat.com | A society that shares: India’s tradition of knowledge

Intellectual property. It’s one of the defining terms of the 21st century. The recent knowledge symposium, "Owning the future: Ideas and their role in the digital age" deconstructed the term "intellectual property" and examined the assumptions beneath it. Since the event was being held in India, it seemed appropriate to examine intellectual property in the context of Indian traditions of knowledge.

Nov

Ready for FOSS.IN

By Pankaj Comments

Categories: Delhi and India

I will be heading to Bangalore Thursday to attend the FOSS.IN event this coming weekend. FOSS.IN is the largest FOSS event in the world. I’m very excited to attend this event and meet people heavily involved in the open source movement. I am not sure if there will be an opportunity to blog directly from the event but I’m hoping that there will be some kind of wireless connectivity at the event. If there’s no connectivity, I’ll try my luck at mobil blogging using my Nokia E61, assuming the EDGE service works in Bangalore.

It’s pretty weird having gotten used to WiFi Internet connectivity at most Starbucks around NYC and here in Delhi, WiFi is a major luxury at home. In public spaces, I haven’t found a single HotSpot to connect up to.

Here are some random pictures of sights in Delhi taken with a Motorola SLVR L7.

Nov

VentureVoice’s VC Yellow Pages

By Pankaj Comments

UncategorizedCategories:

Greg Galant from VentureVoice has got a great post with some very useful information from top VCs. Take a peek here.

Nov

Delhi Real Estate

By Pankaj Comments

Categories: Delhi and India

Since I started writing the previous post on my Passage to India, I’ve been very fortunate to meet some really incredible people in New Delhi. People have been very helpful and extremely forthcoming with advice, suggestions, and contacts.

Last Wednesday and Thursday., I saw three excutive office suites. They range from $680/month/person to $800/month/person. What they include is what’s potentially problematic. A class “A” space is roughly $800/month/person but it includes shared Internet access, office space with a window, and no charge for bringing my own equipment. Phone service is additional.

On the other end of the spectrum is space that doesn’t include Internet access, provides a very small cubicle and no window. It’s more or less a coat closet. They have a preferred telecommunications vendor and any telephone, fax, or Internet access is marked up by 25% from what the vendor charges. The savings in the rent can quickly be overshadowed by these additional charges.

Prices for all types of commercial real-estate in New Delhi has been going through the roof not only because of increased investment (domestic and foreign) into the Indian real estate market but also because of the Delhi Supreme Court’s ruling that all the illegal commercial ventures in residential areas must be sealed and the business must relocate to properly designated commercial real estate.

It appears to be a great time to be an entrepreneur in India and a real-estate holder. It just doesn’t seem like a great time to be looking for office space or a place to live in new Delhi …

Nov

Dial-Up 2.0

By Pankaj Comments

Categories: Delhi and India

Most “broadband” providers in India offer a fairly low cost DSL product with top speeds of 256K. At 256K, you are limited to 400MB of downloads. If you go over 400MB, you will be charged per additional megabyte. Now the interesting thing, for unlimited downloading, the speed drops to 128K. Yup, I was pretty surprised by that but as someone pointed out today, the carriers are even more predatory than telecom carriers in the US.

Unlimited downloads at 256k are solowly being made available by companies like Sify but upload speeds are capped at 64K. I can’t call this Broadband, it’s more like “Dial-Up 2.0″

Nov

A Passage to India

By Pankaj Comments

Categories: India

Emblem of India
Nusair asked that I start blogging about my experience in India over the next few weeks. I have toyed with the idea of doing a podcast and/or blog of my travels and of the whole process of doing a startup. I arrived in India in the beginning of last week. I’m here to determine what the Indian consumer Internet industry looks like with the hope of starting a company to service this industry in India. This is my inaugural post on my Passage to India.

I have started exploring what kind of startup infrastructure exists in places like Bangalore, New Delhi, Kolkata (Calcutta), Mumbai (Bombay), and Chennai. I will be examining Bangalore and New Delhi up close and personal but for the moment, I’ve decided not to look at the other three places, partly because of high churn and burn rates, as well as personal factors leading me towards Delhi and Bangalore.

Bangalore is probably the worst (for tech companies) when it comes to high turnover but it appears to have the highest concentration of talent, with the possible exception of Hyderabad. New Delhi isn’t quite known as a technology hub and it is quite a bit more expensive that places like Kolkata. Mumbai isn’t quite the best place for a technology company, in my very humble opinion. Mumbai is run my financial institutions, much like New York City. All these institutions pay well and hire up any potential engineering talent. This engineering talent, along with people with financial experience jump jobs every 3 - 9 months for sunstantial salary increases. I’ve seen this immense turnover at a previous company I was at. Though, my area wasn’t impacted by the high turnover, the company and customer service was being hurt very badly.

Kolkata is much less expensive than New Delhi, Bangalore, or Mumbai. However, it also has a very small talent pool relative to the other cities and many engineers in Kolkata see a technology job there as a stepping stone to a “real” engineering job in Bangalore, Hyderabad or Chennai. This, obviously, isn’t always the case but it is quite common.

Over the next few weeks, I will be detailing thoughts, insights, and questions that I am facing and dealing with in determining whether India is the place for a consumer Internet application or should I heed the advice of others…. “Go West Young Man…”

Nov

Setting up the ThinkPad T60

By Pankaj Comments

UncategorizedCategories:

The first thing I did after I got the T60 was to format the drive, keeping the rescue partition, and resize the first boot partition to give Windows XP 15 GB. I’ve decided to keep XP on this laptop for being able to do firmware upgrades to the Nokia E61 and to be able to access the Motorola SLVR with the Motorola Phone Tools. Other than that, I don’t need XP and I might eventually do away with it.

I manually partitioned the drive into multiple partions. I created at 15GB partition to hold my home directory as I expect to share it between multipe Linux distributions. I created at 2.5GB Swap partition and a 20GB partition to hold Fedora Core 6.

Installing FC6 was as normal as any Linux distribution goes except it crashed when I tried to customize the package installation. Once I ran a standard development environment install, it went smoothly.

After everything was installed, I got to configuring this puppy. I found there was a bit of manual intervention beyond what was required for my old T40. No big deals other than not being able to get the bluetooth working well enough that I can synch all my contacts and calendars from my Nokia E61 to Evolution. I’m not entirely sure where the problem is but I think it’s somewhere in the libsync libraries. Still trying to find an expert who can help me with this.

Configuring the Intel 3945 wireless was pretty painless - for one specific network. Fedora, in my humble opinion, still does not support location based network profiles very well. And for some ver weird reason, running NetworkManager is the only way to get DHCP working on the laptop with the wireless. It’s very weird, but at least I know I have to keep it on if I want to use DHCP. Conversely, if I don’t want to use DHCP (wired or wireless) and I want to employ a static network configuration, NetworkManager MUST be turned off.

Overall, I’ve been very happy having my ThinkPad T60 running Fedora Core 6 but the little things like synching my phone with my calendar and addressbook are things that Fedora is just not cut out for. I’ll see if i can get it working with Ubuntu when I get some time to install it.

Nov

Apple MacBook vs. Lenovo ThinkPad - Final!

By Pankaj Comments

Categories: Apple, MacBook and ThinkPad

Well, as much as I love OS X, the MacBook just wasn’t cutting it for me. The MacBook is a great computer for people who want to get things done and not have to worry about the underlying technology. I need to be able to get things done without futzing with configurations, but I also need a flexible environment where I can work with new technologies, get back to working on my open source social networking project, and also be able to work with Linux environments like Fedora, OpenSuse and Ubuntu.

The MacBook is great for multimedia things and I will probably continue to use OS X for video editing, managing my music collection, and managing the fast increasing number of digital photos that I take. However, it will probably NOT by my MacBook. I have decided to sell my MacBook. It was a tough decision, especially since I bought it less than six months ago and I upgraded the RAM to 2GB less than two months ago. I might try another Apple portable someday in the future but for now, the geek in me is screaming for a ThinkPad running Fedora Core 6, OpenSuse 10.1 and Ubuntu 6.10.

On Thursday, I picked up a Lenovo ThinkPad T60. Sorry, but i was just too excited about getting a new ThinkPad and I didn’t take the required unpackaging pictures. The ThinkPad T60 comes with 1 GB RAM, 120GB 5400 RPM HD, Intel 3945abg Wireless, ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 with 128MB Hypermemory, SXGA+ video at 1400×1050, Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 at 2GHz, DVD Recordable, 56k Fax modem, Infrared, Bluetooth, Gigabit Ethernet, Verizon Broadband Connect EVDO, 3 USB, Mic and Headphones, 1 PCI Express Full and 1 PCMCIA Slots, Fingerprint Reader, Security chip, 9 cell battery, and a three year warrant. The only real difference in specs is that the ThinkPad doesn’t have any sort of webcam (Apple MacBook has iSight) or remote control (Apple MacBook has FrontRow).

The ThinkPad has an Intel Core 2 Duo chip, 128MB of video RAM, double the hard drive capacity, double the RAM of the MacBook, and also the Verizon EVDO built-in. That’s a substantial amount of hardware for $1600. The only thing I’ve found so far to complain about the ThinkPad is that the screen isn’t as bright as the MacBook and considering winter is approaching, the ThinkPad can’t double as a heater like the MacBook can.

The 14.1″ version of the ThinkPad T60 is a bit smaller and lighter than the 15″ version. I had considered an ThinkPad X60 or X41 but I decided against it mainly because they both use an Intel 950 graphics chip with 64MB of shared memory, the units in stock didn’t have DVD-RW capability and the HD was maxxed out at 60GB.

The feel of the lenovo ThinkPad T60 isn’t very different from my old IBM ThinkPad T40. However, Lenovo has made a few changes like changing the battery type and the power adapter. I won’t be able to use the battery from my T40 nor will I be able to use the two T40 chargers I have. I presume that dock options are also different for the T60 than for the T4x series of ThinkPads. This ThinkPad T60 also has the Lenovo name displayed prominently next to the T60 logo.

I’ll get into what I’m doing with my new T60 in another post but suffice it to say, I am very happy to be typing on a ThinkPad. However, I do miss having OS X working with such ease and finesse. As much as I love Linux, it is a serious PITA getting things to run and things still don’t run as cleanly or well as they do in OS X. Synchronizing a phone over bluetooth with your PIM is a perfect example … Oh well, I guess that’s part of the fun and challenge of using Linux