Rajan's View

The latest version of Ubuntu was out in April 28, following the pattern of Canonical's 6 monthly release cycle. It's called Natty Narwhal. I have been using it for a few weeks and it's natty indeed. The latest edition is very slick when it comes to the user interface. I wasn't too happy with the Unity desktop interface, I am using the GNOME 3 desktop. However, installing GNOME 3 breaks the Unity installation. I would recommend having another desktop manager like KDE. This is where the flexibility and architecture of Linux comes into play, one can do what one wishes! Based on my experience, some of the key features are: - Very simple user interface. Search is now central to the desktop experience (top right in the above screenshot). Hit the "Windows" key and the above menu appears. - The device drivers for for the keyboard, display, bluetooth, wi-fi work out of the box seamlessly (on my Acer 5738z laptop). I am particularly impressed with the trackp

There was a time when the each of the browsers had distinctive features and quirks. Internet Explorer soon started to dominate the browser market. Mozilla Firefox came in like a breath of fresh air with new features like tabbed browsing, spell check and so on. However, Internet Explorer was quick to match these features and maintained it's hold. Along the way, Opera also came into the fray. But, it didn't have much to challenge Explorer's dominance. Safari continues to be relegated to the "apple world". The story started to change with a new entrant - Chromium aka known as Google Chrome (Chromium is the "open source" version). According to me it received a lukewarm response, even among geeks like me. I installed it and quickly shifted back to Firefox. I wish I could say the same now! In the course of my work and home life, I use 3 different operating systems, don't ask me why! They are - Windows 7, Mac Leopard and Ubuntu. I have Chrome in all t

In the past few years, our computers at home have become more and more involved in our daily lives, be it for paying the bills or keeping touch with friends. This articles explores a few basic steps to protect your computer. Here are a set of one time and ongoing steps to help protect your computer. If you have any other ideas, please send them to me and I will add them to the list below. One time setup 1. Ensure that you have a password for your computer login and do not set the option "to login automatically". 2. Use an anti-virus tool. There are plenty of free ones available like - AVG, Microsoft Essentials and Clam Anti Virus. I would recommend Microsoft Essentials. It's quite simple to use. 3. Ensure that you set medium or high priority security options in your browser. 4. Disable pop-ups. It saves nuisance in a lot of sites. 5. If you are using Windows, enable the Windows Firewall or use 3rd party firewall. For most purposes, the Windows Firewall is a

In my previous post , I had predicted that, search engines will try to help users with more applied / custom searches. Right on cue, Google released a food recipe search last week. This search is specific to recipes and one can filter the results based on cooking time, ingredients and calories. For now, it looks like Google is indexing the sites which have recipes using the RDFa or Microformat attributes. We are inching closer to the "semantic web" where we have richer attributes specifying a data. The richer the data, more the application of it. With the growth of smartphones, there will be even greater use of such data. This also means that, to start with all the food sites will now have to tag their recipes with either RDFa or Microformat so that they appear better in Google. Either someone will have to develop a tool to do this conversion or perhaps employ people to do a one time conversion. It makes me think that as things keep changing, the change itself keep

The ICC Cricket World Cup 2011 is on. The cricket fever is now officially on. There is less traffic on the roads, everyone talking about the matches and overdose of advertisements on TV and news. I have to confess, in a land of cricket worshippers, I am an odd man out. I somehow don't have the fascination for it like I used to earlier. But, here are some interesting statistics. Google have a product called Insights for Search. You can look at trends for certain phrases. I tried looking up phrases like "crickets score", "world cup 2011" and compared it with other random phrases like "bollywood", "budget" and "mobile". You can see the results below. Source: Google Insights for Search While there was a temporary spike when the world cup started, people seem to be more interested in knowing or buying mobile phones and about the impending central budget. There is some hope after all!

We have been seeing a proliferation of Android versions, manufacturer and network UI over the Android and various form factors. Now add to this potent mix, different kinds of screens. The screen in a phone or a tablet is one of the most expensive components in the device. If you read the fine print, there are differences between various models of phones. Until now, these differences were in the processor and memory. Now, with a wide of variety of consumer segments, price points and form factors, there are different options being offered for screens as well. It looks like, AMOLED screens are short in supply while there are plenty of LCD screens available to manufacturers. I am not surprised given the explosion in sales of smart phones and tablets. And, we haven't seen the sales of these devices plateau yet. Take the case of the Samsung Galaxy S I9000. This phone was launched around 6 months ago in India at prices ranging from Rs 28,000 - 30,000 (600 USD). We have two more

In a space dominated by Google, Bing, Yahoo and the other search engines, there is a new one - Blekko . Blekko seems to be specialising in search with a "social" twist to it. You can login to Blekko with you Facebook ID. Once you start searching, it shows you the results like other search engines. In addition, it shows if any of your friends have "Liked" the results. I would call it "social ranking or relevance". You can also filter the sites by Flickr or Youtube videos. Somehow, I didn't find it to be an intuitive user interface. Also, how difficult is it for existing search engines to provide a similar features (like social relevance, custom search engine, filters) albeit in a different manner. One thing which I hope Bing and Google are toying over is allowing users to "share" their search. It can be done even today but in a manual sort of way, by sending someone the address from the browser.

For all you foodies out there, here are a couple of great ways to find recipes you are looking for. There is a beta site - Foodily . It's a great a new approach. You can use this site to search various food sites. So, when you search for apple, it shows you all the apple related recipes from all the sites. You can then filter the recipes based on ingredients or sites etc. Having said that, it looks like Foodily is stepping into "search engine" territory. All the indexing and searching that Foodily is doing, someone like a Google can do better. If you want, you can try the Food Recipe search engine that I created using Google custom search here . The user interface will not be as great as Foodily, but I suspect a Google would give more accurate or relevant results. In the "general" search engine space, it is pretty much competition between Google and Bing. It will be interesting to see if either of them ventures into what I call "applied" search

A quick look at some of the new deals sites sprouting all over the world. Prologue As the internet evolved, one of the major industries to exploit it was retail. One of the initial hypes was around the internet only sites such as Amazon and Ebay . These sites are still holding steady and expanding into more countries and services (such as  Amazon Web Services ). Once these sites started succeeding, the brick and mortar retailers were quick to jump the bandwagon. Some of them like Tesco have been very successful, it's online grocery is now one of the leading in the world. Main Story Adding to the mix has been Google. They initially debuted Froogle which morphed into Product Search and the latest avatar is Google Shopping . They are even trying their hand at designer shopping, check out boutiques.com (beta at the time of writing this blog). It includes designers like 7 for All Mankind, Oscar de la Renta, Diane Von Furstenberg and others. It features a unique "visual&

At the recently concluded Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, one of the hottest (odd isn't it sometimes people use coolest) gadgets to be reviewed was the Motorola Atrix 4G smartphone. Specifications The phone itself is quite powerful. It's one of the next generation of smartphones with a dual core processor (NVIDIA Tegra 2). This is the same processor powering the Adam tablet from Notion Ink. This chip is a new class of chips called SOC (System On Chip) where there are dedicated processors to handle CPU, video, audio etc. More about it here . The RAM will be 1 GB. The screen is a 4" HD screen. And the other usual suspects such as GPS, Bluetooth, WiFi, you get the drift. When it ships out, expect minimum Android 2.2 or perhaps 3.0 (if it is ready by then). I think the phone may start shipping out by either the 1st / 2nd quarter of this year. Killer Feature All the above features already are getting it rave reviews. Added to this is the really cool feature

That Google has become like a de-facto search for everyone is known. Here is nifty way to customize it to suit your needs. Google has a really cool service called Google Custom Searches . This is a completely free service where one can customize the google search. Of course, there is an enterprise version too available for companies (which is based on a subscription model). Some of the features are Specify the list of websites to be searched for Auto complete feature Add custom synonyms Index custom websites instantly Add filters Modify the look and feel Monetize the search with AdSense I am trying to create some custom searches which might be useful. Feel free to try any of these and let me know your feedback. I am already hooked! I have created a search for shopping (called "Shopping Search"), you can see it on the menu on the right. I will add more custom searches as I go along.

The Consumer Electronics Show just recently concluded at Las Vegas, USA. CES is the annual show of all gadgets and new products. This year, the unanimous winner was Android (and therefore Google by extension). Also, amazing was the sheer number of tablets, smartphones, smablets (smartphone+tablet), tabbook (tablet+netbook), smartbook (smartphone+notebook)! The last category might particularly appeal to the road warriors. Check out the Motorola Atrix 4G , a cool concept. Another cool tablet to finally be unveiled was the Adam from Notion Ink. This is a startup based out of Bangalore, India. Finally, they got some fair and balanced reviews. The Pixel Qi display technology used in it is a key one to watch out for. It has the qualities of both an LCD and the E-Ink. Check out this article . For more details, you can go to 2011 International CES, January 6-9 or a host of other websites / Google search. Lastly, an interesting search trend for CES. The spikes are quite regular and it

I have finally decided to sell my apple laptop. Yes, the usurper "Ubuntu" had a hand in it. Here are the details if someone wants to buy a lovingly cared for laptop - http://bangalore.craigslist.co.in/sys/2003842541.html . Update (16-Feb-2011) - Finally, managed to sell the apple laptop!

Here is my review of the latest versions of the free Ubuntu operating system. I have been playing around with open source operating systems like Ubuntu, SUSE for the past few years. The latest release of Ubuntu is amazing. I have a Acer 5738Z laptop at home. It had a Windows Vista originally which was horribly slow. I have now configured it as a dual boot with Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.04. The Ubuntu installed far more smoothly than even Windows! Ubuntu picked up all the drivers. All the hardware from bluetooth, wifi, graphic cards. On the other hand, with Windows 7 the DVD drive stopped working. I had to dig various Microsoft KB articles to finally fix the issue. With Ubuntu, one gets all the standard software for home use like - Open Office, Firefox, Music and Video players, Thunderbird etc. The Spreadsheet tool in Open Office can go upto a million rows. I created a spreadsheet with 1 million rows x 40 columns and system kept going on! Adding new software is easy using the U