It’s over 7 days now that I have been using #Moto360 on daily basis.. so here is a quick #review ..

It’s a companion device to your Android smart phone. It’s definitely the best looking smart watch and one can feel the quality of craftsmanship from the moment you take it out of its box.

As noted this is a companion and not a primary device.. look at it like how tv remote was to the tv. Till the tv remote was there you would have been happy to walk up to tv for changing channel or volume; but now that you are used to the tv remote you can’t think of using the tv without the remote.

Pros:
- Very comfortable and high quality product
- Charges quickly and lasts easily for a day with ambient mode off (default)
- Amazing watch faces – you can change daily if you like to match your mood/dress/occasion

Cons:
- First generation hardware & software (expect bugs)
- Not all apps are ready for smart watch yet (this should improve with time)
- One needs to charge the device every night (will not last more than one day - 20h)
- Right now you cannot turn on ambient mode (keep display on all the time) without draining battery with-in the day.
- Very little strap/colour choices. Steel ones is yet to be available for general public.

Conclusion:
- Is it for every one: Not yet
- Should I buy one:  (check if your answer to the following question is yes?)
- Do you like technology and you’re an early adopter?
- Are you an Android Developer? Want to cash-in on by building app for Smart Watch?
- You think removing phone every now and then from your pocket to check any notification is waste of time and are looking to avoid it.

Was it worth it: Yes it was definitely for me. Your mileage may differ. My answers to the above questions.. all 3 is Yes

Buy @ Flipkart http://fkrt.it/RHz3myNN

On my way back from Kabani, I visited Ambavilas Palace or Amba Vilas Palace (better known as Mysore Palace) at Mysore (Karnatak, India). This is an amazing structure and is lit up during Sundays.

Below is a large panorama image of Mysore Palace (made using 16 shots stitched together).
(thanks to gigapan.org for hosting this large image)

[If you are using RSS reader you would want to click on the title or this link to view the embedded large panorama image.]

I was planning to check out Google Maps for India.. since I did not remember the exact url for India Map.. i search it in google.. and to my surprise every page in the result had this line under the link “This site may harm your computer.”

And then I clicked on the link (http://www.google.co.in/interstitial?url=http://maps.google.co.in/) and got this page.. i don’t have words to describe this :))

guess some one or some thing got screwed badly at gogole .. Hope they find and fix this soon. Users may ignore this and continue for now..

Update: Looks like there are others also who have seen this happen .. reports are coming from all over the net..

Update: the bug is now fixed as per Google.. here is the official entry on their blog http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/this-site-may-harm-your-computer-on.html

I have been a big fan of tiny/small gadgets mainly the small computer (Subnotebook).. and smaller they get more sexy they look to me.

For those who did not get what I meant by Subnotebook in the first paragraphs.. A subnotebook is a small and lightweight portable computer, with most of the features of a standard laptop computer but smaller.  Subnotebook are also known as “ultraportable” and “minilaptop”, while Intel has coined “netbook”. The term “ultra-mobile PC” (”UMPC”) is also used, although this is the name of a platform of small form-factor tablet PCs (see UMPC).

Subnotebook shot to lime light in 2007 with the launch of ASUS EEE PC; its success caught most hardware manufactures off guard. And within a shot span of time all other manufactures started releasing UMPC computing products like Acer Aspire One, HP 2133 Mini, MSI Wind PC and others being on their way out..

After much deliberation on which subnotebook to order I recently ordered my Asus EEE PC 901 Linux edition from Amazon. I also got it to India with my friend who happened to be coming back around the same time. I have been playing around with it for a week now; and I am absolutely loving it. I uninstalled the Xandros Linux that came with it and installed the Ubuntu-EEE (Ubuntu optimized for the Asus Eee PC) within two days of using it. The startup speed and battery backup is amazing. And I am getting used to the multi-touch features and the small keyboard. Shall soon post a detailed review.. till then you can view this Youtube video..

Also I just came across this nice little computer called ‘Space Cube‘ - claims to be the smallest PC in the world and it measures a mere 2.1″ x 2.1″ x 1.8″. That according to me is ultra cool ! Its hard drive is actually a 64MB SDRAM card, and it is equipped with a LAN port, USB connectivity, and a monitor connector as well. It’s an offshoot of the Space Systems Research Group of the University of Dundee.I can see amateur robotics and rocket and other engineering groups being interested in devices like this and it can open a can of possibilities for them.

If you have found any such interesting gadgets do sound off in the comments..

With the release of Firefox 3 on June 17, 2008; Mozilla want to set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours. You can pledge your support here;

As per the official release Firefox 3 hash more than 15,000 improvements and this version is more faster, safer and smarter than before.

So spread the word around and get ready to get it on June 17

FF3 will be available 10:33 PM of 17 July 2008 in INDIA

Link to download Firefox 3

Take a Tour of Firefox 3

Watch this amazing youtube video.. were people join together to freeze Grand Central…

very creative and funny.. enjoyed watching it over again and again.. imagine doing this in India.. ?

Talking about creative stuff… i am not a big fan of Microsoft .. but they have started to do some really cool stuff.. at their new initiative ‘Microsoft Research’ .. first there was this incredible Photosynth and then there was Bird’s Eye views and now WorldWide Telescope (soon to be launched)

Do checkout a sneak peek into WorldWide Telescope from Ted

But if you want to explore the skys today.. you should head to Google Sky.. its available right now..

It is very true that simplicity in technology is very fundamental for any technology to be accepted and adopted by the general public.

An idea on a gaming project led to photo website - Flickr. Check the history of Flickr @ USAToday website.

Also do check the study of technology that drives it at highscalability.com

Recently I had a thought that, it would be nice to see once computer boot directly to a java application/server. So googled for some sort of jvm on console based os?s like dos or *uix systems. Though I found a few but most had a limited support for java?s core api.

Though this project is still in its early stages, Michael Ringgaard has
done an amazing job by building this open source [BSD style license]
project.

Finally SanOS (Server Appliance Network Operating System) caught my attention. This is a minimalistic application server operating system kernel and allows building custom boot media (cdroom [livecd]/floppy) and can start a java application after booting.

This project has limited documentation, so it will be some time before you can boot to java, so have patience if you plan to give it a try. Also it does not yet look to be ready to put any production quality servers (no nio support, no server jvm support, no ssl, and does not handle multiple client connections well). What I did was to mount the cdrom [which had windows java jre v1.4 with QuickServer examples jars] as /usr. Then made jinit(java of sanos) as init command for the os. This worked on a few systems when I booted from floppy and I tried to make a livecd out of this, but it only worked on a virtual hardware and did not bootup when I tried on my system, may be it lacked the h/w support.

Looking forward for upcoming versions of SanOS. Also hoping to see more such kind of work on Linux or Solaris , may be Knoppix/BeleniX guys can come up with a slim cd version with just minimal kernel and a jvm to build java application that can boot up like ready to use (of the shelf) servers with minimum configuration or build demo systems and even some other cool stuff.

Also here you can download the QuickServer dir that I used to create a test system (QuickServerLiveCD), I had to put references to NetworkInterface under try bock since it threw Error under SanOS for some reason and it contains modified QuickServer.jar and examples configured on blocking mode with no logging. Also set org.quickserver.livecd.Welcome as your mainclass in os.ini file under [java] section.

QuickServer version 1.4.5, open source Java library/framework for quick creation of robust multi-client TCP server applications is now available.

To view the features added in QuickServer 1.4.5 visit here, the main improvements have been in the following areas

• ClientIdentifier implementation is now plug able and comes with 2 implementations.
• PoolManager, QSObjectPoolMaker have been added to give users control of which ObjectPool implementation to be used when creating pools
• Added a GUI Client for ChatServer.
• Socket Timeout setting now will have to be set in milliseconds, default timeout is 1 minute.
• And lot of improvement in implementation and bug fixes.

Download this release from: www.quickserver.org/download.html

Also based on the feedback from one of the users - ‘Filipe Sabella’, I have added a quick tutor that show how to build basic multi user tcp server -  QuickStart guide to QuickServer, do check it out.