Kiran Jonnalagadda’s Blog

timoreilly quotes Clay Shirky on why Wi-Fi (American for 802.11b) and 3G are competitors and why Wi-Fi will take a lot of steam out of expensive 3G plans.

Very nicely written, except I'm now not sure what to make of Lufthansa's FlyNet service since it now has keywords placing it in both camps. One one hand, captive customers on a long-haul flight with no options but what the airline offers them, and on the other hand, connectivity is provided via Wi-Fi and passengers can use their own laptops. The service has been on trial since January 15, 2003 on the Frankfurt to Washington (Dulles airport) route and free access ends April 15. Estimated charges are €30-35 per flight and that doesn't seem bad at all considering that this is a 7-hour flight and anyone flying from India would have already done the night's sleeping before getting to Frankfurt (but I paid only €12 for Internet access and unlimited snacks and beverages at the Europe City Club (ECC) lounge in Frankfurt airport, so this seems like a lot).

Getting back to Clay Shirky's argument, I can't help but be reminded of this February 2001 article by Andrew Odlyzko on the reason why SMS is so much more popular than WAP.

Also noteworthy is the fact that GPRS service seems to be rolling out across India faster than Wi-Fi. AirTel and Orange/Hutch provide GPRS wherever they provide service in India, and the last I heard, BPL Mobile had GPRS in Bombay (the country's first?). AirTel charges Rs. 999 a month for 10 MB of data transfer, which is outrageously expensive, but fact is AirTel has the service available around most of India, while I haven't heard of a single place offering public Wi-Fi access yet.

Objective Development's LaunchBar is everything that GNOME's Mini-Commander never was. Woo hoo! What an amazing app! Now someone needs to make a tool like this for X11 based environments.

Steve Jobs has a home page! Even his resume is online.

Ingenuity strikes. Eudora for MacOSX uses the same file formats as Eudora for Windows. Mozilla will import mail from Netscape 4. Evolution on MacOSX happily accepted my evolution/ folder from Linux. And all three support transferring mail to and from IMAP with flags preserved.

So all I have to do now is get my IMAP server running, fire up all three and shift mailboxes to IMAP, throw in the maildirs from my last IMAP installation, then move Apple Mail's folders to IMAP too, and live happily with IMAP ever after.

Now to go look up Fink.

I just got Apple Mail to import my old mail from Netscape 4 (1999) and Eudora 5 (2001) and it lost all the flags again. At least I didn't have to import one folder at a time.

I'm beginning to think that the most sensible solution now is to use a local IMAP server with filters defined in a GUI client (that way filters are auto-updated when a mailbox is moved around). I used IMAP with Maildirs in 2000 and all the headers in those messages are still intact (flags are part of the filename in a Maildir).

Now to check if Fink has a decent IMAP server available.

"The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think."
— Edwin Schlossberg, as quoted by Tim O'Reilly

Several reasons why:

A one-way ride to ITPL (27.8km from home) takes one hour. That's two hours lost to the commute.

In the mornings, I have to ride a 10km stretch straight eastwards, into the glare of the rising sun. In the evenings, another 10km stretch into the glare of the setting sun.

There's a flyover under construction at the Outer Ring road and Hosur road crossing. Crowded roads, flying dust.

There is no lane discipline before the Hosur road crossing. Every second of the ride requires me to watch every vehicle around me: The guy in front in case he decides to slow down too quickly, the guys to the left and right in case they decide the guy in front of them is going too slow, and the guy behind, in case he decides I'm going too slow at the same time I decide the guy in front of me is too slow. Every second of the half hour it takes to get to the Hosur road crossing (except when waiting at a traffic light, of course).

Most of the ride is spent swearing silently at all the rash drivers who narrowly missed me. I refuse to inflict road rage on anyone, but there's no denying that at the end of each ride, I have to make an effort to quell that rage and think about my work instead. I experimented with piping music into my ears for a while and it made the ride a lot more tolerable, but when you can't hear the guy behind honk before he overtakes, you're now asking for trouble.

About 17km of the total 27.8km ride is a truck route. That means my competitors for road space are really big, really noisy, and with very little control over inertia. Plus their drivers have reputations needing to be maintained.

And all the simple things that add to the experience: Bangalore summers are hot and getting hotter every year. Most of Bangalore's roads are designed for light traffic at very low speeds. Riding with trucks means their exhaust pipes are blowing into my face. The city's rapid growth rate means there are more vehicles on the roads every day, and the roads are not getting any wider. The rapid growth rate also means there is construction work happening everywhere, and this means there is dust flying into my face whenever I'm on the roads.

The alternative? Work from home. Convert ideas into code and thoughts into words as soon they occur because the equipment for the purpose is always just a few feet away. Wake up fresh and inspired each morning and get to work right away without a stressful ride in between to take all the enthusiasm away. Work through the day and through the night too if the enthusiasm keeps up. No having to take another stressful ride home. Sweaty on a hot afternoon? Take a shower, get back to work cooler. How many workplaces come with a bathroom? Back hurting? Get into bed, back horizontal, knees bent, laptop on lap (notice, laptop), and get back to work again.

There is only one thing I don't like about working from home: email, instant messengers and phone calls are not a substitute for face to face interaction. But given the horror that Bangalore traffic is these days, I'll live with those alternatives quite happily.

I'm trying to migrate my mail from Evolution to Apple Mail, and did a test import, but Mail lost all the flags on the messages (unread, replied to, etc). From what I can make out, mbox files do not store any flags at all so there's no hope of Mail ever doing it right, unless someone writes an import filter that specifically extracts flags from wherever Evolution stores them (mbox.ev-summary?). Since Mail's import filters are implemented in AppleScript independent of Mail itself (unless this has changed recently), this shouldn't be an impossible task.

I've spent the last few hours feeding various combinations of keywords into Google hoping somebody's figured out a way already, but all I've found is someone's rants on how they had trouble migrating their contacts (which is trivial once the difficult part of getting Evolution running on OSX is dealt with: export the Contacts folder as a vCard file in Evolution and import as vCard in Address Book).

Since Mail is yet too lacking features for my comfort, I'm also considering putting my mail behind an IMAP server on localhost and pointing both Mail and Evolution at it. But there's still the issue of migrating existing flags to whatever format the IMAP server requires, and on top, having to filter mail via Procmail or Sieve, which is something I hope I never have to resort to ever again (command line filters are a major pain if you frequently reorganise your folders).

Does anyone have any pointers on how Evolution stores flags? If there is no other choice, I'm going to write the Evolution import filter myself.

Today's been one sweaty sultry day. And tonight looks like more of the same. I can't pay attention to code anymore with this weather.

Barely an hour with a left-handed mouse and my left wrist's howling. I'm now back to right-handed. New strategy is to simply push the keyboard aside when doing something mouse intensive.

I just got a USB PC keyboard and plugged it into the PowerBook, and it works, with some keys behaving differently:

• The Windows key provides the same functionality as the Apple key on an Apple keyboard (but sits in a more sensible location between Ctrl and Alt, not to their right),
• the Windows Menu key inserts a space (?),
• the Insert key brings up context-sensitive help,
• the Delete key doesn't work (the Mac has no such key; Backspace is called Delete instead), (Update: Delete actually works. Don't know why I didn't notice before)
• the numeric keypad works like a numeric keypad regardless of the status of Num Lock,
• the Scroll Lock and Pause/Break keys reduce and increase display brightness, respectively,
• Home and End work, but unlike on a PC here they go between the beginning and end of a document, not a line (Apple Left/Right does that), and not in all applications.

I also realized that PC keyboards are really badly designed from a comfort standpoint. Because the primary two-handed working area of a keyboard is on the left side, with several inches of infrequently used keypad area to the right, right-handed mouse users have to move their hand several inches to shift between keyboard and mouse. If your center your keyboard's primary area around your sitting position, that also means you no longer have an arm-rest when using the mouse.

No wonder keyboard aficionados hate mouse-intensive interfaces. I figured I'd do something more sensible: I'd move the mouse to the left side and learn to use it left-handed...

...and then I discovered that Mac OS X has no support for left-handed mice. There is no option to switch buttons anywhere. Nothing in the online help either. So I googled and discovered that this was achievable with USB Overdrive X, an excellent mouse configuration utility that allows remapping mouse buttons to other buttons, keyboard keys or combinations of shift keys and buttons, among various options, globally or on a per-application basis. I already use it to map the scroll wheel to up and down arrow keys in Adobe Acrobat, and middle-click to Apple Click in Safari and Mozilla so they open in new tabs.

Except USB Overdrive X has no option to swap mouse buttons. Instead I have to remap the left button to right click and right button to left click, and since I have application specific settings, I have to do this reassignment for each profile. What a pain!

I've done that anyway, and in the few minutes of life with a left-handed mouse so far, it already seems more comfortable than extending my (overused) right hand to reach the mouse. Hand-eye coordination is acceptable for non-mouse intensive work. It'll hopefully improve in a few days to a level where I can use it for, say, image editing.

evan has an alternative solution that I'm not sure I understand correctly, since my primary concern is with losing my arm rest when switching between keyboard and mouse.

PS: Discovered something else. Ever notice that the arrow of the mouse cursor points left, not right? Every time I look at that now, I end up pressing the left button instead of the right button because the cursor seems to be indicating I should do so.

I just installed the Mac OS X version of Bochs and it came with an image of Linux 1.3.89. The output from uname -a reads:
Linux dlx 1.3.89 #1 Mon Apr 15 19:46:15 MET DST 1996 i586

Pictures from the war front.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you my current workspace:



Drab, yes, cluttered, yes, but extremely functional, also yes.

What I need now is a clipboard on the wall, an external keyboard and a larger monitor than the spare 15" that was lying around that I recycled. Oh, and a wireless transmitter to pipe music from iTunes to the music system across the hall that in turn plugs into wall sockets for the speakers at each corner of the hall. That would be the finishing touch to an already excellent workspace.

Rajesh Jain of IndiaWorld fame summarizes his current enterprise Netcore's plans in this PowerPoint presentation. The presentation isn't very effective describing how Netcore will achieve its stated goals, but is certainly very clear on what Netcore wants to do. Thanks, Rajesh, for making this public.

And with that, my count of organizations attempting to take technology to the rural masses in India goes up to four: PicoPeta/Encore, Netcore/Emergic, TaraHaat (more) and Media Lab Asia.

Interesting syndicated feeds on LJ: jonudell, dashes, timoreilly, emergictracker, atulchitnis, diveintomark, ravipratap, filtercoffee, joelonsoftware.

Track them too and free some of my units so I can look for other interesting ones.

Paul Everitt, co-founder of Zope Corp and now with Zope Europe, describes an amusing Zope moment:

Last week we had dinner at the house of some friends, who invited a couple we hadn't met. I sat beside them at dinner, and the husband asked what I do. I've gotten used to the challenge of explaining Zope, so I asked if he had heard of Linux. "Yes, of course". So I said we do something like Linux, but for web applications.

His response? "Oh, so it's something like Zope?"

I stared at him, expressionless, for several moments while I underwent a core dump. The stranger sitting next to me at an ordinary dinner in France uses Zope as the first response when thinking about Linux-like web applications?

Ok, so it's official, this Zope thing is pretty freakin' big in Europe. And you can imagine the expression on his face when my wife told him who I was. :^)

An earlier post notes that he uses Mac OS X too. I'm amazed at the sheer number of interesting people who use OS X.

The opening line of the user manual for BSNL's CellOne pre-paid cellular service reads (emphasis mine):

Welcome to BSNLs Pre-paid Cellular Services. We thank you for becoming a member of ex-cel service offered by us. Now we can reach you at any instant, anywhere.

BSNL's sinister plans for big-brotherhood are unfortunately marred by poor technology:

ukj messages me saying she's going to call in a few minutes. When the call comes, the caller id says it's from her landline at home—a BSNL landline, notably—but when I answer, a brazen male voice breathes heavily into the phone and asks for Ravindra. Huh? I tell him it's a wrong number and hang up. A few seconds later there's another call, again from her number. Again a male voice, a different one now, something noisy in the background. The call lasts three seconds. Third time, it's really her. Both on the caller id and in the voice stream now. She says her first two calls ended up going to wrong numbers and is surprised I got wrong calls too.

I've been using cell phones for several years now and have connected to service providers in several states (if I recall correctly, Andhra Pradesh, Bombay, Gujarat, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Maharastra & Goa, Madras and Tamil Nadu), and I've never experienced something like this before. Way to go, BSNL!

I just realized something: most of the sites I read these days are blogs and journals. And none of them carry ads. Sites that need to advertise are fast becoming irrelevant.

Nokia must have one of the lousiest Websites on the Web. I've spent several hours now just searching for details on the Bluetooth Connectivity Kit for the Nokia 6210.

No price mentioned anywhere on any of their sites, no links to an online retailer, no details on what platforms the PCMCIA card will work (will it or will it not work with my PowerBook running Mac OS X 10.2?), no tech specs, nothing that will help me make a buying decision. The best I could find was this PC Magazine UK review.

And today is Sunday so all the stores are closed too. Nowhere I can call to get a price quote from.

Thanks for the wishes, all. I had a great time yesterday.

I am alive.