I am out of Tech65..

Btw, this was a failed attempt at April Fool’s prank.. 

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Since Daniel has already made the annoucement on Tech65, I guess I have to set things straight here. I joined Tech65 almost 2 years ago, when I met Jerrick and Daniel at the E-Life Starbucks. I thought they were a really great team, and had the potential of  becoming the Rev3 of Singapore.

However in the recent days things took a turn for the worse, and there have been many disagreements between me and the rest of the Tech65 crew. Thus, for the following reasons I have decided to leave Tech65.

1. Too much Social Media content. I am sick of people ranting and raving about Social Networking and Social Media. Tech65 was supposed to do Tech Podcasts and not discuss Marketting and PR strategies. I cannot be a part of a team who desecrate the ideaology and purity of Technology with things like Social Media, PR and Marketting. And it doesn’t help when one sees such updates to the team and promises for such kind of content.

2. No respect for Creative Commons and Open Source Content. When I initially joined Tech65, I pushed for our content to be made Creative Commons and Open. I believe in these things more than XKCD, and I finally managed to convince the crew last year. However, in the recent few weeks, un-beknowest to me, they decide to change that and got only the audio and video part of our content published as Creative Commons (you can see it on the website). I find this disgusting. Not only do I believe that we should pay forward the good will and the help we’re getting from everyone, but it’s just disrespectful to change things back without my knowledge.

3. The Tech65’s upper managment’s attitude with respect to finance was the last straw. While it’s great to have an organization which is based of volunteerism and individual interest and passion. But it just sucks when you find out that it’s all a lie. I always believed that Tech65 was running as non-profit organisation. But recently, I have noticed a lot of plugging going on in the content. I got suspicious when the same party was plugged recurrently, for no obvious reason. I am sure Hisham will agree with me on this. More investigation revealed that Tech65 was being paid for plugs!! Obvious question of jounalistic integrity aside, I found it hard that while the upper management was making a great deal of bananas (and I will say it’s a sweet deal for this kind of economy), we were getting paid only peanuts!! Even the weekly coffee at GT, is out of my own pocket..

And thus I have deicided that I will leave Tech65 and let this joke of a Tech Podcasting group be.

I am still devoted to provide great commentry and analysis about new an upcoming technologies and hence will be starting a new project in the near future. Stay tuned on this blog to hear more about it.

Orpheus Raga

It’s a great time we live in.. The cultures of the world collide and bring about mixtures and concoction of unrelated ideas, concepts and themes..

When it comes to music, such collaborations have always fascinated me, especially when one party is playing something that’s Indian or related to something Indian (simply because that one music I somewhat understand).

In January, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra of New York, played the piece they had commissioned Pt. Ravi Shankar to compose for them. While that itself is an interesting combination of music and talent, Orpheus also performed the concerto along with Anoushka Shankar, who played the Sitar parts. Anoushka has already made her name in the contemporary Indian music field, as well as the various fusionistic projects she has taken up.

The best part of this project, was the Raga Saga. Orpheus worked with filmmakers Chris and Alex Browne to records many rehearsals and interviews with the various artists, and decided to publish them online, weekly leading up to the concert. It was really interesting to see what goes behind the scenes of such a project. Espcially since we see two great cultures and traditions meeting and working with each other to create something new and wonderful. The webisodes also give us an insite on the challenges faced by the artists and the way they resolved them. Anyone who’s interested in the scientific aspect of music would surely enjoy watching it.

Furthermore, it is really amazing to see musicians using new media like webcasts to deliver their content. Especially musicians in this field. And I am sure this moved has helped. Without this webcast I would have never known about Orpheus or this project, and now I will probably buy the CD if they come out with one..

The usual banter about how industries should use new media aside, I would urge everyone with remote interest in Indian Classical or Western Classical or Fusion Music to check out the Orpheus Raga website, and especially the Raga Saga series of webisodes (you will have to register for a free account. Trust me it’s not THAT hard.. ). The live concert is avaliable for listening at the website also.

What’s this Zii about??

Creative technologies, yes yes.. our DEAR Creative announced a couple of weeks ago, their new initiative. It’s called Creative Zii.. with the subtitle “Stemcell Computing” (which they seem to have trademarked).. and the tagline “Everything you know is about to change”.

There were a few more details/speculation which floated around the internet. The first was an email update from Creative, which states..

My Babies…

Being in the consumer electronics industry, it’s really awesome to see your work being used by people… It’s the kind of satisfaction you get when you see your children do well in their school…

Anyway, now that all of them have been officially announced…here are my 11 babies…

1. MotoROKR Z6 – The Small starter

2. MotoRAZR2 V8 – The Large flagship

3. MotoROKR U9 – The belated Pebl

4. MotoROKR Z6w – The WiFi that never was

5. MotoZINE ZN5 – The 5MPixl from the past

6. MotoROKR E8 – The radical Omega

7. MotoROKR EM30 – The Local variant.

8. Motorola VA76r – The rugged Monster.

9. MotoAURA – The round Jewel

10. Moto VE66 – The oldest Brother

11. MotoROKR EM35 – The last Slider

Mumbai.. 26th Nov 08..

It’s really sad that I can blog again about another devastating incident in my beloved city of Mumbai.. The last was when the trains were attacked..

While I still want to say what I said last time, I think this track from A.R. Rahman’s from Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, I heard today, sums it up just nicely…

The word “Zikr“,  is supposed to mean the though/rememberance/memory of Allah. But you can think about anything else that incites such devotion/passion/love in you..

Ahl-e-talab aja tum ko bulai ahed Allah
Zikr se budh ke nahin hai amal koiee hai farman-e-rasool Allah
Neejaat milti hai unko yaqeenan karein jo qalb se Zikr Allah
Zikr se sur kat-ta hai Nafs ka beshaq Zikr hai saif-ullah

Zikr aman hai Zikr hai fatah Zikr shifa hai Zikr hai dawa
Zikr is Peace…Zikr is Victory…Zikr is Healing…Zikr is the Medicine

Har gul mein har rooh mein, har shey mein noor-ullah
In every flower… in every soul….in every creation is the Light of Allah
Har dil mein har pal mein reh Zikr-e-illallah
May Allah’s Zikr stay in every single heart and in every single moment

Zikr hai behtar nafrat se; Zikr hai behtar ghaflat se
Zikr is better than hatred…Zikr is better than making mistakes..
Zikr hai behtar hujat se; Zikr hai behtar gheevat se
Zikr is better than arguments…Zikr is better than backstabbing

Google Andriod : Open?? – Part 2

This is a continuation of the Part 1 of discussion on Google Android.

So will we be able see Android on the iPhone, the Nokia N95, or even the Motorola RAZR cellphones? Herein lies the biggest misconception about Open OSs.

Open-source really means that the source code of the OS is available for ALL to be used. So we can read it, port it, re-compile it, program it on some device and do whatever we want with it. But it doesn’t mean we can run it on ANY cellphone. The restriction is not the SW but on the HW. To understand this, we have to look at how Cellphones work.

Cellular networks, on which all cellphones run, require a specific signaling protocol to be used to talk to them (Baseband communications). These protocols include layers of security, error correction, and meta-information to ensure usable communication quality for all. There are also many security mechanisms built into these devices so that users will not be able to spoof as other, or Hijack a signal, or spam the cell tower, etc. And thus, many cellphone OSs (more on this later) till this date have been Closed. That way nobody will be able to “hack” their way into the phone by reading the code and do something nefarious.

With hackers getting better equipped, many cellphone manufacturers started having heavy “chain-of-trust” security mechanism in the cellphone to ensure that nothing else except their own, valid, (and hence not doing anything nefarious) code runs on it. The idea here was to have each component validate and ensure that the next component can be trusted before handing control to it. And this whole chain is “anchored” in some HW, so that every time the cellphone powers on, HW will ensure that the 1st component (say like a BIOS) is valid before start it, and the BIOS will ensure the validity of the OS and so on and so forth. Hence it’s very difficult to run any code on modern day cellphones other than what has been “blessed” by the manufacturer.

Furthermore, these signaling protocols have a strict real-time requirements, and thus need an OS which support Real-Time scheduling to handle this signaling. Linux inherently does not support Real-Time scheduling (There are variants of it which do, like RTLinux, etc) and so it can’t be used to do the Baseband communications. And thus most cellphones will have multiple OSes running together. An Baseband OS (or a Modem) and your usual “SmartPhone OS”. And these two need to talk to each other in order to work and place and receive calls, data, etc. So the “SmartPhone OS” needs to know how to talk to the “Baseband OS”. This is not as easy as it seems, as many times the Baseband OS is propriety and generally Closed to prevent any tampering by the user, especially since many security mechanisms (like Subsidy Lock in the case of the iPhone) are implemented by the Baseband OS.

Hence, there are two problems in getting Android running on any generic phone. 1. Does the HW even allow some other OS image to be programmed and run on the phone? 2. Can Android talk to the Baseband OS and use the phone side of things.

In most phones the HW will only allow the original OS to boot, and no one knows what/how the Baseband OS works and how one can communicate with it. And this is why I feel it will be very difficult to see Android running on other phones, without the HW manufacturer themselves supporting it explicitly.

So is Google Android Open? Surely!! But that doesn’t mean you’ll see it running on an iPhone close to you anytimes soon..

Google Andriod : Open?? – Part 1

This is a two post discussion on the Google’s Android OS.

There has been much furor recently, about Google’s new Embedded Operating System “Android“. The biggest reasons for the attention are the clout of Google as a player in the IT industry, and the fact that the Operating System (OS) is completely Open-sourced. So let’s look at this “Open”ness of Android and a few misinterpretation people have about it.

Google has basically picked up the Linux Kernel, which itself is under the GPL License (Open-source), modified it to work on Embedded systems, and added their framework on top of it.  This frameworks allows users to easily develop application which can run on the cellphone. The idea is once you write an app using this framework, you will be able to run it well on all products which have Android ported to them, a very Java-esque premise. And not surprisingly, most of this functionality is exposed to the developer through “Java”.

Android itself will be release under the Apache License where applicable and under the GPL elsewhere.(Another interesting side note here, is that since the Mobile Edition of the popular Sun Java Virtual Machine, is not completely Open-sourced, Google went ahead and generated their own Virtual Machine and will be Open-sourcing it under the Apache License. You can read more about this here).

So there are two important aspects of Android, which the community at large is excited about. The comprehensive (erm, maybe not so much) and open sourced APIs, or libraries, for the developers to make their applications. And the OS itself which is open. And these two are NOT the same. The benefits arising from these are also NOT the same, and in fact not at all related.

An Open API for App development allows the community to add new functionality to the libraries given by Google. For eg. “Display refresh API takes too long to execute? No worries, we can look at the code, and optimize it and generate a new library which is faster and use that”. More realistically, sometimes it helps to look under the hood into the libraries and API to see exactly what they are doing to be able to use them wisely and properly.

The Open-sourced OS itself is a whole different ball game. OSs, especially Embedded OSs, are generated to run on specific Hardware, a specific platform, for eg. an ARM9 or an PowerPC, or an x86 processor. And a specific operating system image will not run on another platform unless it is compiled for it.  So having an open OS will allow the community to make ports of Android to various platform. We have already seen this with the port of Android to the N810 HW, and cellphones or mobile devices are not the limit. In the latest episode of Tekzilla, Patrick Norton talks about how Android would also be useful in Set-top Boxes, and all other Embedded devices which require user interface.

Also, an Open-sourced OS will allow the community to hack, fix, tune and tweak the OS to make it do whatever they want. Things like enabling new functionality, protocols, supporting new peripherals, or improving the performance for certain types of applications, etc.

So the golden question is, will we be able see Android running on the iPhone, the Nokia N95, or even the Motorola RAZR cellphones? Herein lies the biggest mis-conception about Open OSs.

Check out Part 2 of this article for the rest of the discussion on Google Android and Cellphone OSs.

Hak5 <3 Rev3

So recently my favourite videocast.. well one of my favourites, Hak5 joined the Revision3 network.. WOOT!!

Now they release weekly episodes with more hacking and l33t stuff.. So here’s to the Hak5 guys..

Trust Your Technolust!!..

Indulging the glutton within..

Since Dad is in India, Mom and I decided that it was time to indulge the gluttons in us… So we had..

1. Lebanese Food at El Sheikh on Tuesday

I was inspired by the outing Rinaz et all went to, so we decided to go to El Sheikh.. We just had 3 starters (Hummus, Mossaka’ah, and Falafel) and we were almost full. And they had ran out of Baklava. So we decided to roam around looking for it.. Finally we found some at Alaturka. I had Baklava and mom had mint tea, which she thought was really good.

2. Home-made Pizza on Thursday

Home-made pizza just rocks. Especially when mom and I bake together.. So on Tuesday we decided to have Pizza for dinner..

Vegetable Pizza

Pine-nuts and Olives Pizza

We made a couple with loads of vegetables, and one with just pine-nuts and olives… as I like it.. But I forgot to put parmiggianoon on it.. :( ..

3.  Durians on Friday.

Since it’s Durian season, we decided to eat Durians on Friday. I joined mom after work to eat Durians at at the shops near Aljunied MRT. Now, I am no Durian expert. I don’t understand anything in Durians.. When the guy showed me the split durian to check if it was OK, I just said yes and started gorging it down.. Hahahaha.. Who cares about the subtle differences, they all taste nice.. :)

4. Pasta on Saturday.

So what do you do when you have left over pizza toppings?? Why? Make pasta sauce out them of course!  That’s what we did. Mom made a nice hearty vegetable Pasta sauce on Saturday, while I was roaming around NDP taking photos.. There’s something you can’t beat in a simple tomato-vegetable pasta topped with parmiggiano..

5. Tacos on Sunday.

We found some Taco shells while shopping groceries last week, and we decided to make Tacos for dinner on Sunday. Vegetarian of course.. I made fresh salsa, and mom made beans.. It was kinda burrito+taco+nachos mix thing we had.. Wasn’t anywhere near authentic.. but tasted damn good.. :)

Chip of the old block they say.. I am sure you can guess where my love of cooking and eating different types of food came from..

Ambar..

Ambar pe milte hain qadmon ke nishaan tere hi, har shaam.
Khidki pe likhe kooi, oo uus kii boondon se tera naam.

Na khelo sanam
Tere hi hai hum

Dhadkaniye mere dil ki,
Puche re, tere dil se,
Ki such much kya hai tu duniya me?

Jab aaoge tum tab gaayenge hum
Sargam ye saje, tere sang sang
Is khwaab ko such kar ke hi jaana re

-Raghu Dixit.