From the monthly archives:

December 2007

Can Microsoft get it right with the next version of Windows Mobile?

by jaganath on December 18, 2007

So much has been talked about Windows Mobile and iPhone these days. Some new statistics show that the iPhone, which was introduced 6 months back by Apple, has overtaken Windows Mobile in sales - a mobile operating system which is available to customers for almost a decade now. (Windows Mobile started its life as the Pocket PC in the late 90s.)

The introduction of Apple iPhone, which can’t even be called as a smart phone, has driven Microsoft to its extreme that they have already started talking about the next 3 releases of Windows Mobile, which seems to be a desperate measure from Microsoft to keep the consumer interest intact. Unfortunately, these releases are almost years away from seeing the light of the day, by which time, the iPhone would have improved vastly, not to mention the upcoming SDK which would spawn a whole lot of new applications for the platform. This will result in a very healthy ecosystem of applications which will only help Apple gain a much bigger market share.

So what is wrong with Windows Mobile? To start with, there is a fundamental difference in the way Windows Mobile approaches the handset user experience when compared to mobile OS X. While the Microsoft approach to Windows Mobile is that of a mini desktop (yep, we even have the start menu there!!), the Apple’s approach is a refreshing change. Apple designed the UI from ground up, which is very well optimized for mobile usage, which gives a very natural user experience. Microsoft, only recently has started realizing that the mobile UI paradigm is totally different from the desktop.

The second most important problem is the poor road map MS had for Windows Mobile. Almost all upgrades to Windows Mobile have been incremental in the past. Since the only worthy competing platform was Blackberry, a sort of complacency set in and MS never really bothered to upgrade some of the applications on the handsets. A good example is the Pocket Internet Explorer, which is almost useless as a mobile web browser. You should’nt be surprised to hear that the core engine for PIE, even on WM6 is based on Internet Explorer 4 !! This browser has not changed in years. While competing platforms like S60 and iPhone have browsers which bring full Internet experience to handset, There are other smaller quirks, which beg to be fixed for several years.

The greatest danger is when Microsoft designs something from scratch. We saw that with Vista, Now that the WM team is talking about building WM8 from scratch, it is going to be yet another hit or miss for Microsoft. If Zune 2 is any indication, we hope that MS gets it right with WM 8 too. Till then, consumers can stick with S60 or the iPhone.

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Building a cheap yet powerful Hackintosh

by jaganath on December 15, 2007

Once upon a time, talking about building a Hackintosh was more or less considered an underground activity. Today, even the most popular mainstream websites and blogs have started publishing articles about building a Hackintosh. There are several reasons why Hackintoshes are becoming popular among the geeks - full control of your hardware configuration at the fraction of the cost of a real Mac, advancements like pc_efi which helps you run OS X with very minimal patching and of course, the satisfaction of building everything from scratch- a stepping stone towards geek nirvana.

My original plan was to buy an iMac in mid-2008. But that shouldn’t stop me from running Leopard till that time. Here is a small run down of how I converted my Media Center PC into a near perfect Macintosh running OS X 10.5.1. Note that you can select the same parts that I have mentioned here and end up building a Hackintosh that is as fast as the current line of iMac.

The Media Center PC that I had was an AMD machine built around a cheap ASUS M2N-MX motherboard. This time around, I wanted to build a Intel based machine as the Hackintosh support for AMD processors are a little on the weaker side. I sold the AMD processor and motherboard to a friend who happily upgraded his ailing 4 year old PC with those components.

For the motherboard, I chose an ASUS P5GC-MX, which is one of the cheapest mobo that can run Core 2 Duo processors at 1333 Mhz FSB. It is also almost 99 % compatible with Leopard. The only quirk is that the onboard LAN does not work, so I added a D-LINK DFE 530TX+ LAN card, which works like a charm. There are expensive choices like Intel Bad Axe 2 etc., but the P5GC-MX is a no non-sense dirt cheap mobo. You can’t beat its price. For the processor, I picked up a C2D E6500, which runs at 2.33 GHz. I added a 320 GB IDE hard drive to the 250 GB SATA that I already had, thus boosting the hard drive capacity to 570 GB total. For the RAM, I reused the transcend 2 x 1 GB 533 MHz memory modules. For the graphics card, I used an NVIDIA 5200 with 128 MB RAM. Though this is a pretty low end card by today’s standards, it is more than enough for all the Coverflow magic in Leopard.

The other parts are standard fare: A Sony DW-G120A DVD RAM drive, a Samsung 940BW widescreen monitor at 1440×900 resolution and a creative 4.1 speaker set.

How I installed the software
This is the tricky part, but it is pretty simple if you know what you are doing. There are patched Leopard DVDs available, which is probably the easiest way to install. But I chose the ‘flat image’ method because the flat image is only about 2.5 GB - which makes it pretty easy to download - considering the kind of broadband access we have in this part of the world. I already had the Tiger 10.4.8 JaS DVD, which made things a little easier. On my 320 GB IDE drive (which is set as the bootable hard drive in the BIOS), I made 3 partitions: A 30 GB partition for Tiger, a 120 GB partition for Leopard and the rest for storing movies, music, photos etc.,

Tiger installed without any problems. Once I booted into Tiger, I extracted the flat image and used the excellent Carbon Copy Cloner tool to expand the Leopard image into the 120GB partition. This is an important step because using the dd method, you will end up with a 16 GB partition. You can probably use the restore image tab from the Disk Utility to do the same, but I didn’t try that. Afterwards, I made the second partition as bootable and rebooted the PC. Leopard booted for the first time without any problems. Next comes the important step: installing pc_efi. I made a backup of the kernel in Leopard in a different name under the root folder and applied the 10.5.1 update. This update overwrites the patched kernel that comes with the flat image - that is why I took the backup earlier.

I rebooted into Tiger and installed pc_efi onto the Leopard partition using the instructions provided with the pc_efi bundle version 8. Once this is done, I rebooted again and had Leopard running - this time with the Vanilla kernel, which makes it possible to pull in all sorts of updates that come from Apple in the future! Voila, I have a perfect custom built Mac Pro running!! I am planning to use this PC till I save enough money to buy the iMac when it is refreshed with the Penryn processors from Intel. Here is a photo of my rig running Leopard. Click to enlarge.

Update- 21 Feb 2008: The 10.5.2 install, even with the Netkas method disabled my PS2 keyboard. The workaround? Make sure that you backup the ACPIPlatform.kext file before you start the update and then restore it. Warning: Do not install the update from the Software Updater, but through the offline updater available from the Apple site.

Update: The 10.5.3 combo update from Apple hosed my install again. But thankfully I have started using Time machine and could do a successful recovery. Needed to use the Netkas method again.

Update- 1 July 2008: 10.5.4 update worked like a charm. Just updated it from Software Updates like a real mac.

I strongly advice you to use time machine as this could be your savior in case any update results in a borked system.

Please feel free to post any questions regarding this configuration and I will be glad to help. But please note: You are doing everything at your own risk and I am in no way responsible for any kind of outcomes, good or bad.

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Coping with information overload

by jaganath on December 13, 2007

RSS, while a great way to pull content from several places to one single application, off late is becoming a burden for most people. RSS, kind of becomes a habit and one keeps adding plenty of feeds to the already overflowing reader. For example, it almost takes one full day to finish all the news that are consolidated by my feed reader. Many people take pride in saying that they have 400+ feeds subscribed in their favorite reader application! 

Here are some of the ways to optimize your time spent on your RSS reader.

  • Unless you are a journalist or a professional blogger, you don't really need to keep your RSS window open all the time. Fix a predetermined time when you browse all your news. Make it a habit like newspaper reading - You spend some time in the morning and then forget about the paper for the rest of the day.
  • Use Trends. If you are using Google Reader, there is a very useful feature called trends. This shows the reading habits of you. Make the top 40 list and seriously consider removing the feeds which you have not read in the last one month.
  • Subscribe to highlights rather than full feeds. Many websites offer highlight feeds, rather than full feeds. Highlight feeds are usually sent only once per day and is a selection of best stories of the day. Great way to reduce lot of unwanted content.
  • Categorize your feeds into daily, weekly and monthly. Instead of categorizing feeds as sports, technology, gadgets etc., I classify them as daily, weekly and monthly based on how often the authors update and how important a feed is. You then access the feeds under those folders only once in a day, week or month. I did this change recently and is working out very well for me.

If you have any other suggestions, you can leave them in comments below.

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Staying with GTD

by jaganath on December 6, 2007

I have been on and off in using GTD for almost 2 years now. For some reason, I have never been able to come up with a GTD adaptation that I can stick to and follow for a long time. For a while, I used MS Outlook with various Pocket PC PIM replacements like Agenda Fusion and Pocket Informant. Most time was spent on perfecting the system rather than following it. This is one of the dangers of the GTD system.

Being off the system for a while, my "stuff" is all spread out now. In order to collect them and get things done, I thought I would rather use a software or application that is already customized for GTD so that I don't waste my time in coming up with my own "system". As I have migrated to S60 OS (Used in my Nokia N95) from Windows Mobile, there is a new problem because the PIM capabilities of S60 platform leave a lot to be desired. Unfortunately, the categories from Outlook do not sync with S60, so the Outlook method is highly ineffective. I started looking out for a web based solution, which should also have a PDA friendly web page. I came across iCommit, which is a decent enough application, but seems to be ridden with bugs. The summary view did not show the entries that I created. There were several other solutions, but none of them could properly work on PDAs.

I found a commercial solution called Nozbe, which seems to fit the bill. It has a simple yet powerful adaptation of the GTD system. You can create Contexts, Projects, Next actions, lists etc., and hook them all together. They also have an iPhone and PDA friendly webpages, which look very useful. The only annoyance with this site is that it has some big nag screens and affiliate promotion links strewn all over. The free access is very limited in that you can only create 5 projects and only one additional context apart from 10 other predefined ones. But still I am planning to continue using this for a couple of more days to see how effective it is for me.

Do any of you know of any free solutions that have a nice interface for desktop and the PDA phone? I am ok with hosting the web app on my own server too. Please let me know in the comments.

 

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