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I’ve been tinkering around with Python on the N900 and this one one phone hackers will love. You can make the phone do almost anything you want if you know a little bit of scripting. I picked up a bit of python to try making a call blocker which was missing for the N900, and this is what I came up with. You can read how to do that with Python in the article I wrote on MyNokiaWorld – Block Unwanted calls on your N900. You can even configure the Notification lights on the Phone by editing a configuration file.

Now how about a script which detects if the phone is in your pocket and automatically turn on the vibrate mode? I found someone who wrote up a Python script which does this for the N900 here – http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=44484

I’ve just begun exploring this phone in my free time, but it’s a great phone if you’re looking for a customizable phone and you do know Python or some Linux programming.

I’ve always wanted to know how the various opensource search engines performed when running head to head with each other. I’ve personally not had the time nor patience to setup such a benchmark. Luckily Vik Singh has done just that and blogged the results of the benchmark.

He’s benchmarked the latest versions of Lucene, sqlite, Xapian, zettair and sphinx while indexing twitter messages (968,937 tweets to be exact) and Medical data sets. I was not too surprised when Lucene came up as a winner from these benchmarks

Read the Blog post by Vik to get the details of the benchmarks.

Yesterday Nokia India had arranged for a blogger’s meet in Bangalore to familizarize us with the upcoming N97 mobile phone. The meet featured Axel Meyer, Nokia’s Global Design Head for Nokia Nseries, who took us through a presentation which showed what the Design team took into account while designing this phone.

What I liked about the design was the 30 degree tilt of the screen when the QWERTY keypad slides open. This allows the user to interact with the keyboard and the touch-screen at the same time. The tilt also allows the user to hold the phone with just the index finger – pretty comfortable – unlike the slide out of the E75.

One snippet which kind of surprised me in the presentation is that Axel mentioned that there  more than 1 billion users of Nokia phones. This particular model is targeted to users who are looking at having a personal experience with their mobiles – targeted towards people who share photos, videos, microblog, are active on social network and need a phone which doubles up as a personal computer on the go. During the Q&A session, one of the bloggers did ask about the high price of this model (expected to be around Rs. 35,000 during the launch). Axel answered that this mobile is meant for people who are looking a niche phone which provides the full online and social experience  the N97 provides.

After the presentations, I got to play around with the N97 for sometime – pics of the phone are at the end of this post.

Some of the points which caught my attention about the N97 are:

• A whopping 32GB of internal memory – which can be expanded to a maximum of 48GB. This is great for carrying around your media and there’s no need of another media player
• 16:9 screen ratio – perfect for viewing widescreen movies on the go – this unit’s got a TV out so you can project the movies on your phone on the big screen.
• A FM transmitter – to listen to your music on the car radio without the need of extra cables to hook it on.
• Home Screen Widgets – this allows you to have a pieces of the Internet on your home screen.
• The QWERTY keyboard had a good feel to it. Even though the keys on the N97 are smaller than the E75’s, they layout seems to just feel better laid out on the N97.
• The touchscreen also seems to perform better than the 5800’s.
• The phone comes bundled with the Facebook application, apart from other Social Media application like Hi5 and Qik. So you don’t have to hunt for these apps once you get your phone.
• The tilt of the screen when the keypad is open is a very useful feature allowing the user to place the phone on a table while typing out messages and emails, taking calls or surfing the web.

Thanks to Nokia India and Songita B. Verma & team for getting this event organized! It was great having to hear direct from the Design Team on the rationale behind the various features which are packed in the N-Series phones.

Learn more about the Nokia N97:
The Nokia N97 Datasheet
Nokia NSeries Background
Nokia N97’s product page

Some of the Pictures from the Event:

The N97 Presentation

Home Screen Widgets

Axel Meyer during his presentation

Q&A Session

First look at the N97

Trying out the Handwriting Recognition

30 Degrees Tilt of the Screen when the keypad's open

More pictures from the event are available on Flickr.

Here’s a real interesting article on how Facebook’s handling their photo storage system by creating their own storage system called HayStack.

This week Facebook will complete its roll-out of a new photo storage system designed to reduce the social network’s reliance on expensive proprietary solutions from NetApp and Akamai. The new large blob storage system, named Haystack, is a custom-built file system solution for the over 850 million photos uploaded to the site each month. Jason Sobel, a former NetApp engineer, led Facebook’s effort to design a more cost-effective and high-performance storage system for their unique needs.

Read the article at:  Facebook’s photo storage rewrite.

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Been busy in my spare time for the past few weeks playing on N-Gage. One game I got a hold of is One. The first thing which amazed me was the graphics this game was belting out on a N81 – some of the best graphics I’ve seen on a mobile game!

There are various gameplay options for One – you can play out the story mode, Versus, Survival and Multiplayer.There’s also a training mode which takes you through the various moves in the game. I would advise you to go though the training mode first, there are quite a few moves you’ll miss out on if you don’t. The keys combination are pretty easy to remember – but in the heat of a combat, you’re sure to fumble on which moves to use !

You can customize your player with various hairstyles, gear and fighting styles. You keep unlocking new gear to wear as you keep progressing in the story mode.

The story mode allows you play out the story of the One. In this mode you have to keep fighting opponents to progress in the game – each level has it’s Boss whom you’ll have to defeat to move on to the next level. While you progress through the game, it gets auto-saved only after a few fights- this behavior can be a pain at times. I would have been better if it auto-saved after every fight. Also keep an eye on your rank – every win increases your ranking – beware that ever loss also brings it down!

You can practise your skills in the Versus and Survival mode where you can choose the scenery and the computer player you would like to play against. Practise makes perfect, so hone in your skills in these modes if you find that you’re loosing too much in the story mode. Remember to set the “Ranked” option to “No” in these modes if you don’t want your Ranking to dip while practising your moves.

One piece of advice while playing this game is to keep mixing your moves – if you play the same moves, the computer player usually ends up blocking or countering you. So practice all your different moves and unleash hell for your opponents.

The multiplayer mode works with bluetooth. I couldn’t get anyone else who had One in the same room to go head to head. It would have been better if this was an internet multi-player option instead of just bluetooth.

This game is overall a good buy and will keep you occupied for quite some time if you are into martial art games. Take a break while gaming – I’ve had a bad case of cramps on my fingers after an hour or so of intense gaming.

More about One at the N-Gage Site

Cloud Computing
Image via Wikipedia

Here’s an interesting Article I came across today which goes through the basics of setting up Scalr.  Scalr is  is an open source, fully redundant, self-curing, and self-scaling hosting environment that uses Amazon EC2

This article discusses the implementation of Scalr. Scalr allows network administrators to create virtual server farms, using prebuilt components. Scalr uses four Amazon Machine Instances (AMIs) for load balancing, databases, application server, and a generic base image. Administrators can preconfigure one machine and, when the load warrants, bring online additional machines with the same image, to handle the increased requests.

By using Scalr, you can create a server farm that uses prebuilt AMIs for load balancing, web servers, and databases. You also can customize a generic AMI, which you can use to host your actual application.

Scalr monitors the health of the entire server farm, ensuring that instances stay running and that load averages stay below a configurable threshold. If an instance crashes, another one of the proper type will be launched and added to the load balancer.

Link to Article: Auto-Scaling Web Sites Using Amazon EC2 and Scalr

Here’s some good news for Amazon’s EC2 users:EC2 now supports Static IP addresses using Amazon’s Elastic IP Addresses feature. Each account can allocate up to 5 Elastic IP addresses to be used (you can contact Amazon to get more). These IP’s can be allocated to one instance which will replace the dynamic IP for that instance – you can move the IP to a new instance at any time.

Beware that an unused IP address costs $0.01 per hour of non-use, which means that while the IP address is assigned to a running instance, you don’t have to pay the charge, but if you shutdown the instance which the IP is assigned to, and don’t immediately assign it to another instance, you’ll end up paying for this charge.

The Elastic IP Addresses feature gives you more control of the IP addresses associated with your EC2 instances. Using this new feature, you use the AllocateAddress function to associate an IP address with your AWS account. Once allocated, the address remains attached to your account until released via the ReleaseAddress function.Separately, you can then point the address at any of your running EC2 instances using the AssociateAddress function.The association remains in place as long as the instance is running, or until you remove it with the DisassociateAddress function.Finally, the DescribeAddresses function will provide you with information about the IP addresses attached to your account and how they are mapped to your instances. Accounts can allocate up to 5 IP addresses top start; you can ask for more if you really need them.

Read about Elastic IP Addresses and other new features over at : http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/03/new-ec2-feature.html

Here’s something which caught my attention – Microsoft actually trying to make it’s bloatware product Windows leaner !

October 13th, Microsoft distinguished engineer Eric Traut went into details on the project, known internally at Microsoft as MinWin.

In his demo, Traut loaded MinWin into a virtual machine with only 40MB of RAM allocated to it. The machine booted with 7MB of RAM left.

Link: Tech-Ex: Microsoft Shows Off Leaner “MinWin” Kernel for Next-Gen Windows

It was interesting to follow the battle between ODF and OOXML at the ISO standards voting commitee.

According to NY Times:

Of the 87 countries that participated, 26 percent opposed Microsoft’s bid. Under the rules for approval, no more than 25 percent of the countries could oppose the bid. Microsoft also failed to win the vote of 66 percent of 41 countries on another panel of I.S.O. and I.E.C. members.

Countries opposing Microsoft’s OOXML format included India Good to see India’s getting it head straight by not aligning itself with the $$$.

Here’s a new service from BritePic which allows you to add interactivity to the images on your site, and at the same time make some $$. BritePic allows you to place advertisements in your images, and allow users to zoom, email, create links to your images.

Here’s a sample image served by BritePic:

So instead of using the plain ol’ img tag to place your images in the page, use the BritePic way, good for you and your visitors

The BritePic code allows you to control the image size, image caption, keywords and the link to send the visitors to when they click on the image. You can choose whether you want ads displayed in the images. The ads appear in the image if AdBite has ads based on the keywords you supply for the image.

BritePic is a part of the Adbrite advertisement network.

Link: BritePic