Women more respected in Pakistan & Bangladesh than in India

I’ve been pretty involved in health information and monitoring the state of affairs in that domain, but this is something I believe is as critical for humanness. The UNDP just came out with their Human Development Report (HDR) and celebrating its 20th Anniversary… I would like to congratulate guys at UNDP for the great work with this report and its indeed an excellent piece of work that has been going on for the last 2 decades. Also who better than Amartya Sen introducing us to the report.

The report is one of the most complete ways to give the overall picture to development. There are obviously critiques to how development is measured and qualitative analysis is sometimes required to study the cases. Nevertheless, it is indeed rich in data for looking at how development is measured. The report covers Health (… and life expectancy), Knowledge/Education, Standards of living, Innovation, Economic growth, Empowerment, Gender, Income inequalities, Security… and creates an index comparing these at a benchmark number of 10.

India ranks 119 on the Human Development Index and highlights somewhat of a sad story, when we are so happy celebrating our growth rates and world reputation success, a lot many things are lacking. May be even aggravating - in this view of achieving only economic growth and race for money and world power! Sure, we are doing great in democracy and political freedoms, but what about the many unfreedoms of gender and income inequalities. I would say it’s a shame that women feel more respected in Pakistan than in India, although we are the world’s largest democracy in the world. More and more as you read the whole report…

Sitting in Norway and reading the HDR feels like we are miles away in India…, but even in closer geographies (e.g. SriLanka), I feel we are very far off from our potential as a society!!

Installing Windows 7 from USB

I wouldn’t believe it is so simple… Just download the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool from Microsoft. Have the Windows 7 ISO file on your computer and a USB Pen drive with more than 3.5GB.

The tool will format the USB stick and then just cope over all the required files from the iso. Then you insert the USB stick, boot from it and go through the installation screens… Installs in 30min and you are done!! Didn’t expect it to be this smooth…

Google TV has Android running on Intel x86

While we have seen till now most Android products running on ARM, including the $35 tablet and other tablets, Google TV is a product that will be running Android on an Intel Atom processor and that makes me super excited!! Google TV is Google’s bid to get into the TV market, but installing its Android OS on set-top boxes and then also doing deals with broadcasters. Think of Apple TV, but on an open-platform

You can check out Google TV blogpost here. Google TV is good and there are already many such devices, but what is more exciting to see that Android has been ported to x86. Google TV is supposed to run apps, search media as well as play many types of media. Thus, this means that the whole suite of stuff is running on x86 processors.

It begins with the Logitech Revue, which is insanely price at $299 compared to Apple TV, which is priced at $99. But again, something which is niche product at the beginning of its lifetime is a high-margin product. The thing runs on Intel's CE4100, an Atom-based system-on-a-chip (SoC) and is supposed to become very popular chip for a lot of consumer electronics products. The SoC’s core will run the operating system and the applications, while the other media stuff will run on a different chip.

Prefox: Firefox for the Palm WebOS

One mobile operating system that has not got enough consumer appreciation, but has got critical reviews is WebOS. I’ve played with WebOS in the Palm Pixi and it is indeed the most intuitive mobile platform, in my opinion beating iPhone OS, Android, Windows Mobile and Blackberry OS in terms of pure usability. HP also realized this and bought Palm (and all its assets) earlier this year. What the WebOS lacks, is the rich set of applications that other platforms have and love from the application developers.

To fill an important gap in WebOS, Firefox is in the works to be ported to WebOS platform. The product is under development and is called PreFox. It is based on the source-code of the Mozilla Firefox for Mobile. As developer Dave Townsend states “PreFox requires webOS 1.4.5 and so far has only been tested on a Sprint Palm Pre. It probably works a little better on a Palm Pre Plus but I have no idea whether it would even start on a Palm Pixi.”

Bulk SMS Ban for Ayodhya Case

In another weird act by the Indian government (after recent attempts to get ransom from Blackberry), there has been a ban on bulk SMS for a total of 72 hours. The ban has been imposed through a directive to all the mobile operators that all corporate SMS messaging service need to be blocked. The explanation to this directive is a precautionary measure to prevent SMS as a medium of communication to spread communal disharmony following the Ayodhya Case hearing on Friday.

The Ayodhya-Babri Masjid demolition case has been on for the last 17 years and people have fears that whatever the verdict, since one of the religious groups will be at loss in their agenda, there is expected communal disharmony. I personally do not believe that religious sentiments are strong enough after so many years and politics has gone beyond religious/caste topics to more development-oriented topics these days… But you never know what these politicians pay for

Is SMS the only way to mass spread messages?? If the Indian government believes that SMS is the only way to spread mass messages, then they have probably not understood modern day technology. With internet and messengers, there are lot more ways to fast communication. Such directives only cause headache to people… like banking website that rely on SMS for transactions or SMS voting systems have failed to work in the last couple of days

Android Logo Inspired from Atari

Engadget put up an interesting story today, where it shows the Android logo seems to be inspired from a not-so-popular game on Atari, called the Gauntlet: The Third Encounter. Looks to me quite similar and definitely an inspiration when someone was thinking of an Android image. Nevertheless, I do not believe the suing game will start based on the logo alone...

This also reminds me of many other similar inspired logos from popular brands, which once came by email:

 

 

 

Age of Empires Online: Signup for the Beta

How many years have I waited for this?? More than a decade of playing my favorite Real-Time Strategy game, the Age of Empires is finally coming online… and I am super excited. The thing is currently under beta and if you are lucky enough, you might well be one of the first people to play the game online with the world of friends, share kingdoms and be friends/enemy with players all over the globe.

Although Ensemble Studios was closed down, a few developers from the original game creation team moved to Robot Entertainment. These guys at Robot Entertainment have taken AoE online.

Together with the Games for Windows – LIVE service, "Age of Empires Online" delivers a rich, social experience that lets you play however you want - anywhere, anytime.
Marrying fresh features with iconic gameplay, "Age of Empires Online" offers something for long-time fans, newcomers and everyone in between. "Age of Empires Online" will feature:
* A persistent online capital city that lives and grows even when you're offline
* Cooperative multiplayer quests, trading and a level-based system that lets you progress at your own pace
* Fun, approachable style and storylines
* Free-to-play experiences via Games for Windows – LIVE

More information, news and chances to join the beta program are available at http://www.ageofempiresonline.com.

Netbeans UML Moves to Community

Today after the hand over conference call, we are proud to be the first set of community developers (The Since 2010 developers) of the Netbeans UML plugin. I’ve been a fan of the Netbeans UML plugin, as it was simple and helped produce neat looking UML diagrams, without a lot of fuss. When the Netbeans developers from Sun decided to abandon the UML plugin, I was pretty disappointed. Nevetheless, a few weeks earlier, some members of the Netbeans community were contacted to get involved in reviving the module and I was among the interested developers.

The primary goal of the community developers will be to create a stable release that can be put back on the Plugin Center. This means eliminating the P1 bugs and then P2 bugs which are listed on the dashboard against UML. I hope we can do this before the next release of Netbeans, which is Netbeans 6.10. There are about 3 P1 bugs and 19 P2 bugs today and I’m sure there are more coming on the way as we move to committing fixes and reaching code that works with Netbeans 6.9… It is indeed a milestone that UML has been handed over to the community. Next is the tough part of make it available to the users, so that they can then start filing more bugs and enhancement request and make our contributions more interesting. The developer wiki pages will be updated soon as we start committing code.

NetBeans IDE UML Features is listed under Netbeans 6.9 Features

I guess we aren’t yet here, but we wanna be there soon…

$35 Indian Tablet Vs Dell Streak

Sagar, a friend of mine has been pushing me news about the new $35 laptop from the Indian HRD Ministry… And I’ve been saying it’s one of the false promises that politicians are known to make. Nothing good comes out of these news flashes. On the other hand, we also have another device that Dell is preparing to launch known as Dell Streak. These two devices have a lot in common, but are also quite different in the markets they are targeted for and obviously the price.

Now the Indian $35 Laptop:

Processor / Chipset still unknown 7-inch resistive touch screen display Capable of browsing the web 2GB of RAM Wi-Fi connectivity USB port VGA camera on the back

Interestingly the software or the operating systems seem to be different in different demos. Some recent demos are showing an Android operating system, while the initial demos of the device seemed to have Meego installed on it. The device is still a year away from availability, but having seen it run and that too pretty smoothly for such a cheap device on Android, I am very pleasantly surprised. No technology in recent years has blown my imagination like this one… and if it can be mass produced with excellent software, this is the tablet that the world’s poor children were waiting. Understanding some of the challenges of such devices, I do not believe the tablet is still there. But it is definitely a leap forward…

Dell Streak:

The Dell Streak is another tablet device running the Android operating system. The Dell Streak is costing $550 and is available with a contract from AT&T at $300.

1Ghz Snapdragon ARM processor from Qualcomm 5-inch capacitive multi-touch WVGA 5 MP autofocus camera on back VGA camera on the front 512MB RAM 3G + Wi-Fi support GPS Accelerometer

Streak is pretty expensive when you compare it feature-wise to the Indian tablet. Obviously the market and the margins are different, but just goes to show the line between phones and tablets is blurring. As Android becomes more prevalent in the market, the line becomes more blurred. As realized in Meego, the combination of Maemo (Nokia) and Moblin (Intel-Linux) turns out to be very powerful smartphone OS. Although these devices are great, it is the applications that make the user-experience special and make these useful.

As the Indian tablet progresses forward, the acceptance of the device are going to be determined by the applications that run on the device. If they are targeted towards children between the ages (6-12), it is going to be very interesting to build applications for them. Where education and knowledge can be taken to new limits, the true potential of such devices also depend on how they are delivered.

Tabbed Interface to OpenMRS Global Properties

I’ve always hated to scroll through long lists when trying to find the thing I’m looking for. Computer interfaces which are designed as long list and give you a hard time to look through all of the things without a filter is definitely bad design. But even with a text field filter, long lists take a lot of time to load... The two applications that I’m working with these days, OpenMRS and DHIS2, both have these long lists that in my opinion are a pain to use.

The DHIS2 uses lists for data elements, indicators, users and these are not divided into pages. There is a text filter, but the time it takes to load the page when the list is long is excruciating. One of the recent examples, where we had over 5000 users in DHIS2 Punjab mobile application, it was excruciatingly slow to load that list of users. And then finding through that list to change anything is also quite slow and painful.

Similarly in OpenMRS, one of the things I often use for our modules is the global properties. Modules can use the global properties infrastructure to store options and it is a quick solution when you want to store some settings that can be configured by the user for your module. But as the number of modules or the number of options in a module increases, it becomes a pain to search the exact option from that long list of options. It also does not have a text filter, but you can always use the browser search to reach what you are looking for and text filters, don’t really solve much. Infact, may be the text filter in your application does not have a shortcut, while Ctrl+F would quickly give you a browser search text field.

Nevertheless, a quick hack by our developer Viet Nguyen (the JavaScript Ninja), was an OpenMRS module called moduleoptions. This is his first module, just to understand the OpenMRS framework and to me is quite a useful thing. It divides the global properties in tabs and makes the properties more manageable in my opinion. It provides better management to the long list of global properties and looks more convenient to use. It was developed in a few hours time and is definitely something that I would want to see as default when managing global properties. Below is a screenshot of how the global properties looks now: