Games

• Cube Runner (FREE)
• MotoChaser
• Skyworks Table Tennis
• Labyrinth
• Air Hockey
• Rocket Bird

Utility/Productivity

• 2DO App – For To-Do lists
• Converter+ (FREE)
• Measures Lite (FREE)

Entertainment

• Shazam

Extreme

• JailbreakMe.com – For jailbreaking your iPhone easily. This is amazingly easy!

All of a sudden, a window would popup opening a link to http://www.news-11-today.com with some junk. Now I seriously suspect that this caused installation of this malware. After a little while, a fake warning message appeared, followed by a fake virus scan. And everything after that was an attack. It did not allow me to open any applications that can potentially kill it.

Just Google “AV Security virus” and you can get the exact info. I will just say what worked here.

1. First of all, download the “Malware Bytes Anti-Malware” from http://www.malwarebytes.org/mbam.php (download the free version) from a non-infected computer and copy it to a USB drive.

2. Shutdown the infected computer. Start it, and AS SOON AS windows taskbar appears (don’t wait for the tray icons), right click on it and start Task manager. This way, the malware won’t be able to prevent you from starting Task Manager later. As the startup finishes, see the Applications in the Task Manager and kill the malware app from here.

3. Now insert the USB drive with this Anti-Malware software, install it on the infected machine and run it. Let it scan the whole computer. Most probably, it will clean a few registry entries and an executable in your Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Application Data\[random letters]\[random letters].exe.

You could instead go into Windows safe mode and run this Anti-Malware software from there, instead of having to perform steps in 2. & 3.

The Maven Integration requires that Eclipse be running in a JDK, because a number of Maven core plugins are using jars from the JDK.
Please make sure the -vm option in eclipse.ini is pointing to a JDK and verify that Installed JREs are also using JDK installs.

Now this was a bit surprising because I had chosen a JDK as my default JRE in my Eclipse Preferences. After Googling I found that people talked about editing eclipse.ini and adding -vm option or specifying this option on the Eclipse command line. It still did not work for me.

First let’s see what environment I had. I have a 64-bit Windows 7 laptop. I had installed the 64-bit JDK (installed in C:\Program Files). The latest Eclipse that I had downloaded did not have a 64-bit Windows version.

When I tried using this 64-bit JDK in the -vm command line option (or eclipse.ini),

-vm "C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_17\bin"

it crashed or just defaulted back to the JRE it originally had which was:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre6\bin\client\jvm.dll

So I downloaded and installed a 32-bit JDK. Now my -vm option in Eclipse command line (or in eclipse.ini) was

-vm "C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jdk1.6.0_20\bin"

This fixed it!

Games:
Go to Market and search

• Raging Thunder
• Labyrinth Lite
• Ping Pong Lite

Live Wallpapers:
Just touch on any empty part of the screen and choose to add “Wallpapers”, Select “Live Wallpapers” -

• Water
• Grass

Widgets:
Just touch on any empty part of the screen and choose to add “Widgets”. There are some installed already and some you will have to download.

• Calendar (already there)
• Music (already there)
• News and Weather (already there)
• WxWidget (Weather Channel widget)

Apps:
Go to Market and search

• Google Sky Map
• QueueMan (for Netflix Q management)
• News Apps (NPR, PRI, BBC)
• Weather Channel App

Once you activate your Wii for Netflix from here, you should be in business. The quality looks good. But not having HD could be a problem. Wonder if that would require a hardware change in the Wii console..

My first smartphone was the Palm Treo 650 which I bought in 2005 – only because I had a Palm PDA before that. So I thought it was logical to have both my PDA and phone to be same. But I never took any interest in developing anything for it and I never had a data plan for it. So it was a smartphone that could not act smart

Sometime in 2004, I got a iPod nano as an award for the work I did at my workplace. From that moment on, I got hooked on the iPod. Before that, I did not feel the need to have a MP3 player and after that, I did not understand how one could live without one! So when iPhone was introduced, it made perfect sense to have my favorite MP3 player and phone to be the same. To top that, this one had the most compelling set of features. After enjoying 1G for 2 years, my son decided it was time for me to upgrade to 3GS (!) and while he was playing some game, my 1G iPhone accidentally fell in a tub full of water! Without a thought, I connected it to its charger which shorted its battery and the phone suffered a premature death. By that time, I had already started developing apps for the iPhone and I couldn’t have continued that activity without having an iPhone myself. Thus came 3GS..

I never considered BlackBerry to be a “smartphone”. I know there will be a million people ready to fight with me on that.. but the fact of the matter is, whatever be the capabilities of that phone, the users that use BlackBerry’s are just using it for doing dumb things like checking email or occasional (and poor) web browsing or to listen to music (only because it can, not because it is good at it) or to take a picture (again because it has some camera). That phone has not been put through real torture like the iPhone’s, Palm Pre’s, Symbian phones, Windows mobile phones or the Android phones have been or will be.

I somehow never considered or looked at Windows Mobile phones. They were there but never felt close enough.. that’s pretty much what I can say about them.

When Palm Pre was released with much fanfare and expectations, I looked at their Palm webOS SDK for a brief period of time but didn’t really bother to try it out. And their promise of competition with the iPhone is nowhere to be seen now!

Even when Android came on the market, I noticed it only because of Google. The initial Android phones like HTC Dream or HTC Desire or Motorola Droid did not pose any threat to the mighty iPhone. Apple continued their merry way with their App store and restrictive policies. Come January 2010, Google announced Nexus One from HTC…

Nexus One Arrives!

This was an open phone that sounded promising.. I wanted to get into Android App development. I did not want a new contract with any phone company.. So I got the unlocked N1 that can work with AT&T’s 3G network and asked AT&T to switch my iPhone plan to the normal data plan (same price – $30), switched the Voicemail (Visual to normal) and told them to switch the IMEI to Nexus One.. I was in business in no time.

And the comparison started :

Points in iPhone’s favor:

• iPhone is like the NetBeans IDE whereas Nexus One is the Eclipse (you will understand if are a software developer and you have used these Java IDEs) – so, iPhone feels and works in a very tight, no-nonsense, integrated way, whereas N1 is more open and dynamic.
• iPhone Music Player (iTunes) ROCKS! Nexus One is nowhere close when it comes to music and media playback, organization and user interface is concerned. No Equalizers on Nexus One, the interface sucks!
• N1 has a LED flash for the camera but still somehow iPhone’s pictures look better
• iPhone’s touch screen is more accurate than N1. The buttons at the bottom of the screen on N1 are off by 2mm or so.
• iPhone’s onscreen keyboard is way better than N1. The keys on N1 are too small and error prone.
• iPhone excels in UI overall..
• iPhone Contacts ..see the a-z index cards on the right of your contact list? You can jump to a contact starting with say ‘p’ easily. No such thing in N1.. you just start scrolling and then you will see a tab appear on the right which you can hold and drag to take you to a letter.
• iPhone brought Copy/Paste a bit later but they did a perfect job. N1′s copy/paste is a bit of a disaster.
• iPhone enjoys a great collection of very cool games. N1′s games currently are nowhere near that quality.
• N1 is wild wild west when it comes to Apps, now some might like it. But you always have to be careful before you just download an app, because it might not have been tested well. Now this is a gray area. iPhone did a very good job at perfecting everything for over 85% of users who just want a smart phone that works as promised. The rest <20% who want to hack into it and expect to have all the freedoms are more vocal (and noisy).
• N1′s Browser is a bit slower than iPhone’s
• No Visual Voicemail in N1 like iPhone.
• N1′s headphone/mic SUCKS in a huge way.. Every single N1 is shipped with a headphone/mic that does not work right. http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/android/thread?tid=4fde24402797f306&hl=en . An update to this is, upon calling HTC, the Customer Support immediately sent me a good replacement – no questions asked. So just to go HTC website and call their Customer Service representative.

Points in Nexus One’s favor:

• N1 has a 1GHz processor whereas iPhone is 600MHz
• N1 has a much preferred non-slippery back. iPhone is shiny and all that, but it can slip out of your hands and it then becomes an emotional torture to see the scratches on such a nice device!
• N1′s ability to transfer files (even mp3′s) via USB/Bluetooth is awesome!
• N1′s screen is pretty good (800×480 – much better than iPhone’s 480×320) – but not sure if it is visually so.. the camera pictures look much nicer on iPhone. Also take a look at this comparison (http://www.displaymate.com/Nexus_One_ShootOut.htm)
• N1′s external storage option (MicroSD up to 32GB) is great.. no such option for iPhone
• N1′s battery is removable. Now this may not be much of an advantage for most cases.. but whatever.
• N1 is thinnner and lighter
• N1′s camera is 5MP.
• N1′s Bluetooth stack – very rich.. iPhone? – only Bluetooth headsets!
• N1 has a rich wallpaper / desktop framework. Fancy, animated wallpapers are possible
• N1′s desktop supports shortcuts of ANY kind. Have a contact’s mobile phone number as a shortcut on your desktop or have ALL contact phone numbers as shortcuts for that matter!
• N1′s desktop supports WIDGETs.. So you could have a calendar widget on your home screen to display your day’s appointments or have a news widget to display latest news.. The possibilities are endless.
• N1 has an awesome free Google Navigation App that works like a real GPS with voice and turn by turn directions! That’s a killer.
• N1 allows Apps to run in the background. Yes, very cool.. very much in demand from the iPhone for a long time. They did a little bit but still nowhere close to where N1 is right now.
• N1 has Google Voice! Yeah, the one rejected by Apple/AT&T on iPhone. So when you call, you can either make that call using Google Voice or your carrier.
• N1 has a much faster processor
• N1 has an impressive voice dialing feature THAT ACTUALLY WORKS! iPhone voice dialing is pretty buggy.. and has never worked for me.

Common Ground:

• Both have App stores. Apple has an “App Store” whereas N1 has the “Market”. They probably differ by a factor of 10 at the moment (~170K in iPhone’s App store vs ~17K in Android’s Market) but I am sure the gap is closing. Apple charges $99 for a developer account whereas Google Developer Program is cheap at $25.
• They both don’t support Flash. Although, Android allegedly will support it once the next release of Flash is out. Apple hasn’t said anything to that effect.
• There is a iTunes lookalike for N1 – called “doubleTwist”. It can sync exactly like iTunes and can even import all playlists from iTunes and push them to N1.

Now most of these “advantages” with N1 can easily be embraced by the iPhone if Apple changes its policies and lets users be responsible for their own actions. Nothing groundbreaking here. What Apple did was huge and N1 clearly has BUILT ON TOP OF IT. Whether it is the accelerometer or the swipe to unlock the screen idea or onscreen keyboard or switching to landscape mode when you turn the device or capacitive touch screens.. they broke huge ground when they created the iPhone.

For quite some time, they stood there alone and could dictate their terms.

But now, I think they should pay attention and adapt. Otherwise the competition posed by the first version of N1 itself is formidable and it might be too late as the next releases start shipping.

I really hope Apple gets afraid.. and acts – in the right way!

• DUN/PAN
• Copy/Paste (Satisfied by iPhone 3)
  
• Camera Zoom and Video Recording (Satisfied by iPhone 3G-S)
• Being able to show calendar events on the home screen. I miss this one from my Treo days
• Voice Dialing (Satisfied by iPhone 3G-S)
• Flash
• I want the iPod Settings (for Equalizer etc) in the iPod app!
• I want a bigger bluetooth stack
• …

Now what do I have ?

• DVDs – Videos imported from old VHS cassettes and old VHS-C Camcorder cassettes – Mpeg-2 / AC3 audio (720×480)
• miniDV cassettes (DV format – (720×480)
• Mpeg-1 videos on Digital Camera – Mpeg-1 / MP2 audio (640×480)

What do I want the output format to be? I have chosen mpeg-2 as my universal output format. AVI is out of question (will take too much storage space), mpeg-4 DivX or XviD..? hmm.. not sure, it is more for the web and there is too much compression there.

Anyways, so I looked at the following:

• MPEG_Streamclip : Works if you choose “Convert to MPG with MP2 audio” or “Convert to Headed MPEG” which gets AC3 audio. It is Free!
• SUPER from eRightSoft : Too technical but does its job. And it is Free!
• TMPGEnc XPRESS : Too expensive ($99). Did not try.
• AVS Video Converter : You have to pay $59. I have read mixed reviews
• OJOSoft Total Video Converter : Did the job well. You have to pay $26.99 however. If I feel like buying something, I might go for it.

I vote for MPEG_Streamclip or SUPER obviously because they are Free! Still working on finding the easiest and fastest solution for this.. will keep updating this post I guess.

In the meanwhile, anybody has any other suggestions/comments?

1. You can’t find the video you want quickly
2. You have to buy a new tape when you are out of blank tapes
3. Tapes can get damaged / tangled overtime (has already happened to me and I am using a professional repair shop to get my tapes fixed – Pacific Video Repair)

I was thinking of backing up my camcorder videos to external hard drives. Backup to DVDs is not so attractive – although I have done it before, since, again, finding a video quickly is an issue and DVDs can get damaged too. I have already moved my old VHS-C videos to miniDVs and then to DVDs long time ago.

There is a question about the right format too. If I back them up in an uncompressed format like AVI, I know it will take a huge amount of storage space. Hundreds of Mb’s will just fit a few minutes of video. Also if you have your hard drive in FAT32 format, then you have the 4GB / file limit. Of course, now-a-days it is usually NTFS. But on the other hand, is it wise to use compressed formats such as mpeg2 – DVD / mpeg4 – DivX/XviD etc. ‘coz you will lose some detail there in the compression? How will the resulting video look on a 50+ inch TV? Well, DVDs look good, so it should be okay?

Use Case:

• I have a primary machine running Windows or Mac or whatever
• I have an external 3.5″ or 2.5″ hard drive (~17GB – 20GB) that I pulled out of my old desktop or laptop resp. This is not a flash drive btw, although I have done this kind of setup for the flash drive as well (I will have it on this blog soon)
• I want to use this COMPLETE disk for Linux WITHOUT disturbing my Windows or Mac machine.
• I do not want to install a bootloader on my primary machine, so I am not looking for dual boot. This is a completely separate install on this second hard drive.

Prerequisites:

• Obviously you need a machine that you are going to use with this external drive. (Obviously you need a Processor, Keyboard, Mouse, Display, Network card.. the whole works except the hard disk!
• The BIOS on this machine should support booting from external USB drive.

Get Ready:

• Get rid of all the data on the external hard drive aka transfer it or trash it if you don’t need it. Preferably format it completely (NOT quick format).
• Make sure you run a chkdsk (if you are a windows user) like utility on the disk to make sure it is in good state. This happened to me on one drive and the installation of ext3 partition just stalled everytime.
• Download the Ubuntu ISO from the Ubuntu site and burn it to a CD using your choice of ISO writer software. I think there is a ISO Recorder PowerToy for XP as well.
• Shut down your machine.
• Connect your external hard drive now.
• Make sure you have this CD (called the Live CD) in the CD drive and start your machine.
• BIOS Changes: Be quick and hit F12 or F2 or whatever key it is that allows you to get into the BIOS settings of your machine when it starts. Now make sure you have the following Boot order for these 3 media: CD, USB Drive, Local Hard Disk.

Step-By-Step:

• Thanks to the boot order in the BIOS, your machine should boot from the CD.
• Now select “Install Ubuntu” and proceed till you get to the Partitioner stage.
• Here is where you need to be awake if you want to avoid a huge frustration later on!! I can’t stress it enough. LOOK AT THE SCREEN AND MAKE SURE YOU KNOW WHICH OPTIONS YOU ARE SELECTING. So choose the “Guided install (use entire disk)” option. CHOOSE THE EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE HERE AND NOT YOUR WINDOWS HARD DRIVE PLEASE!!. You can identify the correct drive by looking at the size. It should usually show up as the second drive there anyway. This is why many install instructions, suggest that you disconnect your primary drive before you attempt to install on an external drive. That way you will only see the external drive and won’t get confused. But for laptop users, disconnecting the internal drive may not be so easy and quick. AND YOU DO NOT NEED TO DO THAT IF YOU ARE CAREFUL.
• Go ahead and enter your information on the “Who are you?” screen  and click ‘Advanced’ button on the ‘Ready to install” screen that follows (which shows the information you have selected to get your confirmation). Install GRUB on the appropriate drive (/dev/sdb or whatever it is). (Do not install on (hd0) which is the default option)
• The installation should start now.
• After it is done, you will be prompted to remove the CD and reboot.
• On Rebooting, you should see the GRUB menu. Booting from Linux here most probably won’t work. Here is why – When you installed Ubuntu on this external drive, you booted from CD (so GRUB thinks it is being installed on HD1 (HD0 being the CD) – see our boot order above. Now when you boot from the external drive without the CD, this is HD0 and your Windows is HD1. So GRUB tries to load Linux from the Windows partition – and that fails and gives you error 17.
• To fix this – just type ‘e’ and see that it is (hd1,0). Change this to (hd0, 0) and now Ubuntu should load. But this is only a temporary change.
• So go into Ubuntu and edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst file and change (hd1,0) to (hd0, 0) everywhere in this file and save it and Reboot.

Now everything should be fine!

Enjoy!!