When I bought my Palm Treo 650 about a year and a half ago, I was sooo glad that I bought it for a really cheap price. It was my first international trip. I was in our Silicon Valley office for the new-joinee training. I don't know if I learned enough stuff during the trip; but I definitely bought quite a lot of stuff. In addition to buying electronics for me, I also bought plenty of shirts, a lot of stuff from Google Store for me, my friends, Pascal, etc. Only when I had to pack all the stuff I realized how much stuff I had bought. After starting to use the Treo, I started liking it more and more. It's no-nonsense UI, ease of use, build quality, battery life, quality of the touchscreen, integration with my beloved Linux computer made me happy. Those who believe "reality is far from ideal" are correct. The phone has its own glitches. But you know, it was far better than the Nokia 7710 I was using. A few months back I got tired of big phones. Wanted to get a phone which I can use to make calls, with no fancy features. I settled for a Nokia 5200, which is a pretty low-end phone with Bluetooth support. I could not use it for more than a month. Nokia's UI made me grumpy. Even when I fondly used my Nokia 3120 and had great love for Nokia phones, I hated their UI. (quick question: what is the average number of keypresses you need, to do anything on a Nokia phone?) And a few other minor usability issues. So I switched back to my Treo. Last week I was bitten seriously by Treo's infamous "ghost jack" problem. I decided to change my phone and started looking for a good phone. I didn't want to buy some really good phones for personal reasons, including iPhone (no thrid-party apps), HTC Touch or S710 (yucky Windoze mobile OS). And I already have an aversion towards Motorola's and Nokia's. Syncing with a Linux computer is something that is not support by almost all the phones. So decision made: be happy with the Treo until some superstar company releases an Android phone.

MSify

<shameless plug> After living on my laptop for about a year, my Sify Broadband client has found a new home in Google Code. For the lack of a better name, I am just calling it MSify, and it's available at http://code.google.com/p/msify. If you use Sify Broadband on a Linux computer, try it out. Feedback, bug reports, feature requests are always welcome. </shameless plug>

Suddenly I have a question. About me. Am I a hypocrite? May be. Or may be not. I brag all the time that I respect others. Well, until now I believed that I had respect for others. Now, I am not very sure if I can still say the same thing about me. I use all kind of swear words. Most of the times I don't mean those words when I use them. But, I really do get pissed off when I see some incompetently developed software (which I have to use for some reason). In several posts of this blog, I have complained that some random software developer did something stupid to make me unhappy. One of my colleagues asked me a few days back: "Is there any software that you really like?" when I was cursing Adobe Reader for it's stupid behaviour on the print dialogue. I hate Hyderabad mainly because all the time I have something to complain about the people of Hyderabad. What do this all mean? Do I have no respect for people whom I don't see face-to-face? Am I a hypocrite when I say "I have respect for other people"? Possibly. If you have spent some time with me and you think you have something to say about me/this post, please write back. Oh yes, I encourage you to be brutally honest.

KTorrent Troubleshooting

Some torrent files may confuse KTorrent and it may go into an infinite loop consuming all CPU cycles but essentially doing nothing. I had a similar experience just a few hours ago. How did I solve it? I used the command ktorrent --debug to see what it does. Reading the debug output helped me find the directory* where KTorrent stores the current torrent files' information. I just removed the directory of the torrent that was causing trouble. Voila, KTorrent is back again to normal! [*] $HOME/.kde/share/apps/ktorrent/tor*

Have I become allergic to governments?

Crap! What are these people doing? A few months ago I had to pay 1000 rupees for all my flight tickets in the name of tax. Air Deccan sold tickets for 150 rupees onwards and the government took a whopping 1000 rupees. Now the tax is increased to 1500 rupees. I come in the "rich people" category of the Indian government and I don't have any of that "IT-exemptible savings" so I end up paying 30% of my salary in the name of Income Tax. Whatever I spend the remaining 70% for, I have to pay taxes (again). For petrol I buy, more than 70% of the price is nothing but tax. Wherever I go I pay 12.5% VAT. All this for what? For these idiots to stop me on the road and make me bribe them for not wearing a helmet. And, these laws are for the benefit of me (i.e. the people). I don't understand one thing -- who are they to decide what's good for me and what's not?