Apple Vs Android has become more like Linux vs Windows of old days where half of the people bash the other product just for the heck of it.

I have been watching this Apple vs Android arguments since quite sometime.. and today was the day when I actually got pissed off and decided to note down few things.. I am really not sure what runs into the mind of Apple or Android Fanboys but let me tell you what runs in my mind and this might openup the minds of many fanboys or Apple haters with half knowledge about the product.

Apple vs Android – Sales: Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android are just operating systems. Apple’s iOS is a closed system which caters just to Apple owned devices. And Android is an open OS which can be ported into any device by the manufacturers. So, logically, sales of Android devices are always going to be higher than Apple ones. So there is no point in comparison here.

Now, if you ask why Apple does not allow to port iOS to other devices then the simple answer will be, it’s their choice afterall, it’s their own OS, they have every right to decide what they want to do with it. Google decided to keep Android open and it was their choice, that’s about it.

I have xx feature and you don’t have it: This started with Copy / Paste. All windows fanboys started saying, Apple did not have basic Copy / Paste options and what not but even first version of Windows Phone 7 did not have it. Android had it but there is no point in discussing this. Yeah, Apple did not have it. It was pretty basic thing but there has to be some reason behind it. (I am not the right person to answer)

One more funny thing is, whenever Apple announces some new features.. all Anti-Apple guys add the tag of “Innovation” and bash Apple about it. This happened with FaceTime to start off with. People laughed over it saying, we already had video chat in our old smart phones so what’s so new in it? The point is here is not about new, the point is about how to make people use that feature and how easy it is to use.

Even my old Sony Ericsson phone has video chat but it’s pathetic. It’s a hidden feature. There is Skype for desktop and phones but frankly speaking having a native video calling app integrated with the phone book is damn simple and anyone can use it. So the key here is, ease of use not the innovation.

The recent example in this is, Siri. People started assuming lot of things and started cooking up funny stories. I was going through some tweets. One guy was even arguing on baseless stuff like “If Apple bought Siri then why it killed it from the App Store” haha this was really funny to ask. If Apple bought it then don’t you think it’s their right to do whatever they want with the Application? Do you see Tweetie anymore after Twitter bought it? haha

Siri is innovation. Yes it is but not by Apple but by the guys who built it. The role of Apple comes in terms of making the application much better than earlier and integrating with the core of the system.

Now, why Apple does not allow in iPhone 4 or older version is their business decision and it does not make any sense to argue about it at all.

Patent wars: Apple sued Samsung for using their patented stuff without  taking permission from Apple. And many Samsung fanboys started bashing Apple. (Without even knowing what were the reasons for Apple suing Samsung) From what I understand, the patent wars are mostly (obviously not all) related to the business than the technology. It’s an open fact that Samsung openly copied many things from Apple. Their app screen looked exactly like iPhone’s, the icons, the box and even the power adapter haha

The simple fact behind these patent wars is, increasing sales of Samsung’s Galaxy phones is hurting Apple. It should hurt why not. Let’s assume that, if your competitor copies part of your product and sells it without your permission then wouldn’t it hurt you? Won’t you try to stop them from doing it? I will definitely do it. Anyone will do it.

So let’s not take these patent wars personally.

Processor Wars: This one is another funny war. My phone has Dual 1.5 GHz and it’s 6 months old. Your phone has just launched and has only 1 GHz processor. Yea Okay, it’s possible but do you actually need that much of processing power on a phone? I am okay with whatever processor iPhone 4 has even processor in 3G worked without any issues with the older version of iOS.

The list is just never ending.

But the point here is: Is it even worth criticizing Apple for every other statement they make? Yeah, they must have made few wrong decisions, they too must have killed some products but everyone in the business does that. The simple fact is, everyone loves to copy Apple. They started with iPhone and everyone started copying iPhone and introduced touch screen phones. Same features and what not.

How many phones in the market are usable? Android has reached a good level just now. Samsung Galaxy 2 is something really good from Samsung but that surely does not make Apple products bad. Apple’s sales is increasing. Be it iPhone or Macs. Obviously it won’t reach the level of Android devices or Windows based machines (Unless these 2 giants make some huge mistakes) but it’s growing really well and I don’t think it’s growing so much just because of the hype, there is definitely something good about the product which is helping the company to generate the sales.

So, finally, ending the long article. Let’s not crib about Apple or Android all the time. Let these 2 giants fight and compete. We will eventually get a better product in the end haha

And yeah, I love Apple products. I use iPhone, iPod Touch, Macbook Pro and Mac Mini and Apple’s 27″ Cinema Display is in the wish list already. The next recent purchase is going to be iPhone 4S so I can gift iPhone 4 to my wife haha But that surely does not make me Android or Windows hater or doesn’t even make these 2 products bad. They both are good at their own places but I love Apple products and that’s about it.

Cheers,
Deep

Image Credit: The raging battle between Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android by Tsahi Levent-Levi

Recently, I came across open source messenger server called OpenFire. It’s basically based on Jabber (XMPP) server and provides web interface to handle the server and various settings. (Incl. users and groups obviously). OpenFire made my life easier because, it can directly interface with Active Directory (LDAP) and import all the users and groups automatically. The installation is pretty simple too. I installed it on my Windows 2008 R2 just by running an exe file and going to few configuration steps. (OpenFire is available for Windows, Linux and Mac)

Yes, I did face some issues while connecting Openfire with LDAP but I think that was more or less due to my lack of knowledge in Active Directory management.

Once the server is setup,  you can use free messengers like Pidgin (Windows, Linux, Mac), Adium (Mac), iChat (Mac). Select XMPP or Jabber from the list of servers and login.

I am not going to write a guide for installation and setup as there is plenty of good material available online. I will simply share some important links here:

- OpenFire Installation Guide
- OpenFire LDAP Guide
- Connecting to OpenFire Server using iChat
- Connecting to OpenFire Server using Pidgin

I guess that’s it. I hope this helps you to save few dollars.

Since my monitor was HD, I was planning to get HD based STB as it won’t require any TV Tuner card and will give me better quality for Audio and Video too. (Even on the normal SD channels).

I got Airtel’s Digital TV HD. Pretty decent looking stylish STB and remote controller. So, to get it working with my monitor, all I needed was HDMI to DVI cable / converter. I am not sure if all the HD monitors have HDMI port but if your monitor has DVI port, then you should get this cable. You will also have to keep in mind that, the type of DVI port can be different for your monitor. In this case, mine is DIV-D (24+1, this one is a common one) but some the monitors might have 24+5 pin DVI port too. Check here for more info. These cables cost merely Rs. 250 on eBay India website.

Once this is done, you will need to get the speakers working. You may want to connect your surround sound system (2.1 or 5.1) but for my office, I just had basic speakers, so I just needed a Mini Stereo (Female) to 2 RCA Male speaker cable. This costs just around Rs. 30 and you get it at any local stores.

So for me, by spending additional Rs. 280, I saved myself for lot of mess (wires) and got much better sound and video quality. I use this monitor as a dual monitor and whenever I want to watch TV, I just take out the VGA cable from my monitor and we have the TV ready.

I know, this is not any rocket science but this will surely help the newcomers.

Image Source: HD by phjellming

I googled around for quite sometime, checked many solutions and finally I managed to get things working.

So, here is the solution:

Get the video working (Ubuntu detected the cam but for some reason, it never worked with skype). So to get it working, try this command in the terminal first: (Solutions is posted here)

env LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so skype

This will basically load skype with the help of a shared library called libv. (Correct me if I am wrong here)

Once the skype is loaded, you can test the video and if it works. Just edit the Menu entry of Skype:

Right click on the Applications menu > Click on Edit Menus > Locate Skpye (Mostly under the parent menu called Internet) > Select Properties > enter the above command in the command box and hit close.

This will make Skype load using the shared library. (i.e. whenever you open it from the Applications menu)

So, this solves the problem with the video. Now, on many computers (Including mine), the mic never worked too. The mic showed under the Sound Preferences > Input devices but there was no sound while testing it.

So, this is how we get the Mic working:

1. Download my patched GSPCA: gspca-2.9.51-vx1000-patch-20100712.zip
2. Extract the zip file on your Desktop (so you have the folder “gspca-2.9.51-vx1000-patch-20100712?).
3. Open a terminal window and enter the following commands:
   cd Desktop/gspca-2.9.51-vx1000-patch-20100712/
   make
   sudo make install
4. Reboot your computer and test your webcam in an application such as Cheese (which can easily be found in the Ubuntu Software Center).

The above solution is provided here

So, after applying these 2 fixes, my Microsoft Lifecam VX-1000 worked perfectly fine and this helps me to solve another Windows to Linux migration issue. Will post more tips / pointers soon.

Hope it helps.

• There was were bunch of kids trying to start a website which will allow the users to setup websites in just few clicks. The concept was pretty good but their idea was broken, they decided to implement something social, where as a user will make template and share it with other users, so everyone can use it. I am not sure how practical it will be as the business model. Apart from this, they were not even ready for the alpha stage and they were having demo at the demo pit. In short, they were not “ready” yet..  They did not have clear picture of what they are going to do in the future. (And if they had, they could not convey it to me…)
• There was another team with the idea of making something on the basis of Getsatisfaction.com, again, no clear business plan, the voting manipulation wasn’t taken care of. The making money part wasn’t so promising at all.
• Another one was based on GetAFreelancer.com, again no proper business plan. There were no answers when I asked, there are plenty of other biggies providing same kind of services, why would people come to your site? Frankly, speaking, this guy was pretty much new to this and needed some boost, I gave him few ideas and if he works on those ideas, the things should work out for him. 
• There were many others, from something like Google docs / MS live document sharing clone, to some educational portal with great idea in mind but no proper planning etc..

I am not going to list them one by one but if you notice, everyone had some kind of base idea ready, be it based on any international site or not, but none of them had proper process lined up. No business model. Infact many of these guys never thought of any business model. They were like, we will see when things work out..

From what I understand, their thinking might be like.. we will make a good product and sell it off to any company and earn some good bucks.. (Well, I might be wrong too) But I don’t think this is what business all about… You need absolutely planning and clear picture keeping the worst conditions in mind. You should have a backup plan ready.

And most importantly, the high focus should be on money, profit.. you are spending lot of time over the project.. and for what? Social service? Just to make your name? Don’t you want your daily bread and butter? Think about money.. make a proper business plan and then just into so called startup bandwagon. If you don’t have any plans ready, I don’t think you have any right to start any business..

I know I know.. there will be people with examples like Twitter, Facebook etc.. but they all have a proper business plan, it is just that it’s been kept under the wraps and they are waiting for the right time…

I think people should not simply get into the hype of “startup” and all.. they need to sit, get back to the basic and make a plan, think about the future and think about the worst conditions.

That’s it.

Oh Yea, I am not any so called “startup guru” or anything. I am just a businessman. I understand money, profits, loss along with the great ideas. That’s it. So these are the things which always run in my mind and thought of sharing with everyone, so atleast some of the guys planning to do something new can get tips from this topic.

First, I noticed around 3000 odd tables in the DB, thought it might be the reason (spambot attack) but later found out that this is how BuddyPress RC 1 behaves.. it creates 3 activity tables for each user.. and we have around 1400 users. (I figured it out quite late actually haha)

So, after spending numerous hours finding the issue, I got on to IRC channel of BuddyPress, got in touch with the user Burt (Burtadsit), We spent around 2 odd hours, tried out few things and then we moved on to the plugins section, disabled all the plugins, enabled every plugin one by one and finally found the issue.

The plugin Sexybookmarks was trying to connect to its server and the server was throwing back 500 error code (actually, 403 error, this means mostly mod_security rules are blocking it). So, our server was retrying or getting stuck and causing the page to load very slow.. (it used to take around 12 minutes to load the page).

Finally I traced the issue and fixed the things up.

So, the purpose of this post is to make you guys aware that, whenever you feel something wrong with your WordPress installation, first thing you should do is, check the plugins. (Apart from the normal routine checks, DB check and all)

That’s it guys..

Cheers,
Deep

Note: If you wish to see detailed issue, you can check this thread on BuddyPress forums

I started around playing with it and wrote a small piece of code to display multiple links in the widgets.

Here is how I did it…

First of all, add following code in the functions.php file of your theme

add_filter('widget_text', 'do_shortcode');

Above code will allow, WordPress shortcodes to be called from the Widgets.

Now, you need to create a function which will contain the code for the links.

function show_links($atts) {
$show_links = "<ul>".wp_list_bookmarks($atts)."</ul>";
return $show_links;
}

add_shortcode('links', 'show_links');

Here, I have made a call to wp_list_bookmarks function and added shortcode called “links” for the same. I have customized the code according to my need. I am basically wrapping the list in <ul>. (Adding UL’s HTML code in the widget bar doesn’t seem to be working fine)

Once this is done, save the file, logon to your WordPress admin panel, click on Widgets under themes, add a text widget and call your recently created shortcode:

[links title_li="" categorize="0" category="2" echo="0"]

In above shortcode, I am setting the title as blank, calling the links from the category ID 2 and setting the echo to 0, so that my wp_list_bookmarks does not echo the data (The data will be echoed from the variable show_links)

I guess, that’s about it.. I am sure, there might be better way to achieve the same results but at this point of time, I found this pretty simple, so implemented it.

I hope it helps

Also, do let me know, if you feel the code can be improved using different methods.

This is how it works:

1. Contact your new registrar and ask for their IPSTAG – IPSTAG is basically a code which is given to every registrar.

2. Once you get that, login to your old registrar’s domain control panel, change the IPSTAG to the one provided by new registrar. This basically means that, you want to transfer away the domain name to your new registrar.

3. After this step, a transfer request will be sent to your old registrar, new registrar will also receive the same kind of request and it will mail back the security key to the domain holder. (This is an automated process – old registrar will approve the transfer and send details to new one, new registrar will send the secret key to you)

4. Once you receive the key, start the transfer process at your new registrar, put in the secret key you have..

5. Rest of the things are same as other TLDs.

That’s about it.. I hope it helps someone

So, let’s cut the crap and start off with the stuff..

Why you should not buy an iPhone?

1. Way way too costly.. Rs. 31,000 is what official price from Vodafone..Read the info on their page here. So this makes more than 3 times of the original price.. (USD 199)
2. No 3G – atleast for now.. I have heard that it’s gonna be out on Vodafone in December and all but nothing confirmed. And even after it is out, I am pretty much sure that, their data plan are gonna suck.. plans will be way too costly.
3. No copy paste – Yes, till now no official support for copy / paste. I personally use copy / paste thing a lot on my SE W810i, useful in many things.
4. No Bluetooth file transfer – Yups, you cannot transfer files via Bluetooth.
5. You cannot use it as Modem.. Yea.. Yea.. I know you can install some Apps and get it working but I am not sure whether it will break the warranty or not. And no normal user is gonna go through that pain of doing all those things.

I guess, these are the MAJOR disadvantages that a normal user. I know there are things like MMS and all but I guess… not many people care about it.

So, why you should buy an iPhone?

1. It’s SEXY.. no one can beat the looks of iPhone.. I mean come on guys… HTC Touch Diamond too can’t beat that sleek look.
   
2. Fast and less buggy compared to other phones in the market. (Compare with touch screen phones only) Currently, there is HTC Touch Diamond in the market.. but I have not heard so good reviews about it.
   
3. Usability – No one can simply beat it.. try the browsing…. try composing any message.. you will forget using anything else. The picture zoom and web page is superb.
   
4. Apps – I am 100% sure that no one can beat this App Store thing. (Which Apple introduced with version 2 of their software.) So many innovative apps, so many games.. I have never seen this kind of thing with any phone. There is a sexy iLightr, FlashLight and many other things. It’s simply fantastic.

I think that’s it.. I am not gonna make this post more lengthier with more pros and cons but covering the important one does the job.

So, in short.. if you do not have any problems with the hefty cost of the phone, then just go for it.. you are surely not gonna regret this beauty. Or simply you can wait for sometime, the rates should reduce soon.

Important Links:

• iPhone Pricing details in India (Vodafone)

• iPhone 3G Review
• HTC Touch Diamond Review

Today, few hours back, while I was working, I got few mailer daemon messages with bounced back email details. Found, a user sending out spam messages. I just went to the forum and banned that user.

Now, when I checked the number of online users, I got quite shocking figure of around 75 members, it soon increased to 100+ members within few seconds. This was kind of shocking considering there was nothing important on the site around this period.

After checking few things, I found that all the users were actually sending out personal messages and the bounced message was one of them. (Soon more bounced mails started flowing in)

So, the first question came in my mind was “Is it a Hack?” To be frank, I panicked for sometime as I was in middle of some important work and this thing came up.

I quickly, made the forum offline to avoid more spam messages and secondly, I disabled PM option for all the users. (Usergroups  – Usergroup Manager – Select the usergroup and edit – Set PM limit to 0)

Okay, after this, I opened a support ticket in vBulletin member’s area and started digging out their forums to get more info over it.

So what did I find..?

Well, for last couple of month, there is some spam bot (script) playing around  vBulletin based forums, checking the usernames for weak passwords (mainly the users with password same as the username) and then the spam bot logs in using those weak users and sends out spam personal messages.

By default in vbulletin there is no option to check for weak passwords, so first you need to jump to vbulletin.org forums and download this plugin called: Password Security Tools and install it.

This plugin will check for existing usernames with weak passwords (Incl. the ones with password same as username), reset their password to a random string and email them the new login details. And this plugin also prevents new registration with the weak password too.

So, moral of the story is.. if you see something like this in your forum, do not panic, install this plugin and clean up the mess. But make sure you have shut down the forum before doing anything.