Boycott yaari.com!

Well, I happen to be a recent victim of yaari.com - a cheap trick on social networking! This is totally outrageous! It spreads like a virus by stealing your gmail/yahoo contacts. This is started by some Prerna Gupta, you can find her with this name on Facebook and she is Stanford 2004 alumni. Her email is Prerna@Yaari.com - spam her with your complains if you are victim like me and others. There are many others who are victim like me - read posts by Arun and here and here.

Everyone who received invitation on my behalf please ignore it. It was without my knowledge and un-authorized. I reported yaari.com on invasion of privacy to ftc.gov and also reported to google about such web 1.5 web sites trying to bring shame to social networking!

iPhone Hype and reality!

The kind of hype iPhone has generated, I am not really sure if it lives up to its expectations! Specially when compared with the existing phones.

I love gadgets and for any new thing out there I want to try my hand on, with iPhone the first reviews out there is not so encouraging. Some of the comments I got so far from various posts on internet forums/blogs

The Goods

• Phone is so sleek and thin it makes Treos and BlackBerrys look obese.
• Fast and dead simple easy to use software.
  
• Each thing on screen has physics of its own
• You don't check the Voice Mail, it checks you. Sroll thru and order the way you want. Nice!
• Great Email support! Pretty well formatted text with graphics and supports excel/word/pdf attachment viewing.
• Excellent Web Browsing experience.
• it makes Treos and BlackBerrys look obese.

The Bads

• Making a phone call takes as many as 6 steps - Making a call, though, can take as many as six steps: wake the phone, unlock its buttons, summon the Home screen, open the Phone program, view the Recent Calls or speed-dial list and select a name.
• Average call quality
• Clumsy text editing using the soft buttons on the screen. Maybe it will take time for people to get used to it. Blackberrys are not going away any time soon.
  
• There's no way to cut, copy, or paste text! What a mistake! How am I suppose to efficiently compose email or create documents for that matter! How can Apple miss such a feature.
• No A2DP. Basically you can't stream audio to your stereo Bluetooth headset. My Nokia 6125 does that and so many other latest phone. Such a bummer!
• Sorry can't use music - your mp3s on iPhone as rigntones! You got to buy them from iTunes or from AT&T. How the hell am I going to use my 24 mp3 as ringtone?
• Won't record Video, only snaps! How does Apple loves YouTube, it should realize large number of videos out there are taken on cellphone.
• No MMS! Such a bummer! You can send your snaps thru email but MMS is so convenient.
• No expandable memory support.
• You can't replace the battery by yourself. Apple says between 300-400 recharges battery may go down and to replace it bring to them and will replace for a fee!
• No GPS support, although it is capable, you may expect within a year or you may be able to insert a chip and make it GPS enabled.
• iPhone has some kind of Mac OS X, but the footprint is whopping 700MB!
  

Maybe I should wait for second generation iPhone. Sorry Arti you are not getting it soon:-)

Another wonderful JavaOne...

This is another wonderful JavaOne and there is estimated 15000 people this time - one of the largest. I got to attend mostly General Sessions and got to see Roberto's nice Phobos demo at Graham's session.

There is lots of buzz around AJAX and there is lots of cool things that have been done and are in the process of development around AJAX support in Java.

I have my bof at 9:30 pm.

Another cool thing - project tango, that I am working on currently is now live, see the press release about it.

Muzaffarpur has home on the web

My birthplace Muzaffarpur is on web. This site doesn't have lot to offer at present. But I got to know it's history. Check it out.

CTU Ringtones

Me and my wife like Fox series 24 and were looking for 24 ringtones and found one. The best one thats as realistic as it gets is CTU24.mp3.

To get it to my Mtotorola Razor I used Mobile Phone Tools and now all the calls I get sounds like phones in CTU. Its another thing that I got Motorola Mobile Phone Tools by paying 30 bucks which kind of sucks as the previous phone I used was Nokia and Nokia Phone Toolkit is completely opensource and is free. Lets hope someone hacks Motorola Phones and brings it opensource.

W3C Plenary

Being Sun's rep on Web Services Description Language (WSDL) working group, last week I was at the W3C Plenary at Mandelieu, France.

Well, WSDL 2.0 being a solid spec has hurdles on its way in becoming recommendation. Right now
Woden is the only implementation of WSDL 2.0 and to become recommendation WSDL 2.0 would need atleast 2 of them. Well we will see...

Other highlights were lots of interest on Semantic Web and Microformats and there was good panel discussion on Tech Plenary day, you can get the slides of them from here, see session 3 - Microformats.

Here are some photos from Mandelieu and Cannes.

Started blogging on java.net

With this new year I have started my weblogs on java.net , I guess its more meaningfult to you if you care about Java/XML/Web Services or maybe not...