Raju Alluri’s Personal Blog

VVS Laxman, the person who is deemed to be unfit to be in the initial squad to the South Africa tour is now named as Vice Captain of the India Test team! Hope Laxman makes use of this opportunity…

The changing ways of News Gathering and Entertainment in the network and participation age: Read more about it from Sun’s Big MashUp news release. How is it relavant to our daily life?
Contrary to the word-of-mouth publicity during my college days, my Telugu movie choices are now influenced heavily by online reviews on sites like IdleBrain.

In the last week or so, India’s well known movie producing house, Rajsri, has introduced an online entertainment portal which promises simultaneous web release of future movies along with the theatrical releases. People can view movies that are in Free, Paid and OnDemad categories.

No. I am not talking about falling stars or lightning. I am talking about India Cricket Team’s run in the ongoing South Africa tour. In two of the three matches so far, I thought I would attend some meetings, come back and watch India’s batting. But by the time my meeting is over, the India batting order simply collapsed. Today, I went for a short meeting when India are some 20/0. When I came back, they are 39/4 or so. Then I went to another meeting and by the time I checked the score again, it is 134/7. Its the same story again and again in this series.

Lets see if India is at the bottom of the ditch here or still sliding downwards…

Here are some news bits…

• National Geographic announces best wildlife photos of 2006. I love #3, the “Great Mimic”
• French Parliament goes opensource.

The BigAdmin site has a BigAdmin Bucks program. Checkout the site for more details.

Here is the link.

Yesterday, I got a communication from CitiBank that they investigated and found that I don’t owe them any money for the double billing issue I filed in August 2006. They initially messed it up, but after a strong fax and courier message, they scrutinized the case better this time and sent me a final communication on the issue. I am happy now that I don’t owe them the money I didn’t spend, but sad with the fact that for last 3+ months, I had to go thru the pain of justifying and rejustifying my cause.

Just scanned thru the wireless networks using my Solaris laptop and I found an interesting advertisement as part of the ESSID of one of the networks! Snippet of the output here (name of the company changed to avoid free publicity )

bash-3.00# wificonfig -i ipw0 scan
essid bssid type encryption signallevel
[snip]
fxxxxxt.com - We are hiring! 00:18:39:73:a7:92 access point wep 7
[snip]
bash-3.00#

Good idea!

Last Sunday one of my cousins came to my place and felt that my cable TV signal quality is substandard when compared to the set-top-box based offerings in the market. Today, I went to my cable TV operator in the apartment complex and asked about the plans they have. He talked about the Hathway Digital Cable TV service. For about USD50.00, I can buy a set-top-box and continue to pay what I am paying today (about 5 USD per month) for more than 130 channels. Got the equipment installed for evaluation today.

The quality is amazing. Except for 2-3 channels that have poor transmission quality, most of the channels have a near-dvd quality reception. The set-top-box has very good features. Took me about 10 minutes to explore the features. Here are some features I liked:

• The key channels used by my in-laws are programmed to the 20 favorite channel list. At their age, they shouldn’t need to learn how to operate multi-button functions of this remote.
• Impressed by the reminders facility.
• For the first time in India, I have the choice of selecting audio language.
• The menus are very intuitive and easy to access for most of the key functions. Like one-button operation for favorite channels, selecting the audio language, program guide etc.

I am either not very pleased or yet to know more about the following.

• A couple of channels are transmitting video that looks broken in digital reception (the same channel works okay, with lower quality, in the regular reception.)
• There are 4-5 FM audio channels, but not the most popular of the lot.

Overall, I think I am impressed by the service. I need to iron out a couple of pricing related issues and may signup for the service at the end of the two day evaluation period.

Here is the SDN Channel, blog for Sun Developer Network. Has a vast pool of technical video and text resources for developers.