my orb experience

i read about orb at russ's blog last night and gave it a try. i signed up at http://orb.com and got a confirmation mail pointing me to https://my.orb.com. logging in to my orb portal i could see some available internet tv channels which i gave a try from the xp pc. worked fine and the streaming was passable.
next up revved up services in my 3650 and logged on to https://my.orb.com but the phone came back with a error message (services:no gateway reply). tried some other sites from the phone and they worked fine, so i looked around a bit and then thought it might be related to the secure https:// so i switched to http://my.orb.com and it worked! i was presented with the login page, which i logged into and navigated to one of the links (channels) that was working on my pc. the phone launched RealPlayer and initiated a new gprs connection (which was ok), but then the real player could not start the streaming. it always stayed on 'connecting...'.
well i guess its the data connection speed thats a problem here, which i am gonna sort out with the provider soon. even the contents from tmobile guide doesnt stream in real player.

i blogged about a silly idea some time back talking about doing voip calls between 2 (or more devices) using gprs, which can make use of a intermediate server to act as a switchboard server. looking at orb i am sure something like that is not far (if not already present! update:Skype does this).

PSP hacked?

been reading some news about psp being hacked to enable browsing via the handheld. am not sure about the terminology being used in these articles but seems like some game internals were being used to piggy back to the net by over-riding the default look up servers.
avenues opened: lots i guess ! imagine a nice crisp wide screen to surf at your favorite hot-spots. would this compel sony to take this into the next releases of psp? I guess it would (and it should) to gain entry into a entirely new market.

sturdy nokia's

lost the count how many times i have dropped my nokia 3650 on concrete/hardwood/pavements, all i have to do is pick up the 3 pieces (phone, upper cover, and the key membrane) ,put them together and reboot it.
works fine. also gives me a opportunity to clean the glass from inside :0

yahoo glitch?

stumbled upon this somewhere on blogosphere:
if you add to www.yahoo.com// (note the double slashes at the end), the timestamp shown on the right side of the page booms and shows the current date time as December 31.

a half baked easter egg?

vonage 911 woes

according to a zdnet news here, texas state sued vonage voip company over 911 contract disclosures. according to the report:

The attorney general of Texas is suing Internet phone provider Vonage,
charging that the company isn't clear to its customers about deficiencies in its
911 service

looking at the vonage site, i am sure the 911 service is listed as a service to be signed up for and from the vonage site:

911 Dialing is an optional feature

911 Dialing is free

911 Dialing is available anywhere in the US

911 Dialing requires prior activation on your part

911 Dialing and Vonage Service DO NOT function During a Power
Outage

not sure if these changes were made on the vonage site **after** the suit filed or were present there earlier. as for me switching to vonage, it seems to be on drawing board.

Update: Also carried on by CNN

mobile voip

whats happening on this front? having your mobile phone use the gprs service to make voice over ip to another client? ok, how would the 2 phones be identified? how would the calling phone determine where the target phone is? could a intermediate server be involved where the interested parties are logged on? could the phone imei number be used to identify the parties?

more reading on the topic leads to the news from vonage, the voip pioneer, about announcing their voip mobile phone f1000 in u.s.. its targeted use is being used at hotspots which are scarce in themselves at this time, so the phone would be mostly used at home installations with vonage connections.

never knew these facts....

about infospace. about navin jain. about the guys who became millionaires overnight. and all this due to 'charismatic' lies and deceit. mansions. ferraris.yachts. and then suddenly the bottom gets away, bringing everything down.
reading more here.

Google X

/. reported news of a new interface from google labs that was eventually took off within hours of it becoming public.
Chikai Ohazama with google started this as a fun filled way to learn dhtml and javascript, and the result was put up on google lab page. but since then it has disappeared from the pages, but the caches and mirrors still have the working version. mirror here.
why was it pulled off? maybe its related to the 'genie' effect from apple? maybe that drove the legal eagles at google to pull it off.
whatever the reason, it was a cool concept and effect applied to access various google services.

the rising interest rates.....

......that have appeared rather suddenly on the horizon. internet banks (as they like to call themselves) are becoming mainstream, getting much attention from investors. banks like ingdirect & emigrant-direct are offering competitive interest rates at the moment, living up to the statement of highest rates in usa. inside news is that emigrant-direct is raising up their rates from current 3.00% to 3.25% from monday (3/14). now thats a whopping interest rate for an online bank.
these banks really know how to cut on expenses by folling the internet banking model and cust down costs on brick & mortar model.
i think i am gonna park some in emigrant-direct!

TMobile ways!

I was updating my services on the TMobile plan and upgraded from a lower TZones plan to a higher TZones plan, by visting the online services menu and adding the new plan.

to my amazement the way this works is, that they totally shut off your current plan and then do the upgrade in next 24 hrs. So now my GPRS service is totally shut-off for 24 hrs.

why would you do this? cant you just keep the service up if an upgrade is done via the online tool?

update: actually gprs doesnt kick in until after 72hrs according to tmobile tech support.

Virgin's 3G radio player

virgin announced their new 3g player for mobile users, anywhere where there's a mobile signal. Russ blogged about it a couple of days back, and as he notes, this is a step that might trigger some more new innovations in mobile content delivery landscape. cool thing about virgin is that you dont need any subscription or some specific networks to enjoy these streams. down side is that you are restricted only to virgin's stream (is that a downside?).
as reported at Russ's blog, lot of users were able to hook onto the service without any issues, but there still are some issues with the player being installed on some Nokia phones (esp. with Symbian UI 1.0) like 3650.

i went on to the grab the sis file and install it first on my card memory on the 3650. installation went fine, but i couldnt find any application icon on the phone. time to install on the phone memory. still no applicationn icon. time to launch FExplorer and browse to the .app file for the player (SydusS60_VirginRadio.app ). launching this file gives a 'System error' and nothing happens. another thing that i noted was there was no application icon associated with this app file when seeing in the file explorer. now there were a couple of others who reported the same behavior, and it could be that the application works with Symbian UI 2.0 only, which would elminate 3650 and some other phones listed on Virgin's site under the compatibility list.

as for virgin working on this, i had a brief email with james cridland @ virgin who in turn got me in touch with someone at Sydus, who developed this for Virgin. i am still to hear back from them.
UPDATE: Just got an update from Sydus and recieved an updated .SIS file for older Nokia S60 phones, which were not working with the release version. Mail me to get a copy of the .sis file.

google in a tight noose?

is there a tight noose on google lately? yahoo is already coming up with new ideas in an effort to bring the developer community together under its name, and msn is trying hard to get its new msn search to compete with google.
yahoo announced its yahoo search developer network (ysdn <--> msdn?). i remember google coming up with their web api's some time back (> a year i guess), but this time yahoo has come up with something more than just text search. now you can search for multimedia objects like videos & images. russ cranked out a small jsp to search on the video catalog using the yahoo api's. it looks like a good step towards some new ideas in the search engine landscape after google maps.

Jal Mahal

This is a majestic view of Jal Mahal, Jaipur-India. Taken Jan 2005. I dont think there is anything inside the palace now, but plans are to convert it into a luxury hotel. The palace is seated between mountains on 2 sides (back and front) and is on teh main highway between Jaipur and New Delhi. A must see.