Just managed to pull up Windows 7 RC1 from microsoft website. I immediately managed to installed it to my laptop ( I had to kill my Fedora 10 install in favour of Windows 7 , But I do have a copy of turnkey linux installed in my Vista under virtual box ). I have kept my vista Intact. Coming from Vista, here are my initial impressions (Approx 4 hours of usage). BTW, I have a Vaio CR35G/R  ( Core2 Duo T8100 2.10 Ghz, 2GB DDR2 RAM, Intel 965 Mother Board, ATI Radeon X2300 Card with 128MB on board).

• Installation was pretty fast. I have my copy running in about 35 minutes (Including 2 restarts and my retarded slow DVD drive).
• The new windows 7 taskbar…err… superbar is pretty good, but it will take some time for me to get used to. Plus I don’t like the amount real estate it takes up on the screen (it can be reduced though).
• Windows 7 art work is very very good. Kudos to Microsoft for coming up with fresh art work. Not quite in the apple league, but getting there, fast.
• Unlike Vista, Windows 7 does not thrash Hard disk ( Vista has the nasty habit of keeping your hard disk busy for no apparent reason).
• Bootup, Hibernate – resume, Standby – resume times are a lot faster than Vista.
• Laptop feels a lot more snappier with Windows 7 than with Vista.
• The new Windows media player (Windows Media Player 12)  is a lot more polished and a lot better than Vista’s. However, I was not able to get ffdshow running with it though.
• Changing wallpaper desktop themes are pretty cool. Windows 7 supports wallpaper cycling.
• Reduced foot print. Windows 7 at bootup takes up about 30% of RAM as compared ~50% on Vista.
• Builtin monitor colour calibration tool ( I don’t thing Vista had one).
• I dont know why, but since yesterday night till today morning, I have received at least some 4 updates to my Windows 7. Cant you guys club em and do ONE BIG update? (Pretty annoying, but I guess since this is a RC, they will be fixing up a lot small stuff. I hope they have a better policy for updation cycle in the final release).

All in all Microsoft seems to have go it right this time around. I will seriously consider purchasing this once it comes out. ( And no, Microsoft is not paying me to say this :p, though if they sponsor me a desktop with Nvidia GTX 250 or ATI HD 4750, I can say how well Windows 7 will do on gaming front.   ).

If you have anything to add (Good/bad/ugly things about windows 7), feel free to post em in the comments section.

Leaves in rain by ~allajunaki on deviantART

Hit up “Download” link at deviantART for getting the full res snap

Most of the corporate executives are hooked to their blackberries and its push mail service. However, blackberry service is expensive (at least here in India). Fret not folks, Seven is here to answer our prayers. Seven is a service that enables push mail for most of public domain email service providers (like gmail, yahoo, hotmail etc.). But wait, there is more, Seven can enable push mail for corporate e-mail which has OWA (like the organization that I work ). 

I now get mails from office quite easily. I have also set up my gmail account for push. Now mails are delivered almost instantly to my Phone. Though I can get push mail with E90’s IMAP support (and gmail IMAP’s IDLE feature), I would still prefer SEVEN’s solution. Here are a few reasons.

• SEVEN client will re-establish a lost connection. The builtin email client does not.
• SEVEN integrates with your existing mail/email system of S60 phones (works exactly like the builtin client).
• SEVEN supports times at which real time push has to work. (with provisions for specifying alternate schedule for Push mail during weekends).
• SEVEN retrieves all the mails as they arrive (you can specify the mail size to be downloaded, beyond which, message will be trucated). So no need to click on a mail to retrieve it. This alone makes the whole process of checking mails more enjoyable (and since there is a size cap on per message, rest assured that you wont end up having to sell your car for paying the phone bill). 
• Support for push mails for servers with OWA support.
• SEVEN will switch off the push mail if the phone battery level goes below a certain threshold (Configurable).
• SEVEN Push status is clearly shown on the phone standby screen with a neat icon.

Having said, there are a few observations.

• Seven makes the messaging application a little slow ( Not painfully slow, but noticeably slow). Im not sure if it is a problem with E90’s Messaging application, or Seven’s client.
• Text only mails. No HTML support. But this mostly due to the fact that messaging application of E90 supports text only mails.
• I’m using Beta edition, I’m not sure how long it will last.

Overall, I have been using it since yesterday, I think seven is an application worth keeping. If you are interested then head over to www.seven.com for getting a copy of beta client.

Just out of curiosity I ran Windows assessment of Windows 7 running in virtualbox (with VT-x enabled) and Vista. Here is a screen shot of the comparison.

What was amazing is the Hard disk Score, Virtualbox HDD is faster than the native disk !! Processor score is not too shabby, but I expected more with VT-x turned on. So how much does VT-x have influence on the Virtualbox performance? I tried to do the same score with VT-x turned “OFF”.

To my surprise, I got the same score! Perhaps, the windows assessment tool does not run any ring-0 code ( as far as I know, VT-x helps better management of ring-0 code).

Anyhow I’m posting the screen shot of the windows 7 on virtualbox with VT-x turned off.

If Anybody has a better idea as to why VT-x failed to change the scores in windows 7 assessment, please feel free to comment

Just out of curiosity, I just did a google trends analysis of Advani, Rahul Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi. Posting the image below. Am not taking sides, not just yet.. . Click on the pic to see the full size image

I was browsing through wordpress blogs and I came across a post that posted this youtube video. I liked the comment on the part where he is routing to go somewhere on surface.

Due credit goes to : http://burnsar.wordpress.com/2007/06/23/microsoft-surface-video-spoof/ ( I saw this video there first   )

Never thought I will have to see the Blue Screen of Dread…err death on my vista. But thats exactly what I got today morning..

Untimley Death of Vista x(

In case you are wondering, Im 5th on the right from the teacher…

Having posted 15 Minutes guide to Mediawiki a while back, I was looking for something simpler. I wanted to run an entire Apache MySQL PHP (AMP) in a sandbox. Something that is isolated from Vista on my laptop. So I thought I will setup Virtualbox.  

Now, I’m sure almost everyone has heard of Virtualization. In case you have been living under a rock for past couple of years, Virtualization, in a nut shell is nothing but ability to run another Operating System within your existing OS.

So I decided upon Sun’s Virtualbox as the virtualization platform of choice. Now I need to find an OS to host the AMP (Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack.  Linux was the OS of choice as it can run on a wide variety of hardware configuration. So I started hunting for a Linux Distribution with very low footprint, something that can run on, say 128 MB or 256MB of RAM and require very small hard disk. I just needed the essentials.

After, hours of googling, I came across this great “Appliance Linux” distribution known as turnKey. So what is turnkey? In a nutshell it is a pre-configured environment to perform a particular task. For example TurnKey LAMP will contain Apache , MySQL and Php along with a barebones Linux kernel built from the Ubuntu distro. The advantage of such a setup is that the whole thing needs just 128 MB of RAM.

So how do we go about it?

• Go to www.virtualbox.org and download their installer.(and Install, Duh!)
• Go to www.turnkeylinux.org and download LAMPP appliance (Direct link to the LAMP Appliance page).
• Once you are done with it, follow the err… following steps to bring up the Virtual Machine.
• Start the VirtualBox (DuH!!)

• Hit New, and give the options mentioned in the screenshot.

• Hit Next, and set the Memory to 256MB. This is the amount of RAM your Virtual Machine will have.

• Hit Next, and Click on ‘New Disk’

• Set the allocation to “Dynamic”. This means that the virtual Hard disk of the client will expand when necessary.

• In the next window, set the Storage HDD file location and Max Size (Recommended max size 2 – 4 GB).

• Now just Hit Finish in the last window and you should drop back to the main wizard.
• Hit finish on that too.
• Congratulations, You have created your first Virtual Machine (VM). Don’t pat yourself on your back yet. There are a few more steps ( Simple ones sweetheart, don’t fret   ).
• Now we need to mount the Turnkey Linux’s ISO image file on the Virtual Machine. So next step will be to click on CD/DVD-ROM.
• Follow the instructions in the image below to Mount the ISO to the VM.

• Ok, now you are all set! Time to power on this baby… Err.. Wait, One more step. We need to setup Network for the VM, otherwise how will you be able to talk to your host machine? Follow the pictorial to set up network. Note: I assume that your system is a part of network and you have a DHCP server on your LAN.

• If you are not on a network, then you need to select “Internal Network” from the “Attached to” Dropdown.
• Click OK, and now are all set to go, Just hit the “Start (->)” button. You should see your brand new Virtual Machine boot up. It should boot from the CD-ROM.
• At this juncture, you are presented with 2 interesting choices. a). Boot from CD and b). Install to Hard Disk.
• Select “Install to Hard Disk” and then proceed with the installation. Make sure you select the entire HDD for installation. (Its the virtual Harddisk, so no, you wont lose anything from your REAL hard disk   ).
• Once the installation is done, Turkey will reboot the VM and you should get straight to the configuration page.

If you need a static IP for your Turnkey, go to Advanced Menu -> Netowork -> Static IP.

• Once everything is done, You should be good to go. Try logging into the Turnkey by pointing to http://<ip of turnkey>:12321
• Login with password you had set earlier and you are good to go!

Have Fun Should you need any help, feel free to comment, And I will try to help you out.

A picture while we were sorting clothes.  All of us have one (or more) of these shirts… And if u notice carefully all of em are Indian Terrain Shirts (Except mine which is Wills Lifestyle ). Its like a freakin uniform… One day all of us are gonna turn up in these shirts to office..