T61 - The Thinkpad Chronicles Part II

There are some things, you never expect would happen, but they do anyway, leaving you spellbound...

The fingerprint reader on my Thinkpad is one such thing. I have never expected that it would have a proper driver in Linux at all, leave alone be of any proper use. It all changed after I found out about the thinkfinger package. After installing the package and editing some files thanks to www.thinkwiki.org, I ran "su -" and got this prompt - "Password or swipe finger:". It blew me away... Never had I thought that this would happen.

The other surprise was the BlueTooth. I tried to enable bluetooth manually and failed miserably. Then I found out about KBlueTooh. And things were never the same again! I no longer use my cellphone's data cable. I just select files in my phone and do a send via Bluetooth and it immediately starts downloading to my PC. Great!

The next biggest surprize was KPowersave. One I started it, I saw that it had all these fancy options like Hibernate and Sleep. I thought that this is one feature which would never work because you need tons of devices, to work together and go to sleep or wake up across PCI/USB etc buses. Needless to say, They worked like a charm.

For the windows user, the above stuff means nothing. It just works and it always did. But for someone like me who has not kept up with Linux since FC3, this is truly amazing stuff!

The Weather Man

I recently saw this movie called "The Weather Man". The movie is a beautiful piece of art. It stars Nicholas Cage as David Spritz, a successful weather guy, who desperately keeps trying to get his personal life back in order. Cage's character suffers from Low self esteem which is reflected in various scenarios. The movie is a slightly dark comedy, and has a motif of random people on the street throwing fast food at him. The archery theme is also very well done. It has pearls of wisdom strewn all over. Some of them seem to be so correct, that it both frightens and enlightens at the same time

- "In Life you will have to chuck some things"

- "When you are young, you have this view of yourself in the future with many positive qualities. With each passing year, the qualities keep on decreasing, until you are left with - yourself."

The End of Outsourcing?

Outsourcing has been a boon for many third world countries. It changed Wealth creation in many fundamental ways in China and India. Many detractors of outsourcing point out that US is losing jobs fast, and is piling on debt due to this globalization of manufacturing. However recent events show that these trends might soon be reversing.

Recent jumps in Crude Oil prices have been pretty disturbing. The $4 oil is cutting into consumer pockets and hence some analysts are predicting that this will push manufacturing of more and more goods to low cost manufacturing destinations like China. But there is something missing in this whole theory. The cost of outsourcing is not constant. Manufactured goods from China have to come to the US in shipping containers, the cost of which have proportionally increased due to the oil price increase. Given a weak dollar, China's rising costs and this added transportation cost - the outsourcing of some class of products might soon be coming to an end. Business week reports that this is already happening with products like batteries etc, which cost a lot to transport.

Coming to the Indian story of IT and IT enabled services outsourcing we are seeing the rapidly increasing wage bill of the Indian outsourcing firms which is cutting into their profits. This is affecting India's ability as the destination of choice for the IT related outsourcing areas.

Although this is a blow to Outsourcing, there is no denying that outsourcing is here to stay. But the outsourcing industry as we know it might soon be gone. The outsourcing bubble would have burst.

Firefox 3 is Here!

FF3 download record is a big hit, albiet notwithout some hiccups with the download servers crashing initially. Already 5 million downloads completed, and still 12 hours to go... Firefox 3 Rocks..

Here is my "certificate" about contributing to the record :)

Compiz Rules

Recently installed Compiz-Fusion on my Thinkpad T61, and it rules... ok ok.. what is compiz-fusion? I would say it is the next best thing since the Linux Kernel itself! It is a 3D window manager which started as Compiz, then it was forked into Beryl, only to be merged back again.

Anyway the effects that are possible with compiz are not just cool, but extremely effective too... Imagine you had 10 windows open, and want to go to the one you need. How many ALT-TABs can you do? now with Compiz, you dont have to do any of that painful stuff...

Detailing the features is difficult, so I will let you watch it yourself in this video I made..

T61 - The Thinkpad Chronicles Part 1

I recently bought a Thinkpad T61 with, god forbid, Vista pre-installed. I thought that I would use my Desktop as the Linux machine, and Vista as the laptop one.

One day into using Vista, I ran into this wierd issue where the packets would go only to machines in the local network. Although I set the gateway etc, and no firewall was installed, the packets refuse to move beyond the gateway. It must have been some wierd "user-friendly" setting I guess. But 3 hours down the lane, no luck.

I thought of installing Linux on it. But the Lenovo guys install one big fat C: and thats it. I have to download partition magic - but again no gateway for that.

So I went ahead and formatted the entire C: broke it into 5 pieces and installed Fedora 8 on it. I was using FC3 earlier, and going by the common "knowledge" about hardware support, I assumed I would have half of my functionality not working in Linux. But that was no reason to take crap from Vista.

After installing Fedora 8, I was totally surprised by how well it was designed and how all the laptop functionality was working. Linux has come a long way in the past few years. I would go to the extent that it is just the perception that remains that using Linux is difficult. But it got so much easier.