There’s a new mobile netbook in town and this one has a little bit of an additional component up it’s tiny sleeves to make it even that much more interesting. The Gdium Netbook from EMTEC has everything you’d except from the smaller form factor with some additional features that may make it even more appealing to other uses.
The Gdium has the smaller form factor, light-weight and a 10″ screen that displays 1024×600 resolution. It’s also completely based on open source software. What makes the Gdium unique though is that it also comes with the G-key to allow users to travel …read more

Lots of discussion recently regarding all of the issues with pirates. These are the real kinds, not the Johnny Depp kind and not the kind that wear patches and fly the jolly-roger. The pirates I’ve been thinking about recently though are those of the software and digital content kind.
I had a friend recently tell me not to buy a CD that I was interested in because he had a copy of it and he would let me borrow. Although they didn’t tell me to go burn the disc so I would avoid buying it, but that’s the impression I got. …read more

Every now and then a popular website gets hacked and tons of user passwords are published for everyone to see. On one side, it can potentially lead to huge losses to the users whose passwords have been compromised. On the other, security analysts use the data to gain various insights.
In one such recent attack, Robert Graham, the CEO of Errata Security, came to a few startling conclusions based on the passwords published showing what should not be your password:

16% of passwords matched a person’s first name
14% of passwords were patterns on the keyboard
4% are variations of the word “password”
5% of …read more

We have all heard of the Pirate Bay, the bit torrent search engine site. It was sued by some biggies of the MPAA like MGM Pictures and Sony BMG, and the case began its trial yesterday in the Stockholm district court.\r\n\r\nA police investigation took place way back in 2006 and the current trial is considered a consequence. The trial is being closely observed by the world because its judgment has the power to determine the future of the Internet regarding copyright infringement laws and rethink where cyber law stands.\r\n\r\nThe Pirate Bay is a Swedish site that facilitates users by providing …read more

find is an elaborate search program with a number of features. Unlike the Google Desktop Search and locate, it doesn’t index anything but processes the request on the fly. Thus it is slower.
find is one of the most useful commands when you also have to search within unknown files and make further operations on the result set. It does a recursive search, looking in all subdirectories.
The first set of arguments is always the paths where the search should initiate. $ find /home /tmp <remaining arguments> would search based on the remaining arguments in /home, /tmp and all their subdirectories. If …read more

Jason was kind enough to accept my guest posts for his blogs Microsoft Weblog and Uncover the Internet. These are my first guest posts ever: one about Microsoft’s involvement with Open Source and another about watching movies legally on Youtube. I hope you enjoy them.

The last week has been filled with frenzy here in India with rumors about a $10 laptop. Not $100. It is $10. The prototype designed and developed by IISC Bangalore and IIT Madras (my alma mater) was unveiled today. Immediately, it has been hit by very negative reviews with reporters disappointed that it isn’t really even a netbook with scaled-down features. Of course, you can’t yet get a computer that costs 40 times less and has similar functionality.
Called “Sakshat”, the concept is similar to OLPC. While screenshots aren’t out yet, Sakshat has a small screen, 2GB disk space, wi-fi connectivity, …read more

I’ve realized that my last Tech Channel Roundup was nearly a month ago and I’m guilty of it. So, bear with me as I overload you with a number of interesting links that I found in some of the sister blogs.
Milo discovered a product especially useful for enterprises of all sizes called Nightwatchman, a good news that Microsoft didn’t lay off anybody in the Vista team. I knew that they didn’t touch the Silverlight team, but frankly I’m surprised about this because Vista hasn’t been very profitable to Microsoft. Or has it? One bad news is the Windows 7 minimum …read more

Launchy is a nice little utility that makes life easier, especially for all those users who prefer the keyboard to the mouse, say laptop users to whom typing a few keys is more convenient that navigating using the mouse.

It runs in the background and when invoked to the foreground allows you to launch various programs that you wish. There are a few similar apps like Colibri and yLaunch, but Launchy stands out for the wide range of features that can be customized.
To start with, the hotkey used to invoke Launchy can be set. I choose “Win + Space” instead of …read more

The terminal is an important aspect of Cygwin like for any Unix-based OS. For this reason, you might see its users like me chasing after fancy ways of beautifying it. Well, I will try to make this the last time.
Poderosa is the best terminal emulator for Cygwin that I have come across. It has a tabbed GUI, much like the PuTTY Connection Manager. However, in addition to the network communication protocols through which one can connect to a remote system using PuTTY, local Cygwin shells can also be opened using Poderosa. I use it mainly for the latter purpose.

Poderosa allows …read more