BSNL Self Care Portal on Chrome/Firefox in Linux

BSNL has recently (not sure how recent, since I returned to India after quite a few months) made some changes to their accounting system and the old intranet site (10.240.43.216) for checking unbilled usage no longer seems to be working. It has been replaced with an ultra crappy, barely functional, CRM portal from Siebel and it manages to suck better than the most powerful vacuum cleaner ever made. To make matters worse, it is labelled as "Internet Exploder only", so any other standards compliant browser, which doesn't cause the internet to explode doesn't seem to work. Having nothing better to do, I delved a bit deeper to find out why non-IE browsers fail to render this piece of shit. A little bit of Googling made me stumble upon this - link. Apparently the login window seems to be some kind of popup with some applet inside. Whichever brain-dead retard designed it, something seems to be horrendously wrong with the way the login window captures the mouse focus. Clicking on the username and password field doesn't work! Some users have reported success (see the posts on the above mentioned link) after resizing the window to a very small size and then clicking on the username field. This works most of the time, but the rest of the site after logging in, remains still unusable with a mouse. Fortunately "TABbing" seems to work and makes it possible to navigate around the site.
(BTW this - http://selfcare.edc.bsnl.co.in is the portal I am referring to.)

Experiences with new Mac Mini

Earlier this month I bought a Core i5 Mac Mini. It was quite an impulsive decision, partly influenced by the fact that it was a bit annoying frequently rebooting my office Dell desktop to switch back and forth between Windows and Linux. I have been using Linux for everything (like browsing, programming, creating Tex documents as well as for music and movies) since the last 4+ years. However, when I joined as a Grad student in CQT, earlier this year, my requirements changed a bit, which made be quite a bit dependent on Windows. I got involved in some device driver development in Windows, creating/maintaining several VIs in Labview and working in AutoDesk occasionally to coordinate with workshop technicians. Moreover the lab-notebooks were traditionally being maintained in MS OneNote. Since I am heavily reluctant to completely move away from *nix for my computing needs, I tried dual-booting my Core i7 desktop with Windows 7 and Ubuntu 11.10. Primarily I was using Ubuntu, but had to frequently reboot into Windows for either Labview/Autodesk/Onenote. At this point wanted to give OS X a try and ordered the base version of the new Core i5 Mac Mini online. It came with a 500GB HDD and 2GB DDR3 RAM. It was pointless giving $$$ to Apple for memory upgrade, when 4GB Kingston DDR3 modules are available in the market at a fraction of Apple's price. Even before my Mac Mini arrived, I headed off to Sim Lim Square to get a pair of 4GB, 1333MHz DDR3 Kingston modules for 78 SGD.
When the Mini arrived in my office, before switching it on, I took off the back cover and replaced the 2GB modules with the 8GB ones. I had a Dell 23" display and Microsoft wireless keyboard/mouse, so without wasting anymore time, hooked them and booted the Mini. First time startup configuration was highly "Idiot Friendly". All I had  to do, was enter my Apple ID, everything else was done automagically.
Ofcourse, having used a Hackintosh for sometime, the OS X experience was nothing new. But I was pissed off a bit by the fact that the new computer didn't come with any inbuilt system recovery option. Even though I didn't have any urgent need to do a system recovery, I tried the much famed "Lion Internet Recovery", where the Mac downloads a recovery image of Lion directly off Apple's server. But  I was heavily disappointed to find that it doesn't work reliably. A little bit of Googling revealed that, I am not the only one, it fails to work reliably for most Earthlings.
Anyway, I used SuperDuper to create a full disk image and stored it away in a external USB drive safely, in case I manage to bork the system in the future.

Back after an year

My last post was an year ago! Lot of things have happened in between. I had completed my Masters, majoring in Physics from IISERK, last May and have moved to Singapore to join the Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT) at NUS for a PhD. My current work is on ultracold molecules, where we are aiming to probe quantum many-body physics in an ultracold Fermi-Fermi mixture of ⁴⁰K and ⁶Li.  

Inquivesta

"Inquivesta is envisaged to be the first science fest of its kind in India.
Hosted by IISER Kolkata, Inquivesta 2011 is two days packed to the brim with excitement, innovations, challenges, and horns locked in historic show-downs.

Students from all Indian colleges are welcome. So come, join us. Let our forces unite, and we shall make history!"
.... For more details visit Inquivesta

Website updated

While updating some contents in my site - http://sam.botcyb.org, I thought of changing the looks as well. After spending almost a day fiddling with the stylesheet I couldn't come up with a design that pleased me. Frustrated, I came up with the best solution - dump all stylesheet and images. Pure text in pure html, nothing else!

(UPDATE: Finally added a css once again! - 21/12/09 )

Wikileaks blocked by BSNL - India follows China in censorship

At last it seems like India is following China's footsteps in restricting her citizens' access to the Internet. Wikileaks.org - a well known site that "publishes anonymous submissions and leaks of sensitive governmental, corporate, organizational, or religious documents, while attempting to preserve the anonymity and untraceability of its contributors" (description from wikipedia entry ) has been apparently blocked by the Sarkari ISP- BSNL. Tonight, while trying to lookup a "confidential" (alas! no longer confidential) working paper (wikileaks link) about India's proposed "Multipurpose National Identity Card" (link), I was unable to reach Wikileaks.org from my BSNL Broadband connection directly, although the site could be opened through most public proxy servers. Just to verify that it is indeed the Sarkari BSNL who is trying to act smart, I connected through Airtel Mobile Office EDGE connection and I could easily view the page. What a shame for a "Democratic Republic". It seems India is really trying to join the "elite" league of countries like China and Iran. (Others kindly check if your ISP allows access to Wikileaks.org , if not try this mirror at a different IP address - wikileaks.se .)

My new Nokia 5800 Xpressmusic

Recently I bought a Nokia 5800 Xpressmusic Smartphone to replace my aging Nokia 6600. 5800 is Nokia's first device based on the S60 5th Edition platform, running Symbian OS v9.4 on a 434MHz ARM11 CPU. Notable features include large(3.2inch 640x360) resistive touchscreen with tactile feedback, HSDPA(3.5G), 802.11b/g WLAN support, GPS (with optional AGPS), accelerometer, stereo FM radio with RDS, 3.2Mpixel camera with Carl Zeiss Optics, blah blah... the list is quite long. For a complete list of specifications see the link to the device specs page, there is no point in copy-pasting the list here.

After unpacking I plugged in an Airtel 2G SIM and the 8GB MicroSD that came with the device. Unfortunately the state owned BSNL is the only mobile service provider in India providing 3G connectivity. Though BSNL has excellent 2G coverage all over the country, their 3G coverage is limited only to few cities. Other operators are yet to receive licenses to roll out 3G networks. So for the time being, I'll have to remain contended with 2G services, which means no high speed data and no video call.

The sound quality of the device didn't really disappoint me, however being an Xpressmusic phone, I had expected better quality headphones. The HS-45 headphone that comes with it, is of average quality. I plugged in my friend's Sennheiser headset and the audio quality simply blew me away. So there is nothing inherently wrong with the device's audio output, it is just that the supplied headphones are of mediocre quality.

The inbuilt browser is nice. Adobe Flash is properly supported (in fact excellent flash support, one can watch YouTube videos smoothly over a WLAN connection).

GPS reception is good, I could get my location even indoors. However the initial lock-in time is variable. Sometimes is takes upto 5mins to lock-in to the satellite signals, whereas at other times it takes less than a minute. However with AGPS enabled, startup becomes lightning quick. AGPS allows the device to download the ephemeral data about the GPS satellites from Nokia's AGPS server through the internet, rather than decoding the same from the GPS signals. AGPS works only if a cellular packet data connection is available (for some strange reason it can't use WLAN).
 The Nokia Maps application is utter crap, atleast for me. It doesn't provide any detail about any location in eastern India. On the other hand Google Maps just rocks. In the satellite view, I could even figure out the room of the building, where I was. Google Maps also provides turn by turn navigation instruction for traveling from point A to point B on the map. With inbuilt Google Latitude, selected friends can see my instant location on the planet at anytime and I can see them on the map as well.

The inbuilt mail client is simple with minimal features but works quite well. I configured it for periodically monitoring my Gmail Inbox and a few other IMAP Folders and alert me whenever a new mail arrives.

The music player app is good enough for playing wma, mp3, aac, aac+, awb and perhaps someother formats as well. However syncing the music folder with my GNU/Linux computer was a bit troublesome. I'll write about this in a subsequent post. Initially I had to use Nokia Music(part of Ovi Suite) on Windows XP to transfer tracks.
The device comes with a subscription to Nokia music store, which allows downloading of first 100 tracks from the site free of cost. Unfortunately all the songs in Nokia's music store incorporates Microsoft's DRM, making them unplayable in my GNU/Linux laptop. Really annoying! I can't freely play songs that I have legally downloaded.

Anyway as a concluding remark, I must add that the phone is quite hackable(though nothing compared to a Freerunner!), in the sense that Nokia freely provides the SDK/S60 emulator as well as the Symbian C++, Open C++ and Java API for accessing the device features. Nokia has also ported Python to the S60 platform and I could easily get a Python shell running on the device. I could access the shell through a serial console emulated  over a bluetooth link. The well documented APIs, helped me to very easily write simple Python scripts to play around with the sensors(accelerometer, rotation, ambient light, proximity and gps positioning) scattered throughout the device. I haven't written any full fledged application, but the potentials are limitless.