Venu Anuganti Blog

Today I ordered Apple 15″ Macbook Pro which costed me ~2100$ as I went ahead with Apple Employee Purchase Program (EPP), which gave me extra 15% off of the original price. Last week I brought Dell Lattitude D820 and it arrived in 3 days and noticed few things are not working out of box, so I have to return it back immediately and opted for a Mac. As this is my first ever Mac movement; and need to figure out a way to explore all of the features that Mac offers.

For sure I need to either use BootCamp or Parallels to have my Windows Vista running on the mac, so that I can run Visual Studio from Vista. Also, am bit surprised to see that MacBook pro 15″ is not offering 7200 RPM disk instead am getting only 5600 RPM; and only 17″ one does offer 100GB disk which has 7200 RPM; thats a bad deal;

When I got the order tracking information, noticed that the Mac is actually shipped from SHANGHAI, China instead of from USA….hhh…

From today 23rd April to 26th April, I will be attending MySQL 2007 users conference and expo in Santa clara. Mainly focussing on MySQL 5.x and HA related topics and to meet old MySQL fellow employees.

For some reason since few months; I never been successful in establishing a remote connection to Windows Vista Ultimate using ‘Remote Desktop’. Whenever I try to connect, it actually connets to Vista by logging in; but once I press any key afterwards; the connection closes with a error message “the remote session was disconnected due to another user has connected to the session”. And nobody else is connected to the system other than me as am sitting infront of that system.

But I never had this issue with Windows XP as I always used to take over the session either remotely or connected to the console on that system.

I downloaded and installed the new ‘Remote desktop client‘ on my XP; and still no luck with similar error.

After a while; I thought I will create a new dummy user in my Vista, so that I can use that user instead of the user who uses over the console. So, I created a new user and used that user to connect from remote desktop client; and this time it worked out well, even though I might be using a different user and profile; but it forced to connect by disconnecting the console user…something that works for time being. Need to see how to force the same user to connect as I did in case of XP

Today, I tried to use my gmail after a long time to store some of my important old mails. I attached a zip file of size ~120MB which has all documents. Initially I forgot the total mail size allowed by gmail, and found later that it only allows a max of 10 MB as the message size including any attachments.

So, atleast I was expecting a nice user friendly error like Mail size exceeded, reduce the size; instead it gave an annoy error message with error code 008 and asked to try again as shown below:

Which ofcourse does not have any meaning to end user nor it is telling what needs to be done; instead asking user to try again; and up on retry; you get the same error…..and never ending

I am trying to test how I can link videos to my site as I am unsuccessful from Yahoo! Video due to various reasons. Lets see if it works, so that I can share some files.

Today, I just had a chance to preview the new Beta Yahoo! web messenger, which is yet to release to public. At first glance, no doubt it will rock in coming days as this is the next generation application; Kudos to the team who is working hard on this.

The major positive points of this new web based messenger is:

• Web interface, and its portable. You can use it any where in the world as long as there is a internet with a decent browser.
• Slick design
• Support for both Yahoo! and Windows Live contacts
• Online history of all the conversations
• Complete contact view that you see in your regular messenger based on groups, sorting on top of it either by name. You can also view only online contacts.
• Search capabilities on Contacts and History, which is a great handy feature for people who needs to dig something back in the history.

These are the features that I wish to have:

• Support of multiple themes
• Customization to allow different font size, type and color
• Support for conference or group chat
• Contact aliasing and alias chat
• Wap or mobile browsers support
• Easy file transfer mechanism
• Highlighting a message based on filtering
• Option to save conversation or history to local file
• Options to enable or disable notifications (regular message or audio) for a new message or based on a filter on a perticular word (like irc/mirc does)
• E-mail, Calender etc notification

Here is the few screen shots:

Welcome Signin Screen:	Intro Screen:
Logged In Screen:	History:

Yesterday I received my new Cingular 8125 windows mobile phone as a replacement to anothe one which I had since few weeks. The old one used to hang randomly after the phone call is done; and at times; the touch screen suddenly stops functioning . So, after calling the warrenty department, they sent a new replacement.

I used the builtin WIFI to connect to internet as I do not have the data plan yet from Cingular. I installed the following free applications to play with it as I got 2GB mini-SD card as the storage card and plenty of space left.

TCPMP Media Player to play DivX video songs along with free Codecs like AC-3 from its corecodec website. This is must needed to play videos that Windows Pocket version of Media Player does not support. Free Vista themes from http://freewmthemes.com Yahoo! Go 2.0 which is a internal version, yet to release to public; syncs both my copy and regular Yahoo! mail. Good thing I really liked about this is, I do not need a VPN to get my corp e-mails! Total Commander to edit registry to have the support for Wifi-G; which is disabled by Cingular by default; instead they allow only ‘B’. MagicButton Task Manager to control all currently running/open applications. This is a must have handy utility, which displays small icons on the top of today screen. Pocket Putty to connect to my linux and web servers using ssh or telnet. Its real cool to work from mobile sometimes. Terminal Services Client; to remotely connect to my home Windows box. It came with pre-installed. PHM Pocket PC Power Toys, comes with nice tools like notepad, voice command to perform tasks, run command, reset for soft reboot, suspend, tray launcher and a task manager. I really liked this; but everytime the unit boots I get a error notice that ‘traylaunch’ can not be found; not sure it is becuase I installed on to storage card. Anyway, uninstalled it. PocketNotepad; which is similar to notepad that you get on Windows; and must needed one for every day use.

Few things that I did not like in 8125; am not sure if they were rectified in 8525 which is released few months back:

• By default the WIFI is not enabled; and when you do soft reboot; its get disabled. I could not find a way to make it auto start along with Windows. May be they disabled it becuase of battery life; but should have left with an option for end-user.
• The screen some-times is annoy; and it never responds.
• Overall the speed of the system when loading apps is not that great. May be I need to get adjusted.
• I could not find a way to associate file types to open with certain applications.
• I am not able to reach the contacts directly as in case of regular phones; either I have to use stylus or pull the keyboard. Currently I am managing with voice dials for frequent callers.