Just came back from the iPhone India launch. Here is a list of what all went down.

Breaking News:

Windows was being used to activate the iPhone!

Person who bought the phone second, got it almost an hour late.

Around 30 people bought the iPhone today.

The Mobile Store will also be retailing the iPhone, most probably only with Airtel.

Seconds before the launch there was silence and someone had the balls to shout  -”iPhone sucks.” That was me!

Now for the glitch:

According to the sales rep:

Apple has a database of IMEI nos. and first 4 digits of the no. on the SIM card. Now these 4 digits allow Apple to know whether the phone is from Airtel or Vodafone and maybe same goes for the other international operators. The IMEI & first 4 nos. tell Apple whether the phone is legit or no.

Also, I can use any old Airtel SIM card with my new iPhone.

Now, under the assumption that a consignment of iPhones being sent to India has a certain range of IMEI nos. if someone is able to get the range of the IMEI nos., which I may add is pretty simple as the IMEI is printed on the back of every phone.

Coupling the facility of being able to use any old Airtel SIM card & the ability to find and spoof the IMEI no. 1 can theoretically fool iTunes into thinking that this is a legit phone.

Coming to the event, the event was drab. Onlookers were asked to come up on stage and sing songs. There were mimicery artists & magicians.

7 out of 10 people had no clue what-so-ever about what was happening.

Steven Sinofsky today on the official Windows 7 blog detailed about how they have organized Microsoft for Windows 7. The break-down is pretty simple, I have created some charts in Microsoft Word using the ever-so helpful Smart Art to explain the organization.

Sinofsky & DeVaan have divided their work as:

Now lets see how Jon-man & Sino-man over-see Windows 7:

Sino-man (Steven Sinfosky) & Jon-man (Jone DeVaan), will have 25 feature teams under them, these 25 feature teams will be working on a particular feature of Windows 7 and will be responsible for that particular feature’s Code, Quality & Overall Development.

There will be 4 groups that will be in contact with these 25 Feature teams, other than Sinofsky & DeVaan, represented by the last column.

These 25 Feature Teams will each have engineers covering 3 areas of expertise, here is the composition of every Feature Team:

23 of the 25 listed Feature Teams on the blog are:

1. Applets and Gadgets
2. Assistance and Support Technologies
3. Core User Experience
4. Customer Engineering and Telemetry
5. Deployment and Component Platform
6. Desktop Graphics
7. Devices and Media
8. Devices and Storage
9. Documents and Printing
10. Engineering System and Tools
11. File System
12. Find and Organize
13. Fundamentals
14. Internet Explorer (including IE 8 down-level)
15. International
16. Kernel & VM
17. Media Center
18. Networking - Core
19. Networking - Enterprise
20. Networking - Wireless
21. Security
22. User Interface Platform
23. Windows App Platform

Something that shouldn’t come as a surprise to people, Twitter today posted on it’s blog that it has dis-continued outbound SMS updates for it’s UK customers (Changes for Some SMS Users—Good and Bad News). The reason - Twitter can’t bear the costs anymore.

Here is an exceprt:

Beginning today, Twitter is no longer delivering outbound SMS over our UK number.

Why Stop Sending SMS To Some Countries?

Mobile operators in most of the world charge users to send updates. When you send one message to Twitter and we send it to ten followers, you aren’t charged ten times—that’s because we’ve been footing the bill. When we launched our free SMS service to the world, we set the clock ticking. As the service grew in popularity, so too would the price.

Now that they have stopped pushing update messages of the people you are following for the Brits, I would not be wrong in thinking that more countries are to follow. Once a move is made somewhere, it is replicated else where too.

So what happens to the British? According to Twitter they should switch to alternate services like: m.twitter.com or twitter mail.

Don’t be shocked if you see your twitter RSS feed reading “UK customers rejoice, you can now receive twitter updates by paying a fee”. It’s the next logical move.

I have noticed a lot of times a service called TrustedInstaller.exe running and eating up humongous CPU & RAM resources, so I decided to dig further what it is and is it safe to disable it.

TrustedInstaller.exe is a service for Windows Update. As I manually update Windows, I prefer to have my Update Service only notify me of updates. So for me changing the trigger settings of this option makes a lot of sense as it frees up hardware resources.

I would suggest that intermediate users also set it to Manual if you want to save resources. We will not disable the service but only set it to manual rather than Automatic.

To do this:

Start -> Run -> msconfig -> Services

Uncheck Windows Module Installer

Now:

Control Panel -> System Maintainance -> Administrative Tools -> Services -> Windows Module Installer.

Double click and choose Startup type -> Manual & also Stop the service.

Screen-shot:

NOTE: Doing this might alter Microsoft Update Service’s behavior.

Finally after spending a whole day and a couple of days before, I proudly present to you one of Microsoft’s biggest aggregator website. Featuring news, tricks and anything & everything Microsoft. Subscribe to 1 RSS feed and you shall be getting the latest happening in the world of Microsoft.

The RSS contains MSDN & TechNet blogs, a loads of other sites that I frequent for my dose of Microsoft.

Everything Microsoft

Subscribe to the RSS feed and well … enjoy!

The feed aggregates from a total of 26 Microsoft related blogs of repute.

While Live.com is getting constant upgrades, which are really good. Today I found that even Live.com isn’t exactly inter-browser compatible, a nightmare most web developers endure. The page in question is the All Services page. The sidebar on the right is the one that isn’t being shown consistently in all browsers and appears broken in Firefox 3 & Opera. IE 7 & IE 8 Beta 1, however render the page as it was intended to look.

Live.com Services

Screen shot:

Firefox 3; Opera & IE 7:

We have read thousands of outrageously stupid reasons why one should move to Linux, reasons like - Linux has GIMP so shift to a completely new platform! Off course there are some authors who really know what they are talking about and make compelling arguments about the FOSS movement and why one might contemplate a switch. However, I personally don’t find weight in most arguments and still prefer Windows and I guess will do so for years to come. So, lets list a few reasons why Linux is not worth the hassle.

• Too Many Choices:

When you are new to Linux the first question that you ask is which distro should I go for. There are gazillions of different distros of Linux, I don’t think even the Wiki entry on the same lists all the ones available. If that’s not all there are two different Window Managers - KDE & GNOME, each with its own fan-following. So basically when you are new to Linux the first problem is selecting a distro out of the millions - Fedeora, Ubuntu, Mint, SuSe, Slax, Debian, Slacware, Arch, Mandriva, Sabayon etc. etc. and then you select a Window manager of your choice.

The troubles don’t end here. If you were to choose, let’s say Ubuntu and you wanted to play mp3s out of the box, there will be some wise ass that would say, why did you go for Ubuntu you should have gone for Mint or Ubuntu Studio edition if music & video is your thing. Then there will be another smart ass who will say why did you choose GNOME, KDE is much better! I mean WTF!

The problem continues, if you were on GNOME & a friend on KDE, if you were to work on his computer, you would be dealing with a completely different GUI.

Also, depending on the distro & WM you choose, the packages for applications also differ. The applications for Ubuntu are not the same as that for Fedeora. If you were to use an application on Fedeora and only the Ubuntu version was available for simple installation, you will have to compile the application for Fedeora.

Too many choices, too little consistency.

• Community Based:

Some say its a good thing, but I find it a rather stupid thing. I need to join a community or search on the internet to find solutions for a problem. This has a major drawback. For one I need an internet connection, which we shall come to later. But, community based means, search for content where people have already faced a similar problem, then go through what they faced and what others suggested. Foolishly time consuming and utter time waste.

If you were not able to find or comprehend the so-called solutions you found, you start your own thread and wait for someone to reply. Wait for sometime and you get a reply, it worked, lucky you, if it didn’t, wait again, wait some more and the wait continues till some community expert helps you out.

• Drivers & Incompatibility:

On the outset, I am not blaming the Linux devs for this, but like it or not this is a huge hinderance for Linux and will continue to be. One can’t run half his hardware because the distro either doesn’t come with bundled drivers or the driver disc does not contain Linux drivers. Here you are at the mercy of the hardware vendor whether they have Linux support or not. Even if you were to get the drivers, rest assured the path won’t be as easy. Again if you weren’t to get the drivers you need to go back to the communities. Quite a few times you will find the drivers for another distro and then compile.

Then there are the software incompatibility issues. You will have to search for an application that suits you and does what you want. It also does not support the world’s largest online media distributor - iTunes. Content bought from iTunes such as movies will not work under Linux as Linux does not support DRMed content.

• Internet Connection Must:

Linux has this repository system, where it collates most of the applications available for that distro and you can download them. You will need to download a lot of stuff as most of the applications are dependent on some library or another which your Linux distro will not be bundled with. Point 2 & 3 also depend on this. So if you don’t have a working Internet connection, forget support - for you and your hardware.

• New Environment/Still CLI:

This is a huge issue, 7 out of 10 people who buy a computer or upgrade aren’t actually looking for learning but want the damn thing to work. KDE or GNOME, Fedeora or Ubuntu, they are equally alien to most users and you will have to learn to adjust, learn to adapt to the community way of getting support, learn to compile applications, learn to use CLI commands. Unfortunately, Linux distros still heavily depend on the CLI interface for doing most things, though some may argue it gives more control, it isn’t exactly what one considers user-friendly. Arbitrary commands for mounting disks, retarded commands to install drivers and compile software. Now, why does one need to do all this?

The hardwre requirements of Aero and that of Compiz are left for another post.

After the biggest launch by them, wherein they introduced 3 of their major products together - Server 2008; Visual Studio 2008 & SQL Server 2008 (I attended the event, you can find the coverage and details here - Microsoft’s Largest Launch Event - Mumbai Leg), Microsoft held quite a few events where they explained the products more deeply and showed demos that were more serious in nature. These events were held way back in April, but I got the mail with download links today. maybe I must’ve missed the previous mail, if there were any. Anyway, here are the download links. There are a little too many download links, so I will just link you to the page.

The download links have Power-Point presentations & *.wmv videos of the event. The sessions include :

1. 8 videos on Windows Server 2008.
2. 4 videos on SQL Server 2008 - Business Intelligence and Admin.
3. 4 videos on SQL Server 2008 High Availability & Security.
4. 4 videos on SQL Server 2008-RDBMS.
5. 4 videos on Visual Studio 2008 Web Applications.
6. 4 videos on Visual Studio  2008 Fundamentals.
7. 4 videos on Visual Studio 2008 Smart Clients.

Download Page

Was going through the newspaper today also, came across a story that just shook me inside completely. It still has me in a weird state of mind. It is 3:45 AM and I am wide awake writing this post. Couldn’t help but share it with a wider audience. An 8-year-old boy named Reece Fleming who was suffering from Leukemia passed away a couple of days back. He was diagnosed with Leukemia when he was 4 and it was a couple of  back weeks when the doctors told him that he has a few weeks to live. Reece then made a list of things to do before he died. The list included:

1. Ride in a Ferrari & Porsche.
2. A day at a Fire-Station.
3. A pirate-themed party.

He achieved all the three above. But, Reece told his mother that he wasn’t ready to go yet. He had one more wish - Get married to long time school friend - Elleanor. The parents of both children decided to grant his last wish and arranged a make-believe wedding for young Reece. Reece & Elleanor exchanged wedding vows, rings and even got a certificate of marriage.

I cannot even imagine what parents of Reece might be going through when they watched their child getting ‘married’. Their dreams of seeing their child graduate, actually get married, have his own children must have flashed right before them. I seriously CAN-NOT visualize how a parent could have kept rationality and not broken down while watching this. Such is life, fragile & cruel.

If you thought that this was it, here is the kicker, Reece after the wedding told his mother, “Mum, I can go now.” Human courage in an 8-year-old. A toddler making such a strong statement is beyond me. While children older than his age, people thrice his age cling on to materialistic objects and aren’t ready to give up toys and such petty stuff, this 8-year-old has the courage to say that he is ready to give up life. Bravo!

My hearty prayers and wishes to Reece’s parents and a salute to the courage of an 8-year-old. While we involve ourselves in petty day-to-day disputes, these are stories that can really brake you down. Words seem insufficient & incapable to explain what I am feeling right now. This story has moved me to tears - literally.

You can read more about this here:

The Sun

Russia Today

Telegraph

This article was published in Mumbai Mirror dated 23rd July 2008.

When I reviewed Windows’ Live services a long time back, I said that Web 2.0 is here and Microsoft is making it’s presence felt. Here is just part of what one can expect of things to come.

First Look [Part 1] of Live Mesh showed how Mesh looks and what are the basic categories of Mesh, now let’s get down to some how it does what it is supposed to do.

Let’s try creating a new folder. Double click on the ‘Create new folder’ icon, yes double click like you do on your desktop. You will be greeted by a screen like this:

Pretty self explanatory, gives you the options of how you want this folder to synced, the name of the folder. The sync options that have been given are:

1. When files are added.
2. Once used.
3. Smaller than 500kb
4. Modified in the past 30 days.
5. Don’t sync.

Once the folder has been created it will appear on your online Mesh desktop. Let’s open this folder and see. You will be surprised to see pretty much the same Explorer interface that Vista has, the toolbar, the navigation bar, the bread-crumb navigation, close/minimize/maximize buttons (which all work). Everything like Vista’s Explorer. The navigation bar is breadcrumb style and when click on it will turn to the old XP style. Screen shot:

Toolbar:

Let’s have a look at the toolbar, the following options are available:

• Organize:
  • New
    • Folder
    • Upload File
  • Layout
    • Detail Pane – The one at the bottom in your Vista Explorer.
    • Navigation Panel – Folder navigation just as found in Windows.
• View
  • Details
  • Icons
  • Media
• Upload
• New Folder
• Media View – You will need Silverlight installed for this.

The section on the right of folder window is something I call the Details pane. It shows activity details, syncing & permission options for that particular folder that you have opened. It has 3 sections:

1. News – Updates & messages left for this folder.
2. Members – The members who are allowed access to the particular folder.
3. Synchronized Devices – The devices that Mesh is synced with for this folder.

Each of them is drop down, clicking on either shows the details in the respective categories. Screen shot:

1. News:

Let’s see the News section for any particular folder:

Under News, you can leave a message as a reminder or as a note for others who have access to that folder and that message will be shown. To add a note, all you need to do is click on ‘New post’ under News and you can post a note. “Manan Kakkar said …” is a note/post that I have made and is visible under News for all the members who have access to the folder. As you can see the icons for each update make it easy to understand the kind of update. Screen shot:

2. Members:

Mesh allows you add other users and grant them access on a per-folder basis. There are 3 permission options for users:

1. Owner
2. Contributor
3. Reader

In order to add members or edit permissions for a member you need to click on the Members tab in the details pane and you will get something like this:

Click Add to grant access to another member. You add members using their email ids and can send an invite Email from the Add-Member wizard itself. You can invite 5 new users. Add-Member wizard screen shot:

3. Synchronized Devices:

This menu allows to set the devices with which the particular folder is synced. You can add and remove devices and also set as to when the files should be synced. The sync options are the same as shown in the beginning for the new folder. Screen shot:

Back to the Explorer of Mesh.

Media View:

As I said above that Mesh has a Media View option. The Media View is simply slick. If you have images to see, it will generate thumbnails at the top and will start in the slide-show mode in the window, with all slide-show options as in Windows. The transition between images is a fade-through-back, which makes it look abso-friggin-lutely slick. Screen shot:

In Mesh if you have something like the Start-bar for Windows but it’s purpose is only to navigate between the multiple folders that are open. The scree shot will explain this:

I have 3 folder open, namely – Manan, Feeds & Being Manan, clicking on the name of the folder will bring that folder to front. Exactly like it happens in Windows on the desktop.

This is I think the most comprehensive tour of Live Mesh. Hope you liked it. Please Digg it as a sign of appreciation. Thank you!

Live Mesh is my new tool to pass time and play around. Recently, there was an article that allowed you to sync your IE Favorites with Live Mesh, but unfortunately I use Firefox and wanted to sync my bookmarks with Live Mesh for obvious reasons. Doing this in Firefox 3 is not as simple as it is in IE. We need to use a couple of tools to do this. Firefox 3 by default DOES NOT store the bookmarks in a bookmarks.html file but uses a database approach. So how do we enable Firefox to automatically export the bookmarks in bookmarks.html?

1. Export Firefox bookmarks as html.
2. Merge these with IE bookmarks.
3. Sync them with Mesh.

To export Firefox bookmarks as HTML:

In Firefox type about:config in the address bar, then search for: browser.bookmarks.autoExportHTML Now change the value to ‘True’ which is ‘False’ by default. Restart the browser and you will see the bookmarks.html file in your Profile folder. To locate your Profile folder:

Start –> Run –> %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\

Here the folder with some arbitrary text and .default at the end is your profile folder. Here the bookmarks.html file contains your bookmarks. Keep this folder open.

To merge Firefox bookmarks with IE:

We shall use a software – Bookmarks Bridge to achieve this. Open Bookmarks Bridge after installing it then:

1. In ‘Source Browsers’ delete everything other than Firefox.
2. If Firefox is not there, then: Settings –> Add –> Select Firefox.
3. Now here is the important step:
   • Same screen, down you will see ‘Location’.
   • Choose ‘Browse’ and navigate to your Firefox profile folder (the one that we left open).
   • Select the bookmarks.html file and OK.
   • Screen shot:

   

4. Once done, on the main screen, hit Merge…
5. To download Bookmarks Bridge:

download: Bookmarks Bridge () added: 21/07/2008 clicks: 23 description: Merging Browser bookmarks with each other.

To sync Favorites with Live Mesh:

1. Navigate to:
   • C:\Users\<username>\ (Windows Vista)
   • C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\ (Windows XP/2000)
2. Right click on the folder named – Favorites.
3. Select: ‘Add folder to your Live Mesh’.
4. Screen shot:

   

The only problem is that when ever you add a bookmark to Firefox you will have to manually Merge it with IE using Bookmarks Bridge, syncing with Live Mesh will happen automatically if you chosen so.

My Live Mesh folder where I have only synced my RSS feeds with my Mesh account, screen shot:

Happy Meshing

Ah! The iPhone, the device that has made people go bonkers. Keeping my thoughts on the device aside, one of the biggest complaints against the iPhone is the crippled bluetooth support it has. The fact that it cannot send files over bluetooth is considered as one of the major flaws for a cellular device in 2008. I too think so, I hate the fact that a ~22k (gray market) device does not allow me to share pictures I take from my phone to the other phone and vice-versa.

I was reading the newspaper today, Mumbai Mirror to be specific. The Business section carried an article - It’s ringing losses for the mobile content industry. The article says that the sales of mobile oriented content (wallpapers, ringtones, videos & songs) is worth ~500 crores. But they face losses as big as 250 crores due to content piracy. According to Mr. Savio D’Souza, secretary-general Indian Music Industry (IMI) trasnferring copyrighted content over bluetooth is illegal and this is the biggest source of revenue loss due to copyright infringement. He says that, “Mobile-chip piracy comes under provisions 51, 52A, 63, 65 & 65A and poeple who transfer songs & ringtones are liable for punishments under the same act.”

Mr. D’Souza said that his organization has started talks with cellphone manufacturers like Nokia “to adopt measures that block further sharing of copyrighted content on the handsets.” - A line that answers the million dollar question.

The article was about losses incurred due to piracy by cell-phone content & music industry but in turn answered a question that has baffled me for long. Apple is the biggest online retailer of music and it sure knows how it feels to be cheated of revenue due to piracy. It is a company that does not even allow installation of it’s software on non-Apple hardware, forget allowing sharing DRMed content freely!

I am pretty sure that not allowing users to freely transfer songs & other copyrighted material over bluetooth was the reason why Apple took such a step, but I guess for a company like Apple it makes sense. It has allowed syncing of the phone with iTunes because you will want to transfer your songs to your other devices.

Today morning I came across a thread on a forum where someone was able to access classified data on a PC. The guy who’s data was accessed was freaked out. Totally! It was more so his fault because he failed to take some basic and I mean really basic steps to make sure anyone & everyone does not have access to that data. Here are some tips to make sure people with even basic computing skills don’t get access to your data in your absence. What all should you take care of:

• Disable Recent Docs
• Folder Access
• Parental Control
• Disable Media Player History
• Clear Browser Content

Most important for Windows users - Use NTFS file system, if you are on Vista then you are on NTFS, if you are using XP make sure the data you want protect is on a NTFS partition.

1. Disable Recent Docs in the Start Menu, to do this:

1. Control Panel -> Taskbar & Start Menu
2. Choose the Start Menu Tab from top & then un-check the ‘Display list of  Recent files’
3. Screen shot:

2. Create Separate Accounts:

• Enable Parental Control.
• Deny Access.

This is a very basic step & I suggest everyone should do it, other than data protection it has other benefits too. Anyway, create separate Guest accounts or accounts with Standard (non-Administrator) rights. Give yourself the Administrator privileges and set a password for your account.

Parental Control:

The beauty of Vista is that it will allow you to set Parental Control over a certain account. So simply set Parental Controls for the new Standard (non-Administrator) account you created. Screen shot:

Deny Access:

Now navigate to the folder you want to deny access to and right click on it. Then:

Properties -> Security -> Advanced -> Edit ->  Add -> Enter the name to restrict -> Check Names -> Select -> OK -> Check ‘Deny’ on Full Control -> OK -> OK-> OK -> OK

Now when you right click to see the properties of this folder, go to Security you will see the name you recently denied access will be shown. When you click on the name you will find it has been denied complete access to this folder. Screen shot:

Now that these steps are taken, we shall go beyond this, let us Hide this folder. There are 2 levels of hiding a folder:

1. Normal hide.
2. System folder hide.

Normally people set the simple Hide attribute to the folder, but we shall make this is a System Folder to give it that extra bit of security as the prying usually don’t enable ‘Show System Folders’ option, they will only enable the ‘Show Hidden Files’ options and think they will now know all. To do this:

1. Rename the folder/file to without any spaces and NOT more than 255 characters
2. Start -> Run -> cmd -> Navigate to 1 directory above the folder you want to hide then sue the following command:

   attrib +s +h <folder name>

3. Now, go to Folder Options and select the ‘Hide Protected Operating System Files’, it is selected by default.

Wanna go more g33ky?

Let’s just create a new partition and hide the entire partition from My Computer. Boom! No one other than you will even know that there exists a partition! Pretty simple to do this, you will need a 3rd party tool, there are Registry ways of doing this, but let’s keep it simple.

Create a new partition. Then, Start -> Run -> regedit -> Navigate to:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer

In the right pane of Explorer, right click on a empty area and click New -> DWORD (32-bit) Value and type NoDrives and press Enter.

1. Right click on NoDrives and click Modify.
2. Type in the Value Data below in boldyou want to set as restricted and click OK.

A=1, B=2, C=4, D=8, E=16, F=32, G=64, H=128, I=256, J=512, K=1024, L=2048, M=4096, N=8192, O=16384, P=32768, Q=65536, R=131072, S=262144, T=524288, U=1048576, V=2097152, W=4194304, X=8388608, Y=16777216, Z=33554432, All drives=67108863

Courtesy: Vistax64 Forums

For XP users, you can download a software called Tweak UI and hide partitions using this tool.

That’s with regards to the drive. If you have set all this, you’re NOT done.

There are a few more things that need to be done. You will need to hide the history of Media players & Internet Browsers too. For Windows Media Player you will need to un-check 2 things:

1. History:
   • Options -> Privacy. Screen shot:
     
2. Add to Library.
   • Options -> Player. Scree shot:
   

Internet Browsers:

1. Clear your history regularly. If you are suing Firefox then you have the option to delete everything once you close the browser.
2. Also, disable auto-complete feature.

You might wanna check out these 2 articles by MS MVP Vishal Gupta:

1. All Kind of Restrictions for Windows 2000, XP, 2003 and Vista
2. The Best Method to Hide Files / Folders in Windows Without Using 3rd Party Utilities

This should save your arse on more than 1 occassion. Peace out homies!

Been some time since I wrote about any Live product. Been actually lazy, these things are getting so many features, every product is being updated pretty quickly. Anyway,  I recently got my Live Mesh account activated and damn you I love the interface. That’s not all, I am pretty optimistic of what Ray Ozzie has actually set out to achieve. Microsoft is behind in the race of ruling the cloud, but if they were to somehow integrate all their Live services with Windows then it is going to become a formidable force. The integration part is left for another post. Right now, Ray Ozzie’s baby and Microsoft’s online hope – Live Mesh!

This one is for my less-fortunate friends who missed out on this opportunity too.

The Mesh team a couple of days back announced that are open to doubling the number of people that get access to Live Mesh and I got in. Got my account activated pretty quickly and was greeted with the Devices screen. Man it looks so slick and the transition between devices is so smooth. I wish they can bring such smooth animations to Windows desktop. The default page is set on the Live Devices and you can see that you have around 5 GB of online space. Here is a screen shot of the Devices screen:

Here you can see the different types of devices:

1. Your PC
2. Live Desktop
3. Mobile Phone
4. Mac
5. Add A Device

Now let’s say you want to sync your desktop, so simply click on the ‘Add Device’ icon, look at the cool rotation animation then have a look at this screen shot:

It shows you that Mobile Phone & Mac support is Coming Soon. To add your XP or Vista desktop, you will need to download & install a client. Note that Vista 64bit has a different client. So download the client and install it. When I tried doing this something really depressing happened. Something that kinda turned me off. On a RTM Vista (non-SP1) you need to have UAC enabled. Have a look at this post if you want UAC to bug you less. Anyway, if you have Vista SP1 this can be avoided. The error message I ran into has been shown in the previous post. Once I got UAC enabled and installed the client you will see the Mesh icon in you taskbar, clicking which will show you a pop-up which has 3 tabs:

1. View Recent News.
2. View Devices.
3. View Recent Folder Activity.

Here is the pop-up windows showing you the devices, similarly you can see the news updates and the folder activities too. Screen shot:

After installation a folder named – Live Mesh Folder is created in your profile and has a shiny blue folder icon. You can drag-drop files into this folder and it will be magically synced and available online and on other devices too. Pretty cool, eh? Once you have added your desktop, the Live Mesh Devices page will now show that device name. Let’s say you click on the PC you just synced, this is what you get:

As you see under Storage it says Coming Soon, I have no clue what that is so, also under Options you have the choice of renaming the device or deleting it.

Let’s have a look at how to navigate in Mesh. The top has the bar very same as that in other Live services, in Mesh it has 3 tabs and the Search box. Screen shot:

The 3 options:

1. Desktop – Is your Live Mesh online desktop and trust me it absolutely looks & behaves like your Vista desktop.
2. Devices – We just saw this page.
3. News – Shows you updates about activity on your Mesh account.

Let’s go to our desktop and see what we have there. This is the screen that comes when you go to your desktop:

To the right of Devices is News. News, basically shows you the updates to your Mesh account, whether by you or by someone who you have given access to. Yes, you can add members to use this service. I shall be covering this with the Desktop capabilities of Mesh in subsequent posts. Mean while here is the News screen:

This is part 1, the next part will contain the working of the desktop feature of Mesh. So, enjoy!

I was talking to my friend Aditya at Vignetting Life, that I don’t exactly see myself shifting full time to the cloud anytime soon. But, but, but! I think that was the past. I guess I am gonna shift full time to the cloud pretty soon. Mesh is Live! Yay! The last time I was excited about some online technology being launched was when Skydrive was launched.

Liveside reported that US residents have access to Live Mesh which in simple terms means that the whole world has access, all you need to do is change the country settings to US as I have explained earlier in the i’m Initiative Now For non-US Live Users. So, we basically use the same trick, change the country settings to US and voila!

Live Mesh Tech Preview

This is going to be a multi-part post.

Anyways, I logged into Live Mesh and the friggin’ UI is damn cool! The animation looks so smooth. Silverlight FTW! I has a first look and was thoroughly impressed by it. They will soon be adding support for Macs & Cell phones, I thought they already had Cell support acivated but WTH! I downloaded the client to add my desktop and this is what happened. Made me go

Mesh RTM Error

Some more screen shots will follow here.

My friend showed me something that made me go WTF! Is this free? And he gleemingly said, yes! E-mail on the go is something most of want. It is handy. The phone is in the hand and so when the mail comes on the phone it becomes ‘handy’. Sorry for the crappy joke.

Anyways, Mobile service providers in India have Push E-mail facilities for their customers, some give it for free, while others charge a bomb. Needless to say, the services which aren’t widely used give it for free and the ones that are famous and most commonly used charge for it. There is also a table that shows a certain hack that might work for you to get emails forwarded to your phone and get your own mobilenumber@cellularprovided.com email id.

My friend has the option of receiving mails only for free, he does not have pay anything at all and apparently the service was activated on his number without his knowledge, he accidentally came across it. Here is the list of Mobile Operators providing this service and how you an get it on your phone. MobileMe$$ for Push mail, well you can now say, “I’ll pass.”

BPL:

• You will get an email id: mobilenumber@bplmobile.com
• Charges: 199/- per month. Unlimited amount of transfers.
• To activate this service:
  • For Postpaid: send A-Mail as an SMS to 50800
  • For Prepaid: send SUBMail as an SMS to 50505

IDEA Cellular:

• Your email id will be: mobilenumber@ideacellular.net.
• Charges: Free to receive, Rs. 3/- to send.
• The site does not carry any info on how to activate it.

Airtel:

• Call Airtel Customer Care to get the service activated. CC numbers.
• Download phone client from here.
• Login to your Airtel Easy Mail and integrate your mail.
• Charges:

	Plan 1	Plan 2
Monthly Rental	Rs. 299/-	Rs. 899/-
Data Limits	30MB	Unlimited
Additional Charges	10p/10KB	NA

Vodafone:

• To activate SMS ACT VM to 111
• Charges:
  • Prepaid:
    • Subscription charge: Rs 199 / month;
    • Usage charges: 10p / 10K.
  • Postpaid:

  Plan (Rs/Month)	Free Data (per Month)
  299	30MB
  499	100MB
  699	500MB
  899	1GB

Reliance:

• Handset should support J2ME and have a memory capacity of 32 KB.
• Download Rate Card, click here.
• CLient on phone required.

NOTE: Some of these services require you to install a client on your phone. Also, phones that support GPRS are usually the ones that support this service. none the less do check if your phone is supported.

You can try the following hack and see if you can also avail free emails forwarded as SMS to your phones, refer to this list (Courtesy: funsms.net)