Another blog

My Friends

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 02:09 GMT

Over the last couple of years there has been a good amount of websites popping up called social networks like Linkedin,Facebook etc .All these are fabulous sites the only problem I see with them is that they are islands and your data is really locked in it.So I prefer , a distributed social networking like FOAF(Fried-of-a-Friend) or microformats like XFN to represent my social relationships where there is no central authority controlling the data and locking it.
So essentially I have listed my friends in the list below and the publicly available information about them.The list is in the order of ascending first names.
N.B. If you want to get yourself removed from the list below , please send me an email and I will remove you immediately.I respect your privacy and hence I have just pieced together your public information ONLY.

Pay as you Drive Car Insurance

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 02:12 GMT

I'm very excited that California is considering allowing Pay as you Drive Insurance .I strongly believe in consumption based metering :-)
Progressive Insurance has offered this in a few states, You can get more details @ http://www.progressive.com/myrate/
So the concept is that you have a GPS based device which records your speed/location/miles driven/time driven etc.

From my point of view there are 2 benefits.

Lower cost for infrequent drivers
It will force us to drive less and help the environment

My only biggest concern at this point is the privacy issues around it.I don't have a problem with they tracking speed etc because it will force us to not to speed etc but I thing recording the locations of where you are going and when you are going etc is too intrusive.
My hope is that Progressive respects our privacy and I'm pretty sure this concept will take off.Without the privacy issue addressed I feel that this will fail.
You can read more @ the paper http://www.brookings.edu/papers/2008/07_payd_bordoffnoel.aspx

Free Edutainment games for Kids

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 18:02 GMT

There are quite a few free Edutainment games for kids for K-12.Some of them are

These games are not only free as in Price but they are Free Software which meand everyone has access to source code of these games and we can learn /read the code and modify it .

IPKall a free incoming Phone number for your SIP/VOIP Phone

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 20:07 GMT

A lto of companies like Yahoo/GizmoProject charge you anywhere between $3-5 monthly for have a PSTN incoming number for your VOIP/SIP-Phone.
IPKall provides a free number based in Washitngton.I have been using them for a couple a months and till now I have not seen much problems.

Santa Clara County launches phone alert system for emergencies

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 03:07 GMT

An alert system , alerts their registrants about any calamity or emergency in your area by calling your cellphone number.Santa Clara county has finally launched this system.Most of the landlines are already registered in their system.
But they are missing cellphones and email addresses of residents.I would highly recommend Santa Clara county residents to enroll in this system.
You can read more about it @ http://www.mercurynews.com/topstories/ci_13447993?nclick_check=1 and to register your number please go to http://www.alertscc.com/

Digital signatures/Id

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 22:33 GMT

I learned quite a bit on digital signatures this weekend.I also generated a free email signing certificate from http://www.cacert.org .It is community driven non-profit organization running out of Australia.
After reading a lot and experimenting i finally stumbled upon this article of how to use it in Outlook 2007.Be sure to read about it @ http://wiki.cacert.org/EmailCertificates
Then I finally was able to send my first digitally signed email :-).
Then I thought of using it a lot but came to know that if you send any signed emails to a webmail accounts like Yahoo/Gmail/Hotmail etc the end user gets an attachment(smime.p7m) with a blank body line.Now to open this attachment you will need to download a viewer for it from http://www.cryptigo.com/p7mViewer/

Overall after spending about 12-14 hours reading about it and experimenting about it I feel that it is too difficult for average used to use Digital signatures.
The idea is great and we should use it but i believe the learning curve for people is going to be huge and it will take sometime before people actually start using it.

Finding the cheapest gas prices in your area

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 14:09 GMT

Gasbuddy.com is a website which allows individuals to update the price of gas for any gas stations.
This helps in knowing where the cheapest gas station in the area you are looking at.
Remember, that the data there is as best as the number of people updating it .So please consider updating the gas prices when you see it :-).Welcometo crowdsourcing.

gpsd as a gelocation provider for Firefox

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 04:30 GMT

As you know with Firefox 3.5 geolocation is in-build into the browser.However I was extremely uncomfortable with the fact that I have to use Google as the geolocation provider instead of the GPS which I have.I felt it was a little silly because GPS is more accurate then wifi based geolocation.And I was looking out for ways to integrate my gps with Firefox or for that matter any websites.
Let me give a brief use case of Geolcation .So if you are in a city while driving and you are looking for the nearest hotel of your favorite cuisine.So till now you would have to type in your location etc.But with geolocation , if you allow Firefox to give your location to a website you can get context sensistive searches.You can read more about geolocation in a browser @ http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/geolocation/

Now coming back to the original post that you want to use your own gps , to provide your location to firefox then recently someone has checked in a fix for it in firefox.So I anticipate for it to show up in 3.6.I will try out the nightly builds as Im extremely excited about this fix.

gpsd on Windows

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 04:16 GMT

Finally the port of gpsd is working on Windows.Yuo can read more about it @ http://home.arcor.de/ulf.lamping/gpsd/gpsd.html#mozTocId282581
This is a pretty important development because quite a few gps's only work on Windows and this allows you to stream nmea data to various Linux GPS software which have been ported on Windows.

Extracting OSM data with Osmosis

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 22:14 GMT

For those of you who might have played with OSM , might have always felt a need to download and view it on their laptop offline.
The files are typically at a contry level or a state level and most of them are pretty huge and memory hogging.
In any case if you feel a need to extract out a bounding box from a huge .osm file here is what you can do.

First download Osmosis from http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Osmosis#Downloading
Since it is java based it will pretty much run on all platforms where java will run.
Then download the state or country maps in osm format from OSM or from Cloudmate
The file format which we need to download the file will be something like .osm.bz2 like in my case it is california.osm.bz2
Once you download that file you need to unzip it using a command like bzip2 -d california.osm

Now say for example you want to only extract OSM data from a bounding box between Top Left Longitude -122.093566 / Top Left Latitude 37.39062 and Bottom Right Longitude -122.093566 / Top Right Latitude 37.39062 which is an Area of Sunnyvale and Mountain View, California you would give a command like

./osmosis --read-xml /mnt/officedesktop/maps/california.osm --bounding-box top=37.39062 left=-122.093566 right=-121.939929 bottom=37.318027 --write-xml svl.xml

The output of the command will be called svl.xml

This way you can extract out bounding boxes for areas of your interest and use it in applications like Gosmore