It’s been a week since I bought my Nokia Lumia 800 and I think I’ve got enough experience to review it. Rather than writing it in the technical perspective, I’m gonna keep this review as what I like and what I don’t like in this windows phone, so that I can write close to the truth.

Lumia 800 is the new Windows phone from Nokia, featuring the Windows 7.5 operating system – Mango. Apart from the Lumia 800, there are Lumia 710 and Lumia 900. I couldn’t see any drastic change in the processing power (all are featuring the 1.4 GHz processor). Anyway, if you really want the finer details before choosing your next windows phone from Lumia series, you could compare Lumia 710 vs Lumia 800 or Lumia 800 vs Lumia 900.

Let’s start with what I don’t like first so that I can close this review in a positive note.

Lumia 800 – the things that failed to impress me:

1. Sound - as a ‘phone’ this is a big letdown in Lumia 800. Even if I keep the volume to the maximum, the sound is not much audible. I have to be in a silent place to hear it clearly. Forget calling someone if you are in a noisy environment, you won’t hear what the other person is saying unless you have very sensitive ears. The speaker too isn’t that impressive.
2. Data Connection Issues - I have configured my Lumia 800 with Airtel 3G. But suddenly, one day it stopped using the data connection and always throwing an Error Code: 80072EFD. I left with not able to access my emails for a whole day until I figured out a solution (i.e. delete the current APN and create a new APN). But still, it scared me off in the first place.
3. Difficulties in transferring files other than Music, Photo and Video - Zune software did a good job in synchronizing the photos, music and videos between my phone and PC. But when I wanted to copy a CAB file from my PC to Phone, I was hitting the dead end. Zune didn’t sync the file and I couldn’t just copy the file to my phone as it was not showing up a storage drive in my PC when I connected it. I’m still not able to the copy the file I wanted and looking for workarounds like uploading it to my Gmail and download it from there.
4. The cover that guards the USB charging port - before connecting your phone to a charger, you need to open a little cover on the USB charger port. Believe me, its not such happy experience given that the phone’s battery drains a lot (considering my usage) and every time it irritates me to snap open the USB cover before connecting it to a charger. It might seem a like a little thing but it adds up everyday.
5. Internet Explorer - oh, come on! As a web developer,  I have grown hating IE to the core and I’m let alone with this only browser in Lumia. But I must say that it renders most of the modern web pages very nicely (yay! my home page looks good in my phone too!), but still the browsing experience isn’t smooth. It does supports tabbed browsing, but its not easy to open a new tab with your favorite page in it. The browser needs something like a speed dial to save us some time. I’m trying to install Opera mini, but I couldn’t find it in marketplace and due to the point #3 above, I haven’t figured out a way to copy the installer to my phone yet.
6. Not much apps that I need - yeah! there are hundreds of applications in the Zune marketplace. But I couldn’t find the application that I need or the services I use. When the time goes on, the marketplace will grow. But at this point of time, you have to compromise yourself.

Lumia 800 – the things that I like the most:

1. People hub & Personal hub - the one feature that beats me my android experience left and right. It’s the only place that I constantly check to see what my friends are up to. I can easily connect my Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Live accounts to my phone and see and post to all the social updates in one place. Totally love this feature.
2. Camera and Picture quality - Lumia 800 comes with 8MP camera. The picture quality is good and the camera application is very much user friendly. To take a picture, just open the camera application and then tap on the screen where you want the focus to be in and your picture is taken (no need to hard press any button that might introduce shake in the photo). Nice!
3. Performance - is real fast. The 1.4 GHz processor proves what its worth of (but as a side effect, the phone emits some considerable amount of heat, but you can’t help it right!?). Now the Angry Birds are much more angry and ferocious.
4. Multi-tasking - opening up several application and switching between them is simple and smooth. Just hold on the back button and you’ll be shown a list of applications that are currently open and you can choose from them by tapping on it.
5. The Metro UI - the new Metro UI surely gives a refreshing experience. Live tiles on the home screen, minimal UI elements everywhere – totally like it. Again, its just personal preference. You might have a different taste.
6. Nokia Drive & Nokia Maps - The phone comes with this free application that helps you to see the route map while driving (like a GPS device). Comes handy when you want to explore unknown places.
7. The on-screen keyboard and Auto suggestions - I have been using the Swipe keyboard in my Android phone that helped me to input words just by swiping a path. When I switched to Lumia 800, I was little worried about the keyboard performance. But then, now  I’m totally satisfied with Lumia’s keyboard. The auto suggestions were most of the time accurate and reduces my key input time very much.
8. SkyDrive and 25GB of free storage space - SkyDrive is the cloud storage system from Microsoft and as a Lumia user you are entitled to a free storage space of 25GB. Quite useful to backup important files.

Well, that said, Lumia 800 is a great response from the Microsoft to the smarphone market. I hope the Application marketplace picks up pace and soon host all my needed applications. But that’s not a show stopper to buy this phone. Worth the money.

Recently I happened to use Windows to do some cross browser testing (no prizes for guessing the browser). It’s  been a long time since I used Windows and Ubuntu has become my primary OS then. And, when I was a windows user, I never cared about its command prompt. Mainly because I never had anything to do in the command line.

But things have changed, thanks to Git. Now, the command line has become an inseparable tool in my dev life. Ubuntu has console which is quite effective to work with. But, Windows command prompt is never programmer-friendly.

For an example – have you ever tried to copy & paste text in command prompt? If you’d, you know its PITA. So, I was eagerly searching for an command prompt alternative just because of this one reason.

Thanks to Console2, I found one.

Here’s why I like this little tool:

1. Copying is now really simple: Shift + Left click and drag to select text and copy. You can even enable the option to auto copy when you select the text.
2. Pasting is dead simple – just middle click.
3. Support for tabs – you can have multiple console tabs inside single window.
4. Ability to set “startup directory” and configure shortcut keys.

Now this Console2 has completely replaced the Windows command prompt & Power shell. If you are in Windows, try this – you won’t regret.

I’m using Sublime Text 2 in my Ubuntu machine. But unlike Windows, I couldn’t just right click on any source file and say “Open with Sublime” (may be because I just copied the binaries to a folder so that the editor didn’t register itself to the OS). Because of this, whenever I want to edit a file using Sublime, I had to use the File > Open File dialog, which is not an ideal way to do.

Since most of the time I would be inside a terminal when I want to edit a file, I found a workaround for this problem – using the Unix alias w/ parameters.

In Unix, we can create shortcut names to any long commands so that it saves our precious time (which we can invest back in Facebooking!). For my issue, I also need to pass the file name to edit as a parameter to this shortcut alias. So, I needed to create a function.

Below is the code for this. I have placed this function definition in my .bashrc file so that it is available at my service whenever I open the terminal.

You need to replace the correct path per your installation location!

Reviews of the best unix hosting providers including information on their prices, uptime, support and features can be found at businesswebhostingplans.com.

You would have seen the context aware computing in your day-to-day life even if you are not already aware of it. For instance, when you rotate your smart phone/iPad, the screen organize itself to the new orientation. This is a simple example of what context aware computing is trying to address – that is responding to the environment changes, awareness of the context in which the system is running.

The application of context aware computing goes much deeper – automatic lighting solutions, GPS navigation systems and a lot more. This must be a hottest field of research right now considering the increased focus on the user experience these days.

Recently, Mads Soegaard from interaction design contacted me to give my blog readers a sneak preview of one of their upcoming chapter on Context aware computing (ha! now you get why I am writing this!!).

Thanks Mads, for sharing this with us!

If you are interested in context aware computing, or even just curious about it, you should read this sneak preview. You’ll like it for sure.

And don’t forget to share this with your circle.

Today I got stuck on what could be a simple problem to long time Ubuntu users – making changes that require root access.

I never faced this problem until today because my Ubuntu user account/password was enough to make system level changes as it was treated like admin user by Ubuntu.

Today I tried to modify the directory /var/www which is owned by the root. Since the folder is not owned by me, Ubuntu asked me to enter the root password and I typed my Ubuntu user password. It didn’t work, obviously.

Then I tried to escalate the permission level to root, so I tried the command: su root and gave my Ubuntu user password. This also failed.

After googling sometime, I found out that,

1. Ubuntu does not allow you to directly login as root.
2. The first Ubuntu account you create is treated like admin account.

So, in order to escalate yourself as a root user in Ubuntu terminal, I had to give the command: “sudo su -” (without quotes) and then enter my current Ubuntu user password. After that, I was escalated to root user and then able to modify the /var/www folder as I wanted. Piece of cake!!

At any given point of time, you can find at least 4 windows/editors opened on my screen. As a web developer, it is not unusual for me to work on several files at the same time. So, to reduce the Alt+Tabbing, I try to have most of the windows visible on the screen. Following is a list of tools that help me to do so.

1. Two monitor setup

Along with my laptop screen, I have setup one additional monitor. This gives me lots of screen space which I can make use of. In fact, I would like to setup one more monitor too, but the limitation of laptop graphics card holding me back.

2. Grid plugin in Compiz

I’m running Ubuntu on my laptop. I have installed Compiz which provides several plugins to fine tune the Ubuntu UI. Grid is one such plugin for re-sizing windows.

Once enabled, you can press Ctrl + Alt + <KeyPad 4> to re-size the current window and fit it on the left side of the screen. You can repeatedly press the same key combo to switch between different window sizes. There are other keyboard shortcuts too which positions the current window in different directions.

Unfortunately, after upgrading to Ubuntu 11.10, the Grid plugin does not work correctly. There’s a bug raised for this and hopefully it’ll be fixed and the world will come to an order.

3. Terminator

Terminator lets me to run multiple terminals inside a single window. Initially it opens with a single terminal window. Then, I could split up that window either horizontally or vertically to get additional terminals. I can go further and split them again until I get the number of terminal I want. Pretty neat!

You can download Terminator from the Ubuntu Software center.

4. Eclipse split editors

Fortunately, Eclipse comes with a built-in support for having two editors side-by-side. Just drag the editor until it sits on its own space and you’re all set.

Now the only things that concerns me is the default file manager in Ubuntu. I do not feel the Nautilus file manager is that effective. For instance, I couldn’t copy the current path name or split the screens to have two folders opened at the same time.

I’m still looking for a workaround for this. Would appreciate if you are using any better file manager than Nautilus, please leave a comment!

Edit: Nautilus already does both the things. Thanks to Leandro Facchinetti for the awesome tip (in the comments section)!

It seems like the Chrome browser in Ubuntu has some issues in displaying Tamil fonts. I guess, other Indian languages also might be having the same issue. The weirdest thing is Firefox was displaying the Tamil content properly.

So, after searching through the Chromium group for a while, found the fix for this issue.

To fix Tamil font in Ubuntu Chrome

1. Open Terminal
2. Go to the folder: cd /usr/share/fonts/truetype/freefont
3. Delete FreeSerif.ttf: sudo rm FreeSerif.ttf
4. Delete FreeSans.ttf: sudo rm FreeSans.ttf
5. Close and re-open the browser.

The Tamil font should be displayed properly now.

I’m not a power user of Twitter. I don’t tweet much and according to Tweetdeck, I have an average of 1.75 tweets/day. But still, I read a lot from the people I follow in Twitter.

Based of my usage pattern, I find it much much effective not to use any native twitter clients. Instead, Opera Mini + Twitter Mobile site serves as a killer twitter client for my android mobile.

Here’s why:

Unicode font support

First and foremost, I can enable the Regional font support in my Opera mini browser and can read the tweets that are not written in English. This is a BIG plus and one of the main reason I don’t want to switch to a native client (Until there’s a built in support for Unicode fonts in android).

Always lists the latest tweets first

Whenever I open the twitter’s mobile site, it lists the latest tweets on top. During day time, I check the tweets may be say every 2 hours and the site always lists the tweets that are fresh. If and only if I’m interested in what my friends said in the past, I could scroll down and see their tweets.

But this is not the case with native twitter apps which lists the tweets from where you left it in your last session. I had to manually scroll to the top while unnecessarily downloading all the tweets from the web, thus increasing my data usage.

I searched for any settings to show the latest tweets first, but couldn’t find it in official Twitter client. Not sure about other apps, though.

The UI nightmare

I have a small screen Android mobile (Samsung). So, when I try to tweet something from the Twitter app, the split up of the UI space taken up different elements of the screen is (ha! you think it is easy to take screenshot in Android!?) :

1. The Android keyboard – 60%
2. Tweet and Cancel button bar – 10%
3. User image and user name panel – 10% (seriously, why do I need this!? Don’t I know I’m the one who’s tweeting!?)
4. The tweet textbox – 10%
5. Photo and location icons panel – 10%

Thus leaving only 10% of UI space to the text I’m typing and making it hard to read. Even worse, it always shows the first line of the tweet and never scrolls to show the second line.

Never the case with the mobile site where the tweet textbox gets 40% of UI space.

And, that’s the reason why I don’t care about any new Twitter interface changes and still love the simple and effective Twitter mobile site.

What do you think?

Recently I got hold of an empty Rackspace server in which we have installed Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal version. My next step was to setup the LAMP stack in that server to run our PHP site.

First I tried to install XAMPP for Linux. But unfortunately, it failed because XAMPP only supports 32 bit operating system and ours was 64. I didn’t want to spend much time on fixing that issue, so I moved to setup the LAMP stack by other means.

Here’s what I did (after googling/referring a lot):

1.Install lamp-server

1. sudo apt-get install tasksel [installs the tasksel that helps you to install multiple packages as a single task]
2. sudo tasksel install lamp-server [it will install the lamp stack in location /etc/]
3. http://yourdomain.com should work now.

2. Configure PHP Curl module

1. sudo apt-get install php5-curl [downloads and installs curl module]
2. sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart [restarts server for the changes to take effect]

3. Install phpmyadmin

1. sudo apt-get update [updates the packages repository. When I first tried to install phpmyadmin without updating, it complained that phpmyadmin isn't found.]
2. sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin [will trigger a installation wizard]
3. Choose apache2 for the server configuration and choose no for database configuration (since we have already installed database).
4. sudo cp /etc/phpmyadmin/apache.conf /etc/apache2/conf.d [copies the server configuration so that it is accessible via web]
5. sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
6. http://yourdomain.com/phpmyadmin should work now.

Last week, I attended the x.commerce conference - Innovate - where eBay launched its new platform for merchants and developers. I have already covered(or tried to cover) the event as it happens. In this post, I’m summarizing my key learning from the conference.

Remove the e from e-commerce

First of all, the whole point of the new x.commerce platform is to remove the e from the e-commerce.

The two separate worlds of online and offline commerce are increasingly blending together. The growing trend is that we no longer differentiate online buying and offline buying. As an end user, we want to buy the item. It doesn’t matter how we are buying it.

By launching its new platform, eBay provides the ability to developers to come up with innovative apps that combines both online and offline experience and gives a streamlined buying experience to the end users.

The x.commerce developer package is already available for download and it has all the necessary code sample, SDKs to start with.

Magento is the wordpress of Merchants

Magento, the eCommerce platform, was recently acquired by eBay. Innovate emphasized the role Magento plays in commerce world. Magento helps the merchants to setup a online storefront easily. Additionally, it has lots of features that makes merchants life simpler: for example, the integration with Adobe lets the merchant to see the detailed analytics data of their business, and one click upload to eBay and other major marketplaces.

There’s a huge market for developers in making Magento Plug-ins. Since, x.commerce will definitely gain some traction from the merchants around the world, it creates lots of opportunities for developers to get some more business.

PayPal Access – Identity Provider

If developers started using x.commerce and develop custom storefronts on top of Fabric, the common requirement they might have is to manage users. Every store website needs the user registration/login and then collect bank/credit card information from users.

If PayPal has already solved the same problem, then why not open it to the world!? With PayPal Access, developers can let their users to login with their PayPal account. No need to create a separate user account for each and every store websites out there. Its like the OpenID for commerce.

Finally,

The launch of x.commerce platform is going to open up huge opportunities for merchants and developers around the world which might lead to innovative applications that benefits the end users.