Random Rants & Raves

I picked up this book to read on a flight and finished it in one sitting (including the taxi to the venue at my destination). This is a book about our previous Indian president Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam written by his personal secretary Mr. PM Nair.

The book is a light read filled with many incidents that show many facets of our most popular president so far. Dr. Kalam - a rocket scientist, no less - was a completely apolitical appointee to the President's post and has probably envisioned and done more for India than any of the crop of politicians we have or seem to have in the horizon.

Anecdotes about his meeting with the President of Pakistan and George and Laura Bush make interesting reading. He was a tech-savvy person who did not care about protocol when it came to his passion about India, honesty and knowledge. The book has many photos of the President in ways you couldn't think of - sitting on the floor of the stage at a panel discussion on journalism, playing the drums with Sivamani, flying a fighter aircraft (he's over 70!) and more.

Although the book does highlight him as the President we all loved and looked up to, it is fair in also showing him to be human - with human failings. One of the things that Dr. Kalam had a major problem with was time - he was extremely unpunctual and would make up meetings at odd hours of the day without giving a thought about the infrastructure requirements that the President of India needed when visiting places. I guess as a geek himself, he was used to working odd hours of the day!

This is a great book to pick up and read about Dr. Kalam. Many small things in the book reinforce the fact that after a very long time we actually had a visionary leading the country - albeit for a very short time. It is surely a pity that our country's politicians did not heed the pleas of the citizens to make him the President for at least one more term.

HTC has just released an upgrade for the HTC TyTn II phone that takes it up to Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional. If you have a original, unlocked HTC branded phone, you can head over to the HTC eClub and sign in to get the upgrade which weighs in at around 67 MB. Remember that the upgrade is shown only if you register the phone by using its serial number at the site. Which also means if you have an operator supplied phone (ATT Tilt, Orange, etc.) this upgrade will not work for you.

Windows Mobile 6.1 Pro has a few new features:

• Threaded SMS
• Improved battery and bandwidth usage with Direct Push on Exchange 2007 SP1
• Auto complete for Messaging
• Page Overview mode in Pocket IE
• Zoom Level instead of Text size in Pocket IE
• Phone book contact exchange over Bluetooth
• Support for System Center Mobile Device Manager
• HTC improvements for orientation rendering - although it still takes the same time, it feels faster since it uses a buffering mode

Unfortunately, this still doesn't have the video performance upgrade that everyone hoped it would have. But in any case, this is an important upgrade to get if you have a TyTn II.

A few posts back I made a comment about the excellent service I got from Dell for my notebook having international warranty since it was purchased in the USA. In that case it was a laptop adapter that got replaced the next day.

However, I now have to eat my words about the Dell service - especially their so called "Complete Cover International Warranty". My notebook suddenly decided that it will not use any of the video out ports anymore - VGA, DVI or S-Video. So I am unable to use the notebook to project using a projector or TV. I tried all the ports, and even went ahead and formatted the system and reinstalled the default drivers - all to no avail.

Finally, I called up the XPS tech support line and told them about the problem. They immediately told me that the motherboard would need replacement - however since India does not sell the model of notebook I have they are unwilling to ship the motherboard to me. I reminded them that I have an international complete cover warranty and therefore it shouldn't matter whether the country in which I currently am in sells the model or not - I need to have it supported as this is critical. After a lot of checking by the tech, she came back to me and said that there is no way that they can support it. I even gave them a few options - ship the motherboard to me and I'll replace it myself at my own risk or ship it to Dell India and have a XPS technician install it for me. I even said I don't care about the next-business day clause - even if it takes them a month to get the part, to do so and ship it so that at least I can use it a little later. None of this was acceptable to them and even though I paid extra for getting international support from Dell, it is of no use to me - and this is for a high end notebook that costs more the $3,500!

I'm sad to say I take back the good stuff I said about Dell support and keep this as a warning to others who might want to rely on international support for high end models around the world. They should have at least given a list of countries where there is full support and called it Limited international warranty instead doing this.

I've been busy traveling the last couple of weeks and will continue doing traveling the next few weeks as well. Meaning that my blog updates are going to be few and far between during this time - but yes, building in a lot of stuff that I will be posting about soon.

Also, an upgrade to the hosting server on which my blog resides caused a small outage of the blog content already existing and required a bit of mucking around to get it back up again. All should be fine now going ahead.