Author: Ronak Gandhi

I'm a software developer, who is also passionate about driving, traveling, automobiles, photography, computers and games. TT (Ping Pong as some people say) is the latest entry to my list of hobbies. I'm slowly getting better, but not there yet.

Bajaj Allianz Customer Care – Thumbs Down

Bajaj Allianz Insurance company is arguably the best in industry when it comes to customer friendliness and ease of getting/renewing an Insurance. However I became victim of their buggy online renewal and their ill-equipped, ill-trained customer care executives.

It all started the day I recieved an email from Bajaj Allianz notifying me that my two-wheeler insurance is due renewal in a months time. That’s good, I have 30 days to get my insurance renewed before it expires. Never did I know that I’d be making calls to various people to get the task done on the expiry day.

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The Samsung “bada” OS Revolution

Makani Gadzair is a smart-phone apps developer.  I found his article very interesting, so posting it here.

[…] Misconceptions of the Samsung Bada platform

The Samsung Bada Revolution

I’ve been reading some news articles by people that don’t really seem to know what they are talking about, by making statements such as:

“Bada, on the other hand, is looking shaky. After an overblown launch at the end of 2009, there’s still only one handset available that runs it — the Samsung S8500 Wave. Still, as it’s been born in-house, the company is rather less likely to unceremoniously dump it in the same way it has Symbian.” – Samsung dumps Symbian

For an article dated October 1st, this guy really doesn’t have its’ facts right.

Firstly, the Bada platform is already launched on two new phones, the Wave 2 and Wave 2 Pro in certain countries and more countries coming soon. They are also launching a third device this month called the Wave 723. In reality, the Bada platform is actually a remarkable success for Samsung. It really is stunning, considering the competition they faced with existing operating systems, including iOS, Android, Symbian, Blackberry and Windows Mobile. Yet they managed to get a million sales in the first 4 weeks, and already at 10 million app downloads. […]

Read complete article here.

God’s Own State – Wayanad, Kerala

We had been waiting to go to Kerala sometime but kept postponing due to some or the other reason. A colleague of mine visited Wayanad in second week of August and showed me the photos. I was just out of words seeing the atmosphere there and decided to head to Wayanad the next weekend.

I had only 3 days before the trip for booking the accommodation. Checked with few resorts but all were running full on the weekend of 21st-22nd. So I moved to hotels; Green Gates looked like a decent hotel in Kalpetta with good reviews on internet as well as here on Team-BHP. Checked with them and booked a deluxe room for 2K per night for two nights (plan was to leave Bangalore Friday morning and come back Sunday evening). More on the hotel later. Continue reading “God’s Own State – Wayanad, Kerala”

2 Amazing Applications You Must Have For Ubuntu

There are zillions of must-have-apps-for-ubuntu kinda blogs.  Those are very useful when you are new to Ubuntu and looking for the best way to get something done.  Here I’m going to talk about two Ubuntu applications which I find are amazing and haven’t been mentioned by most of those blogs.

  • Ubuntu Tweak
  • Shutter

So here we go.

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Refrain From Using Rupee Font For New Rupee Symbol

New Rupee Symbol

I saw this news article in today’s Times of India and was surprised to see such an article in a national daily.  This company Foradian Technologies is mis-leading people by coming up with a font for the new Rupee Symbol. They have designed a font that can represent the symbol (`) as the Rupee symbol.  That’s not how a currency symbol should be represented.  It should be a Unicode symbol and should get approved by Unicode Consortium first.  Dollar ($), Euro (€), Yen (¥), Pound (£) are all Unicode characters and not just fonts. This company –  Foradian Technologies – is simply trying to gain some mileage of this hype created around the new Rupee Symbol.  This is just a marketing gimmick to get the company in lime-light.

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How To Setup Thunderbird + Lightning + DavMail On Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx)

As the title suggests, I’m going to take you through exact steps on how to setup Thunderbird + Lightning + DavMail on Ubuntu 10.04 for your corporate email and calendaring (both hosted on Microsoft Exchange server) needs. Let’s save the debate on why did I chose this particular combo only for some other day. So let’s get started.

Thunderbird doesn’t come pre-installed with Ubuntu 10.04, so we will need to install Thunderbird first. We will be using the Synaptic Package Manager and the aptitude utility that comes with Ubuntu for all the installations. When I am writing this, the latest versions for Thunderbird, Lightning and DavMail are 3.1, 1.0b2 and 3.6.6-1032 respectively.

Setup Thunderbird

Install Thunderbird

Open the Synaptic Package Manager from System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager.

System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager

Search for “thunderbird”, select the entry “thunderbird”, right click and mark it for installation. Apply the changes.

For those who are more comfortable with text commands, fire up a Terminal from Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal and install Thunderbird using the apt-get utility.

$ sudo apt-get install thunderbird

A shortcut will be created for you in Applications -> Internet -> Thunderbird. You can either launch Thunderbird from there or just use the Terminal command “thunderbird”. Go ahead and launch Thunderbird.

Now we will setup the mail account.

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