Mind over Matters: Rumbles of my mind.. Echo in this blog..

Expedia is starting its indian operations at expedia.co.in. This should be very interesting and very useful. I have heard many people say that expedia has been very useful in comparing and booking flight tickets and hotels. Hopefully, expedia's indian website should also be able to offer a comprehensive search suite and hopefully a better one when compared to sites like makemytrip or yatra. Today i also came across a new indian site called flightraja . You can not only book hotels, air tickets or rent cars, but it also helps you book bus tickets from multiple bus service operators. Finally, the online travel market has begun to see some good and quality competition in India. Booking tickets online has never been more easier for Indian travellers and you can finally look forward to saying good bye to long queues at the reservation counter. 

On a related note, hopefully, irctc(online train reservation) will take a note of this, and try to improve the quality of website in a number of areas such as usability of website, faster load times, prevent java exceptions being thrown in the website, time-outs while making payment etc..

I recently installed ubuntu on a desktop pc in office. Since i need to access the internet through a proxy, i needed to make sure that apt-get was configured to access the proxy server. After googling aroung for a bit, i came across the configuration for using a proxy server for apt-get.

1) Edit /etc/apt/apt.conf using a text editor.

sudo vi /etc/apt/apt.conf

2) Enter the following text

ACQUIRE {
http::proxy "http://userid:password@proxy-ip:port-number/"
} 
 
If you dont use an user id/password to access the internet, simply use http://proxy-ip:port-number
Then save the file and do the following
sudo apt-get update
Now, we should be all set.. Make sure that you have selected the appropriate repositories  to install/
upgrade software
Similarly, we would need to configure the proxy for wget too.
1) sudo gedit /etc/wgetrc
2) In the following lines
 
# You can set the default proxies for Wget to use for http and ftp.
# They will override the value in the environment.
#http_proxy = http://hostname:portno/
#ftp_proxy =http://hostname:portno/
# If you do not want to use proxy at all, set this to off.
#use_proxy = on
Uncomment the http_proxy and ftp_proxy lines and put the proxy server hostname and ip address there. 
Also, make sure to uncomment the use_proxy line.
3) In your .bashrc file (assuming you are using bash shell) set the http_proxy and ftp_proxy variables
export http_proxy = http://hostname:portno/
export ftp_proxy = http://hostname:portno/
Now you should be all set to install updates or new software! 
 

 

 

Definetely not spam! Atleast i tried it and its true.. Amazing.. start of a different era in internet telephony. The new web 2.0 site on the block called ibibo (which publicizes itself with a "balti" a.k.a bucket ) has all of the usual features that most of the websites these days offer.. friends network, blogging, photo sharing, q&a, polls etc. etc. etc.. yaawn.. Or so i thought when i first visited this site. 

But then, when i was going through the features, there was a small link in the page which said "call me". Maybe it was the "poke" kind of feature offered by facebook.. Or some amazing web based application like skype where you could call from computer to computer.. No, but i was wrong.. After a bit of mucking around i found out that i could actually talk to ANY person's phone in India through my cell phone. I need to enter my cell phone number and it sends me a confirmation SMS . The other person whom i need to connect to also needs to be subscribed to the service (which means he/she also has to be a member of ibibo.com)

Then, whenever i visit their profile, i can click their "call me" icon and there is a software that connects my phone with his/her's. Amazing. No STD/local call hassles. There is a catch here though. Only 10 free minutes a month. I suppose you would have to pay to use this service after that.. I am not sure where they found the legal loop hole to offer this service for free.. This i believe is a really cool service and i am sure other "friend sharing, web 2.0 community" websites will soon begin to have this (atleast for Indian audience). And as competition increases, the consumer is going to be the final winner. The free minutes can only go up from here.

The only negative point: I still need my cell phone! It would have been nice if the widget actually allowed me to speak to the other person's cell phone from the computer itself.. That way i dont need to find out where i left my stupid little cell phone and go running to it when it starts ringing.

There is an article on wired which tells us the evolution and history of the iphone and the way it has changed the network dynamics of the cellular phone industry (atleast in the US). The story has a very interesting read. For example, i didnt know that Apple had already partnered with Motorla earlier and came up with a dud phone called ROKR (the MotoROKR which i think is very different from what the  MOTO ROKR advertisement in which abhishek bachchan stars in.)

 Earlier, the cell phone networks dictated what kind of phones should come out and since they saw the network as a precious resource, they generally were satisfied by dishing out low cost mobile phones with long term subscriptions which kept revenue coming in for the companies and also the consumers happy. (So unlike India where gadgets are independent from the service providers.. But hey that didnt offer any advantage here.. still no 3G )
 

Here is the complete story 

In India, high end cell phones are seen as the "in-thing" though, the mass market lies in low end cell phones. Hence, even though you have a nokia N-72 which has a dual camera and you can do a video conferencing with it, you really cannot do much with all those "extra" features that it has to offer. Simply because the service provider that you have doesnt support it. Heck, i sometimes even cant make a call to a number of a different service provider because the network is too congested! 

There is news that the mobile phone projector has arrived. We will be able to project stuff from our cell phones and watch it big screen. As of now, the projector has a brightness of around 8-10 lumens, and is capable of displaying an image of up to 50in, though the folks there insist that with perfect lighting, the image display can be upto 60 in. Amazing. 

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/153237/mobile-phone-projectors-will-launch-this-year.html 

IMO, this is just a starting step. The implications of this could be enormous. Even though, right now, the article says that movie watching may not be possible (even though you can see up to 2 hours of content with a normal cell phone battery), things are surely bound to improve in the future. Given that the cell phone memory sizes have been increasing tremendously and you can store movies in them, you can take your cell phone along with you for a camping trip among the hills and when you are bored watch a movie with your friends by projecting the movie on to a hill nearby. (Though i am sure you would have a dozen more interesting things to do in a camping trip.)

Also, this camera may not be limited to cell phones. In future, you could also attach them to a usb drive or maybe something like an ipod and watch your movies from there too.Infact, if this projector was some sort of a USB device or bluetooth enabled, you can actually connect it to virtually any memory storage device and project them on to a screen anywhere..

And hey, given that most of the cell phones have cameras these days, you could actually visually watch a person talking to you by projecting his image which is recorded by his cell phone camera  on to a screen. This would also help creating virtual team meetings more realistic!

I have been working with javascript for sometime now.One of the many little useful utility things that i came across in javascript is the conversion of a number that is given to us in string format to an integer format. Similar to java's Integer.parseInt, javascript has a parseInt function which allows you to convert a string to an integer representation. Its syntax goes something like:

var intValue = parseInt(string[, radix]);
Where the radix represents the radix of the mentioned string.
So, for example, the following
parseInt("F", 16); 
returns 15.
If the given argument to the function is not a valid number,the very famous and 
troublesome NaN or zero is returned.
There is also a parseFloat function which returns the float value of the input 
string. The syntax is

parseFloat(string)
 Note that there is no radix argument for this function. 
 

Happened to spend last weekend in karwar and gokarna.. Had a good time at the beaches there.. Here are some good pics.

A very funny clipping i saw in youtube about outsourcing to India. Its taken from one of the Simpson's episode called "Kiss kiss bang bangalore". Frankly, its been a long time since i watched an episode of simpsons on tv. So, this should be a good hilarious watching experience for those who haven't caught this episode on TV earlier.

Its been a damp rainy day today.. And i had set my alarm to wake me up at 7:30 AM! God.. What an unearthy time me.. Who would ever want to wake up at a time like that? For God's sake.. Its midnight... So, i woke myself up at 7:45. Hmph.. Managed to get to office in the drizzling rain and haphazard traffic. (Maybe i should have woken up at 7:30 instead and beat the traffic.. and maybe the rain too)

By the time i reached the conference, the first session was over for a good part.. Here are the highlights of what i managed to gather from the rest of the day's proceedings.

Building a web 2.0 venture  

This was given by Rohit, one of the co-founders of Tech Tribe. He was doing a talk about web 2.0 startups and what start ups these days needed to do. One word - INNOVATE. He also gave some interesting views about tech tribe, how it managed to build a good online community and some of the methodologies he followed. Some interesting points

- He had his dev. team in USA but  the target market was India.
- The place he hosted his website made a difference. For example he could achieve a gain of around 1.5 seconds by choosing to host in new jersy when compared to sfbay.
- Development teams needed to gel together and perform as a unit to actually produce something really good and innovative.

Expanding the reach of SOA and BPM

Given by Subbu Gopuraju from Infosys, it was a very interesting topic. I guess it's just the nature of Infosys or something with me, but it seemed to me that the entire presentation was completely filled with technical jargons. Made the presentation a bit too tedious.

Web 2.0 in SOA

  - Enhanced interaction models with RIA as service consumer.
  - RSS/ATOM as client - common aggregation mechanism.
  - supports occasionallly connected/disconnected devices.

Portals in Ajax

    - Javascript update portal stuff.
    - Content from multiple sites and RSS/ atom feeds

Ajax with SOA standards like WSRP

    - Web 2.0 with SOA -> Moving mashups up the value chain. For example sites like Mappr, AllConsuming.net etc.

Social computing for the enterprise

This was given by Ravi Pinto, Manager at BEA systems. He reflected what most of the other participants agreed to in this conference. Social networking is the in thing. People define what they want to see. Wikipedia has been one of the greatest success stories because of "WE" in it rather than an a single editor doing the input. User generated content has been getting more famous (hence since like digg getting more popular) than sites like new york times or wall street journal. One of the biggest consumers of these technical applications were companies in the financial and in the banking sectors.

Building scalable and Resilient Infrastructure for Web Applications 

Given by Jayabalan, CTO of Netlogic , he talked about what kind of infrastructural set up needed to be done for a good robust and resilient server infra structure.

The objective of a content provider is to provide reliable, scalable, robust, secure and good performing content.
The functional elements (Application infrastructure and IT infrastructure) remains the same for web 1.0 and 2.0 applications.

The recommended setup is to have resiliency built upon all layers of the IT infrastructure. One needs to incorporate security, acceleration for each storage layer and each layer should be able to scale independently.

Some of the performance optimization techniques are compression, TCP multiplexing, TCP optimization, TCP buffering and caching. Other factors include proximity to content delivery, load balancing, URL/content/cookie switching, content modification, SSH offloading, surge protection.

LUNCH

Definetely much better than yesterday. Lot more variety and lesser crowd. 

Web 2.0 and communities 

This was given by Raghunath Thali, one of the Eco directors at SAP.

The trends shaping business

- Powerful customers
- Empower workforce
- Intensified competition
- Increased risk
- Disruptive technologies.

The work style right now is collaborative and content driven. Collaborative and information driven processes will become the main workstyle. Innovation is more partnered in the market. People try to outsource portions of the project to experts who can do that portion well and make the project a success as a whole. A  web 2.0 platform offers an architecture of participation, collaboration and innovation.

Community 2.0 -> Each user generates structured and unstructured content and dynamic interaction. It may be done in any form. Either from his laptop/desktop/palmtop or even his mobile.

Architecture Patterns and Models for the new Internet

 Given by Rajesh Bhaskar, Architect, HCL, he started with four dimensions of enterprise architecture - Business, Application, Technology and Data. There has been a continuous evolution of technologies.

For example in the browser side, IE/Firefox which are more conventional browsers now have a competitor like Flock which is a web 2.0 based browser.

The way news has been presented on the Internet has also undergone change. Sites like NYT, WSJ are becoming less popular to blogging sites and digg. Mashups are the in-thing.

With web 2.0, the control has been passed from the content authors to end users.

The network has acted as a platform for web 2.0 applications.

The capital and funding decisions have also been made easier given that the development time for web 2.0 applications has become much smaller and ease of which it is trying to make user bases.

Why do we need an architecture for web 2.0?

  - Manage explosive growth in community
  - Leverage best practices
  - Unlock value for the enterprise
  - Make good modularized reusable code
  - Implement an agile business model.
  - Benefit from architecture as an application.

Web 2.0 architecture life cycle could be something like : Define -> design -> Develop -> Deploy -> Govern. Quite some what similar to enterprise application development.

Top 5 challenges that we face today are:

  - Harnessing collective intelligence
  - Ownership rights for online content
  - Building network effectively
  - Security
  - Moving to enterprise

Extending the power of Application Integration using SOA and RSS

Solution:

  - Elimination of redundancy
  - Development of process oriented value added services and increase of reuse of services using SOA

Highlights of the solution

  - Support for data feeds
  - Integration framework
  - Single window portal interfaces
  - Service oriented
  - Data model enabled
  - Ontology supported
 

Innovation of solution

   - Usage of RSS for application integration
   - Rich data models and meta data repository

Advantages

  - Seamless integration of application
  - Support of heterogeneous applications
  - Deployable across multiple verticals

Scaling web 2.0 applications with open source software

The presenter was Varun Singh, CTO of web 18. This presentation was excellent and he gave a lot of good tips on how to develop a very good web 2.0 application completely using open source technologies.

Demands of web 2.0 application

Quick response times
Bandwidth intensive
Database intensive
Storage intensive

Scalability heads:

- Web server
- Storage
- Application
- Databases

Why open source?

Free, reliable, modifiable, lower level diagnostics, professional support available, commercial  + OS world is also getting along these days.

There were also a lot of good tips given on scaling web 2.0 applications on the server side configuration, data base being used, load balancers being used, storage solutions being used and programming languages to be used.

4 Quantum States of Ajax

This was given by Manas of TIBCO software. He started off by giving an introduction to what Ajax was and followed up with Ajax basics. The development strategies to be used while developing web 2.0 applications were to use

- Enriched HTML Pages

- "Client/SOA"
      - Object with JS apps
      - Communication with services.

Quantum States

- Ajax - All about communication
- DHTML Widgets - Enabled with Async. communcation
- Multi widget libraries - Shared by underlying services
- RIA frameworks - Common GUI, perform data communication and ability to visibly author apps.

There was also a brief demo of TIBCO's  Ajax framework.

Future of e-commerce  

Given by Darpan, CTO e-commerce of Indiatimes, he talked about problems facing growth of ecommerce in india.

Some of the problems mentioned were delays in shipment, product quality, manufacturer warranty, missing parts and more importantly little or no communication between the vendor and the client.

Some of the proposed improvements were technology automation, better integration with vendors, no questions asked return policies and differentation on pricing.

There needs to be a shift in focus and build relationship with customers rather than just sell products and services.

Some of the opportunities to be explored were

- Assisted e-commerce - Affiliates at various places in India forming communities and selling products
- Human filters for finding products at better prices
- Geek squad for servicing the market
- A/B testing (which type of sites work best for a given target population)

The future of e-commerce leads to specialized content vendors where different vendors sell specific products.

The speaker finished off by indicating where Indiatimes tries to provide service for these kind of vendors and sellers.

Enterprise 2.0

This was given by Guneet Bedi from Oracle. The talk focussed about how web 2.0 could be used in the enterprise for better content management and collaboration. He mostly discussed about what Oracle was doing within the company and what kind of frameworks/technologies were being used to build the next generation enterprise 2.0 application. The application mainly focuses on integrating all activities involved for an employee in a single page and means of better interaction with colleagues on the web.

Lastly, there was a "power session" being held , where the delegates could give a speech on anything they liked. But the rain had stopped by then and i rushed back to home safely.

WebInnovation is the name of the two day conference that is being held in bangalore today and tomorrow at the Grand Ashok hotel. It is supposed to be a web 2.0 conference where different companies come and talk about the latest web technologies that they are coming up with.

 The conference registration had already begun when we reached the place at around 8:45 am. It was a good turn out at that time considering that it was a cold lazy tuesday morning. We had to stand in a long queue to get our registrations done. (There was no online payment for the conference and the credit card machine was not working when we went to pay the money.. hmmm). By the time we had our registrations done and went inside the conference hall, the opening key note session had already started and there was a briefing going on about what to expect about the conference and what the conference was all about. Some cool facts were stated over here.. More than half the crowd present (more than 700) were non-bangaloreans and there were also people who had come out of India to attend this conference.

Forenoon Session
 

There was a panel discussion to start up with. Five dignitaries were present on the stage and each one of them had to define in their own terms what web 2.0 was. Considering that all five of them were highly placed in their own companies, each one of them managed to let out their own lengthy explanations of web 2.0. There were some questions asked in this short panel discussion as to what the revenue model of most web 2.0 companies was and how some of the more successful companies were making money from web 2.0 applications. (Amazon was quoted as a long time winner from the web 2.0 model.)

Some other interesting points mentioned over here is that, the online advertising market in India was (understandably) quite low.  Singapore was one of the major Asian economies to have good online advertising revenue. The broadband penetration in India was also pretty low which was preventing from creating strong online communities.

Web 2.0 Principles
------------------- 

This was given by Jaspreet, Country Manager, MSN India. Some of tghe web 2.0 characteristics that he mentioned was:

- user generated content v/s published content
- Contextual data
- Social networking
- interactive and personalized applications
- Ad funded business model

Some of the points that he mentioned was that even though India continued to be a growing market and there was a large consumer consumption boom, the present online advertising market is pretty pathetic. The global players would continue to do well in services whereas the local players would win in content.(because of the local knowledge and language barriers). He also mentioned an interesting thing that local search would fail in India because, local search is done differently over here (pan shops, road side enquires) as opposed to online queries in westernized world.

The mobile market was a super important one as there is a large potential waiting to be tapped over there. But one had yet to come up with a good killer application for that.

There was still al LOT of scope for online market in India and broad band penetration. The next big thing on web will be advertsing.

 Web 2.i

 The next presentation to take place was from Mohit, Times Internet. He gave a good and brief presentation on how the internet was going to evolve in future in India. There would be more "personalzied" web pages and that mobile was the next "IN" thing to take a look at.

Rich Internet Applications

This was given by Naresh Gupta from Adobe. He talked about the latest trends on the online web space.

- The customer expectations from a web site has changed. He now expects more dynamic and interesting content.
- Explosion in digital content. There is personal publishing and multiple devices.
- The user experience has to be same in multiple devices that the customer uses. (laptop, desktop, mobiles).

He also gave a brief overview of how Adobe has been trying to keep up with the technology advancements by enabling users to publish their content and how Adobe is adapting to web 2.0. There was also a talk on RIA (Rich Internet Applications)

- Rich Controls
- Separation of data and UI
- Use of client side power to deliver rich UI
 - Mashups and custom user interfaces.

He also gave a small talk about Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) and what it aimed to do.

Software as a service

This was given by Bhaskar, CTO, Sify Ltd.

The talk was on SaaS and how the business world was adapting to it. There seems to be a lot of existing vendors who provide SaaS. The advantage of this methodology was that since the software was accessed over the network (web), it freed the customer from onsite support hassles. There were also problems with SaaS such as customization, robustness, reliability, integration capability, security, viability of service providers..

The next level of SaaS could be Edge computing, cloud computing, utility computing and Infrastructure as a service. (network.com)

Powered by users 

This was given by John Thrall, VP
Network division, Yahoo. He gave a talk on some of the strategies for
building social software.

- Know your base

- Adopt flexible plans

- Minimized development cycle

Some of the strategies to be followed were

- Don't silo your team

- React quickly to user needs

- React quickly to user behavior

- Beware of vocal minority

- All community members are not created equal. Serve super class through flexibility

- Engineer an online persona users can invest in

- Create a system that rewards good behavior

- If a community grows, anticipate the needs for like minded people to have some privacy

- Build a flexible system

- Use agile development techniques.

The speech was really interesting and informative

Lunch

Very nice.. But long queues for soups, main course and
desserts. More counters would have definetely helped. Since the
organizers knew the number of people coming for the event, could not
they have come up with a strategy for minimizing the waiting time? It
was really frustrating to line up like beggars waiting for food to be
served.

POST LUNCH SESSION 

Nothing much to speak about .

Microsoft gave a wonderful demo of their silverlight framework. It had the audience share of "wow"s.

There
was intel next to talk about code optimization and provide some tips on
code optimization and some idea as to what Intel's software was doing
to optimize code

Adobe again gave a very good demo on "AIR" and its functionalities.

This
session was mostly the sponsor's session with each one of them trying
to advertise their framework to the developers present. Hopefuly, Sun's
JavaFX would also prove as a competitive product to Adobe Flex and
Microsoft's Silverlight. Infact, if flex has a very good integration
with netbeans, i think that it would be a very big plus, considering
that Adobe's FlexBuilder and Microsoft's .net 2008 are not free
products.

More on webinnovation tomorrow!

 

Take a look at this VERY disturbing video. Not for the faint hearted. It shows how cows/chickens that are bought up in animal farms for human consumption are bred and reared.. Heart touching indeed.

But i have a query here. The narrator states that for example if i drink milk, i support rearing of these animals and hence implies that, i would be supporting the cruel practices that are present right now. Ahem.. excuse me for a minute. Does this mean that i should stop eating chicken, lamb, beef or for that matter also stop drinking milk? And even if i do abstain from eating it, is it going to stop these people from treating these animals so inhumanely? I can say with a quite some amount of certainty that no amount of cajoling or persuading or blackmailing would make all the people in the world stop eating animals. So, animal rearing farms are going to exist and the butchering is going to continue forever. There is a whole section of society that lives on these animals. They would certainly not allow people to stop eating chicken or beef. Infact how many times have i seen ads in TVs and news papers that drinking milk or eating egg is good for health.

The solution to the above mentioned problem does not lie in the fact that we should abstain from animal products. I believe the solution is to set up a committee and come up with certain amount of minimum standards that should be maintained at animal breeding farms. The standards should prescribe the quality of the living space and conditions of the animals that live there and the way they get treated. These standards should be internationally followed. So regardless of which country you are from, if you dont follow these standards while bringing up animals, you should ban that particular farm and confiscate those animals and put them in other farms. To keep in check that the standards are indeed being followed, you could set up teams that travel randomly to animal farms and investigate the conditions there.

(On a bit lighter tone)
These animals are similar to us in many ways. They work for their owners all their life and bleed to death. Its only fair that they get treated with some dignity while they are alive. For example, similar to our office cubicles, each animal should be allocated a cubicle. As like we have adequate lighting, each animal should have access to adequate lighting. Instead of computers in our cubicles, they could have watering holes and a basket wherein food can be dropped. Also, similar to the free time that we get inbetween our work days (where we go home eat sleep and come back to work), these animals need to go out to a nearby farm field where they can graze and take rest. The animal farms should be well maintained and should be cleaned daily so that these animals live in hygenic conditions. This would ensure maximum productivity.

Thanks to Dick for the information. A website called ulteo has come up with an amazing utility.. It has an online version of openoffice . You can create documents online and store them (it gives you a space of 1GB) The product is still in alpha stage. So, it is still a bit clunky. .But hey, i am sure in the future it will be great enough to contest docs.google.com one of better online version of office suite.. With all these free versions of office utilities gearing up, hopefully the future of office wont be locked down on to one propreitary office suite.

I love watching simpsons. Unfortunately, it airs at an unfavorable time in India during weekdays for me to watch it. ( i think around 6 pm when i am at office working..). So, i have never been able to watch simpsons on tv. I am sure there are some weekend episodes too aired during sunday afternoons when i invariably forget that i need to watch simpsons or i am doing something more important (like sleeping for example).

There is a new site called Hulu and it is a venture between NBC and News corp  . The site contains all the latest video episodes online which you can watch for free. There are some commercials that bother you between the episodes.. But that just adds to the feel of watching the episode.The site has been started to combat the piracy threat posed by video uploading sites where you can watch the episodes of serials and dramas for free. The site is currently operating in beta stage and i had to wait for around a month to get my subscription. Now i never have to miss my simpsons episodes.

Given that i live in India and most of the shows hosted on this site are new to me, i am sure i will find a lot more interesting episodes that i can watch over here.. Hmm.. i am never going to turn on my tv again! 

Found this video doing rounds about a team in the in the Indian Cricket League doing rounds on the internet (and maybe on tv too). Quite funny.. take a look for yourself.

I have always wanted to get my hands on to a mac OS. It has amazed me over the past. Its UI and some of its applications have been so mind numbing that i have always thought that no other OS on earth could come near it in terms of usability. I recently got to lay my hands on the latest Mac OS X (leopard). I had also been using the latest version of opensuse (version 10.3) on my laptop. (well i have windows xp too.. but thats nowhere in the race). Here are some comparisons that a novice user like me could make.

a) The first thing that struck me odd was the single click mac mouse.. I had to press the control key to simulate the right click. How odd and completely unusable is that? On the pro side, the scroll ball on the mouse could scroll in any direction which was not available in other ordinary mice.

b) I have always thought that the Mac OS X UI was the most advanced and pleasing UI the modern desktop OS ever had. Well, after actually using a mac, i would say that the linux desktop (with xgl enabled) is actually as good as the mac OS X UI if not better.

c) The login screen in both mac and linux looks the same. Infact, in linux, you can configure your login screen to look the way you want it to. I am not sure whether you could do the same with a mac.

d) The startup screen in linux of late has evolved to give you the progressbar showing the OS start up rate similar to the way mac shows you. Nothing different here. I am not sure whether Mac has an inbuilt bootloader like linux gives you given that you can now run windows on intel macs.

e) The Mac has a totally different desktop when compared to linux(which emulates windows). So, i was a bit uncomfortable to indentifying where the "applications" portion was situated. But that is just the part of the learning curve and i guess i would get used to it.

f) Another big change was that each time i opened an application, i saw the menu bar of the application coming up on the taskbar that was situated at the top. Depending on which window had focus, the taskbar's menubar changed. It took me a couple of hours to figure out where the menubar of the application was situated and i still havent got used to the fact that the application's menubar is actually not embedded in the application but rather way up above in the top. I am not sure how the keyboard accessibility of this works yet. But its really a pain even if i want to use my mouse to use the menu bar if my application window is small.

g) The file navigator in mac leapord has a new feature where in you can browse the files similar to the way you can do it in your iphone or the touchscreen ipod. This is a very big plus when compared to the file navigation in windows. You could actually run a movie or see a pdf file in the preview mode. The UI for this is very sleazy too.

h) The taskbar at the bottom of the screen where you invoke your applications from is a big hit for me. I dont need to go to a start menu to access my frequently used applications. I could of course make a shortcut on my taskbar if i wanted to in my linux. But the icons over here are so big in mac and with  the fish eye widget functionality its hard for me to click the wrong icon which so often happens for me in windows and linux.

i) On the negative side though, the portion of the task bar which shows the current running applications is small and i cant enlargen it a lot. So, if i have a lot of windows open, it becomes a bit hard to navigate between them using a mouse.

 j) Has any one seen or know how to use the "show-desktop" icon on mac? I use that a lot in linux/windows.

k) I found hacks on how to lock the screen in mac (by using a screen saver and putting a password for it was supposedly the easiest). But is there actually a button which i can put in my taskbar which when clicked locks the screen?

l) The workspace switcher is a big bummer in mac. The linux version with xgl enabled is quite amazing IMO. You can actually rotate the desktop like a cube and you can drag the window visually between the cubes or even put it inbetween two cubes. That is visually mindblowing than a mac which actually allows you to use keyboard and move between desktops with a small visual window with arrow marks showing you where you are.

m) Hitting alt+tab on linux shows me a preview of windows that i use currently. Not the same on mac which has the old windows style version of showing the application icons.

n)  Games?? Do i need to purchase games for mac?

o) The software that comes bundled with mac is quite awesome. But given that with linux, you can download and install any software for free, i really dont think it is a big plus for mac in any way.

p) A big plus for the mac is that everythign works out of the box. No tinkering needed. I just boot it up the first time, run the wizard, and i am on.. No opening the console and typing in commands to configure my system.. How cool is that for a unix based OS.. (It better be i say.. i am paying money for it! ) 

q) It did not have any problem with bluetooth. I havent managed to make my cell phone work with my linux bluetooth driver till now. Maybe i am just lame..

r) Network browsing? The best i have seen on mac. No glitches whatsoever. Linux still has some catching up to do on this. I can search for files on a whole network using mac.

Overall i would say that linux has done a pretty awesome job of catching up with Mac in terms of usability though there are minor glitches here and there and you still need to know some amount of linux to set up the OS and start using it. OTOH, mac just works out of the box and can be used by users who dont know crap about unix. But the availibility of free software for linux just beats mac.

Update: After reading the comments, i configured the mouse to be a two button mouse and also found that i could configure my "middle click" to "show desktop". The F8 button shows all the workspaces that i have in a much larger window which is much better than pressing ctrl+arrow keys. Pressing F9 had the same effect as moving the mouse to a corner of a screen in linux by which you could see all the open windows on the screen Thanks for all your comments!