Pranav Chavda

… According to the political compass. cool quiz to see where your economic and social ideology stands in comparison with famous historic and current political figures.

Smoking in a restaurant

There! I’m smoking in a “Public Place”
Fuck you , Mr. Ramadoss, Former Health Minister of India…

I used to blog a lot, on finaltag and here. haven’t blogged for months. I miss blogging!

India celebrated it’s 60th year as a republic today, and although I should be, that’s not what I am most glad about, what I am most happy about is, sadly, that no one bombed trains or gunned people down in the name of religion or whatever today.

now only if the forces and governments of the country can keep every day as peaceful as today.

Here in india, most big restaurants and coffee shops used to have open, ventilated seating for smokers and closed, more air-conditioned areas for non-smokers. This, however, didn’t stop the stupid fucked-up liberal government to ban smoking completely in restaurants starting today. The problem is, I can’t eat without smoking in between, so why don’t I just kill my self already? Hey, It’s my choice to smoke, bitches, and if I’m not harming you .. why the F can’t I smoke?

Setting up the Ahmedabad office is taking way longer than anticipated. Things are at their final stages though - changing the flooring and stuff, hopefully, work will begin before the end of this month. Found some very cool hang-outs meanwhile, I’ve started liking the city - as a place to live in - a bit already.

View from my new office in Ahmedabad, peaceful, no?

FYI all, Will be mostly away from the internet for the next few days.

If, like me, you are a subscriber to Apple’s MobileMe suite of web-apps, and also run linux on your computer, when you tried to access the service on your linux machine, you probably got this:

Apparently, It is only possible to run MobileMe on either a PC or a Mac. MobileMe was marketed as a way to be able to view and edit your email, calendars, photos and files from any computer - this, however does not apply to computers running linux.

There is, of course a a very easy workaround: Install the User Agent Switcher add-on on firefox and select firefox on vista or firefox on mac as your user-agent. That does the trick just fine.

Another way to access MobileMe on a Linux box - something I just found out and made me want to write this post - is that when me.com is opened on Konqueror - KDE’s default browser, MobileMe doesn’t prevent the browser from letting the user log-in. Sure, Safari is based on KHTML - created by the Konqueror community, but it sure is great to see that they haven’t blocked at-least one linux browser.

What would be better, of course, is that they officially let linux users on firefox access the service they have paid for and in the mean time, mention konqueror as a possible way to access MobileMe on a linux OS.

…is mobileme for the rest of us.

Funambol, is a free (as in open-source) way to get push email, contacts and calander on your phone (not just the iphone). I signed up and downloaded it on my WM5 based HTC Wizard, and I am already thinking about what to do with my dotmac subscription - which will transition to mobileme soon - I guess I will just keep it for the idisk and photo and media sync that funambol doesn’t have yet.

Anyway, if you are in the market for a free push email, puch contacts and push calander solution, I recommend Funambol.