Pranav Chavda

At this point, I am not proud to be a citizen of the largest democracy in the world.

Just got an email from PayPal indicating that the RBI (Reserve Bank of India), won’t let them continue to function here in the way they have been. Why? Hey, they’re the government of India, they don’t really have to make a lot of sense in order to block foreign companies’ businesses here and thereby abandon hundreds of thousands of their own citizens who depend on it to make a living — whether directly or indirectly.

This has happened only days after the Government of India threatened to shut down BlackBerry services and issued notices to Google’s Gmail and Skype.

This has happened for a second time this year, and I am disappointed, not at PayPal, but at the RBI and the Indian “System”.

In a democracy, I am supposed to have a say in these things. I don’t. I feel like I’m in China. I had Chinese food for lunch and then again for dinner yesterday and now, without a visa and plane ticket, I am there. In a country where the government is the master of it’s slave citizens.

I wanted a kindle ever since amazon launched it, and after waiting patiently for a couple of years, they’ve finally decided to sell it internationally – including in India!

Kindle now for sale in over 100 countries!

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.

LMAO – these are VERY funny photo-shopped images try to visualize how the world would be if google was it’s ruler – thanks to a contest at worth1000.com.

Here’s my favorite:

Well, no .. it’s not exactly liveperson, and isn’t meant for businesses and enterprise customers, but google has a cool new widget gadget out that lets visitors to your website or blog chat with you whenever you are online on Google Talk.

Look towards the the left side of this page for a live demo. If you like what you see, grab your own gadget from here