As many would already have observed, I am moving my blog from “tux.medhas.org” to “prasad.medhas.org”. These days more people know me as ‘Prasad’ and hence it makes more sense to have my blog here.
The old URL does redirect here, but please update your bookmarks - specially the links on your websites to make me more famous on the search engines 
It’s been more than a year since I blogged here, it’s not becuase I did not have anything to blog about, but it was mostly because I was away biking in the Himalayas, enjoying the beach in Goa, a boat ride in the Papi Kondalu area of Godavari river, attending the Mozilla Summit or very busy with Spicebird!
Earlier this year we went on a trip to Papi Kondalu, a group of hills along river Godavari. I would recommend the trip for anyone in Andhra Pradesh who is looking for a short holiday close to the nature. Ofcourse there are other places too like the Araku Valley or find a friend’s home in the greenery of the coasts of Godavari, Krishna or Guntur districts 
In early May, it was time for a trip to Goa where a couple were renewing their marriage vows, this was only the second Christian ceremony I attended, but they do look interesting for the simplicity with which the entire ceremony is organized. We did go around Goa for a couple of days.
July was the time for a Biking trip in the Himalayas… after half-a-year of planning we finally made to Manali, which was the starting point for what would be a memorable biking tour through few of the world’s highest roads to Leh. The trip lasted for a 10 days (Hyderabad to Hyderabad). From Leh, we later took a cab to the world’s highest motorable road. In my attempts to spend holidays close to nature, this is my second trip to Himalayas and is definitely more memorable than the first. For all those residents of India, 10 days and some money is all it takes - don’t miss it. For people who don’t reside here, India is a place of diversity and am sure it is difficult to cover all of it in one trip - so there might be other things that you like better here. Will try to make a dedicated post for it
End of July came the Mozilla Summit at the amazing Whistler, BC, Canada. It was an oppurtunity to meet many Mozilla developers whom I knew only by their IRC handles or the e-mail addresses. Attended a lot of sessions there, mostly those that are relevant to mailnews, many of the Mozilla Labs sessions and the India specific stuff. As a representative of Spicebird, I hope there will be a lot more cooperation with the Thunderbird and Lightning developers. The evil forces did try hard to disrupt the summit, but could not match the force. Thanks for the great conference guys.
And then it’s the Spicebird during the rest of the time. We released Spicebird 0.4 Beta in January and got loads of constructive feedback from the community - lot of it has already gone in to the nightly builds that we make, and a lot more lying still under development. More about Spicebird to come in further posts - a short thing I will want to say is that 0.7 is in development and all the developers are working hard to get it out as quickly as possible. I will post a more detailed update about 0.7 soon.
Well, that was a long post and expect shorter more frequent updates in future. Keep visiting
I was born on August 17th, 1980 and was browsing to see what else happened on Aug 17th. Here are a few things that matter to a lot of people.
If you know of more, post it in comments
ConsortiumInfo.org - Norwegian Standards Council Recommends Mandatory use of ODF and PDF
Norway is the latest European country to move closer to mandatory government use of ODF (and PDF). According to a press release provided in translation to me by an authoritative source, Norway now joins Belgium, Finland, and France (among other nations) in moving towards a final decision to require such use.
I was browsing one of the many government portals - The Ministry of Company Affairs. Though the portal is a great idea for the companies in India, don’t the developers of such important portals realize that the Internet Explorer is not the only browser on the Internet and that Microsoft is not the only producer of software?
Well, I did contact the webmaster through the contact form on the website and got a reply which said that a portal that works on Internet Explorer was part of the requirements and that the developers have met the requirements as laid out by the government! Will the government ever wake up and move itself to standards? Thankfully, though not mandated by the government, the reports and a few other downloads seem to be PDFs.
Orangemedhas is the name of the software company we founded. So, what is in the name?
The name is derived from two words “orange” and “medhas”. Medhas means intelligence in Sanskrit and orange is a color that signifies strength and endurance. There is another reason why “orange” is good - “O Range”, “Oka Range” and “One Range” were common terms used to indicate exceptional abilities by the students of IIIT, Hyderabad.
Advantages of using the name - “orangemedhas”:
Now, the disadvantages:
Comments and alternate company names are welcome - mail the names to me (there are many people looking for good names on the Internet)
Well, this is what the community had to say to Steve Ballmer.
It’s come to many in the Linux community’s attention you have claimed again and again, that Linux violates Microsoft’s intellectual property. Not only that, but it’s been reported Microsoft has convinced businesses to pay for a Linux patent that you can’t provide.
So, Ballmer are you ready to accept the challenge?
There have been lot of phones that claimed to run on Linux, and most of them failed to support and service the phones properly. Few very good examples are the Motorola series A760/A768i/A780, which were available in India. These phones have Linux running in it, but thats just the Kernel, rest everything is proprietary and cannot be played with. Its not easily possible to do anything beyond what you could do with a non-Linux phone.
The trend seems to change now, with Nokia taking the lead of releasing an Internet Tablet running on an open platform - development of new applications, installing and running them was also supported and this made this tablet look like a true open-source device (not a phone!). With Trolltech releasing the Greenphone, phones went a little closer to having open platforms. FIC (First International Computers) has recently announced a phone based on OpenMoKo - and OpenMoKo has contribution from Herald Welte, which makes me believe that this is going to be another true OpenSource mobile — all for $350
Indic Input Extension is an extension to Firefox that lets the user input Indian language content without much difficulty. It supports Hindi, Telugu, Tamil and a few other Indian languages for phonetic input. Needless to say, I wrote the ‘firefox’ part of it and the backend is mostly from the Entrans project, which inherited code (and ofcourse added a lot of improvements to it) from the IndicIME project.
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/
That was kind of hard to believe, but had to after I saw this page on gnu.org. Its true that it would not take more than a week to roll out another browser based on the free sources available from mozilla.org, but would this not dilute the dominance of mozilla and lead way to IE based browsers?
An article discussing this was slashdotted today.
This August was a month for me to remember for many things. It all started with a trip to Manali - I had the faintest idea of what was in store for me after I returned from the trip. I came back in the early hours of 14th and by 15th everything was on track and the date for my marriage with Srilakshmi was decided. The muhurat was on 20th August and we had only four days to go (compare it with an average time of about two months that Indian families take for marriage arrangements).
Srilakshmi being my classmate at college we had a lot of common friends who took care of all the arrangements, thanks to them, everything was over even before I realized that I was getting married on the 20th of August. Two weeks after having known nothing about my marriage, I got married and married to a very close friend.
I am Prasad Sunkari,
co-founder of