F1 has been hardly hit by the financial crisis. Honda has pulled out and many team are facing the pinch. The F1 regularoty body has introduced a slew of changes to reduce the cost of racing, increase overtaking so the game is more fun and less expensive. F1 rules are really complicated, there are many rules and explaning them is boring. The video below does a good job of presenting the information beautifully

I got a Dell Mini 9 netbook. One of friends bought a Dell Studio 15, along with it the Mini 9 was offered for $100. So I lapped it from him It was a pretty good deal.

It is base model Mini 9 – with 512 MB RAM, 5GB SSD and Ubuntu 8.04. It has no moving parts – not even a cooling fan. I love the fact that it make no noise. I’ve gotten used to the humming sound from all computers. This is my first silent computer.

The switch from the enormous 15″, 3lbs laptop to a 8″ netbook is interesting. Two things I noticed quickly are screen real estate and keyboard layout.

• I knew that netbooks are underpowered but I didn’t know that meant I can run only Firefox. If open Firefox and the Ubuntu update manager, Firefox would stop responding. In such scenarios the system mamager would report max CPU and/or RAM utilization. The major resource hogers were – Firefox and GNOME. Firefox is definitely not recommeded for netbook. I installed Midori web browser – which has much lesser memory foot print. But flash is not working in Midori – I need to fix that problem. Next I installed OpenBox Window manager which is supposed to be much lighter than GNOME. It seems faster, but I don’t have the numbers yet. GNOME panel which runs the OS taskbar takes 30 MB. The only information I need from the GNOME panel is battery and wifi information. I’m hunting for options to get these info without the GNOME panel.
• The screen size is 8.9″ – which is sufficient for my needs. But the title bars and task bars take up a lot of screen space. I used Metacity window manager to remove the title bars. I tried autohiding the taskba, but it wasn’t annoying at times – the taskbar won’t come out sometimes, or would take too long.

• The keyboard is definitely cramped; many keys are ridiculously small. I don’t blame Dell – they have used all the space they had. I think 10″ netbooks would be the sweet spot – to have a full sized keyboard. From a human factors perspective – width across two comfortably held hands would be 10″ to 12″. So I think 10″ would be the sweet spot – as long as the main input device is an analog keyboard. The Mini keyboard doesn’t have the F11 key (so I use full screen), there is only one Ctrl key, and page-down, insert keys are entered using Fn key combinations.
• Battery life is an acceptable 3 hours. But the standby time seems to be poor. I didn’t measure it – but I think it consumes relatively more battery during standby.

Today, many Indian online news sources carried stories about Google launching Internet Bus project in Tamil Nadu India. It was an outreach program to communicate the advantages of Internet to common man. None of the news stories had any links to the project page. After some digging, I found a link from bangaloreinc.com to the project home page here.

When I read – Internet Bus, I thought it would be like a First Mile Solution project – where a bus is used to provide Internet access to the remote regions of the country. That would have really cool. Compared to the First Mile project – the Internet Bus is just an advertising campaign. The project pages has some videos which I found boring but got the message across.

I hope more work is done in this direction to improve communication technologies in the remote regions of the country.

Being an Indian, I have been asked many times what I thought about Slumdog Millionaire. I liked the movie – but it not Oscar material. It was a typical Bollywood story – with the escapism theme. The arbitrary switch from Hindi and English dialogs was frustrating. The cinematography was topnotch – it almost made me belive that life in slums in very colorful. Overall, I think the movie’s success is due to the fact that it was made for the global audience. An Indian director would have a different perspective on the story.

On the same lines of thought, there is a photographer I follow in Flickr. He is an European who spends lot of his time in Tamil Nadu, India. I find his photos absolutely stunning. I love my state, but I never thought it is so photogenic. I guess it is the difference of a perspective.