Kiran Bulusu’s Blog

Updated to the Firmware 31.x.y, I should say, I’m not all impressed with the performance..its slow and i can feel the difference..I use emoze for checking emails of all my accts incl outlook and it painfully slow when i invoke it..

On the positive, I no longer have the sound when the camera clicks..apparently theres a law in US which says whenever a camera clicks, it has to have a sound..

Second diff I noticed is,  I see PTT (push to talk) options ..not that I want to use it as radio , but feels good to know that N95 has so many features…

Hopefully, I will be able to uncover few more in coming weeks…

BTW, I had to change to EURO1 using NSS to test this firmware

Recently, My friend’s (Krishna Mohan ) wife has been diagnosed with Acute Leukemia and bone marrow donor is one of the options to save her…To reach to wide audience, I’m posting a flyer regarding Bone marrow donor drive and message from my friend ..It would be of great help if all the readers can fwd it to their respective frnds ..

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Hello. My name is Krishna Mohan Vattipalli. I am from India , a PhD student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Portland State University , Portland, OR . My wife, Sailaja Chada , is also an active PhD student in the Department of Chemistry at the same school. Early this year, all our hearts were agonized when we came to know that my wife was diagnosed with Acute Leukemia. Only solution to bring her back out of this life-threatening blood disorder is to conduct a Bone Marrow Transplant.

This transplant can be performed only with the help from a donor. Bone Marrow Donors with South-Asian Ethnicity can definitely help save Sailaja. I sincerely request you to join the National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP) and be a life saving (or giving) donor. The procedure in joining the NMDP is very easy (a simple Q tip swipe on the inner cheek). The more of us on NMDP, the better chances my wife has to live her dreams. Please forward this email to your friends.

I can’t imagine a world without my Sailaja. PLEASE HELP!

Regards,

Krishna Mohan

http://www.marrow.org/HELP/Join_the_Donor_Registry/Join_in_Person/US_Donor_Centers/dc_list_by_state.pl#CA

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Cisco On-stage Telepresence : http://www.musion.co.uk/Cisco_TelePresence.html

Hand Cellular tech ad from QCOM ( its friggin cool) :

I’ll continue to update these links as and when I find something interesting in Hardware/Semiconductor space.

For last couple of months, I want to move to personal financial SW and I’m glad to  recommend yodlee money (web based). My criteria were
1. Sophisticated ,yet simple in terms of management
2. Ability to auto categorize transactions with minimal guidance
3. Easy Account setup
4. Ability to setup budgets
5. Gives me spending analysis in terms of pie charts and tables etc
6. Should be able to setup all accounts incl IRA/401K , Indian banks etc and manual real estate accounts.
7. Less expensive ( less than 30$ per yr)

With the above in mind, I tried
1. Quicken Premier deluxe 2008
2. Microsoft Money
3. wesabe (free web based)
4. mint.com (free web based)
5. yodlee (free web based)

Quicken is far too sophisticated and demands more attention/time. It cannot auto categorize all of the transactions correctly. But by far it has all the nuts and bolts if you have time ..Doesnt support Indian banks a/c . Formats supported are QFX/OFX only.

Microsoft Money also pretty much has the same features as quicken, but I didnt like the way setting up accounts , the look and feel, manageability of the accounts and SW itself.

Wesabe : You cannot setup indian bank accounts, cannot auto categorize the transactions, but gives you the ability to define the category names you want . Has best online community..it gives you tips on say groceries from other users in wesabe and if its applicable , you can implement. I didnt care for this feature as it was too generic in some cases and not for indians ..I dont care what mr.dude from Idaho has to say on the food and dining..For me this feature was not imp.. and big minus from my side was this doesnt have auto update feature….

mint.com : By far the it has the best UI ..you should check it out just for kicks..far better management and account setup than any…it still misses in auto categorizing some transactions correctly..Limited setup for Indian banks/overseas bank. shares the same infrastructure as yodlee for transactions retrival..this site has the ability to compare your spending in a particular category vs users in particular city avg spending..it also gives you tips on saving more money..for example, it can tell you that have  a checking a/c WAMU will save you an extra  50$ etc…

Yodlee: UI is not as great as mint, but better than wesabe. Supports most indian banks, some india pvt life & pension insurance accts (I expected that it would since , very minimal guidance is required for auto categorization and probably bets in class among all..you can track your airline rewards etc.. and it satifies all the 7 criteria I had and best of all its free …

for webbased finance management, all 3 of them use the same level of SSL encryption as many bank do and yodlee has extra layer of support for filtering phishing by asking you to identify a image and some extra questions you need to answer ..I think they are verisigned as well..so I’m least concerned abt security and if you want to avoid browser hijacks itself, use idvault and for firefox, use fijan secure browsing addon  + adblock plus addon + noscript addon

give it a shot ……