Rakesh Agrawal’s Blog

I just got a Blackberry 7290 (an extra my brother-in-law had lying around) but couldn’t do anything with it because it was stuck on a password screen.  An my BIL couldn’t remember the password so I went a searchin’ for info on how to reset the thing and start over.  I searched on:

‘Blackberry 7290, hard reset’

‘Blackberry 7290, handheld is locked’

‘Blackberry 7290, reset button’ (note to anyone else trying to find this — the 7290 doesn’t have one!)
‘Blackberry 7290, password protected’

‘Blackberry 7290, reset password’

None of the resulting pages had the right answer for me.

The solution?  I decided to try and exceed the maximum password retries (in the case of my 7290, I had a max of 6 retries).  Once I did this, it nuked all the data on the Blackberry and let me set it up from scratch.  Perfect!

Something that’s sorely lacking on the mobile web (or maybe I just haven’t come across the right site yet…) is a good restaurant guide.  If you know one, let me know!

Google Video lets you link to any specific place within a video now — just append the timecode in this form (#1m34s) and it’ll jump you to that exact location.  I believe this feature will prove to be extremely popular and widely copied by other online video services.  This goes a long way to improve the linkability of online videos.

Fox also announces their fall 2006 premiere dates:

Monday, August 21
8:00-9:00 p.m. Prison Break
9:00-10:00 p.m. VANISHED

Wednesday, August 30
8:00-9:00 p.m. Bones
9:00-10:00 p.m. JUSTICE

Thursday, August 31
8:00-10:00 p.m. DUETS

Tuesday, September 5
8:00-9:00 p.m. STANDOFF
9:00-10:00 p.m. House

Thursday, September 7
8:00-8:30 p.m. ‘TIL DEATH
8:30-9:00 p.m. HAPPY HOUR
9:00-10:00 p.m. DUETS

Friday, September 8
8:00-9:00 p.m. Nanny 911
9:00-10:00 p.m. DUETS Results Show

Saturday, September 9
8:00-8:30 p.m. COPS
8:30-9:00 p.m. COPS
9:00-10:00 p.m. America’s Most Wanted

Sunday, September 10
8:00-8:30 p.m. The Simpsons
8:30-9:00 p.m. American Dad
9:00-9:30 p.m. Family Guy
9:30-10:00 p.m.The War At Home

Saturday, September 16
11:00 p.m.-Midnight MADtv
Midnight-12:30 a.m. TALK SHOW WITH SPIKE FERESTEN

Friday, October 6
9:00 p.m. Trading Spouses: Meet your New Mommy

Thursday, November 2
9:00 p.m. The O.C.

TV.com posts NBC’s schedule for their new fall TV lineup:

September 18
Deal or No Deal (special two-hour edition, 8-10 p.m.)
STUDIO 60 ON THE SUNSET STRIP (10-11 p.m.)

September 19
Law & Order: Criminal Intent (9-10 p.m.)
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (10-11 p.m.)

September 20
The Biggest Loser (8-10 p.m.)
KIDNAPPED (10-11 p.m.)

September 21
My Name Is Earl (8-8:30 p.m.)
The Office (8:30-9 p.m.)
Deal or No Deal (9-10 p.m.)
ER (10-11 p.m.)

September 22
Law & Order (10-11 p.m.)

September 25
HEROES (9-10 p.m.)

October 3
FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS (8-9 p.m.)

October 4
TWENTY GOOD YEARS (8-8:30 p.m. and 8:30-9 p.m.)

October 11
30 ROCK (8:30-9 p.m.)

October 20
Crossing Jordan (8-9 p.m.)
Las Vegas (9-10 p.m.)

While I was visiting my sister in Berkeley over the July 4th weekend, we got out and did some hiking in El Cerrito (town just North of Berkeley). Here’s my first attempt at a stitched together panoramic shot…

(you really want to see large or larger version)

Some quick lessons learned for myself for future panorama attempts:

• use the same the shutter and aperture speed on every photograph (I had to manually adjust brightness and contrast on each photo above to even get close and I lost more detail than I would have liked in the process)
• I used AutoStitch to build this image — but it unfortunately only worked on 5 out of 9 of my images. It didn’t link the other 4 into the panorama above. And it started out only stitching together 3 of the 9 — I had to tweak the alpha, beta and number of retries parameters to get it to recognize 5. I could have done with less intelligence on the part of AutoStitch. I would gladly have just told it the sequence of my images. Is there better photo stitch software?
• A tripod would have been nice. Without one, the alignment of each frame was off the next one by enough that by the end, when I was ready to crop the final product down to a rectangle, I probably lost 5% of the potential height of the Panorama.  Another way to approach this would have be to pad each frame out so that my target image would have remained intact, even after cropping.

We enjoyed ghazals at Anil Uncle’s house last weekend… A ghazal (pronounced just like “guzzle”) is an “Urdu poem, vocal song style” (courtesy of Google Web Definitions). Basically it’s Urdu poetry that is sung. I love the music but can’t claim to have anything more than a broken understanding of the underlying poetry. Shonali, on the other hand, eats and breathes this stuff. Two photographs of the living room (there were two other rooms in Uncle’s house where people were hanging out, eating, talking… it was great):

This emarketer brief says people are paying money for mobile applications like MapQuest (average of $3.99 / month) on their cell phones.

Wacky, when a lot of these things are free (like Google Maps Mobile which I use all the time) with an unlimited data plan.  And with all the other useful things you can do on a cell phone with an unlimited data plan, I have to believe that mobile phones will mimic the web.
But then the mobile service providers also hold the keys to resolving the big problem with the mobile web (at a high level, there has to be better integration betweeen services and phone platforms… a separate post on this later).

What’ll it take for mobile service providers to give up their walled gardens?

Kevin Smith is responding to a movie critic… and how!

This is exactly what I was talking about when I wrote that movie makers should respond to their critics (though I never imagined it would be as much fun as Kevin’s response!)

(hat-tip to Jeremy)