Firefox Release 3 Beta 2

My first impression on typing in the address bar of Mozilla Firefox's new beta release was "Wow! This product is cool."

My Books List

My Movies List

Some Statistics about my Blog

I was curious to check my reader profile right from the time I started blogging. Unfortunately, I didn't have a proper analytics subscription before I started using Google Analytics. So, I have data available only from July 12, 2007. A modest 335 visits and 614 pageviews from 125 cities in 35 countries over 5 months. Well, a decent beginning.

Here's some useful information I managed to get:


Thanks to all my readers out there!!!

Broadband over Power Lines - Now in India

Finally, I'll get to see something which always stirred my curiosity during my engineering days. Broadband over Power Lines (BPL) is making its way into India, according to the news item in Economic Times. The very fact that there are thousands of power lines crisscrossing our country, resting on huge arms of towers gave a ready-to-use infrastructure for carrying data. All that is needed extra - repeaters at regular intervals to boost the data signal and a BPL modem connecting the power point to the computer's LAN port. Simple. No need for laying thousands of miles of underground optic-fibre cables, no need for installing towers, no need even for telephone cables.

However, some concerns will also need to be addressed before BPL is implemented.

• The quality of power is as such poor in India - both in terms of the outage as well as voltage fluctuations. The BPL should not be affected by this, and in turn it should not make the existing poor quality even worse.

• There are two different frequencies (50Hz electricity and UHF for data) mounted on the same line. This may lead to degrading of the already poor power quality. Though this may sound highly impossible to happen, it is something which the generating and distribution stations stations face everyday due to the high use of electronic appliances (computers, CFL etc) which inadvertently feed high frequency signals into the power lines, leading to higher inefficiency in generation and distribution. BPL will only add to this problem
  

If these two points are effectively addressed, then we have hit upon an excellent solution for rapidly enhancing data connectivity across the country without the need for pumping money into new infrastructure.