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Here is a small tutorial on creating offline maps for iphone using GMDL. You can find more detail in my other post.

1. First of all you need to have a jailbroken iPhone or iPod and you should know how to transfer files into your iphone/ipod.

2. Download the “OfflineMaps”, App from Cydia by using the Search Menu.

3. If you wish to make maps for your own area, download Global Map Download Tool (from www.in7ane.com) extract it and then open “/GMDL/bin/debug/Global Map Download Tool.exe”

4. It will open Google Maps website inside the tool. Search for the area for which you want the map.

5. when it appears, click the “preview 1x” button at top left.

6. It will show the area for which maps will be downloaded.

7. If you are satisfied with the selection then press “download the map” button at the extreme top left.

8. It will ask for a directory to save the map files. Create a new one.

9. it will show the selected map in form of small tiles. Uncheck the unwanted tiles and the zoom level 1  &  2. It will keep the size of map to a reasonable limit. when done press the button at the top for download to start

10. Status bar will show the download progress. Wait till the download is complete and a message for the same appears.

11. Now click the “iphone” button at the top left to convert the maps to a format understandable by Iphone.

12. A pop-up window will appear. Select the firmware version of Iphone.

13. Click the “process” button to start conversion. By default it saves the files in desktop\iphone_map folder. If this folder already exists then change the name of output directory in pop-up window. It creates directory itself so you don’t need to create one.

14. After successful completion it a pop-up message appears. Now you have the files in desktop\iphone_map folder available for transfer.

15. Now, transfer your files to the device using software like DiscAid (or Iphone Browser). Download and install DiscAid , and then on the left hand side under “Media” folder, there is a “Maps”, folder. If there isnt one there click on the Media Folder which is the very first one on the left side and then click “Create Folder”, and then name it “Maps”.

16. In this maps folder make a folder which is <4 letters long that corresponds to the map you have made. It just has to be less than 4 characters. In that folder copy “com.apple.Maps.plist”, and “MapTiles.sqlitedb”.

17. Now open the “OfflineMaps”, app on your device and see if the maps show up on the list. If they do everything has worked great, otherwise trackback and see if you have made a mistake.
If your maps are there, select it and then press the “Link”, button and wait till it says “OK”, press the home key and the OfflineMaps icon should have the letters of the map u selected on it.
Now fire up maps and you should be able to browse freely. remember to turn off network access when you are browsing outside of the cached area.

I have already wasted almost whole day in creating offline maps for my iphone. So it was quite logical to waste remaining day in writing about ‘how to do it’.

Iphone has google maps by default and you need internet connection to use it. If you want to use maps without internet then one way to do this is to browse that map online once, Iphone will store it in cache so you can later use it without connecting to internet. But its not foolproof method. Second way is to use ‘Maps offline’ application. To use it your Iphone must be jailbroken.

‘Maps offline’ is an application which let you use google maps offline. It actually switches the iphone offline google map caches,which can be made by GMDL(Global Map Download Tool).

You can find a good tutorial here.

To download Iphone maps for NCR click here and for Chandigarh click here.

This was the first pie chart ever made!!

6000 yrs old stone axe vs Iphone

There are references in the Rig Veda that point to the velocity of light as accurately as today. Given below a partial quotation and explanation:
योजणानां सहस्रेद्वे द्वेशते द्वेच ….एकेन निमिक्शषार्धेन क्रमेण…नमोस्तु ते
Half nimesha = 0.21333333 seconds
1 British yard = 0.9144 metres
1 Kose = 8,000 British yards
1 Yojana = 4 Kose
2202 Yojanas = 2202 x 4 x 8000 x 0.9144 = 64,432,281.6 metres
Velocity of light = 3.020263 x 10(8)m/s

These guys from India are really creative. They have created this first ever interactive video game for youtube. This game is quite basic but its innovative. Good work.

I have already described how much i love my Iphone. But still i don’t recommend it to others. Now its launched in India so many people ask me whether they should buy it or not. For them i will list its limitations.

It works on Mac operating system so expect compatibility issues with windows .

Mail

- No Universal Inbox

I have 11 accounts which I use regularly. Different ones for
different sites I own, work, home, etc. Does Apple really think I want to go in
and out of 11 different inboxes to view 14 messages? I mean, come on…

- G-Mail

Even though Apple has GMail listed as one of its supported
3rd party mail providers (even going so far as including their graphic when you
try and set up a new account in Mail from the iPhone), GMail has issues. Every
one of my Sent messages is showing up in my Inbox.

Edit This can be fixed by going into mail settings, clicking
on the account in question, going into advanced, then turning “Use recent
mode” off.

If you set up Gmail as a POP account rather than going through
the icon provided, it solves this sent message problem

- Junk

Some of my accounts get a lot of Junk mail. The iPhone
doesn’t let me mark stuff as Junk… lame.

- Mark Read

No contextual menus means the only way to mark these as read
is to open every single message I get.

- Email Attachments

There are loads of attachments that you just can’t open!
e.g. A simple text file created in notepad (MS) opens fine, but if you rename
it to .log, it won’t open! :-/

Calendar

- Day View

I was expecting when viewing in Day View to simply be able
to flick to either side to move between days, in the same way as you can in the
iPod, Pictures, and most other interfaces in the iPhone.

Phone

- Voice Dialing

no voice dialing.

Can’t record audio.

- One-push speed dialing There is no equivalent of the
push-and-hold speed dialing that exist on most other phones. Instead, the
iPhone Favorites list gives you a quick(ish) access to the most frequently
dialed numbers.

- Bluetooth DUN Profile Unlike nearly every other Bluetooth
enabled cell phone, the iPhone will not share its internet connection with
other devices (e.g. a laptop). In fact, out of roughly 25 common Bluetooth
profiles for cell phones, the iPhone only supports two (see: iPhone’s Bluetooth
is dumb, purposely crippled or both?). This is a limitation of the firmware/OS,
not the hardware.

There have been reports of people sharing their iPhone
internet connection via a SOCKS or HTTP proxy over an ad-hoc WiFi network; this
requires running SSH and/or “srelay”, manual IP address
configuration, etc;

- I wish there was an auto-answer app or feature of the
iPhone!!!

Safari

- Text Selection

Why can’t you select just a specific bit of the text? I’m on
rajivbhardwaj.com/index.php?thread=456, I want to go to rajivbhardwaj.com/Apps.
Why do I need to delete 20 letters to type 4? It’d make way more sense to
highlight the index.php part and just write apps.

- Saving Images/Files

We have a gallery here of iPhone wallpapers. I browse to it
on the iPhone. I find my image I want. And then I… wait, I can’t download it?
I can’t choose to set it as wallpaper? I have to go to my Mac, browse to the
URL again, download the photo, purchase and install iLife, import the photo
into iPhoto, set it to sync with the iPhone, open up iTunes, hit sync, then
browse to it on my iPhone and set as wallpaper? Hmm.

- Flash

Seriously? No Flash support? I can’t live off YouTube
videos. Even when using YouTube, I cant save the clip on the phone.

Camera

- Quality

Overall camera quality is lame. If there is ANY movement at
all during the shot you get a blurry image, and the general quality is just
mediocre.

- Options

There are none. Where’s my Zoom? Exposure? Maybe save a few
in not full res?

- Video

Doesn’t shoot video.

General Usage

Cannot transfer music from two computers. If you sync with new computer old data will be overwritten.

No handwriting recognition.

-Cannot use as USB drive.

Waste of so much available space.

- No Contextual Menus

Where are they? You’d think holding your finger on an item
for a couple seconds would bring up a contextual menu with items like Delete,
Copy, Move, etc depending on what you had selected. But nope, not the case. A
little limited. These menus are also not available via a button anywhere – they
just aren’t there. Which brings me to…

- Copy/Paste

The phone lacks copy and paste functionality.

- File Management

There is no way to save files which are attachments in your
Mail, nor from Safari. A Documents folder wouldn’t be too bad, Apple…

Cannot Text message a Photo, Important? not really but quite
handy.

Can’t browse files in the phone. Only way to transfer files (music & video only) is thro ‘Itunes’.

Can’t use as reader for excel doc or pdf files.

- Contacts

Cannot copy contacts to or from SIM

No way to input standard DTMF commands as part of the phone
number. e.g. pause (p) and wait (w) commands.

SMS

Can’t forward the SMS.

Can’t send phone numbers via SMS text message.

When receiving phone numbers/contacts, e.g. VCARD, I can’t
save them to contacts.

Can’t click on MMS notification to go to Safari to view.

Hardware

Only Bluetooth headset support, cannot transfer files (pics, music, videos etc)

Bluetooth Stereo Headsets: Bluetooth stereo headsets work
perfectly well when you are on a call. But due to a redundant bluetooth stack,
you can not stream your music. what good is bluetooth then? you are not calling
people all the time, but you are listening to music all the time.

We have received & sent many SMS jokes about this but its time to think more seriously about it. Jobs in Telecom sector are critical in nature. By critical I mean…

1. Problems in system need to be attended immediately. Night visits are very common.
2. Even a small mistake can cause revenue loss in Crores of rupees.
3. Large number of customers is affected by even a single equipment failure. So very high quality equipment maintenance is needed.
4. On festivals and other holidays, Calls are more than average so, engineers need to be in office. Diwali & New Year eve are too important to stay at home and enjoy.

Telecom sector is booming in India right now. Despite all this, compensation packages of telecom engineers are not as good as IT\Software engineers. Also IT\Software companies provide other benefits like gym, swimming pool, etc but not telecom companies.

This is puzzling me from quite some time now. What can be the reason (s) for this?

Take a quick poll at http://pendu.in/viewtopic.php?t=10

Vista is definitely much more secure than legacy windows. It’s not affected by common viruses and Trojans. Its interface is also slightly better, but it’s too heavy on system.

Mac & Linux can provide better graphics without much load on system. May be Microsoft over estimated the hardware capabilities of today’s PCs. Instead of designing good code they relied on power of hardware. Although people around the world use very powerful machines (with lots of Giga’s in CPU, RAM & HD), but Vista demands too much.

One very good feature of vista is very long battery life for stand by mode. If you put your machine running vista on sleep (stand by) mode, it consumes very less battery and on average can go for 3 days. Some people have reported up to 7 days of standby time. While Windows XP on same machine will give standby time in ‘hours’. It’s really a feat to change the battery consumption by changing the software only. I

don’t know if XP SP3 can achieve the same in stand by time. Apart from this there is nothing much in vista. As now SP3 is launched for XP, its security level should equal vista. So now there is no reason to use vista.

Declaration: I use Windows Vista Myself.

There was lot of fuzz about dual-homing feature in R4 CN. Today finally we made a plan to implement it. But guess what, it ’s extremely over rated. What is dual-homing? ……In short we can say that with dual-homing we provide a backup MSCS for 1 or more MGWs. Thats all we need to say.

But…

1. This Active/standby (backup) mechanism will not work if there is connectivity loss between MGW & MSCS.
2. Also if one of the peer entity’s connectivity with currently active MSCS goes down, it will not be automatically accessible from standby MSCS.

All in all poor Active/Standby or backup mechansim.