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IndianExpress: Even if thousands of Puneites who have to travel on the rain-battered roads find them potholed, cratered and waterlogged, their elected representative thinks otherwise. In fact, MP Suresh Kalmadi says there are fewer potholes this year when compared to last year. ‘‘There are still many good roads in the city. Look at Nagar Road and Sinhagad Road,’’ he said at the review meeting in Council Hall held to assess the flood situation in the district on Saturday.

The MP also feel Puneites are painting a grim picture of the city roads when, in reality, it was not so. ‘‘IT companies are setting up base and investing in the city. It is not as if everything in the city is in a dangerous condition and collapsing,’’ he said, adding that if Puneites themselves continue to label their city’s infrastructure as bad, those from other places would do the same.

 He did say that the Pune Municipal Corporation needs to fill up the potholes. ‘‘We need to find some solution soon,’’ he said.

IndianExpress: Empathising with the cases of back disorders and head aches among auto- rickshaw drivers in the city, Bharati Vidyapeeth’s, Homoeopathy Medical College has come up with a novel idea to provide special cards to the rickshaw drivers coming to the hospital for treatment.

Bharati Vidyapeeth’s spokesperson, Anil Bhosale said that the cards would be handed over to rickshaw drivers when they will come in for the check-ups. Bhosale said that auto-rickshaw drivers who come in for the treatment normally suffer from head and back aches, mental tension and pollution related diseases. The rickshaw drivers will be given a concession of 50 per cent in the treatment if they carry the cards along with them.
 
The facility of the cards will be available at Bharati Vidyapeeth’s Homoeopathy Hospital and Bharati Vidyapeeth Medical Foundation’s Bharati Homoeopathy Rugnalaya.

IndianExpress: With thousands of software professionals and numerous IT parks, Pune is a happening place in IT space. But some 30 km out of the city, in the hinterland, IT penetration and awareness is dismal. To bridge this gap, a group of seven software professionals have formed Sarvangin Vikas Sanstha (SVS), a trust to promote e-literacy in rural schools.

‘‘It’s not that computers are not available in rural schools. But their usage is very limited. One needs good teachers, who can show the students the various applications that a computer can have. We want to do that through our trust,’’ says trustee Anand Kulkarni, a Java professional who provides software training and development services to IT companies.
 
As a first step, SVS recently released a CD called Sanganak Saksharata Abhiyan having many public license software, which can be easily used to learn various utilities of a computer. ‘‘It took us about a year to compile the CD. Now, we want to take it to rural schools,’’ says Kulkarni.

IndianExpress: The Central Railway will be introducing a tri-weekly super-fast train between Nagpur and Pune from August 26, to cater the increasing demand of the Pune bound traffic.

The train will come as a major sigh of relief for the commuters. who had to either take the Azad Hind express or the Kolhapur- Nagpur-Maharashtra Express, to reach Nagpur.

The train would depart from Nagpur on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday at 6.35 am and reach Pune at 10.25 am. The train would depart from Pune on Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 5.20 pm and arrive at Nagpur 9.25 am. The reservations will open on August 14 at Nagpur.
 
 

IndianExpress: The Wanawdi police has arrested constable Siddhram Vijay Harke (31) of wireless department, city police, his father police hawaldar Vijay Somanappa Harke (53) from SRPF and mother Mangalamma Vijay Harke (50) on Saturday for their alleged involvement in the death of Siddhram’s wife, Suvarna. In a complaint lodged by the deceased’s father, Umakant Shivrudrappa Katate (46), he said that Siddhram and his parents brutally assaulted Suvarna for not bringing dowry and a golden ring on the occasion of a family function in August. The police said that the trio conspired, abused and tortured her, both mentally and physically.

IndianExpress: Ravindra Navnath Vyavahare (46), a police naik attached to the Haveli Police Station died of a massive heart attack on Saturday at Hadapsar-Gandhi Chowk on his way to duty. Vyavahare suffered the attack while driving his motorcycle. He was rushed to the Mali Hospital at Hadapsar where he was declared dead on arrival. Vyavahare is survived by his son, daughter and wife.

IndianExpress:  Four members of the Devnoor family were injured when the side wall of their eighty-year-old, one storied house at Bhimpura, Camp caved in during the wee hours on Saturday morning.

According to the cantonment police, eight members of the Devnoor family were fast asleep, when the incident took place. According to Raju Devnoor, the youngest member of the family, the wall caving came in as a great shock to the family. ‘‘All my family members were fast asleep at the time of the collapse. I heard a huge noise and the very next moment, I found everyone covered with dust and sand,’’, Raju said.

TechWorld: Canadian company ParetoLogic has become the first vendor to offer an anti-spyware tool for use from portable U3 USB drives.

 The company’s new XOFTspy Portable software would typically be used to protect roaming users from the threat of malware, such as password-stealing Trojans, when connecting back to company networks from PCs in hotels, business centres and cyber-cafes.

As well as scanning the host PC for malware, the program also claims to be able to stop malware installing itself on the U3 drive itself, from where there is a danger it can be transported back into a company or infect another PC.

Using the U3 standard means that the software can be licensed to be run on multiple PCs because no trace of the program remains on the host machine once the USB drive has been unplugged.

News.com: Apple Computer this week released the kernel for Mac OS X 10.4.7 to open-source developers, on the first day of its Apple Worldwide Developers Conference.

The move was announced through a posting to Apple’s Darwin developer mailing list by Ernest Prabhakar, the open-source product manager for Apple. “As of today, we are posting buildable kernel sources for Intel-based Macs alongside the usual PowerPC (and other Intel) sources, starting with Mac OS X 10.4.7. We regret the delay in readying the new kernel for release, and thank you for your patience,” the message read in part.

The delay Prabhakar is referring to had caused some to wonder whether Apple planned to release an open-source version of Mac OS X for Intel at all. Piracy concerns have been a hot topic with Apple’s move to Intel’s chips after hackers demonstrated how Mac OS X could be run on Intel-based machines other than Apple’s with a little bit of work. Apple does not allow Mac OS X users to run the operating system on anything other than Apple hardware. But high-performance computing shops like to tweak open-source kernels for their own applications or environments to ensure maximum performance.