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indianexpress: After two court verdicts against it in three years, the Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation (PCMC) seems to be taking no chances in putting the roads and the Pune-Mumbai highway in order. Promising a quick-fix job, the PCMC has kept aside Rs 24 crore for road repairs.

And that’s not all. It has even invited complaints from citizens — about potholes, craters and shoddy patches on roads. “If citizens bring to our notice the condition of roads in any corner of Pimpri-Chinchwad, we will set it right in less than 24 hours,” Municipal Commissioner Dilip Band told Newsline. He said the complaints should be directed to city engineer Eknath Ugile who can be contacted on 9922501508. However, when contacted, Ugile said he had no idea about it and would discuss the issue with the commissioner.
 
Band said in comparison to last two years, the state of roads in Pimpri-Chinchwad was much better this year. “We have done most of the roads, though I don’t deny that there will be some that need repairs,” he said.

Band’s decision to reserve Rs 24 crore has however drawn criticism from activists. “First, crores are being pumped for making roads, then a few more crores will be spend on repairing the roads. This only means the PCMC is not sure about the quality of its roads being constructed,” said Kannan Nambiar, a political activist from Chinchwad. “By reserving astronomical amount for road repair, PCMC has exposed itself. It is now certain that the civic body cannot ensure roads that will last for years,” said S D Patil, another activist.

In last three years, lower courts have passed severe strictures against the PCMC for shoddy state of roads. In 2004, the Municipal Court, Akurdi, had fined PCMC

Rs 250. The civic body went in for appeal in Shivajinagar district court which increased the fine to Rs 750. Domnic Lobo of Sangvi who had filed the complaint had received the fine amount as compensation. Last year, municipal court judge S R Yadav himself inspected the state of roads following a complaint by Lobo. The judge had also summoned the municipal commissioner and other PCMC officials when he inspected the road. The court subsequently imposed a fine of Rs 2,000 on PCMC which has again appealed in the district court.

indianexpress:  The anxiety of students and parents over non-availability of textbooks even as schools are set to begin this week was lost in the din when Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) workers attacked the Maharashtra State Bureau of Textbook Production and Curriculum Research (Balbharati) on Senapati Bapat Road on Monday.

Over eight MNS workers forced their way in at about 4 pm and ransacked the ground floor office of director Vasant Kalpande, throwing files and other office items, and attempted to assault him. The attack happened in the presence of several media persons who were with Kalpande. By the time the police arrived, some woekrs f the activists had left the scene.

A shaken Kalpande tried to explain that he had recently been relieved of additional charge as chairman of the State Board. But activists threw files and hurled a fiberglass stand at him. At this juncture, Balbharati staff, a majority of them women, rushed to the office, formed a barricade around Kalpande and escorted him to a separate chamber.

Minutes before, a delegation of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had met Kalpande to discuss the issue of the printing errors in the Marathi textbooks, which held up production of 13 lakh textbooks.

Kalpande told the delegation that the books were printed after an elaborate proof-reading exercise by the Board of Studies appointed by the state board headed by Dada Gore, and comprising nine state board members, a five-member editorial board and academic experts from schools, junior and senior colleges

indianexpress: The civic body is planning to undertake full-fledged trials of the Bus Rapid Transit System (BRTS) on Fatimanagar-Hadapsar stretch in the coming days. The civic body is yet to complete around 500-metre on the 13-km stretch, apart from the 4-km section between Dhobi ghat on Shankarshet Road and Bhairobanalla.

With the routes almost ready and bus shelters in place, PMC officials said the work was not completed due to the railway lines at Hadapsar. “We took permission from the Railways and now work on the remaining 500-metre will be completed soon,” said a PMC senior official.

The officials said the trials may begin this week. “The buses are already plying on Katraj-Hadapsar route but the trial will have buses running in the dedicated lanes,” the official said. To ensure that there is no repeat of the chaos that Pune-Satara witnessed, announcements about the BRTS operations are already being made since last week.

However, the Dhobi ghat-Bhairobanalla stretch is stuck due to jurisdiction problems. “We have been communicating with the Pune Cantonment Board (PCB) and Public Works Department (PWD),” the official said. The 13-km stretch falling under PCB is narrow and will have a mixed lane system between the Dhobi ghat-Bhairobanalla stretch.

Meanwhile, the BRTS buses have been gaining popularity among commuters. According to Pune Municipal Transport (PMT) officials, the number of people travelling in BRTS buses was 2,000 when it was flagged off in 20 trips daily. The number increased to around 5,000 in next two months with same number of trips.

indianexpress: The Pune Cantonment Board (PCB) issued notices on Monday asking people living in 14 houses, including individual units within big buildings, and a PCB-owned one housing 30 families to vacate before the monsoon.

Cantonment Executive Officer S K Sardana said, “We had carried out a survey of all the buildings in Camp area to check whether they were safe in the monsoon. Since there is a risk to the lives of the people in these building, we issued a notice asking them to vacate these premises before the monsoon.’’
 
Last year, a building had collapsed in Synagogue Street. “Most buildings surveyed are old and in a dilapidated condition. Some are without beams and columns. During our survey we also noticed that buildings were in a dilapidated state because they had not been maintained. There is a dispute between the tenants and the landlord,” said Sardana. who has ruled out any forceful eviction. The PCB has offered the residents an alternative place at Veer Savarkar School in Jan Mohammed Street for the monsoon.

indianexpress: When a budget hotel adds intelligence to its portfolio and targets the techno-savvy business traveller, surely Pune has to be on the map. The city-based Talera group has opened the 50-room Smart Inn on Apte Road and is planning to roll out three more in the city — in Koregaon Park, Kharadi and Chinchwad — over the next 12 months.

The group has pegged room rent at Rs 900 for a single room and Rs 1,000 for a double room. Unlike conventional hotels, there are no formal checkout procedures at the hotel. If the customers have paid for two days, the hotel doors open up when the card is flashed.
 
The customer gets an AC room with flat-screen LCD TV, electronic locks, free wi-fi rooms, rain showers and dial-a-meal services from 40 restaurants in Pune besides vending machines for snacks.

“The Smart Inn is based on smart technology that has been developed in-house and research at Cornell University. The idea is to use technology and eliminate the use of manual check-ins and offer a seamless self- service experience,” Harshad Talera, MD, Smart Hotel Ventures said.

Customers can check into Smart Inn by using the touch-screen kiosks located outside the hotel. Once the payment formalities are completed through the kiosk, the machine pushes a smart card for the customer with his stay details in the hotel. The customer can then flash the card and gain entry inside the hotel and use the same card to open his room.

“Although hotels have begun using smart card technology, it has been restricted to keyless room entries. This is an industry first in India where integrated technology offers a seamless experience for the customer,” Talera said.

indianexpress: Bronchial asthma and allergic disorders among children have multiplied over the years. On the other hand owing to improving healthcare, infectious and nutrition-related diseases have come down, finds a study done by the Department of Paediatrics at Armed Forces Medical College (AFMC).

Bronchial asthma is a disease of the lungs in which an obstructive ventilation disturbance of the respiratory passage evokes a feeling of shortness of breath. Col Madhuri Kanitkar, Head, Department of Paediatrics, AFMC said there has been a shift in the spectrum of childhood illness from infectious diseases and malnutrition to environment-related diseases like asthma, allergies, developmental disorders and cancers.

Observations are based on a three-year recent study from 2000-03 which compared the children to the data ten years ago. The department had conducted a continuing medical education (CME) programme on children’s health and the environment on the occasion of World Environment Day (June 5). Dr H Paremesh, consultant paediatric pulmonologist from Bangalore said the frequency of asthma among children under 18 years has more than doubled over the past decade the world over. In fact he said after Bangalore it was now the turn of Pune to be named as an ‘asthma city’.

Lt Gen S K Kaul, Director and Commandant of the AFMC stressed on the need to increase awareness in the public about environmental degradation and its effects on children. “If we have to protect our future generations, we have to act now to stop pollution by various chemical and biological agents,”he said.

techtree: Logitech’s newly-launched Z-10 Interactive 2.0 speaker system comes with touch-sensitive controls on the face of the speakers, thus eliminating the need to tie between applications to control music on the computer monitor.

Talking about the speakers, Moninder Jain, Director of Logitech South Asia, said, “The Z-10 speakers aim to incite more of the senses - sight, touch, and sound - with their media display, touch-sensitive controls, and premium audio. And beyond that, these speakers are simply stunning, adding a level of design sophistication to their breakthrough digital music capabilities.”

Apart from a groundbreaking design, the speakers are capable of delivering rich audio without using a separate space-consuming subwoofer.

Logitech claims with the speakers, users can continue to work, or surf the Web, or even turn their monitor off and use the integrated speaker controls to adjust volume, treble, and bass, and navigate music tracks with play, pause, skip forward and back buttons.

While using USB technology, the speakers can display track information from iTunes, Windows Media Player, Winamp, and Music match. The digital display includes a clock, volume levels, and other system information from the PC.

The Z-10 speakers have four Internet radio preset buttons located on the speakers’ touch sensitive panel. When touched, the preset buttons let users quickly save and recall their favorite Internet radio stations and playlists.

The speakers have a built-in amplifier that splits the high and low frequencies (called bi-amplification), directing the high-range signals to the tweeters, and the low-range signals to the woofers. Logitech says this approach is typically used only in performance home-theater speakers.

techtree: Gigabyte has unveiled its flagship GA-P35-DQ6, GA-P35-DS3R, and GA-G33M-DS2R motherboards based on the Intel P35 chipset.

The P35 series motherboards have optimized system memory capabilities, and chipset overspeed protection removed so as to achieve extreme levels of overclocking performance, according to Gigabyte.

The motherboards support the latest Intel multi-core processors up to FSB 1333MHz, and are the first to introduce proprietary Ultra Durable 2 design, providing optimized power savings, ultra cooling, and extended system durability.

The new motherboards offer both DDR2 1066 and DDR3 1333 memory support, providing scalable options for users wanting to take advantage of higher memory performance with less power consumption to run next generation applications.

The P35 series motherboards also include options for users wanting ATI CrossFire support, providing dual PCI Express connectivity for high performance, high-definition entertainment platforms.

Besides, the motherboards are equipped with the latest Realtek ALC889A, enabling high quality Full Rate Lossless Audio for content protected media, and support for both Blu-ray and HD DVD formats.

cnet: Adobe Systems on Monday released a beta version of AIR, a software download formerly called Apollo, that makes Web-native applications operate like desktop programs.

The much-anticipated software, now called the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), is expected to introduce a new class of hybrid applications that meld the Web with the PC.

A free AIR software development kit released Monday is aimed at developers building those applications.

Also on Monday, Adobe released a beta test version of Flex 3, its software development tool that can now be used for writing AIR applications in addition to Flash and HTML-based Web applications.

AIR is one of a growing number of downloads, or “runtimes,” coming onto the market. Others include Microsoft’s Silverlight and Google Gears, which are Web browser plug-ins.
 
Each serves a slightly different purpose. Like Adobe’s Flash, Silverlight runs interactive Web-based applications, including those that integrate media such as video. The first version is expected this summer.

Google Gears, set for release later this year, offers a way to run Web applications offline by providing a local database and other features.

Adobe’s AIR also brings an offline component to Web applications. But AIR applications can operate without the need for a browser.

The key advantage is that software developers can use their existing tools and skills to build these desktop applications, said Kevin Lynch, the company’s chief software architect and senior vice president of its platforms group. Typically, a developer will use AIR to write a desktop application that links to an online service, as Adobe has done with its video playback application, Adobe Media Player.

computerworld: Hewlett-Packard Co. on Monday announced its third generation of blade PCs, which it says solves the “Achilles’ heel” of most thin-client infrastructures: performance.

Like blade servers, blade PCs are physically stored on racks, typically in data centers or server rooms. Users equipped with thin-client devices, keyboards and monitors can access their blade PCs through a network or over the Internet. The users (and the blade facilities) can be located anywhere in the world.

Centralizing the PCs, rather than having them located at users’ desks, can make them easier and cheaper to manage. One downside, however, is that the distance between the actual hardware and the user’s monitor creates the potential for network-based delays as the PC tries to send down data and ‘paint the screen.’

For instance, the conventional Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) used by most existing blade PCs (including HP’s own) to transmit data sees its bandwidth requirements jump from 10Kbit to 15Kbit/sec. during normal usage to 100Kbit to 150Kbit/sec. when users are watching a YouTube video, according to Tate Davis, a product marketing manager in HP’s personal systems group, in an interview during last month’s Microsoft’s WinHEC show.

By contrast, HP’s new Remote Graphics Software (RGS) uses better compression to let users watch streamed video while using only about 65 kilobits per second.

“With RGS, we’ll deliver a true desktop experience,” Davis said, adding that users should be able to run even demanding graphics applications such as Adobe Systems Inc.’s PhotoShop with few hiccups.

That change, he says, could help remove one of the barriers to corporate adoption of blade PCs: employees demanding desktop-like performance.

HP released its first blade PCs in late 2003. In late 2005, HP switched from Transmeta Corp. processors to its current Advanced Micro Devices Inc. processors.