News

punetimes: Driven by an unusual penchant for performing difficult feats on his birthday each year, 25-year-old Girish Kulkarni, an adventure lover from Pune, scaled the 70-metre high Parvati hill for an astonishing 101 times, within a span of 20 hours, ending 2 pm on Sunday.

The Parvati hill, located in the centre of the city at a height of 2,100 feet above sea level, is home to a heritage structure temple built during the erstwhile Peshwa dynasty. It offers an aerial view of the city and forms part of several citizens’ daily exercise regimen of climbing 103 steps up hill.

Through this physically enduring feat, Girish is eyeing a mention in the internationally-recognised Guinness Book of World Records , besides the Limca Book of World Records .

His father, Mukund Kulkarni, told TOI that there were no official representatives from the Guinness Book to witness Girish’s feat.

“However, Girish’s effort has been shot live extensively and a CD of the same will be sent to the Guinness authorities, along with a note of recommendation signed by prominent people, like the history scholar Ninad Bedekar, who were present to witness the feat,” said Mukund.

punetimes: As many as 4,500 power thefts have been exposed in Pune city and surrounding areas with the Maharashtra state electricity distribution company ltd. (MSEDCL) recovering Rs 3.50 crore from the guilty.

During a meeting at the Rastha Peth headquarters of the MSEDCL on Saturday, managing director Ajay Bhushan Pandey said first information reports have been filed against those found involved in power thefts. A request has been made for a special court to take up these cases so that they could be disposed of quickly, he added.

On the issue of consumers receiving inflated bills, Pandey said a new scheme would be implemented soon, where photographs of meter reading would be printed on the bills. “This scheme will be implemented first in Pune and replicated in other parts later, depending on the response.”

State energy minister Dilip Walse-Patil told the meeting that a Rs 15,000-crore infrastructure development programme for MSEDCL has been undertaken out of which projects worth Rs 4,000 crore would be launched shortly.

punetimes: Three women, including an estate consultant, were arrested on Saturday for allegedly running a prostitution racket at the high-profile New Era Society in Market Yard.

Following a tip-off, a team led by inspectors Rajendra Bhamre and V.N. Bhandare arrested Simran Vaswani (35) of New Era Society, Bharati Rana (30) of Bibvewadi and Meena Chavan (30) of Dapodi. According to the police, Vaswani is a real estate consultant. “The racket was going on for the last five months,” Bhamre said.

Vaswani is a commerce graduate and unmarried. The two other women too live alone. Bhamre said Vaswani used her residence to entertain ‘customers’, and accepted fees from them. The social security cell, which raided the place, said the ‘customers’ were local businessmen and their employees. “We never suspected that something fishy was going on in the society. It was shocking,” said a resident.

punetimes: A bunch of talented youngsters set the ramp a fire at a modelling contest recently. The models showcased their best attire and charmed everyone with their attitude. Compere Neha Sareen enthralled the audience with her impeccable poise.

The judges consisted of Narendra Jadhav, Amala Seth, Smita Neogi, Nikhil Arya, Rupali Ganguly, Mugdha Godse, Sandip Sopparkar and model Mahima Choudhary. And, indeed,they had a tough time choosing the winners.

Finally, Soham Thorat and Ridhima Sahani emerged victorious. Apart from the talent on the ramp, the crowd also got to see two well choreographed dance performances and a stand-up comedy act that had everyone in splits.

After that, came the honorary award function, where Puneites who were instrumental in putting the city on the global map were felicitated. The dinner that followed was delectable, and this was certainly an unforgettable evening.

computerworld: Two years in the making, Version 8 of IBM’s Lotus Notes and Domino were officially released today.

By all accounts, the much-needed upgrade offers a modernized user interface for Notes as well as new usability tools and added capabilities, such as the ability to send instant messages from within the e-mail client via IBM’s Sametime software.

The changes are the result of building the Version 8 client on top of the company’s Eclipse-based rich-client platform, according to IBM officials.

Version 8 represents IBM’s strategy to create client interfaces built on a common platform. This will allow components of any client application to be provisioned and managed centrally, said Barton Group analyst Karen Hobert.

For example, Notes 8 is built on the same programming model as Lotus Expeditor 6.1.1, which is based on open standards from Eclipse.org. The common framework becomes an open client for mashups and composite applications in addition to the traditional Notes features.

Although Notes 8 may not steal market share from Microsoft Corp.’s Outlook client, Hobert said the new release should more than satisfy current Notes users.

computerworld: As IBM and Sun Microsystems Inc. laid out a new agreement to have more IBM x86 servers and blades run on Solaris, the two companies were already looking ahead to another partnership, which could see IBM mainframes support the Sun operating system.

The tie-up between IBM’s x86 servers and Sun’s operating system is likely the first of several such relationships, according to Bill Zeitler, senior vice president of IBM’s systems and technology group. “This could hopefully be the beginning of what could be a stronger collaboration between our two firms,” he said Thursday during a conference call. “There are a large number of customers interested in Solaris on the mainframe.”

Although there’s nothing formal in place yet, IBM is interested in actively collaborating with research and engineering firm Sine Nomine Associates to move OpenSolaris, the open-source version of Solaris, to IBM’s System z mainframe, Zeitler said.

In a blog posting on its Web site, Sine Nomine said it welcomed IBM’s interest in the project, which Sine Nomine, with headquarters in Ashburn, Va., has been working on since July 2006.

“We’d love to see Solaris running on the mainframe,” said Jonathan Schwartz, president and CEO of Sun. “We’d love to make it happen.” The tenor of the agreement announced on Thursday is that for both Sun and IBM, “our eyes are wide open and we’re interested in serving more customers,” he added.

As teams from IBM and Sun work closely together on optimizing and testing Solaris on IBM’s System x and BladeCenter servers, IBM’s Zeitler expects they’ll find more and more areas to collaborate on.

reuters: IBM (IBM.N: Quote, Profile, Research) has agreed to sell Sun Microsystems’s (SUNW.O: Quote, Profile, Research) Solaris Operating System software to IBM’s customers in a deal that pits the competing computer hardware makers against shared rival Hewlett-Packard.

Financial terms of the deal, originally announced on Thursday, were not disclosed.

IBM will distribute the software with certain of its blade server computers. Blade servers are compact servers that typically stand on end like books on a shelf. Sun lags Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ.N: Quote, Profile, Research) and International Business Machines in the blade server market.

Solaris is one of the main varieties of the Unix family of operating systems, known for their ability to safely and securely handle major computing tasks rather than for their ease of use.