A reboot on Photography

Well this time at a different place in the world… Oz, the “island continent”, place of kangaroos.

When I got my first digital camera, I had been regularly with my photography interest. But I soon hit into how much I can stress with my very minimal HP camera with 3x optical zoom. Most of times I am interested in either far away objects or macro shots. For either of these I have to strain a lot with my HP camera to get good shots. I also tried things like putting extra lenses for macro shoot and also a telescope for getting a closer look at the moon.

In any case, my interest in photography has not gone done, least because I can not yet afford a good quality DSLR ;-)

So, I decided to go about my photography again with my HP camera, this time a new place. All the photos here are in fact indoor photos, in that me and the camera were both inside my home or on a balcony at a friends place, but what was shot was all outside ;-)

On my backyard, the clouds begin to appear…

 

they are a bit shy ;-)

and then they are all over!

and the rain…

and the storm was hard for this branch…

no one out there, its raining there !

and I try to cook in the mean time… Those potatoes stacked up on their own, I didn’t do it :-)

 

and at the end there was this wonderful rainbow. All shots are taken with different EV exposure settings.

And then, I go to play tennis on weekend these days… but since my games is very bad, I though its better to shoot some thing that looks better than my self ;-) which now really makes for  the outdoor photography :D All these photos were taken on my mobile (Nokia e51) camera.

Then we went to a small (but quite steep) waterfall near Canberra

and some of the photos on Bateman bay

 

That is it for this photo story ;-)

Have fun!

My parents fixed the PC at home!

This was an experience!

For the last one month or so my parents have been complaining that my PC at home some times suddenly refused to start up. This was strange to me as the PC in question is a Dell machine and is about an year and a half old. Though I have opened it up and added a few memory modules and a graphics card to over the time.

Now I have absolutely no physical access to my machine @ home, but I heavily depend on it to talk to my parents. The only rational thing I could figure out most of the time was that the power plug was loose and you just need remove it from UPS and fix it back. Though I was pretty sure that it was not the real problem as I have never seen it to be loose before.

And one fine day, i.e. on a Monday (March 9, a holiday for me and had planned a cycling session to a near by lake for the day), my mom calls me and tells me that my computer is broke!! It is giving strange beeps and there is no power on keyboard! From which I could only make a vague guess that there is some memory problem or some of them have gone loose for some strange reason.

That was pretty good observation by my parents, I must admit, as they are not really used to computers as I am. Though my dad has worked on third-generation computers, but that was quite a while ago.

Ensuing this was a real ordeal from my and my parents side, beginning by telling how to open the machine. Thank god it was a Dell machine, and you can easily open the side cover without using screwdrivers! To make them open the cabinet did not take much of a time it was done with some five minutes of instructions.

The real hard part was telling them where the RAM was installed! I tried giving all sorts of rubbish analogies. First I made sure that they know what board to look into (motherboard). And then finally settled on to this one: there are 3 "ruler-like" strips placed next to each other, which are perpendicular to the motherboard and are placed on "white" strips. Lol, I have never had had to tell any one before how a RAM chip looks like :)

After this, they told that yes, they can see it. Next, it was easy to tell them how to remove one and then test whether the system powered on. My system back home has a 2GB, 1GB and a 512MB chip. One-by-one they removed the chips and checked, but all was in vain. So next, I asked them to put back the chips one-by-one, this was more harder to tell them, as you need to put them back properly (they go only one way in) as also you need to press the chips somewhat hard to place them firmly on the holder. It didn't work for the first two times. So I was almost gonna give up and in between I called up my computer guy back in Pune to ask if he could to be free to drop in at home that same day and fix up the things. He told that he would call me back in 10 mins and let me know! This was pretty surprising reply by any standards!

But in the mean time they could properly figure out how to place the chips and started the PC. Next I was able to remotely connect to it and could figure out that only one module was properly fitted. So I again called them and asked them to properly fit the other two. And viola, the next time I connected remotely, every thing was back to perfect and normal.

All of us were pretty happy for this. But I was pretty amazed, my parents fixed the PC!! and this was the first time ever they had opened it by themselves, though they have seen me doing this countless number of times :)

And to add to all the amusement, the computer guy form Pune called back, I am still recovering from this! Any way so I told him that my parents fixed it, though you might be needed some other time ;)

Ha and on the downside, its was all a 3 hour "fixing time", and cost me 500 INR for all the conversation we had, and well I stayed home for the whole day. But what the heck, it was worth it!

MeTA Studio online update

A new version is available (2.0.12032009).

Two reasons for this version:
- First, it is a bug fix release with a few new features added. You can also note changes in graphics APIs (which are far from complete). MapReduce is now more simpler to use with wrapper functions, essentially it boils down to:

res = mapreduce("/home/ganesh/meta/scripts/map.bsh",
"/home/ganesh/meta/scripts/reduce.bsh", data);
print(res);

- Second, its a special day ;)

Have fun!

GMail times

Some days ago I noticed that GMail is giving weird timing information. This is related to what is shown on the top of the message (yyy minutes ago). Most of the time now they turn out to be negative!! I think they have started using clock reading from the user's computer to stamp their mails. So in case if some one has a time set in future, it gives -ve date. I dont think it was this way earlier, the time stamps *should* be taken from a known, correct source! Google please change this!!

4:44, 22 C

.. numbers are interesting, aren't they?

At times they can get serious too: Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street . Check out this interesting article on wired.com :)

MeTA Studio update: MM/UFF, map-reduce and bug fixes

An online update for MeTA Studio is available (v. 2.0.02032009).
If you have not followed the instructions in the previous updates as put in (http://tovganesh.blogspot.com/2009/02/meta-studio-update-map-reduce-editor.html), kindly go through that before applying the current update.

There are some interesting things happening behind the scene with MeTA Studio development:
- Josh Milthorpe, a Ph.D. student at ANU, is actively contributing code and bug fixes to MeTA Studio. So hope to have some quite interesting contributions from him in near future :)

- Current version includes a very basic implementation of MM/UFF by Josh in MeTA Studio, but is not fully integrated yet. First plan is to get it working with the MoleculeEditor. To test out you can use some thing like the following from bsh prompt:

mmEnergy(readMultiMoleculeFile("/home/ganesh/tmp/ch4.xyz").get(0));

Note the APIs here are at a very primary stage, and may change as we progress.

- There is a major upgradation of map-reduce implementation. Now this supports handling of node failures as well as has multi-core support. Next plan is to get some useful application on this platform. All ideas in this respect are welcome!

- This version also includes stable release Apache math-commons lib (http://commons.apache.org/math/), which supplements and enhances math APIs that are already a part of MeTA Studio.

- As usual, the update includes many bug fixes. You may also spot some organisational changes in graphics rendering APIs, which is being slowly re-factored. If you have not written any script that explicitly depends on these very raw APIs (and I presume this is highly unlikely) nothing would break.

As always, if you have any issues / suggestions feel free to post them at: http://code.google.com/p/metastudio/issues/list

Have fun!

( Update: Found out some last minute bugs with the way the node failures are addressed in map-reduce implementation in MeTA Studio and is subsequently patched today with version (2.03032009) ..

This version also adds some enhancements to MM/UFF by Josh.

The number 03032009 seems to be interesting though ;)
- two 3 s
- one 2
- 3 x 3 = 9
- 3^2 = 9
...
)

Vibrational analysis widget for MeTA Studio

Many had asked about the support for visualizing frequency data from GAMESS/ Gaussian output in MeTA Studio. The short answer was: not out of box.

The long story: you and write a widget, and well good thing is that I myself wrote it ;) You can get the widget here [freqViewWidget.bsh].

To use this widget:
- make sure you have the latest version (2.0.24022009) or higher
- download the above script
- use the Add/Remove Widget button on the Widgets panel to install the widget
- Optionally open it in code editor (in meta studio) and click on "Make Widget" button
- the widget should appear in the Widgets panel.

- next open a molecule file as usual in meta studio
- then click on select molecule in widget, select the molecule with freq data
- then i guess its pretty straight forward ;)

So how does it look?



And I guess the graph (generated from jfreechart API which are shipped with MeTA Studio), looks pretty too .. try it out and let me know!



Have fun!

MeTA Studio update and re-factoring plan

First on the re-factoring plan:

After much of though, I have decided to re-factor the graphics engine for MeTA Studio so as to make it more flexible and enable it to use multiple rendering engines at the backend at the same time providing complete UI integration with existing IDE. This will take some substantial amount of time and hence I plan not to update the source release till such time. Only on-line updates will be provided till such time. Any changes to APIs will be reflected in the API documentation that would be shipped with the on-line update.

Current version is more of bug fix release with some new APIs:
- GAMESS/ Gaussian reader now reads more additional information
- Some of these can be see by: Right Click -> Tools -> Additional Information in the MoleculeViewer, there are a number of usability bugs in this code though at the moment.
- Molecule.AdditionalInformation class is updated
- there are other API additions and modifications in org.meta.molecule package (refer to IDE help for mode details).

During the time when graphics engine re-factoring is being done, any features that use graphics framework (for example Frequency visualisation) will be shipped as user scripts, and at a later stage would be integrated into the IDE.

The current version is: 2.0.23022009
The usual UAC note to Vista users apply, you need to start MeTA Studio in admin-mode to update (I plan to fix this in the next full binary update).

Have fun!

(Update: some necessary small updates made the current version to 2.0.24022009)

Cooliris (PicLens) is great even on small screens and netbooks :)

Some time ago I wrote a short post advocating for a wonderful piece of software called Cooliris (here). Back then I was using my high powered desktop but currently am on move and only have access to my MiLeap. Even on this small screen and pretty basic graphics hardware , Cooliris seems to just work very smooth, and the UI also scales pretty well :)

Windows 7 WritePad supports saving as ODF!

Windows 7 WritePad seems to support saving in ODF format!! Which is totally surprising .. it also supports writing in OOXML format. In simple tests that I did with saving to ODF format, I could open the files written in WritePad in OpenOffice without any glitch!

Popular(?!) Windows 7 and the lesser known MeTA Studio ;)

... just to say that it works perfectly ;)

MeTA Sudio: minor update

A minor update (bug fix and jrman) update is available. The version number is (2.2.0.09022009).

Please read this post before applying this update.

This update brings the jrman library to the latest version, this makes rendering images much better than what was available with previous versions. However, it removes many jrman classes that are really not required for rendering (UI and some test classes). Also there is a scuttle change in the JRMan rendered image within MeTA Studio: the background of the images is always transparent. This behaviour may be modified in future.

Again no source update yet ... the next source update will include changes to the jrman lib as used in MeTA Studio... but this will be after quite some time ;)

Have fun!

Reporting and Blogs: Blatant errors!

I am not sure how you take this when some blogger in PC World announces that Malaria is a Viral infection!!

Even a 10th grader student would know that Malaria is not a Viral infection but is a caused by protozoan parasites, generally Plasmodium vivax, which is *not* a virus! It is simply ridiculous that people don't try to atleast verify what they are writing, or atleast update it, when there are comments telling that how wrong they are!!

The point for Rs 500 laptop (or shall I say sub Rs 1K device?)

OK. So now Hindu has a more reasonable story about the device (I will not call this a laptop any more) with a bit hazy picture of it.

And potentially it seems to have got bashing from every where (here, here and here)!

.. well including me. The problem was with calling the device a "laptop". A "laptop" as is commonly seen in the tech world as a completely different device as opposed to what was shown in Tirupati. But, I still feel that every one missed the point, because of the device being labelled as "laptop". Does any one remember Cherry PC? To me this is an Indian competitor for the same... only probably a lot less cheaper, and may be a less capable too. It would be fantastic if for example you could connect this device to the TV (they are in many many Indian households), and get a cheap keyboard, and a wireless or a wired broadband connection... and viola you have the whole Internet, or the as the education ministry wants it to be...

As against what many people say, this device has a potential, but only time will tell if this does not turn into another "vapourware" like well Simputer or Mobilis (although they are not "vapours" but their cost is extremely high as compared to what they were originally predicted to be).

Rs 500 laptop followup

As I speculated earlier in this post, this device (aka "laptop") doesn't have a display (http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Hyderabad/10-laptop_proves_to_be_a_damp_squib/articleshow/4072417.cms)

.. But I am still awaiting more details on what actually it is. But it is definite that it cannot be called a laptop ... pretty safely!

.. So I can continue to dream on my netuter design ;)

MeTA Studio update: map-reduce, editor, bug fixes

New online update is available (version 2.0.03022009) [accessible via. Help->Check for Updates with in the IDE].

Before any thing,
Very Important:

After applying this update remove the following file from metastudio settings before restarting:
~/.meta2.0/launcherConfig.xml

Note that depending on the OS, ~ should be appropriately replaced. For Windows Vista this is in C:\Users\< user-name >, for earlier windows its C:\Documents and Settings\< users-name >, for UNIX/Linux this is usually /home/< user-name >, for OSX it is /Users/< user-name >.

This is required because the way MeTA Studio is launched has completely changed from this version to allow purely non-gui MeTA Studio demon (using --daemon command line switch) to be running, even on machines that do not have graphical environment.

Future additions to the current version:

- The Molecule option in IDE now provides and additional option to create a new molecule using in built (yet to be complete) MoleculeEditor. This is highly experimental and its functionality is going to change over time. Don't complain at this stage ;) but suggestions are welcome :)

- The mapreduce framework is now usable, but not yet complete. To test out this framework you can use the scripts from http://tovganesh.googlepages.com/mapreduce.zip, try running mapreduce.bsh from IDE [Tools -> Open Code Editor]. Every thing else, at this point, I guess is self explanatory ;)

The current mapreduce framework has a slow start and does not yet handle node failures. Note of security: mapreduce involves remote execution of BeanShell scripts. By default MeTA Studio prompts for any action relating to Federation framework (mapreduce is implemented over the Federation APIs). This can be appropriately configured as suited from with in IDE [Preference -> Federation Security Rules].

- Includes a usual list of bug fixes
- But does not include updated help for the new mapreduce APIs and no source update yet ... I plan to do this in the next iteration.

have fun!

windows 7 UAC

Interesting reads on UAC on Windows 7:

[1] http://www.istartedsomething.com/20090130/uac-security-flaw-windows-7-beta-proof/
[2] http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2009/02/windows_7_secur.html
[3]
http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/01/15/user-account-control-uac-quick-update.aspx

The speculation over the Rs 500 laptop

I had a series of posts earlier (available here) largely dreaming about a cheap netbook (or laptop) for India. And now there seems to be a lot of buzz on Rs. 500 (or $10) laptop being introduced by the Indian government for the masses.

What would be the speces of these, would it be highly subsidized, will have to wait till 3 rd Feb to see all that. My only speculation on the Rs 500 laptop is, if this is not something that is substantially subsidized by the government, then this will not have a proper display ( would connect to a TV, or have a cheap LCD monochrome display that could be easily manufactured in India). But well my speculations usually don't go well ;) so its all wait and watch for me. Look back at this space, I will be posting info on this launch as and when I have more idea.

Update: Indian Express has a nice article on other aspects of laptop (and OLPC) especially for education.

On 'Republic Day is now just another holiday'...

Yahoo News (via Indian Express) has a very terse article on 'Republic Day is now just another holiday'...And that is when India celebrated its 60th republic day on 26th Jan 2009. For me the first one out side my country.

Though touted as a holiday, it has been never been a holiday for school kids atleast. And to the best of my knowledge a majority of government employees too. Most of whom will flock early in the morning to their respective offices and take pride in saluting and hosting the national flag, with occasional cultural programs. When I was in my school (AFS, Pune), we used to have march-past and some cultural events in the morning with the chief guest mostly being the AOC of pune AF division. It used to be such an enthralling event for me.

As far the concerns of 'new generation', which includes people like me too, being too less concerned about our own country is way too generalised statement. I think there were always self-centred people, and they will always be there. That doesnt mean that every one is like that! What would be more positive from people around is to ensure that their siblings, mates and colleagues develop an esteemed pride towards their nation. Its always easy to criticise, but its what makes people like APJ stand apart, who is true epitome of person who can positively inculcate such a pride towards nation. Its not essential to and is highly undesirable to "follow" APJ or some one, but its more essential to take the message forward and spread it.

Jai Hind!

MeTA Studio: bug fix release

:( within hours of release of the latest update of MeTA Studio, I was doing a demonstration of it and found a critical bug with multiple views in the MoleculeViewer (though the demo did go well :)) ...
So this and some more minor bugs get fixed in this online only release....

Important NOTE: U need v 2.0.14012009 installed before you apply this update so as to make sure that everything works OK.

Vista Users: You will have to start MeTA Studio with administrative previlages to complete the update process.

MeTA Studio update: full source and binary update

Releasing the full binary and source update for meta studio. Available from usual place at http://code.google.com/p/metastudio/
The latest version string is:
2.0.14012009

This is the first major update this year. Note that this update is not an online update so you will need to install the full binary version ( windows/linux/mac (only the latest intel macs))... Online update will not work for this update!

There are no major changes in the UI, however there are a number of additions in the underlying APIs:

- The integral evaluation (for QM calculation) APIs have been revamped with a completely new structure so that it can be easily extended.
- Map-Reduce as a new means for writing distributed applications over metastudio. This is not yet fully complete, but hope to complete in the next iteration.
- Update to BeanShell interpreter. This was made available in previous updates but now is a part of full binary distribution.

.. and some acknowledgments.. :)

RK helped test the generic binary version on Intel Macs with OSX 10.5 .. and reports that most of the things work except mp3 playing and Java 3D.

Also included are a number of bug fixes reported by users...

WARNING: (again!) The online update will fail, you will have to update with the full binary release for this version.

Mac: not so great for me

Well thats my experience so far!!
The most sour thing for me was the poor support for Java on Mac... Can't Sun just handle this on their own?!

ISRO posts stunning lunar flyby videos

ISRO has posted two stunning Lunar flyby videos which can be accessed from http://isro.org/pslv-c11/videos/tmc.htm and http://isro.org/pslv-c11/videos/tmca.htm.

The videos are combining multiple images taken from Terrain Mapping Camera (TMC) on the Chandrayaan-I.

You will need windows media plugin for your browser to watch these videos. In short, its better watched on a windows box. Hope that they can use flash next time ;)

MeTA Studio: minor update

Another minor update is available. Again, only online update is the only way to get the latest.

This version fixes some bugs reported by users. And adds some small new functionalities (mostly for my convenience ;))..

As usual, check: http://code.google.com/p/metastudio/ for more info.

I am using a Mac!

I had always thought that I would never own a Mac. Well that is still partly true, but now I do have an old Mac that I bought for $260. When I was in India, I did think that, given the price factor of a new Mac, I would never buy a Mac. But recently I moved over to Oz and though that investing about 3K on MacBook Air would be good idea. But then I dropped the idea completely as the only reason for which I wanted to get it (the Nvidia mobile 9600 graphics processor) was not really good: it only had 128MB VRAM. That meant I would not really be able to do CUDA programming on it.

As far as laptop was concerned, my Mi Leap-L (now dual booted with Vista and Ubuntu 8.10) are great for my work and for communication back home. But I still wanted to try Mac. And Lol, the CS department came out with an old Mac sale :) This is iBookG4, 12.1" (not the new Intel once), but pretty cool .. Am testing it out, so may post some more info. at a later time :)

MeTA Studio: maintainance update

Minor update of MeTA Studio is available through online updates (MeTA Studio v2.0.12122008).
This addresses some of the issues noted in http://code.google.com/p/metastudio/issues/list. There is no source / full binary update at this time.

Check back for some interesting new addition in coming few weeks :)

On Google Earth, Mumbai and the PIL

Its been recently reported (e.g. in TOI) that a PIL has been filed in a Mumbai court for complete ban on Google Earth and other related mapping services in India (not sure if it include GPS too), under the pre-text that these maps were used for planning the recent attack on Mumbai.

Though appearing to be logical at the first look, it is a completely flawed argument for banning a free and extremely useful service for the general public like Google Earth. To me Google Earth and especially Google Maps (mobile version) has been extremely useful in going to places in recent times, and I guess it is so for a large number of people too. Given the lack of accurate maps available form the government it self, I think private services like these (which are in fact free) are extremely useful. Many technologies like Google Earth are many a times dual use technologies, you can benefit from them and at the same time be harmful to you. But this does not mean that we stop using Petrol since it pollutes our environment. If we go by the argument presented by the respected Advocate Amit Karkhanis, we would end up even banning Petrol!! To me this is highly illogical, and higher judiciary should take a correct decision.

With due respect to the unfortunate people caught up in the Mumbai attack, I must say that a technology or service cannot be banned, for good. Only it should be used with caution.

Small Basic: Bringing the "fun" back to programming :-)

Ever wondered where that simplicity and elegance of "GW"-BASIC has gone? And remember all the fun we had with writing absolutely stunning BASIC programs in schools. Well some people at Microsoft are try to bring just that back, for kids and adults alike :-) And its called Small Basic. Wanna get hand on it? Get it from here [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/cc950524.aspx].

PS: You would need to have either Windows XP or Vista with .NET 3.5 installed before you can use Small Basic.

MIP of Chandrayaan-I hits lunar surface

So the Indian flag is finally "symbolically" placed on the Lunar surface... :-)

Here is the short news on TOI.

ISRO is yet to update its website (http://www.isro.gov.in).

And by the way today is Children's day here in India (marked on the day of birthday of India's first prime minister, Pandit Nehru).

WOW. So we are finally on moon :-)

UPDATE: ISRO updates its site with news and some pictures from MIP.

Another AVG fiasco?

Just discovered that with the latest Flash player update the install file is being marked to have a Trojan when scanning with AVG free latest update... Any body having similar problem??

I have heard last time it detected user32.dll to be a virus ;-)

PS: Am using Vista UE, AVG Free edition with latest updates (14nov2k8)



UPDATE: This issue seems to have been sorted out in the latest update (270.9.3/1788). But now I feel that anti-virus software in general are dicey... move to Linux ;-)

ARM Netbook will run Ubuntu!

Yes, its official, Canonical (makers of Ubuntu) and ARM have signed a deal to bring the complete Ubuntu distribution to ARM Cortex-A8/A9 processors (ARMv7 architecture). Expect the builds to be ready by April 2009. These netbooks power a full day no-recharge functions. But well only when the true devices come in, can something be said about them.

I also hope, that by meaning "complete Ubuntu distribution", they also port the gcc natively to ARM. Then, truly, new ARM based applications can be developed without the need for the now ubiquitous PC.

More info: http://www.arm.com/news/23761.html

Nokia Care Center: Is simply bad

Ever since I have been "mobilized", so to say, I have been using Nokia phone. That was not long ago though. My first phone was Nokia 6600 which I got in 2006. I was quite happy with the phone and Nokia build, until they invoked the then much publicized and now deeply forgotten advisory on their BL-5C class batteries made by a particular manufacturer. After I learned from their website (http://batteryreplacement.nokia.com/batteryreplacement/en/) that my battery also falls in the faulty category I promptly registered it on their site for a replacement to be sent to my home address. The point is, I never ever got this replacement.



If I enter my battery number, 0670400363563N035122500166, at the above mentioned site, I get a page indicating that the battery shipment had already been done on 2007-10-09 !!



Which obviously is very very false, as I have never received this. I repeatedly called the Nokia care center, India on their provided number but they repeatedly kept dodging me saying that you will soon get the replacement. On the top of all this their number is *not* toll free and I have ended up paying more than 200 INR just to call them, which of-course provided no definite information. In the end one of their executives asked me to go the Nokia Care center in Shivaji Nagar, Pune called "Akshay Telecom". When I reached the place, I was informed that those people have moved to another place: F. C. Road. WoW! The "care-executive", neither their website have made the changes and made me go from one place to another! The lady at the reception (of F. C. Road branch)was simply rude. She simply said we dont provide replacements. Irritated, I again called the Nokia Care center number, again paying through my nose for the call. The "executive" this time took down my "complain", and asked me to again visit "Akshay Telecom" at the Shivaji Nagar address!! I politely told her that I was at the center, and they have moved to a new address! She merely said, that I would get a replacement within a week. That was one month ago. And I have decided not to call those people again. They are simply bad.

Even though I got a new Nokia phone (E51) a few months ago, the next time I am buying a phone, I would think very very hard before going for Nokia. Just making good phones is not good enough, you must have good customer care too. You should know that even one dissatisfied customer can make a lot of difference to you.

An OS called Puppy :-)

Background

In an earlier post, I had noted that I have been using Windows Vista on my netbook - HCL's MiLeap. To speed things up I used to use a spare 256 MB card as a ReadyBoost device until recently, when I upgraded MiLeap memory to 1GB from 512MB. Well its been quite some time now since I switched over to Vista from Ubuntu, and as far as my netbook is concerned I don't think that I will ever come back to Ubuntu, even after the release of the most recent 'netbook' friendly version. I find myself more productive than just tweaking things around on my netbook, ever since I had installed Vista. Ok thats for my day-to-day-work.

I had also been posting about the possibility of a ultra cheap netbook especially tailored for the Indian market. Putting Vista or any version of Windows (probably even Windows CE) on such a machine would probably, according to me, be a big mistake. Firstly, it adds up to the extra cost of the product. Secondly, you would be dependent on a company for your software and would limit the ability to squeeze hardware as you want it, if an-off-the shelf OS is chosen. Thirdly, an OS like Vista is not devised for small footprint system (MiLeap is not exactly a small footprint device: 900MHz Celeron-M-ULV, 512MB (now 1GB) RAM and 30GB HDD). Vista won't, for example, even fit on a 2GB pen-drive on which I have been using Puppy Linux for some time now. Windows CE does address the second and third issue to a large extent, but definitely not the first one.

With my 256MB SD-Card lying around I thought of putting it to some good use. MiLeap has a inbuilt card reader and you could make it boot from the SD-Card. Since, I though that carrying my pen-drive around just to boot of Puppy was a bit of a pain, I simply installed it on my SD-Card and made MiLeap dual-boot: Puppy from 256MB SD-Card and Vista from 30GB HDD. You see the contrast?




The Good

Like Vista, Puppy works out of box on MiLeap. No fuzz. In fact it is better off than Vista on out-of-box experience for MiLeap on some accounts. All drivers are detected (except the touchpad, which is not properly configured, and behaves more like a mouse. UPDATE: this is fixed in the latest version, but have not verified it), Vista had problem with detecting on-bord WiFi, though the drivers were found on Windows Update. The screen resolution is correctly detected as 800x480. Vista on first boot presented me with a scrollable 1024x768 screen, thinking that how can I have such a small resolution?

All this similarity ends here. For good. The first point is that I have the whole OS with hell lot of applications: Office, Multimedia, Internet, E-Mail, Calender, Games etc. etc. packed into a ~90 MB image, which when installed on the card is about 120MB and the rest of space on the 256MB card is allotted for user files..., which, I would say is quite an achievement. Puppy is pretty well thought of Linux distribution with absolutely no compromises made on usability. Its simply wonderful to have a modern OS fitted in my arcane 256MB card, and with ample space to keep my files too.

So is puppy secure? Well it depends on how you see it. If you are looking for multiple user accounts with login screens, it is not, as far as the out of box version is concerned. You can of course tweak it ... but well you know, how many out there would do so? Yes, OEMs may probably try to do it. That is one of the main reasons I suggest using Puppy for a extremely low cost NetBook that is productive. You can essentially remaster the Puppy the way you want in minutes... and then simply make an ISO and use the remastered copy every where. Its such a breeze. I am in the process of trying out this very feature and will post my experiences soon.



And well it still has one problem that seems to have not been solved in any Linux distribution that I have used so far: Its default WiFi driver can't join my home ad-hoc network if I use WEP/WPA security features... This is really frustrating. But in the wild probably no one uses ad-hoc networks?

But then again the point is, I still love this little Puppy :-) Battery life being one more issue to love it.

Under Vista I generally get average battery life of 3 hr 10 mins. Of course I use quite a lot of applications and do some programming on it (Java, MS Office/OpenOffice, LaTeX, Nokia PC Suit, Firefox, IE8, Chrome and many more). All this leaves about 15GB for user files (of the 30 GB disk)... of which 5GB is already consumed ;-) If Vista installation is cozy, Puppy installation seems to be breath of fresh air :) Puppy too gives similar battery life, though some what better... about 3 hrs 20 - 30 mins. So I guess the power management stuff in Puppy is pretty good. However, I have not found a way to suspend / sleep in Puppy. But then Puppy boots and responds fast enough to probably not have this feature at all!

Another issue to love Puppy is that it plays mp3 files out-of-box, no need to download any codecs. The in-built gxine player is superb, no fuzz, minimalistic multimedia player, which can also handle number of video formats. And, oh well, SeaMonkey browser comes with Adobe Flash Plugin, so YouTube support is out of box.

For whom it is good?

Well if majority of your data is on Internet (read Web 2.0), but you still need a usable OS that does most of things right (word processing, Internet, picture editing, multimedia (mp3, video)) ... then Puppy is your best friend. You can of course, remaster and make a customizable distribution which you can share with others.

Since a NetBook is exactly meant for the above usage scenario, Puppy Linux makes a very strong case for an ultra low cost x86 based NetBook. And I strongly feel that if a ultra-inexpensive NetBook for Indian markets is to be made, Puppy Linux should be the default, supported OS installed on it :-). Well some customizations will definitely be needed, especially pertaining to locale for Indian languages.

And what it is not meant for, in short where to stop expecting more from Puppy?

Well if you are a heavy desktop user and frequently use applications such as the ones I mentioned for my Vista installation on MiLeap... then sorry you must better get pretty heavy hardware and one of those heavy weight OSs: Vista, OS-X or Ubuntu, or wait for Windows 7 ;-)

PS: This post was written using Geany (an IDE!!) on Puppy and then posted by connecting to net using SeaMonkey browser via the ethernet port. The screenshots were taken using mtPaint-screen capture utility in Puppy.

Chandrayaan-1 enters lunar orbit...

There we are! Was wanting to post of Chandrayaan for a long time, but was just tracking it. And now that its reached the lunar orbit, we can hope that it goes well for the next thing in the line ... an impact probe that plants Indian flag on moon :-)

Khoodos to ISRO people :-)

More info at: http://isro.gov.in/pressrelease/Nov08_2008.htm

perfect Indian netbooks?

This is a followup post to an earlier post (available here) on the same topic (be sure to read the last PS).

These are the thoughts that come out to me when I strive hard to find out a solution for a made in India low cost netbook.

Processor:
The most important part of the computing machine today is evidently the kind of processor to be used. A processor not only defines a consistent architecture, it also defines how power efficient is the overall system design. While an ideal design would have a system on a chip architecture; such as the one offered by Philips or Texas instruments, these are not yet wide spread and are definitely not the more widely supported x86 architecture. Moreover as pointed out in my earlier post these systems are still dependent on the standard architecture for software stack development. Where as on the other hand the x86 systems are generally the one that have a full support for self bootstrapping i.e. they do not need any host machine to bring life, read software stack, to them.
A netbook for India must have a large support base. x86 systems do have a large support base, more people know how to write software for them than any other platform. Though you might argue that there are more ARM based processors even in this part of the world, the fact remains that applications developed for this platform is quite rare and are most of the times Java based games that largely restrict the usability of these devices. What made x86 popular is its ability of infinite customization. Whereas what makes an ARM devices widely seen is because of its large production and definitely not because of its ability of customization or programmability.
Thus I feel that for a general purpose computing machine a low cost, low power x86 processor is the best bet. If you check out the current x86 market, only VIA's nano and AMD's geode seem to have these capabilities. Of these the AMD's processor has been extensively used in the first generation OLPCs. The amount of work that has gone into porting both Linux and windows on this low end x86 processor has been any thing but extensive.

VIA's processor on the other hand has been extensively tested in many embedded devices along with the nano-ITX and pico-ITX boards. This processor is actually marketed as a processor for the next generation netbooks; in direct competition with the more expensive Atom processors. The introduction of the Atom processors have infact shot up the prices of these netbooks by more than double. Which is exactly the reason I would not like to ponder on processors from Intel.

Another option is to develop a made in India x86 processor which I would be a lot interested in. But this for long term!

Memory:
This should be at least 256mb and ideally 512mb. Nothing much to say here for the moment.

Secondary storage:
This should be a solid state device. Provided that these devices would need to be rugged under Indian conditions. They should be a minimum of 2G.

All these thoughts make me think that the simputer project should be revamped!

More on this later.

PS: There is lot of speculation in the market that ARM (through their licensee) would come up with a netbook based on their Cortex processor by the end of this year. My speculation: the OS is going to be Google's Android. If that is so and if they are going to be half the price of the Intel based netbooks, I am hooked :-)

-----
Note: This post was completely keyed in from my nokia e51.

MeTA Studio updates (shh... voice!) and source release

Well here is the long promised source update to MeTA Studio (v2.0.01112008), get it from the usual place at: http://code.google.com/p/metastudio/downloads/list

The binary update is from the now usual online update scheme.. download the latest full package from http://code.google.com/p/metastudio/ and then get the online update from with in MeTA Studio.

Well this release adds assortment of bug fixes as usual and add some cool new features which you will discover as you use MeTA Studio. But one stuff to mention is that you can now do voice communication with in MeTA Studio talk! Yes! you heard it correct ;-) The voice feature is not very stable and has not been extensively tested as yet, but is usable.

Another feature is that you can now dock the talk window with an existing window in MeTA Studio, allowing you to work and collaborate more comfortably. Right now the docking can only be done to a MoleculeViewer window, in future other widows will be supported.

Ok thats it for this post! I will be taking a short break on development of MeTA Studio as I would be moving out and am working on some other related projects… Have fun with the latest (source and binary) MeTA Studio :-) All suggestions, code contributions, documentation is ofcourse welcome ;-)

PS: Some what unrelated but I updated the mobihf code for s60 3rd ed with fp1 (read my phone, e51) and the updates (with some cool new timings) are available from http://tovganesh.googlepages.com/s60. Have fun with that too ;)

PPS: There is a small fix with the Voice communication code for MeTA Studio that is not updated in the source ... this will be done when I next update the code. Till then take a deep breath .. sounds familiar ;-)

My experiments with CUDA

Those of you who are tracking NVIDIA and GPGPU would be aware of CUDA 2.0 .. well the final version is released and is available on many platforms including Windows Vista. I had been experimenting a bit with CUDA APIs in my spare time on my Fedora 9 machine and 8500 GT card. Though I have a similar setup for my Vista machine, I didn’t take the pain of configuring it on Vista … it looked far simpler for me to use gcc on Fedora 9. I had to make some minor changes to the sample SDK code to compile with the new gcc compiler though.

So what have I done? I merely wrote a small program to add two arrays of limited size. This whole example is very simple demonstration of how to pass data from host CPU to the device (GPU), do the computation on GPU and get back the results. Well a lot of such examples are there in SDK samples .. but you see, if you don’t do it your self, you don’t get it ;-) The source is available here (deceptively called vecdot.tar.gz)… and what is this thing called documentation?

Xming: opensource X sever for windows

I was just searching around to check out for a good X server implementation for Vista, and was surprised to find opensource high quality Xming. If you use your windows box to remotely connect to Linux box and some times need GUI applications for Linux ... this is highly recommended!

MeTA Studio update: the big and small changes

Ok, the big change first. Starting from the current version (MeTA Studio v. 2.0.09102008) a customized version of BeanShell library is being used. This change was largely entitled, because I found that some threading issues are not property handled in the original BeanShell implementation and turn out to be resource hungry when run inside MeTA Studio. This means that from now on MeTA Studio will use a separate source base of BeanShell. In the coming days I will post the updated source base for MeTA Studio which will include the changed BeanShell package source.

Next, a new component for finding-text-as-you-type (see screen shot) is introduced at various places (such as code editor, search result page etc.) so the finding text information and coding becomes easier with in MeTA Studio.

 

For, developers only, a thread monitoring component is added to the “Job notification and query panel –> MeTA Studio Scheduler” panel (see screen shot). This panel will be expanded in future to include more information and control.

Other small changes include a number of bug fixes in various components, especially the Federation framework (hopefully things are better now for discovering peers!).

Finally, as with previous few releases, the current release is also purely online release, means you need to download the latest full binary package (from http://code.google.com/p/metastudio/), and then use the MeTA Studio update service to get this latest update.

 

PS: Please be patient for the latest source release ;-), this will be done in coming few days…

Turing test: will it prove any thing?

Guardian is reporting that six computer programs will answer questions by human volunteers at the University of Reading in a bid to become the first recognized 'thinking' machine, in essence pass the Turing test. To me it appears that it would probably prove nothing, at least for the time being.

For instance, if the “AI” computer programs are coded to follow a particular grammar and semantics,  it can, never be taken as a machine that “thinks”. Over time, humans have evolved their grammar and language, can machines do the same? For the time being, I do not think so. A big example of this is the way SMS text messages are frequently sent [r u tr?, ts is gr8!, i wil cal u l8r!] … can a computer program that is only programmed (or “learn”) how to interpret English, would ever be able to “think” and understand this SMSenglish? I seriously doubt!

Minor updates to MeTA Studio

.. again only online updates ...

This version adds: support for automatic monomer detection, and some bug fixes ;-)

Engineering Windows 7

This is an interesting blog from MS engineers on the development of Windows 7. It gives some interesting insights into what goes into developing a morden customer OS.

MeTA Studio gets another update!

.. This was really quick...

Ok the major addition to the code is that now you can easily add external libraries to MeTA Studio which will be automatically loaded the next time you start MeTA Studio instance.

Here is what you need to do:

1) Ensure that you have the latest version [Right now the only latest version is the one that is offered via online update, so even if u download the latested binary package, you need to update it using online updater]

2) To add a new library:

     a) create lib/ext under MeTA Studio installtion directory if it already does not exist.

     b) copy the .jar file of your library to the above directory [say you want CDK (chemistry developmet kit), then you may put cdk.jar in lib/ext]

     c) Ensure that no instance of MeTA Studio is currently running. And then issue the following command from bin/ directory under MeTA Studio installtion director:

       

          java -jar MeTA.jar --addlibs cdk

         You can specify multiple such entries in one --addlibs command.

3) To use the newly added library:

    ... well just restart MeTA Studio ;-)  [UI / daemon mode]. You will be able to access all the libs from any BeanShell script that you write.

Well... we are slowly developing something interesting here, more on that later ;-)

PS: Now with the online updates, this package will be most often updated. The source will also be updated frequently, but a bit less than online updates. And finally, full binary distribution will be updated least frequently as they are a bit large for me to upload from my limited internet connection.

PPS: This version also has some standard bug fixes listed on: http://code.google.com/p/metastudio/issues/list.

If you wanna report bug, want enhancements etc. head straight to http://code.google.com/p/metastudio/issues/list

Note: To Vista users, online updates and adding external libs must be done with administrative privilages if you have installed using the windows binary installer and UAC is turned on.

MeTA Studio update: new features and UI tweaks

A new version of MeTA Studio is now available for download from the usual place at: http://code.google.com/p/metastudio/

This version introduces a number of updates:

a) First and foremost, the binary package downloads are no longer from the UoP chem server, but are from SkyDrive. This is because I am no longer associated with UoP and hence have moved out the binary download site.

b) The source updates are now stripped of the the generated Java docs which allows me to keep the whose source tar ball small and thus make it more frequently available from: http://code.google.com/p/metastudio/downloads/list

c) Starting from the current version (MeTA Studio v2.0.14092008), an online update service is introduced. The updates are kept at: http://tovganesh.googlepages.com/ and are fetched by the updated manager. Note that this is the best and cheapest way to keep MeTA Studio updated from now, of course, once you have installed the complete binary package of the current version. However, note that this service currently doesn't work properly on Windows Vista, if you have used the windows specific installer. One workaround is to start MeTA Studio in administrative mode and then attempt an update.

d) Preferences tab now contains a button to show a simple federation rule editor. This is to allow changing security rules of underlying federation framework without restarting the editor.

e) A new command line switch (apart from --daeom, to start in daemon mode), to execute external script without starting the MeTA Studio interface:

java -jar MeTA.jar --script <script file name>

Currently the only supported script is of the type BeanShell. This feature allows you to write scripts that are entirely new applications, but runs inside the MeTA Studio virtual environment :) Boy this should be cool ;)

f) Assortment of bug fixes and routine changes [detecting monomers] ... something you always expect from an update ;)

g) and a number of more scripts in scripts/ folder so that you can write more of what you want to enhance the IDE.

So try out the stuff and give me feedback...

Puppy and Fluxbuntu: perfect for Indian netbooks?

A netbook for India should be a sub 10,000 INR device. In fact, should be well below 10, 000 INR to have a mass appeal. None of the products available in today's market are any where near this price range. The cheapest in the range is Eee PC 2Gsurf and HCL MiLeap X which cost around 14, 000 INR.

But the fact remains that, for a netbook (or what ever you call it), a basic computing device with Internet access, to be accessible to an average Indian, should be priced well below 10K INR. I have no idea of how this can be achieved, but am a strong believer that it is not difficult to make it a reality. Some of my ideas of how such a device could be built is what I would try to jot down in a series of posts. I call my creation "peoplebook", which as of now is nothing but a vaporware, until someone picks up the idea and builds a real usable product. Or someone generously funds me to materialize the idea ;)

The first and the foremost requirement of building a device like this should be that applications and in fact the operating system itself be built using the same hardware. This immediately disqualifies many devices that can provide cheap hardware, including ARM based devices which are heavily used on mobile phone and other low power devices.  The biggest drawback of ARM based devices like Simputer, Mobilis, Nokia Internet Tablet or Smartphone (based on Symbian or Windows) is that they require a host computer (the dependable PC) to build the software stack. Moreover it is overlay complex to change operating system on these kind of architectures. So the best bet is to use a x86 compatible low power processor which can support a standard Linux/ Windows OS. As Windows has a licensing cost, which eventually adds up to the total cost of the device, I can safely rule out using Windows here. So the natural choice lies in choosing GNU/Linux for the purpose. Building a customized Linux distribution is not exactly an easy task. Though projects like Linux from scratch (LFS for short) do give you hands on for building exactly that, maintaining and upgrading constantly evolving Linux stack is again a problem. So the best bet is to use standard Linux distributions that are available, build by those who are good at it and supported by community. While distros that fall in this category are easy to trace: Ubuntu, Fedora and OpenSuse, all of them have pretty hefty hardware requirements and may not be able to support low power hardware that I am talking of.

While Intel has introduced a new range of low power processors called Atom, along with its previously available Celeron-M ULV and A110 processors, they will still be requiring fans for cooling. This a major hurdle in bringing down the cost of the whole system, as having no fan will eventually translate to thinner and more portable devices that are probably far efficient in power consumption. So, for the time being, I would rule out using a Intel branded x86 processor. The most qualified processor for such a device appears to be Via's Eden processor with the Nano-ITX board. This processor and board seems to be an extremely interesting architecture for building such a general purpose computing device. I am not sure though as to why other people have never tried this, or have they?

Though Via's Eden processor is quite a capable x86 processor that can support Linux and Windows, its definitely not suitable for heavy weight distributions like Ubuntu or Fedora. So in the search of a lighter but complete distributions, I found two interesting ones: Puppy and Fluxbuntu. While Fluxbuntu is based on Ubuntu, but is tailored for low power devices, with 64 MB RAM and about 2GB of hard drive, Puppy is exactly meant for similar hardware (but about 256 MB ram is required) but has been around for quite a long time and has a wider community support.

Since, I didn't have actual hardware to test out these distros, I first checked Fluxbuntu under the Virtual Box environment, with 64 MB RAM and 2GB HDD, but with Intel Core 2 Duo processor @ 1.86GHz. This gave a reasonable and usable desktop with software for word processing and browsing. But its no fun testing on a virtual environment, so I installed Puppy on a 2GB USB drive and then booted my MiLeap with it. MiLeap uses Celeron M ULV @ 900 MHz and has 512MB RAM and 30GB HDD and currently runs Windows Vista Home Basic. For our purpose we have only 2GB HDD as Puppy is now installed on the USB drive.  This installation turned out to be snap for booting from the MiLeap.

Now some real applications stuff: Puppy comes with standard tools for editing docs (Abiword), browsing Internet (Skymonkey, with embedded flash player for playing youtube) and music player (xine, with requisite codes for playing most of the media files). On development front, you can install the latest gcc and other libraries to use Puppy as a platform for developing new applications, or even building new customized Puppy distributions. The same is true for fluxbuntu, however the support for this distro seems to be lesser.

I feel that if someone could piece these things together, with cheap and low power x86 hardware, one can build a really usable machine for the general Indian public and satisfy their computing needs.

[Lots of blah blah? You will have to bear with me till I see these kind of devices ;) ]

Google Chrome: Simply terrific :)

And finally they have it here! Google just released a beta version of their browser called Chrome for Vista and XP. And I am already loving this so much that I have stopped using the IE8 Beta 2, with immediate effect and am using this as my default browser now.

This is the best ever design of the Tabbed UI I have ever seen... On the tablet integration stuff for which Firefox and Opera failed, Chrome also fails, but its simply too tempting to dump this fresh and lightweight browser. I will be installing this on my MiLeap too :)

Update: Most of my frequently visited sites work great with Chrome. However one thing I miss is the superb RSS reader like the one available with IE... so for the mean time IE8 beta 2 not dumped :)

Update2: (See the screen shot), its got some serious tools for Web App developoers and Task Manager and a Memory meter, note IE8 beta 2 and Chrome beta memory usage ;)

Why I will never buy an iPhone?

The iconic iPhone has officially arrived here in Bharat. At the stroke of the mid-night of 22 Aug 2008, it was introduced in India, as it was done world over. But there was a marked difference, no one was queuing out there to get the first hand on that device. For the price tag that it is supposed to be sold, its definitely not for the Indian masses. I am one of them.

Ever since I have been using mobile network, I am using smartphone. First it was Nokia 6600, and now its Nokia E51. So actually speaking I am smartphone user form the beginning. For the past two times I have bought a smartphone, I have always got a basic model that has got all features. I got E51 lately because its the cheapest phone that has all the connectivity options including WiFi and can handle most of the file types that I frequently use on my desktop and laptop. I am price conscious, and always look for the best offer in the least price. My earlier posts on mobilis/simputer had effectively indicated by what I mean by this product pricing issue. This is the prime reason, I will never get an iPhone. The second reason is openness in installing applications, which is tightly controlled by Apple. The third reason is based on speculation: does Apple use the Darwin core on iPhone, if so why is it not making it available to the community?

Moreover, the iPhone does not support (as of now) some common file types that I use frequently. The only advantage it seems to provide over my E51 seems to be pretty looking and touchy interface. To pay almost thrice the cost for such features, is simply not convincing for me.

An iPhone that is tied like this, to the network, is highly priced is simply not worth it. I would better wait for Windows mobile 7? or something more interesting for Linux world like OpenMoko.

MeTA Studio update

Had been a bit too caught up with many activities... so didn't get time to post on the updates. Well here hare some of the updates on MeTA Studio...

First and foremost, a software report describing the MeTA Studio platform has been accepted for publication in J. Comput. Chem. (currently ASAP). I hope that this brings in wider audience and more developers for the MeTA Studio platform!

And well after that wonderful news, here are standard set of improvements on the platform.. again no major updates right now, but expect quite a few in coming versions:
1) More cleaner federation framework interface for writing user level applications. See scripts/ directory for examples.
2) Federation framework now includes a new service for transferring files (binary or otherwise).
3) Many bug fixes and enhancements as enlisted here: http://code.google.com/p/metastudio/issues/list

Switching form Ubuntu to Windows Vista! (...installing Vista on HCL MiLeap-L)

I never thought that anybody will ever write such a post! And I would have considered myself to be the last person to ever think of making the switch.

But it happened. I have been using Windows Vista Home Basic on my HCL MiLeap-L, which originally came loaded with Ubuntu 7.10 which I had upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 very recently. The switch was not a single day decision. I was using Ubuntu on my MiLeap of quite a time, in fact ever since I purchased it, thats about six months ago. Over the time I realised that I was spending more and more time configuring and fine tuning the Ubuntu installation than actually getting any real work done. True, I learned (majority of the times re-learned) many a things, but I just felt that all this was a complete waste of time. The Ububtu updates are one of the most horrid experiences; they can come any time (unlike scheduled release of Windows updates) and they are big all the time (10s or 100s or MBs!). Then as I mentioned in this post, that I had to recompile the rt73 drivers for appropriately supporting wi-fi ad-hoc mode... this resulted in another pain, every time there is a kernel version change, I had to recompile these drivers. And after I updated to Ubuntu 8.04 there have been at least a dozen of these updates. All this made me think hard and finally I switched over to Vista.

I have installed a Windows Vista Home Basic edition on MiLeap, as this is the only edition which is fit for the kind of hardware that is there on my laptop. I chose Vista instead of XP because I have been using Vista on primary desktop and my experience with it has been a far better environment than XP.

It took about 2hrs to completely install Vista and get the desktop. The drivers for my Wi-Fi and Sound were missing in the default install. Which were easy to obtain from Windows update ( I connected to the net using the Ethernet port on my laptop). I also quickly updated to SP1. Overall the amount of download was about 300 MB. This was far better than Ubuntu, where I am sure that I have done more than 2GB updates.

So what do I miss from Ubuntu world?

If I forget about the philosophical reason for using Ubuntu, which anyway a user hardly cares (a user psychology is always to get her task done, and very rarely how the task is done)... I only miss one thing: the gcc compiler package. That said, I rarely used it on my laptop, as most of the time I accessed it from either my VirtualBox installation or my old and well configured FC6 linux box. There was obviously no problem in installing Python and Java on my laptop, that I frequently use (need)...Python for trying out s/t quickly and Java ofcourse for MeTA Studio :)

Other things that I generally use on my laptop: OpenOffice, LaTeX, Media player and Browser are there in Vista. OpenOffice and LaTeX of course had to be installed. But the Windows Media player and IE7 are just great. I hardly used Firefox in Ubuntu (when I had it installed), but rather used Opera as it was better and faster. But on Vista I am sticking to IE7 for the time being, for some strange reasons like this and this [links to previous post].

The new Windows media player has a simple but amazing feature, that allows you to share your playlist to other Windows media player capable devices.. and you can guess what I do with my desktop and laptop ;)

Next, I used to use Gizmo to make voice calls to my GTalk mates... now with GTalk available natively, I am evidently not missing it.

Next, my laptop has a strange screen resolution: 800x480. Ubuntu had always trouble with this, most of the dialogs never fitted properly in the display area, even after I did a lot of tweaking. Vista was not without problems though. The first time I started it, it went to a virtual 1024x768 resolution and gave me a scrollable desktop! But after I changed the resolution appropriately, all most all the dialogs I have encountered are fitted properly in the display area... which is sorta great considering that Vista was never made for such a low powered ULCPCs.

Boot up time of Vista is about same as Ubuntu, provided AVG is not installed. In any case I installed and uninstalled AVG which I found to really slow down my laptop to make it almost unusable. So, for the moment I rely on Vista's "strong" security features and windows defender to protect me against malicious attacks.

Though battery times are almost equal for both Vista and Ubuntu, I find Vista does a better job in handling the "sleep" mode. For me the sleep and the hibernate feature never worked on the Ubuntu setup. But it has worked out-of-box for the Vista installation. And now, I never shutdown my laptop ... I just put it to sleep :-) Putting it in sleep mode has obvious advantage of getting the desktop back in under 20sec (max), as against about 2mins required to boot up the whole stuff. My desktop though boots in less than 20 secs, and wakes up from a sleep in about 5 secs ... owing obviously to quite high end hardware specs. 

So whats not well with Vista?

Well the general answer to this Q is, nothing so far ;)

But there are a few things that are not smooth. One of the prime things is the support for Bluetooth dongles. While on Linux I found that most of the dongles work properly without a hassle, this is not true with Vista, forget about earlier versions of Windows. I simply do not understand why this area is so neglected in Windows.

In Ubuntu, when running on battery mode, the GNOME applet always used to display the amount of time the battery will last. But in Vista so far what I get the the % amount of battery remaining, this to me is actually not so helpful. Till now I have not found a way to change this.

And what about Vista ratings?

aka. Windows Experience Index. Here is it:

evidently, the very basic stuff, if you compare it with my dekstop:

PS: This post was written on my MiLeap running on Vista Home Basic using Windows Live Writer.

PPS: I am in no way advocating the use of Vista. I am just telling my experience. Its for each user to decide what is best for him/her. I am no way related to Microsoft and this post is not endrosed by them either.

virtualization using java!

I have been using virtualization technologies on my Vista machine, but was surprised to find that there is a purely Java based virtualization tool exists.. and what a fun it runs on my Nokia E51 too, allowing me to boot FreeDOS on my mobile!

My New Laptop ;)

 

... so soon expect some updates to application written by me on S60 (2nd ed) phones (http://tovganesh.googlepages.com/s60) ;-)

MeTA Studio updates: new graphics pipeline, federation updates

This MeTA Studio update brings in an assortment of changes... especially to the backend graphics pipeline. The graphics pipeline has be rewritten (but all the public APIs preserved) so that external dependencies (like Java3D) are differed till they are acutally requested for. This makes using MeTA.jar to construct applets a simpler task and now only requires this file for all the default graphics applications. For an example take a look at: http://chem.unipune.ernet.in/~tcg/MeTAppletAdapter/MeTAppletAdapter.html
I will further update and release the source of the above link in comming days.

The new binary distro also include two files in scripts directory that give example on using the federation framework for building simple distributed applications: testfedconsumer.bsh and testfedservice.bsh ... more on this soon ;)

In the mean time get the latest from: http://code.google.com/p/metastudio/

... no source updates yet but expect that soon :)

UPDATE:
The applet adapter source is posted at: http://tovganesh.googlepages.com/MeTAppletAdapter.zip
The HTML/Javascript stuff seem to work well in Firefox, however there are some problems with IE. Didn't have time to look into it. Any help in this regard is appreciated!
This new interface is now used in WebProp.

When Operating System = Browser

I primarily use my desktop running on Vista UE and my MiLeap running on Ubuntu 8.04 for work and fun. As most of the real work that I do (read programming) is on my Vista machine, I many a times need access to Ubuntu to get some stuff checked in the Linux world for which I find using VirtualBox as the best solution. I had tried Virtual PC before, but I find VirtualBox to be much better product.

When I started using VirtualBox, I had installed Ubuntu 7.04 and later upgraded to 7.10. At the same time my MiLeap came bundled with 7.10 which I quickly upgraded to 8.04 as I badly need a lots of new stuff that was in 8.04 but not in 7.10. Was thinking of doing the same thing with my VirtualBox installation, but then something strange happened. My VirtualBox hardware emulation is actually pretty minimal for Ubuntu installation: 5GB HDD and 256MB RAM. I though for myself, I have the required gcc/g++ (which for my work has not changed much from the 7.10 to 8.04) and the only other thing I occasionally use is Browser aka Firefox. Now the only thing I really care about is a better web experience inside my VirtaulBox Ubuntu installation whenever I need it. I actually do not use any thing else than that: compiler and Firefox. So I merely upgraded to Firefox 3.0 and just forgot about what version of Ubuntu I was using. Later on I started jotting this down in the blog, from Firefox 3.0 on my VirtualBox Ubuntu (which version? what hardware?)

The above was just a description of what I had experienced in the VirtualBox environment. But lets take this further to real (yet mock) usage scenarios. User Joe buys a computer. Joe doesn't care about what kind of processor and stuff like that, the marketing guy on the counter manages to convince him that he has got the best deal. Jeo uses GMail for mail, PicasaWeb for photos, YouTube for videos, Google Docs for docs, spreadsheet and creating presentations and thats it. Jeo needs only these every day. He uses his favorite browser (the one that came with the OS) to access these services (to him they really are applications). Some day he discovers that there are alternative browsers and then installs one of the popular ones. After a few years Ubuntu and Microsoft come up with brand new OSs with tonnes of features and ever increasing hardware requirements. Joe doesn't see why he needs all that, stops buying (or using) new hardware and new OS, and just upgrades himself to the new version of the browser that was just released.

If this is how it works out for majority of users, Ubuntu and Microsoft will have tough time convincing users to try out their next best offering... of course this has a caveat that your favorite browser might stop supporting previous OS releases. As it happened with IE and Firefox 3 (no support for my old Windows 98 machine!).

Leaves me wondering about this cloud computing scenario. It looks to be an interesting perspective. Something that can't exist without the current client OS but soon these will be a thing of past when they will be accessed through low cost devices like ULCPCs... where only a browser upgrade will enhance the user experience. The applications keep improving on the sever side .. no need to purchase/download/install them locally. You only need a fat pipe, and that is becoming cheaper by the day. Sun Microsystem always says "The Network is the Computer"... looks like we are sooner or later headed that way.

On the developer front, this is gonna be another interesting stuff. Google is already providing a lot of APIs to access and build applications for its cloud computing resources. Note that you are here not developing on a isolated machine anymore, you are using a huge computing resource .. and the possibilities are limitless.