Important intermediate binary release for MeTA Studio

This is with reference to the previous post for updated binaries (http://tovganesh.blogspot.com/2010/05/intermediate-binary-release-for-meta.html), just making it more clear in a separate post.

- This is an important update, any one using MeTA Studio must update to this binary release

- The current version number is 2.0.15052010

- This update, with out change in version number re-enables online updates. Any further updates to be shipped as online update, till major changes are needed.

- Also includes updated docs for API changes

- Moves the binary package download to Google code. Skydrive will still be used for hosting user scripts.

Update: There is a new online update available (now the version number is 2.0.24062010) that fixes issue with Java3D rendering. You will need to have v 2.0.15052010 installed before you can apply this update to make it work correctly.

OneNote on Linux using Office webapps

I don't really use MS Office too much (neither OpenOffice or Google docs), most of my docs are done with LaTeX. But I have been using Office 2007 for quite some time on T91MT and I must admit that MS has done some really nice work on it. I particularly use OneNote (with inking and audio) and is probably the most used application for me from the suite.

Now MS has released Office web apps on Skydrive. Though limited, it basically serves the purpose. I am able to use them on Linux (finally!), especially OneNote (no advanced features though!). I plan to review office web apps in a few days, on how it fairs on Linux using Firefox. So stay tuned ;-)

Random thought

Intermediate binary release for MeTA Studio

This is a stop gap binary release for MeTA Studio. The current version is v 2.0.15052010

There are no noticeable user related changed in this release except:

- Jython libraries are integrated into binary release, so it need not be separately downloaded. Complete Jython integration is not yet done (Jython scripts for MeTA Studio cannot be run from command line yet, you can use wrapper though). You will still need to use the old procedure to get the Jython shell up : using the widgets, as described here.

- A number of bug fixes

Under the hood there are lots of changes:

- graphics APIs

- .mar - MeTA Studio archive format to package applications that run with in MeTA Studio environment

- scripting integration API changes

- added mt4j to experiment with multi touch features in MeTA Studio

None of these are currently exposed to UI and will take some time for maturity.

The downloads are available from usual place: http://code.google.com/p/metastudio/

Stay tuned and enjoy!

Important Update: Another binary update has been released with the same version number. This merely enables the online updates as well as updates the help set for the latest API documentation. I have also moved binary update packages to Google code as I don't expect to change their file names in near future. SkyDrive will still be used for hosting user scripts and is now managed by kritwik. You must update to this binary package, as in future I would mostly be releasing only online updates up-till a point where major update is required.

MeTA Studio project updates

Long time since I blogged on the status of MeTA Studio. Behind the scene there is lot of work going on, but has not come up to the point for a release. In the meantime have got two more developers who have expressed interest and joined in for contribution to the project. Hope this works out well :)

I will now be regularly posting design note on the current development of MeTA Studio code base. At this moment these are available from http://cid-76d41f4618b0b6af.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/metastudio/notes as PDF documents.

At a later stage, as I get in contributions from other members  I would like to make this process completely open for comments and modifications.

That is all for now. Expect to hear more in coming weeks.

‘Nameless’ people, who amused me

I keep meeting strangers, some of who amuse me quite a bit. I have met some ‘well known’ strangers: Chandra Babu Naidu, Arun Shouri and Anna Hazare are some I vividly remember. Of these I have quite a respect for Anna Hazare for the social work he has done in past and continues to do. I have been fortunate enough to have travelled with him as a co-passenger on train (from Hyderabad to Pune) quite some time ago. Had a long chat with him and he was actually fine with giving his autograph to me :)

But I have also met many ‘nameless’ people who amused me, like the once I described here. ‘Nameless’ because, I met them only once, and may probably never meet them.

In Oz too, I met some of these interesting people (affectionately, Aussies :)). Both seemed to have immense interest in Science, even though their current jobs had no direct connection with Science: one guy was a cleaner and another had come to do window frosting in the building I work in.

Both of these guys seem to be well read, and keeping up-to-date with latest Science news and happenings. And I must admit that I was totally impressed with their breadth of reading and knowledge.  The window frosting guy, was quoting from Richard Dawkins, ‘The Selfish Gene’. A book that I read quite some time back, but definitely cannot remember so much that I can quote from it!!

One of the guys (the window frosting guy), was a member of Creation Ministries (http://creation.com/), which seem to promote Science education. But am not totally sure about it, because it seems to have some church connection. Even so, talking to these guys made me feel and wish that people were like this in India :-)

Well, for some reason, I cherish memories of meeting these totally strangers … probably it makes living life fun; and I hope to keep meeting more :)

For Google and Chrome aficionados ;-)

... they do not seem to recognize each other as compatible ;-)

Or well there is some problem, but thought it was fun reading the error message.

iPad craze, and my Asus T91MT

Well the media is all praises over how "revolutionary" the iPad is. But for me it is a no sell, primarily because it is a consumer device: a device for consuming content and less of creating content. By content I mean write applications, not just make documents. There are other things that no one has bothered to check:

- For a tablet of this size, don't you expect to have handwriting recognition? Hey but iPad has a capacitive touch screen so that probably will not work.

- Does it have palm rejection? No one seems to say anything about this.

- Then there are a whole lot of other things: no multi-task, no web cam etc. etc. that many others have pointed out as obvious omission.

For me the Asus T91MT, that I have been using has all of this. Though it is not all good with palm rejection; it only works well with Microsoft Journal. I heavily depend on the Windows 7 handwriting recognition and has become my primary means of entering notes or writing lots of text; it just works for me. And it has a inbuilt physical keypad, in case you need one (write code?!). I have not yet tried programming on T91MT, but would do so soon ;-)

In any case it depends what you are looking for: if you want a fine balance between productivity and entertainment go for a tablet like Asus T91MT which has an integrated physical keypad. If you are looking for mostly an entertainment centric and content consumption device with which you would also like to get some productivity you might think of getting an iPad. Both of these, I guess, cost almost the same.

Three decades and a DSLR

Well that is a bit of farce. I had been planning to get a DSLR for quit a long time, but just have not been convinced to spend on it, until recently, I went ahead and ordered one (from digitalyes.com.au, whom I would rate as quite excellent and prompt online retailers). And they delivered exactly on the day I turned 3 decades old ;) … sounds like getting old.

Well so, I have done quite a bit of photography before but have never handled an SLR before. So the piece I ordered for is quite an entry level but good camera from Canon: EOS 1000D. This came with twin lens : 18-55mm and 75-300mm. Both of these lenses are with out IS, so essentially for the later one I would need a tripod (which I already have).

In any case, I am still learning to use this camera. In the mean time I tried to take various shots with varying settings to see how the photos turn up. These are just a some of ones that turned out to be reasonably good. All photos are taken in and around my home and other places in Canberra. All shots were taken mostly with manual settings, and no flash turned on. More to follow, as I learn more. Just got another reason to travel more :-)

Enjoy!

Spammed by Comments!

This has never so been bad. Over past two days I have been spammed by some Japanese comments littered all over my blog. So, from now on all comments will be moderated on this blog. If I still continue to be spammed, I would consider disabling comments all together for some time.

Cheers & Enjoy!

Why Windows 7 is still not "that" touch friendly?

#1 lesson about UIs I learned today ;-) : Without using the stuff, you don't really know how good or bad a piece of user interface it.

I have used iPod touch quite frequently (I don't own one, this one is used by my friend) and have been using Windows 7 on my T91MT for a few days now.

After using both these interface for "reasonable" amount of time, I do really feel that Windows 7 UI is not exactly optimized for touch screens; at least if they are the size of T91MT (8.9" screen). On a larger screen (like the all-in-ones), the story might be different.

What is good?

#1 What ever the MS marketing has advertised ;-)

#2 The super bar, the desktop and explorer arrangements are well done

#3 IE8 is quite well touch friendly

#4 The handwriting recognition and the math input panel are simply fantastic and work very well

And whats not so good?

#1: In the tablet mode on T91MT, there is no replacement for Alt-Tab or Win-Tab. I think this is a way big omission. Given a multitasking OS, I did expect to flick through open applications (only the super bar, and the live preview is *not* the solution, there ought to be something better).

#2: Any dialog with options in it to select, is simply not usable by finger, you end up using the stylus to operate it.

#3: Third party applications are not touch optimized. To me, most notably, Google Chrome.

#4: Interface elements need to scale appropriately for smaller screens with finger touch enabled.

Experiences: My first convertible, Asus T91MT

Ok, I was going to type the title of this post as “Experiences: My first tablet”. But then realized that, I in-fact have a tablet: Mobilis, even before I got myself a Netbook (MiLeap). That is partly because I don't like laptops: primarily because of their form factors and secondarily because of the price factor (they were too expensive back then, well still are!).

This made me first buy the Mobilis. However that experience was not exactly pleasing. I am still trying to figure out how best to use this device!

Then I got HCL-MiLeap-L. Which was a terrific machine. But when Windows 7 was released, I really missed the touch feature. So I installed Ubuntu 9.10 on this kid and gave it to my parents as a backup machine for Skype call in event of power failure (the primary desktop running Windows 7).

In the mean time I got an office laptop (Dell XPS). Though pretty good performance (well good for doing some serious work!), it has two major problems: Weight and Heat. Either of these makes the device not so mobile. Also even if Windows 7 is there on this machine, there is no touch screen. To be fair, I was looking for a very portable, light weights, not to expensive machine that I owned ;)

I have been searching for this kind of a device for couple of months, and finally zeroed in onto Asus T91mt (or its successor T101mt). But eventually decided not to wait for the successor and ordered one from techbuy.com.au (who, I guess is fairly good online retailers/ re-seller, that is my experience). Prime reason for that being that there is no public set release date for T101mt, and there is no concrete info on if this will sport an SSD or an HDD. I really did not want to get an HDD based device. For MiLeap too I wanted an SSD based model, but they were simply out of stock when I ordered one.

I don’t intend to write a technical review of this product here, but just my experience of using this, in short it has been fantastic as of now.

So what do I use this device for: every thing except for serious programming. My “every thing” doesn’t include playing games or watching high-definition videos.

The best way I like to use this device is in tablet mode specifically to read news and stuff. Touch typing is accurate and handwriting recognition is terrific (of Windows 7), it also correct spelling mistakes on the fly ;) Multi-touch (two point) is also pretty accurate and works flawlessly for me.

The keyboard design is pretty good (if I compare this to MiLeap, which was quite cramped).

Heat generation is “very low”. I have a feeling that it is better than my Mobilis, which at some point got so hot that I could not hold it.

There are no fans! So it is very quite, and I am quite happy about this.

The bundled software (Windows 7 with the touch pack) and Asus touch suite are pretty good. Though I found Asus touch suite to be bit buggy and unstable some times, hope they fix it.

As far as the windows experience index goes it is 1.9, the lowest one going to the processor. (Note: I upgraded the memory to 2GB, though the default 1GB is usable, I simply always have too many apps open when it comes to a desktop operating system ;)…).

Finally, this need not be mentioned, but MeTA Studio works pretty well on this device. And drawing molecules with fingers is pretty intuitive (but buggy, so expect a fix, now since I know what happens!) ;) In any case, MeTA Studio is not multi-touch capable (yet).

Update: After constantly using it for few days I have made the following changes-

- Removed all Asus applications except Hotkey, I don't see they are really useful and I find Microsoft touch pack to be much more stable and usable than Asus applications. Also the Asus applications simply make the machine too slow.

- And installed them again! after realizing that merely changing power settings to 'high power' makes it faster.

- Removed the super hybrid engine too and put the power options to High performance. With this T91 performs way much smoother even in the tablet mode. The heat is not much of an issue still. Though battery life could be, have to see how it goes.

- Installed Google chrome. But it does not support some cool finger gestures like kinetic or hold and scroll. IE is still integrated well with the touch gestures. (moved to firefox, much better integration with windows 7)

- With this (expensive ?) purchase, I plan to buy no further gadgets for next 2 years, at least ;)

Update2

One of the commentors requested me to check pressure sensitivity with Open Canvas. As far as I can see, yes there is pressure sensitivity.

Update3

I have been using One Note (2007) on my T91MT for quite a while now, specifically to quickly write design documents and record memos. And I find it to be quite usable and very productive.

Notion Ink: Another attempt at making a device in India

Wow! Now I am really excited about this one... and I really wish they can come up with a successful business model for tablet devices in India.

In my last post I mentioned about Pi, the e-book reader to be sold in India, and was not very happy about lack of "innovation" there. I also mentioned that Simputer was a remarkable product, but failed miserably in market (to read more about my views on Simputer look here: http://tovganesh.googlepages.com/simputer).

Now, a few guys (http://www.notionink.com/Home/about-us) have setup Notion Ink with the intent of creating a tablet for Indian market (http://notionink.wordpress.com/). And apparently they were at the CES.

This is good going. However, again for this to be really successful (as in consumers and developers appreciating it) there are few factors that I feel are important:

- Why would one want this device? A compelling reason(s) on why some one from Bharat will save and spend on this device, rather than just buying a mobile phone.

- The software stack. Merely porting an existing Android will not help. May I repeat, it will not help! It needs to create a whole ecosystem around it. What differentiates it from other Android devices, say for instance what Dell plans to introduce?

- What particular advantage is this device going to offer culturally? As in, culture in India. This is largely a software issue, and I think there is a lot of interesting things that can be done in this space, which address to some extent the above two points.

- Software developers are very important. You have to be able to attract "mindshare" in large numbers and it needs to be specific to your device. This cannot be just off the stock Android.

- Finally, price is a very (very) important issue in India. It has to be very rational.

I really wish that I can work with these guys. These are some of the issues that I would really like to address and seem fairly challenging to me.

(Update: The specs are out now http://notionink.in/adamtechspecs.php, still no news on how the software and sevices will stack up, but the device has quite interesting usage scenarios. The rotatable camera is something that is cool design :) In any case, as of now this is definitely innovative than that Jojoo or Crunch Pad, or what ever...)

The Indian Kindle!

The Kindle (from Amazon) is available worldwide, but is too expensive when shipped to India. On the top of it is English only (for the moment).

Now an Indian company (http://www.infibeam.com/) have come up with an Indian clone for Kindle and its called the Pi. So much so that the site also looks heavily inspired by amazon.com ... I did have wished that they would have been a bit creative here!

The plus point with this device is that it supports Sanskrit, Hindi and most of other official languages, which is missing in Kindle. The only truly missing point is wireless, the thing that makes kindle successful. To ignore it wont do good in long run, I think. Also the ability to make notes on kindle, along with the dictionary are two great reading aids, which I think would be completely missing in Pi.

The price of 10K is also too high, I think. The device should be below 5K to be popular in India. Some features like an SD card reader is actually not very useful, it should simply be removed and the cost saved.

Overall, I think it is interesting to see some thing like this come up in India. I think after the Simputer, this is the first IT hardware product made in India, and made for Indians. The Simputer was quite an innovation, which is missing to a large extent in Pi. Even then, kudos to Vishal Mehta and team for kick starting this. I hope he can open up the device for 3rd party programming too, possibly release an SDK along the lines of Amazon Kindle?

(Note: Pi is available for pre-order from http://www.infibeam.com/Pi)

Why search suggestions need to be a little better?

Just out of curiosity, I was searching “indian people” in Google, and and I was quite surprised to find the suggestions like this:

Personally, I don’t feel annoyed or hurt about this, but definitely feel sad. The world’s best search engine “suggesting” people are “ugly” or what ever, is also quite funny. I think the search suggestions are a good idea, but they should better be reasonable!

Bing, for instance seems to be not that great, but at least it doesn’t give you quite absurd suggestions.

Google, when are you fixing that ;-) ?!

 

Update: After though, just thinking how this could be automatically filtered. Probably should assign negative weights for words that qualify (living) person or words like people or person or human. Well to be truly democratic, that should not be done, but then there needs to be exceptions for the well being of society.

Alice in multicore land

.. Is a talk that I gave for a conference recently held for the 60th birthday of my Ph.D. guide Professor S R Gadre

The slides (available here) were prepared just a day before the actual talk, and that too while attending other talks! So don't expect them to be perfect.

Any how I enjoyed giving the talk ;-) Hope the ISSC public did get something from it :P

Eee of Tablet

Asus Eee T101MT. Unless some one comes with a superior model, I plan to get one of these as soon as it is available:

http://www.liliputing.com/2010/01/asus-eee-pc-t101mt-10-inch-tablet-coming-this-year.html

and ditch my heavy laptop, for ever. Well, as far as mobility is concerned. I will still use it at office ;-)

I really hope that they are fast enough to introduce it in Oz as well, given that they have already cleared FCC.

Update:

- I also found out Lenovo s10-3t

- But I also found another interesting thing, the Pinetrail processor GPU GMA 3150 is apparently less capable than the GPU used with Asus T91 MT which is GMA 500 .. Also T91 MT is mere 960 grams. Makes me think if the older version is better for me !

OzInd

I was not sure if I should ever write this .. but any ways just jotting down some random thoughts...

- Being on an India tour the most asked about question is: "Whats all the media reports about Bharateeya in Oz? Is that true?"

My conclusion: Belief of Indians in media reporting (especially sensational) is dropping, for good.

The bad: I almost felt like an Oz diplomat every time I tried to address this question.

The good: My very close friends did not ask that Q ;-)

That brings me to the Hindu report (http://www.hindu.com/2010/01/08/stories/2010010857021800.htm) and again a reason why I read The Hindu than any other media in India.

- Hopped a number for flights in India (10 to be precise!). Was the first time I ever visited domestic airports (train being my first choice of long distance travel). Of all the airports, I found the Kochi airport to be best managed and also cheap on food. I could get 120 ml coffee for 15 INR as against hardly measurable amount of coffee for 40 INR at Chennai airport! Also the Chennai airport was the worst airport I have visited so far. The other airports I visited (in the decreasing order of goodness): Pune, Mumbai and Madhurai.

- The rikshaw travel from Pune airport to my home (which is hardly 2.5 km) is 80 INR! For me this quite literally amounts to: looting! Or am I missing the point of Inflation? Next time I should get less luggage and just walk down.

ICONCT’09 : Again a not-so-technical view of another conference I am attending ;-)

Dha. I was supposed to post a technical round up for the eResearch’09 conference, but had been on travel so much and have been caught up with other “todos” that it has still not happened. But hope do that in at least next few weeks.

In the mean time I am attending this conference at Shivakashi, better known for fireworks, than probably an engineering collage ;-)

I have previously visited Tamil Nadu for only two purposes: Travel and Conference. This is my second conference in Tamil Nadu. The first one was quite boring. I did not have much expectations from this either. The only point here was that this was a computing technologies conference rather that a subject specific conference. Which thankfully took away most of my boredom.

My flight from Pune-Chennai-Madurai was so-so. While I discovered that the Pune airport is far better managed than the Chennai airport. I was quite astonished with the kind of checking these people do. Well this was my first domestic flight, so I should have expected some surprises. The worst part of the whole trip was getting from my home in Pune to the airport (which is barely 2.5 Km away). I was expecting this would cost me around 30 INR on a rikshaw with meter. When I actually went to ask for the fare the rikshawala said 100 INR! I said I will pay whatever comes on the meter, but he refused to do so (This is pretty horrible, there should be a legal system in place by the RTO, Pune, to place a complain. If there is one it needs to be publicized, at least I am unaware of it!). Any way this guy came down to 80. I simply said that I would pay nothing above 60 and he agreed! On a second though I should have said even lesser. If he was not prepared for that, I would have simply walked to that place (I have done this many a times, but not to catch a plane of course!).

The trip from Madurai to Shivakashi was not a bad one, I was escorted with a guy who was giving one of the keynotes, and eventually also turned up to be the chief-guest. Anyways, I was quite amused to find a 4 lane highway here. Only if people also could follow the lane disciplines. But then, we are Indians ;-)

Also there seems to be nothing so interesting to see around Shivakashi, or rather that is the impression that I got. Have no plans to go around Madurai, as I have already been there before, twice. The Internet connection is also so-so, am currently using Airtel GPRS, which is simply too slow for anything other than checking some mails, and posting this!

I did better not say much about the conference it self, but can be summed as: Ok (my talk day 1), bore (day 2), bored (day 3). Now I simply want to go home. Makes me think again and again that I should simply switch my field. Only thing that I really care about is whatever I do, I should be enjoying it :-)

As of the collage where this was held, MEPCO Schlenk engineering collage, I must admit that it was a pretty good experience. I even interacted informally with a couple of students out here and guess the facilities that the collage provides along with the kind of teaching that is offered here is quite good.

In the end I felt that, my visit was more valuable in terms of the feedback I gave rather than what I presented there.

No idea on how the journey back home will be!

Free internet kiosk at public places: best case for Chrome OS

Ok, so I am getting bored at transit. Lesson learned: never take a flight with huge transit time, even if it might be a bit cheaper. Awaiting my flight at this "buzy" Singapore airport. I finally got my "private" wifi connection. Rather than using the public free internet kiosk.

I did use these public kiosks at the Sydney and the Singapore airport before. But the interface is just too bad and wants for a better experience. At Sydney this is provided by Optus, and surprise surprise its an Ubuntu terminal with I think either boots into Firefox or Seamonky as the browser. The bad part is that it is so locked down that you can just use it for one thing: browsing simple pages. The real bad thing is the interface. I clicked on the "delete private data" before giving it to another guy in queue. And this process took 2 minutes! As it rebooted the whole kernel. As far as this experience goes Singapore airport has much better interface. But guess what it runs Windows and Internet Explorer. Yuk ;-)

More over people seem to be least bit worried about clearing private data on public computers. There just needs to be better user interface. At Singapore airport, each session is only valid for 15 minutes and it automatically terminates (clears all cache) after that period. Which is one step better than what was there at Sydney airport.

This brings me to the point where I feel Google Chrome OS can provide a substantially better user experience and secure access to Internet. In fact, in all these kiosks all the ingredients for best user experience for Chrome OS are already present. I look forward for this change the next time I try to access a public internet access kiosk. And it would be best if it also has VoIP built in (see for instance http://flaphone.com/).