Who ate that byte of apple ? ;-)

Out of enthusiasm and out of sheer curiosity, I wanted to own an Mac. So I got one, not a shiny new one, an old, but an equally shiny white, iBook G4. After about 5 months of continuous usage of the default OS that came with it (OSX 10.3 aka Panther), I bid it a farewell. No regrets, I spent only $260 for it...

Though I found the software (OSX) to be all crap, for a number of reasons listed below, I found the hardware to be actually too good to just dispose of. So things were reborn.

Why I found OS X to be not good for me?

Reason #1: To get an update to the Java virtual machine, you need to upgrade the whole OS! This is the most sanest thing I have ever experienced.

Reason #2: If you want to use the latest XCode, you will need to ... yes you gessed it, upgrade the OS! As I had got a second hand Mac, I did not get the installation media with it so could not install the gcc suite that came with the OS. But there was now way to get the earlier version of XCode from apple developer connections site that was compatible with Panther either. The same is true with every other piece of development tools I use: Apache server, PHP etc. .. the list is countless. I simply have no money to invest in an OS like this!

Reason #3: In general, the application support is nothing but. Most of the recent versions of the applications (including OpenOffice and FireFox) are not supported, which is nothing but weired.

Reason #4: The same is the case with drivers. My 3 mobile broadband modem is not supported on this version of the OSX .. but is apparently supported on even antique versions of Windows! Same is the case with my webcam. I tried using macam, but the result was nothing but a poor video resolution.

Reason #5: The general window management in OS X is not at all productive. The only feature I liked in the window manager the ability to directly close an application while using Apple+Tab. I had used OS X before, but at those times I simply used to be amazed with all the jazz that comes along, and hardly ever worried about its usability. However, when I was using this on a day to day basis for more than five months now, I found it to be hardly productive. When I compare OSX with GNOME, Standard Windows or even the latest Superbar in Windows 7 or the KDE4 ... all of them turn out to be much more productive when handling multiple windows. The "Expose" functionality, to me is nothing but of not much use at all.

Who ate that byte of apple?

The iBook G4 that I bought, is not that new. But has fair amount of hardware if I compare with my MiLeap. It is an 800 MHz PPC processor with 640MB RAM, 30 GB HDD, WiFi, 2USB ports and 32MB ATI mobility card (more specs here).
:-) Have you seen a penguin eating an apple? It probably never liked it so it ate only a bite ;-)


Switching from OSX (10.3) to Ubuntu 9.04 :)

So, I made up my mind. No OS X, ever. And then decided to try either Kubuntu / Ubuntu or Fedora. Since Fedora 11 was not yet released, and required me to download a whole DVD to test it, I decided to give Kubuntu a first try. I had tried KDE 4 when it was released, and didn't have a pleasant experience. This time it had improved a lot but still was tempted to install plain Ubuntu instead. And so the switch happened.

Installation was easy as is usually with Ubuntu. I did not have to worry about partitioning hard disk as I was doing a full format, in the process completely removing OS X. I had to boot off from the live CD using live-powerpc video=ofonly option though.

After installation, the login screen looks pretty decent and neat (see above, in the backdrop is MiLeap running Vista).

Here goes some of the screen shots:




What worked out of the box?

Every stuff that matters most works: Most hardware is detected (including the WiFi and my 3 wireless broadband modem), there are some problem with AGP acceleration (more on this later). Most of the software that I need just works: Latest Firefox, OpenOffice, Pidgin, GIMP, GCC. What was not already there: Java and codecs were easy to obtain from the Ubuntu repositories. There is no Adobe official support for Linux-PPC so I use the default evince for viewing PDFs and Gnash as Flash plugin. Though evince is fairly good at handling most of my PDFs, Gnash is not that great in handling all the YouTube videos.

Since I could get the latest JVM (1.6) working on PPC without much trouble, MeTA Studio also worked pretty good. The only downside is that the JVM (icetead) does not currently have a HotSpot VM for its PPC version, so Java applications are not as snappy as on x86 box.

What did not work out of box?

3-D acceleration via the ATI card was not working by default on 9.04, but this happened to be a known bug with the current Ubuntu kernel for PPC and has an easy fix (listed here).


What I miss from OS X?

Big nothing. But being heavily depended on Skype makes me miss that, which obviously is not available on Linux PPC. I have been trying to use Ekiga instead, so if I am successful in using it will put it up as a separate post.

And finally, in the spirit of the "I am" advs:

I am PC (on Windows) and I am Linux (on Mac) ;-)

PS (update):

The compiz has some troubles handling windows that are using OpenGL rendering. For instance, the following is a screen shot which incorrectly overlays the glxgears display with desktop composition. I am not sure if this is a general problem, or problem with the PPC port.


Just for the note at the end, this post was entirely written and edited using Ubuntu 9.04 on Mac.

quick review of windows 7 on eee pc 1000 H

Over the last week, apart from being quite busy with my work (he he working hardly ;)) .. I did some major changes to my computing environment (and my friends). For my self, I installed the latest Ubuntu 9.04 on iBook G4 Mac, completely removing OSX 10.3 (more on this pleasing experience in the next post :-) ).

My friend, who was not quite happy with default Windows XP that came pre-installed with Eee PC, wanted to test out Windows 7. So, I first ran the upgrade advisor for Windows 7 (beta available at: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/upgrade-advisor.aspx). This required me to install the .Net runtime which was not installed by default on Windows XP. The upgrade advisor suggested that I can safely install Windows 7 :) On the side note, I also ran this on my MiLeap and my Dell machine back home. For it was quite obvious that MiLeap didn't meet the basic Windows 7 requirements (so would stick to using Vista on it, for the moment), on my Dell machine it noted that I need to update OpenOffice to work well with Windows 7, which seemed reasonable.

So I downloaded the DVD image of Windows 7 RC from (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/). Next, as Eee doesn't come with a DVD drive and I didn't have an USB pen drive at my disposal, I downloaded Daemon tools (http://www.daemon-tools.cc/eng/downloads), that allows you to mount .iso images. Well from here it was pretty easy and straight forward to install Windows 7 side by side with Winddows XP. I did not have to worry about disk partitioning too as Eee already had two partitions with one of them being free.

So how does it fair? I am quite impressed. The aero effects are all very pleasing and surprisingly more useful than what was there with Windows Vista. Though the graphics is not very smooth (as compared to my desktop), the speed is quite acceptable, given than I have Nvidia 8500 GTX with 512mb dedicated card for my desktop contrary to the default Intel chipset graphics that comes with Eee for the moment. I would not put any screen shots for pleasing you though (as all these are quite prominently there at various sites on the Internet, and also official videos at http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/developers/archive/2009/05/07/new-windows-7-videos-on-channel-9.aspx)

Apart from all the (pleasing) reviews that have gone into Windows 7, I like some small but wonderful changes to basic Windows applications:
1) Paint: All the interface changes aside, the default format in which the images are saved is PNG and not BMP. I just like this.
2) Write: Again all the pretty interface changes (finally!!) but good this is that it directly supports OpenOffice Writer formats (opening as well as reading). Though the default options is RTF still, which is OK.

I have not yet tested any third party apps on this installation, but have tested many on my virtual machine setup (including my MeTA Studio ;-)) so I see no problem with major applications that are used daily, with an exception of OpenOffice. It seems there are some issues with 3.0 version but the latest OpenOffice 3.1 seems to have resolved these issues as the Windows 7 upgrade advisor doesn't complain about it.

So the short story is: In most likely hood, when windowd 7 is released, I will upgrade my desktop back home (only the OS)... am not sure though what will happen to my MiLeap ... which is most likely to still run Vista (SP2) ;-)

And well finally, look back for my post on installing Ubuntu on my Mac ..

Have fun!

PS: This post (as usual) was written using Eee running Windows 7 with IE 8.

MeTA Studio minor bug-fix release

A minor online update fixing a few bugs for MeTA Studio is available. The current version is 2.0.23042009.

enjoy!

PS: In the coming days I would be changing the way online updates will be done in future versions. This is because the current updates were hosted on pages.google.com, which seems to be closing its doors by June this year. By this time I would need a reliable solution, any help in this regard is welcome!

Cooking!!!

Never though I would blog on cooking.

Or even, never though I would ever require to blog on cooking.

Mostly because all I do is “only for me cooking”, and is highly experimental, always. ;-)

But then today I made masala dosai, and turned out to be fairly delicious, so thought some pictures are worth it.

Yummy :) … but sorry I ate all of them!

Disclaimer: The dosa batter was given by my friend’s wife, so infact all credits to her. I did make the fillings and rest of the cooking though ;)

Minor bug fix release for MeTA Studio

A minor bug fix release of MeTA Studio is available as online update. The updated version if 2.0.12042009

Apart from bug fixes there are a number of reorganizations in the graphics code as was planned earlier. These are at this point again far from complete, but as promised earlier these do not break any of the high level APIs.

Have fun!

Upgradability: The prime reason I will still buy a desktop PC

Lately, there has been a lot of talk on how the sales of netbook have overtaken that of PC shipment, though we hardly find any talk of laptop shipments at the same time.
There is one primary thing with a PC however that will always keep its sales up. I for one, will always prefer a PC for one thing it has to offer: Upgradability of each and every component that makes it up. And a PC of all the lot can be built at home by buying your own of-the-shelf components. A laptop is too restricted in its upgrade, and a netbook (what ever that means) is mostly an use-and-throw piece, not a real long term investment, it is more like a mobile phone. So, in the event of a much boasted "economic slowdown", would you be settling for a netbook as a primary computer or would buy a dependable and upgradeable PC? For me it will always be the PC as I said earlier. Of course, if you are looking out for a portable solution, I find netbook to be a better choice for me as compared to a full blown laptop, primarily because of the price, size and weight ratio.

Comment on: BeanShell, Rhino and Java -- Performance Comparison

These are my comments on an old performance test by Pankaj Kumar on BeanShell, Jython and others (http://www.pankaj-k.net/spubs/articles/beanshell_rhino_and_java_perf_comparison/index.html).

There are some notable problems with the benchmarks reported in above Blog:
1) When a time comparison is done, you chose the best possible implementation of an algorithm in that language. Evidently this is not the case. For instance, in case of BeanShell, ArrayList is used to represent an array of Strings and not a normal array. This introduces additional overheads especially calls to get() method.
2) If you use inbuilt methods to do the sorting: i.e. array.sort() for Jython and java.util.Collection.sort(array) for BeanShell the results are totally different, and it seem to show Jython to be 13 times slower than BeanShell for array if size 1000. Which is bizarre.

In short, I find all such benchmarks as misleading, and should not be used as the mere metric for choosing a particular scripting language, or for that matter any other programming language. And Pankaj does seem to make this comment at the end of his article.

Another reason to fool around with MeTA Studio: Python support

Well yes! Many had asked for it so now here is it!

First a bit of history. When I started developing MeTA Studio, I did evaluate Jython (Python implementation for JVM) along with BeanShell and many others. But then finally decided that BeanShell would be the first class scripting interface for MeTA Studio with provision for adding any other scripting language that is targeted for JVM. There were couple for reasons for this decision:

- Jython is too heavy. At about 3 mb (with no debug info). My modified BeanShell is 800kb while if u compile it with no debug info it boils down to a mere 200kb!!
- Prototype-to-production. Python code, though easy to write, doesn't translate easily to Java code. It is very easy to prototype in BeanShell and put it into Java.
- Speed. While BeanShell can run at native speed of Java (i.e. after you compile the code for a target JVM), Jython is purely interpreted, and it was definitely orders of magnitude slower than BeanShell. When I tried Jython the first time many years ago it was about 40-50 times slower than BeanShell, enough to keep me away form making it the primary scripting interface for MeTA Studio. In recent times though Jython has improved substantially. In many cases faster, but not as flexible as BeanShell in terms of the earlier point(s).
- License. It is not LGPL/BSD... So I will only distribute it as a separate addon package (maintainers are needed here ;) !)

and why it is included now:
- IBM supports Jython in their enterprise apps like websphere, I want to impress them ;) With rumours of them taking over Sun.. (Glee .. Well now wondering on that as Oracle plans to buy them instead!)
- I want more developers and users for my platform!!
- Proof that other languages can be easily supported, with out changing anything within the core IDE!
- I want to have fun ;)

Well the complete Jython support for MeTA Studio was added with about 4 days of work, which largely involved writing appropriate wrapper functions akin to BeanShell. And thanks to ways to add external library and widgets framework in MeTA Studio, there were no changes made to the core IDE specifically incorporate Jython support.

So you wanna give a try? Here is how:
The installation instructions are same as previous, but again ..
0) Ensure u have v 2.0.01042009 or a higher version installed. Project URL: [http://code.google.com/p/metastudio/]
1) Unzip metajython.zip (download from: Jython support file on Skydrive) in meta/lib/ext
2) Shut down MeTA Studio if it is already running
3) from command line:
meta/bin >$ java -jar MeTA.jar --addlibs jython
(you can skip this step, if you have already done so with the previous builds)
4) Start MeTA Studio, open the code editor. Then open jythonWidget.bsh from meta/lib/ext/meta-jython directory
5) Click on Make Widget to get the Jython widget on the the widget panel

Now you can either use the shell (like the usual python shell) or use the editor to write code in python as you would normally do for BeanShell scripts.

I will be putting up user guides on how to use the Jython support in MeTA Studio at: http://code.google.com/p/metastudio/wiki/PythonSupportForMeTAStudio. You are also strongly encouraged to contribute to the wiki, just drop me in a mail if you want to!

Now that Jython support is out, would like to state few things about future of this Jython support of MeTA Studio:
- Firstly, BeanShell will always be the primary scripting interface in MeTA Studio. Meaning that all new releases of MeTA Studio will come installed by default with BeanShell as has always been the case.
- Jython will never be distributed along with binary distribution of MeTA Studio. This support will always be available as an external download as is provided above.
- Since this project is getting big day-by-day, it would be really nice if some one can take up the responsibility of maintaining the Jython support in near future. Though I would maintain it with a bit less priority till I can get a maintainer for this port.

Fool around ;-)

MeTA Studio bug fix release

Another online release is available (MeTA Studio version 2.0.31032009). This is primarily a bug fix release. But it also includes a test geometry minimizer based on MM/UFF being written by Josh. To use this Right Click in MoleculeViewer, Choose Tools -> Minimize. Again note that the minimizer is an experimental code, and may not give you expected results!

And yes, suggestions are also welcome for the modified project page at: http://code.google.com/p/metastudio/

Have fun!

(Quick Update: as usual, found some last minute bugs after I uploaded the online update, so now the latest version is 2.0.01042009)

MeTA Studio SVN repository

Starting from today, daily source updates of MeTA Studio will be available via the SVN repository: http://code.google.com/p/metastudio/source/browse/

Note that I will still release stable source tar balls as earlier (http://code.google.com/p/metastudio/downloads/list), but the current source will give a preview of things to come. I do not recommend using any of the APIs in the current source to write scripts or applications of your own! These are subject to change on day to day basis.

On a side note: I hate SVN :(

Enjoy!

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!