The Weakest Link

You all know the saying and how Windows is always on top of it. Granted this isn’t nor as it ever been what I’d call a big deal but it’s funny how it’s never fixed. Most people I know actually LIKE to know the type of files they are dealing with and to them, changing this option is one of those little Windows tweaks that you have to do every time you install it. But hey I’m sure MS has got some good reason to make this annoying behavior the default.

It’s The Algorithms, Stupid

“It’s the algorithms that need parallelization, not your code.”

Abstract

For decades, mainstream parallel processing has been thought of as inevitable. Up until recent years, however, improvements in manufacturing processes and increases in clock speed have provided software with free Moore’s Law-scale performance improvements on traditional single-core CPUs. As per-core CPU speed increases have slowed to a halt, processor vendors are embracing parallelism by multiplying the number of cores on CPUs, following what Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) vendors have been doing for years. The Multi- core revolution promises to provide unparalleled increases in performance, but it comes with a catch: traditional serial programming methods are not at all suited to programming these processors and methods such as multi-threading are cumbersome and rarely scale beyond a few cores. Learn how, with hundreds of cores in desktop computers on the horizon, a local software company is looking to revolutionize the way software is written to deliver on the promise multi-core holds.

Riding The Multi-core Revolution
RapidMind (or as I now call them, the chicken guys)
Data-Parallelism (Wikipedia)

Rockbox

I switched to Rockbox on my old, trustworthy iRiver H340. In case you don’t know, Rockbox is an open source replacement firmware for mp3 players.


Advantages (I actually care about, i.e. not little games & apps):
– Themes. I’m using a DGT theme.
– Actually usable Database playing;
– Ability to play other music formats (FLAC comes to mind);
– Having an actually beautiful interface can’t be understated (themes again);
– It’s Open Source (which also means you’ll probably get new firmware long after the player manufacturer stops bothering with it.

In case you’re wondering, Rockbox was very easy to install, at least in my player. Despite the fact that the instructions look relatively long, the actually steps needed are quite simple and easy (though it might be a bit confusing figuring out exactly what you need to download). And it turns out it’s even easier to uninstall (just delete one file).

In case you want to do it and got confused or if you’re wondering just how easy it is but don’t want to read the full instructions, here are the steps:
(NOTE/disclaimer of sorts): this is a summary, read the full instructions at the rockbox website)

1. Download the firmware;
2. Download the firmware patcher;
3. Patch the firmware you downloaded (the .hex file) using the firmware patcher (duh);
4. Put the just-patched firmware file on the root of your iRiver H3xx player;
5. Tell the player to install the new firmware ([hold Navi] -> General -> Firmware Upgrade).

Pretty straightforward right?

[Updated: I forgot to mention the ability to play other music formats such as FLAC]

STALKER: First (and probably last) Impressions

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl turned out to be nothing more than “Oblivion in Chernobyl”. Yet another boring Action/RPG or whatever you want to call it. Combat is just lame. So far the story is at least poorly told (Doom3 style PDA except worse) and you waste time just going from one place to the other. On top of that, graphics are slightly dated.

Off course that’s my opinion… I heard there were people that actually like crap like Oblivion, maybe they’ll like this game too…

I prefer a “tightly controlled and scripted ride” with more action than walking around and talking to NPCs (and by talking I mean reading) and not having to constantly re-arrange the inventory. Seriously, why would I want to pick up 20 weapons exactly alike? Oh that’s right, because they wear out and I might want to sell them. What’s up with trading? How is that fun?

Movie Suggestion: Crank

Watch Crank. the movie is like 95% action. Not a particularly good story or anything but it’s damn fun, I really enjoyed it.

Hasta-la-Vista

After like 6 weeks I removed Vista from my laptop last week. The main culprit was application compatibility (or lack of thereof) – either not installing, not running, not running well i.e. crashing OR requiring “tricks” (read annoyances) to run (run as admin and stuff) and other random, lesser annoyances.
Off course the fact that I also have Ubuntu on my laptop means that on an average day I won’t use Windows anyway – be it XP or Vista. Nevertheless I miss the integrated search. Beagle sucks. I’ll give tracker a try and post some comments about it – if I remember… I probably wont.

Off course performance (or the lack of it) had something to do with it but it was a significant factor (just another “little thing”).

Generally speaking there’s something about Vista that seems to cause more attrition – you are forced to become aware of it for some reason(s) I can’t seem to figure out what exactly. No it’s not UAC, I turned that off – it got really old, really fast (“sigh. continue”) and I suspect turning off UAC will be the norm among Vista “power users”/experts/wtv. I should probably mention that I’m used to Ubuntu’s password prompts whenever I need to do admin stuff and those are NOWHERE near as bad as UAC – in fact I don’t even consider those prompts all that annoying (except when they take a while and I forget in which monitor they are opening in). That’s because you get the UAC prompts (yes, plural) not at the start of the application/installation but only when the applications actually tries to do the admin stuff. So much for unattended installations. I found it very annoying. And why not go all the way instead of that half-ass “continue” button, why not just ask for the password? (wouldn’t surprise me if they were just afraid of trojans imitating it)

Ok that UAC rant was a bit off-topic… I was talking about attrition, I didn’t explain very well what I meant by it. I’m sure GUI experts have some term for it but I don’t know it. The GUI just seems to run contrary to some common GUI design principles at times – mainly those of directness (try changing the wallpaper or the theme), efficiency/predictability/consistency (the new control panel where everything is at least a thousand clicks away in 100 different types of menus/tabs/wtv and you have to guess where and when you do you’re rewarded with something that looks a lot like the old XP applet where it used to be 2 or 3 clicks away from the starting line), comprehensibility, simplicity and clarity. Though it’s hard to pinpoint where exactly where (except in the control panel case), but it just annoys me (though I think it’s mainly windows explorer and the taskbar/system tray). I used Vista for 6 weeks, and I’ve every version of Windows since 95 excluding ME (yeah I dodged that one, the only (large) version of Windows that became a flop so far), and I couldn’t get used to it. Plus the more Gnome evolves the harder it is for me to go back to any Windows, I just miss Gnome and it’s attractiveness. Something else that is to blame for my lack of patience with Vista is that every time I boot into Windows it feels like a chore. It’s something I don’t want to do, it’s something I’m being forced to do.

Funny thing. There was a time when linux newcomers complained about installing apps in linux and said that I should be more like in Windows. Now it’s the other way around. People try Ubuntu and ask why isn’t app installation in Windows that easy and convenient. I doubt that’s something Microsoft will ever manage to do.

Thank god for Linux and GNOME (and Mark Shuttleworth for Ubuntu).

Now compare my Vista experience with that of OSX: today, for the first time, I used OSX for more than 5 minutes unattended simply because I left my notebook at home and Filipe was in a meeting (thanks btw) . A full half hour! And I got used to it. I was quite impressed with how fast I got used to it – and I how much I actually liked it (loved the growl notifications that kept popping up) – though I obviously didn’t use it long enough for major annoyances to appear (like some linux/windows app that has no equivalent in OSX or having to use interface-crippled software like VLC). Sucks that I have to admit it (but no way I’m going to stop making no-one-uses-it jokes). I feel dirty somehow, like I’ve joined the unwashed mass of Mac-Zealots *eeew* I already felt slightly ashamed of belonging to the same species as them… But I’ll go even further: if I knew what I know now (namely that linux’s power management would keep sucking) I would’ve bought a macbook (one of the 13″ models probably) one year ago when I bought my Vaio. There I’ve said it. Now I’ve got to go take a bath.

But before I do one more word of praise for Linux and another stab at Windows: my Windows XP installation currently occupies around 40GB. My Ubuntu installation (including 3 different desktop environments – GNOME, KDE and Xfce not counting fluxbox which is too small to matter anyway) occupies around 4GB – 10x less.

In Summary:
Why don’t I use Vista? I have something better, it’s called Ubuntu.
Do I recommend OSX? No, I haven’t used it enough to recommend it or recommend against it. One huge disadvantage is that it’s tied to Apple hardware. (Zealots: please don’t bother telling me how that’s actually a hidden advantage, it’s not)

Seamless Virtualization in Ubuntu

The OSNews post entitled Windows Applications in Ubuntu with a Seamless Desktop sure caught my attention. I’m sure I’m not the first person to say this is going to need to be GUI-fied and made even simpler but it is definitively another big feature for Ubuntu that will not only help people who already wanted to migrate but it will also be another reason for people to switch.

Direct links:
Seamless Virtualization
Windows XP Under Qemu How To

Amazing Software for Automata Theory and Related Stuff

I just found JFLAP an incredibly useful java program for anyone doing (basic?) automata theory (e.g. automata theory classes, compilers classes) stuff:

JFLAP is software for experimenting with formal languages topics including nondeterministic finite automata, nondeterministic pushdown automata, multi-tape Turing machines, several types of grammars, parsing, and L-systems. In addition to constructing and testing examples for these, JFLAP allows one to experiment with construction proofs from one form to another, such as converting an NFA to a DFA to a minimal state DFA to a regular expression or regular grammar. Click here for more information on what one can do with JFLAP.

Many THANKS to the people that developed it.

Album Covers

If you want to download and set the covers for your large mp3 collection in a semi-automatic way and you happen to be using Ubuntu (or another Linux variant), I suggest giving Album Cover Art Dowloader a try.

Updated: Forgot to mention that the .deb works with Ubuntu.

Random Noise – Back from the present

After spending the past 5h30min working for my “Compilers” class project, I’ll have to take some care not to use regular expressions writing this post.

Codeplay makes autoparallelising compiler – I had no doubt this was coming.

Google: Taking steps to further improve our privacy practices – corporations taking steps to protect their customers privacy is always welcomed. Google again takes a decisive lead when it comes to online big names. I fully expect You-know-who to tell the press that he and his company believe privacy is bad and that they are taking further steps to “help protect our children”.

Gnome 2.18 is out – another incremental improvement. Step by step, PC by PC, the world will be converted to gnome.

I’ve had more than one discussion on the subject of enabling IPv6 support. My argument as always been “I don’t need it, I won’t enable it”. I’ve actually went on about how IPv4 stacks have been heavily scrutinized – specially in the post-nmap world with IPv4 packet manipulation tools being a commodity. I postulated long ago that IPv6 stacks had not been subject to such intense scrutiny and that we would see at a few DoS, a couple of remote root vulnerabilities, an amazing array of OS-specific signatures and off course a quit a few “complications” all thanks to IPv6. Check out Van Hauser of THC presentation Attacking the IPv6 protocol suite from EuSecWest 06. Now, thanks to the vulnerability research work done by Core Labs, I can go “IN YOUR FACE DUDE!” to the people that keep harassing me over IPv6.

{letter}*({ Damn!