motorola.. you s**k

bootload... what?

Bootloader is a piece of code that runs before any operating system is running.

Bootloader are used to boot other operating systems, usually each operating system has a set of bootloaders specific for it.

locked... so?

as a long term pc users, i loved the freedom to install any o/s and boot any kernel.

with the advent of smart mobiles, this freedom is now slowly taken away and with windows 8, this will start to creep in desktop arena too.

i currently run multi o/s setup and in near future either i will have to let go of windows or linux. point is, what will i do in case of preinstalled o/s?

cant we crack it?

with the encryption level upto 128bit, not only we will require a super computer, but a miracle too.

yeah i am just ranting over here cuz i have a looked bootloader on my defy. but i am more afraid for my desktop.

google is calling

i have lost count, google has attempted its dabble with social networking including twitter clone (buzz), myspace clone (orkut) and what not.

though i will have to give it google.. they have tasted success in almost all the fields they have touched. search, mail, office, browser, operating system etc.

but they have miserable attempts with social networking, including working with facebook. this time with google+, they going with whatever they have got... and the rewiews seems positive too... what sucks is that they have announced it and everything... but its still in closed beta mode. this means average joe who are not invited (oh i am one) cannot join it.. at least for now.

will google win this time around? will be like... chat google, social google, mail google, internet google.. eat google, sleep google (ok i will shut up)?

time will tell. for now i am excited to try another social networking site (and then dont use it after a while like i have done with other social sites). how about you? will you switch the ships? 

mobile battle

the battle between AMD and Nvidia is heating up again but not in the GPU segment, in the mobile CPU segment.

although AMD is far cry from mobile CPU, but their APU are aiming for it. on the other hand nvidia is already in the mobile segment with tegta CPUs.

here is a bit of background - AMD aquired ATI so that they can go for their fusion strategy.. i.e. combining GPU and CPU and use both of them for compute purpose. intel already had their GPUs but are now leveraging powerVR technologies to advance their sloppy GPUs.

this left Nvidia as they didnt had any x86 license and hence started GPGPU on their own.

but the best solution was to get an ARM licence and thus tegra was born.

back to present - now both AMD and nvidia wants fully integrated GPU and CPU (right now the CPU house both graphic core and CPU core), nvidia is betting on ARM which is power efficient and AMD is betting on X86 which now scaling to the power level ARM. who will win? i think both will.. and competition is good for us consumers too.

see it to believe it

actually, i had enough of ubuntu. my upgrade to karmic rendered my system unbootable. best part was that it was common. many people were facing the same problem. i decided to switch my distro. (m still downloading ultimate edition 2.5, a whopping 3 gb. will take a full month).

so i started to look for new distro which i have never tried. a gentoo based distro ...sabayon. but while checking phoronix.com, i found some intresting news. new stuff to be included in lucid, plymouth, fast bootup,kms and what not.  but i was adamant, it was time to change. especially since gnome 3 wont see the light of the anytime soon.

but how things change, and that too very fast. enter RGBA support in gnome. this seemingly simple integration will make ubuntu take on windows and gnome on kde. thats right, it will add transperencies effects and thus making ubuntu look good for the 1st time. yeah i never liked ubuntu's ugly themes and combination. but seeing sample images i can just drool. so i guess i will be sticking to ubuntu for sometime now. coz for time being it will be ubuntu only feature, polished and right out of the box. best part is, its fast and doesnt require hardware acceleration. yay!

android - linux power

Google's android has made linux a mainstream mobile os. best of all it has a BSD licence. so everyone seems to be jumping in. not only it is now open source, the community has started playing with it too. one of the project in stumbled upon was a live cd. yes, a live cd.... an iso.... cabable of running on an x86 machine. SURPRISE! hold your horses fellas! it works only in a virtual machine. i tested it with sun's virtual box, a superb open source product. although i got bored of android in couple of minutes coz its got nothing. not even android store. but the cool part is, if you have internet, then most probably you can run internet on android too.

so go on and play and leave some comment on what kind of experiment you did.

i just wished that they did not pushed chrome o/s and concentrated on android. hm....

best linux nle?

Have you ever tried to edit a simple home video in Linux? Lets face it, it sucked? Yeah couple of years back I couldn't find a single NLE editor for Linux that could “just do it” you know what I mean? Simple easy to use program in which you start editing and presto! Done. No you couldn't, cause Linux video editors were weird with steep learning curve.

They lacked the standard interface and easiness, granted they were mature and with adequate learning job can be done. But hey! That not the point. The only saving grace was kdenlive, but it crashed like mig planes in India. I had to resort to blender for video editing.

Enter Openshot, the new dawn of Linux nle. Not only it sports standard interface that is super easy to adopt, it is stable as a rock. Its just awesome. And whats more, the project is in nascent stage – it has almost completed 1 year and is already ahead of most of the nle projects. The recent addition now sport skins, effects and presets. And now it has its frekin ppa repository. I wish it was also available for windows.

My only gripe are

1. slow preview, especially high res videos and applying of effects

2. lack of editable formats – I was unable to output at my desired resolution

3. less effects

4. need lots of small feature

just give this baby one more year and it will rip part commercial video editors

I don't want to be biased here. I recently updated kdenlive to 0.7.6 and found it much better. Of course its a more mature project than openshot and thus have more feature, its effects list are just huge and preview was fast. But still not much stable. The previous version couldn't start at all.

So I can conclude that with both these project, Linux NLE open are intact and kickin.

get openshot from

http://www.openshotvideo.com/

single window

So i was wrong, thats because i wasnt mentally ready. but its true, our beloved Gimp in the upcoming version 2.8 will sport sincle window system rather than multiple windows. for those who want to cry,"oh my god! i loved multi window system" relax.... there will be a one step option to revert back to multi window.

the single window will have tab viewer and maybe even something like aero peek for multiple opened images. and it looks awsome too. if that is not enough, right after this all the focus will be on the upcoming 3.0.

start gimping already

fermi - do or die

nvidia is facing one of the worst days. here is a long list

1. they are late with directx 11

2. launch of low segment directx 10.1 gpu

3. partners ditching gtx series

4. a losing console war

5. higher cost

6. doubtful chipset support for intel in the future

there is more to it, but i will refrain myself. but why such a beating?

the major problem is lack of CPU, i mean an x86 CPU. Both intel and AMD have their cpu and and we all know that in future the GPU will be integrated right inside the CPU. So that nvidia is the only vendor with lack of CPU and thus their only hope is survival of GPU market.

here is nvidia's trump card, GPGPU. thus enabling general purpose computation on the GPU itself. GPUs are powerful, even more powerful than the latest CORE i7. the only backfire in this plan is that they are pushing CUDA, a proprietary standard for GPGPU, and thus lack of popularity.

nvidia's next move is tegra and tesla. with the new ferni, super cheap renderfarm can be made with the combination of GPU. Fermi will be super powerful and rest assure will retain the performance crown. the only question is at what cost? if its not cheap then it will lose mainstream marketshare to AMD/ATI.

and surprise surprise! the tegra, the computer on a chip will now be a part of new Nintendo DS. at least the Rumor says so. after microsft's zune HD and samsung this is the next significant partnership for nvidia. nintendo DS is right now the number 1 selling console and with graphics from tegra with the ability to play 720p videos, DS will be a force to reckon with.

the nvidia is not totally dry at CPU end and has license for ARM cpu on which tegra is based. thus the next fight will be at the smart devices level.

nvidia is a beast, a beast that has evolved to always lead the market. i am sure nvidia will remain a powerful force

contibute to gimp

competition is good, it is a necessity. competition is good even for open source world. there were cries and hues, yes, after adobe released their CS version people started crying for features and power from gimp too. adobe steadily distant itself from the open source competition and all gimp could do was to release small updates.
things changes, sometimes too fast. Gimp is changing too. they are getting ready with gimp 2.8 but they also getting ready for the world with the preparation for gimp 3.0
whats in store?
long answer short -GEGL. they have already started implementing GEGL, but its not fully integrated yet. after finishing 2.8 all focus will be on completely integrating GEGL with gimp thus gimp will truly have the power for high dynamic range colours. instead of rgb conversion cmyk conversion will be done resulting in more powerful and accurate editing.
with 2.8 gimp will be offered in gpl v3 license and hence paving the path for new tools.
if you were wondering why no new features were added? now you know.

krita was becoming a threat too with cleaner interface which is even better than photoshop, it has reached version 2.
there is also a rumor that 2.8 will sport single window system just like photoshop or krita. all i can say that its just a rumor. but who knows with v3.0 this may really come true. v3.0 promises lots of ui changes. lets hope for the best. you know, i would rather like an option for this multi window and single window switch. maybe a hide window button. or even better, a window rip feature a-la blender 2.50.
can they do it? gimp 3.0 will be a huge step just like blender 2.50. lets hope open source photo editor becomes powerful showing the world what open source can be.

its fair in love and war

you are an idiot! this will be the reaction when people will read the title. but i am still adamant, directx will die.
sure windows is the widely used desktop and server O/s. no doubt about it. its one of the easy user frienly O/s. no doubt about it either. but the future trend shows something different in store.

directx is easy to program and feature rich graphic API. yeah yeah! opengl 3.2 already catches up with directx. directx compute can be countered by openCL. so what remains is harware tesselation. well that will be implemented in openGL soon, i am sure.

so what gives? let me explain you this simply - if you add all the devices with smart O/s, how many do you think are using directx? if i add mobiles, pda, notebooks etc this scenario changes. almost everyone is using opengl.

most popular phone - iphone, uses opengl. android is Linux based and hence uses opengl and the way its alliance is increasing, its going to be a force to reckon with. the new nokia n900 which will be the top end device by nokia uses Linux maemo and opengl. symbian o/s, also uses opengl. java has jsr support for opengl. and i just heard limo, will be launched by voadphone is also linux based and its alliance is huge too.

that doesn't make any sense. the king of desktop is windows and always will. but dear, what if the desktop doesnt remain a computer king? handheld devices and net-tops may become our computing partner?

lets just look at this trend -
Intel is pushing atom very hard, it is now selling like a hot cake. with this intel wants to invade the mobile devices where there is almost a monopoly by ARM. ARM is similarly trying to invade the net-top marked by making more powerful processors. if this trend continues then in next two years we will have very powerful mobile devices. powerful enough to challenge desktop.

and as i have mentioned earlier opengl is the choice for everyone. Intel is pushing moblin and let me tell you its the os that will dominate the net-top market. there are people who are trying to port android in net-tops. and Google is promoting its chrome OS. apple is already established as smartphone leader and is slowly eating Microsoft dominance at desktop. whats common in all of them? OPENGL.

oh i forgot the game console. who is the leader in the console market? surprise surprise! its Nintendo DSi. in the big console war Nintendo wii is the winner. both of them uses a derived opengl system.

what about Linux? well Linux is still plagued with graphic problem. but wait the future is promising. gallium 3d is being integrated and develop. huh? gallium 3d will help in doing gpgpu, 3d acceleration, 2d acceleration, video acceleration and what not. and it will be bleeding edge.

Microsoft's defence? they have realized and catching up with speed of development and feature with Microsoft mobile. windows mobile 7 should bring them closer. they are already in the console war and that is good for them too. zune was a failure but they are still at it with zune HD which will sport nvidia tegra.
Still don't believe that directx will die? well ..... neither do i. heh heh

i bet you haven't heard of swiftfox.

if you are you on Linux chances are you are using firefox. whats the problem with that? well the default firefox is for generic processor and thus is slow and cumbersome.

Swiftfox is an optimized build of Mozilla Firefox. Swiftfox has builds for both AMD and Intel processors and is based on the most cutting edge Firefox source code available.There is now an installer available that is distro independent. It is a script that downloads and installs Swiftfox in the /opt directory and attempts to use existing Firefox plugins. The installer is probably the best way for most users to install Swiftfox. If your distro is Debian based you will want to install using the deb files as the apt repository will provide automatic updating.

get faster get swiftfox

http://getswiftfox.com/

gigabyte - mobo

i was trying this virtualization with this cool free and open source software called virtual machine. and its really super easy and powerful. few years back i tried virtualization with vmware and was disgusted with the way hardware works. don't get me wrong, vmware is an amazing software. but the hardware at that time Pentium 4 northwood and ram couldn't cut the cheese.
now that i have AMD 64 X2 machine things changes. the possessor sports amd-v, virtualization at hardware level. this is what i like about AMD. unlike its competitor it doesn't cheat. yes Intel also has its hardware level virtualization, but they (i don't know why) sometimes disable it in some processors. and these are not low cheap processors, they are high end ones. so if you are not careful, you may loose virtualization even with brand new processor in which you have spend so much. why i call that a cheat? because Intel disable them at hardware level. yes you heard it, disable them. that means it is present in the processor but is disabled. and you cant enable it by software hack as it is disabled at hardware level.

anyway back to the point, so i was virtualizing a 64 os in a 64 bit environment. amd-v was selected but when it booted and it said amd-v is not available. that just tore me apart. my faith in AMD shattering. so i jerk all the BIOS option i could but no enable amd-v. hmph!

the secret - after lot of searching here this is what i got. gigabyte has hidden options. you need to enable it to access advance features. all have to do is crtl+f1 in the main menu and voila ! new advance options. there it is, hah! enable the amd-v and restart for magic.

so how did it go? the virtualization thing?

fantastic, its really feels like an os running natively almost at full speed. and it didn't hog much resources of the base OS. neat

oh by the way, if you think virtualization is a just a stupid technology- think again. Microsoft windows 7 has virtualization options for running win xp apps. does it help in an organization? of course, nissan saved lot of moey by going virtualiztion way instead of upgrading and have saved lot of money. virtualization is the future. lets embrace it.

make your choice

make human is a stanalone professional human model generating software. it is making slow but steady advancement. its still is in alpha stage but here is a the surprise, it now sport hair right out of the box.
that's not all, there is new feature for blender. 
this is right out of horses mouth "This is an experiment (a prototype in Blender) of a new feature we are developing in our makehuman software. It's a new, original next-gen tool, that automatically models the most probable realistic head. So the user needs just a few clicks to roughly set the most important facial features, and makehuman will do the rest of the work :-)
Actually we have a limited DB at the moment, so the results are still limited."

here is the link for further details
http://www.makehuman.org/blog/index.php

Moblin interface

ever heard of moblin? its a new distro. hmph! ya ya! there are n numbers of distro popping up now and then. but moblin is diffrenet. just peek at the attached image and you will know.

moblin was a linux o/s sponsored and developed by intel. the motive behind moblin was to create new easy to use oerating system for netbooks with super ease of use.

as you can see, mobin looks are a wave of freshness in the world of os. i started with linux as an experiment to see how a different os looks like. sadly it looked so similar to windows. thats the problm with current pc o/s. all look similar. moblim here breaks the shakles. the interface is mind bogglinly new and beutiful. its awsome. the gui is made using clutter. its sexy as hell. the interface is very simple and easy to use. all the social sites are well integrated. the web browser is called....internet! how simple. oh oh... there is no right click. thats right, this o/s is so simple to use that it doesnt sport a right click. all this reminds me of os similar to mobile phone. of course, the os was designed for netbooks. but perople have tried it on other intel based notebooks. as for now, desktop users and AMD users cant test it. moblin oogles with innovation. with new kernel modswith, root less xserver and everything, i mean every gui is harware accelerated with opengl. moblinn is still in beta but i can claim without a hitch, this is the future of o/s. its going to kill everything out there. go open source

Ati and nvidia

1. good news for amd/ati gpu owners. open source driver now accelerate r600 and r700 gpu, well at least compiz is running

2. kde 4.3 is released promising more stability and features. But i am more interested in version 4.4 which has huge list of features.

3. Nvidia owners can rejoice to. Nvidia has showcased ray tracing engine witch is claimed to be Linux compatible too. Yay to raytracing

News courtesy phoronix.com

7210supernova - super?? yes it is.

so i recently purchased nokia 7210 supernova (yes i didnt had a mobile phone before, so what?). yeah its a cheap s40 version 5 FP1 phone. but thats what i could affoard. intrestingly i used a blackberry a day before. how cool, u can configure any email and voila! push email right on your handset. als they also charge yearly subscription.

hmm... so one day i discovered that i can confire emails on my phone. all i had to do was just type in my email address and all setting was done automatically. and guess what "push email" even with attachment. how cool is that. even with my dirt cheap handset (ok its not that cheap) and even dirtier cheap gprs connection, i could get push emails for free. granted i couldnt open attachment right away. but man o man the price difference for handset and subscription is way too much.  yay Nokia. i hope they keep this thing free. for s60 devices nokia has similar stull as an external software. that too FREE. so who needds a blackberry??