Blog of V.Ganesh

MeTA Studio maintenance release

2012-01-30T18:59:00.000-08:00

A maintenance release of MeTA Studio is avilable via online update (Help -> Check for updates). The current version number is 2.0.31012012

If you are not able to use the online update, manually download and extract: http://metastudio.googlecode.com/files/metaupdate.zip in the meta/bin directory.

There are a number of bug fixes in this release. It also adds support for .mol2 files. Many features are still work in progress (chemnotes, app creator etc.), so expect more updates down the line.

Kosh: Building a mobile user experience for myself ;-) - I

2012-01-28T21:02:00.000-08:00

I have been a smartphone user ever since I went mobile, my first phone being a Symbian Phone. Since then I have, on daily basis used newer version of Symbian, Android (up till Gingerbread), and now I am loving the beauty and elegance of Windows Phone 7 (Mango) on my Lumia 800. Intermittently, I have also dabbled with iOS and Bada. None, however come close to the usability that Windows Phone currently provides. For those of you, who still don't 'get' the Metro UI, this post might enlighten a bit: http://spillwaybrain.wordpress.com/2011/11/10/why-windows/
My primary requirement from a Smartphone has been programmability, preferably on the phone itself. With Symbian, I really enjoyed the pys60 (http://sites.google.com/site/tovganesh/s60) and now with Windows Phone, I am having fun with TouchDevelop (https://www.touchdevelop.com/wblh), more on this in subsequent posts. With Android though, I just couldn’t get connected the same way.
While Windows Phone is a great OS, the current price point makes it unaffordable to large section of people. This may change over time, particularly in combination with Nokia. On the other hand, Samsung, with its Bada OS, plans to build a ‘smartphone for everyone’. However, with the current programming model for Bada, particularly the use of C++; doesn’t really go well with the philosophy. Because, to me a smartphone should not only be programmable by a professional third party, but also as easily by the owner of the device; just as is the case with the PC. When you have this joy of programming your own device, you kind of connect to the device for a long attachment, not just for period of your current contract (anyone remembers the BBC Micro?).

The Phone
Most smartphone designs today seem to forget that it is actually a phone. So making a phone call on a smartphone is typically much slower than on a very basic Nokia device. You can't just start keying in the number to give a call. You have to open the Phone App and then give a call. And in some designs you even have to press one extra button to bring up the dialer app! Oops that is a complicated phone, but we still like to call it smartphone, for some reason.
So the smartness comes from the fact that it is able to do a whole lot of other things than just being a phone, not that it is easier to make a phone call from it. It serves as a communication hub. It basically tries to provide a complete mobile computing experience in your pocket. Over time, probably we will use the phone component in it a lot lesser, and then it would be more technical to call it a smartmobile.
Another drawback of most smartphones today is the battery life: it is simply unacceptable. Though my current Nokia Lumia 800 easily lasts for a day and half of normal usage (always on data, few calls and text messages, occasional games, about half hour of GPS usage - for sports tracker), for it to be usable by a large majority of people in a nation like India, it needs to run on solar power or an alternate form of energy (body energy, crank shaft, anybody?). Currently, though I can see Solar energy as the only viable solution. This could be coupled with a crank shaft enabled charger, though my experience with a crank shaft device (Philips radio), has not been that great : probably it had a design flaw. For most of the mobile devices today, the display is one of the components that consumes the maximum amount of power. Without the display these devices could go on easily for more than a week. Take for instance the Kindle, it can easily go for about 10 or more days, even with the 3G radio on; with the radio off it lasts for more than a month. The one major difference is the screen: e-ink. Although the e-ink looks fine for a book reader, for a mobile device it will not work out. Options would be to use color e-ink or PixelQi screen. The recent demonstration by the OLPC project [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITHNbOrPQyM] shows some hope, but a lot of work needs to be done to make it to a device that can be held in your hands.
To design the right hardware would be a challenge. At this moment I am not very clear about what this hardware would be, so I will use followup posts to put in my thoughts on the hardware side.

The UI
So, I want a smartmobile, whose primary functions is to stay connected with the people you care about: friends, family and co-workers. The Metro UI, which I pretty much like, tries to do this with what is called as a People's Hub. This is a well though out piece of UI, which threads all your contacts, communication into a single place. This also connects to the social media, and brings up the latest updates of your friends.
Taking cue from this, and observing how I use my mobile device, I think there are three most important things I do with a mobile device: Keep in touch with people, Search for information and use Applications.

So let me introduce to you : Kosh (Sanskrit: a collection / repository)
It is a collection of things I do:

People Kosh : The collection of all tools allowing one to connect to people. The Kosh UI is always accessible from anywhere (if using a full screen application), by using a Swipe down gesture. People Kosh needs only three main components: Phone (which includes VOIP / video calls), Message (which includes SMS and Email) and Social updates (a quick way to be in touch with people on your social networks). The Phone and Message Apps are also 'live tiles'. Unlike Windows Phone 7, they will display additional information, such as from whom you missed the last call, last line from the text message you received recently etc.

Search Kosh: The collection of all search tools. This will be central place to search anything (well probably some things in life are still better searched on your own ;) ) : either on the phone, or the Internet. The search can be either text based [input: on-screen keyboard], voice based [input: microphone, audio file] (this will not be just voice recognition, but should be localized, and probably should integrate music search, radio search etc.) and visual [image, camera] (scan image, photo, QR code, bar code and probably video clip).

Apps Kosh: The collection of all apps. Device status like remaining battery, Network connectivity are just another apps. One need not have integrated UI for the same. Each icon acts as a means to launch the application. By default the icons are alphabetically organized (as grid of or as a list). Application icons may display notifications. Notifications can be in the form of text or image or a combination of the two, and are displayed alternatively or along with the default icon. Icons with notifications automatically move up and have a glow surrounding them. Once the user taps the apps with notification to open, the icons are automatically placed in their usual location.
To switch between Apps, use three finger pinch. This will show a list of 'active apps' with end of the list being signified by a shadow on the edge. An active app is not the same as a background app : in fact, on a constrained device it would not be really a good idea. An active app here, is the one that has registered to the system for a background notification. Alternatively the only app that is available 'in memory' is the foreground application. The applications that require background processing (play music, for instance) will be handled by a system process instead.

The Architecture
Well, I want to build the full stack. That is because whatever is currently available is probably not going to work for me. It is not only important to get the kernel done right, but also the rest of the components done well to make for a great user experience (UE). The diagram below shows the most important components of this stack.

The Kosh system will be build on a mirco-kernel architecture. This would mean the Linux (or Android / Palm OS ) kernel would not be a good starting point. A QNX like kernel would be the way to go. The other components are the telephony and network layer, specifically for handling the communication needs. The system process for notification and other management purposes. The Kosh API layer for providing APIs for the UI layer as well as writing third party applications.

The Kosh API layer will have the above major components. I think for all that I outlined about, these set of broad APIs would be just enogh to start with. The UI layer will be build using these APIs and a WebKit based (or WebKit like) rendering engine. This essentially means all user interface layer will be build on HTML 5+ and JavaScript. Consequently, the Kosh APIs will be exposed as JavaScript. Also all the third party apps will be written using HTML and JavaScript. This is a philosophy quite akin to webOS. Essentially this means that EnyoJS might be a good starting point for looking at API design. Another project to look at is Mozzila B2G, the Boot to Gecko initiative.

A carrier independent network
We are over reliant on the 'carrier network' for all the communication today. Though 'carrier networks' will not disappear overnight, it would be good to have a way of communication that does not rely on a centralizer carrier.That would allow for a medium of communication which is not overlay regulated. For emergency needs though, a carrier or satellite based solution is still required. Irrespective of this, for me, communication among humans should ideally be free, that is what takes the race ahead. At the moment though this is not exactly the case. There is the Internet, that was supposed to be a free medium, but due to one component: the DNS, it could be unfairly controlled. TCP does allow peer-to-peer communication, with no centralized control, but again for people to 'find' each other, we need a kind of directory service. Skype for instance uses peer-to-peer communication, but requires a central authenticating authority. A few years ago, Nokia, experimented with peer-to-peer, proximity communication, using an application called Sensor. The Sensor application (still available for old Symbian), used the Bluetooth as a means of communicating with people in proximity (instead of directly talking to each other!). The Sensor app would host a mobile page of you (like your facebook page), people could see this from their apps and if they like, send message to you, and probably become friends. Sounded like a pretty good idea, but somehow did not catchup, and the project seems to be abandoned altogether, at least for now.

I think, at least for local communication needs, one can setup a peer-to-peer communication system that is independent of any infrastructure. Every device in this system behaves as a carrier. Consider that everyone owns such a device. Also, in a modern city, I think it would be safe to assume that every person will find at least another person with in 10 meters radius (this is just a hypothesis right now, a proof for this would be amazing). All the devices in this system will have a unique number, and will be owned by a person. Every device will have a public and private key for the purpose of security. Now consider that a person wants to send a message to his mate. The way this would work out is as follows:

The sender knows the public key and the device identifier of the receiver. For this to happen, both the sender and receiver should have met physically and exchanged this information once.
A message packet is prepared with the device identifier, and the content encrypted using public key.
In addition, the message packet will contain a field for signifying the importance along with a hop counter. At the source, the importance field will have the highest value, while the hop counter will be zero. Every second hop a packet makes the importance is decremented by one, where as the hop counter is incremented with each hop.
The message is then broadcasted to all the nearby (say with in 10 meters radius) devices.
If any of these devices is the intended device, the process completes. There still might be lingering packets in the network carrying the original message, these will eventually die as their importance decreases.
If the importance field of the message packet reaches a negative value, it is not re-broadcasted, else it is re-broadcasted.

The above is quite akin to the way messages were transmitted in olden days (that were not from Kings). I think this should work wonderfully if the density of the device is sufficient, though at this point I don't have a proof of what this sufficient number should be.
One drawback of this system is power requirement. I am not sure a device that would handle this amount of traffic can last for long, given today's battery technology: the radio (apart from the display) is a major power guzzler.

Alternative positioning
While the GPS works great where I live, and I am actually pleasantly surprised by the accuracy of Nokia Drive app on my Lumia, there is a need for a cheaper solution that will work even if the satellites are out of visibility. Nokia Lumia and most other modern smartphones supports A-GPS, which augments the satellite positioning with other information such as cellular tower positions, wifi hotspots and the IP address of your device to give pretty accurate positioning information.
Another approach would be to use landmarks as a way of positioning. This would basically involve the use camera and some image processing. The device will store information on the known landmarks and their positions. The stream shot coming from the camera will be mapped on to the available landmarks and approximate position calculated. A system like thing, might not be good for turn-by-turn navigation, but will be useful if your are walking or cycling and you want to roughly know your current location. Again, this is not a substitute for GPS, which also provides altitude information, but then for day-to-day use this might just work out.

Programming Model and On-device programming
Kosh will be using HTML + JavaScript for user level programs. Any hardware level code will be written using pure C.
The most challenging aspect, though is to create an On-device programming environment that is easy to use, but also powerful to take full advantage of the capabilities of the device. In my earlier post on Nokia Lumia, I had mentioned about TouchDevelop from Microsoft Research. This is terrific on-device programming environment and I have not found anything yet that comes even close to this. This is one environment that makes me love the Lumia (to see stuff I am up to using TouchDevelop, visit: https://www.touchdevelop.com/wblh).
To make Kosh really interesting an on-device programming environment akin to TouchDevelop must be built.

References
[1] http://spillwaybrain.wordpress.com/2011/11/10/why-windows/
[2] http://enyojs.com/
[3] http://www.eink.com/display_products_triton.html
[4] http://www.pixelqi.com/products
[5] http://www.qnx.com/products/neutrino-rtos/index.html
[6] http://www.webkit.org/
[7] Wiki on Nokia Sensor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_Sensor
[8] Mozilla Mobile web OS: https://wiki.mozilla.org/B2G

Followup
At this point, I only have idea. Not a single line of code to show. But to start it up, I had to write this down. This is just a beginning of the things to come, and hopefully you will love it too :)

Fine Print
The ideas, text and graphics in this post are exclusively created and owned by the author. The templates for few icons in the post are taken from a Google image search, they were then suitably modified for my needs. All the above content, and any followup posts with the label "kosh" is henceforth made available under Creative Commons License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) and may be attributed as : Kosh, by V. Ganesh.
The text also contains references to product names, and are trademarks of respective organizations. They are used in the text for information purpose only.

An inside look at one of the first popular smartphones: Nokia 6600

2012-01-25T19:51:00.001-08:00

The first ever mobile phone I owned was in fact a Smartphone: Nokia 6600. This was one of the best phones available at one time, in terms of cpu, memory and availability of installable 3rd party applications. It even had a modern day browser: Opera Mobile. Was just a perfect piece of hardware: but lacked 3G. And then the advent of iPhone just made it look too lame. I always wanted to have a look inside this smartphone to see what chips make it tick. So, finally I took apart the circuit board of 6600. It has a 104MHz ARM processor, with onboard RAM of 10MB. There is also internal storage chips which I guess is either 16MB or 32MB. Pretty low specs compared to what I have on my Lumia 800 (which has almost comparable hardware to my Asus t91mt – except on the RAM front).

A photo … and a national day that two nations share

2012-01-25T19:30:00.001-08:00

It is republic day in India again. And I was pleasantly greeted by this tri-color on my Lumia this morning. Happy Republic Day!
Today is also the Australia Day, so warm wishes to my Oz friends. I remember, discovering this for the first time few years ago when I was in Oz, that we share the same day as our national day. It was also the first time I was out of India on a republic day, but knowing that the other land also shared a national day, made it sweet .

|| वसुधैव कुतुंबकं || ( vasudhaiv kutumbakam )

A test post from Nokia Lumia

2012-01-22T07:16:00.000-08:00

This is just a test post from my Nokia Lumia. Just to say that it works great. And the onscreen keyboard is just too good even for writing a long enogh post.
Just loving this :)

Back to Nokia, with a Lumia!

2011-12-18T00:41:00.001-08:00

Well yes, somehow I convinced (rather spoiled) myself into buying this device. I was just to frustrated with my current Android device and I had no plans on falling back on Nokia E51 (the Symbian device that I used before). Well in the process I actually cleared up my digital inventory: essentially sold off my laptop (to get some funds ). So now I am reduced to this stunning new Nokia Lumia, my Asus t91mt and the regular desktop.
There was good reason to do that. I seem to be carrying a lot of “digital burden” with me. Particularly the laptop. At home I use Windows on desktop (with Ubuntu running as virtual machine). And when my desktop is being used by my parents, I use my Asus t91mt. At work I almost exclusively use Linux. I need a Windows machine mainly to take notes (I use OneNote) and if I need to make presentations or use Word. Since I don’t have a Windows machine at work, I mostly tried to use my personal laptop for this purpose. I also tried using Google docs, but it simply doesn’t meet my needs. And carrying the laptop was a pain for everyday travel. I wanted my phone instead to do the task, but it simply wouldn’t work the way I wanted. Moreover, it was simply problematic : the more I tried to use it, the more it crashed. Eventually, I found one smartphone that could do it all: the elegantly build Nokia Lumia with Windows Mango OS, and Office App built right into the device.

On the face: Beautiful, and Wow
Nokia knows how to build the hardware that blends seamlessly with the software. The Lumia 800 (I still think Nokia should not have put that number and just made one product with the name Lumia), has a stunningly beautiful, unibody polycarbonate casing with curved AMOLED corning gorilla glass display. To sum up all the jargon: its a beautifully designed solid product, with a soul in it.

Even the power adapter is nicely designed. It is slim as a plug, and you don’t even feel its an adapter. My only complaint is that it should have been black for a black phone, or they should have made a white Lumia.
And then there is this wow factor. The Windows Phone Mango adds the needed sweetness on the top of that wow factor. The Metro UI is a refreshing break from static icons of iOS and Android. Though one may say that Widgets do the same thing as Live tiles : it is not. Widgets are battery hog on Android, Live tiles are not.

Below the skin: pleasantly useful and gets the work done
A lot has been said about the “gets the work done” for Windows Phone and I can say this again. I have all that I need out-of-box. It connects to GMail, Hotmail and Yahoo without the need for any app download. Twitter and Facebook is supported on the phone : no apps needed if you are happy with basic functionality.
I use OneNote a lot, and the integrated Office Hub is a treat of usability for me. This is kind of “must have” functionality for me and Windows Phone does it just right.
The other application I use a lot is Maps. Although the Lumia comes with Nokia maps and you can download a third-party Google maps app from Windows Phone market place, I miss one feature: ability to search for public transport routes. The Nokia maps seems to support this, though it doesn’t seem to work in the place I live.
And most importantly: the device has no lag even when using it with loads of apps or browsing a number of sites. This is remarkably better than any Android device that I have used so far.

Apps and all
Generally all the reviews on the Internet these days are all praise for Windows Phone, except one thing: the selection of Apps. After using the windows phone marketplace, I don’t think I fully agree. I found my most used app on the other platform in the marketplace. Moreover, these are more beautifully designed than the once available on other platform. Sure the number of Apps in marketplace is smaller, but definitely not the quality, they are simply superior.
Not everything is rosy though. Two main sour points are: Skype is entirely missing (though I hope this will soon get resolved as now Microsoft itself has purchased the company) and Adobe reader (while on all other platforms this has been updated to X, marketplace still has the older 9.0 version .. thats lame).

The Camera

The camera performance is reasonable for my needs to do casual photography. For serious needs I do have a DSLR. Of-course it is just unfair to compare this camera with my DSLR for quality, but Nokia could probably have done a better job at handling scenes with low light conditions. I also could not find a way to correct for “red-eyes” within the Camera application. There is no auto-panorama on the default camera app, but you can get an App from the marketplace that does a pretty good job for this.

Sound and Music
Zune player on the phone is a nicely integrated app. The “music+videos” hub really makes it interesting as it not only integrates the radio, but also other online music services and related apps.
The speaker quality is what I would term as OK. The bundled headset is of good quality, but as with others, it slips from my ears (they just don’t get it that I am a good listener ).
On the Nokia Support site there were many complaints regarding sound quality when the headset is attached (either supplied or any other headset with 3.5mm connector). What I found is that it actually depends on the quality of the music file you are playing. With good quality mp3 files (the ones that I created from my own collection of CDs) had excellent response (even at the highest volume). This is not simply the case with another mp3 file I created from a cassette tape. It actually sounded better on my PC, but on the device it had this cracking sound as I increased the volume. This prompts me to think that this is more of an issue with the software that does the decoding. Hopefully a future software update will fix this.

Battery life
My usage of this phone has been quite heavy till now. So I can’t really judge the battery life in normal use. That said I got about 8 hours of continuous use with Wifi on. I will update this post as I get more idea of battery life on daily use basis.

[Update 1: I am still testing the battery life. But my normal use seems to last for about 24 hrs or more. Nokia also replaced my phone (without even me asking!), so I am actually happy :). Today I had put on the WiFi most of the time as I was writing scripts using TouchDevelop (see below). The battery lasted for about 8 hrs, that is sort of consistant with my heavy usage as observed earlier. ]

A new way to develop: TouchDevelop

My first ever phone was a Nokia 6600 (here) and then the Nokia E51 (here). After this I had a brief stint with Android platform (here). My primary requirement from any device has always been: programmability, apart from usability. I have been always hooked to the Nokais from day 1 because of the amazing programmability of these devices. I build a complete Quantum Chemistry program (mobihf : http://sites.google.com/site/tovganesh/s60) on it and even presented a paper on this work! I could not say the same for the Android platform, somehow I have been disappointed even before I used the platform (here and here). Although Android has an in device programming project (http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/), it is not actually “officially supported”. Neither I got around to use this properly on my android device.
With Windows Phone, though, Microsoft Research has done a great job by releasing TouchDevelop (https://www.touchdevelop.com/help and http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/touchdevelop/), a new way to program the device without a PC. On my Nokia Lumia, I was up and writing a simple graph plot script in not more than 15 mins (see this: https://www.touchdevelop.com/wblh). Although, I already have Windows Phone SDK installed on my desktop, I find programming on the device very interesting (as I have said this here and various other posts here), and is the only way to break from being dependent on the PC. This also gives you a feeling that you have complete control of the device and that you are not dependent on any third-party to get something done exactly the way you want it.
I think, Microsoft Research, with its TouchDevelop, has shown a way that this could be done. It may not be perfect, but this is probably the direction that we should take. Hope that this gets carried over to the forthcoming “Windows 8”, which would be quite a radical development.
In forthcoming posts, I hope to put in more efforts to cover TouchDevelop as I get more familiar with it and write more “fun” scripts .

Connecting to the PC : Zune

This is very simple. And as I have been already using the Zune player, I had no problems with connecting the device to the PC. Compared to Android (or Symbian) however, there is no way to expose the device storage as a filesystem on the PC. The Windows Phone is handled by Zune just the way iOS devices are handled by the iTunes player.

Nokia care: has it improved?
I had complained about my previous stint with Nokia Care (here). I am not sure of the current status. Though I must say that in-showroom experience of buying the Lumia was fantastic : very friendly and knowledgeable people.

In the end : would I recommend this?
Definitely. The major deciding factor for many would be the price. It would however offset if you look at it as a complete mobile computing device rather than just a phone, which is what it really is.

Changing times with the Rupee and the Paisa …

2011-12-09T23:18:00.001-08:00

Was thrilled to see these new coins with the new rupee marking Also in the picture is the one paisa coin that is my constant companion, even though it was abandoned long before I was born. Hope that we can see the value of that one paisa grow up some day
Enjoy the weekend !

webOS goes opensource :)

2011-12-09T20:27:00.001-08:00

HP is making the webOS opensource and it intends to make it "pure opensource" as opposed to the "other" controlling project. The press release of the announcement is here: http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2011/111209xa.html?mtxs=rss-corp-news and http://developer.palm.com/blog/2011/12/open-source/

Hope this serves as a viable alternative to all the "corporate" managed mobile OSes. I would love to see a homebrew, DIY community sprung around this and create more interesting ecosystem around it with least central control.

Just painting...

2011-12-04T06:56:00.001-08:00

Mathematics add-in for OneNote

2011-12-03T05:27:00.001-08:00

Okay this one is not only cool but very usable tool from Microsoft. If you use OneNote / Word and if you are into Science, you might find this tool very valuable. The mathematics add-in for Word / OneNote is available from Microsoft at: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=17786

The tool combined with Tablet PC features (on my Asus t91) is quite a fun and addictive

Insanely helpful error message

2011-10-22T08:48:00.000-07:00

Ofcourse, I don't see any harmony in the exception thrown !! ;)

(PS. Nokia, eagerly waiting to know when the WP7 devices are heading to India?)
(Update: So looks like, mostly probably Nokia WP7 is landing in India by the end of the year, ref: http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_phone/b/windowsphone/archive/2011/10/26/nokia-s-first-two-windows-phones-are-here-and-they-re-awesome.aspx. And in most probablity, I am gonna switch to one of the Lumia devices :) )

Steve, you live on!

2011-10-06T08:51:00.001-07:00

http://www.apple.com/stevejobs/

qusoware: Quantum Software on there way

2011-09-02T18:37:00.001-07:00

Until now if you wanted to try out any of the algorithms based on quantum computing framework, you would basically need to reconfigure the hardware, presumably with an expert experimentalist. This however is probably poised to change with the introduction of quantum memory:http://www.technologyreview.in/computing/38495/. This essentially brings the quantum computing devices to the realm of general purpose computing architecture, the thing that is most common in todays processors.

On a lighter note we will might soon have qusoware (my pun for software that runs on a quantum computer), probably something like QComBasic 1.0 from someone like Microsoft ;)

Upgrade to MeTA Studio : full jython integration, first steps of jchempaint integration

2011-08-27T11:01:00.000-07:00

A new upgrade to MeTA Studio is now available for download. The current version is 2.0.27082011 and the update is available from usual place: http://code.google.com/p/metastudio/

Changes in this version:
- Updated smackx libraries, GTalk integration works again!
- Fully supported Jython integration into the IDE

- Initial implementation of JChempaint integration, more improvements on the way

- Other improvements: surface normals, improved GTalk widget, bug fixes and improvements in federation framework, issues with .mar handling fixed, new APIs for managing workflows (no UI integration yet).
- I also welcome javadba, who recently joined the project and plans to contribute unit tests for the parallel framework in the MeTA Studio and in the process improve it.

With this release, MeTA Studio SVN has 500+ commits (http://code.google.com/p/metastudio/updates/list). Though the development on MeTA Studio started quite some time back (2003-04 for version 2.0.x), it was only made opensource in 2009. Just interesting to look back ;)

Enjoy!

(PS: as you might notice from SVN logs, I unsuccessfully tried porting the project to JDK 7, which was recently released. I am almost sure that the problem is with a bug in the current JDK release. Will be investigating and may eventually migrate to the new JDK release once it becomes stable enough.)

Hello Kinect : Speech recognition

2011-08-16T20:13:00.000-07:00

If you have ever used speech recognition built into recent version of Windows, you would know of all the troubles it has. It is good, but not good enough to make you want it use on everyday basis. It is good when it works, and painful other times. Handwriting recognition or merely typing is much less annoying to get your real work done. Most of the trouble comes when you are in a room where other people are also talking. The engine gets confused.
With Kinect, however, things are better as the speech recognizer also uses additional inputs from the camera to figure out the source of sound to recognize. Which pretty much makes speech recognition quite interesting.
So what all do we need to identify speech using the Kinect SDK?
First of all you need to add Microsoft.Speech.dll to your project, and them make the following two imports:

using Microsoft.Speech.AudioFormat;
using Microsoft.Speech.Recognition;

All of the speech recognition stuff is then essentially handled by the classes: KinectAudioSource and SpeechRecognitionEngine. The later is part of Microsoft speech API and provides a generalized framework for speech recognition.

private KinectAudioSource kinectSource;
private SpeechRecognitionEngine sre;

RecognizerInfo ri = SpeechRecognitionEngine.InstalledRecognizers().Where(
r => r.Id == RecognizerId).FirstOrDefault();

if (ri == null) return;
sre = new SpeechRecognitionEngine(ri.Id);
var helloChoice = new Choices();
helloChoice.Add("hello");
helloChoice.Add("kinect");
var gb = new GrammarBuilder();
gb.Append(helloChoice);
var g = new Grammar(gb);
sre.LoadGrammar(g);
sre.SpeechRecognized += sre_SpeechRecognized;
sre.SpeechHypothesized += sre_SpeechHypothesized;
sre.SpeechRecognitionRejected += new EventHandler(sre_SpeechRecognitionRejected);
var t = new Thread(StartKinectAudioStream);
t.Start();

For the speech recognizer to work correctly, you need to provide words that need to identified. These are handled by constructing a 'grammer' for the same. In the above code we construct a simple grammar to recognizer only two words 'hello' and 'kinect'. Next we register event handlers, which are 'callbacks' when the SpeechRecognitionEngine recognizes (or does not) something that is spoken.
After this we open the Kinect's audio stream and start listening to it in a different thread.

The body of StartKinectAudioStream() function is as follows:

kinectSource = new KinectAudioSource();
kinectSource.SystemMode = SystemMode.OptibeamArrayOnly;
kinectSource.FeatureMode = true;
kinectSource.AutomaticGainControl = false;
kinectSource.MicArrayMode = MicArrayMode.MicArrayAdaptiveBeam;
var kinectStream = kinectSource.Start();
sre.SetInputToAudioStream(kinectStream, new SpeechAudioFormatInfo(
                                               EncodingFormat.Pcm, 16000, 16, 1,
                                               32000, 2, null));
sre.RecognizeAsync(RecognizeMode.Multiple);

The code above basically tries to construct a beam for each person recognized by Kinect (skeletal tracker).

Finally, the signature of event handlers for speech recognizer are as follows:

void sre_SpeechRecognitionRejected(object sender, SpeechRecognitionRejectedEventArgs e)
void sre_SpeechHypothesized(object sender, SpeechHypothesizedEventArgs e)
void sre_SpeechRecognized(object sender, SpeechRecognizedEventArgs e)
{
   Console.Write("\rSpeech Recognized: \t{0}", e.Result.Text);
   lastRecognizedWord = e.Result.Text;
}

Here a short video:

More to come soon :)

Google + Motorola = Googarola !

2011-08-15T07:02:00.000-07:00

Here we go, Googarola (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/08/supercharging-android-google-to-acquire.html)! Google has announced that it would be acquiring Motorola mobility, the unit of Motorola that build the Droids. Essentially, Google has stopped being software only company, by buying a major Android handset manufacturer. This is a quite smart move. From the official blogpost, it is quite apparent the motive of this buy: Patents. Lately, Android handset manufacturer have been hit by patents from all sides, some of which may be ligit, but overall they simply seem to seve as a way to scare companies away from using Android alltogether. With Motorola acquisition, Google gets its hand on a large pool of mobile patents, and at the same time also weakens its complaint againt Apple+Mircosoft et. al. to the US DoJ for the rescent issue of Nortel patents buyout.
Personally, I feel this is a good move in view of customers. Hopefully, the mobile space has room for atleast about 5 different ecosystems which are sustainable as against only 2 players in case of PCs. Google can now have more control over the hardware and at the same time will have less worry of any patent litigation. Also, I think this move is good for other Android handset manufactures, as now Google can essentially be more helpful to them when it comes to patent litigations. What actually worries me is if the culture of an 80 year old company will jell well with an yet young Google.
In view of this acquisition, one more thing seems to be clear: the reason why Nokia didn't go with Android. I guess, with Motorola acquisition in mind, Google obviously couldn't think of giving Nokia enough room for customization of Andoid.

Things in mobile space are getting very interesting. May be another major cosolidation is underway... like the 'unlikely' acquition of Nokia by Microsoft? Although I am highly skeptical of such an event.

Hello Kinect!

2011-08-06T03:25:00.001-07:00

So, finally I gave up all the resistance to avoid buying this cool new stuff and ordered a piece for myself from http://www.flipkart.com/. The unit arrived last week, but had to spent the weekend rearranging my living room so that I could get enough space to use my Kinect. Plugging it to my PC and using the drivers provided with Microsoft Kinect SDK was straightforward. I did initially face a problem with the driver not installing properly, but quickly figured it out that this was because the Kinect was not plugged into a root USB port.

My intention of getting Kinect was not to play games, but to play with programming it. Although I would happily take an XBox, if you gift me one ;-)
This post and subsequent posts on Kindle on this blog will tell my experience of programming on Kindle. As a first step, I ensured that the samples provided with the SDK work well. Next, I installed Visual Studio Express 2010 (available for free here: http://www.microsoft.com/express).
I chose C# (C-Sharp, may be they should call it C-Dumb :P) as my programming language for Kinect. Jokes apart, I have very little experience using C#, mostly using Java or C++ (left using Fortran on day-to-day basis 2 years ago!). Any how, I found C# to be quite neatly designed language and easy to learn particularly if you come from Java or C++ background. If you come from C++, you are sure to enjoy some freshness that Java brought to object oriented programming.
So considering you have some idea to program in C#, writing a 'Hello Kinect' is relatively easy. First ensure that you have added Microsoft.Research.Kinect.dll as an external dependency to the Visual Studio project you create.

Next is to import the Kinect APIs:
using Microsoft.Research.Kinect.Nui;
All the initialization of Kinect NUI (Natural User Interface) is handled using the Runtime class.
Runtime nui = new Runtime();
nui.Initialize(RuntimeOptions.UseDepthAndPlayerIndex |
               RuntimeOptions.UseSkeletalTracking |
               RuntimeOptions.UseColor);

Next we open the Video and Depth streams of Kinect:
nui.VideoStream.Open(ImageStreamType.Video, 2,
                     ImageResolution.Resolution640x480,
                     ImageType.Color);
nui.DepthStream.Open(ImageStreamType.Depth, 2,
                     ImageResolution.Resolution320x240,
                     ImageType.DepthAndPlayerIndex);
Note that the current Kinect hardware only support VGA resolution (max) for video stream.
When a data frame is available for processing on Kinect, the driver sends a notification to the application. In C# this is handled by registering an appropriate even handler as follows:
nui.DepthFrameReady +=
new EventHandler<ImageFrameReadyEventArgs>(nui_DepthFrameReady);
nui.SkeletonFrameReady +=
new EventHandler<SkeletonFrameReadyEventArgs>(nui_SkeletonFrameReady);

The signatures of the event handlers look as below:
void nui_DepthFrameReady(object sender, ImageFrameReadyEventArgs e)
void nui_SkeletonFrameReady(object sender,
                            SkeletonFrameReadyEventArgs e)

Now, I have managed to see how to get the Skeletal data easily:
SkeletonFrame skeletonFrame = e.SkeletonFrame;
foreach (SkeletonData data in skeletonFrame.Skeletons)
{
       foreach (Joint joint in data.Joints)
       {
              // transform and plot joint.Position
       }
}
In the end uninitialize:
nui.Uninitialize();

So here is a video of my ‘dot avatar’) in action

My ‘dot avatar’, the other ‘dot avatar’ is my dad in background. Kinect SDK for Windows 7 at the moment allows tracking of only two people.

Next up, I need to figure out how exactly to use depth data as well as handle audio. Hopefully a post for next weekend

Have fun!

A need for sincere debate on the energy issue in India

2011-07-10T07:49:00.001-07:00

When was the last time there was a debate regarding future of energy resources in India?
Many would want to say ... um .. well when was it? When Indian Parliament was trying to get a nuclear deal signed with the USA? Or just last month when there was a fuel hike?
I have a strong feeling that none of these debates were sincere. None of them had anything visionary coming out of it. I always felt that there were more emotional and monetary reasons behind any decision involved towards the future of energy resources in India.
Everyone at the decision making level today seems to make statements such as, "Nuclear and thermal energy is the future for power needs of India". Seriously? Did we ever think if this is sustainable? How did we come to that 'conclusion'?
To understand this let us go to the root of the issue. Bharat, traditionally has been an economy that always emphasized upon sustainable villages. The villages were always as resourceful as the cities. When the Colonial rule came to Bharat, they got with them the Industrial culture in the West and India was born. Industrialization was good, it brought the so-called 'progress'. There was one differentiating factor though which was not so good. It promoted an economy of unbalance. Of all the unbalances, the unbalance of a region or territory is what made things even sorrow. This is what resulted in the formation of 'cities' of modern time. Instead of decentralization, we had concentrated hubs that had all the amenities. And all these were completely absent in other places. This is what prompted large scale migrations from villages to 'cities', which keep on getting bigger and bigger. But how long will this expansion last is anyone's guess.

A case for decentralization
We can’t keep expanding cities. It will surely crumble at some point. We already keep seeing signs of this. All that the city administration tries to do is find workaround.
A good example of how not to expand a city is the one that I live in: Pune. This city is full of malls. So many of them and so close. And each of them suck power like crazy. There seems to be no full stop in growing number of malls. I can count like four big malls in my small suburb of Viman Nagar. And one of the malls even proclaim to be biggest in India! So you can easily imagine its energy needs. Add to this the fact that the city houses two of the most powerful supercomputers in the country, which also figure in the top 500 list. You can easily get where this is all headed.
When Mahatma Gandhi said we need self-sufficient villages and not big cities, he had point and a vision to see ahead. We just seem to have forgotten that, our vision blinded by the glitz of big malls. At the same time people migrate to cities because villages are under-developed, have rigid social structure and very limited opportunity for ‘growth’. The form of decentralization that Gandhiji advocated once seems to have been completely lost. No one cares about it. Heck none of the political class even speak of it, most are simply concerned with providing subsidies or ‘rojgar’ schemes, which most of times are pointless and foster corruption.

Bad Science and Why no investment in future, the renewable energy?
A few years ago a group of people from a wind energy company had come to our home to meet my dad. They wanted my dad to be a part of independent scientific advisory panel. The reason: There was immense political pressure on this unit to shutdown, apparently because this unit had been blamed for not enough rains in this region. Logic was because of the windmills the wind was diverted, and somehow the rain clouds didn’t come there! Now now! The committee did submit a report to state government , saying there was no such evidence. To top it all, it rained heavily that year in this particular region. Guess, even rain god don’t like bad science
In India, I don’t see concerted efforts to push for generation of renewable energy: particularly solar and wind which is available in abundance or even the biogas, but poorly utilized. There are ‘here – and – there’ efforts. We do have a ministry of new and renewable energy : http://www.mnre.gov.in/, but I hear more of Petroleum ministry that this more important ministry. I strongly feel that ministry of renewable energy should put in concrete efforts for large scale adoption of renewable energy, which need not be subsidised. A policy like compulsory solar power for all new buildings and existing housing complexes may be a good starting point.

I strongly feel that Nuclear or thermal energy is just not suitable for our sustainable future. What do you think?

PS. 1) All views expressed here are solely mine. They have nothing to do with my current employer or any organization that I represent.
2) I had though of writing this up from long time. But recent statement on solar power and 'its everyone's choice' by German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, during her recent India visit further prompted me to write this up.

From Symbian to Android

2011-06-01T23:20:00.000-07:00

About few months ago I switched from using Symbian to Android. The transition is still in progress, but I can say this much: probably I would never go back to Symbian. And well, Symbian is more or less dead with the Nokia announcement that they would rather be shifting to Windows Phone OS.

As much as this is about moving from one mobile OS to another, it is also about moving from one handset to another. The Symbian phone is a Nokia E51 while the Android phone is a Samsung Galaxy 5.

These are just notes on what I find good and not so good with the switch.

Daily Usage:
My basic requirement from a Phone call is just that it makes and receives phone calls. For this both Android and Symbian seem just OK.

Another requirement from my phone is calender management. In this case Android just wins, mostly because of its seamless integration with Google calender.

Finally battery life: My Symbian phone used to last much longer on a charge than my Android phone. Generally, I feel Symbian is still better in power management. But this may also vary depending on the phone model.

Always Connected:

With Symbian phone I never felt like being always connected. Simply because there were no great apps that needed online update, like no good chat clients.

System stability:

As far as I can say, Android on my phone has not really be stable. With Symbian, my phone worked with a reboot for months ... this has reduced to a few days! This in no way is an advancement. I should really checkout iOS and Windows Phone OS stability to see how other modern OSes fair.

Usability:

I generally find Android to be much more easy to use and navigate than Symbian. Making phone calls, browsing Internet, accessing e-mail, playing music, watching YouTube is all much more enjoying and smoother experience with the Android interface than it has ever been with any version of Symbian.

Did I program?

Not much. Basically, didn't get much time to play around with Android programming as yet. But I did easily manage to port some of the core parts of MeTA Studio project. This initial port is available at: http://cid-76d41f4618b0b6af.office.live.com/self.aspx/metastudio/MeTADroid.tar.gz
May be somewhere down the lane there will be UI Android port for MeTA Studio.

That said, programming on Android is definitely much more enjoying than Symbian C++. I am not sure about the new Qt support for Symbian. But then I always find it enjoying to program in Java than with C++ (i dislike hunting for segfaults in someone elses code ;)).

Push pedal..

2011-05-29T20:52:00.001-07:00

An Indian express article (http://www.indianexpress.com/news/pushed-to-pedal-post-fuel-price-hike-a-spurt-in-cycle-sales/796946/) is indicating that there is increase in Push Bike sales in Pune with the recent increase in fuel prices. To me it is just a blip in the timeline. Not sustainable. Unless of course there is substantial up gradation of cycle tracks in Pune.

At least for now I would not actually recommend long distance commuting on a Push Bike in Pune … from my own experience.

Just drawing…

2011-05-29T19:23:00.001-07:00

Normal generation for surfaces in MeTA Studio..

2011-05-28T23:13:00.001-07:00

For some reason, the earlier builds of MeTA Studio did not have normal generation for surface rendering. This resulted in poor but fast surface rendering. I have just modified this to always generate normals for surfaces starting from r468 revision in the SVN. So now you need not tinker to get a smooth surface.

Remembering Dr. V. Sundararajan, sir

2011-05-17T18:29:00.000-07:00

When I called him up yesterday morning on his cell, to invite him for some function, that soothing voice on the other end was no longer there. He had left all of us the very same morning. I am at loss of words.

To me Dr. Sundararajan was an 'un-official' mentor during my Ph.D. program. Although I had quite less academic overlap with him, he always used to help out in umpteen ways, particularly when it came to using the C-DAC facilities for our research work.
He almost always used to attend my Ph.D. progress presentations and had ready useful comments at the end of the session. After I had completed my thesis, he had asked me to give a presentation at C-DAC, which unfortunately never happened as I almost immediately went to ANU for post-doc.

Even when Dr. Sundararajan went into higher administrative roles at C-DAC he was always accessible to everyone who had an interest in doing interesting work with HPC and evolutionary algorithms. He also taught courses at my alma mater, and would indeed be a great loss as a teacher.

R.I.P. may god give his family strength and courage for the life ahead.

MeTA Studio binary release

2011-04-17T02:06:00.000-07:00

Another, major bug fix release of MeTA Studio (2.0.17042011) is available for download. The list of issues addressed, and not yet fixed can be seen here.

New additions and fixes in this release:

- apps folder: simple examples of writing new applications on MeTA Studio platform
- MO plot (a new widget is supplied for the same)
- Support for NetCDF and HDF libraries
- problems with i/o redirection for scripts running with in MeTA Studio GUI environment

Still in works:

- Rotation of individual molecules in the editor (partially working)
- Interpolated normals for on-screen iso-surfaces

Configure WiFi usb adapter as a WiFi hotspot (Windows 7)

2011-04-04T03:10:00.001-07:00

Had allocated this long weekend for fixing Issue 46 in MeTA Studio, but ended with lot other bugs that had to be fixed. Eventually, I am only half way through fixing the real issue. With all this I got painfully bored :( So decided to do some changes in my setup.

I have a mobile data plan currently on my mobile for which pay about 100 INR per-month for 2GB, which are hardly used up. In fact, I find that I really do not require that. Also, after seeing the new 3G data plan rates (http://airtel.in/Airtel-3G/tariffs.html), I though it was high time I just dump the subscription. So now my phone is quite simply put, un-plugged, with only voice and sms, and pay as you use data.

Now when I am at home, on most of the weekdays, my parents watch TV. And my main desktop as well as the TV is same unit. So, if I need to work (with internet connection), I simply used to setup an ad-hoc connection using a WiFi usb adapter connected to my desktop. The sad part was that my Android 2.1 phone never saw this ad-hoc network. I could simply purchase a Wifi router, but just can't convince myself to get a new device.

After a bit of googling, I came across this very useful article: http://www.blogsdna.com/5506/how-to-setup-virtual-wifi-in-windows-7-without-any-extra-software.htm

Essentially, the whole thing boils down to two commands:

netsh wlan set hostednetwork mode=allow ssid=mywifi key=mypassword
netsh wlan start hostednetwork

and also enabling Internet connection sharing in Windows 7.

Next up, I wanted this to startup automatically when my main desktop booted. I did this by writing the above commands in a batch file and using NSSM - the Non-Sucking Service Manager (http://iain.cx/src/nssm/) to create a Windows auto start service.

Cool afternoon, now back to fixing Issue #46 ;)

Ban! Pretty much an un-Gandhian way

2011-03-31T09:43:00.000-07:00

It seems here in India, there is a fad, to BAN.

Recently, many state governments banned a book on Gandhi, proclaiming that it has insulting statements on the father of our nation. The Law ministry is even considering changing the law to make such statements a crime! The bureaucrats and politicians who even think of doing this of course don't seem to have an iota of idea what Gandhiji represented.

When I started writing this post, I thought how can anyone even think of such absurd idea a 'ban'. Let's be quite clear: we are a democratic and intellectual society where the word 'ban' and an associated 'authoritarian' behavior of the people in power has absolutely no place. You can never enforce respect towards a person or a nation or a place, it has to come from within. That is but human mind.

I was quite relived to see that I was not alone to have similar feelings, descendants of Gandhi seem to have much more sense towards what to say, than our learned bureaucrats and government.

My only thoughts at the end of this post: I wish, if the respected law ministry were as sensitive to more real issues like that of Dr. Binayak Sen (http://www.binayaksen.net/) than going down the un-Gandhian way of protecting Gandhiji himself, Bharat would be a far better place to live in!

Note: Any view expressed here are solely my personal views, and have nothing to do with my employer or organizations I am associated with.

HCL Launches ME Tablets

2011-03-29T19:54:00.000-07:00

Now, I am not a tablet fan as such, though I do own and heavily use a tablet PC.

But as a mass consumer product, I think, this has a large potential if the price points are right, especially in a market like India, where PC penetration is not that great.

So, I was quite excited almost an year ago when Notion Ink announced their plans to come up with a tablet. And actually delivered couple of months back (http://notionink.wordpress.com/). However, I still don't have a first hand look and feel of it (missed the first pre-order and then the second preorder invite :( ..)

While Notion Ink is quite innovative in what it has designed and continue to do so with their quite open development process, there are other Indian companies that might just get the critical mass in selling tablets, without innovating a lot. Or to say it in other words, provide what a user needs, not necessarily always the "wow" factor.

This is where the news of HCL ME Tablets comes in. And it is not just news, but you can buy the real product online (http://www.hclstore.in/ME_tablet). Of course, this one is not as good in "specs" department as the Notion Ink. But do users really care about specs of a tablet? Steve Jobs wants all of us to believe this, rt? Quite frankly, I think that is true. I don't really care about specs of these devices, if I get a smooth experience and get my job done.

HCL has a history of disrupting the Indian market with low price with pretty high quality products. In fact, my first laptop (or netbook) was from HCL. It was simply the best piece of portable hardware that I could afford back then. And this time around HCL has again come up with a similar strategy. The only difference this time is that in coming months there will be many other players in this space, particularly big Indian mobile manufactures like Micromax.

With all this, I am a bit concerned that NotionInk would actually become a small player, unless they do something radical. Just hope that Rohan is thinking along these lines, or at least reading this post of mine ;-)

Adventurous flight

2011-03-27T08:46:00.001-07:00

The funny game

2011-03-26T21:57:00.001-07:00

speech, html5 and chrome

2011-03-24T08:54:00.000-07:00

Now this is cool (http://chrome.blogspot.com/2011/03/talking-to-your-computer-with-html5.html). Putting speech in browser has just reduced dependence on the PC OSes a bit more. What would be more cool is if it could support more than just English.

So now, the ChromeOS is looking more and more complete. Now when is handwriting recognition coming into picture ;)

A public school in Kanpur

2011-03-11T17:50:00.001-08:00

New MeTA Studio binary release

2011-02-19T21:32:00.000-08:00

This is essentially a stop gap release that fixes a number of bugs, but also adds a major new feature: MeTA Studio Archive format (.mar). The .mar format allows you to package an application that uses the MeTA Studio platform. This version also includes inbuilt support for Jython, though this is not yet integrated into the UI.

Head to http://code.google.com/p/metastudio/ to get the latest binary package. The current version number is 2.0.19022011 and is also the first binary release in 2011.

Adam, I missed it again! :(

2011-02-12T20:44:00.001-08:00

Android finally has official blogger client

2011-02-05T07:26:00.001-08:00

So Google has finally released a blogger client for Android. I have been waiting for this for quite some time and was pleasantly surprised to see that in market.

The other pleasant stuff was that Google Goggles is now available for my phone which is pretty cool. Now the only stuff missing is proper offline Google docs support.

Now hopefully I get some time to develop on Android :-)

Is Bing really recycling Google?

2011-02-02T04:36:00.000-08:00

Well thats what Google wants you to believe and Microsoft doesn't. I am not a search engine expert, but I just don't believe what others have to say. So I randomly generated a "synthetic search" query: "abduljkastifu" and put it in Google and Bing with the following results.

Which obviously are different. After this, I pretty much stopped reading (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses-google-search.html). The said "recycling" only happens if you seem to be using some settings of IE8 / Bing toolbar (does someone actually use a toolbar?).

But the media putting it simply as Bing copying Google results is what I can classify as being bad Journalism.

Forgotten art: Microsoft Origami for Tablet PCs

2011-01-22T20:12:00.001-08:00

Lately have been using my Asus T91 MT a bit too frequently, primary to write documents and occasionally to browse the web. Though I constantly use the tablet, I hardly thought of two things: faster way to login my machine and better touch friendly window title bar and scroll bars. The rest of the elements in Windows 7 appear to be quite touch friendly to me, but not the above mentioned ones.

During the previous iteration of Windows, Microsoft had released a set of tools called Origami. These tools were specifically meant for touch based UMPC tablet PCs. Two of the tools offered by Microsoft Origami: picture password and touch settings have made a pleasant difference to how I use my tablet PC. You can download Microsoft Origami from here. But note that you may not be able to use other Origami tools on Windows 7 except the ones that I have mentioned. With Asus releasing the "most powerful TabletPC on earth" , probably its time to revive origami for Windows7.

New MeTA Studio icon

2011-01-09T07:15:00.001-08:00

Its been long time since there was a public update for MeTA Studio, partly because there is been lot of behind the scene re-architecting going on. And partly because I have been caught up with other stuff.

Even as a number of features were added for MeTA Studio, its icon had never clanged to reflect the new changes. The current icon is a simple rendering of a macro molecule, with the original intent of MeTA Studio being ease of handling large molecules:

Starting with today, the SVN has a new icon originally designed by APR.

The main site also hosts a logo as shown above. The above icon is basically designed with the four core foundations of MeTA Studio in mind: Organize (molecules) , Visualize, Code and Collaborate.

Look back at this space as we prepare to release updates to MeTA Studio in coming weeks.

Motorola Atrix: super phone with a promise

2011-01-07T22:31:00.001-08:00

In a recent post, I had argued for a super phone Software interface that:

"Ideally I would like my smartphone OS to automatically scale its user interface form small portable screen to a large desktop scale screen, handle touch, pen and pointing as well as keyboard, seamlessly. That will make computing on the go painless and computing on desk seamless. You will always need only one device: your personal super phone."

With the release of Atrix, Motorola seems to be heading in exactly this direction. Probably a way to active this an a phone is via virtualization. That, I guess is how Motorola is implementing it. With the ever improving ARM SoC capabilities and recent announcement of Windows for ARM, we are soon approaching:

"Three screens, One brain and the Cloud"

mantra. One who gets this right will define the next revolution in computing technologies.

Notion Ink: Good startings

2011-01-06T22:29:00.001-08:00

Almost an year ago I started following Notion Ink (http://tovganesh.blogspot.com/2010/01/notion-ink-another-attempt-at-making.html). One thing I was pretty critical about the device then was the software stack, just what sets them apart from other android tablet efforts?

Now with pretty positive reviews from Engadget (Joanna Stern), Liliputing (Brad Linder) at CES'11, I must say that Rohan Shravan and team have pulled up quite well. Good beginnings Rohan et al., though there is still lots to be done ;)

Mypaint: An open source painting application

2011-01-05T07:31:00.000-08:00

For some time now I have been searching for a good, responsive, free and professional digital painting tool for my Asus T91 and the bamboo tablet (pc). Today I discovered Mypaint (http://mypaint.intilinux.com/) which is an excellent tool for professional digital painting. Best of all it is open source and simply works. The program can also be configured for pressure sensitivity (provided the hardware supports this) and thus provides most natural painting experience. Highly recommended even if painting is just a hobby for you (like me ;-))

When can I have my Personal SuperPhone (PS) ?

2010-12-10T18:35:00.000-08:00

There is no doubt that Personal Computers (PCs), and the mobile phones have revolutionized our lives in multiple meaningful ways. Now smartphones are redefining the way mobile computing is done. But a smartphone today, be it from any vendor, can hardly be called personal the way PCs are.

A PC allowed you to customize from top to bottom. Every thing in a PC can be upgraded or swapped out in case a particular part malfunctions. I have a host of choices of what software stack I want to run on it. Right from the operating system to the applications are customizable. And it has been so form day one.

Not in case of a smartphone. True, yon can install some apps on them. True you can increase some storage space on some of them. May be change wallpaper to make it appear "personal". But that is it. It is what I call "pseudo-personal". You have no standard way of choosing a different operating system. You can buy different hardware for different mobile operating systems. But yon can't use the same hardware for different OSes even though they might be capable of doing so.

There is no way to fully customize software stack. Hardware wise it is even more restrictive. There is simply no way to expand or add capabilities. Though one might argue that you can put something like a USB host port. But none of the major phone makers have that feature. Currently I am using an Android phone (previously a Nokia Symbian). None of them have an easy way to install or upgrade the OS. My Android device is still 2.1, new 3.0 is round the corner. There is no way to upgrade the RAM or phone memory. You upgrade external storage, but that is too limiting and only useful as a way to store data. Thinking back, my first PC was an HP machine with AMD processor. It only came with 64 MB RAM which I later upgraded to 343 MB, upgraded from Windows 98 to XP, dual booted with numerous flavours of Linux, installed BeOS!, installed graphics card and what not. That freedom is missing completely in a smartphone available today.

Capable closed hardware, crappy software

Today's smartphone hardware is no doubt very capable. But is closed. Closed to the extent that even if you manage to open up your device you will have difficulty in identifying the essential components that make up the phone. The only parts that you could mange to remove would be the battery pack and the display panel. Possibly a key pad if your smartphone does come with one. Don't ever think of interchanging these parts with another phone: it would almost never work. Simply because there are no prevailing "Standard" as in the case of PC.

On the other side, software on these devices is not really productive. The PC software has matured over years, to the extent that people have started calling it legacy. Note that I consider all cloud based applications (aka. web appps) to be actually tailored for PC usage, not for ultra portable device. Eventually the productivity offered by these smart devices is but quite limited. You almost always fall back to your PC to do the actual work (why do yon think Google is releasing ChromeOS?). The phones do not truly and transparently sync with your workflow. To some extent this has improved especially with mobile e-mail clients. But not in general. Ideally I would like my smartphone OS to automatically scale its user interface form small portable screen to a large desktop scale screen, handle touch, pen and pointing as well as keyboard, seamlessly. That will make computing on the go painless and computing on desk seamless. You will always need only one device: your personal super phone.

More eco-friendly

Another important factor of these smartphones is battery. My E51 used to last for at least 3 days on a single charge. My current Android phone only lasts a day. Difference being that I am using a lot more data services than I did with E51. I would actually love if the phone operated on solar power when on move and on battery when on desk.

From Asia not America

A noted company has to take initiative and came up with a reference design for a personal Super phone: Like the IBM PC. That, this would rather happen in some part of Asia and not America is my hunch.

A reference design like Open Moko is a good starting point.

Update: Motorola just released an interesting superphone: http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/06/motorola-atrix-4g-hd-multimedia-dock-and-laptop-dock-hands-on/

some fun with C++

2010-12-01T22:30:00.000-08:00

Was playing around with C++, and found that you can actually use a base class member function pointer to call functions defined in derived class. Round about way, but useful for implementing stuff like: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_%28programming%29

Here is an example snippet:


#include ... 
class Base { 
  public: 
    typedef void (Base::*WhoPtr)(); 
}; 
class D1: public Base { 
  public: 
    void WhoAmI() const; 
}; 
class D2: public Base { 
  public: 
    void WhoAmI() const; 
}; 
void D1::WhoAmI() const { 
  std::cout << "I am D1" << std::endl; 
} 
void D2::WhoAmI() const { 
  std::cout << "I am D2" << std::endl; 
} 
void run(Base::WhoPtr fptr) {
  Base base;   
  (base.*fptr)();  
}
int main(int argc, char **argv ) { 
  Base::WhoPtr func; 
  func = (void (Base::*)()) &D1::WhoAmI;
  run(func);
  func = (void (Base::*)()) &D2::WhoAmI;
  run(func);
  return 0; 
}

(Un) Portables :-)

2010-11-19T23:38:00.001-08:00

Droided

2010-11-03T20:36:00.001-07:00

Just a test post from my android phone. Essentially meaning I jumped platform boat from symbian.

The phone is Samsung Galaxy 5, and is probably the cheapest and most feature rich android phone available in India. And turns out that it is even cheaper and more useful than my 3 year old nokia e51. Except that there is no skype on this phone... Yet.

Update: And Skype just released an update for Android (http://www.skype.com/intl/en-us/get-skype/on-your-mobile/skype-mobile/android/), which works great on my phone (audio only at the moment) :)

Location : Atmanand Park, Clover Park, Viman Nagar, Pune, Maharashtra,

Remembering Fractal Geometry creator: Mandelbrot

2010-10-18T19:37:00.000-07:00

Benoît B. Mandelbrot, most famous for the Mandelbort set, which so oftern is one of the first few and cool assignments for many graphics and fractal geometry introductory courses has recently passed away. NYT remembers him and his work (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/us/17mandelbrot.html?_r=2).

I believe them, they don’t ;-)

2010-09-18T00:18:00.001-07:00

Ok. I had to express my anguish, so the post!

From childhood, I have stayed near the airforce colony. Was educated in Air Force school I which is inside the airforce colony. And have frequented to the temple there. Only in the last visit to home, I had been to my School with a friend of mine. No issues. But this time when I wanted to go with my uncle to the temple inside there they asked me for an ID card!! And they made me go home and fetch one. Made me feel: I believe they don't. Only then I remembered the reason for this paranoid behaviour: Pune had an unfortunate incidence of terror early this year and 'they were not taking any chances.'

Back to home: A journalist, a seaman and a jockey

2010-09-17T23:47:00.001-07:00

The journey back home has always been exciting. When taking a flight to or from Mumbai, I usually take KK Travels as a pickup service. They usually have Tavera or a similar four-wheel-drive and are confortable and fast.

Typically there would be 2 to 3 co passengers along with you , and is usually interesting to talk to these "strangers". Of all the time I have travelled with this pickup service, my co-passengers were largely IT professionals. Never found someone with research background or something else.

This time around, I was for some different treat :)

All started at Sydney airport when someone behind me told that my backpack zip was open. He said not worry and closed it for me. Probably he pitied on me as I was carrying 3 handbags :) After conversation with him, he told me that he is a Malayalee working with The Australian as a journalist. He and his wife were both Oz citizens and had voted for the elections just before boarding the flight. For me I was quite pleased to meet a journalist working with The Australian, which was the only sensible newspaper I found during my stay in Oz. In the end a thought crossed me: wish it was so uncomplicated to vote in India.

Next, two interesting people a seaman and jockey made the journey back to Pune fun. This time around the cab driver also did not drive like the world was coming to an end. So it turned out to be an extraordinary smooth ride.

The seaman guy seemed to have traveled the world over in the past 8 or so years he has been working with a shipping company. Being a "demanding " job, and probably pretty-highly payed (>8k $) he is fine with working 6 months or even less a year. And says will 'retire' in couple of more years. Of all the chattering he was doing one statement stood out 'I have seen the world, much closes than you have, at-times fascinating, at times pathetic, but it is only when I come to Bharat that I feel peace. There is no better place to live than India. '

The jockey was another interesting guy. I have never imagined before that a jockey was actually a sort after profession. Unlike most of the people going out of India to work, where they live in the urban world, this guy lives near a countryside stable north to London. Unlike the seaman, this guy had pretty less grab an English, and most of our conversation was in Hindi/ Marathi. This guy too had some general opinions, one that I vividly remember was 'Indians are the most cultured and caring while English are the most fit'.

Between us we had a healthy talk on wide variety of subjects during the three hour journey. At times I was stunned by the kind of questions these guys asked me. In the end thought, I felt that experience and maturity shapes a persons viewpoint towards life and others in general.

Moving on..

2010-08-10T15:22:00.000-07:00

Long time since I posted on my blog! Mostly because I have been pretty busy with preparations to move on.. Yes will be taking up a new position at http://www.vlifesciences.com/ from next Monday.

So just wanted to update on a few things which have kept me engaged:

- Moving is not exactly pleasant, especially if you had not anticipated it and you have too many stuff to get rid of!

- Keeping track of NotionInk Adam, but lost a bit of touch with them due to the above!

- Trying to finish up my current work.

- Getting my thesis published as a monograph :-)

- Best of all : Roaming around on Oz land :) Hope to post in some photos..

Finally, what happens to my existing opensource contributions?

- In one line: there should be no difference, I would continue to contribute and maintain the codes during my free time. All the current licenses will be maintained.

- For MeTAStudio : I would continue to update and add new features to this project. There are also a number other contributors now, whom I guess will continue their contribution as usual.

- For codes developed at ANU:
A part of my work involved writing codes for performing Hartree-Fock calculation on molecular systems using X10 programming language being developed at IBM. These codes were jointly developed by Josh Milthorpe and myself. The portions of the code written by me are copyright of ANU but are available to public under the EPL. For more information visit: http://cs.anu.edu.au/~Josh.Milthorpe/x10.html. These codes are also linked from http://x10.codehaus.org/For+Researchers.

More updates later :)

T91 MT tip

2010-07-09T17:48:00.001-07:00

Laptop is dying ;-)

2010-07-06T22:07:00.000-07:00

This is like 'thinking aloud' after reading this article on infoworld.
I have a prophesy (!!??) to make: "Laptop is dying"
Think about it:
What do you use your latops for?
- Check Mail
- IM
- Skype
- Powerpoint
- May be programming (?). Really, are you serious? ;-)
What do you use your desktop for?
- All the above
- and Programming (without any doubt)
What can an netbook do?
- All that the laptop can do
- But is very cheap and more importantly quite a lot portable (my T91MT is about 940 grms), and pretty good battery life.
What can an iPad do?
- All the things that a netbook can do (and is probably better at it), I haven't used one.
- except Programming!
How many of you program?
- Not many, I guess. Are we still short of good programmers ?

So the logical conclustion from above ;-)
# iPad is going to keep selling
# Netbook is also probably going to keep selling
# So is Desktops
## But the story of laptops don't look very healthy, unless they start making it very very portable and affordable as Netbooks are now.

Sloppy journalism

2010-07-06T16:50:00.000-07:00

This is like the 'not again!' moment..
Some time ago I had reported about some sloppy reporting in blogs (http://tovganesh.blogspot.com/2009/02/reporting-and-blogs-blatant-errors.html). I would have given that some neglect thinking that it was just a blog!? But today a friend of mine pointed me to this stupid report on a news site:
http://au.news.yahoo.com/a/-/latest/7524727/cheryl-cole-contracts-deadly-virus/

Which essentially claims again that Malaria is caused by Virus! Horrible error made again! Either the quality of reporting has noose dived or as Rupert Murdoch says 'quality reporting comes at a price'. I am quite reluctant to take side with the later as I feel that there should be free flow of credible information for a healthy society rather than it being for an 'elite only'. BBC news is primary example of this 'free flow', whome I think, do a wonderful job of reporting and is accessible to everyone who as a simple radio. We still can access BBC via short wave radios, anyone remembers those?

Bharat: Bandh and Math

2010-07-06T16:32:00.000-07:00

The opposition parties in India organized a one day 'bandh'. I guess, beining right now not in Bharat, makes me less sensitive to these happenings. The purpose of the bandh was apparently to protest again high price rise in India in past few months. I fully support this cause. But after I see that those protesting resoting to damagin public property (including expensive public transport buses), I have heavy reservations about the authenticity of this bandh altogether and all the people who promoted it. Public property is my money, and so is of every one who pays up tax in some form or another. People destorying it, makes me really worry.

In another news, this year's Mental Calculation World Cup, 2010 held in Magdeburg, Germany was topped by Priyanshi Somani from India (http://www.recordholders.org/en/events/worldcup/2010/results.html). Thought would mention this, because main stream media in India probably has other interesting topics to discuess ;-)

Important intermediate binary release for MeTA Studio

2010-06-17T17:50:00.000-07:00

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

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

- The current version number is 2.0.15052010

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

- Also includes updated docs for API changes

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

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

OneNote on Linux using Office webapps

2010-06-08T02:54:00.001-07:00

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

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

Random thought

2010-06-04T13:50:00.001-07:00

Intermediate binary release for MeTA Studio

2010-05-18T18:20:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

- A number of bug fixes

Under the hood there are lots of changes:

- graphics APIs

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

- scripting integration API changes

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

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

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

Stay tuned and enjoy!

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

MeTA Studio project updates

2010-05-06T02:53:00.001-07:00

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

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

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

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

‘Nameless’ people, who amused me

2010-04-20T05:03:00.001-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

For Google and Chrome aficionados ;-)

2010-04-19T00:01:00.000-07:00

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

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

iPad craze, and my Asus T91MT

2010-04-03T14:17:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three decades and a DSLR

2010-03-19T03:19:00.001-07:00

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

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

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

Enjoy!

Spammed by Comments!

2010-03-04T14:39:00.000-08:00

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

Cheers & Enjoy!

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

2010-02-09T23:52:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

What is good?

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

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

#3 IE8 is quite well touch friendly

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

And whats not so good?

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

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

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

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

Experiences: My first convertible, Asus T91MT

2010-02-05T15:44:00.001-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update2

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

Update3

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

Notion Ink: Another attempt at making a device in India

2010-01-29T15:30:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Indian Kindle!

2010-01-28T15:05:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why search suggestions need to be a little better?

2010-01-16T16:22:00.001-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

Alice in multicore land

2010-01-11T01:36:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

Eee of Tablet

2010-01-08T22:14:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

Update:

- I also found out Lenovo s10-3t

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

OzInd

2010-01-08T16:30:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2009-12-11T04:14:00.001-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No idea on how the journey back home will be!

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

2009-12-03T13:05:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

Tired of reading articles with obvious errors

2009-12-01T13:44:00.000-08:00

http://in.news.yahoo.com/32/20091028/1065/ttc-rekindling-the-market.html

An article in an Indian media reporting about Amazon's Kindle. Full of technical errors. Do the people who write such articles really know what they are writing about? Or is it just cut-copy-paste?! I wonder.

kindle update

2009-11-25T13:52:00.000-08:00

Amazon updated Kindle firmware for PDF support the other day (and other improvements, like enhanced battery life). It should have been installed by now on your kindle if you had the wireless switched on. You can manually install the update from here (http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200324680)

With this you can read PDF natively on kindle, however I found few caveats:
- You can't change the text size in a PDF document as you can do with default kindle format.
- You can change the orientation though, which is good.
- The PDF loading is slower than the native kindle format.
- The text brightness is not as good as with documents in native kindle format.

Still exploring... but the PDF support is actually very beneficial. Hope Amazon can improve it with future updates.

Missing link in ChromeOS?

2009-11-20T15:29:00.001-08:00

Well, as the whole world tries to figure out who exactly will be using the Google ChromeOS (as is probably the case with Google Wave), this some how reminds me of Sun Microsystems days when they were releasing Jini and Jxta (which are surprisingly still highly active). There is one thing common between these two events, thinking ahead in time. While ideas of Sun were too ahead of time, Google might have got it just at right time, well may be…

There is one big missing link with Google ChromeOS; a dirt cheap (or even free) internet connection that is fast. If you do a comparison with traditional Operating Systems, this what is basically your RAM and Hard disk (they are extremely cheap to upgrade, as compared to the central processing unit) are supposed to substitute for. Google is trying to make a shift here, move the storage out, so that you need not worry about local failures (at this point I am completely neglecting all the privacy concerns). RAM still plays a crucial role, but then the OS is lean and mean, and the apps that run on that would also probably be of similar type (and possibly constrained too).

In fact, idea wise ChromeOS is bringing in nothing new. If you open up a bit this is exactly what was there in Windows 98 – IE integrated tightly into the OS, to the extent that there is not much differentiation between an OS and a browser. However, it is important to note that the design principles are totally different … and Google “assures” them to be safe.

Coming back to the “missing link”. I think this kind of model can only succeed if there is always connected device. This would probably mean this won’t be mobile. Mobile networks as of now are in no way great to provide good QoS while on move. Another issue is that the network should be absurdly fast, and cheap at the same time. Building this infrastructure from ground up for a company is simply going to take ages. However, if the experiments with providing internet access via powerlines would succeed, this would be the place where ChromeOS can win a majority market share… only time will tell where this is headed.

For me, I want complete control over all my digital content, and don’t really see myself using such a dumb device (probably ever dumb than my mobile phone!). Though, if ChromeOS catches on, I could imagine a world filled with computer (ill)literates who cannot do any thing without Google.

7 :-)

2009-11-20T02:42:00.001-08:00

Well I finally got Win 7 upgrade disks for Dell XPS, and needless to say I immediately upgraded from Vista. And well I need not write another praise for it, as it is already good and tonnes of others have said so ;-)

But thought a few points from my perspective:

- The upgrade took about 3 hours to complete. Required me to uninstall Virtual Box and reinstall it. I also had to reinstall DisplayLink driver. But well everything went of smoothly.

- I dual-boot my Win 7 (32 bit) with Ubuntu 9.10 (64-bit), so that required me to reinstall the grub, which also worked out quite well.

- I am using Zune player as my music player, and it is simply fantastic (must test this machine now with Bose speakers). The best thing I like about it is that I can control this easily using the touch keys on XPS without actually opening the Zune player window, pretty much like a music player.

So that is with Windows 7 on my work machine, 7 :-)

……

On my Mac (iBookG4) I installed Fedora 12, which was not a smooth install, but then at the end I am able to get a quite workable machine. I might post a different item on this experience depending on the time I get ;-)

……

In the end, I am now seriously looking for a tablet with multi touch (Asus T91 MT is close, but I need better graphics, an Nvidia ION or Intel PineTrail) .. and yes it should be SSD and fan less design, reasonable batter life and of course Windows 7, Home Premium as OS :-)

……

Btw, I did hear (and read, and glanced through some of the code) about “that OS announcement” today. As of me, I only see myself using that on a internet access device, with absurdly huge battery life. In no way replacing my current usage patterns.

One day journey to Sydney for eResearch’09

2009-11-13T14:49:00.001-08:00

On 10th I went to Sydney to attend and give a talk at AustralAsia eResearch’09. It was a terrific experience. Probably the first conference I really enjoyed being at. This is just the non-technical side of the experience I am posting here. I will later on post some of the technical sides particularly on the feedback I got for MeTA Studio in coming days.

Ok, so first of all this was unique travelling experience for me where I took road(cab and walk), air, rail and water(ferry) transportations [only missing in the equation was a “bail-gadi” or a tractor, but the well this is Oz :-)]. Taking all these modes of transport and still reaching well in time for the conference to start was quite an experience. The best part of course was the ferry ride.

The road and the air transport were rather standard, nothing exciting to describe about. But I was eager to experience a train travel in Oz. If any thing I came out not being really thrilled about it (may be next time I should try monorail). I do still feel though that train travel in India is a lot better experience. Next, I have travelled in ferry a lot before (in Kerala), but never so big (well this was actually a ship), and never in sea. This experience turned out to be the best of all them. The ferry ride was from Circular Quay to Manly (where the conference was being held). And on the way you see pretty much of every thing Sydney has to show on its shores. The best is the Opera House.

The beach on Manly is also pretty good, and the best part was that the conference was organized in a hotel just facing the beach :-)

The journey back was made by sitting on the ferry deck rather than inside, another wonderful experience. In short, any one coming to experience Oz, a ferry ride in Sydney is highly recommended.

And well finally some pleasing experience :-)

[Review] uCertify, certification preparation tool

2009-11-12T19:09:00.000-08:00

Frankly, I never actually evaluate a software (until it is an consumer OS or a Linux distribution, or ultra cool stuff like Cooliris). A few weeks ago some one from uCertify contacted me to look into the usability of their certification preparation tool. I always wanted to give one certification (scjp), mostly for fun, but I had my other priorities. Though in the mean time did help some of my pals who were actually serious about giving these exams. So when this offer came, I was quite curious to know if these tools are really helpful. I do remember that I had used a similar tool for GRE preparations long ago, and to some extent these were helpful, but then the software interfaces and tracking tools were not so great.

The tool comes with a set of 10 practice tests (which quite fairly represent scjp in this case), interactive quiz etc. The idea is to start of via giving a diagnostic test that gives fair idea of your current level of capability in giving the test. There is also option to create a custom test, in case you are interested in improving only particular aspects of the test objective.

The best part the "Enhance your understanding" section which gives everything you need for preparing any kind of test including objectives, flash cards etc... but are tailored for a particular certification, in this case scjp. The "Track your progress" option is also very helpful and gives succinct information on past tests as well as test objective wise performance in all the tests taken.

There are few points to note though:

- The certification platform is really useful. However, one must note that the amount of questions available are only limited. A person practicing with the same test questions should understand at the back of his/her mind that just mastering the questions presented here will not be ultimately helpful in obtaining the certification. You really need to know your basics! This tool just enhances your grasp.

- The interface and the test suite is well done, however there is one thing that I think should be fixed: For a simple application like this, why would the installer need a UAC prompt (talking in the context to Vista and 7), this should be fixed.

- I wonder why this thing should not be made available on other platforms, people taking RH Linux certification exams would not be using Windows right?

----

For you to test out or get a full copy visit: http://www.ucertify.com/

MeTA Studio bug fix, full binary release

2009-11-08T19:22:00.000-08:00

A bug fix release of MeTA Studio (2.0.10112009) is available as a full binary release is available from the usual place http://code.google.com/p/metastudio/

Apart from fixing numerous issues reported, it also updates the API documentation.

There are no considerable new features in this release.

Enjoy!

In Memoriam: DeLano

2009-11-06T01:38:00.000-08:00

The creator of one of the most popular molecule visualizers, PyMOL passed away recently. See here for some accounts http://www.macresearch.org/memoriam-warren-l-delano

a test post

2009-10-23T20:07:00.000-07:00

directly from my e51 browser. Which seems to work fine. And works via opera mini beta 5 too except image upload seem not supported. With this i really will not miss my small laptop ;-)

Kindled !

2009-10-23T14:29:00.000-07:00

I actually never planned this, but I always liked the idea of Amazon kindle. So when Amazon said they were releasing kindle to the rest of (US), I simply went ahead and ordered one for me.

And then it landed in my office yesterday, since then, have been lugging around with it ;-) So far liking it, quite a lot.

The reading experience is fantastic, the connectivity (well have been to a lot of places around ACT since I got it) is quite good, if not fast. I can access Wikipedia for free (with images), which is fantastic. Listen to MP3 while reading a book (wow, is a bliss). I can easily convert my PDFs to Kindle format, but only text and pictures convert correctly, not (vector) diagrams. I have not used the Amazon stores yet, but will be checking this out for some good books. I am not sure of how much I do have to pay for it though vs. buying a paper back.

And finally, that 20$ rebate was quite a surprise (but well should thank those Nook guys ;-)).

Next, I am waiting for Windows 7 (well for my copy to come), and hopefully some one releases a good (read with a real GPU), lightweight convertible tablet with multitouch :-)

1 mb boradband connection a legal right in Finland

2009-10-14T20:40:00.000-07:00

Well, what ever that means. I presume, they were wanting to say 1 Mbps broadband connection is a legal right, no idea who pays for it though.

But this reminded me of Dewang Mehta (wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewang_Mehta) who was closely associated with NASCOMM India, and was instrumental in the growth of IT industry back home, used to always say:

“roti, kapada, makan, bijli and bandwidth”

We need visionaries like these to be always around ...

Another Blunder: IB asks gov to consider banning VOIP

2009-10-10T01:55:00.001-07:00

A few months ago some one filed a case in Mumbai High Court with a recommendation to ban Google Earth saying that the terrorists used this tool to plan the Mumbai attack that took place a year ago. I am unaware of the current status of this case, but I had a very straight opinion (http://tovganesh.blogspot.com/2008/12/on-google-earth-mumbai-and-pil.html): you can not and should not ban a technology. If do some one will eventually develop a workaround. BANning something is NOT the solution.

And now to top all this, IB, supposedly the organization that is entrusted to provide top intelligence in India goes the same way: BAN the VoIP services as they can't track it! I am quite surprised, if this is how capable our premier intelligence is?! To suggest a naive and laughable solution like this to the GOI.

I heavily depend on skype (with video) to be in touch with my parents back home. And this is the only possible and viable solution for me at present to be able to work far away from home and be still close to them. And I am sure there are plenty of them like me. If the GOI is silly enough to follow the recomendations of incapable IB, I would eventually look for other solutions. Either I go back home, or better still develop my own VoIP with no hopes of any one blocking it.

The excuses that IB gives to GOI of inability to track calls is the encryption done by services like Skype. And the IB claims that Skype shares them with other countries like US and China. Is IB incapable of collaborating with intelligence agencies of some of these "friendly" countries. Does GOI not have enough power to do some thing positive other than merely following short cut solutions like banning?

If IB is incapable of breaking encryption (I admit that is hard, pressuming Skype uses 256-bit encryption, see http://blogs.zdnet.com/ip-telephony/index.php?p=919), the GOI should seriously consider of making quick and urgent upgrading of capabilities of IB.

For me, now is the time to seriously consider other VoIP (with video) alternatives, or write up my own. But, I feel mentioning the "dehya wakyam" of the wonderful, though under staffed, Maharashtra police (http://mahapolice.gov.in/):

सढरक्षणाय खलनिगॄहणाय

which translates to "Protecting the righteous and controlling and annihilating the evil". Guess that sums up every thing, of what I always believe in.

An aspect of finding water on Moon

2009-09-26T06:25:00.001-07:00

The press in India is all gaga over the recently published finding by a joint team of NASA and ISRO about confirmed presence of OH and H2O molecules on moon surface. This is stark contrast to all the negative press that ISRO got after it declared that it has lost contact with Chandrayaan. It is press after all, when are they going to do some mature reporting?

Cutting sort, see (http://m3.jpl.nasa.gov/NEWS/ and http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1178658) for more technical information on this findings.

Apart from the scientific (and possibly in longer terms practical) significance of this finding, the Chandrayaan-I mission has opened up a whole new shift in space explorations: of global collaboration. Yes, Chandrayaan-I has some amount of “pride” attached to it, but it was essentially a first space exploration program that involved as many as 20 countries. For this very reason it was chosen for AIAA Space 2009 award (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrayaan-1#Award_for_Chandrayaan-1).

One needs to note that, space exploration in future should not be a just done for “pride” or for a mere “me too”. Space explorations are going to be expensive, of what benefits it brings to the human kind should be the prime objective of each mission. For me, Chandrayaan-I has given a glimpse of what can be achieved by collaboration and not merely showing off some false pride.

I wonder to what extent such collaborations can bring in more knowledge to the human kind. All of us just need to loose a little bit of pride. How much are we ready for this?

(After I posted this, I came across an article [letter] in the Hindu, which has similar things to say, albeit in more beautiful words :) To read head here: http://www.thehindu.com/2009/09/27/stories/2009092755981100.htm).

Numbers and Windows 7

2009-09-14T04:06:00.000-07:00

Windows 7 is going to be released on:

22 Oct 2009

2 + 2 + 1 + 0 + 2 + 0 + 0+ 9
= 16

1 + 6
= 7 !!

Was that a coincedence or they planned it ahead? Has any one observed this before?

Interesting to observe this though :-)

(Posting this from Windows 7, RC)

MeTA Studio update: GTalk, other improvements and some experimental ideas…

2009-09-05T16:48:00.001-07:00

A new full binary version of MeTA Studio (2.0.05092009) is available for download from the usual place: http://code.google.com/p/metastudio/

New features in this release:

- GTalk/ Jabber integration with the talk and collaborative framework in MeTA Studio, allowing one to have more means of communication than just direct LAN based talk. Note that both the parties need to be using MeTA Studio to take full advantage of this feature. To access this feature use Tools –> Down-arrow –> GTalk –> Sign in

Note that if you have a proxy you will need to make those settings first before trying to log into GTalk / Jabber. All features of MeTA Studio talk except voice talk is supported via GTalk. With this the issue reported here http://code.google.com/p/metastudio/issues/detail?id=11&can=1 is addressed. The original issue did mention yahoo and irc, but there are no plans to support these. GTalk and Jabber protocols are fairly open and are well supported by Smack APIs which are inturn used with in MeTA Studio.

- Staggered reading and connectivity formation for large molecules. With earlier version of MeTA Studio, large molecules (> 1000) atoms took long time to load, as there is huge amount of pre-pressing done to identify and classify bonds, rings and other structures in the molecule. Starting from 2.0.05092009, staggered reader and molecule builder APIs are introduced which allow for faster loading of molecules and at a later stage selectively obtaining the required details.

You might experience some problems using this feature, if you find problems, report them at: http://code.google.com/p/metastudio/issues/list

- “Share this!” feature in MoleculeViewer, allows one to instantly share a molecule object to peer MeTA Studio users on LAN or on GTalk/ Jabber network.

- ~~The update sever has been changed to ohloh.net and with this the online updates are back. So expect quicker updates in coming days.~~ **

- Support for Apache Derby embedded database has been added to MeTA Studio. Expect some interesting features based on this in near future.

- Additional BeanShell functions to ease programming:

atof(): String to float

atoi(): String to int

au(): Convert to a.u. (overloaded for value, Point3D and Atom)

angstrom(): Convert to angstrroms (overloaded for value, Point3D and Atom)

- Under the hood graphics and other API changes. And as usual there are assortment for other bug fixes and improvements. For a complete list of changes browse through http://code.google.com/p/metastudio/source/list

Experimental features with this release:

- I will be experimenting with symbolic language interface for MeTA Studio in coming weeks. A simple demo interface has been added for this purpose and is called a Workbook (accessible from Workbook –> New workbook). The only symbol currently interpreted is: Molecule[H2]

- An App Builder tool to simplify making completely new applications based on MeTA Studio runtime (accessible from App builder –> New app builder workspace). This is currently not functional, and is only a design spec.

MeTA Studio on Ohloh.net

MeTA Studio is also now hosted on Ohloh.net: https://www.ohloh.net/p/metastudio/, which currently is providing a means of on-line update. This also serves as a way of showing off the way for displaying users and developers of MeTA Studio. So if you use or develop for MeTA Studio, help spread the word, click on “I use it” Ohloh.net button at the bottom of MeTA Studio home page at: http://code.google.com/p/metastudio/

Have fun! And check out for some new updates with MeTA Studio in coming weeks.

--
Update: Just realized that this is not the case. Once a file is uploaded on Ohloh.net, it is immutable. So this issue is not fixed yet. Any suggestions on online update server place are still welcome.

On loss of Chandrayaan link and reporting by western media

2009-08-29T21:06:00.000-07:00

ISRO released a press statement yesterday indicating possible loss of Chandrayaan 1, India's first moon mission. Though they seem to indicate loss of radio contact, it is in all probability that the satellite might have been lost for ever. It is worth noting however that the satellite lived up to almost half is expected age of two years, which as a first ever attempt is quite commendable (http://www.isro.gov.in/pressrelease/scripts/pressreleasein.aspx?Aug29_2009).

What I don't understand though is how reporting on each and every event attached to Chardrayaan been done particularly by the western media. All of these so called reports regarding Chandrayaan typically end like this:

"But the Indian government's space efforts have not been welcomed by all.
Some critics regard the space programme as a waste of resources in a country where millions still lack basic services."

Which I feel is nothing but quite ridiculous and some times even irritating to read (If you are following all the reports of Chandrayaan). Is this reporting or news analysis? Do these reporting guys have a "template" that are simply "applied" without any though? I wonder!

For me, I await Chandrayaan 2 launch :-)

PS: For a more detailed reports on the chain of events related to this link loss see: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Features/The-Sunday-ET/Chandrayaan-1-comes-to-end-loses-contact/articleshow/4949845.cms

Back to Linux on MiLeap

2009-08-03T16:24:00.000-07:00

(Ha, finally, got some time to quickly jot this down!)

Almost one year ago I had a pressing need for a fully functional software stack for MiLeap in which I could do some real work (and some play), so after evaluating Ubuntu (at that time 7.10 [the good one] and then 8.04 [bad experience]) I shifted MiLeap to Vista (see the post here). For this post I got some pretty immature comments from people who really do not understand what a user needs (you can also read the comments and my reply in the post).

In the mean time I tried other distribution (Puppy Linux was the one that worked best). But I wanted to try a more main stream distribution. I tried Ubuntu netbook remix in the mean time but was not satisfied. Also I do not have any plans of upgrading the Vista HB on this machine to Win 7 as it doesn't meet the minimum advertised system requirements of 1GHz processor (MiLeap has 900 MHz Celeron ULV processor).

As I got a new machine for my work purposes (Dell Studio XPS), I decided to do a fresh clean install of Ubuntu netbook remix on MiLeap. But I must say that this was a complete disaster. One of the primary requirements for me to use a distribution is Skype should work without any glitch. UNR failed miserably with it, and in the attempt to configure the sound settings I manged to crash the UNR desktop and I had no time what-so-ever to spend in fixing it. Later on I figured out that UNR's system requirement is an Intel Atom processor (minimum) [http://www.canonical.com/projects/ubuntu/unr], so no point fiddling with it either.

Next up tried Xbuntu, everything worked great. Except that the UI looked pretty sluggish and arcane. I needed a modern desktop environment and which is quite responsive. So after perusal from one of my friends (who actually wants me to try OpenSuse instead), I went ahead and installed KDE 4.3 from the Kubuntu development repository. And I am amazed, but this is exactly what I needed. Though there still are a few bug in KDE, and some plasmoids crash suddenly, this is a fairly stable system. Well needless to say, my primary requirement, Skype, works like a charm.

I am still wondering ... I seem to have missed the wonderful KDE for quite some time (6 years since I have been using GNOME as the only DE!)...

Note: My current MiLeap configuration is a bit different from one what I originally purchased. The original one has 512 MB RAM, while my current one has 2GB of RAM. So I have no idea how KDE4.3 will behave on the original MiLeap configuration. In the mean time I would be trying OpenSuse on my Mac with KDE 4.3 ... more on this when I get some more spare time now!

PS: This was written using Chrome 3.0 (in-progress version) for Linux running in KDE. I am not sure why, but Firefox is too sluggish on MiLeap (windows or linux), mostly because of a slow disk.

Update: Downgraded MiLeap L to 1GB RAM and it still works well. I think upgrading the RAM to 2GB on MiLeap is not really beneficial unless you intend to run Vista or do some serious programming, both of these are ruled out for me. Hibernation also works without any problems, though it seems to take longer time to wake up from hibernation than clean boot. In any case, I am beginning to like KDE, its just a fresh breath of air :)

“Reward yourself” experience: Dell Studio XPS

2009-08-03T04:54:00.001-07:00

Generally I do not like heavy laptops. But since I have a heavy workload, and I do not have my desktop as back at home, I had to “reward myself” with a Dell XPS 13 (well ….). Dell XPS for all the features it offers, at around 2.2 kgs is a terrific machine, with desktop kind performance. So far I like this machine. Contrary to many reports around the internet about overheating, I can safely say that it gets heated as much as my HCL MiLeap, which is fairly OK… though should test how it behaves in summer. Only drawback I see currently is the Nvidia drivers that come with XPS are a bit old, and CUDA support is not great. Essentially you have to wait for Dell to upgrade their drivers as they are not available from Nvidia site. Currently though I have shifted all my primary work from MiLeap to this machine (which means I will now experiment with OS that best suites MiLeap … read “remove vista” ;-))

Currently, I have Vista dual booted with Ubuntu 9.04 on this Dell machine, though I will be upgrading this machine too to Windows 7 (along with my home desktop). So I will put in a more detailed review when I do so.

In the mean time I am deeply engrossed in writing other things up ;-) Also you could expect a new release of MeTA Studio with some interesting features in coming weeks.

(Update: As of today, 25 Sep 2009, Dell released an updated BIOS for my XPS, after this I am able to install CUDA enabled drivers directly from NVIDIA. Which is quite great :) Now I should have some fun experimenting with CUDA :D)

WIKI-OS: an interesting project

2009-07-12T17:22:00.001-07:00

WiKi-OS seems to be quite an interesting open source project in terms of building a “web based OS”. The most important fact that differentiates this form other web OSes is that there is not a single line of JavaScript or HTML in this, but is entirely written in C# and runs in Silverlight plugin. Another interesting aspect is its Wiki nature, you can edit customize and deploy applications (including 3D applications) on the fly as you would edit Wiki pages. And finally, it comes inbuilt with code editor, so you can edit the application code as you want, you do not need any dependence on external tools to write applications on Wiki-OS, not even an editor or a debugger … well eventually that means you don’t require the browser too. Who said browser was becoming the OS of today? I personally feel that this project has quite a large potential, if of course there are compelling applications written for it.

To access visit https://www.wiki-os.org/. Note that as of now the site can only be accessed from a Windows PC running IE or Firefox. But I see no reason why this should not work at places where .Net is supported.

Also would be interesting to know if some one has tried to do similar stuff with JVM instead of .Net, which I think is more portable, though lacks 3D support on many platforms.

Google Chrome OS and Windows 7

2009-07-08T04:03:00.000-07:00

As has been speculated by many, Google is finally planning to release a Linux based OS for PCs and Mac and those ARM based netbooks, and it is called the Google Chrome OS.

Apparently the idea of OS directly booting into an web browser is not new (for those of you who follow tech news frequently would well know of the CrunchPad from Tech Crunch). Interestingly, the site on CrunchPad's early prototype says that it runs Linux with a WebKit based browser, which sounds quite close to what Google Chrome OS is described to be.

Though it is too early to compare Google Chrome OS with now "quite mature" Windows 7, it would be interesting to know in which market they will compete. Initially I would think that Google Chrome OS will create a whole new market for it self, rather than "downing" the sales of Windows 7. As I see it, Google Chrome OS is targeted more towards people who spent a lot of time on the Web, unlike me, who also spent a lot of time over an ssh connection! I doubt, Chrome OS will have ssh client on it, though I might be completely wrong ;-) That example was not great, but I wanted to bring home a point that if you rely too much on "fat applications", for what ever reason it be (document processing, editing media files, developing applications or system programs), Chrome OS is not for you, the same reason why Sun Microsystem's Java OS was not for you.

There is a difference though. When Sun first came up with the idea of "Network is the Computer", and pursued relentlessly till the end, they always seem to fail, largely because they were way ahead of time. But that time seems to have come now. There are fair bit of "web applications" out there for a web-based OS like Chrome OS to succeed. And when it comes from Google, you know that it comes with some pleasingly simplistic and elegant UI.

Regardless of this, I still see myself moving to Windows 7 as my primary home OS, when it gets released.

(PS: For a more deeper commentary on why this release of Google Chrome OS is a "turning point", have a look at: http://www.winsupersite.com/alt/chromeos_preview.asp).

A few snaps ;)

2009-06-20T15:35:00.001-07:00

Was writing, writing and writing this week (don’t ask me what :( … ) , so though will take some break and put on some snaps …

The bubble: does it appear to be cut through?

And what about this? Progressively becoming transparent ;-) Wonder if something like that could be used for making the “disappearing act” gadget.

Well … am … the picture says as thousand words, they say!

Have fun!

Is the Indian media truthful to its task?

2009-06-14T03:01:00.001-07:00

To me, proactive reporting came to India with Tehelka.com, though before that print media has been and still is constructively proactive in their reporting. Even in pre-independence era, people like Tilak and Agarkar have put in unprecedented effort and energy in upbringing of the thoughts of the fellow people, to fight for a better cause and a better tomorrow. But with Tehelka, the constructiveness in reporting has gradually wiped out. I feel most of the media reporting done today in India, especially on televisions, is nothing but hollow. It is missing a point. And a major one. In that, the media, reporting and journalism has an important role in bringing up the society, shaping their thoughts, and in longer run create a cohesive atmosphere for the nation to progress as a whole.

If the reporting is hollow, the news analysis is even worse and is becoming more and more dangerous of making up a public opinion and to some extent go so far and say that this public opinion is the law of the land! Well, it is not gone that far, but with what is happening on most of the current news channels, such a dangerous idea is not far to come into reality.

For these reasons, I have been particularly choosey about the newspapers and media I refer to. For newspapers, it has always been Indian Express and The Hindu, and for electronic media, though not perfect, it has always been Doordarshan for Indian affairs and BBC world service for world affairs.

I had all these thoughts for a few months now, but when a friend of mine sent this Youtube video, I was literally shocked.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2l7DmKgKpzc&feature=related

This is supposedly a news analysis program where Noted criminal lawyer Ram Jetmalani is being questioned as to why he is going against the “public opinion” of defending some one who “majority” of people “think” is a convict. Before I saw this video, I must say frankly that I didn’t have much respect for Ram Jetmalani, because of the kind of cases he handled. But the points he puts in have simply made me think high of him. He has a solid point. When it comes to justice and having the authority to say if the rule of the land is maintained, only the Indian courts must have the final say. Not the media, and not the public, for how much ever they think it is correct. The media should not be in a dangerous position to proclaim that they are the one who deliver justice. Their job is to bring the facts and show it in court, and not be court itself. They should not try to create a situation where every one begins to think that they are the only resort for final justice.

On the other hand it is the duty of every citizen to know the roles of institutions of democracy and the press (or the media), and be vigilant when there are conflicts, and make conscious decision for the greater interest of the society and nation.

(PS: Views expressed here are solely mine. I am not trying to give any advice here.)

Samsung Solar Guru : the solar powered mobile

2009-06-10T22:39:00.000-07:00

A few days ago Samsung India launched world's first mobile phone that could also be power via solar power (see the report on The Hindu). At first take this is good news. I had always wanted this, and it is good to know that a leading company is perusing it and that too in a low end market... The mobile will cost below 3000 INR, which is less costly but obviously far from being the cheapest mobile phones available. If they could really make it cheap, it will sell, for sure.

If we peel of the "worlds first" marketing phrase and come down to actual product specs and its availability, it really does not appear to be that great, though it is definitely a first step. Apparently this is currently only available in Indian market, I wonder why not Oz too, as there is heavy promotion of using solar and alternative sources of energy here as is in India. The only issue I see is, while back in India its more of a necessity to have solar power, in Oz it is more of an option. Another drawback is the specs itself: to get a talk time of 5-10 mins you would need to recharge under sun for one full hour, and to get it fully charged you need 40 hrs of sunlight! This is quite ridiculous. Apart from the fact that you will never have 40 hours of sunlight at a stretch (which means you can never completely rely on solar power), in most cases you would need to make a call when your battery is almost dead .. to wait 1 hr to make that important call is something that does not cut in as a selling point!

But even so, I just like this idea and unit. If they introduce it in Oz market, I will most likely grab it and use it as a secondary backup cell phone to my E51.

I just hope, that there are more innovative products in this space. I also wonder if one day we can have a solar powered Simputer with 3G access, that would be the day when I can conveniently kiss a good bye to my netbook ...

(PS: I was unable to find the actual product specs from Samsung India website: http://www.samsung.com/in/. Views above are based on reports in the media about the specs of Samsung Guru 1107)

New Binary installer for MeTA Studio

2009-05-20T19:27:00.000-07:00

A new binary installer for MeTA Studio is released for public download. The current version is 2.0.20052009.

New in this version:
- Updates to UFF, HF APIs. HF APIs, in particular, have changed substantially to provide better access to individual parts of the algorithm.
- Improved optimiser APIs
- HF analytical gradients (seems to work, but needs to be tested thoroughly!)
- Gradual changes in graphics backend.
- Support for JNA, simplifying interfacing of native code with in MeTA Studio. The native code libraries can now be easily interfaced from BeanShell or Jython support for MeTA Studio. Expect more information on this in coming days.
- Number of added scripts in 'scripts/' directory
- Numerous bug fixes, as usual ;-)
- And a Linux (x86) installer
- Windows installer on Vista and Windows 7 no longer requires UAC prompt.

Note: If you are compiling MeTA Studio from source, you would need to update the dependent libraries (bsh.jar and jna.jar). While there are substantial changes to BeanShell library (bsh.jar), jna.jar is newly added to support calling native code.

Get all the code here: http://code.google.com/p/metastudio/

enjoy this version!

(Update: There were some glitches reported with the binary distribution, especially missing jna.jar in the Windows installer. I have subsequently updated all the binary distributions to v 2.0.27052009)
(Another Update: Found some really nasty bugs, and had to fix them, so the latest is now v 2.0.04062009 .. this binary release turns out to be a bit expensive, given that I am yet to move to a new online-update mechanism).

Deep in Java: fiddling with Java bytecodes

2009-05-18T23:18:00.000-07:00

Even though I heavily program in Java, I have not really felt the need to manipulate at bytecode level for most of the applications that I write. Even for MeTA Studio, which offers scripting interface via. BeanShell and Jython (at present), I used to just use these interpreter packages. Currently BeanShell is (and will probably will always be) the primary scripting interface to MeTA Studio. However, there has been no development on the BeanShell (www.beanshell.org) since long time and I needed some improvements to be put in it which were tailored towards MeTA Studio. So some time back, I forked the BeanShell code for MeTA Studio. Subsequently, I also fixed some minor bugs in the interpreter which affected functionality in MeTA Studio. Later, I also updated the ASM package to the current version, which is used by BeanShell to actually generate bytecodes. All this time, I never ever felt the need to fiddle around JVM bytecode specifications.

However, while finding a best way to call native libraries with in the programmable framework of MeTA Studio (what?? ... yes, but for reasons behind this you will have to wait for subsequent posts, when I get some stuff working) I stumbled upon a JDK incubation project called JNA. JNA, in fact, provides a very clean way to call native libraries without going through the pain of generating JNI stubs.

In fact, its pretty cool. For instance, you can call a C function sqrt like this:


import com.sun.jna.Library;
import com.sun.jna.Native;
import com.sun.jna.Platform;

public interface CLibrary extends Library {
    double sqrt(double v);
}

// and use it as:
CLibrary clib = (CLibrary) Native.loadLibrary((Platform.isWindows() ? "msvcrt" : "m"),
                                            CLibrary.class);
System.out.println(clib.sqrt(2));

Look ma, no JNI, pure Java!

Now, the above code worked fine if I compile using standard Java complier. But failed to run at all via the BeanShell interpreter with the following error:


java.lang.ClassFormatError: Illegal class modifiers in class CLibrary: 0x201

At first glance, I had absolutely no idea of what this meant. Long time ago, when I was in my graduation, I had fiddled around a bit with JVM specification in the hope to write a JVM for a 16-bit DOS environment. Needless to say, it never materialised ;-) But this some how made me check back the JVM class format again to look for possible solution. I also checked the BeanShell code that was generating the bytecodes, and essentially tracked it down to the following lines in bsh.ClassGeneratorUtil


public byte [] generateClass() {
  int classMods = getASMModifiers( classModifiers ) | ACC_PUBLIC;
  if ( isInterface )
    classMods |= ACC_INTERFACE;
 ...

This too made not much sense, until I read the following in JVM class format specification:
"If the ACC_INTERFACE flag of this class file is set, its ACC_ABSTRACT flag must also be set (§2.13.1) and its ACC_PUBLIC flag may be set. Such a class file may not have any of the other flags in Table 4.1 set."

So the solution was simply to modify classMods |= ACC_INTERFACE | ACC_ABSTRACT; which worked great, except that I got another error:


java.lang.ClassFormatError: Interfaces must have java.lang.Object as superclass in class CLibrary

It appeared that BeanShell somehow did not do this correctly, and possibly the ASM interface would also have changed. I was not sure of the reason behind this, but I knew how to fix this :


   if ( isInterface )  {
      classMods |= ACC_INTERFACE | ACC_ABSTRACT;
      try {
         interfaces = new Class[]{Class.forName(superClassName.replace('/', '.'))};
      } catch(Exception e) {
         e.printStackTrace();
         throw new UnsupportedOperationException("Super class " +
                  superClassName + " is not varifiable for interface : " + fqClassName);
      }
      superClassName = "java/lang/Object";
   }
   ....

The above seems to do the trick, though am not very sure if this is the correct way to do it. And well in the end, I enjoyed doing this :-) .. and now calling native methods from with in MeTA Studio scripting environment is a lot easier and intuitive, well should I say its pretty cool ;-)

Note that all the source changes for the above are available from MeTA Studio SVN repository: http://code.google.com/p/metastudio/source/checkout

The above changes are not yet reflected in the binary package. But I hope to provide a full binary update too in coming days.

Have fun ;-)

Who ate that byte of apple ? ;-)

2009-05-14T22:00:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-08T16:36:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-23T00:05:00.000-07:00

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!