My thoughts on Tech & FOSS

Column: The sweet smell of new hardware

May19th
2013 Leave a Comment Written by Sathya

sathyabhat
shared this story
from IndianVideoGamer:
"Me: “Hey, so which graphic card do you have?”
Him: “I have a Nvidia Geforce, bro. I got it from Lamington Road”
Me: “Oh, nice. Which one?”
Him: “The latest one”
Me: “Oh, you have a Titan? NICE!”
Him: “No dude, this is a Timex”
Me: “…..”
Him: “Yeah. I got it from Shopper’s Stop. Damn nice stuff they ha….WHOA, is that a shotgun!?”
Me: “Yes. Stand still for a second, won’t you?”

Ain't this true. heh

Azeem Banatwalla on the joys of building the ultimate gaming PC, and the ridicule that comes with it.

via sathyabhat’s blurblog http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/IVG/~3/PIHdT83vVi4/20086

Linked    ,

The keys to Oracle…

May19th
2013 Leave a Comment Written by Sathya

sathyabhat
shared this story
from The Tom Kyte Blog:
"What do I have to do to become expert, where is the list of key things I need to do with regards to Oracle"
This is a question I get on asktom frequently – what are the things I need to know, what do I have to do to become expert, where is the list of key things I need to do with regards to Oracle. It is a hard sounding question that has an easy answer.
If you are still wet behind the ears – or even just damp – then the definitive place to start is the Oracle Server Concepts Guide. Not only is this free – but it is your guide to understanding how the database works. If you understand something – you can use that thing. If you don’t, well, simply put – you won’t be able to effectively use it. Getting a solid knowledge of how a transaction is done, what locking and concurrency controls are and how they work, how the database makes the data durable on disk (redo, undo management) – all of it is key to effectively using the database.
If you don’t know who can see what data, which version of data, at what points in time – confusion will abound and data integrity will be lost. Getting a good basic knowledge of how the database manages data is the only way for you to know how to code a correct program.
Once you’ve mastered the material in that document – I would suggest taking a look at the 2-Day guides. They are a good way to get spun up on the necessary knowledge for either a Developer or DBA track. There is the 2-Day Developers Guide and the 2-Day DBA Guide. These documents are designed to get you going – you won’t be an expert after reading them, but you’ll know the gist of what it is you need to know, to learn. You’ll have a good idea of what is available feature wise at the very least.
After these 2-Day guides (you can read either one or both), you might want to move onto some of the other overview guides – the 2-Day Performance would be a must read for anyone (followed by the Performance Guide itself eventually).
While all of this is going on – you should also be communicating – a lot. Constantly. Get on the forums – http://otn.oracle.com/forums, start writing – start asking questions (after reading the guidelines!!), start participating. Itis the way I learned much of what I know now myself. But communicate – a lot. You won’t be able to progress forward in a vacuum. Share everything you have in your head – and find others that will share back with you. You’ll find you not only get to learn (and to teach eventually) from people all over the world – but you may end up calling some of them your really good friends.
And then add time, a lot of time. Maybe years of time. You will not become really good at what you are doing in six months, not in a year, probably not in five years. It will take a while – you need to have lots of different experiences, encounter many different situations, attempt and fail to solve many problems – before you’ll become really good at what you do. You might feel like you are expert in a year – but trust me – you aren’t. And four years later you’ll realize how little you knew and how much more you have to learn.
I learn something new everyday about Oracle, just the other day something about Total Recall but many things in general, technical and otherwise – and I’ve been doing Oracle things for a long time.
:));));)))))))))

via sathyabhat’s blurblog http://tkyte.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-keys-to-oracle.html

Linked    ,

On Backupify killing their free backup service & online services’ bait and and switch tactics

May18th
2013 Leave a Comment Written by Sathya

Long ago when Backupify said they were going to offer their service for free, I knew it was too good to be true and weren’t going to last long. Fast forward today, they mention they’re going to not only kill their free twitter backup service, but also wipe out data of their existing free users.

Dear Customer,

We are writing to let you know that we are discontinuing the current TweetBackup service.

Your TweetBackup account will continue to back up for the next 30 days, until June 13th. Access to the service, and your data, will be disabled on June 28th. You will have the full 45 days to export any data. Please visit our Tweetbackup service shutdown FAQs answers to common questions, or you can also contact support directly with your questions.

Yeah, let me just quote from their blog when they announced their free service:

If you sign up during this time period, you get unlimited storage, for free. You get an account that is not a free trial, not free for a limited time, free forever.

Free forever, eh? Right. This is what annoys the fuck out of me. Why in the world do you promise shit you you can’t keep? Why the fuck do you have to sugarcoat and provide false promises? All in the name of “gaining traction”.

These services are driving me up the wall with their bait and switch tactics. Bait users with their free tactics, gain “traction” and then switch over to paid service or sell out to big cos (“yay, exit!!!!11″) and then dump users, early adopters and others who promoted their services for free, leaving them in the lurch.

STOP. FUCKING. DOING THIS. Argh. I’ve lost count the number of times and the time I’ve had to spend in moving shit out of the services.

Don’t have a business model? Don’t launch. Don’t assume giving things for free will work out. It fucking won’t. Unless you’ve bazillions in reserve.

Opinions    ,

Error’d: Where I Come From, We Don’t Need July

May15th
2013 Leave a Comment Written by Sathya

sathyabhat
shared this story
from The Daily WTF:
"In my native language, we don't have translations for seven months out of the year. Way to go Windows Live!!"

LOL.

“Someone FINALLY got it right!!” Farz wrote, “In my native language, we don’t have translations for seven months out of the year. Way to go Windows Live!!”

 

“I know Dell is supposed to be going private, but I didn’t know that it would be up to me to keep them afloat!” writes James Helms.

 

Ben N. sent in the following screenshot whilst shopping online. I bet some pun minded categorizer at Amazon thought that having a BOLD cup of coffee sounded REALLY good at the time.

 

“Developer’s excuse for screwing up #439: Sorry, I was eating a milky way, so I forgot to fix any issues with the feed.” wrote Chris M.

 

Wilt writes, “I know the budget is tight, But even if it wasn’t, I don’t think I could justify NVIDIA at that price.”

 

“I’m fine that Thirstin Howl’s track Spit Boxer isn’t on Spotify,” writes Nick, “but their suggestion wasn’t quite what I was expecting.”

 

“Things aren’t looking so good for being able to read ‘Fine Cooking’ on my iPad,” wrote Jeff.

 

[Advertisement] Make your team a DevOps team with BuildMaster. Pairing an easy-to-use web UI with a free base platform, BuildMaster gets you started in minutes. See how Allrecipes.com and others use BuildMaster to automate their software delivery.

via sathyabhat’s blurblog http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Where-I-Come-From,-We-Dont-Need-July.aspx

Linked    ,

Pirates play a gamedev simulator; go bankrupt because of piracy.

Apr29th
2013 Leave a Comment Written by Sathya

What happens when pirates play a game development simulator and then go bankrupt because of piracy? →

Summary of “What happens when pirates play a game development simulator and then go bankrupt because of piracy?”

  • When Game Dev Tycoon (a Game Development Simulation Game) was released, its developer released a cracked version on BitTorrent simultaneously.
  • After a certain point in the game, the cracked version would prevent the player from generating simulated revenue due to simulated piracy.
  • Many comments of people using the cracked version arrived on forums asking why their game would not take off and how to get rid of simulated piracy in the game.
  • Analysis of the usage shows that 214 genuine version where used/purchased against 3104 cracked version (93.6%)

Oh, the irony. And the sheer brilliance of the game devs. Check the full story for some hilarious responses from the pirates.

Gaming    ,

Alienware X51 with Ubuntu makes no sense

Apr6th
2013 Leave a Comment Written by Sathya

This morning in my half-woken state, as I was checking Hacker News, I spotted this piece about Alienware launching the X51 with Ubuntu. I initially thought I was dreaming, and woke up immediately and read the piece, and I was left dumbfounded when I read it again to be sure.

Kind of dumbfounded at Dell launching an Alienware X51 with Ubuntu http://alienware.com/ubuntu/ Not sure what’s Dell thinking – there aren’t any great native AAA games available, can’t imagine this would make studios to make Linux ports either

- Me, on app.net

Mikhail echoed his thoughts on this as well

As much as some people want it, I don’t see AAA gaming shifting out of windows anytime soon. Even if Valve manages to do something it might kill stuff on win8 but tons of people use 7 so they are fine?

Even on GOG, most games are windows only. Unless the next windows has something worse than win 8 for other apps and games , i dont see it happening.

I honestly don’t get what Dell is aiming for here. I wonder if some dude at Dell heard that gaming on Ubuntu is on the rise, and thought this would be a good way to ride the wave and get some PR. Incidentally, the same thought is currently the top most comment on Hacker News.

This seems like the sort of thing where they don’t really care whether they sell any or not. Gaming on Ubuntu is a hot blog topic right now, so they took an existing product and put Ubuntu on it. Probably cost a couple thousand to do all the paperwork surrounding a new SKU, and they’ll probably sell enough of these to make cover that. Boom, Free marketing and some cred with the indie gaming & Linux community. And if Steam on Linux does take off, they’ve already got their foot in the door.

Call me a cynic, but this is exactly what it sounds like. Don’t get me wrong, there’s definitely a (niche) market for pre-built, certified for Linux, desktops/laptops(and System76, for example)… Dell’s Project Sputnik makes sense. Latitude/Precision series of Linux laptops makes sense. Heck even the Chromebooks make sense, but right now, the X51 with Ubuntu is just stupid.

Why? I’ll go back to a rant I had stored when Steam for Linux was announced

The success of Linux Gaming doesn’t depend on Steam, it depends on the game devs. Steam for Mac was here like like when? 3 years ago? There are hardly 500 games, most of them indie. The only recent high-profile game that I know is there for the Mac is Diablo III.

Indie games are great, God bless devs for struggling and slogging their asses, but ultimately AAA games is what drives the industry.

I’ll repeat what I said when Steam for Linux and Steam for Mac was announced: Steam is a platform. Build a new bus stand on a deserted place with no buses, you won’t get hundreds of people at the bus stand.

Is it great that Steam has arrived? Sure. Does it mean that “age of Linux gaming” is coming? No. All we have right now is one functioning SteamWorks game. Even if we consider all of Valve’s games, that’s not more than 10.

And Mac’s market share is roughly what, 10x the Linux desktop base? Hell, even on the X51′s highlights page you have this

With over 25 gaming titles available and more being added, users can access Steam For Linux to play online games, including your favorite titles like Team Fortress 2 and Serious Sam 3.

I mean really, really? Hell I’m bloody sure even the NextBox/PS4 will have more launch titles than this(not exclusives, mind you – but that’s a different story altogether). Even if there aren’t any launch titles, you can be guaran-damn-teed (excuse the WWE slang) that devs will come out with games for the the X360/PS3/PS4/NextBox.

I don’t see any such thing happening on the Linux desktop gaming side. By now, I’m pretty sure whoever’s reading this, are yelling SteamBox, SteamBox. Considering that it still officially doesn’t exist, and a prototype that was shown at CES was announced as lolucrazy-that-aint-steambox by Valve, that pretty much tosses that out of the factor. Even if introduced, I won’t be surprised if it’s a custom-closed-system, much like today’s console.

 

Opinions    , , ,

Reviving my dead Windows 8 install with no bootable USB/DVD and Linux Mint & Cr48

Feb25th
2013 Leave a Comment Written by Sathya

Couple of months ago, just about a month before #cpgweds – the engagement my Envy 14 laptop started showing signs of dying – weird noises coming from the vents, system freezing arbitrarily, system getting incredibly hot – and that’s really unusual because the Envy’s cooling system is probably one of the best that I’ve seen in a laptop. Soon enough, it became clear that a fan was not working – my idle temperatures hit 85 degrees C, and start any game or even xbmc, and the temperatures would hit 95-100 and shutdown sooner or later.

And soon enough, HP’s diagnostics started informing me that my system fan’s dead during bootup. To figure out which one’s the dead one, I dismantled the Envy(I was out of warranty anyway) and switched on the laptop – and was kinda surprised that the laptop was still able to run at all.

And this was really torturing my system

temperatures

So now, while I experimenting with switching off/on to see if I can “jump” start the fan, I ended up screwing up my Windows 8 install – and ended up with a BSOD( bad_system_config_info) boot loop. No amount of reboots could help and I was stuck there. Also, thanks to the new “enhancements” F8-mashing would not result in the start up menu being shown up.

I had to resort to switching off in middle of a boot process to bring up the start up menu so that I could try our Windows 8′s Reset/Refresh. Unfortunately, both Reset and Refresh failed for some reason. I tried to refresh but somehow my custom recovery image got wiped out.. with no backup of it. Reset failed to work as well and I was back to status quo – BSOD Boot Loop.

Generally I keep a bootable Live USB with me, but this time I didn’t have that either, neither did I have any bootable DVDs. So my situation now:

  • Windows is stuck on a BSOD boot loop
  • No bootable USB or DVDs present
  • No other laptops/desktops available except……
  • …. Except for the Cr48.

Yep, the Cr48 turned to be my savior. So, the Cr48 comes with ChromeOS. With the developer switch turned on, however, you get to do things. Like get access to a real shell. or install a distro like Ubuntu. I didn’t want to install Ubuntu on it, so I tried to gain access shell.

Booting into Cr48 after enabling the developer mode, I found that hitting Ctrl+Alt+T brought up a shell. Within Chrome, as a tab(!). However, this was the crosh shell,which is limited. I found out that typing in “shell” gives you access to bash & full range of *nix utilities. So with that, I first grabbed Linux Mint iso using wget. With the ISO downloaded, I made the USB bootable using dd.

dd if=/path/to/mint.iso of=/dev/sdb

Now, I had a bootable USB. Next step, I used the bootable USB to boot into Linux Mint on my Envy. So now, my Envy is alive. So how do I get this to boot/reinstall Windows? I had Windows 7 ISO, I have Linux Mint & can install VirtualBox. So yup – that’s what I did.

  • Installed VirtualBox
  • Created a new VM, installed Windows 7 to the VM
  • Booted in to the Windows 7 VM.
  • Now in the Windows 7 VM, I used the Windows 8 upgrade tool to download Windows 8 setup & made a bootable USB(I had another USB key, thankfully!)

With a Windows 8 live USB finally available, I managed to do a clean install and finally revive the Envy.

News, Tips & How-To's    , , ,

Salute to Fabrice Bellard

Feb8th
2013 2 Comments Written by Sathya

I probably top the ranks of lazy arses who procrastinate like there’s no tomorrow – and then there’s Fabrice Bellard

Amongst others, he’s created/led

  • A 4G LTE base station running entirely in software on a standard PC.
  • A new ASN1 compiler generating small and efficient C code.
  • A PC emulator in Javascript: how much time takes your browser to boot Linux ?
  • 2700 billion decimal digits of Pi computed with a desktop computer.
  • Analog and Digital TV (DVB-T) signal generation by displaying an image on a PC display.
  • QEMU is a generic machine emulator and virtualizer.
  • FFMPEG, the Open Source Multimedia System. I launched this project in year 2000 and led it during several years.
  • TCC is a tiny but complete ISOC99 C compiler which enables you to use C as scripting language. TCC has its roots in the OTCC project. The TCCBOOT boot loader demonstrate the speed of TCC by compiling and launching a Linux kernel in less than 15 seconds.
  • QEmacs (for Quick Emacs) is an emacs clone I began to learn Unicode rendering algorithms, text buffers manipulation and XML/HTML/CSS parsing.
  • OTCC is a very small self-compiling compiler for a subset of C I wrote to win the 2001 edition of the International Obfuscated C Contest.
  • TinyGL: a Small, Free and Fast Subset of OpenGL.
  • An online Scientific Web Calculator.
  • Pi formulas, algorithms and computations.
  • A tiny C program to print the biggest known prime number.

Mind Boggling. Read the HN comments for more.

Programming

My Experience on upgrading from Windows 7 to Windows 8

Nov9th
2012 1 Comment Written by Sathya

So after much thought, I upgraded my Windows 7 Ultimate install to Windows 8. I didn’t plan to upgrade so soon, I wanted to wait for few more months before doing the upgrade – the main reason for holding back the upgrade was lack of drivers. However with Super User‘s Windows 8 Challenge around, I could no longer use the RP for posting answers.

And since the RP was working fine, including the GPU drivers which I had to install in Windows 7 compatibility mode, I decided to complete the upgrade. Now my Windows 7 install is a culmination of several years of crap, including lots and lots of software, context menu entries, personalized superbar and to add to the mix, some exotic software  Here’s what I had installed/present on Windows 7

READ MORE »

Opinions    ,

Patch 1.0.5 for Diablo III

Oct16th
2012 Leave a Comment Written by Sathya

Blizzard Rolling Out Patch 1.0.5 For Diablo III, Brings in New Events →

Along with lots of bug fixes, the patch brings in two new types of Gameplay events – the Infernal Machine and Monster Power.

tl;dr version:

  • Monster Power increases monster health difficulty & health from 100% to OMFG-are-you-nuts!?!? levels
  • Infernal Machine brings in not just one, but two Bosses.

If Ghom wasn’t bad enough – I shudder at the thought of going against Rakanoth and Ghom simultaneously. I have no freakin’ idea how the Monk’s going to cope up with Ghom’s gas attack and Rakanoth’s shielding :-\.

It’ll take some time before I can even think of Infernal machine – considering that the components required for building Infernal Machine are dropped only in Inferno :-|.

Monster Power, on the other hand – gotta check it out. Looks fairly balanced, only after trying it out can say how it feels like.

Gaming    ,
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