Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Texas Instruments DaVinci™ Technology Spirit of Invention

The best video i have seen till now.

Texas Instruments DSP Ad

I love Texas Instruments...

GMail rocks...Added New features...

My favorite e-mail service - GMail has launched some new features...

Now Gmail can check for the mail you receive at your other email accounts. You can retrieve your mail (new and old) from up to five other email accounts and have them all in Gmail. Then you can even create a customized 'From:' address, which lets you send messages from Gmail, but have them look like they were sent from another one of your email accounts. Please note that you can only retrieve mail from accounts that have POP3 access enabled. Learn More

This feature is currently only enabled for a limited number of users. GMail is working on making it more available soon. I am one of the lucky ones. Look for it in the 'Accounts' tab in Settings.

Google is great ! GMail is already having so many excellent features... i wonder what else Google is looking to add into it.. mind you, GMail is still in the Beta version !!

Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us

I found this very nice video... A must see for all.

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SOFTWARE UPGRADE NOTICE

Nice one... Do read.


Last year a friend of mine upgraded GirlFriend 6.0 to Wife 1.0 and found that it's a memory hog leaving very little system resources for other applications. He is only now noticing that Wife 1.0 also is spawning Child-Processes which are further consuming valuable resources.
No mention of this particular phenomenon was included in the product brochure or the documentation, though other users have informed him that this is to be expected, due to the nature of the application.

Not only that, Wife 1.0 installs itself such that it is always launched at system initialization where it can monitor all other system activity.
He's finding that some applications such as PokerNight 10.3, BeerBash 2.5, and PubNight 7.0 are no longer able to run, crashing the system when selected (even though they always worked fine before). At installation, Wife 1.0 automatically installs undesired Plug-Ins such as MotherInLaw 55.8 and BrotherInLaw Beta release. As a consequence system performance seems to diminish with each passing day.

Some features he'd like to see in the upcoming Wife 2.0:

  • A "Don't remind me again" button;
  • A Minimize button;
  • An install shield feature that allows Wife 2.0 to be installed with the option to uninstall at anytime without the loss of cache and other system resources;
  • An option to run the network driver in promiscuous mode which would allow the systems hardware probe feature to have greater use.

Another friend decided to avoid all the headaches associated with Wife 1.0 by sticking with Girlfriend 2.0. Even here, however, I found many problems.
Apparently you cannot install Girlfriend 2.0 on top of Girlfriend 1.0. You must uninstall Girlfriend 1.0 first. Other users say this is a long standing bug which everyone should have been aware. Apparently the versions of Girlfriend have conflicts over shared use of the I/O port. You'd think they would have fixed such a stupid bug by now.
To make matters worse, the uninstall program for Girlfriend 1.0 doesn't work very well leaving undesirable traces of the application in the system.
Another annoying problem -- all versions of Girlfriend continually pop-up annoying messages about the advantages of upgrading to Wife 1.0

***** BUG WARNING *****

Wife 1.0 has an undocumented bug. If you try to install Mistress 1.1 before uninstalling Wife 1.0, Wife 1.0 will delete MSMoney files before executing a self - uninstallation. Then Mistress 1.1 will refuse to install, claiming insufficient system resources.

***** BUG WORK-AROUNDS *****

To avoid the above bug, try installing Mistress 1.1 on a different system and never run any file transfer applications such as Laplink 6.0. Also, beware of similar share-ware applications that have been known to carry viruses that may affect Wife 1.0.

Another solution would be to run Mistress 1.0 via a UseNet provider under an anonymous name. Here again, beware of the viruses which can accidentally be downloaded from the UseNet.

Monday, February 26, 2007

Want to reduce Firefox Memory Consumption?

Firefox seems to need more memory when I have it open for a long time and surf to many different websites. I was never able to find out why it behaved this way and assumed that it was either a memory leak or an extension which would be responsible for this behavior.

It seems that my assumption was wrong. Firefox saves the last 50 visited websites of a single session in memory which means that it could add up quickly if you visit lots of content filled websites. The reason behind this is that it is faster to access a already visited website if it still resides in memory instead of loading it from disk cache or from the server.

50 sites on the other hand seems a lot to me. I usually do not visit sites again that I visited a while ago - I tend to visit many different sites and only a few ones more than once daily. The fix is relatively simple. Type about:config in the Firefox address bar and search for the term:

browser.sessionhistory.max_entries

Right-click the entry, select modify from the list and change it to a lower value. I set it to 5 which works well for my surfing habits. Other values might be better for yours.

Sunday, February 25, 2007

Why use Google Search...USE CLUSTY !

How many times you have searched for something on Google search and gone to page no 4 to see the result ?... Not often right?... What happens many times you want to search for something and maybe the result you wanted is on 4th page..typically this happens with tutorials n all...but you do not go to 4th page to see the result...

Can we have solution to this?.. Why not have the search results clustered ?

This is what CLUSTY does. Its a whole new way to search the web.

Clusty queries several top search engines, combines the results, and generates an ordered list based on comparative ranking. This "metasearch" approach helps raise the best results to the top and push search engine spam to the bottom.

But what really makes Clusty unique is what happens after you search. Instead of delivering millions of search results in one long list, this search engine groups similar results together into clusters. Clusters help you see your search results by topic so you can hone in on exactly what you’re looking for or discover unexpected relationships between items. Rather than scrolling through page after page, the clusters help you find results you may have missed or that were buried deep in the ranked list.

And with a name like Clusty, it’s gotta be good!.. I liked it. It simplifies your search a lot. About the results that it gives, since it is taking the search results from top search engines... The search is good !! So i recommend you all to use CLUSTY !!

Thursday, February 22, 2007

SUN Tech Days 2007

Its been more than 24 hours since i attended SUN Tech days 2007, But the effect is as fresh as it was 24 hours ago. Yes, I attended SUN Tech days 2007 yesterday. "Awesome" is the word to describe it literally. Sun Tech days is a worldwide developer conference that SUN organises. In India, it is during 21-23 Feb, at Hyderabad.

The major 3 day event is supposed to take place at Hyderabad, but SUN also organized a 1 day event in cities - Pune, Mumbai, Delhi. I attended the Pune Event. The organizer's had arranged a satellite link to telecast welcome and keynote session. The SUN keynote was presented by Rich Green - SUN's visionary behind web technologies. The sessoin was excellent. He talked about web 2.0, open source and future of it as he sees it. This then followed with a SUN Technical Demo of some of their products not released yet.

Then we had some live presentations by SUN engineers. It included Java SE6 features, Java Persistence APIs. Then we had the best presentation of the day - Solaris The Developer Friendly OS. Frankly speaking, i had attended the event only for this session. The presentation was by Ananth Shrinivas - A SUN engineer at B'lore. He talked about various features of Solaris which really took the crowd to amaze. The features like DTrace, ZFS, Containers - They really cought my eye. Thats for Developers for Sure !!

I think this was a day i will remember for a long time - Nice experience ! Not to mention i had to bunk my company work, but it was worth !

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

MPLAB with MATLAB now...

Microchip Technology Inc., a leading provider of microcontroller and analog semiconductors, today announced that, through its close collaboration with The MathWorks, Inc., a leading developer of technical computing and Model-Based Design software, Microchip's popular MPLAB® Integrated Development Environment (IDE) now features a free plug-in for The MathWorks MATLAB®, Simulink® and Real-Time Workshop® Embedded Coder modeling and code-generation programs.

Update: a Simulink blockset for dsPIC is presented and can be download at : http://www.kerhuel.eu/RTWdsPIC

What is Digital Signal Processor ?

A digital signal processor (DSP) is a specialized microprocessor designed specifically for digital signal processing, generally in real-time.

Characteristics of Digital Signal Processors

Image:DSP_Block.GIF

Architectural features of digital signal processors

Digital signal processing can be done on general-purpose microprocessors. However, a digital signal processor contains architectural optimizations to speed up processing. These optimizations are also important to lower costs, heat-emission and power-consumption.

Program flow

  • Floating-point unit integrated directly into the data-path.
  • Pipelined architecture
  • Highly parallel accumulator and multiplier
  • Special looping hardware. Low-overhead or Zero-overhead looping capability

Memory architecture

Data operations

  • Saturation arithmetic, in which operations that produce overflows will accumulate at the maximum (or minimum) values that the register can hold rather than wrapping around (maximum+1 doesn't overflow to minimum as in many general-purpose CPUs, instead it stays at maximum). Sometimes various sticky bits operation modes are available.
  • Fixed-point arithmetic is often used to speed up arithmetic processing.
  • Single-cycle operations to increase the benefits of pipelining.

Instruction sets

Hello World Collection

"Hello World" is the first program one usually writes when learning a new programming language. This collection includes 311 Hello World programs in many more-or-less well known programming languages, plus 51 human languages.

http://www.roesler-ac.de/wolfram/hello.html

Monday, February 12, 2007

StumbleUpon


Recently i came across an excellent firefox add-on : StumbleUpon !! StumbeUpon installs a toolbar in your browser and lets you collaborative rate content. This improves the recommendations for other users and behavior matching is used to find users like you and pages that you haven't seen before, on-demand. One indicator I use for the popularity of a social bookmarking site is how much inbound traffic I get from it, and I've seen a clear switch during the year from del.icio.us bookmarks to StumbleUpon referrers. StumbleUpon reports that it has over 1.7 million registered users and growing. Bottom Line: Del.icio.us is still my favorite bookmarking service, but for true content discovery, StumbleUpon now makes it much easier to find new content than del.icio.us does. StumbleUpon is a winner by a nose for taking content discovery to the next step.