Saturday, April 14, 2007

MS's insane logic ..wtf?

Have a look at this.
What the fsck ? From when did Microsoft started assuming crash is a feature and not a bug? ...lolz :D
Seriously now i am convinced MS have just a bunch of overpaid programmers who don't have any work to do.So they have started rolling out completely idiotic and out of the world statements, to save their crappy products which are incidentally great and flashy on the GUI front.But all that at the cost of efficiency and robustness.

Good going MS, keep it up.Suddenly BSODs will be centre of attraction.May be you can put advertisements there as you have lost doubleclick deal to Google. :)

~psr

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

OO concepts with C

As usual my example is more related to simple C and not Objective C.

Here, is the second tip.
How can i use function overloading in C?
Answer is ,you can provided you are absolutely sure what you are doing. This means you should be double sure of your parameters passed and avoiding any smart newbie stuff like passing an expression as and argument, which many people do to flaunt their horrible obscure C programming constructs.(No pun intended cuz i am also one of them :)).
You can impersonate function overloading using macros and inline functions in C(more specifically C99). Before you take this suggestion, remember Macros are a bad way of coding.They show how lazy you are. Thank C99 for inline functions.

Implementation :-
#define my_function(x) \
do { \
//do something sane \
// with x , with \
// one expression per line \
} while(0);

void my_function()
{
//kill'em all :)
}

#define my_function(y, x) \
do {
x = y+1;
my_function((x));
while }(0);


Weird it seems but effective.

Later

~psr

Sunday, April 8, 2007

OpenBSD Vs GPL

OpenBSD developers especially Theo seem to be apprehended by linux community.Whats wrong with GPL , you BSD dudes? I think BSD people are too paranoid.

He is not only difficult but keeps his personal ego above the benefit of the community.Which is suicidal for BSD community. Code doesnot work with human sentiments ...period.

Copyright act and permission rule the open source community, if he cannnot respect them... sorry you are in trouble. You ll be dragged to court.

Whatever the case may be, AFAIK lkml discussions have a common goal for linux kernel.No personal feuds. I remember Alan(Alan Cox) pissed with Dave(Dave miller) for a serial driver.He didnt fire his personal vendetta on the lkml. linus inervened and kicked dave to utter surprise for being fussy. To which dave gracefully accepted and asked suggestions to fix the flaw, which was finally fixed by Linus's suggestion.

I have pbserved this is a very common scene except in rare cases.Exception being when some nutty dumb wit tries to say like - "how about a poll for GPLv2 Vs GPLv3 for linux kernel".Obvious Linus's reply was -"How about this?Go write your own kernel and then poll whos is popular":). Linux kernel is his kernel, he decides it has to be GPLv2, thats it.Mostly all kernel developers are very professional and extremely dedicated. Warning, Linus is an exception.He is professional and doesnot care what you think when it comes to common kernel goals.you can be thrashed for poor code submission or idiotic logics or misinterpretations.

Anyway, i wish Theo de Raat was more acceptable of the FOSS community.Sadly this is not true.

Later

~psr

Thursday, April 5, 2007

switched to Gnome ... yet again!!!















Tried my hands with xfce4 for few days.xfce4 is indeed cool but somehow the shortcuts i am used to work only with __GNOME__. Too bad, i have to switch to heavy gnome.

The wallpaper is pretty cool.:)
Back to gnome and happy to have it back.
Thinking should switch to ever favourite, the fluxbox.
Will give it a shot and let you people know the results.

~psr

Wednesday, April 4, 2007

How to pull an overclock hack safely!!

I tried my hands at overclocking CPU at my home machine and not on my work system. I must say, i am in trouble.Will have to purchase a few hardware components :(.

Writing this so that somebody who want to do the same doesnot land into trouble like me.

The dangerous way of getting max out of your computer is changing the FSB frequency.FSB is the frontal side bus which connects CPU with the system memory.Changing FSB means you are changing not only the system memory access speed but also the processor clock, the PCI frequency and many other IO device's operating frequency including the chipset (your motherboard's heart,AGP etc) .

So you need to be extra careful.

If you want to :-

1. Read the motherboard manual to see if overclocking the FSB or for that matter even CPU overclocking is supported. Do not trust your BIOS like i did. Good BIOS vendors lock the FSB freq option to avoid any not so pleasant scenes. Unfortuantely Chinese manufacturers are either brain dead or don't know how a software should work, no matter how small it is.

2. Best to test is download software utilities which can check and tell you if you can do it ,and if you can what is the best range.

3. Sometimes overclocking comes with the price of over heating.Be prepared to face this.

4. Check if your perihperals can work with freq increased to orig freq + half the margin by which FSB freq is increased. Important ones are IDE HDDs, AGP cards and RAM modules.

5. Stick your both palms and pray.

6. If you are luck enough, welcome to the elite club.

7. If you are not welcome to the elitest club, because now you know what to do and what not to do , rather than just what to do. :)

Good luck

~psr

Monday, April 2, 2007

Google Gags

One thing about Google which amuses me is its innovative ways.

It may be work culture there, their web based dominance or April 1st announcements which turn out ot be gags at times. :)

Google Tisp as they call it is Toilet ISP. hahaha ... gag was good , but for a moment i was also surprised if they are kidding or serious. Anyway figured out when i clicked on advanced installation link on FAQs :).

haha... gotcha.

Anyway though it was a April fool prank, concept is very much possible and has been employed near 2002-2003 by a company(oops ..name i dont remember).

Whatever, people are getting free WiFI services from google without flushing even right now.Though the service is limited to a few priviliged cities in US sadly :(.

Anyway whatever, it was indeed a worth rolling on the floor after i figured out the prank ... :)

~psr



Sunday, April 1, 2007

Future calling...

Many of the computer engineers are perhaps unaware of the fact that Dell and HP are serious about adopting Linux as a Desktop Operating Systems for their customers.
This is a heartening news for me. May be this is just beginning of an era.An era of competition, quality and engineering.

At the same time i am disappointed to find most of the people as a mute spectator.Nobody is willing to hop in.Nobody is willing to engineer and take risk.

Linux has a huge potential in Gaming markets.Still unexplored and lackluster because of the kernel's GPL2 only policy to which big guns like Nvidia and ATI refuse to budge.

Only consolation which Linux community can get happy with is OpenGL, thanks to SGI for OpenGL.

Anyway whatever the case may be, Noveau project will bring some smiles on our graphics engine.
Frankly speaking i am more than skeptical about Noveau's success. Why?

Because Reverse Engineering is a science which is not only insanely difficult but also not even match for the purpose it is employed.
Isn't this much enough for Nvidia and ATI to think about it.

May be someone need to tell them "FREE SOFTWARE AND OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE ARE TWO DIFFERENT TERMS".They form a closely knit but well defined union of two entirely different sets with a common intersection region. :)
Sorry, for a bit of set theory there. ;)

I am quite sure they know this, but problem is they are too paranoid about their patents and hardware designs.
My suggestion you are wrong, kernel developers are willing to sign a __NDA__ if you are willing to open source your driver.

Time has come for GPU giants to hop in and help the Linux Penguin. After all open standards in x86 architecture is what brought Intel to the top.

~psr