Whitenoise

The movie shows how a ‘chaiwala’ makes a dream run at a popular game show to become a millionaire
overnight. The movie has a racy screenplay, and was enjoyable to watch .

It has all the ingredients of a typical masala movie . Everything including the very lucky ‘just in time escapes from villains’ to ‘picking the phone calls by  the right people at the right time’ .  The movie depicts Mumbai during various times in the life of the hero. Unfortunately it shows all the grey /shady parts of Mumbai.

I fail to understand when Quantum of Solace shows esoteric unheard of places,road side shops in Europe.
Whereas if the movie happens in India its always slums,the Taj , brothels and beggars (and now call centers) ..sigh..

The background music is quite subtle . The songs fail to make an impression ,except for one  tune that reminded me of a humming in another movie by Rehman. Rehman’s music is great , but this is not one of his best.

Slumdog Millionaire is watchable once,if you forgive the director for some stereotypical descriptions about India .  A corner of my heart says that this movie should not get the Oscars this year. It should be TDK !

Hello all and welcome to 2009’s  first issue of this (not so regular) thread at my blog.

Nokia licenses QT under LGPL: After acquiring () Trolltech , Nokia has decided to move license QT under LGPL instead of QTs  Q Public License A major issue with QTL was its incompatibility with the GNU GPL.
This made it extremely difficult to link QT with other GPL covered programs. With QT moving to LGPL this limitation is gone!   The decision has been hailed by many in the FLOSS community. QT is already cross platform and changing the licensing model will make is more ‘corporate’ friendly.

Meanwhile,it has been found that there could be some issues with LGPL 2.1 and the various C++ template classes  in QT.  Though QT’s signal’s and slot mechanism does not use C++ templates, templates are used  with the container classes in QT. Template instantiation actually  nests (QT LGPL code) into the end user code.  So, we have a problem if the end-user licenses his code under non-LGPL! For the update on this,you have to look here .

I am not sure how this move would thwart GNOME’s efforts in getting into the mobile Linux world.  I hope both these libraries have their own  pro’s and cons and would continue to be widely used.

Windows 7 in beta: Last week also saw the release of Windows 7 as a beta. The Windows 7 buzz was around for quite some time.  User response has been overwhelming for this product. More than desktop, I think the strategy is to run Win7 on net books  as well and removing dependence on WinXP for this.

TechRadar has made an attempt to run this on a ASUS EEE 1000 and are impressed with the sleekness.    Also some hackers have released a Windows7 LiTE version (find this in Bittorrent) that strips out some modules like language support,speech assist ,Windows Media Centre etc and managed to
get Windows7 run with a lesser memory than Windows XP SP3  and lesser install space than Windows Vista!

I believe Windows 7 will finally allow Windows to stop its support for XP after so many years.

Vodafone demos 16Mbps with HSPA+: Last week also saw Vodafone demonstrating 16Mbs bitrates using HSPA+ , an evolution over HSPA . HSPA+ is considered as an enhancement to HSPA and achieves high data rates by including MIMO technologies. The current HSPA+ Release 7  provides  downlink data rate of up to 28Mbps and an uplink of 11Mbps. Future revisions may support higher bandwidth.

Linux kernel 2.6.29 -whats new : The merge window for the next release of the Linux kernel closed recently . Heise online has been running a series on the new and noteworthy features in this release.
An important feature would be the integration of Intel’s WiMAX stack into the kernel mainline by Greg Kroah Hartman. The next noteworthy feature is the integration of Kernel Mode Setting (KMS)  feature into the kernel mainline. Kernel Mode Setting would add a rich boot experience to Linux desktops .  This feature is already present in the latest Fedora release and many were impressed with the seamless boot process of that release.  Now that KMS makes to the linux mainline other distributions would also benefit from this. For a complete coverage on the release, you can have a look here.

Ever since downloadable apps were popularized by the iPhone, this space has grown pretty much.
Many innovative applications have come up. These applications have made good use of sensors inbuilt with the  device. They are also well integrated with the web.  Such apps were not done prior to the iPhone and their ilk.  This is a post on few apps that I liked for their innovative use of available information on smart phones .

1. OCarina:
The best app in this list would be Smule’s OCarina . This application simulates the Ocarina, an ancient flute like instrument on the iPhone .

The application converts the iPhone into a true musical instrument. Its quite  amazing to see how gestures, tilt, touch and breath are fed into the device to create some good music. Some videos here .

Its not surprising that the application made it to the list of entries contending for the  ‘Best Mobile App’ category at the Crunchies 2008 event .

2. Google Mobile App
The next application is Google’s mobile application for the iPhone. Especially the voice search.
The application makes use of an undocumented API that allowed access to the proximity sensor of the iPhone . With this information,the application would automatically activate voice search when appropriate. Users have found this app quite useful and the voice search ‘really works’ .This app has got good reviews from many.  Here is a video that shows this app in action.

3. Textecution:
This is an Android application that automatically disables texting while you are driving.
The application reads the GPS information of the phone to find out if the phone is moving faster than 10mph.
If the phone is moving faster than 10mph all texting is disabled on the phone! A simple idea that brings in
a lot of safety. For more,have a look at their site here .

4. Pandora :
Pandora was one of the first applications to come to the iPhone. This application allows users to stream music from Pandora Radio directly to their iPhone . The service plays new songs based on earlier songs played by the user. This application is quite popular and there has been  over 2 million downloads of this application since its launch on July 2008.

5. Shazm :
Talking of Pandora,here is yet another music application that is equally innovative. Shazm is a music discovery service . Bring your iPhone close to any tune that is played now, and Shazm discovers the tune and  shows the name of the song!

Its quit interesting to hear of these applications .I am curious to see how all these apps work internally.Hope someone is magnanimous to open up the source code of these apps!

2008 has been an eventful year for me. There were many changes ,most of which were good. Here is a snapshot on various things that happened the past year.

Entertainment :
Most liked movie: Into the Wild.
Jaw dropping performance : Javier Bardem (NCOM),Heath Ledger (TDK) .
Best actress : Ellen Page  (JUNO)
Favorite Songs -  English: Society(Eddie Wedder), Tamil:Dosthu bada dosth (Saroja), Hindi: Khwaja Meri Khwaja (Jodha Akbar).
Good riddance of the year : Stopped watching ‘Junk news/Junk Media’ and moving to Good Old DoorDarshan.

Others:
Most eagerly expected event – Firefox 3 download day (Yes I am part of that World record download feat)
Favorite pass time              – Blogging.
New addiction of 2008        – Twitter.
Favorite website site           – Ars Technica.
New skill set                       – Sending SMS’s.

Change in affiliations from previous years:
Songbird instead of Rythmbox
OpenOffice 3.0 instead of MS Office .
Perforce instead of Clearcase .
ABG (Anything but Google) instead of ABM.
Pidgin instead of GTalk .
WordPress instead of Blogger.

Favorite quote of the year:
Joker: "If you’re good at something, never do it for free… "

New and noteworthy :
-> Getting married!!
-> Buying a ‘gift’ for a girl.(quite a feat this one)
-> New job.
-> Taking pictures like never before.
-> Tweeting.
-> Visiting Western Europe .Some pictures here and here.
-> Digital surround sound at home . 
-> writing a major exam with (literally) 0% preparation. And passing it (God is great).

Things to try next year:
Making a check in to a FLOSS project.
Build a decent Movie/English series media library.
Use twitter for news updates.

I wish you all a good year . Have a nice time!!

Happy New Year too all ! Hope the New Year turns out a good one for all of us.

This year,  I would like to write more ‘code’ and blog more about hands on programing tips and topics. With this in mind,  here is the first hands on tip I thought of putting as my first post for the year.

One of the metrics that is measured  in Desktop and Embedded Linux programs  would be its ’startup time’  and memory (RAM) usage . Owing to its virtual memory , there is no ’static ‘ way to estimate  RAM usage of a program.

Here is a quick & dirty way to identify the memory consumption your Linux program. This relies on the page-faults that occur as soon as the program is started .

———————
A  gross estimate on the total page faults that happen over an interval by cat’ing /proc/vmstat and look at the page-in count (pgpgin).

As long as your program is the main thing running, and the only work that’s starting up between two checks of that value, the vast majority of those page faults will have been for you.
It’s also useful to look at that value when the device seems to be running sluggishly — when I’ve done that, the page fault count is rising very rapidly, indicating thrashing due to too much memory in use, and too little left for a usable page/file cache.

eg: Before starting your app:
# cat /proc/vmstat
nr_dirty 0
nr_writeback 0
nr_unstable 0
nr_page_table_pages 677
nr_mapped 8151
nr_slab 1231
pgpgin 166187
pgpgout 33
pswpin 0
pswpout 0

After starting app and allowing the initial UI to come up, run the command again:
# cat /proc/vmstat
nr_dirty 0
nr_writeback 0
nr_unstable 0
nr_page_table_pages 711
nr_mapped 8012
nr_slab 1139
pgpgin 172090
pgpgout 33
pswpin 0
pswpout 0
The difference in pdpgin gives an estimate on the memory usage by your application on startup.

So what does these esoteric names mean .Here is a reference on what these terms mean.

pgpgin      -  Number of kilobytes the system has paged in from disk per second.
pgpgout     -  Number of kilobytes the system has paged out to disk per second.
pswpin      -  Number of kilobytes the system has swapped in from disk per second.
pswpout     -  Number of kilobytes the system has swapped out to disk per second.

The following statistics are only available by kernels from 2.6.
pgfault     -  Number of page faults the system has made per second (minor + major).
pgmajfault  -  Number of major faults per second the system required loading a memory page from disk.