scratching an itch

call it the power of memes. its an itch. to blog. to tell the world what I think.

not that the world needs one more person's opinions, but hey, what the heck, that ain't going to stop me! what does stop me though is my laziness. and my disinterest in telling the world what I think. but the mind has a mind of its own which only the mind knows, and so as a compromise between my mind's desire to blog and my desire to keep shut here's a little something. a mini blog. a tumblelog.

p.s. I have some stuff at my Google Reader page too.

“ PCI devices always “steal” RAM, even on a system with less memory. You just don’t notice because PCI devices are usually sitting at an address beyond the end of physical memory.Remember, 32-bit processors have a 4GB address space (from 0x00000000 to 0xFFFFFFFF). If you have 1GB of RAM, any address above 0x40000000 is free.Most PCI devices are memory mapped. This means they are mapped to a memory address. If the CPU wants to talk to your Ethernet Card, it reads and write to a certain memory address, which happens to be where your Ethernet Card is listening.The memory address that your device uses is determined by the BIOS at boot time (although the operating system can remap the device later). The device can claim anywhere from 0 to 6 memory regions, and they can be just about any size.Exactly how many memory regions, and their size can vary gratly by the device. Ethernet cards tend to use very little. Graphics cards, however, can use a lot. Grpahics cards have a lot of onboard RAM, and that RAM can be often addressed by the PCI bus. If you have a video card with 128MB of RAM, it may claim a 128MB window on the PCI bus. Some high-end SCSI controllers claim a lot of address space as well.If you want to see the addresses claimed on your system, go to Control Panel - System - Hardware - Device Manager. Click View - Resources by Type. Expand the memory selection. You should see all the memory-mapped devices in your system, and what they claim.Since you have a 4GB limit, your system needs to make all of the devices, and your RAM fit. That’s why you see less RAM. If it didn’t allocate enough address space for your hardware, the device wouldn’t work (which would be really bad). So, it does the safe thing, and give you less ram. 4GB RAM | Tech Off | Channel 9
Coding Horror: Dude, Where's My 4 Gigabytes of RAM?

One more very interesting article on the 4GB RAM problem.

I wonder how much RAM FreeBSD or Linux (32-bits) saw when I installed them on this machine. Didn’t bother checking that time.

4GB RAM in Windows XP

Tried Windows XP on a machine with 4GB RAM today. I thought it would recognize the entire 4GB coz my understanding is that 32-bit OSes can do that. But nope. XP only saw 3GB. My search for an answer led me to this informative post.


Happened to see the Samsung OMNIA HD i8910 today. Awesome phone. Looks great.

I had an impulse to buy it as soon as possible. But I don’t know, I think its just an impulse and I mustn’t jump into it.

First of all, the phone’s kind of expensive. About OMR 240. That’s not that big a deal coz my previous phone - the SE K850i - was OMR 230 when I purchased it. But I had a terrible experience with that phone and ever since I have been wary of spending heavily on a mobile phone. Plus, for OMR 240 I can get myself a decent laptop (not that I want one, I just mention it for comparison sakes). Back when I bought the K850i, laptops were more expensive (meaning: I think OMR 240 is unreasonable for a “mere” phone).

Apart from that, I am not sure if I really need such a complicated device. I don’t need a movie player and something with widgets and Facebook etc. I don’t use these things. I can watch movies on my iPod Touch. And I am not into widgets or Facebook or using the Internet heavily on my phone. All I want is a good phone with 3G and WiFi, a 3.5mm headphone jack just in case, email, and the ability to install Opera Mini. Oh, and it would also be nice if the screen were 2.4” or larger (preferred) and if the camera was decent (3.2MP fine as long as it took good photos). I really don’t want anything more fancy.

I am slowly starting to hate my E75 coz email sucks on it. And I am getting bored of the tweeny 2.4” screen. And I hate its keyboard and keypad (maybe I should put “decent keypad” as one of my requirements; never thought I would encounter a phone with such a crappy keypad/ keyboard).

I was ok with the E75 until early last month. Then I applied the firmware update, hoping email will improve. Which it didn’t, and so I began getting pissed at the phone. And then the update seems to have changed/ removed things on the phone - I can’t place a finger on what, but I do find stuff changed from how they were before and I can’t find a way to undo that. So I am slowly getting discontent with this phone.

Which brings me to my last point - I don’t think I’ll ever like a Symbian phone. Don’t get me wrong, the OS is fine, but I just don’t see it as the future. Never had good experiences with it. I think its kludgy. The future us Maemo, iPhone OS, Android, etc.

Speaking of which, the Google Nexus released sometime in the past few days. And I am keeping an eye on Maemo to see how it works out. Once Nokia adds more portrait mode stuff to it, I might purchase the N900 (or its successor).

Saw “Monsters vs. Aliens” yesterday. Yet another movie that I never bothered to check out when it was released at the cinemas. I saw it now coz my brother-in-law recommended it; I’m glad I watched it.

The movie’s cute and funny. It’s from Dreamworks Animation, the same people who made hits such as “Shrek”, “Madagascar”, “Shark Tales”, “Kung Fu Panda” and not so hits such as “Bee Movie”, “Antz” and “Over the Hedge”. “Monsters vs Aliens” is firmly in the former category.

Seth Rogen’s character - BOB - is my favorite monster!

I also loved the way the movie put a lot of emphasis on songs (like the President playing the keyboard to greet aliens, Dr. Cockroach and his dance moves to turn on self-destruct of the alien spaceship) and tries to make fun of things (the big red button to launch Nukes/ Coffee, BOB’s confusion for Derek, BOB’s date attempts, etc).

Man, I wish I had seen “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra” when it was released in the theaters here earlier. I found it to be an awesome movie, and I’m sure I would have loved it and been in awe even more had I see it on a big screen.

There are two movies, from recent memory, that I should have watched when they were released at the cinemas but I never bothered to. One of them is, of course, “G.I. Joe” and the other is “Speed Racer”.

I never bothered with either movies coz I read some reviews here and there that said the movies suck. And I hadn’t seen the cartoons on which either movie was based, so didn’t have any reason to check out the movies either. Bad decision. :)

“G.I. Joe” rocks. The story is not strong (wouldn’t call it weak or non-existent, as some reviews do) but it makes up for that with some terrific special effects and fast moving screenplay. Kept me on the edge of my seat for the whole 2 hours; and I am definitely going to watch the sequels to this at the cinemas whenever they are released.

The chap who plays “Duke” is cute. And the lady who plays “Baroness” is good looking. Also, “Ripcord” is funny and the perfect foil for “Scarlett”.


My craze for iPods went down one notch yesterday night. 

The way I organize my music collection is that I am very tagging-crazy; thanks in part to iTunes. Before iTunes, my collection was a mess, just organized into folder names corresponding to albums and no regard given to the tags. Even when songs were tagged, there were usually typos and missing information.

iTunes changed all that. If you remember, the first versions of Windows iTunes had the option to ‘organize the music folders automatically’ checked by default. So I installed iTunes, pointed it to my music collection, and boom! my entire collection was turned into a mess (coz iTunes organizes by the artist and then album names, and this info was lacking).

I spent the next 4 years tagging away. And I ensured that every new song I added has proper tags and album art etc (which was a good idea, coz a few versions later iTunes had Cover Flow and iPods showed album art and I was ready!).

Yesterday I encountered a problem though.

You see, since I am tagging-crazy and I don’t want to miss out any info for each song, I make it a point to put all the artist details in each song. So, for instance, a song by Pt. Ravi Shankar and Ustaad Alla Rakha Khan would have these two as the “Artists”, while a song by Pt. Ravi Shankar and Ustaad Zakir Hussain would have these two as the “Artists”. If I wasn’t so particular, I could omit the two Ustaads coz they are not the main artists; but I am particular, and I want to give credit to the two Ustaads coz I feel they are an important part of the performance, and so I put their names too in the “Artists” field.

Further, I put Pt. Ravi Shankar as the “Album Artist”. The album belongs to him, after all, and while each track might have him and another artist just for that particular piece, I like to have all these tracks appear together and under Pt. Ravi Shankar’s name. The “Album Artist” field is for that, and iTunes thankfully honours it. It stores all these tracks together on the disk too. So far so good.

The problem is that for some unknown reasons, iPods don’t care about the “Album Artist” tag! There’s no way I can browse by Album Artist on the iPod. So when I go to a particular genre (e.g. “Classical Indian”) and then browse by artists, I have multiple entries - “Pt. Ravi Shankar and Ustaad Alla Rakha”, and “Pt. Ravi Shankar and Ustaad Zakir Hussain”. Both these tracks might be from the same album even, but they’ll appear separately. And so, on my iPod: (1) the artist list is huge and messed up, and (2) if I want to play other tracks from that same album, I’ll have to choose the song and then hold the menu button to get the “Browse Album” option, then select the album, and then play all songs in it. Very cumbersome. And not neat and elegant as you’d expect Apple products to be. 

I spent a good part of yesterday midnight trying to find a solution for this. Many posts on the Internet said I could make the iPods work around this by checking the “Compilation” box and using the “Sort Artist” field. None of them worked for me, unfortunately. 

I guess the only option I have is to change my iPod browsing habits. After drilling down by Genre, I mustn’t browse by artist, but must instead choose the “All Albums” option and then browse by albums. This way I can see all the albums along with the artist names beneath it. This is an extra click for me, but seeing that there are many posts on the Internet asking for this feature and Apple hasn’t implemented it yet, I guess there’s nothing else to do. :-/


Saw “Sherlock Holmes” on Christmas Eve. First day first show here in Oman.

What can I say - awesome movie! Great direction, great background music, and above all superb acting by Robert Downey. He makes Sherlock Holmes come alive. With his quirkiness and attitude and mannerisms. Whoa! Can’t imagine anyone else doing justice to that role.

Guy Ritchie finally proves that he is not limited to British Gangster movies. I am now eagerly waiting for the sequel to Sherlock Holmes and RocknRolla.

Must mention that I was very impressed with the little attention to detail given to Holmes in one scene. Holmes is at a restaurant, waiting for Dr. Watson and Mary, and the scene shows how Holmes is taking in all the stimuli coming from all around him. Its a small thing, but that scene showed me that the director (or screenplay writer) had thought through the character. I had always wondered how a person like Sherlock Holmes would find day to day life. It would be very difficult for him coz his brain would be constantly analyzing all the bits of info gathered by his sense, analyzing them, cataloging them - wouldn’t such a brain (and the person attached to it) get bogged down?

Great movie!