scratching an itch

"PCI devices always “steal” RAM, even on a system with less memory. You just don’t..."

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 09:27:47 +0400

“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?

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 08:45:13 +0400

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

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 08:20:42 +0400

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...

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 01:19:35 +0400

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...

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 00:56:01 +0400

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...

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 00:47:28 +0400

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...

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 10:05:01 +0400

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...

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 15:49:32 +0400

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!

I wanted to post this earlier but never got a chance to. Apple’s released a new firmware for...

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 15:44:52 +0400

I wanted to post this earlier but never got a chance to.

Apple’s released a new firmware for the iPod Classic 6G (the one released in Sept 2009). This one adds support for iTunes U so that it appears as a category of its own. Finally! Thank you Apple. This is a wonderful update coz so far all my iTunes U stuff were appearing mixed with the other audio and video, but now they are separate like Podcasts.

I would have liked a similar update for my iPod Nano too. Maybe I haven’t got it yet coz I have an older Nano (4G, released in Sept 2007). But I am ok for now coz I don’t use the Nano for iTunes U and Podcasts anyways.

Thank you Apple, once again.

Sagar Alias Jacky. Whoa, what a movie! I sat down to watch this movie yesterday (on Asianet,...

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 15:41:01 +0400

Sagar Alias Jacky. Whoa, what a movie!

I sat down to watch this movie yesterday (on Asianet, Christmas Day special) with the lowest of expectations. Every review I read about this movie said it was crap. But I guess the reviews were wrong, or my expectations were low enough that I found the movie good.

I loved this movie. What direction. What cinematography and background score. The only thing I didn’t like about this movie was Mohanlal. Man, that guy’s fat! Seeing a fat guy like him walk around in tight dresses and run and beat people leaner than him is kinda unrealistic. If the director had put someone else in his place - Mamooty, Dileep, or even Prithiviraj - things would be much more believable.

I can understand why this movie was a flop though. It is unlike other Mallu movies. It focuses a lot on the style and cinematography, and has too much unbelievable action for the Mallu crowd to accept. Mohanlal walks alone into the villain’s den, shooting everyone left and right, and even though every one is shooting back at Mohanlal not a single bullet so much so as grazes him! That’s too much creative liberties to take with my sense of reality. And then there’s this great assassin who never misses a shot, and yet when he shoots Mohanlal he always misses. First he shoots one of Mohanlal’s henchmen, the other time he shoots a tree! What crap. Let Mohanlal get injured. Maybe on his left arm. Or a leg. Make it a bit difficult for the guy to beat up the bad guy.

Such scenes work in Tamil movies coz when we watch Tamil movies we suspend our sense of reality anyways. Tamil movies are movies where a skinny hero can beat dozens of baddies with easy. Tamil movies are movies where not so good looking heroes have cute and pretty heroines lusting after them. But that isn’t the case in Malayalam movies. In Malayalam, we are more pragmatic; more balanced. Someone has to die. Either the hero, or the hero’s closest friend(s). Or at least the hero’s mother. And we definitely don’t have not so good looking chaps are heroes; they are relegated to being the hero’s friend or comedian etc.

And oh, what was Bhavana’s role in this movie? Strong reporter. First she hates Sagar. Then he saves a kid and her. And then she hears some good stuff about him. And suddenly her emotions take a round-about and she starts to love him!? C’mon! She has respect for him, I can understand. After a lot of meetings she starts to love him, I can understand. But what’s this? A sudden development of feelings? So much so that even on her deathbed and when she’s unconscious she’s calling out his name.

I think Bhavana’s character is simply there so the director can arrange to have someone close to the hero killed. Like I said above, we Mallus like to have a balance. For every few baddies that get knocked off, we like to see someone from the good camp too sacrificed. So the director thought he’d introduce a woman reporter - this serves multiple purposes in that (1) the first movie too had a woman reporter to whom Sagar was close, (2) Bhavana’s good looking so we can get a song out of her, and (3) we’ll make her say she’s in love with Sagar etc so people start to think she’s close to him and then we can kill her off. No one else needs to die (except for that baldy henchman of Sagar, but that’s ok, he wasn’t close to Sagar any ways).

But. Even in spite of all the points above, I loved this movie. Amal Neerad should make more movies. Maybe not in Malayalam coz of the reasons I mentioned above, perhaps in Tamil or Hindi. (And Malayalam too, if he want’s to. I’ll definitely watch his movies!)

I wonder why I don’t use Opera regularly. It’s a browser I like a lot (small size, tons...

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 10:32:00 +0400

I wonder why I don’t use Opera regularly. It’s a browser I like a lot (small size, tons of good features in built, fast, sync) and yet I always choose Google Chrome over it. Is it because Chrome is more hyped?

I guess its coz Opera tends to act slow with Google Reader. Maybe its JavaScript isn’t strong? Dunno. And since I use Google Reader a lot, I stick with something that works well with it (in this case Chrome, and occasionally Firefox).

I mention all this because Chrome doesn’t have bookmark sync yet on Linux (Mint). And although it renders fonts better than Firefox (on Linux), it isn’t as good as Opera. Moreover Opera has sync, so my bookmarks and search etc are all transferred across; and Opera has Mouse Gestures so no need to wait/ hunt an extension for it. I really must start using Opera more. It’s a good browser but sadly neglected (not just by me but most users I guess).

I updated my E75 to the latest firmware 201.12.01 the other day. It’s supposed to bring a load...

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 12:00:53 +0400

I updated my E75 to the latest firmware 201.12.01 the other day. It’s supposed to bring a load of speed improvements and such, but I didn’t see any. Its also supposed to improve the email client, but that still sucks.

(I find the email client sucky coz (1) its slow and (2) it doesn’t work well with my email provider. It fetches mails from the Inbox fine but never picks up mails from the other folders. Tried it over 3g and Wireless, tried playing with whatever settings I could find - but no go. I was hoping this update will improve things, but it hasn’t).

Added to that, the update deleted all my contacts. Everything else was left as it is, but the contacts got wiped clean (not the groups though). I wonder why that happened. This phone’s supposed to have User Data Protection and all. Maybe its because the phone contacts are synced to Gmail via Mail for Exchange, and so when the email client was updated it did something. Since I sync with Gmail, it wasn’t a biggie. The next sync got everything back (but it was a bother coz I had to add all my contacts back to their respective groups etc).

A bigger problem was that after the update my phone started freezing for no reason. Once the phone’s locked, the keypad wouldn’t work. Which was weird. I figured that if I manually lock the phone, it unlocks fine. So I disabled the auto-lock feature hoping that will solve the issue, but then the phone began freezing just like that after a period of in-use. This led me to suspect the screensaver as causing some compatibility issue. My screensaver is a copy of the N86 screensaver - the one that shows the time. Had got it from the Internet as a .swf file. So I turned off the screensaver and the freeze-ups went away. Didn’t bother turning it on and investigating further.

And oh - a very good thing about Mint 8 is that unlike Ubuntu or OpenSUSE it has the fonts right in...

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 11:20:06 +0400

And oh - a very good thing about Mint 8 is that unlike Ubuntu or OpenSUSE it has the fonts right in Firefox. Apart from PCLinuxOS, I don’t think any other distro which I’ve tried has the fonts right. (Of course, I understand there are legal issues and so these extra fonts might be downloadeable and configureable, but I am talking about the out of box experience here).

I wonder why Linux Mint, which is based off Ubuntu, is so much better than Ubuntu. Linux Mint is...

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 11:18:30 +0400

I wonder why Linux Mint, which is based off Ubuntu, is so much better than Ubuntu. Linux Mint is really what Ubuntu should be. Polished. Working out of the box. A pleasant user experience.

If you recollect my posts from afore, Ubuntu never managed to work with my widescreen monitor. But I tried Linux Mint 8 today, and whoa! it works well. The Live CD even gets the correct resolution, and the system’s snappy! I think I’ll install Linux Mint and give it a go as my main system.

I started checking out Mint from version 5 or so but I don’t remember why I didn’t stick on with it then. I do recollect having good impressions about it back then too - especially the way it exposed the Compiz stuff to the user - but something didn’t work and so I left it. Later, Mint 6 and 7 were briefly explored, but I left it coz (I think) I didn’t like the MintMenu. But Mint 8 seems good so far. Yaay.

While on holiday in India, I re-saw “The Usual Suspects”. The is the first full-length...

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 10:48:48 +0400

While on holiday in India, I re-saw “The Usual Suspects”. The is the first full-length movie I’ve watched on my iPod Touch. “The Usual Suspects” is also one of the first movies I saw back in college at Delhi. In fact, that’s when I started watching Hollywood movies big time.

I love the villain of this movie - Keyser Söze. It never made sense to me though as to why the villain would allow himself to get caught and then weave this elaborate story to get released; it seemed so pointless. I was hoping that this re-watch would offer some clues that I might have missed out earlier on, but it didn’t. Nevertheless, the movie’s great. A definite must watch.

“Year One” is fun! Loads of fun. I love Jack Black movies. And I am crazy about Harold...

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 10:41:59 +0400

“Year One” is fun! Loads of fun. I love Jack Black movies. And I am crazy about Harold Ramis movies. They are often very good.

“The Taking of Pelham 123” is a good watch. Purely for the pleasure of watching Denzel...

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 10:40:31 +0400

“The Taking of Pelham 123” is a good watch. Purely for the pleasure of watching Denzel Washington and (to a lesser extent) John Travolta. They’ve tried to make the movie stylish and stuff, but the story and direction left me unimpressed. I feel I have seen better stuff. Denzel’s character is good, especially the bits he negotiates with Travolta. And the idea behind the hijack is … well, fine. Like I said, I wasn’t blown off by it, maybe coz the movie makes it obvious that that is Travolta’s plan when they show him staring at his laptop most of the time.

Watch it once.

“Love Aaj Kal” sucks. I don’t know what the director was trying to get across with...

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 10:37:31 +0400

“Love Aaj Kal” sucks. I don’t know what the director was trying to get across with this movie. Maybe he just wanted to appear as all philosophical and wise when it comes to matters of the heart, or maybe the movie’s just bad direction and story telling. Apart from the fact that the two lead characters were trying to be all practical when it comes to love, and they didn’t succeed, nothing else made sense about this movie. What’s so different about this movie compared to all the other movies about characters who don’t think they are in love and yet realize later on that they are? Nothing, as far as I can tell.

Crappy movie. Stay away from it.

Is it just me or have others too noticed the fact that Google Chrome is sluggish when a machine...

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 09:48:13 +0400

Is it just me or have others too noticed the fact that Google Chrome is sluggish when a machine resumes from hibernation while Firefox is snappy. I haven’t tested with Opera so can’t say much about that. And IE 8 too, as far as I remember, is snappy (but that’s ok coz its integrated with the OS blah blah). Hmm.

15 Ways Nokia’s N900 Is Better Than Apple’s iPhone (and 5 ways it’s not) - Starry Hope Productions

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 12:23:34 +0400

15 Ways Nokia’s N900 Is Better Than Apple’s iPhone (and 5 ways it’s not) - Starry Hope Productions:

A well-balanced comparison. I have my eyes on the N900 ever since news leaked about it. If the phone’s reasonably priced in Oman, I hope to purchase it.