Phoenix

My iTouch looked drab. It was screaming for a new UI, a new fresh face and so I got to work! Once a UI developer always a UI developer (no matter what platform :D). I took iNav and modded it to my liking - integrating widgets, editing the main menu, revamping the dock among numerous other things. I present you the iNav ANi Remix! Haf a look at the pics floating around this post. Kudos to the base iNav :) This UI has been customized for iPod Touch, however by placing the Phone and Text/SMS icons this interface can be converted to an iPhone UI. For those of you who dunno how to install it, I'm gonna quote the procedure. I'm too lazy to type :P Btw, before you proceed make sure you haf a jailbroken iPhone/iTouch for this (obviously!). If you are comfortable with SSH'ing into your device and uploading files then don't bother reading this tutorial! :D [Guide] iPhone/iPod Touch with 2.2.1 Firmware (Tested, might work with older firmware) Categories V2.23 (Tested, Might Work ...

A lot of you folks must haf heard about GPGPU (General-Purpose computation on GPUs). GPGPU is the term associated with using GPUs for general purpose computing. Today's CPUs are approaching the theoretical "speed" limit. A single core maxes out at about 3 Ghz. Going anything above does not give proportional performance gain. Its more of a liability since it involves more power, more components and hence costs more. Of corz, multi-cores is the solution which the industry has adopted; but then according to industry analysts, if there is no break-through in fundamental design of the processor then multi-cores will not scale beyond 8 cores. So, how do we satisfy all those number hungry programs like Folding@Home? Use the shamelessly powerful GPUs as co-processors to the present-day CPUs! This idea was explored way back in the '90s. The first public project was BrookGPU which exploited the GPU for general purpose computing. But since the guys who developed it were not the ...

What does the PS3 mean to you? Just a gaming console? Think again! The power under the hood is immense. The PPU and the SPEs together make it a very powerful computing device. Stack up about 8 of them and voila! you get a supercomputer! Haf a look at this screenshot: (Thats our PS3 Cluster on which almost all the time I SSH to. Ah ha! Now I know where all the PS3s from our Library haf vanished! :P) One of our labs at NCSU runs a cluster of 8 PS3s. How powerful is it? Well.. quite powerful for hundreds of NCSU students to remotely login and complete their assignments and projects on it, simultaneously! The cluster is connected to the main University network and hence sharing is a piece of cake. Its faaaast.. responsive and absolutely apt in such a scenario. The cluster runs 64-bit Fedora Core 5 over a hypervisor layer custom-developed by Sony. Fedora was an obvious choice considering the fact that Red Hat's Head Office is inside our University Campus! :P [OK, I know NCSU gets RHEL a...

I needed an external HDD to carry my data and was looking at the options since a week. I'd zeroed in on either Western Digital Passport or the Transcend StoreJet. Went to the electronic market to buy and saw that the WD Passport is almost on its way out. Nowhere was it available. Instead everywhere it was being replaced by WD Elements. The build quality was quite flimsy and somehow it didn't appeal to me. In the end I bought a Transcend StoreJet 25 Mobile 250GB USB 2.0. I must say that I'm pretty impressed by this device. It has the toughest protection I've ever seen for an external drive (apparently meets the US Military drop test). Speed is impressive; a sustained 28 MB/s. Phew.. Thats fffffffaaaaaaaaast! It also has one-touch backup and sync button (works only in Windows with the StoreJet Elite software). The included Windows software lets you backup, sync, encrypt data etc. Would I recommend this product? Certainly! :)

Yeah.. I know.. I know.. its been a looooooong time since I bored everyone. So here I am, doing what I am best at - boring people with the content on my blog! So whats new in my life?? Quite a few things... First gOS is getting a new look. It will be an OS to look forward to! So guys and gals, get ready to witness one of the most web-centric OS'! I replaced my laptop with a new Desktop. Its big, bad and noisy! But then can't help it.. performance comes with a price! FOSS India guys did mail me a questionnaire regading Mac4Lin and FOSS India Awards, which I dutifully answered. Expecting that to see in the next Issue :) BTW, this month DIGIT also gave away Mac4Lin on its DVD. Oh yes, I finally got calls from UTD and NCSU. Some universities are yet to reply. So waiting for that before I take a decision. What else? Hmmm.. I guess thats enough for this week! :D