Phoenix

Mac4Lin has been featured in the January 2009 issue of Linux Magazine. It has been included under title "Projects under move" alongwith AWN and pdfsam. Here is the link to the write-up. The whole article can be found in PDF format here or you can always buy the print version and read it there ;) Meanwhile, the Mac4Lin downloads page at Sourceforge.net has been updated with a new archive. This contains new themes and scripts. The themes fix the infamous "Engine Error" in the newest version of GNOME. The pack includes an updated installation script which does not attempt to set the GDM theme automatically. Also, a user contributed Mac4Lin uninstall script is now included in the pack. Feel free to drop in any complaints/suggestions. Edit: The link seems to be down. The PDF can be viewed here .

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 ...

Being away from home you mostly don't feel like celebrating (unless of corz, you were "caged" at home! :P ), but then birthdays are something which get you in the mood; especially after getting your face painted with the cream! About 10 of my friends were part of my birthday celebrations this year. Very thoughtfully they'd got a chocolate cake with my name "engraved" on it! The cake was looking just yummy. Poor cake.. if only it'd know its fate ;) After cutting the cake my face was "decorated" with the delicious cream, smeared all over! We all had a ball on my birthday. The photos, as usual, are on my Picasa Album. Being away from home I couldn't visit the orphanage this time on my birthday, unlike last year. But my wonderful mum went to the orphanage and spent time with the kids. Some simple things in life sure give us a lot of satisfaction :)

With my mid-terms over, it was time for some outing. We hadn't been anywhere since our classes started. Class - Home - Lab and the cycle continued! Two cents of Hope (TCH) team decided to plan an outing to Asheville. Its like a "small" hill station, something like Ooty in India. About 30 of us in three 11 seater cars drove to Asheville on 18th October 2008. The Fall season is just beginning to show its colors. The leaves on the trees change from green to yellow then to red/pink color and finally fall off. This change is called 'Fall Colors'. This phenomenon has just begun and trees are half green, half yellow in Raleigh as of now. To see Fall colors in full glory Asheville was the perfect place and we hit the road. The temperature was close to 0C there. The trip was wonderful... a trip to remember. The photos can be seen in the right frame - Now Playing. PS: I know I need to update the MS in US and the Mac4Lin posts. I'll do it soon.

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...

What is the value of a cent? Well.. actually nothing in the US, but certainly something in India. Just like drops fill up a bucket, cents collectively mean a lot. In their own words: The Power of Cents - "Little drops of water, little grains of sand, make the mighty ocean, and the pleasant land." Two Cents of Hope (TCH) is all about creating a responsible and self-sustaining society. A society like this can be created by imparting education to the aspiring children and youth. TCH focuses on providing educational opportunities to deserving children and youth who crave to learn but cannot because of financial constraints and other such factors. The organization supports such deserving students against the harsh realities of life and makes an effort to help make their dreams come true. Committed volunteers across the globe work closely in order to ensure that resources reach deserving students and monitor the progress of the student ensuring fairness and proper utilization of fu...

Mac4Lin is back! This is the version 1.0 Release Candidate. Some components are still under development. Currently the shell script is not able to set the GDM theme, cursor theme, sounds, emerald theme. They need to be manually set. Also components like Firefox3, Thunderbird theme, awn theme/plugins etc. are still under development. The Mozilla themes may not be stable. Hence use the non-core components of Mac4Lin at your own risk. Documentation is still in the pipeline. I decided to release the RC anyway so that patrons can start using it and update to the stable version when development is complete. Whats new: Mac4Lin v1.0 RC - 9th September, 2008 New! Automated Installer in the form of a shell script New GDM theme Supports the newest version of GNOME and Xfce New Mozilla themes specifically built for Mac4Lin Adium style AWN status icons for Pidgin Mac style scrollbars, menus Other tweaks in GTK theme Adium sounds for Pidgin New usplash Keeping up the tradition I'm including the ...