There are 4 main causes of battery hogs:

1. Cell Phone Usage
2. Display
3. CPU usage
4. Sensors like (GPS, Wifi etc)

Lets start with the easy one:

Cell Phone Usage

Cell tower is the one that provides you connectivity, EDGE and 3G. Unfortunately weak signal can cause this to use exorbitant amount of  battery. If you are experiencing full battery drain in about 2-3 hours then this is most probably the culprit. First thing to do is go Settings -> About Phone -> Battery Use -> Cell Phone standby. Look @ Time spent without signal. Any number other than 0 is very dangerous. There are no practical solutions to this problem. Search for network and fix it. This will prevent phone from searching network when signal is weak. However this may not work when you go on roaming and if you spend most time out of signal this will still consume battery.

Display

The only downside of having a large screen is that it consumes exponential charge. If you using an LCD screen, your phone is only likely to survive 4-5 hrs of screen on time. This is assuming that you are not performing any CPU intensive task during that period like gaming, video etc. It is highly likely that you will consume 4 hrs of usage out of your phone in the entire day hence its unlikely that your phone will survive more than a day. The only aspect to debug here is if some freaky software or buggy ROM is keeping your screen up. Gingerbread provides you clean interface to check your screen on period. You can use Juice Plotter on non gingerbread phones but it has been known to consume a lot of battery itself. Make sure you only use to to debug your screen and not on a regular basis.

Have a look at your Screen ON time and make sure you are getting around 4 hrs of usage. Any thing less than that means that you have issues with your battery. Look through the CPU Usage and Sensor usage area  debug those issues.

Solutions:

1. Choose an AMOLED screen phone: AMOLED screens consume very little battery in comparison to LCD Screens.
2. If you have an AMOLED screen then choose darker themes while browsing/surfing/wallpapers. A light color pixel consumes about 5.8 times more energy than dark pixel. This method will not work for LCD phones. You can see the impact of changed wall paper using Current Widget. This will tell you how much charge your phone is consuming(wait for couple of min for it to refresh when you change the wall paper).
3. Choose  lower screen brightness in general. Rely on Power control widgets to increase screen brightness when required.
4. Reduce display timeout to 30sec-1min. Adjust that to a time that is comfortable to you.

CPU usage

1. Launch Spare Parts. Fortunately this is bundled in Gingerbread phones, for Froyo you can try out this market app https://market.android.com/details?id=com.androidapps.spare_parts and hope it will work.
2. Look at Battery history inside Spare Parts. Select “Other Usage” in first drop down.
3. Check out Running time vs Screen On time.

If these two numbers are widely different then you have a problem on your hands. This means that some app is keeping CPU awake even when your screen is off. To find out which app

1. Launch Spare Parts
2. Look at battery history and select “Partial Wake Usage”
3. Now you will see which app is the culprit and eating up CPU.

Now comes the hard part . You can reduce your running time by disabling this app. If the app manufacturer is good, he would have provided you means to reduce its battery usage(Disabling sync, changing sync from push to hourly, reducing data refresh etc). If not then you should uninstall the app and use something else for that purpose. Keep repeating this exercise till your running time is almost equal to your screen on time.  You will see radical improvements in your standby time with this exercise which in turn can reduce your charge cycles to as much as 2 days.

Other than choosing good apps which use CPU wisely some suggestions:

1. Use less push sync in general. True push is only available with Blackberry everybody else is doing a very frequent pull to emulate push, so make sure you don’t use push where its not required.
2. In my opinion disable auto sync all together and do a manual sync when needed. You can put the auto sync button in your power widget and flick it on and off whenever needed
3. Use Juice Defender it will give you good usage patterns(disabling sync at night etc).

Solution for Advanced Users: if you need all the apps that sync but still want to reduce your battery usage you can try Set CPU to underclock your CPU. You can also use the inbuilt underclocking baked into the CM7 ROM. This solution will only work if you have rooted your phone and your kernel supports underclocking. Default android kernel comes with OnDemand CPU clocking. CPU almost instantly scales to max frequency(like 1Ghz) from its min frequency(like 245Mhz) when required. You will need this kind of speed for gaming/browsing etc however its not required for sync and other background tasks. Set CPU lets you configure so that

1. Your CPU scales slowly(Conservating  scaling/Power intensive), especially when you have very little battery left
2. Reduce highest CPU frequency to something like 700 Mhz especially during the night or when the screen is off

Keep in mind however that these solutions can impact your phones performance while rendering pages, gaming etc, so do not reduce cpu frequency or scaling when your screen is on to prevent frustrating experiences.

Sensor usage

If you have reached here then the problem is quite simple shut off all your sensors . Well Android provides various ways of debugging sensor usage, have a look at your Spare parts => Battery History => Sensor Usage/GPS Usage. If you see a lot of devices are using GPS Sensor you are likely to see a lot of battery loss. Its unfair that android does not let us control which device has access to my location and which does not, I hope they will add that in future versions of android. Meanwhile if you see useless apps tryto access location(mostly to serve relevant ads etc) then you can adopt the following solutions:

1. Disable both ways to determine your location in Settings => Location and Security. If you really need location then go for “use wireless location” instead of GPS for location. Use GPS only in critical situations where precise location is very necessary
2.  Change Wifi sleep policy (in Settings => Wireless and Networks => Wifi Settings => Menu key => Advanced => Wifi Sleep policy => When screen is off) This will switch off your wifi and turn on  mobile network when you are not using the screen. This way your background apps can use your slow mobile network to sync while saving wifi juice.
3. Turn on “Only 2G network” in (Settings => Wireless and Networks =>  Mobile Networks) . This will switch off your 3G network and use only 2G which uses much less battery and is much slower. You can also use 2G/3G switcher in power widget to control this if you rely on 3G for browsing.

Got any other suggestions?? Let me know in comments…

Apache Mahout

For the past two years, I have been working with this amazing bunch of people whilst, being paid by Google in their summer of code program in a project called Mahout. And like the name says, it is trying to tame the young beast known as Hadoop. I have received a lot from the community. Being part of the project, I have got some real exposure to Java, data mining, machine learning and hands on experience over distributed systems like Hadoop, Hbase, Pig.  The project is still in its infancy, but, its ambitions are high in the sky. I am happy to announce the second release of the project, and proud to be a part of it. I hope people will adapt it in their projects and that it becomes the defacto standard machine learning library the way lucene and hadoop has become in their respective focus areas.

If you are already excited and want to take it for a ride, read Grant’s article on IBM developerworks here
The release announcement below

If you have less than 1 million rows then you are better off using mysql’s inbuilt commands

Alter table <tblname> create index (<column name>);

If you have more than than then read on…..

The concepts I will be using are as follows:

Memory Tables:

These tables are hash maps that mysql stores in memory. These tables are temporary (in the sense they disappear after mysql server restart)  and have limited rows. However they are lighting fast on index creation or sorting.

Partitioning:

Somebody in Mysql finally realized that to be fast database has to split the data across servers. Finally in version 5 they have introduced partitioning. If you have the luxery of more than 1 server you can use this. I did not have this luxury so will do indexing without it.

Merge tables:

So these are 1 server counterpart of Partitioning. If you want to split your dataset into multiple tables and run single query on all of them you can use Merge tables. They have their own share of problems, but for general functionality of insertion, deletion, searching and dumping, they work great. The only 2 major limitations one that they only work if base tables are MyISAM and searching on them is multiples of logn(see below if interested)

Irrelevant Mathematical jargon(feel free to skip)

So if you search  table on indexed columns then search takes Log(n) time (n = number of tuples). So imagine you have 100*n size of table and you create 100 sub tables of n each. Now searching on one table will take Log(n) time and total time is 100*log(n)=log(n to the power 100). If it were a single table it would have taken Log(100*n) =Log(100)+log(n). So in a single table it scale logarithmically but merge table scales exponentially.

I will explain the steps that I took below, you can customize them to your dataset.

There are several ways of creating index however mine will require you to have quite a powerful machine and a reliable power supply. Atleast 2gb of ram is required and more is better here. If you have around 2 million rows then skip to step 4.

Step 0

This step is about reconnaissance. It will determine the numerical data in the next steps. You need to know the approximate amount of space your row takes. This will determine the size of your memory table. You can determine the size of memory table by trial and error also but a numerical estimate will help.  In the steps below I will assume initial table as client_data and final table as client_data_sorted. All other tables are temp and generated on the spot.

Step 1: Increasing allowed size of Memory table to fit data

The first thing you need to do is extend the allowed memory limit of mysql. To sort faster we will need memory tables. Do so by adding the lines marked as red below under  [mysqld] in my.cnf file. Typically located in /etc/my.cnf or /etc/mysql/my.cnf depending on your distribution.

my.cnf file

[mysqld]

datadir=/var/lib/mysql
socket=/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock
..
max_heap_table_size=4096M
tmp_table_size=4096M

Adding these lines will ensure that mysql can now take 4GB space for storing memory tables.Feel free to increase this number if you have higher memory but ensure that you dont encounter swapping.

Step 2: Dump data in memory table for indexing

Now you need to create a  memory table with same structure as your final table.

create table client_data_memory like client_data_sorted;
alter table client_data_memory engine=Memory;

The second line alters the engine to memory. The only thing to keep in mind is that memory engine keeps all the data in memory hence if your mysql server restarts or machine restarts then all the data is lost. Ensure that you never rely on them as a reliable storage.

Figure out  how many rows your memory table can contain. In a typical scenario this would be order of 10 million. This value will change depending on your system’s memory and values set in step 1.  You can test it out by inserting data from source table to memory table. After the limit the process will interrupt in the middle giving error like table is full.

Insert into client_data_memory select * from client_data limit <test limit value>;

Ex:  Insert into client_data_memory select * from client_data limit 0,10000000;    # 10 million rows from 0th row

Step 4: Storing data from Memory table to MyISAM table

If you have order of 10 million rows then the process stops for you here. Just use an alter table command to create index on memory table(3-4 minutes) then insert the memory table data into client_data_sorted table. You just saved yourself  hours of pain. If you have more than 10 million then  skip this step.

Alter table client_data_memory add index (<column name>);

(or sort the table)

Insert into client_data_sorted select * from client_data_memory;

If you can store 10million rows in your memory table and total tables are around 40 million then you are better off iteratively repeating the above steps. Merely sort 10 million then insert, then truncate memory table , then insert next 10 million , sort then insert. The process will take exponentially more time every time but still will finish far faster than normal.  If you have more than 40 million then read on. A world of pain awaits you….

Step 5: Create Merge table for accessing data

The above process will not work iteratively for you if you have more than 50 million rows as while inserting you have to merge too. Suppose your memory can store 10 million and you have 180 million rows then create 18 temporary tables of engine type MyISAM.

create table data_temp1 like client_data_sorted;
alter table data_temp1 engine=MyISAM;

Now use the above technique to insert data 10 million a piece into each of these tables. So data_temp0 will contain 0-10 million then data_temp1 will have 10 miliion to 20 million and so forth.

truncate table client_data_memory;insert into client_data_memory select * from client_data limit
0,15000000;insert into data_temp0 select * from client_data_memory;
truncate table client_data_memory;insert into client_data_memory select * from client_data limit
10000000,15000000;insert into data_temp1 select * from client_data_memory;

…….

This will take quite a long time, for me it took 10 min for every 10 million so 180 min in total. Meanwhile consider some of the more worthwhile alternatives like  hive, its too late for it now but its worth a look. This is also useful.

Now create a merge table. A merge table is created on top of several MyISAM tables of same structure. Its important to have same structure and MyISAM tables. You can use this as  a single table however all the searching is performed on all tables and hence is slower than single table.

create table client_data_merge like client_data_sorted;
alter table client_data_merge engine=merge union=

(data_temp0,data_temp1,data_temp2,data_temp3,data_temp4,data_temp5,data_temp6,data_temp7,data_temp8,data_temp

9,data_temp10,data_temp11,data_temp12) INSERT_METHOD=LAST;

Step 5: Final Sorted table(if required)

For most temporary uses this merge table will work. You can use this table normally. Insert data into the table etc etc. However if the limitations of merge tables are not acceptable you have to create the final table  from this merge table. You can use merge tables to dump the data in a sorted fashion according to indexes or simply use

Insert into <tblname> Select * from <merge table> order by <index1>,<index2>…..

This way you get to Insert much faster as the data is already sorted and mysql simply has to insert the data and update the indexes. If this method helped.. do let me know in the comments.

In my Tharavadu (Ancestral home), I have drunk pure Toddy made from the sap of a Coconut or Palm Tree. Believe me this light alcoholic drink can blow away all the products of UB group currently in the market. You might have heard of Fenny and other Indian Locally Brewed delights. So with the rich history and wealth of knowledge for creating alcoholic drinks, why do we still suck at making Beer. I got a small tip from my friend Rohit Sakhwalkar (Sakhu) during my recent visit to Gurgaon. A million thanks to him for making not just my day but the whole drinking career ahead .

Why do Indian Beers taste bad? The answer is some organic compound which behaves like Glycerin. This is the reason why there is a bitter aftertaste. Yes, Glycerin exists in the alcoholic state as Glycerol. My mother who is a whiz at Organic Chemistry had given me some insight into this molecule. Due to its higher molecular weight and inductive effect of the Hydrogen atoms, Glycerol is less soluble than Ethanol in water. So after a bit of google search and poking around beer forums, I was convinced that this was the culprit behind the bad tase. Glycerin is added to beer as a preservative. As you know Indian climate is close to being ideal for beer storage. But all major sources of information like Wikipedia denies this fact. They also says that pure glycerine is sweet in taste. And that Glycerine is a major constituent of Bio Diesel which is gonna run the vehicles in the future. So basically it is gonna run both man and machine alike.

So with the help of Rohit’s tip, I tried his method of separation of the contaminent from Beer. Here are the steps and photographs of the same

Step By Step: Removal of Glycerin from Beer

1. Get a Glass/tumbler of water.
2. Open the bottle of beer slowly so as to create less turbulence.
3. Cover the mouth of the beer with your thumb and slowly turn it upside down with mouth inside the water. This is the trickiest part, ensure you do not shake the bottle and cause the dissolved Carbon Dioxide to effervesce. The reason will be clear below.
4. As soon as the bottle is upside down you will see thick yellow colored liquid coming out. Which I believe is the organic compound mixed with  the colouring agents in the beer.
5. Keep it there for some time. Maybe a min or two. I kept it for over 5 mins. Hoping to drain out the stuff completely losing some beer in the process.
6. Put it back and enjoy the amazing taste of what is actually Beer. Yes my friend that is how Beer tastes like. If it doesnt taste close to Budweiser beer , you might have done something seriously wrong. I even feel that Carlsberg is de-glycerinified Kalyani beer, Who knows!. I dont care as long my b rew tastes awesome.

Take look at the only video I found online talking about this. I couldnt take one myself for my camera wasn’t distinguishing the colors
Video showing the removal of Glycerine from beer

Get ready for some geek funda. The science (or atleast my hypothesis) behind this method.

When you put a bottle upside down, the atmospheric pressure is pushing the water in the tumbler, the low pressure created inside the top of the bottle is causing the liquid not to fall down into the tumbler. So at equilibrium, the liquid inside the beer + water starts to settle down based on its density. Glycerine(or whatever Organic compound  being denser than water settles down into the glass of water, Water from the tumbler will go into the beer bottle(but not much, if you dont shake the bottle). If the Carbon Dioxide had started effervescing, the gas content inside the beer bottle would have started increasing, this would have caused the beer to flow into the glass due to increasing air pressure.

I am a power user. When I surf, I have around 20-25 tabs open. I have many processes running simultaneously on my windows 7 RC. When I code, I have a test Ubuntu installation running on VMware.  To do all these, I spent most of my earnings on a 17″, Core2duo 2.4Ghz, 4GB ram, NVidia 8600M GT Dell Inspiron Laptop 1720. I have been using Google Chrome since the day it was made available and i keep up with the latest builds of the same. I also love the fact that it was zipper than my earlier favorite(Firefox) in opening new tabs. But, the whole time Google Chrome has been stressing my laptop’s hardware.

To prove my point, take look at the screenshots from Process Explorer, a Task Manager replacement for Windows. The Laptop was restarted and the screenshots were taken after around 4-5 hours of casual browsing with around 25 tabs open. I also had a Hadoop installation running on a VMware Player. Simultaneously, I was also dabbling  around with some code in eclipse .

The following were my observations

• The Browser Process of Chrome is doing over 10 Million Page Faults. The closest that comes to this process is the Microsoft AntiMalware service(Morro engine) at 2 Million. As you can see in screenshot 1(below), the whole top list is dominated by Chome processes.
• The Flash process has over 70 Million Context Switches(see screenshot 2(below) which was taken 20 odd minutes after screenshot 1), @5000 Context Switches/sec which is quite appalling.  The nearest competitors are Interrupts, Chrome again, Google Talk (Another Windows Application from Google)
• Lastly, Techcrunch.com, Mike Arrington’s “Bloat-ware” Blog , one tab of which is taking around 500MB of RAM taking the total RAM occupied by all  Chrome  processes at 1.05Gb (Note: Firefox was really good at this. I seldom get past 400-500 MB on that many number of tabs). Also funny thing is that,  if you compare Techcrunch to Gmail, the latter  just takes 64MB of ram(see Chrome’s Process Manager screenshot above)

Let me teach my readers a quick Computer Science 101. The following explanations are over simplified, so if you are not satisfied with the explanation, go read Wikipedia for a detailed discussion over the same.

Page Fault: When a processor tries to fetch some block of data from the memory, if doesn’t find the data in the memory it tries to get that data from the hard disk. Operating system manages the blocks of memory and moves some of them to the HDD based on Most Recently used criterion. Since you know the over head of a disk access is way larger than a memory access, too many page faults translate to more spinning of the hard disk. Read Wikipedia for a detailed description

Context Switch: In a multiprocess environment like windows. The cost of switching from one process to another process is quite high. If an application keeps switching very fast, that means it’s not getting enough cpu time to do its work, and it is wreaking havoc on the other applications by decreasing their effective cpu time also. Read Wikipedia for a detailed description

Few things come out of this little insight

• Flash NPAPI plugin is a useless piece of crap. Even after 10 major versions, they still have an ill designed system. (Some people have told me this was specific to chrome as according to them Flash runs fine on Firefox)
• Chrome even though is very fast in terms of HTML rendering and JavaScript execution. But, it kills the system by the large number of PageFaults and Context Switches it does.
• Techcrunch seems to be doing more job than a complex web-application like Gmail. Or is it because the 20 odd flash ads they have on their Blog. They could be even doing mouse pointer/user tracking or even Javascript  code Instrumentation. Who knows!(Just Kidding). What ever it is, they need to find and fix the root cause of the problem.

If my readers believe they are also suffering from the same fate as I am, I would request them to put their stats up in the comments section.

I am using Chrome 3.0.193.0 with Flash 10.0 on a Win7 RC ( Yeah I know that it’s a unstable combination. But, even when I was using Chrome 2.0 on Vista SP1 with Flash 9, I had the same problem)

• Mostly they are specific to one or two sites
• In some cases they are shareware
• They have hardcoded techniques for url retrieval which outdate easily.

A slightly better technique for downloading is relying on sites to decode the url for you. This removes the latter 2 limitations of applications. For most of you who have come here Ripzor will suffice .  However the top limitation still remains if you are looking for a site not listed in ripzor.com. Also some times the url retrieval technique changes and sites do not update their scripts. I will give you the method to retrieve URLs in an easy manner using every day tools.

Tools required

1. Firefox
2. Firebug(or any other debugging tool)
3. [Optional] Downloader ( like flashget or Downthemall)

Dont get scared from the word debugger. This technique is mostly a misuse of the word debugging .  Now after you have installed the above “tools” . Lets start

Step 1: Select a video downloading site like youtube.com/dailymotion.com and pick a video. For further screenshots I have picked up this youtube video and this dailymotion video. The same techniques will work on any video site.

Step2: Now open video in Firefox and enable firebug debugging tool from Tools ->Firebug-> Open Firebug in a new window

Open Firebug in Firefox

Step3: Click on the youtube tab and click on Activate Firebug for the firefox tab button in the firebug window

Activate Firebug for Firefox tab

Step 4: Select the Net tab among Console/HTML/ CSS/Script/DOM and Net on the top . Then select the Flash tab. This tab will give you all the web requests that a .swf file will make. Most sites use flash players for playing the video so this tab will work. If the following steps dont work then select the All tab for seeing all requests

Tabs to be used are net and flash

Step5. Play the video you will get a screen like this in firebug. Now look for requests that look like video requests. For ex. those ending with .flv, .mp4 or in youtube’s case get_video. Right click on that link and select Copy Location. If there is no such link then you need to go back to step3 and select All tab instead of flash.

Copy link location

Step6. Use your downloader to download that video or paste that link in firefox itself to use it for downloading the video. In some cases you will have to close the video site tab to download this video as only one streaming might be allowed.

So now you can download any video from any video sharing site as long as the video is not encrypted with the player. Let me know what all sites you tried below.

SwipeBall is fun and addictive yet simple to learn and play! Light up bulbs by bouncing balls off of walls and lines that you draw by swiping your finger on the touchscreen! Balls bounce and change in color as they touch the colored walls.The objective of the game is to light up all bulbs – each with a ball of the same color before time runs out. Light up all bulbs and reach the next level – hit the light bulb with a ball of a different color and you lose. Game gets more exciting and challenging as you complete a level and encounter different wall layouts, colors, speed and number of balls!

SwipeBall is a must have for any user looking for a fun game that gives hours of entertainment and interaction and yet is quick to learn. Different levels of difficulty make it a perfect game to get started on and hone your skills and show off to your friends as you get better. Don’t tell us we didn’t warn you it’s addictive!

Download Now From Apple Appstore for 99 cents http://itunes.com/apps/swipeball

Features

- Multiple levels with different wall colors and layouts
- Touchscreen to create your own barriers while you play
- Sound effects to indicate you have lit a lamp and countdown as time runs out
- Increasing levels of difficulty as you get better
- Twenty-five levels for non-stop fun and action

SwipeBall - Level 20

SwipeBall - Level Selector

SwipeBall - Level 20

For support please send an email to “swipeball <at> thinking <dot> me” or post a comment here

PS. It took us over 3 months to get accepted into the Apple Developer Program from India.
Download Now From Apple Appstore for 99 cents http://itunes.com/apps/swipeball

This could be your Trackpad

Very few people know that every synaptics trackpad supports multitouch and as long as your OS supports it  you can always use multitouch to enhance your computers interface. Apple has patented several UI design elements ,hence has inhibited Windows and Linux to come out with similar UI elements like pinch and zoom, scroll etc.   

If you are using Windows xp, vista or Windows 7 then click here

Install Synaptics driver  in ubuntu

apt-get install  xserver-xorg-input-synaptics 

Now  edit your xorg.conf file

sudo vi /etc/X11/xorg.conf

find the input section

Section “InputDevice” Identifier “Synaptics Touchpad”

Add these lines in it

Option “HorizEdgeScroll” “on”

Option “VertEdgeScroll” “on”
Option “VertTwoFingerScroll” “on
Option “HorizTwoFingerScroll” “on”
Option “CornerCoasting” “on”
Option “PalmDetect” “on”
Option “CircularScrolling” “on”
Option “CircScrollTrigger” “3″

 

This could be your Trackpad

Very few people know that every synaptics trackpad supports multitouch and as long as your OS supports it you can always use multitouch to enhance your computers interface. Apple has patented several UI design elements ,hence has inhibited Windows and Linux to come out with similar UI elements like pinch and zoom, scroll etc.

 
If you are using Linux and want to setup multitouch then click here 

You only need a patched driver to enable multitouch features in synaptics. Download the latest driver from here

Download links (for XP/Vista 32/64-bit):
http://www.sendspace.com/file/9n9c6i
http://mihd.net/42vtopk

This driver is made from an outdated driver of synaptics. So you may have to uninstall your existing driver. 

1. Go to Add-Remove Software. 
2. Find and uninstall synaptic driver
3. Reboot

Extract the zip file(touchpad_synaptics_v10.2.4_vistax32x64_xpx32x64_modded_build2.zip) to a folder

Install selected driver.

This driver is not signed. Hence windows will issue a warning. Do not install this driver on your production machine. This is a development build and using it may crash your system

Now you can  enable these 3 features on your Windows Desktop using Synaptic Options. Go to bottom right in your Windows taskbar to select synaptics tray icon or search synaptic in control panel. Then select Synaptic touchpad in Device Settings. 

UPDATE: The driver has not functioned for some laptops. It is suited only for some laptops. If you have installed this driver, do let us know in the comments if this worked for you. Thanks!!!

Hyper-V is the new hypervisor based virtualization solution from Microsoft. The product is targeted mainly for the data centers for server consolidation. I have been using it since the day it became RTM and am really impressed by its performance and stability. There are some minor issues which is acceptable as the product is still young. I have a Intel Core 2 6420, which has the Intel-VT extension required for Hyper-V and 4 GB of ram sufficient enough for running a single guest. Hyper-V is supported only on windows 2008 server 64 bit edition.

Installation Steps

These are the installation steps for installing Hyper-V

1. Check if your processor supports either Intel-VT or AMD Pacifica extensions.
2. Install Windows 2008 server 64 bit edition.
3. Install all the updates.
4. Add the role Hyper-V using server manager.
5. Install updates for the Hyper-V role.

Now you are all set to install you guest operating system. Run the Hyper-V manager application to manage your guest operating systems. Create a new virtual machine and setup different properties like memory, number of processors etc.. If you are planning to install your guest operating system from network make sure that you add a legacy network adapter as the guest operating system wont be having drivers at install time for the normal network adapter. Once you are done installing the guest operating system install the integration services from the settings menu of that virtual machine. Installation of integration services is highly required for better performance and also getting remote desktop to work.

Issues

1) No audio on the virtual machine. How to listen to your favorite mp3′s ?

The first thing that you might notice is the lack of Audio device. Hyper-V is for running multiple servers on a single physical machine. Not many people play mp3′s on a production server, I suppose. So how do we get audio to work on your virtual machine ???

The solution is simple. Don’t use the hyper-v manager to connect to the guest operating system. Instead enable remote desktop on the guest machine and use mstsc to connect to the guest. If you are using windows 2003 as the guest you still find that the audio doesn’t work. There are couple of setting that you need to make to get audio to work. First thing is to change the windows audio service startup to automatic from disabled and start the service. This can be done by running services.msc from the run dialog. Next, you have to fire tscc.msc from the run dialog to change a couple of terminal services settings. In the connection tab, double click on the Rdp-tcp row to get the properties tab. Unselect the “Audio Mapping” option there and save the settings. Remember you have to logout from that session and start a new session for the settings to take effect. Of course simpler thing would be to reboot the guest. Connect again to the guest and enjoy your favorite mp3′s …..

2) Unreadable/fuzzy  text on LCD monitors if you are using remote desktop

So you think you solved your hyper-v problems by connecting using mstsc instead of the hyper-v manager,  then maybe you are using a CRT monitor or you have never seen cleartype in action. Yes, font smoothing doesn’t work with RDP if you have either windows XP or windows 2003 as the guest OS. And if you have a LCD monitor like me, you know how much pain in the *** it is to work on a LCD without font smoothing. So now you have to fix this cleartype issue.

Microsoft has finally issued a Hot fix for this feature at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/946633. Download the fix and install it. You have to reboot the machine for the fix to work. Also make sure the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows\TSEnableFontSmoothing is set to 1.

3) Strange cursor problem and fix

Also, when I used to connect to guest machine using the hyper-v manager instead of remote desktop client, I faced a weird problem with my mouse cursor. After using the guest machine for sometime may be a couple of hours the mouse pointer becomes fixed meaning that it doesn’t change depending on the thing beneath it. It sometimes becomes a wait cursor, sometimes a small dot and like that. This is quite frustrating while you try to re-size windows or frames as you cannot make whether you are at the proper point to re-size the window. Luckily after using remote desktop to connect to the host this problem also is solved.

Hope these solutions fix some of your hyper-v problems.

If you were looking for MP4/Mpeg4 Part 10  CoreAVC vs FFmpeg video codec performance review then click here

Codecs:

Though there are several codecs that perform the encoding owing to the universal use of this encoding in dvds, common implementations are Nero, Divx, Xvid etc. Among these arguably the most popular codecs are Xvid and Divx. We will be seeing side by side comparison of both in the article. You can find both codecs individual history on their wiki pages. I find the history of Divx quite amusing,They adopted their name Divx to mock a company that used to charge users for viewing by the hour and themselves used spyware in their later version hence becoming a subject of mockery. You might have already noticed that “Xvid” is “Divx” backwards.

I will talk of decoding performance here. Decoding probably makes much more sense to a normal user as encoding is done by few but everybody decodes videos. Decoding is quite a subjective criteria hence besides my own comments I have also attached screenshots that allow the user to make his/her own judgment. The codecs were taken from Final build site.

Xvid

There is a very good chance that any video that you come across is encoded with Xvid. Across my search of encoders I found Xvid is the most preferred one for encoding. Its opensource hence free, much more configurable hence lets you draw the last byte’s worth. Though it seems logical that if video is encoded with encoder its respective decoder should also be the best, however I found the results didn’t fare as I expected.

Divx

The good old closed source version. Divx is costly and costing is on per PC basis hence encoding costly. Decoding can be done for free using their web player. The pro version is not free however there are other ways of using the codec in Media Player classic shipped with Klite Codec as explained below.

Here is the screenshot of Gspot codec analyzation. This provides the codec information with which the file was encoded in:

Important things that can be highlighted from the Gspot codec is

1. Video Encoding was done by Divx version 5.1.1

2. Audio Encoding was done by MPEG-1 Layer 3 more popularly known as MP3

3. The default resolution is 352×272 and should be judged at that resolution

Further information can also be seen from the screenshot

PS: you can also use other codec information utils like AVI codec etc.

Following are the screenshots taken from the video with different filters(All the left screenshots are Divx and right ones are Xvid)

Click the pics and view them at full-size and compare them. As the videos clearly depicted the Divx Filter far outperforms Xvid Filter in visual apeal.

There is a very important decoder that I have not mentioned here, that is the FFmpeg decoder(default decoder in most open players like mplayer, media player classic and vlc). This decoder generally uses libavcodec to decode the media files and even though the performance is not as good as the above decoders but it is good enough but the difference in CPU usage is extreme. Ex for a normal movie where Divx and Xvid take as much as 25-30% CPU usage, FFmpeg will take barely 10-15%. So if its quality you are looking for then look no further than Divx but for performance nobody matches FFmpeg

So overall the results are quite ambigous. If you are looking for quality then Divx, for free encoding/decoding Xvid and for decoding performance FFmpeg . You can download the filters from here, and you can learn how to switch your filter from here. So what are you going to do with your player???

If you were looking for MPEG 4 Part 2/ AVI video codec performance review: Divx vs Xvid then click here

Codecs:

As told previously 2 parts of MPEG-4 format are popular. There are several codecs available that implement  MPEG-4 with different level of perfection, popular ones are Quicktime(Part 10), FFmpeg(Part 10), Xvid(Part 2), Divx(Part 2) and CoreAVC(Part 10). After consulting several forums, I found 2 of those very talked about CoreAVC and FFmpeg. I have compared the 2 codecs below.

FFmpeg

Whether you are a codec geek or not, this is the most probable codec that you have been using since time  immemorial.  Its free, opensource, can allow a lot of tweaking, plays a major number of containers and codecs. I will try not to go beyond H.264 in this article but one thing is for sure, whether you are using CoreAVC or not, you definitely have to use FFmpeg due to its overwhelmingly large number of codec compatibility.

CoreAVC

Its a closed source alternative for decoding H.264, infact its one of the accepted formats for Blue-ray. When it came out it astonished everyone with the sheer speed and performance outputs. Its known to exceed several hardware implementations (reminds me of John Carmack implementation of square root in Quake 3 which was faster than FPU). Corecodec people call it the fastest codec on earth.(and I am nobody to argue).

Left one is CoreAVC and right is FFmpeg

Doesnt take a rocket scientist to notice that better one. However when I discussed this on outside forums, I faced considerable shouting and screaming so I did more tweaking and testing and found another bit of information that convinced me to use CoreAVC for good.
Left is CoreAVC and right is FFmpeg.
Top is W/O post processing and bottom is with Post Processing

Difference between CPU usage when using FFmpeg and CoreAVC is huge. It can be seen from the above CPU usage or by seeing CPU cycles consumption . Considering that I have a Core 2 duo system with 1.8Ghz this difference is a substantial one, infact with preprocessing the player hung at 100% cpu usage in FFmpeg.

I found out to my amazement that Corecodecs are actually the fastest codecs in the world. I used all possible codecs at my disposal(VLC, ffmpeg, quicktime, windows media player and Nero) but CoreAVC not only gave better performance compared to all of them but also astonishingly smooth one at that. I ran it on 1080p trailer of 10000BC on MPC using quicktime alternative(had to rename .mov to .hdmov to use coreAVC) and performance was mind boggling.
Bottomline, I’d suggest you one thing. just go right now to Final build site and download the coreavc format and start using it. You can find out how to do that here.

Step 1:

Decide the codec you wanna use. There are considerable number of guides available on this on the net. I have found doom9 forum quite helpful and informative.

MPEG 4 part 2/ AVI codec review: Divx vs Xvid here

H.264/ MP4/ HD codec review: CoreAVC vs FFmpeg here

Step 2:

Download the codec. Though there are several sites that provide opensource codecs for free, there are few that provide closed source too.  I have found Final build site to be quite good and provides almost all codecs. If you dont have any codecs at all I do suggest you to install Klite codec Pack and have some basic codecs to start with.

Step 3:

If you have started using Media Player classic without any change then you are most probably using FFmpeg codecs. These are very good codecs and use libavcodec for most of the decoding. It decodes most formats however not all of them perfectly. Now that you have your new filter installed.

1. Open the options window in media player classic(by pressing ‘o’ or through right click menu )
2. Go to External filters option. Now in the right side of the window select Add Filter
3. You will get an elaborate window with a plethora of options. Select your codec
   1. If your codec is not available there you will have to put a little more stress. Open the folder that your codec installed in.
   2. find a file with .ax extension in that folder and put it in filters folder inside Klite Codec Pack folder
   3. Now you should click browse in the bottom left of codec window and select the filter inside filters folder. You can browse to select ax file from the folder it was installed but needlessly adds a dependency.
4. After selecting that filter go the right of the window and click Prefer among the 3 options(prefer, block and merit)

Eureka your filter is changed, you have a better video already!!!

Windows XP Service Pack 3 English
Windows XP Service Pack 3 Simplified Chinese
Windows XP Service Pack 3 German
Windows XP SP3 French
Windows XP SP3 Russian
Windows XP SP3 Japanese

These are official windows update links.

Courtesy: Ghacks

The app has more tools for network analysis than this simple visualization like plotting the Degree Distribution Vs Rank, Pk Vs k, Clustering Coefficient Vs Rank, Betweenness centrality Vs Rank plots. Despite this much effort we are not confident about getting the best possible grade due to the lack of good innovation ( I guess I am talking big here). So, here comes the small innovation. The networks that we analyse are generated using standard models like Barabási–Albert (BA) model, Erdős–Rényi model etc. In this way the application is limited and finds little use as these models had been analysed fully in every possible angle. So the application needs to support new models. But, writing code for each and every model is too complex and inefficient. The obvious path then would be to somehow express a network. The simplest way for the end user would be to express the network in english . But poor computers yet donot understand english completely. So, the alternative is to ask the user to express the network in a language that computers can understand. The essence is that we need a scripting interface to express the network in our application. A single problem can have more than one solution and with opensource its more true. After all opensource is about choice. We had a couple of alternatives for this problem too. There are lots of embeddable scripting languages at our disposal.

We finally decided to pick java for this purpose. The solution that we picked might seem odd as it comes second to last in the scriptometer rankings. But, it has its own benefits. The obvious thing is the simplicity and elegance of the soultion.

1. There is no need for us to learn a new language
2. There are no integration costs. ( If you have missed the point, we programmed the whole application in java itself )

Once we have decided that the end user expresses the network in java, we need to chalk out a solution for running his network model to generate the set of vertices and edge. The problem boils down to two things

1. Compile the code that he has written from the application itself.
2. Execute his code to generate the network graph.

So how do you compile java code from java application. There are two solutions to this problem too. The first one is using an undocumented java class com.sun.tools.javac.Main. The other solution is to use a more standard and documented api available from java 1.6 onwards. We chose the earlier one as the final application has to run on a machine with only java 1.5, though that means using undocumented and unsupported functions. Time for some real java

String[] optionsAndSources = {“Synthesis.java”};

try{
PrintWriter out = new PrintWriter( new FileWriter( “C:\\out.txt” ) );
int status = Main.compile( optionsAndSources, out );
System.out.println( “status: ” + status );

} catch(IOException e){
System.err.println(“The file cannot be opened “+e);
}

Remeber to include the tools.jar shipped with the jdk in the classpath. Main.compile is basically a wrapper over the javac ( javac is not required on the machine running this application. ). It does the real job of compiling the java source code and producing the class file. The arguments are self explanatory.

Once the class file is generated it has to be executed. This process is much simpler and doesnt require any undocumented classes ( aah releif !! ). Java has a class called Class. Instances of the class Class represent classes and interfaces in a running Java application. One can create a new instance of any class using the member function newInstance(). Once a new instance is created it has to be typecasted into a class that the compiler knows at compile time so that we can invoke its methods. So we have an abstract base class called Model that models all network models. Any network model defined by the user inherits this base class and also implements an abstract function defined in the base class Network called generate. Once a new instance of the user’s network model is created, it is typecasted to the base class Network and the generate method is called on this object to generate the network. More code follows …

Model obj=null;
try {
Class c = Class.forName(“UserModel”);
obj = (Model)(c.newInstance());
} catch (Exception e) {
/* Catching Exception for simplicity. */
System.err.println(“error while loading class”+e);
}
obj.instantiate();
obj.compute();

I would try to write more about creating an applet from this application and may be a link to the applet that we created in my next blog.

1. As Strategy (aka Greed): Most evil are those who employ opensource as a strategy, this not only allows them to publisize there product but also gives them a GNU loving status. Google like always leading the way with Google Gears and Libjingle. By making Gears opensource it caused a 3 way effect
   1. It allowed the people to look into the code and ensure that there are no google spies sitting in it, hence building trust.Without this nobody would opt for it
   2. It also became instant favorite to all those who hate The Microsoft way, giving them the satisfaction of using an opensource alternative on an opensource platform(firefox).
   3. Allowing other people to step in with it and start making more tools to replace more softwares(ZOHO, Offline WIkipedia etc)

   So using it as a stratigic weapon you can assasinate a lot more quickly than otherwise.

2. As a User (aka Gluttony): You reading this blog in firefox and me writing it in wordpress doesnt make things a whole lot better. If you have used a product of opensource and have never cared to:
   1. Submit a bug report.
   2. donate for it(and are never planning to).
   3. Contribute back.

   then you are evil. You are another one of those selfish people who just wanna use the product for free and run away with the benifits. I wouldnt blame you for it but we are all sinners

3. As a developer(aka Pride): If you are a developer associated with a opensource community because of any of the following reasons then you are also a sinner:
   1. Even if you see your own project suffering because of unsufferable GUI, you still stand by and keep working on core internal library which is already ruthlessly efficient. Since GUI is one of the most boring things to work on you choose to ignore it and because of that your project suffers. This is the sin that leads to poor interfaces of so many opensource software.
   2. You have been laid off, and just want to code to keep your skills sharp and to build your CV and have no interest in the concept of “greater good” and benifit of all man kind.
4. As a startup(aka Sloth): If you are a startup or for that matter any company and you are using opensource software because of any of the reasons then you are also sinners:
   1. Using your expert skills you are able to disprove Microsoft’s TCO model and use opensource as cheap software.
   2. Use plenty of opensource tools in your company but have never released any of the scripts etc neither have cared enough to put even a simple logo on your official site.
   3. You rely of free service of opensource community that is 10 times larger than that of any company’s support staff.
   4. Worse are all are those developers who use the free experience provided by opensource community in development of features that they eventually want to put in there own software(best oppurtunity is GSOC).

Disclaimer: I’d like to apologize to anybody who feels offended. This article fundamentally represents how opensource is practically being used by different catagory of people(coders, users and companies). There are several other ways of employing/deploying opensource which will be discussed in future articles.

“Google is more like us than anything that we have ever competed before.”

This famous quote about Google is by none other than Bill Gates himself. Microsoft is one of the biggest and fastest growing giant, the world has ever seen. The reach of Microsoft in various fields is inspiring. With a steady product range and effective marketing strategy, Microsoft is poised to become bigger and better by the day. Google is a relative new comer and often underestimated in comparison to Microsoft. True Google has an entirely different revenue model and ideology but that ideology to organize the world’s information is the key to success of Google in the fields where Microsoft has been unable to leave a footprint.

Everybody knows that Web is growing at a rapid rate. Over 5.4 million new sites are put up monthly and the success of Google in monetizing this exponential growth has made Google the fastest growing company in the history of the world. . The growth of internet will inevitably have far reaching consequences than earlier predicted. It has already started pushing more and more desktop functionality to the internet making all our information available everywhere. Google has anticipated this trend and has started developing applications to mimic the desktop functionality. No spreadsheet in the world will provide you with infinite rows and columns like Google spreadsheet, and no hard disk can provide potentially infinite video storage space like the way YouTube does. The consequences don’t stop there. Ads were well known to the real world till Google came along with state of the art Adsense. Now the traditional video ads that we are so familiar with on television are being replicated in Adsense. Your friend circle has migrated on the web, your college facebook, your mails, your calendar, even you yourself can now have a second life.

There are no two ways about it. Google has not only pioneered the IT revolution it is leading it with an online revenue generation of over 16.59 billion dollars, if that’s not enough then check this out; Google owns about 5% sites in the world that’s 77 million sites worldwide. Only those companies will continue to succeed which are backed by effective research and the best employees. Microsoft is renowned for its efforts in research and work culture. Microsoft has come up with products which have ensured its continued capture on existing market. Google is not far behind with its unique way of promoting research among its employees. I am of course talking about the 20% free time, which is an integral part of Google’s company policy. Using this Google has targeted the researcher in its employees. This free time has lead to numerous products which are in main stream for Google like Orkut, Gmail and even the popular Adsense. This unique work culture also has been the key to attract the best employees around the globe. Not only this, If you are wish to know in depth about any field the best lecture you can find is probably Google tech talks. Google tech talks are available on Google videos on almost all fields (Bio fuel, Second life to begin with). People who talk are from variety of backgrounds and are generally the forerunners in their field.

Those who claim that Google is not the next Microsoft have perhaps not observed the striking similarity between the acquisitions undertaken by Google in the recent years and that of Microsoft in the early 90s. Microsoft undertook major acquisitions in process of its growth targeting a vast array of companies. The companies’ skill set ranged from Business Intelligence to server virtualization.

Microsoft’s aggressive takeovers were the backbone of its strong and innovative lineup of software. Google also is actively acquiring companies with a wide agenda in mind. It has acquired companies like Double click to improve its existing ad services and it has also acquired companies like Android to expand into mobile devices thereby diversifying its target market.

Anybody who has observed the growth of Microsoft knows that acquisitions were not the only way Microsoft grew. It undertook major alliances with companies such as Dell, IBM. A prime alliance methodology was the OEM alliance, this alliance helped Microsoft to capture the desktop market. Google has also learned from this and started alliances with a wide array of companies. For example the alliance with Airtel in India, Apple iPhone in US and the major alliance with Firefox which ships Google as a default search in over 150 million browsers worldwide. This shows that it has the business acumen to compete with Microsoft and even outsmart it.

A major speculation made on Google is that its state in the market is fragile, owing to the one-dimensional success that it has established till now. However I would like to point out that Google is not as fragile as they think. There are several reasons for it.

1. Google shows interest in competing startups and acquire them if they show promising talent, for example YouTube.
2. Google has always stimulated diversification by keeping its employees in small groups imitating the research groups kept in the best universities in the world.
3. A typical misconception about Google is that it leads the market solely because of its powerful search. Very few people know about its Map Reduce. What is this Map Reduce? Imagine the power to organize millions of bytes of information in a matter of seconds. The power that enables Google to process over 20 Peta bytes of information daily. This magic sauce allows Google to quickly test out its innovative ideas in matter of days faster than anybody else in the world. Taking this amazing algorithm in account, who’s to say that Google won’t venture into as many dimensions as Microsoft if not more?

Reaching the heights to which Microsoft has reached is an ambitious target. There are very few companies in the world that can achieve what Microsoft has done in the software market. There is always the chance that Google may also fail to do so, but I think that it does have the right mix of ingredients to become a Microsoft or even topple it.

PS: I could talk about how Microsoft and Google both are being sued for antitrust or how both have shown monopolist tendencies, but I believe that this point of view would not weaken my cause but would also not be credible. Just because Google has made the same mistake as Microsoft in a juncture of its corporate lifetime does not prove or disprove that Google will become the next Microsoft.

http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/f27853y2/iphone/972345688g_1_ip.mp4

3gp

http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/f27853y2/iphone/972345688g_1_ip.3gp

• GMAIL hacked:
  

  Open your Gmail account settings and check your filters. If you find a weird filter which was not made by you , then your account was HACKED.

  This was a nifty little trick to hack the gmail javascript and add a filter that sends mails as designated by the hacker to a particular account. The emails are also deleted hence you cannot retrieve them. Moreinfo here. (Google has fixed the vulnerability but if your account was hacked you will still have to manually correct it). Curse google for not being a little more vocal about it and tell its users.

• Google reader hacked:
  

  Go to your google reader and unshare all items

  Okay Okay the reader is not hacked but Google has started its new share feature that not only allows you to force your shared items on your friends “All items” list, but also to all the folks that you have ever contacted(mailed, send gtalk request to). So if are privy about your shared items in any other mode (besides all and none) you cannot do so with current Google reader settings. There are workarounds(http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2007/12/managing-your-shared-items.html) but I am more of a better safe then sorry kind of guy

• Taking over of double click:
  

  Pray

  Google’s attempt to buy out display ad service DoubleClick has received the approval of the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), although it still faces European antitrust scrutiny(I trust in Europe).
  The £1.56 billion deal has been heavily-criticized for potentially reducing the options open to web marketers and endanger web user privacy. There is nothing you can do about that except pray to god that the big brother(Google) doesn’t take over

• What privacy??
  

  “you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, adapt, modify, publish and distribute such Content on Google services for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting Google services”

  Ya thats true for Picasa, Google groups and many such services, including google apps.

• General privacy concern:
  

  Well, use MSN atleast you’ll die in peace

  http://www.privacyinternational.org/article.shtml?cmd%5B347%5D=x-347-553961 I don’t think more needs to be said

There are many other threats out there to privacy. But bottom line is that in this age of data, stricter privacy laws are in demand, because as you can see from above not much can be done to protect your data(besides not using the service at all). Protection of IP needs to take front row, the more social we get , more problems will emerge. So you can either put your head in sand and hope that your data is not being used, or stand up straight and take action.