Electronics & IT Grimoire

Google Analytics - Graph annotations

Abbas Ahmed — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 18:11:52 +0000

Google Analytics now permits one to annotate the points on the traffic gaphs and thus allows them to become more meaningful and useful. This means that people in the organization can add their part to the annotations and thus these graphs can mean more to the higher management and can show the impact of various marketing campaigns and promotions associated with the timeline.

An easy way to determine the best URL shortener

Abbas Ahmed — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 16:40:22 +0000

I had been wondering which of the URL shortening services to stick to/ I specially found Bit.ly to be very useful in terms of the stats provided on the hits received etc. Today I came accross an interesting quiz that interactively asks a few questions to intelligently suggest the best URL shorterning service for a specific set of requirements. The choices include things like the need for a custom short URL and whether an API is preffered. There was another question regarding the need for click stats for short URLs that I particularly find very useful.

Give it a try and see if you find it useful enough.

http://www.hunch.com/url-shortening-services/

My first C/C++ learning environment - Quincy

Abbas Ahmed — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 02:17:42 +0000

When I was about to start learning C programming back in college many years ago, I took a peek at what was about to come my way. I had some issues understanding the ‘cryptic’ syntax. I was familiar with Turbo BASIC from Borland Corp and could program quite well in it. I started looking around for some good book to learn C. I found a very nice book named ‘Al Stevens Teaches C’, it was an interactive tutorial that accompanied a C interpreter with it. This is the same Al Stevens who used to write great articles in Dr. Dobb’s journal. I enjoyed the way he took me through the core concepts and simplified approach to C syntax. The interpreter allowed very quick testing of the code I produced and it was pure fun.

You might be thinking why a post on such an old thing, well the interpreter created by Al was special, I loved it and I have recently been looking for it. I didn’t find the original text based version, but I was able to locate a newer GUI version that runs on windows or WINE on top of Linux. This specific version was produced in 2005 and works like a breeze. Its not an interpreter anymore. It is now more of an IDE built around the GNU C compiler. Its something nice for those who wish to No need for those bulky commercial compilers for newbies anymore, just get your hands on Quincy and get on with your learning with the power of open source.

By the way, I must mention that Quincy was named after the adorable cat of the author of the book, I wonder if the cat still lives? You’ll find a photo of her in the program logo.

You can download Quincy from this link.

http://www.uploadmb.com/dw.php?id=1255959978

More information can be found at http://quincy.codecutter.org

CMOS Fuel Cells?

Abbas Ahmed — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 21:13:31 +0000

A German microchip vendor Micronas AG has come up with something revolutionary. It is a chip that contains 42 micro fuel cells integrated on it. It ws created in collaboration with University of Freibur, Germany.

The power generated is regulated at a nominal voltage of 3.3volts by a regulating circuit that is powered by 4 additional fuel cells on chip. With a lifetime of about one year at nominal load in the triple-digit microwatt range, the device could eventually power smart autonomous systems in applications where no conventional power source is available. In the lead research scientist of the university Mr. Hoffmann’s view, energy harvesting devices and the chip-level fuel cell are not mutually competitive, but can instead be regarded as complimentary technologies, For instance, the fuel cell could be used as a power buffer for periods when energy harvesting methods don’t generate enough power.

An article detailing the research and device can be found here.

Does my processor support virtualization?

Abbas Ahmed — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 09:07:41 +0000

I was looking around for a comprehensive list or table that would tell what models of a certain processor support virtualization technology (VT) and I found this very nice interactive page on Intel’s website. Ofcourse it lists only the Intel processors. The link is given below.

This is how it works, you just select the processor family at the left of the page and you will be shown a table for VT support on the right. Match your processor number in the right pane and you’ll know if your processor supports VT or not. You can easily get the processor model for your computer from ‘My Computer’ properties on Microsoft Windows or using the ‘cat /proc/cpuinfo’ command on Linux.

http://ark.intel.com/VTList.aspx

The all new MySQL Librarian

Abbas Ahmed — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 12:53:16 +0000

MySQL Community just got a great a tool that allows then to systematically share the community knowledge about this amazing open source database server. This is just a short post to mark the introduction of this facility to the public. All you need is a valid user account on http://dev.mysql.com and you are done.

You can click here for further details.

Atmel’s advanced capacitive touchscreen technology - maxTouch

Abbas Ahmed — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 01:04:19 +0000

Imagine a touchscreen so friendly, it feels like the extension of your own hands… This is what’s promised by the revolutionary new touchscreen technology by Atmel. Now, you’ll be able to use multiple gestures and multiple touch points at the same time. And the maxTouch technology claims to be equally effective with dry and wet hands and weather. So, it ought to behave whether if you are in a dusty desert or in the snow of tundra… The demonstration video looks very impressive.

The new maxTouch technology makes use of a capacitive sensing methodology and booasts the following benefits over the ordinary touch screens..

Unlimited touch
Unlimited touch provides you maximum flexibility in the human interface including the use of fingers, nails and stylus pen.
Precise
Excellent multiple touch adjacency and intuitive rejection of unintended touches.
Fast response
Atmel’s touch optimized AVR microcontroller combined with our patented touch technology minimize acquisition time and enhance the user experience.
Ideal for broad range of touchscreen applications
Supports a broad range of touchscreen applications including mobile handsets, netbooks, printers, GPS, digital cameras, portable media players and point of sale terminals.
Environmentally robust
Robust and resilient under harsh climate (hot/cold temperature), dusty and humid/wet environment.
Low power consumption
Atmel’s power-saving technology allows for extended battery life.

We’ll soon be seeing the maxTouch technology being used in new products, it is poised to be demontrated in September 2009. Well, I am waiting for the curtains to be drawn.

NVIDIA® Tesla™ C1060 Computing Processor

Abbas Ahmed — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 09:12:24 +0000

If you remember the long gone legendary parallel computing elements known as Transputers, behold.. they have been revived.. nVidia have come up with a supercomputing processor that plugs into a PCI-Express slot and gives your computer an astonishing performance capability of more than 933 GFLOPS. It contains a massively parallel 240 core GPU that allows it to achieve such performance at a clock speed of around 1.2GHz.

The NVIDIA® Tesla™ C1060 computing processor board is a PCI Express 2.0 fullheight
(4.376 inches by 10.50 inches) form factor computing add-in card based on
the NVIDIA Tesla T10 graphics processing unit (GPU). This board is targeted as
high-performance computing (HPC) solution for PCI Express systems.
The Tesla C1060 is capable of 933 GFLOPs/s of processing performance and
comes standard with 4 GB of GDDR3 memory at 102 GB/s bandwith.

To add more firepower to your personal super computer, ASUS P6T7 WS Supercomputer motherboard provides 7 PCI express 2.0 slots, so you can actually accomodate as many Teslas in it as your pocket allows.

This amazing feat has been made possible through the groundbreaking computing architecture termed as CUDA by nVidia. CUDA allows a variable number of comoute cores in the system and thus permits extreme scalability to 240 cores and beyond.

The image below shows the CUDA architecture..

Apache Lucene - PHP Implementation VS Java version

Abbas Ahmed — Sun, 10 May 2009 07:01:31 +0000

I was excited to know about Lucene’s inclusion into Zend’s Framework, but a bit of Googling brought up some serious performance issues with the PHP implementation. The Java implementation works faster and I would consider using it instead.

Click here for a comprehensive comparison…

By the way, the Xapian project offers much superior performance as shown by my Recoll personal search system. I have indexed more than 7GB of data which consists of large PDF files, IMAP mailboxes, Text files, DOC files, etc.

The search results are quick, considering the size of the data indexed and the resources on my machine.

Good work Xapian team !!

Intel Parallel Studio Beta Available Now

Abbas Ahmed — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 08:16:44 +0000

Until recently, parallelism was used for technical and high performance computing (HPC), but was not critical for most desktop/client applications. But today, as businesses and consumers invest in multicore hardware, demand is growing for software that takes advantage of these new processor core capabilities.
Parallelism is simply the ability to perform multiple functions simultaneously. Without hardware support for parallelism available in Intel® multicore processors—there was little or no benefit to writing parallel programs. Now, Intel brings 25 years of parallelism experience in high performance computing to more developers with products that complement and extend Microsoft Visual Studio* for parallelism.

Intel® Parallel Studio includes Parallel Composer, Parallel Inspector, and Parallel Amplifier, providing the most comprehensive set of development tools for parallelism. Below is a brief description of each of these components.

Developers who will benefit most from Intel Parallel Studio software products are:

• C/C++ developers who are driven by schedules to include new features and functions in their software releases
• Developers who want to take advantage of multicore, but are concerned about supporting software on multiple generations of microprocessors and multiple releases of Microsoft Windows.

• Intel® Parallel Composer speeds parallel software development with a C/C++ compiler and comprehensive threaded libraries. Developers can choose from a broad array of parallel programming models and use the coding methods most appropriate to a specific application.

• Intel® Parallel Inspector is a proactive memory and threading error checker. This flexible tool adds reliability to all supported parallelism programming models. Unlike traditional debuggers, Parallel Inspector detects hard-to-find threading errors in multi-threaded Microsoft Windows* C/C++ applications and does root-cause analysis for defects such as data races and deadlocks.

• Intel® Parallel Amplifier assists in tuning parallel applications for optimal multi-core performance by finding
unexpected serialization that limits scaling. Parallel Amplifier makes it simple to quickly find multicore performance bottlenecks.