Dhruba Bandopadhyay

My iPhone 3G (just like others I know who have one) has been sluggish and jerky both before and after the 2.0.1 update. I’ve been overlooking all problems to date because it’s a new product and there are clearly many software updates to follow (2.1 being the next which is already at beta3). However I’m beginning to fear that the slowness and poor data and cellular reception may be hardware related. What’s Apple going to do for me if indeed there is a hardware problem? Would I have to accept implicitly the sluggish performance and bad data and cellular reception for the coming 18 months without any compromise in what I’m paying every month? That really would be the “worst user experience” for the “best device” on the market?

I was wondering how long it would be before the financial industy adopted the iPhone as a platform for their applications. Not only that but I wondered also whether they felt that the phone had sufficient market share and penetration into their clients to make it worth developing on it. Well it seems that it has already begun. Follow through to the lab49 website to see further details and a screencast of functionality. I really should start making use of my developer licence. So much to do and so little time. Has anyone managed to address that predicament effectively yet?

A quick note to say that two weeks ago I purchased a white 16GB iphone 3g. From an operating system and applications point of view it is simply superb. However from the point of view of stability, responsiveness, mobile signal and 3g reception it is not so good. Apple are working on iPhone OS 2.0.1 and 2.1 (and have already seeded 2.1 beta 2 to testers) which should hopefully address some of these as well as copy and paste and turn by turn gps and personally I just can’t wait for these updates. I’ve also signed up for the iphone developer program at the cost of £59 but I’m not sure where I’ll find the time as yet. I have many more thoughts on the iphone in general but that’s for another time. For now I think it’s suffice to say that the current iphone desperately needs an OS update or two.

Oh and also O2 is abysmal in everyway as I expected. Moving from Vodafone has resulted in a deterioration in signal and 3G reception and this is in Central London so I dread to think of less metropolitan locations. However O2 was a necessary evil in order to acquire the device.

If you’re thinking of getting an iphone you may prefer to wait at least until the next update or if you absolutely cannot wait (which is understandable) then just get one. It has now become a permanent appendage to my body and has to some degree replaced my macbook pro which should give you some idea of its appeal.

Lol. I’m sure this is all too familiar to many of us.

Just to make a note somewhere here are my bare minimum set of favourite eclipse plugins that I use every day at work.

• M2Eclipse
• SpringIDE
• HibernateTools
• Subversive
• EclEmma
• PMD
• CheckStyle
• FindBugs

The plugin architecture and the committment of many companies to developing on it is what makes it virtually impossible to move away from Eclipse. An example would be SpringSource’s choice to provide the Spring Tools Suite on the Eclipse platform. Eclipse is also open unlike IntelliJ where you are at the mercy of JetBrains providing what you would like.

This is a great time for graphics technology and also for pc gaming.

Previously Nvidia was king of graphics cards with the 9800 series. Subsequently both Nvidia and ATi (yes I still insist on calling them ATi) released new cards - nvidia releasing GTX 260 and GTX 280 and ATi releasing the HD 4850 and HD 4870. Although Nvidia released first and showed promise its cards initially were equalled and in some cases outdone by one of its own predecessors - the dual gpu 9800 GX2. Once ATi released their cards the HD 4870 proved to be marginally better than the GTX 260 and considerably cheaper albeit with higher power consumption and heat generation. Nvidia had no option but to cut their prices and recently reported that there’s going to a second round of price slashbacks. Now we all await the ATi HD 4870 X2 - will this be the dual gpu nvidia killer that ATi fans are dreaming of? There are rumours that it will be cost effective at around $500 which will make it cheaper all other Nvidia offerings although I imagine UK prices will be characteristically higher.

As for the gaming world it is experiencing a resurgence in innovation and passion both from developers and gamers worldwide. In the world of FPS first, a good while back, there was Far Cry by Crytek (03/2004). Then came Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare (11/2007) by Infinity Ward. At a similar time (11/2007) Crytek released the legendary Crysis which took the concept of an open map to a new level along with breathtaking graphics, superb realism and a highly engaging storyline albeit requiring a high end machine which to be honest only added to the attraction. Now we eagerly await the release of the sequel of two of these games - Far Cry 2 by UbiSoft (11/2008) and Crysis Warhead by Crytek (fall 2008). These two games are going to considerably improve on their predecessors and shall herald the coming of highly realistic depiction of natural environments and elements and our interaction with them.

Previously Crytek had said that they will now no longer develop games for the PC exclusively due to rampant piracy. However it seems with their upcoming title, Crysis Warhead, they’ve once again reversed their stance and said that it will be available on PC only. I wonder what steps they shall take to ensure legal use. Already there’s talk of some games, like Spore, requiring regular online activations and allowing only a limited number of installations. It seems that game piracy is finally taking a toll on the legally compliant player. I just hope it is enforced in a non-disruptive and non-prohibitive fashion to the user.

Recently after the purchase of my new machine I completed Crysis and COD4. Now I’m eagerly eyeing Bioshock although a friend of mine has recommended Race Driver GRID and Mass Effect. I’m most looking forward to Crysis Warhead and Far Cry 2 however so I just need a couple of titles to keep me going until then.

Due to the frenzy of activity in the graphics card world I’ve not been able to upgrade from my now humbled 8800 GT. Initially I thought I would get one of the GTX series. The 280 however consumes a lot of power and generates a lot of heat so I settled on the 260. Then came the HD 4870 which equalled the 260 but at a cheaper price. I remained concerned about ATi’s linux driver support however. Two price cutbacks were announced afterwards for Nvidia cards one of them to come into play in the next week. And now the HD 4870 X2 is upcoming in August. Not only that but later this year Nvidia are due to add support for GDDR5 and next year DirectX 10.1 which seems to suggest that we shall have virtually a continuous stream of releases in the next year or so. I’m spoilt for choice. Do I stay with what I have and wait it out for the ultimate card or do I upgrade the now rather mediocre 8800 GT to something more formidable and yet cost effective and then observe future releases from a distance? I’m tempted to go with option 2 as I’m poor at waiting and my 8800 GT needs an upgrade in the light of recent releases. The GTX 260 is now available for roughly 200 GBP and this may come down even further in the next week. Let’s wait and see.

Anyway, it’s great to see such vibrance, vitality and competition in the GPU and gaming industries and that too at the same time fuelling each other. There seems to be a lot of activity in the physics and processor world too with PhysX, Havok, CUDA, Nehalem and Tesla. Intel are saying the future is in the processor - Nvidia beg to differ. 2009 is going to be a fascinating year.

First there was the proposition that Scala and Erlang were the multi-core programming languages of the future. Then it was expressed that multi-processor computing goes beyond purely technical issues.

Addressing the issue of loosely coupled systems design, Peter Van Roy advocates for decentralized architecture where “each computing node is by default independent of all the others [and] contains the whole application and works even if there is no communication whatsoever between nodes [but] can use information from other nodes when it is available”. He believes indeed that this kind of architecture is instrumental for addressing issues raised by system distribution and provides some examples of tools built that way.

The description above bears a lot of similarly to a typical scale-out jms model. Not only are languages and architectures focusing on the multi-core crisis but there has also been in recent times a parallel programming framework engine released which provides out of the box a programming model that naturally results in multi-core utilisation.

Going forward it certainly appears that multi-core considerations will be critical in programming as well solutions created to address them. What are your thoughts on this matter?

-showsplash
org.eclipse.platform
-framework
plugins/org.eclipse.osgi_3.4.0.v20080605-1900.jar
-vm
/opt/java/bin/java
-vmargs
-Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.5
-Xms256m
-Xmx512m
-XX:PermSize=256m
-XX:MaxPermSize=512m

The above is a sample eclipse.ini configuration I use on ubuntu linux. It customises the choice of jvm, the min and max heap sizes and the min and max permgen sizes. Note that every argument must be on a separate line and -vm must go before -vmargs.

With the release of firefox 3.0 here’s a list of my favourite firefox plugins primarily for me to keep track.

• Adblock Plus
• Delicious Bookmarks
• Download Statusbar
• DownloadThemAll
• FireGestures
• Foxyproxy
• ScribeFire
• Web Developer

Some of them I don’t use that much like ScribeFire and DownloadThemAll. Also when doing client-side work I use Firebug in addition to Web Developer. All the above are compatible with FF3 now.

There are a few things that I think have gotten worse with v3 and that’s disappointing but overall I respect the reduced memory footprint and faster page loads and also the reduced download size. On Mac I still use Safari though - as compelling as FF’s plugin architecture is - it is no match for the sheer speed and responsiveness of Safari. With the release of Snow Leopard it’s going to get upto 50% faster.

There’s been much rumour and speculation and it has been an agonising wait but today finally the object of desire was announced by Apple. Behold the 3G iPhone with greater battery life and GPS support built in. Typical of Apple’s practices they’ve not made it available right away but set a date on July 11. No doubt there’ll be a massive build up till then with people sleeping outside retail stores the night before. Either way I intend to get the 16GB version in black as soon as it is made available and you should do the same. Yes I want to avoid O2 as a network at all costs but the IPhone is just too good to pass on. I look forward to the WWDC video release tomorrow to get the rest of the announced news.

A while back InfoQ reported: ‘The Sun Deflections continue‘.  Although I’m reporting a little late on this topic when I first read about this I was quite shocked.  Not only were these two people key to Sun’s client side technology, JavaFX, but this came after QCon London and JavaOne events at which this technology was much publicised and promoted despite not yet having been released.  What makes it worse is that the deflections have been towards a competing firm and technology - Adobe Flex.  I can’t help but wonder what lies in store for JavaFX - will it die before it is even born?  I am also left wondering which of the two remaining client side technologies will prevail and become more valuable to the enterprise programming industry going forward particularly in the financial services industry.  Certainly at this moment in time from everything I’ve seen and heard Flex seems to be winning.

These next generation technologies blur the line between server-side and client-side programmers by providing better interoperability between them and are also geared for programmers via the object oriented ActionScript 3.0.  Will purist server side programmers be compelled to meet industry demand by learning Flex and will Flex be able to address the, in some cases (not mine), strong aversion that they have towards client side work?

When I tried the newly released Apache ActiveMQ 5.1.0 JMX exposure was no longer enabled by default for me. To do so add the following environment variable as documented.

export SUNJMX="-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.port=1099 -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=false -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.ssl=false -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote=true"

This will be picked up by the $ACTIVEMQ_HOME/bin/activemq shell script automatically and used as a startup parameter. Then connect using a JMX client such as jconsole as normal.

jconsole service:jmx:rmi:///jndi/rmi://broker1:1099/jmxrmi &

The instructions above have only been tested on linux and the port in the variable above corresponds to the port in the jmx connection url and can be customised if one wishes.

Firefox 3 RC1 released - release notes, what’s new. Developer specific quote follows.

• Find out how to update your web application to take advantage of the power of Firefox 3.
• Try out the improved CSS support in Firefox 3.
• Test your site with the new DOM improvements, including support for extensions to the DOM added by other browsers.
• Add power to your web applications with JavaScript 1.8, included in Firefox 3.

A quote from the paper copy of CustomPC Issue 57 June 2008 follows.

… Nvidia’s graphics division is apparently already beavering away on the GeForce 9900 series of GPUs, which are alleged to be based on a new GT200 chip. The GeForce 9900 GX2 is rumoured to be based on two of the chips, while the 9900 GTX is rumoured to feature one of the chips and 512MB of GDDR4 memory. According to http://en.expreview.com both cards are scheduled for release in July.

There is an online version of the article as well. The original source of the rumours/information is in fact ExPreview. This is exciting news - I will be getting the 9900 series as soon as it comes out as it will no doubt offer much improved performance from my current 8800 GT.

Update: Expreview have updated their article (linked to above) to say that there won’t be a 9900 GX2. Nevertheless I suppose one can still look forward to the 9900 series whatever the cards.

Recently I was overcome by the urge to get back into gaming. It could have been all the gaming talk that I am exposed to regularly by my friends and colleagues. It could also have been the release of several new and promising PC titles of late and of course GTA4 which I’m not able to play because I don’t own any consoles. It may have been that I needed some stress relief from work and some level of engagement to take my mind of recent times. Or it may simply have been nostalgia and a desire to relive the old university days, or should I say whole nights, spent playing multiplayer networked games in the computer labs.

Whatever the reasons, I suspect it was a combination of them, I began to game on my previous pc which was in fact a refurbished Dell Dimension 8400 bought cheaply for a few hundred pounds at the Dell refurbished outlet online. It had a single 3.4GHz CPU, 2GB RAM and an upgraded GPU of a 6600GT. As I started to game I noticed that it was struggling a little to play certain games such as Call of Duty 4 : Modern Warfare at high detail and then I realised that there would be no point in even trying the game I wanted to play most of all - the legendary and highly acclaimed Crysis.

Coincidentally, at around the same time, a friend of mind sent me an email at the end of which he’d casually mentioned that he’d been browsing the overclockers website and had come across a particular gaming system and that it may be just what I needed to get back into gaming. That night I didn’t sleep very much. For the next two or three weeks I was glued to the overclockers website evaluating the pros and cons of the plethora of overclocked systems that they have. It turned out that overclockers also offered a 12 month interest free finance deal which made it all the more tempting which brings me to the present time.

Eventually after much re-consideration recently I purchased the ‘Ultima OC 8800GT‘ with the following specs.

• Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 GO 2.40GHz Quad Core CPU Overclocked too a minimum of 3.30GHz and beyond. (8/9 x 400MHz - 1600MHz FSB)
• Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro Intel approved cooler
• Arctic Silver 5 Heatsink compound professionally hand installed by our technicians
• Abit IP35-Pro Intel P35 (Socket LGA775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard
• Award winning OCZ 4GB Reaper PC2-8500 CAS5 (2×1GB) Dual Channel Kit (Overclocked at 1000MHz+)
• 500GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 32MB Cache SATA-2 Hard Drive
• NVIDIA 8800 GT 512MB GDDR3 HDTV/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) DirectX 10 Graphics Card
• Pioneer 215DBK 20x DVD±RW Dual Layer ReWriter (Black)
• Corsair TX 650W Next Generation Power Supply

As extras I had added Vista Ultimate Edition 64-bit, 4GB RAM, a second identical Seagate 500GB 7200.11 HD and the Coolermaster Cosmos Sport case again recommended to me by the same friend.

The product, delivery, service and support by Overclockers has been fantastic. Initially when the machine was delivered to me, although the hardware itself was fine, one of the front panels of the case wouldn’t shut due to a non-working plastic latch and without that shutting properly the numerous front metal grills of the case were prone to falling out every once in a while if there was any movement. It was unfortunate that a quality case and build that was otherwise perfect was let down by a tiny plastic latch that couldn’t really be fixed as such. So I sent it back and they essentially replaced the case and rebuilt the pc and since then it’s been fine.

Subsequently, I’ve been playing EA CryTek Crysis on high detail at 1280×1024 non-stop and it’s been like a dream. What can I really say about Crysis. I am absolutely taken by it. Crysis is my reality and my real life has now become a fictional memory.

Crysis is a breaktakingly beautiful game and provides superbly satisfying gameplay. There have been many first person shooters previous to this but none like Crysis. In addition to having tremendously realistic visual impact it also innovates on the traditional FPS challenge through its empowered character and its storyline. It also makes the perfect showcase or benchmark game because it is extremely demanding of the host machine and actually utilises everything you can possibly throw at it. In my case I was able to offer it a quad core CPU overclocked to 3.2GHz, 4GB RAM overclocked to 1000 MHz, Vista Ultimate 64-bit, Nvidia 8800GT and DirectX10. With these provisions although Crysis runs fine it could offer significantly better frames per second with better hardware such as the 9800 GX2.

I’m taking my time with Crysis exploring every little part of every map and replaying portions of the game to perfect my skill and learn more about the intricacies of the game and, believe me, there are many intricacies. So what about life after Crysis once I eventually finish this game? The choices are limitless. There’s Call of Duty 4, BioShock, Assassin’s Creed, Gears of War and Splinter Cell Double Agent to start with. Then in a few month’s time a whole host of new games are due to be released including Spore, StarCraft2 and Splinter Cell Conviction. There’s no shortage of games really - only a severe shortage of time and a consequent shortage of sleep.

All-in-all I’m pretty happy with overclockers and my machine. It was an excellent value for money affordable option compared to the 2-3k gaming systems that sound like vacuum cleaners or come with water cooling. I’ve made some deliberate compromises to keep the heat and noise levels down such as going for the 8800GT instead of the 9800GX2 and these compromises have reduced the cost significantly. Overclockers make a natural default effort to build with low heat and noise levels in mind anyway and I think my choice of case has greatly helped with both too. The Coolermaster Cosmos Sport is a beautiful case with excellent ventilation. My only qualm with the case is that it is a real effort to add or remove hard drives. I was naively expecting slot in slot out but in fact it involves a lot of unscrewing, dimantling, pulling and reassembling that to be frank, in the modern day, I’m surprised is still necessary. Eventually I’ll swap out to a case with HD and MB trays I suppose.

Whereas my previous Dell PC had reached it’s maximum upgradability limit this new purchase has opened up a whole new world of upgrade hardware possibilities that make me feel like a kid at a toy store once again. I’ve already purchased a second hard drive and going forward I’m looking forward to upgrading to four hard drives perhaps using RAID and most excitingly I’m looking forward to the next generation of NVidia cards - 9900 and 10000 series which should be out later this year. It took a lot of will power to forego the 9800GX2 but hopefully there will be adequate advances to make the wait worthwhile.

For anyone considering purchasing a complete system from overclockers I’d recommend it. All I’d say is really consider the components carefully to pick current generation components, an adequately powerful PSU for gaming (at least 600-650W) and an easy way to upgrade hard drives if not the motherboard as well. I shouldn’t be too demanding of them though given that they’ve provided such great value in comparison to say Alienware or Dell XPS. My tower without extras was around 750GBP and that’s a hell of a lot lower than 2-3k usual pricing for a gaming system.

Having run 3DMark06 my score has been reported to be 12125 3DMarks. I’ll be running PCMark and 3DVantage a little later on. Tonight I’m watching Iron Man - with any luck a formidable alternative to the GTA4 that I couldn’t play because I own no consoles but that’s a topic for another day.