• Bad Apples – Their 10 worst inventions
• The 7 sins – Microsoft’s worst inventions ever

The noise level of the CPU Fan of my Sony Vaio VGN-SZ71E laptop was driving me crazy for the past few days. When the laptop was on, you could hear the fan operating even in the room next door. The fan was also producing vibrations, which I could feel when I had my arms on the keyboard palmrest! It’s needless to say you can’t work properly (i.e. concentrate on your work) under these circumstances.

I tried removing the chassis to see if I can replace the fan, but in order to have access to the CPU fan on this laptop model you need to disassemble pretty much everything! Luckily there is a workaround.

I had installed the Sony VAIO Power Management utilities, which allow me to manage the CPU Fan speed (Control Panel -> Power Options->VAIO Power Managent -> CPU Fan Control ). I set it to level  “1-quiet” and I have to say it is much better now.  Probably this has some impact on the performance, but this comes second to the peace of mind when working

My first experiences (I’ve only been playing with it for 10 minutes):

1) Doesn’t import my huge firefox visited sites history. If during the installation I ask it to import the history it just doesn’t proceed, without any error. The third time I tried to import my firefox settings I unticked the “import history” and it worked.

2) It seems to take longer to initially load up a page (I guess because it spawns a new process each time a new tab is opened and because of the javascript VM).  But once the page is there, it works really well. I tried it on a couple of “heavy” sites (lots of scrolling text, flash player, animated gifs). Firefox would use 100% of the cpu, but chrome seems to work just fine.

3) The feature, which shows the 9 most visited pages when you open up a new tab seems cool initially. However, it raises privacy issues. I don’t want my employer to see that amongst my most visited site is bbc and a betting website  The problem is that so far I couldn’t find an option to change the behaviour of the browser when it opens up a new tab.

4) It does eat up quite a lot of memory (I have 2 instances of chrome running, with 5 tabs of “standard” sites, such as facebook and my blog based on wordpress, on each instance and the browser eats up more than 100MB of RAM). However, when I close a tab the memory it eats up seems to decrease substantially, so it probably doesn’t have any memory leaks. And I really like the “stats for nerds” feature!

5) The tabs are part of the window and there are no big buttons and statusbar. This allows for more website content to be visible at a time and reduces the need to scroll up and down all the time.

One think is for sure. I like it so far! I still need to use it more and see how it behaves, especially from a performance point of view…   It doesn’t have a spell check (yet) or any fancy plugins, but it seems to be what a browser should be… Stable and transparent! I don’t know how secure it is though… guess we’ll have to wait and see…

Update:

• I just came across my first problem… Facebook has a “read more” link, which expands long text in facebook posts. Chrome doesn’t seem to work with it
• Guess my point no. 2 above was not correct. Just tried it on: www.goalnews.gr and the flash player utilises 50% of the CPU, so I guess it was pure luck it had better performance on the other heavy on javascript/flash sites I tried it. In fact firefox’s CPU usuage didn’t peak over 20% on the same site!
• It seems that it doesn’t work well with Kaspersky antivirus. When I disabled it Chrome’s performance was greatly improved.
• Flash perfomance seems to be an issue. I have a youtube (music) video playing on another tab and the current tab becomes momentarily unresponsive from time to time.

“In the 21st century you can’t invade another country, occupy a capital, overthrow a government and get away with it”

Yeah… right!

So, the experience of a CS undergraduate in Birmingham=Pub drinking/eating/socialising…whatever… I don’t mind the message the image is trying to put across (even though I should probably mind)! However, I think the moment you visit the website this image strikes you as contradicting the site’s look and feel. What do I mean? In general the page is what you would expect to see in a CS department’s page… nerdy stuff! On the top there is the brain with the monitor to emphasise the strong AI background of the department. The image for the research is full of post-it notes. The image with the undergraduates in the pub… well it just doesn’t fit!

The list of artists which you may see on an artist page as being “similar” is based exactly on our user’s listening habits. If a lot of users listen to Artist X, but also Artist Y and Z – Y and Z artists will become similar to X.

With a few added constants and other functions thrown into the equation to help make it more accurate, you’ll find that’s how Similar Artists are made.

The screencap follows:

Here’s how it works! I created a VBScript that goes through a directory (and subdirectories) of .class files and creates a dos batch file. The dos batch file can now be used to run and actually decompile all the .class files!

The VBscript can be found under this link: Decompile_vbs.

You need to edit it and change the paths to the .class and source directories.

When you execute this file, it will create a dos batch file like this one: Example_decompile.bat.  Please note this batch file will be generated under the directory where jad.exe exists! You can now run this batch file, which will actually decompile the .class files.

There is an internet service ( http://www.greeklive.tv/ ), which broadcasts greek tv channels over the internet. It is a subscription service, but it is probably worth the money considering you can watch all shows of the most popular greek tv stations of the past 6 days. Anyway, I only use to watch basketball games.

This service has its own program (myTV.exe) , which has the ability to record a show. Now, the stream data is encrypted and the videos saved are not easy to transfer as they are encoded using a very unpopular codec. If you want to convert the video files saved by the application to DivX or other popular video formats, all you need to do is use the anyMP4 Media Converter.

My set-up: A Toshiba 2450-S203 laptop (P4@2.8), an nvidia video card (don’t remember the details of the chip) and a wireless pcmcia linksys WPC11 version 4.

My experiences:

Mepis 6.5

First I tried Mepis 6.5. It worked very well out of the box and the wireless card connected to our router without a problem. However since Mepis 6.5 is based on an older version of ubuntu its repository has reaaaaly old versions of software. This was a problem and since Mepis 7.0 is coming out, I decided to try version 7.0 RC2.

Mepis 7.0RC2

Installed well, but I couldn’t make the wireless card work. I sent a post to the mepislovers forum and received a number of useful answers. It could be the version ndiswrapper that comes with Mepis 7, or the driver. So I had to either download the latest source code of ndiswrapper and compile it, or try different version… Too much work for a RC version.

Kubuntu 7.1

As I have been a windows user, I decide to go for another kde distribution, kubuntu. The installation went smoothly. However I couldn’t connect the wireless card to our router. Kubuntu would recognise it, but as soon as I tried to connect to the router… kernel panic! The caps lock light flashed and the system was unresponsive. I tried to blacklist the native drivers and use ndiswrapper with my windows drivers… but to install ndiswrapper it asked for the installation cd! (Even though I was already connected to the internet with my ethernet cable).

I managed to make it word with ndiswrapper and the system was quite stable. So, now let’s try ubuntu for a change…

Ubuntu 7.1

As expected I had the same problem with the wireless card and  resolved it using ndiswrapper again. I have to confess that I liked the interface better than KDE. It was quite fast and stable. The problem is that I need windows anyway (some .NET development, software which don’t have a linux version) . I can use virtualization (vmware) to run windows from within linux, but to do that I need more hard disk space and probably I will need again the firewall and antivirus installed.

The verdict?? I might try to switch to linux after I finish writing up, but right now I don’t have the time, resources (i.e. hard disk space) to do it properly. However there are some things I didn’t like. First of all in (k)ubuntu, when the native wireless card drivers crashed, NOTHING was logged in the log files, no warning, no nothing (at least a windows blue screen gives you a message with the address/module that caused the crash.).  The other annoying thing… why do you need the installation cd if you are already on the internet and the package manager can find the binaries on the internet?

I mean ok… you blaim windows for the blue screens of death, you blaim them for asking the installation cd all the time… so people say switch to linux (or get a mac).. you switch to linux and see things are not much better there.

Having said that I hope that some day I will have the time to be actively involved in a linux distro.