saquib's blog!

It was hard, but I finally made the move to wordpress.

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I had to manually import each blog to the new wordpress, but at least their back dating feature helped me to some extent. Please visit my wordpress blog from now on. Short url, www.saquiv.vze.com has been updated for new redirection as well.

Honda might have been trying to create ultra advanced, superbly expensive and not so realistic robots that were meant to make our lives easy, but Sony has better plans. I just loved its ultra cool “Disco Robot” named Rolly. And boy it can dance! The artificial intelligence system really kicks ass with great learning mechanism that knows how to match the rhythm. I also love the fact that they didn’t try to make the robot look like a human being; it has its own funky look that sets you in the party mode. The movements (especially those spins) are awesome and it has the ability to make the "buzz". It's also pretty small for its capabilities, makes me wonder how much power it takes for those sleek moves. True, the 400 dollars worth of music player might not have the best sound quality, but hey when you enjoy music this way - who cares?

Microsoft recently showcased one of the most interesting features for the upcoming version of their operating system, Windows Se7en. Although touch sensitive devices are nothing new, they probably got inspired from Apple’s iPhone and introduced some snazzy multi-touch controlled user interface in this new version. Well I know, even Windows Vista has a lot of issues with how the entire architecture of Windows have been built, but it’s still the best Windows ever made. Windows Se7en will build on fully functional touch sensitive GUI. The looks are still not that different from Vista, but I did love the new feature. But would I have to buy a super expensive high resolution LCD for this to work? – I might not really be that interested then; since I have already paid a hefty amount of money to get this sweet LCD, not sure I want to ditch this only for the multi-touch option. Considering this, I also doubt how much difference would this make in offices or for business users. I know some snazzy presentations or working with reports will feel great, but how much greater benefits to productivity would be added is still a question. I’m hoping the new version will gives us some jaw dropping features which does not require us to replace our current investment on hardware.

When it comes to designing phones now a days, I sense sending the manufacturers back to their drawing boards. Since last 3 - 4 years, companies like SonyEricsson, Nokia, and Motorola seems to have lost it all. I mean most of their current designs seem nothing like the phones they used to make. Of course exceptions did take place in models like Razr and Razr2, Nokia's 8 Series and probably the Nokia 6500 Slide. But other than those few pricey stuff, phones mostly loook like toys. I mean looking at the bulky shapeless N series, or the bizarre designs from SonyEriccson, or the unexciting and repetitive style of Motorola phones, I really get myself misplaced. Samsung comes up with sleeker designs at affordable price more often, but then again they lack features, and the internal GUI seems too colorful. Why can't they come up with something simple, clean yet sophisticated? Why can’t they make the phones look like phones, keep them "portable" and "sleek"?

Well, I was relieved to find some great looking Nokia phones that re finally on their way, and no they don’t really cost you over 800 USD. Nokia recently showed off their coming mid range line up, and some great phones were showcased. Among those, I think Nokia 3600 Slide, 6600, 6600 Slide, 7070 Prism really deserves some attention. I personally think 6600 is definitely a greatly redesigned phone, and 7070 Prism would work great with trendy females. A cell phone is more than a gadget; it defines personality, style and works like a fashion accessory. Just letting you know, the 6600 has an electromagnetic mechanism comprised of a thin strip above the display and an electromagnet below the keypad. That is, once you press the opening key on the right hand side of the Nokia 6600 fold, the magnetic field pushes the thin strip (on the display) upwards, opening smoothly all the way up. Now that's fancy! Since you want it to work only when you push the button, you couldn't design it with a real magnet - the electromagnet takes power once the button is pushed, and therefore the mechanism would only work when the phone is on and will take tiny amount of battery power. Of course, the phone can be opened in regular way as well. Hoping more people would start working with design than just putting more and more technology in phones.

Have you been having issues with Audio on Flash player or maybe no audio at all in Flash? Sometimes when running multiple audio streams, having no audio from one or more sources.. or any other weird issues regarding sound? Are you using Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Haron)? Well, This version of Ubuntu install PulseAudio by default and even being really cool, it does give some issues at times. Note that I have installed the "restricted extras" and running the actual flash player 9 (not gwflash or anything). And as 8.04 default, Im runnign this on FireFox 3. I fixed all of mine pretty easily. It's stargne, but the flash player probably does not install "libflashsupport " or "libflash" by default, so please install that. Even being a LTS release, Ubuntu included a beta browser as default - it still leaves me confused. Now, go to System > Preferences > Sound, and change all the options to "PulseAudio Server". Do a reboot if needed, and things should work just fine. I've seen this on multiple PCs, starnge Ubuntu haven't fixed it.

This might be applicable to older Ubuntu versions if you are using PulseAudio as well.

Usually it's a different atmosphere when you have Yaatri singing in a show. The corwd is different, and so is the feeling; which is actually very positive. Otherwise if you put Artcell and Warfaze in the same arena, the shirt ripping losers strike back - and the whole show turns gay. This is why having an invitation to be on a show where "only" Yaatri will perform got me excited, I knew it would be different, more importantly it would be pleasant, where you can actually enjoy music. But little do we think about just how difficult Dhanmondi has become. I think there's a 5% increase in traffic every hour, and number of cars and rickshaws far exceed total number of people (by a factor of couple of thousands I guess). It took me 90 minutes to reach from Gulshan, and more than 2 hours to get back - I knew just exactly why people complain about going in that mess. Arriving at Decagon, that all did change. Topu Bhai, as usual, did a superb job with the show. His work is simply awesome, and he is so natural and fun in his live performances. The audience was great, and so was the whole setup - thanks to INEX. I loved the sound, can't remember when was the last time I had a feeling of being in a concert so clean, so smooth and so enjoyable in Dhaka. Topu Bhai with Yaatri sang almost all of their songs, and wow would you not love being there or what? Yaatri does so well with guitars and vocals; everything seems like a recording, very groovy. Especially tracks like "Shottobdai" and "Meye" empowered the whole mood. Many of Topu Bhai's friends from the audience also joined him in some of the tracks, not to mention some previously unheard tracks were there too. Due to copyright restrictions and as gratitude towards such a fine piece of artist, I didn't bother recording them. I can assure you however, whatever is coming up next from Yaatri would be equally enjoying if not even more.

The cozy atmosphere and a beautiful crowd added a lot more to the show. I don't know how they managed to keep the "weird" people away, but whatever happened was just great. Of course the negative side of it was the way tables were laid out in Decagon, not the usual show like setup, with seats being taken by groups in the front, very little could be seen from back. The show had little chances for enjoying the evening alone; you just had to be with someone else or would feel left out. So yes, getting lost in the crowd feeling wasn't there, and I usually don’t like catching too much attention when I'm at these stuffs. Nevertheless, I really wish a lot more of this to come. But I dream of having my own cafe / blues place, and it has to be somewhere closer with less traffic. A place in Gulshan with shows like this could have been really cool too.

Well, if you cant beat 'em - join 'em! The rumors been around for more than a week that Microsoft is making an exact copycat of Wiimote, codenamed: 'Newton' (why would they name such a copycat innovation after Newton???). 

Well there's nothing bad in copying as long as you copy the right stuff right? In fact, the idea of wireless motion sensitive controller is nothing new at all, but Nintendo's success is at actually making it work; the way they implemented the whole system and how it was supported. Microsoft's product can only go two ways: it can be like a Wiimote, or end up to be something like SIXAXIS ... Sony tried copying Nintendo and it was a disaster. However, MS's approach is definately a bit diff, i think they will give developer's the capability to port anything they did for Wii with minimum work and get those games or future ones out on both the consoles - just an idea, this could indeed make a huge impact. Can Microsoft finally take over Wii? For now, some not so verified sources are putting up all sorts of sketches for this... this should be the biggest news for this month, at least for game industry.

But how come they don't copy so many other things that I really want them to copy? For example. why can't MS give us the capability to use any USB Devices or Hard Drives like Sony Does? Or Let us copy MP3/MPG files, or give us more liberty with what we can do with the X360? I don't think I'll buy one of these controllers unless there's particularly a game I really want to play which can "only" be played using this. Then again, if games as such interested me I might have considred a Wii long before. But I do think this will make X360 have a lot new gamers coming in. Let's see...

This is an interesting discussion I found from Jason Booth's (a game developer) blog:

"The PS3 is more graphically advanced than the 360"
Fill rate is one of the primary ways to measure graphics performance - in essence, it's a number describing how many pixel operations you can perform. The fill rate on the PS3 is significantly slower than on the 360, meaning that games either have to run at lower resolution or use simpler shader effects to achieve the same performance. Additionally, the shader processing on the ps3 is significantly slower than on the 360, which means that a normal map takes more fill rate to draw on the ps3 than it does on the 360. And I'm not talking about small differences here, we're talking roughly half the pixel pushing power.

"Ok, fine, but the cell is like, super powerful"
In theory, sure, but in reality it doesn't work out that way. Game code simply doesn't split well across multiple processors. You can probably find a way to split a few things off fairly easily - put the audio on one processor, animation on another; but generally the breakup is always going to leave several of the SPUs idle or underutilized. On top of that, it's usually not CPU speed that restricts the visuals in games - it's fill rate.

"Uh, Blue Ray!"
Great for watching movies, but not so great for games. Getting data off the blue ray drive takes about twice as long as it does to get the same data off the 360's DVD drive. That translates into longer load times, or god forbid if your streaming from disk, tighter constraints on the amount of data you can stream.

"But it's got a lot more space than DVD"
Ok, you got me there - it does have a lot more space, and there is the potential to use that to do something cool, but thats unlikely to be realized in any useful way. There are tons of compression techniques available for data and I'd personally rather be able to get my data faster than have more of it. Most developers who use the entire Blue Ray drive are doing it to work around other problems with the ps3 such as it's slow loading - for instance, in Resistance: Fall of Man, every art asset is stored on disk once for every level that uses it. So rather than storing one copy of a texture, you're storing it 12 times. If you took that entire game and removed all the duplicate data, it would likely fit on a DVD without any problem. They do this to speed up load times, which, as I pointed out before, are painfully slow on the ps3. So in this case, the extra space is completely wasted.

"Once developers figure out the PS3 they'll maximize the hardware and it will be amazing"
I suspect a small number of PS3 only developers will optimize the hardware to do something cool. However, this will be an exception to the rule, and will likely involved game designs that are specifically designed for the hardware and funded by Sony. If those will prove to be fun or not is another question.

Most of the performance centric research into the PS3 has been around making it easier for developers to get the same level of performance you get out of the 360 naturally. For instance, some developers are using those extra SPU's on the cell to prepare data for the rendering pipeline. Basically, they take the data they would normally send to the graphics chip, send it to an SPU which optimizes it in some manner, then send it to the graphics chip. So, once again we see an 'advantage' in hardware being used to make up for a disadvantage in another area - a common theme with the ps3. And this introduces an extra frame of latency into the equation, making controller response slower.

So, the common theme is this; developers must spend significantly more time and resources getting the PS3 to do what the 360 can already do easily and with a lot less code. Lets look at how this translates into practical realities for a moment:

Why the PS3 version often pails in comparison to the 360 version, and why exclusives often suck: As outlined above, getting equivalent performance out of the PS3 requires a lot of work unique to the platform, and in many cases, even with all these tricks, you still won't see equivalent performance. Thus, many ps3 games have simplified shaders and run at lower native resolutions than the 360 versions. On top of this, there is shrinking incentive to do this work; the PS3 isn't selling.

The code needed to make the PS3 work is most likely only useful to you on the PS3, as the types of tricks you need to do to make the thing perform are very unique to the platform and unlikely to be useful on any other architecture now or in the future. These issues all stem from unbalanced hardware design, and any future hardware that is this unbalanced will likely be unbalanced in a completely unique way.

Finally, there's the problem of resources. Game Development is, at it's heart, a resource management challenge. Given finite resources, do I have these five engineers work on optimizing the PS3 version to look better, or do I use them to make the game play better and fix bugs? Do I change my design to fit with what the PS3 hardware does well, or simply run the game at a slightly lower resolution on the PS3 to make up for it? Developers striving to push the PS3 hardware have often sacrificed their game in the process.

This post might come across as a lot of Sony bashing, but it's just the reality from the trenches. Sony let their hardware be designed by a comity of business interests rather than a well thought out design that would serve the game development community. They are going to loose hard this round because of it, and I hope that in the next round they take lessons from this round and produce a more balanced and usable machine.

Source: http://jbooth.blogspot.com/2007/10/ps3-misconceptions-and-spin.html

The concert 'ROCK THE GROUND' on March 1st @ Samaraii Convention
Center was not quite as expected. The lineup was great, that included Aurthohin, Black, Artcell, Yaatri, ArboVirus, PowerSurge among a few others. Tickets priced at 150 Tk, was in fact pretty cheap - but little did i know about how it was being organized. We had barely seen any posters or marketing for this event. Seemed like the event was forcefully underground - and filled with irritating audience. Little chance was there to actually watch the show properly, most people probably only got to see 10 - 15 minutes max of the whole program in proper way. The venue was utterly useless for concerts, felt like a few bunch of kids throwing a party in their big apartment. Things got worse with the heat and noise, there was no sonic experiences - the audio work seemed like trash, probably for such a small place. I liked what Topu Bhai and Yaatri did, that probably was the only thing that worked for me. Sad part is, he only sang 3~4 songs and that was it. (I'm sure artists would want to have a better place to perform.) I wouldn't blame any of the performers who were there, it was all about organizing that wasn't there, and I think the crowd just made it worse.

Okay, wow! Just awwed at the all new Land Rover LRX - it's probably the best looking SUV I've ever seen. The sleek looks, perfectly shaped lights, artistic roof, gorgeous interiors - what's keeping this object of desire away from the streets? I hope the concept becomes reality soon - not that I'll be ever able to afford one. Here are the comments by the guys at Land Rover while they were at Detroit Motor Show (2008):

"The LRX concept delivers the powerful message that we are as serious about sustainability as we are confident about the continuing relevance and desirability of our vehicles," says Phil Popham, Land Rover's managing director. "LRX is in every respect a Land Rover, but it's a very different Land Rover.

"LRX is a design born out of passion for the brand, but it is different, relevant, engaging and exciting - because Land Rover has never built ordinary cars," says Gerry McGovern. "LRX has a highly desirable identity and the design alludes strongly to its capability, while clearly underlining our forward-looking philosophy - it's a Land Rover that would be comfortable on Bond Street or Fifth Avenue, but wouldn't flinch at getting its wheels dirty."

"Flexible load-carrying capacity is fundamental to the concept of LRX," says Gerry McGovern. "With this car, we've interpreted the idea of Land Rover 'breadth of capability' to be more about versatility and on-road dynamics than about ultimate off-roading. This meets the needs of the new customers that we believe would be attracted by this type of car; they will not only appreciate LRX's flexibility, but will also recognise that it has been packaged with the highest levels of precision."