Adobe Acrobat and GPU Acceleration
I’ve been using, like the most of you have to, Acrobat Reader since about version 4 or so, and I can say that, of all the releases, this is the only with a feature worth mentioning: 2D GPU Acceleration.
For the majority of users, who simply use it to view mostly plain text document, there isn’t any benefit. However, when viewing mammoth sized, image intensive PDFs, page transition and loading is notably smoother and faster, thought not by a huge margin, but its certainly an improvement.
The catch is that you need a relatively modern GPU to enable this function. The hardware compatibility list can be found here.
There is certainly much more potential to what it is capable of, and I hope to see other features like being implemented such as Anti-Aliasing. Currently, if the image quality of your original scan isn’t of a decent quality, having GPU acceleration turned on would make it unreadable, since it lacks the smooth line art and images rendering options.
I must admit that this is one of the areas I would never expect GPU acceleration to be applied. This just goes to show how much GPUs have moved from the traditional workstation and gaming arena, to complimenting the workings of the CPU on daily tasks. Now, it would be nice if more applications took advantage of the threading capabilities of multi-core CPUs.
Its quite different
Apparently Google Reader does not parse italic tags and the meaning of a sentence could be quite drastically altered with the omission of those few words.
Foreground as seen in Google Reader, Background as seen on actual site.
Fedora Core 6 on laptop
I’ve remove my FC5 installation on my laptop and installed FC6 in its stead. The installation took somewhere between 1h 30mins and 2h, probably due to the magnitude of the software installed. In addition, another 2 hour or so was spent updating the packages after the installation.
However, once the OS was up and running, there wasn’t much left to do, as the OS installation included the essential entertainment/productivity software. In contrast, after a typical Windows installation, you would need to install the multitude of software (Office/Winamp/Photoshop etc) required for daily usage.
The configurations that I actually did were the following:
- Added the livna repository
- Reinstalled Totem with one that used xinelib.
- Installed Firefox 2.0 replacing the 1.5.8 that came along.
- Installed Kismet
- Installed MS TrueType fonts. I tried various included fonts but they all rendered pretty poorly at small sizes (web) and most webpages were designed around Times New Roman or Arial anyway.
- Installed PPracer for a bit of fun and sentimental values. The original open source game, Tux Racer, came with an early distribution of Linux Mandrake many years back, before it went commercial.
- Installed Java.
- Configured the special Dell multimedia buttons. They now can be done via GUI in Gnome, which is really nice compared to having to edit X11.conf or something similar in the past.
- Enabled Network Manager.
- Enabled Compiz. Must say I fell in love with it at once. It beats any effects available on the Windows or OS X, and doesn’t require some overpowered graphics card (my ATI X300 mobility ran it fine), unlike Vista’s Aero Glass.
I’ve gotten quite acquainted with it, and I try to use it whenever I’m not required to run some Windows based application. I’ve got 2 installations of Windows XP on my laptop, one as my primary OS and Visual Studio 2005 installed on it. The other just with Visual Studio 2003. This semester requires me to develop on both of them, because apparently for some reason or other (as I was told), VS 2003 is required for my embedded devices lab as the hardware is incompatible with later versions. VS 2005 is used for ASP .NET development. On my desktop, all I have to do is run Virtual PC for the other XP instance, but the 512mb of ram my laptop runs on does not permit that.
Virus? Lecturer says nevermind
On Thursday, during my Internet Appliances lab, it was brought to the lecturer, a Mr Shankarappa Kumbar’s attention that multiple computers in the lab were infected with a virus, W32.OlderData, the lecturer’s response was simple “never mind”.
While such a task might not be his responsibility, but for a lecturer, especially one in more or less, the IT sector, to just shrug off such an alert, it is largely irresponsible and ignorant on his part and it prompts one to question his competency, among various other acts of his which I would not disclose here. However, some part of the fault also lies on me.
Out of necessity of needing to get my work done, or pure stupidity, and since the copy of Symantec antivirus on the particular system I was on wasn’t beeping with alarm unlike the others, I inserted my thumb drive into to the system to copy over some files where I had done previous at come to continue development. Big mistake. The virus passed itself onto my thumb drive, which then ultimately ended up infecting my machines back home.
All of the infected computers were Windows systems running Symantec AntiVirus, viruses def as of 22/11/06. The virus was able to replicate and elude detection until an instance of it executed, which SAV then attempted to halt it. This meant that as long as the virus didn’t attempt to meddle with system configs, it wouldn’t be detected.
Only when I became curious of that consistent floppy seek every now and then did I became curious and launch and investigation to the cause of it. As of the time this post was written, I’ve managed to stamp out all the instances I could find using scans from both Trendmicro Housecall and SAV, along with manually removing registry entries calling for the virus.
Everything goes wrong
With my luck, when it comes to device malfunctions, it usually doesn’t just stop at one. As if enough things hasn’t gone already, my main PC’s south bridge fan decided to give up on me today. During the course of the last week, my TDK 1616DLN DVD writer went kaput, followed shortly by my Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 250gb hdd.
My south bridge is currently running at a 49°C idle, with my fan randomly doing 600 rpm or so as and when it likes, which isn’t too bad. Since I’ve pretty busy schedule this week, I probably wouldn’t be able to get it replaced until at least Wednesday or the weekends, I’ll have to be careful not to tax my system too much.
MSN issue resolved
The long standing issue with my Windows Live Messenger not being able to receive or synchronize with the server has been resolved today. It appears to be an issue with MSN’s registry entry and is fixed by deleting them and then relaunching MSN, which would then write a fresh new entry. The solution was provided by a user by the alias of “The Juice” on the Whirlpool Broadband Forums. The particular thread can be found here. Thanks, “The Juice”!
IHT AudioNews good, but not practical
The AudioNews service provided by the International Herald Tribune is not suitable for my use. At 6min+ a clip, and about 30 or so per day, this isn’t a pratical solution for me to listen to on the trip to school daily. What I am looking for is more of a summary you would expect on a normal radio station.
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MSN Contacts not synchronizing
For some reason that has eluded me so far, my Windows Live Messenger (aka MSN Messenger 8) on my main computer refuses to fetch the contact list from the server.
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