7 Cents For The 2013!

This post is dedicated to Arzu Kotan, who insisted that I should write more and made me convinced. This one is the first of many to come.

 

2013 was full of new hardware. To me, it was dominated by hardware news and not software. Which is strange, ‘cause end user seems to be interested in the software not the hardware. And yet all the major buzzes were mostly hardware. Let’s take a look at what I was most interested in 2013 in seven bullets.

7. Windows 8.1 and DirectX 11.2 arrived, even they are software they are somehow hardware related. Not that they changed our lives, certainly they’re welcomed graciously, AMD and NVidia played their last cards on their current generation hardware for the DX 11.2. Intel also played its card and released Haswell Micro-architecture. Of course it is not game-worthy. But at least -with a correct cpu- now we can have barely playable modern games at low resolution. Before Haswell, Intel HD xxxx was a joke. I'd appreciate low power gaming. Also now Haswell is a competitor at OpenCL game. I'd say it is losing horribly but at least competitor now.

6. Oculus Rift is still a no go. This brings us to wearables… 2013 brought them to our doorstep, however 2014 and 15 will be the decisive years for the technology. Because of that I am expecting a leap on battery-duration/issue of gadget oriented life.

5. Dawn of the Linux gaming era; I still don’t think it is ever going to dominate the market, the direction with the Steam powered boxes/machines sounds right to me nonetheless. Some of them have pretty bumped up monstrous specs. Many of them are simply beasts. 2014 will be a very expensive year for gaming community, so many things to buy, continues on…

4. a) Nokia’s Windows Phone lineup got matured into something spectacular. Especially Lumia 1020 is practically a super slim professional camera that you can use Windows on. Icon (leaked in 2013) will be even more.
4. b) Nokia and Android rumors took place in the darkest corners of blogosphere. I never thought it will become a reality. As far as I know and concern every OEM tinkers with possibilities, but I assumed this, even it was true, will be a rumor or a dirty experiment. As of my writing, $#!7 just got real. That’s a shock for me. I really did not expect this.

3. Intel’s Galileo; my hobby time is mostly consist of drinking, gaming, tinkering hardware. Although I like hardware projects, I am mostly uninterested in arduino. I do not have a specific reason but I really never touched arduino as of yet. On the other hand that X86 based arduino SoC is very appealing. If I’d have my hands on one of them, I have already 1 or 2 projects in my mind. 2014 will tell.

2. Many new SoCs has been released or announced. So far I’m very interested and excited about Tegra K1. It has 192 CUDA cores; which is very, very impressive. If utilized correctly, that can be a game-changer. Personally as an original Surface RT user, I would like to see it in Surface 3; I would immediately consider an early update as I am pretty happy with my Surface RT anyway.

1. X-Box One; clearly my choice of best hardware. Microsoft’s newest addition to the gaming community’s arsenal held much of the anticipation. Alongside with the new Halo title (possibly “Halo 5”), dedicated cloud gaming, exclusive music and video content and etc. it was the best thing ever happened in 2013 for me.

That's it for this post, thanks for reading.

Installing Windows After Linux!

Hello, this time I am gonna try a different type of post. I am not gonna give any in-depth-details about the commands and stuff but rather share my experience to dual boot as installing Linux first and Windows after. First of all let me give you the configuration I have so you could judge it if you should try below steps in such operation if it suits you anyhow...

I had a single hard disk in my laptop as single partitioned (ext4) 500GB for Kali with latest updates, everything is working right, no problem in anyway. It is a very healthy system, but I will never ever never trust my NTFS formatted archive external disks with any version of Linux or Mac or anyother OS if that matters. I will never use those disk under any circumstances on other operating systems except Microsoft ones as their content is invaluable, years of backups, works, codes, datas, you know my digital life. I lost my other machine to a hardware failure and so I also wanted to have a Windows 8.1 preview version as my second OS on this machine. I downloaded from the official Microsoft site and the risky operation series has begun. I strongly suggest you to take backups before try anything. In fact don't try this at all, these are only my experiences I decided to share.

I will try to write the steps I followed in bullets, give commands or links if necessary along the way;

• Downloaded the Windows 8.1 preview iso from the official site. Just do a Bing search for it you'll quickly find it. Or click "w", I am annoying =P
• Made the iso a bootable flash drive. There are innumerable guides out there, just Bing it, or Google it.
• After that I booted my system with Kali live usb stick, and used gparted to shrink my single partition's size by 190GB, that is how much space I wanted for my Windows 8.1 Preview. Decide and shrink your partition with your live Linux USB, I believe any modern live stick will do job. {I somehow couldn't manage without this second live Linux usb stick there are guides to shrink a partition but I couldn't do it.}
• Then I booted into Windows install stick (I think you can use any version but for the sake of my experience I will assume you are using also 8.1 preview) and installed my 8.1 preview to that newly emptied free unallocated space. after installation it looked like this =>here sda1 is my Kali, sda2 (the small area between sda1 and sda3) Windows boot partition, sda3 is Win8.1Pre, last part is linux swap.
• But at this point I was cut off of from my Linux. No way to boot into. Stuck with Windows, I followed this guide I found. I know it is in Italian, I don't know any Italian. You could simply follow the commands or have Bing translate the page for you.
• And now I am stuck with only Kali, but now I had Windows installed over my disk somewhere. I just cannot boot into it. That's I figured pretty good, and thought can be a very manageable situation. But once again for the sake of the completeness of my whole experience I am gonna write the misssteps I took. In italic don't do them, just read them and go to the next bullet.
1. I booted into my Windows Install USB stick and try to recover MBR there. I succeeded with some commands from the prompt like bootsect and stuff, but that got me stuck with only Windows once again.
2. Then I re-recovered my grub from the guide above I linked, then again I was stuck with only Kali, with Windows over there unreachable.
3. I tried old distros' with the option "boot the first partition" live CDs. Nothing worked, for a time I had a very healthy Kali and an unreachable Windows.
4. Then I try some other guides I found, involving bunch of grub config file editing and grub-updates etc... those only worsen the situation. I decided the safest way to achieve my goal is to have Kali and making the whatever it is going to take manually
• Then I started to play with /boot/grub/grub.cfg file.
• After some trial and error, these below lines worked for me.
• menuentry 'win'{
  set root=(hd0,2)
  chainloader +1
  }
• I added above entry to the file mentioned above completely manually to the appropriate place. If you are following this then take a look at the file, examine it carefully and edit it accordingly.
1. using grub.d/xx_win stuff (I mention this because chances are good you are gonna find such guides involving that online pretty easily, they didn't work for me) messes my configuration and makes me to start to recover the grub process all over again and again.
• That's it; now I have dual boot.

I am guessing I took a very rocky and long way to have a dual boot system, but you may be in my shoes and need some light. Therefore my post may help to your cause. Have a nice journey and dual boot.

Remember don't follow this post to have dual boot. It may only help if you are nearly exactly in my situation to begin with. There are, I believe, tons of easier and safer ways to have dual boot in the first place.

Cloud Services...

Sorry for the long silence (whomever I am going to apologize anyways), I have written these below lines a while ago but had no chance to form them into a blog post. So here goes nothing and my 2-cents.

In an era which is "the thing most matters is the choice of complete service provider", we are living. Current heavily armed forces are Microsoft, Apple, Google. They serve nearly everything you can think of; from OSes to games, office solutions to cloud services.

And I believe soon we are going to see some posts like "my everything is on Live, how can I migrate to Google?" or "I am an Apple guy, how to go Microsoft way?"

At that point, if it ever happens, in my humble opinion; the one provider who makes this conversion easy and with smaller/shorter steps will win this cloud service war in the end. What I mean is -just stay with me- if a user want to migrate, he/she has to do it manually to the bones nearly... Calendar, music, contacts, other content such as apps, documents etc, etc. Everything must be backed-up first and moved nearly manually right now.

What I am saying is that I believe; if a provider offers to be such a conversion with easy steps possible, that provider will win this "Cloud Servicing" stuff right that moment in my book.

Think like that, sorry but end-user gets dumber and dumber by the moment and such internet based services (even whole networks, providers, etc...) are keeping up by being dumbed down even more. True right? I think so... but moving from one such service provider to the another is still not an easy task. I accept it is not that difficult but it is also the least easy thing to achieve nowadays.

I hope one of the providers will see this opportunity and make a move to end this race, so we can move to the next competition...

Windows 8 (M3) On 2008 R2 SP1 Hyper-V!

This may look like a complex title but it is so. I am just trying out Windows 8 leaked build on a Hyper-V VM of a 180 days trial version of MS Windows 2008 R2 SP1 Enterprise Server.

Let me just show you some pictures...

This one is the moments away from finishing the installation.

This is when I'm done with user and first use settings.

I changed that wallpaper ("shh let's not leak our hard work" thingie) so you can read that text (build 7989 winmain thing and the disciplinary note), and my trial 2008 Server.

So, now I am gonna try to install Internet Explorer 10 Developer Preview. Strangely Windows 8 (Build 7989 Milestone 3) came with IE version 9. I understand that there is "Windows 7 Ultimate" text everywhere on this very early preview version, but why IE9? IE10 will most certainly be completed (and already released in some form) and bundled with Windows 8. So why not include the IE10 beta even now in this leak? May it be 'cause they want it (this Windows 8 version) as stable as possible, therefore avoid unnecessary beta utilities? It can't, because it is not supposed to leak?! or maybe... hmm.

A little surprise, by the way, came with Windows 8, IIS 8! There it is;

Click on it for full size image.

Internet Information Services version 8, in other saying IIS 8, is or will be ready with Windows 8 Family (server and desktop editions) and armed with something they called Smooth Streaming.


UPDATE: I tried IE 10 Platform Preview 2. It works very smooth and fast, I am impressed. Really, It was good.

Also, last time when I write this post, I forgot to take the picture of Microsoft Beta Fish so here it goes ^ .

8.5 Billion! WOW!

8.5 Billion! WOW! Microsoft bought Skype for that amount. Dollars! Cash!

That's actually great, in my opinion. I mean now MS has a control of (select amount of) communication in nearly every handheld and all computers. Whether you use PSP or iPad, Android or Symbian, MacOSX or Linux you use a Microsoft Service. That's, however, ok for me. I like Microsoft products. I mean I have Mac Mini and iPhone but my only console is X Box 360 for instance and I use MS Office on Mac. What I am saying is, a widely used comm service such as Skype now belongs to Microsoft and that's too much power for a company like Microsoft but I am ok with it, and reading that people are also ok with it. No big deal? Right? Right. BUT 8.5 BILLION!? WOW I MEAN C'MON!!! 8.5!!! Eight point five! Billionzz!?

Anyways, very congratulations for MS and Skype...

Browsers...

We are always going to be in need of, I think so at least, two different browsers... While working on windows, my primary choice is Internet Explorer of course; my secondary is Safari. While I am working or spending time on my home PC, which is a Mac, I use Safari as my primary and Opera as my secondary.

For Windows I use Safari for secondary because of I believe I must have same browsers on different platforms to accept something as, you know, baseline some-kind.

Ok, but why am I not using Opera as my second on the home PC so I still can have a baseline? Then again users who has and utilizes two browsers at the same time of course use their primaries more often. And if I use opera as baseline and the secondary at both environments, my usage will be small portioned (for Opera) and I will be missing the, you know, best of both worlds. Don't take me wrong, Opera is a great browser, but for mobiles you know.

Only if MS Internet Explorer was on Mac too that would change everything...

MSN on iPhone...

Quick post, this will be. Microsoft has just released official MSN App for the iPhone. That's quite awesome, no really, it is a very good thing for MS to do.

BUT WHY IS MSN 8 FOR MAC STILL BETA?!?!?! and broken...?

We have tons of different solutions to use Live Accounts on iPhone. On Mac I cannot say it is true, at least for me. I was waiting for a decent version of MSN for Mac over 2 years now. MS only releases more and more irrelevant(*) apps on iPhone! That I do not understand, please Microsoft; first fix the main platform(**) which is Mac OS X not iOS...

(*): Bing, Seadragon, Tag (however I see a bright future for Tag, still; on iPhone, it is irrelevant in my humble opinion).

(**): Here is the link to the borked version of MSN for MAC 8, which is still in beta and has a lot of known issues... (if somehow it becomes released and gets completely fixed, I am probably not going to bother to edit this post. So I state that this is on 12/07/10.)

tFU Hoth Expansion

I just played the Force Unleashed Hoth Expansion Mission Pack. Guess what? There is no single achievement for the whole thing on X-Box Live! The overall quality was not as good as the previous expansions. I didn't get disappointed that much however. It was still the Force Unleashed action but, well could be 400 MS Points or so, at the moment it is 800. 800 is not much but to this particular mission pack it is a little bit much, I acknowledged.

Anyways... Until the sequel hits the stores I am guessing this will be the only tFU action we are going to get. I mean I don't think we are gonna get another expainsion for the first game. Maybe some more Avatar Tees or something like that, but that's all. Any new game content; I don't think. In fact that may be the last content ever for this game. We'll see.

Silverlight on iPhone?

Ok. Nowadays, it seems everbody is accepting the truth that Adobe's Flash is too slow to run on low power consumpted handheld devices. Or rather I say Apple's devices, yeah that sounds more appropriate (btw I am an iPhone user and excited about iPad). The thind I wonder most about is, well uhmm, is it true for Microsoft's Silverlight too?

I know for a fact that Adobe's optimizations are "file size" oriented. It is said that developers at Adobe are strictly dictated over patch sizes and new versions in about 3 digit byte levels. Also I know for another fact that Silverlight is CPU-wise optimized. So why not fully support Silverlight instead of so called slow Flash on Safari Mobile. At least we'll have an alternative, and that's better than nothing.

Over a night, things change. Today the video on internets may equal to Adobe's Flash. Tomorrow, if everything played nice by Microsoft, it could be Silverlight in my humble opinion.

Appstoresesesesessss

In recent months there was a leap in numbers of the applications on iPhone AppStore. I wonder if it is ever going to be unmanageable for both sides in the future. I mean the Apple, and the customer. Already, there are so many apps to choose from if you want a specific tool; say a twitter client. And the search is even today started to get messy. I am only guessing here; but I think soon the problems will begin to emerge due to high numbers. Besides I am hearing AppRejectPolicies are getting also out of hand...

And on the other hand, every other major mobile phone or platform company has a store now. To me which is even worse for a customer stand of point. For instance I bought a phone and a multi-platform app for this phone. Then I decided I hate this phone and bought a new one or return/change it etc. Now I have to buy that app again for the new platform. Such Apps are minority right now but I suspect there will be more in the future due to high demand. Apps should be one licence per person, not phone. This will make you customer very happy. Take my words for it 'cause now changing a phone is too easy. Thanks to uncontrollable competition in the market.

Besides, everyone must know by now, in this era copying something is not good enough to get a slice from the pie... You need to better the things a lil bit up for success. I don't see a point opening a store up with so little enhancements and overall quality? Are they doing it because of prestige issues? like "they have it, so must we!". That shouldn't be the way.

It's been such a long time since I wrote but a lot has changed. I begin to write at http://blog.starwars.gen.tr/ and it takes time, a lot of my time. You know I love Star Wars.

And now I noticed my attitude is somehow like Daring Fireball. Respect! :)

ODST

I played Clone Wars: Republic Heroes and Halo 3: ODST this weekend. Both games are finished. I am impressed with Clone Wars [by the way my X Box read it very problematically, disc may be flawed]. The game doesn't look that good but it is a Star Wars title nontheless and I loved it. The real deal is ODST however.



I have seen only a handful of games over the last decade with that much beautiful storytelling. Action was in Halo standards but the story, enviroments, dialogs were very satisfactionary =p . Actors and the Actress plays an important role here but, even if there would no such names there, It would still be a good story. And if you stil don't know whom I am talkin about here goes nothing: Nathan Fillion and Tricia Helfer. After this there is nothing much I could tell more.

Microsoft Image Composite Editor

I discovered this new experimental tool from Microsoft. Actually it is not new but I recently got my hands on it. It stiches the photographs together and mimics that, uhmm like, you have a wide angle camera. Let's first see my 2 stitches...



And now the other one with less distinctive features;



As you can see, if the pictures' patterns are not too distinctive it does some error's but if they are distinctive enough, it works wonders. These all are taken with an iPhone. What if you had an actual camera and take the shots outside, not indoors?



You would have probably this... [This is not mine this, last one, is Microsoft's Demo]

What did I do? Nothing, all details are here and it is amazingly easy to use. http://windowslive.com/Connect/Post/4c24fc70-3ef4-4bee-8de2-68bea65227ee

You can click on the pictures for bigger versions.

Windows 7 Performs Better Than I Expected

Hello all, today I want to write about my Windows 7 experience. I have been using it for 7 days now, and collecting data in order to write about it.

I was a Ubuntu user as I said it earlier cause I am in war with piracy personally. I do not pirate anything under any circumstances. Since I am not so rich. I am trying to avoid licensed stuff and stick with share and free ware whenever I can.

Back to business, when my Ubuntu last died, I was trying to install OpenLDAP so I can get some idea first and then decide to use it at work in development environment. Yeah, Yeah I had free time to try it out at home, that wa my mistake. Anyways Ubuntu died and I had no OS CD or DVD at that time except that MS sent Windows 7 RC 7100.

Since Ubuntu died completely at that time I had no internet connection to download anything to recover it or fix it or etc... I hopelessly put the 7100 dvd in. And my trip began.

It was a wonderfully fast installation. Under 20 minutes, and at that point I'll give my computers specifications. But under 20 minutes? wait a minute! Here goes specifications;

• Pentium 4 2.8 GHz Prescott [800 MHz bus]
• 1 GB ram [DDR 400 mhz]
• 160 GB SATA HDD
• ATI x1650

Installation ended in under 20 minutes, I was not impressed but shocked! Because last time I installed a windows on this computer it was an XP SP2 and it took twice that!

Yeah Installation ended anyway, It was a disaster from a point of finding the appropriate drivers. I had no internet connection cause it missed my NIC. I found the drivers that took my 3 minutes or so [yes I am going to count this time as setup time, at the end it was Windows' fault]. I showed the drivers. and excatly like another 3 minutes. It installed all my other drivers, including on board sound card, ATI, some other drivers that belongs to mainboard. Cause as soon as it gets the internet connection there wa appropriate drivers installed and Windowsgot updated too. So yeah it was a clear 26 minutes update. And under 30 minutes I installed the DivX codecs and start to watch movies on my LCD TV.

Along the whole week I noticed Windows is abruptly responsive on my old very old system. I am clicking on something and BAM! It is there, so fast so responsive. You know what it is even shocky that it does whole this with no HDD noise. After this week; I decided to give it a longer term chance, I found my original MS Office 2007 Home and Student Ed. installed it, give this old timer 2 GB more ram [It is now a 3GB machine with practically wings]. It is working like a magic. Looks everything right for the moment we'll see, who knows maybe this RC expired I buy a Windows 7? not go back to free Ubuntu or buy a Mac Mini? Who knows?

PS: Death To Software Piracy! I am living a true developer dream! Everything I am using is licensed or free of charge! YAY!

Chrome OS

It's been rather an exciting week so far. Google officially announced Chrome OS, which got me excited because I never pirate. For instance, I am using Windows only when MS sends an RC copy or something. Other times Ubuntu works for me.

You know at home, I am only using my computer for surfing and watching TV Series such as sitcoms etc. So Ubuntu is pretty much whatever I ask at the moment, but as I always say, if I ever become non-cheap, I'll buy a Mac. This is also because the actual Total-Cost-Of-Ownership wise, Mac is the cheapest system out there. You don't give much time to troubleshoot. Like you do with Ubuntu. You don't pay an overprice check for the Macos. Like you do with MS-Windows.

These are the reasons why I am excited for a new OS announced by Google. It'll be definetely free, and It'll be hopefully doing whatever I need at home. I think this is what I have to say about Chrome OS for now, you can check some details on this good blog here.

So, wassup on the MS side? I am hearing there is a very very majorly big major announcement coming over on Monday. I am anxious to know what it is. My tiny guess is something to do with Silverlight, which I adore nowadays. But we'll see on Monday. I need to be patient.

Till then I'll probably write somethings from the gaming world, there are some major announcements there too this week also.

Peace!

Patience as a Virtue

Which I don't have. I have no patience whatsoever. Non at all at least when it comes to the stuff that I am very very interested in like technological toys and stuff. For instance; if it is said it is on June 17, I expect it to have it when I wake up. No compromises. If I'll have it on the next day then don't say it is on June 17, say June 18. And I couldn't care less about the time regions. I don't live in the promising party's coutry. I live in my own home country. And my time and date is set by that. Not their own country. Make it the release dates to my country because I am your customer too, you fartlings!

Although I may understand the boxed goods like electronics, hard copy video games and etc... Not all but to a level, I know logistics and deliveries are bitch most of the time. But it is not acceptable as long as the product itself is a digital download, or something like it, like a tv show or alike. Because everyone cares about their own time actually.

My words are going -especially- to big bozos like Apple & Microsoft. I wonder when this issue will become an actual issue of customer relations and customer appreciation subject. Every big company tries their best efforts to keep their customers happy, but noone thought about ridiculous times, time periods of releases and like, I don't know, help desk working hours? In my humble opinion this should be addressed.