I've been reading here and there lately and yesteray i bumped into this amazing article by my friend and kong technology. He writes many interesting stories and tutorials and i must admin i am a fan of is blog. The title of his latest blog post was eyecatching: "CUDA: Breaking the Intel & AMD dominance". Now what is CUDA and how is it possible to break the mentioned dominance?

Well for starters let me say this. When you are playing a super cool game that has very good graphics nowadays, you must know you are putting alot of stress on your graphics card... Now with this on their mind the graphic cards designers have put alot of computing power on the card. My friend at kong technology notes:

while your PC may have dual core, or at best quad cores, GPUs are approaching in excess of 600 cores in a single chip

What he says after that is most important

However, unlike traditional Intel and AMD CPUs, these cores are smaller and less able to perform complicated tasks. So you still need CPUs around to run all the heavy processing for you.

Now, let's break it down a little... Graphics is all about complicated mathimatical equations of vector processing and matrix multiplications. These calculations, most of the time, need alot of process power and they can be parallelized. So, the Graphic Processing Units (GPU, that's what we call the CPU's on the graphic cards) should only be capable on solving those math problems very fast and efficiently and if they need anything more that's what a CPU is there for.

Now what if we can harness this power for other processing needs other than complicated graphics? Here is where CUDA comes in. Actually, this is the C like programming language that one can use to make a program that can run using these GPU's. Here is what you need to do that:

• nVidia powered graphics card 8 series or later.
• The driver for the card with CUDA support.
• The CUDA development kit.
• The CUDA SDK.

All these (and many more information) can be found here. An amazing application  is a plugin they developed for Matlab. Just the perfect one i suppose. They say that it speeds up the processing very much.

Anyway, i think there is one huge catch there (one that caught me to what matters). As i said you need an nVidia powered card of 8 series or better. All those cards are PCI-Express which narrows down to a PCI-Express enabled motherboard. That one right there is my problem I suppose i have to upgrade my hardware to check it out but sometime i'll have to do it anyway.

All in all i think nVidia is outdoing it's self and realy standing up from the others. I've always been a fan of those cards instead of ATI or others but now this gives me one more reason. We shouldn't get ahead of ourselfs and say "who needs cpu's gimme a graphic card", that would be wrong. But the way we empower our desktop experience is definitely going to change. A new era on personal computing is around the corner and God am i happy to be here to witness it!

I remember my self when i first stumbled uppon a site that on the login link it would blur the site and "popup" the login form. That was neat i must admit. Yesterday i was talking with my friend #FN$# and he was asking how he can show an image over a link when hovered. This second one is somewhat a part of the first one.

When you place a component on the page you are creating, most of the time, you define either a margin or a padding for it. You might also define a width and a height.

Read the rest of this entry »

It seems that my friend #FN$# did not just do the work and get it over with. He came back to me with a new set of logos. With a small discussion we had he imroved it and here it is! The best thing with this one is that it has the moto on it and also the letters look slightly better on the background. I just wanted to blow the whistle and let you all guys know what happened on the top of the blog Take the opportunity to congratulate him since it's a thing he does just for fun and he is doing a nice job. Hope you all like it!

Now this is a nice game. I've been a fun of big fish games since they started or so. I enjoyed "Virual Villagers", "Build-a-lot" and many more. This is a one i found yesterday on a $0.99 (+ Tax) sale. It is on till tomorow, August the 15th. It is a puzzle game with many types of puzzles like point and click (not the annoying kind of ones), blocks. find the same etc. Very nice graphics and a pleasant and relaxing gameplay. Colours are bright and shiny and the interface is appealing to the eye. Moreover the navigation and gameplay is not hard since the clicks are not close one to another making your life easier. Anyway i strongly recomend it and rush for the sale that is on! You can get it from here.

Let the games begin

There was a period where my blog had a twitter widget. One day, while trying to browse it, it would totaly hung up on me. With a little debugging i found out it was the twitter widget. The site was down and so was my blog. I was so mad, that i couldn't trust such a big (nowadays) site, that i ripped it off. Recently, i read that twitter upgraded their hardware or whatever and they said they were sorry for the down times and they hope it won't happen again. Moreover, the huge blue space was very empty and i wanted to put something there since day one (i mean since the day i changed the theme). Browsing some blogs today, i saw a blogger that had her tweets on top, rather than a widget. I found it as a good idea for my hudge empty space up there. So, here it is, back on. Let's see how it goes. I hope it won't take my blog down again. Let me know if you have any loading time problems and also, what do you think about it?

PS: the tweet bird was a perfect match for the blue space up there

I've been missing around or the past few days but as you all know it's the month of vacation and relaxation. So, i am doing just that. I am doing some stuff  have to do but the blog is another thing. I need to research and code (sometimes heavily) to have a post ready. Today i decided to post about a well known problem.

As you all know, recently i had a logo design by my friend #FN$#. The logo was transparent and obviously it was on a PNG format. After that i saw the widely known problem with IE 6 and transparent PNG's. Take a look at the image below.

This is how the logo used to be displayed on an IE6 browser. Actually, this version is, in my humble oppinion, the worst browser ever made. Many many incompatibilities and it actually has a mind of his own. Anyway, the problem is caused because IE6 cannot render correclty the layers of the image. Anyway the cause is not what matters but the actual result.

Read the rest of this entry »

We have come to a point that i think you are ready to explore what Java is all about. You will often hear me say "RTFM", i.e Read The Fine (??) Manual! In Java this is more feasible than any other language. The documentation is well structured and well written. Nothing is left out. To be exact every bit of code is documented for us to see how to use it. The full documentation API is availiable here. You can also download a local copy for your reference here. But let's see how you can get all the info from the documentation...

Read the rest of this entry »

Reading one of my friend's blog the other day i stumbled onto this title: "How to copy Multiple Files/Folder names in bulk to Notepad file". I remember my self wanting to write a small app that would do that exact thing because i needed it a couple of times. At that time i decided not to waste any time on it since i thought that no one would need it actualy. But reading this post i was convinced i should write it since it could be usefull. It took me about an hour and here is what i came up with.

This application actualy lists the contents of a given folder (recursivly or not) into a plain text file or into an EXCEL spreadsheet. I know that those commercial software do a bit more but i think it's just to show off without any meaning what so ever. To run this small application you need the Java Runtime Environment 6 or better (with older version it won't work because i used 6 to compile it). You can get the JSE6 here.

Read the rest of this entry »

I've been thinking alot lately about the contribution of the readers and the community on a blog such as mine. Heck, i even got a banner in less than a day! I have a small blog and i write for fun. The readers are devized into two categories: the regular ones that come over, comment and participate and the ones that are looking for somthing on google and just happen to find it here. The later ones rarely leave a comment. Now, one main reason i am still here, and not bored of the whole thing, is of the regular readers. Their comments keep my interest alive. So, i decided to give back to them, to all of you guys. I already told you that i don't like ad campaigns and stuff like that but i would like to make an exception. So, i decided, from now on the top commentator of each month will be named the "Member Of The Month" (MOTM) and will get a free banner like the one you see on the right. As i said before, from an ad point of view, my space is worthless but i hope, as the time passes, the worth will be rising. This month's top commentator is Siddharth. He is among the most loyal readers of my blog so this is a way to thank him. Keep commenting guys and let's see who wins next month!

Before i dig deeper into Java, i need to explain a few more things that i think have been underestimated before or have not been metnioned at all. There are many key concepts that i am surely missing in this series but this is why it's called a "crash course". I am trying the best i can to explain the most of it but please forgive me if i leave anything out. So let's get into the point.

Read the rest of this entry »