Noulakaz

The blog of Avinash, Christina, Anya and Kyan Meetoo.

Liverpool King of Europe

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Liverpool and Milan play in the final of the Champions League 2004/2005 at Istanbul (Turkey) on the 25th of May 2005 and LIVERPOOL WINS ON PENALTIES !!!

AC Milan: Dida, Cafu, Maldini, Stam, Nesta, Gattuso (Rui Costa 112), Seedorf (Serginho 86), Pirlo, Kaka, Shevchenko, Crespo (Tomasson 85). Subs Not Used: Abbiati, Kaladze, Costacurta, Dhorasoo.

Goals: Maldini 1, Crespo 39, 44.

Liverpool: Dudek, Finnan (Hamann 46), Traore, Hyypia, Carragher, Riise, Gerrard, Luis Garcia, Alonso, Kewell (Smicer 23), Baros (Cisse 85). Subs Not Used: Carson, Josemi, Nunez, Biscan.

Booked: Carragher, Baros.

Goals: Gerrard 54, Smicer 56, Alonso 59.

At end of 90 minutes, the score was 3-3. As no goals in extra-time, the game went to penalties. Milan starts:

  • 0-0 – Serginho (Milan) misses from the penalty spot. The Brazilian playmaker blasts his effort over the bar.
  • 1-0 – Hamann (Liverpool) scores from the penalty spot.
  • 1-0 – Pirlo (Milan) missed the penalty saved by Dudek.
  • 2-0 – Cissé (Liverpool) scores from the penalty spot.
  • 2-1 – Tomasson (Milan) scores from the penalty spot.
  • 2-1 – Riise (Liverpool) missed the penalty saved by the goalkeeper.
  • 2-2 – Kaka (Milan) scores from the penalty spot.
  • 3-2 – Smicer (Liverpool) scores from the penalty spot.
  • 3-2 – Shevchenko (Milan) missed the penalty saved by the goalkeeper. Another terrific save from Dudek.

Liverpool has won the Champions League Cup for the 5th time and the Cup is ours to keep!

Testing some new KDE applications

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“Il n’y a que les imbeciles qui ne changent jamais d’avis…”

As you can guess by looking at this screenshot, I’m using KDE now (and I’m pleased to tell you that it works perfectly on my Athlon 64 running 64-bits Gentoo Linux). I’ve rediscovered KDE by accident… which I will relate now :

  • It all started when I downloaded (out of curiosity) iTunes for Windows which I used to convert my whole CD collection (about 100 CDs) to MP3 format. I was very impressed by iTunes.
  • I looked for a similar program running under Linux and I quickly found out about AmaroK.
  • AmaroK was a KDE application and, as I was running Gnome, I tried to find something like AmaroK in Gnomeland.
  • And I did not succeed… :-)

I quickly realised that there was lots and lots of great KDE applications like AmaroK which I didn’t know about because of my fixation on Gnome and Gtk applications. And I was devastated… So, I decided to give KDE a second chance (as I was a previous KDE 2.0 user before switching to Gnome for some unknown reasons).

KDE has become a (nearly) perfect desktop environment. I run version 3.3.2 and everything is beautiful and snappy.

The standard KDE applications are OK but nothing to shout about. Fortunately, I quickly discovered KDE-Apps where I found some very promising KDE apps which I intend now to test :

  • celestia – The free space simulation that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions.
  • filelight – graphically represent your filesystem as a set of concentric segmented-rings.
  • kdissert – mindmapping-like tool to help [people] to produce complicated documents very quickly and efficiently.
  • kdevelop – an easy to use Integrated Development Environment for KDE [which] supports many programming languages.
  • kile – an integrated LaTeX environment.
  • kmymoney2 – a full-featured replacement for Windows-based finance software.
  • lyx – is an advanced open source document processor that encourages an approach to writing based on the structure of your documents, not their appearance.
  • scribus – brings award-winning professional DTP to Linux and *nix desktops with a combination of “press-ready” output and new approaches to page layout.

I am also testing blender which is an open source software for 3D modeling, animation, rendering, post-production, interactive creation and playback. Blender is not a KDE application though.

Aha ! Interesting times ahead !

I’ll keep you posted.

The new Playstation 3…

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… will be launched around this time next year (spring 2006) :-)

The Sony Playstation 3 is very intriguing.

On one hand it is a game console. And I personally don’t care about those… I mean, a Computer Scientist does not have time to play games, isn’t it ???

On the other hand, the Playstation 3 is one hell of a machine according to its specs :

Let’s see.

It uses a Cell processor (jointly developed by Sony, IBM and Toshiba) which is, in fact, a PowerPC core running at 3.2 GHz dispatching tasks to 7 (yes, seven!) vector units each with its own 128 registers and its own memory… The Cell has been announced to perform at 218 GFLOPS compared to my latest AMD Athlon64 3000+ running at 4 GFLOPS. Of course, the question is whether application developers will be able to leverage this power but things depend a lot on the quality of the optimising compilers I suppose as no one now writes directly in Assembly code (especially for RISC architectures)

It also has a GPU from NVidia called the RSX which runs at a maximum of 1.8 TFLOPS (I am feeling dizzy…) and supports 2 channels of high-definition (HD) video. Judging by some screenshots released by Sony, I can tell you that games will be photorealistic.

The Playstation 3 uses Blu-Ray Disc which can hold up to 25 Gb of data compared to the 4.7 Gb found on a single-layer DVD.

Finally, it also can handle up to 7 Bluetooth wireless appliances like a keyboard, a mouse, joypads and what not. It is also fully USB, Wi-fi and Ethernet capable.

The Playstation 3 has only 512 Mb of RAM though. And it does not have a hard-disc which is pretty disapointing.

It has the potential to become the PC killer. For that, it must get additional RAM, a hard-disc and, most important, a real operating system.

Why not Linux ?