Noulakaz

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

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 ?

Visual Basic is flawed

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I’ve never understood people who think that Micro$oft Visual Basic is a good development environment. For me, VB is flawed. It is useless when one wants to write good quality code because the Basic language is too primitive (check the OO features for instance). And the GUI builder, while easy to use, only helps in producing non-compliant and, 9 times out of 10, plain ugly user interfaces. Sure, it’s nice to be able to prototype a small application in VB rapidly, but what you get is only a prototype and not commercial quality software.

And, this time, I have an ally. Alan Cooper, father of Visual Basic who, in his very interesting book The Inmates Are Running the Asylum says :

“Some software developers have arrived at the unfortunate conclusion that modern prototyping tools – like Visual Basic – are effective design tools. Rather than designing the product, they just whip out an extremely anemic version of it with a visual programming tool. This prototype typically becomes the foundation for the product. This trades away the robustness and life span of the product for an illusory benefit. You can get a better design with pencil and paper and a good methodology than you can with any amount of prototyping”

I have nothing to add :-)