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Last week, I triggered the apt-distupgrade on both my Ubuntu laptops which effectively downloaded Ubuntu 13.04 (“Raring Ringtail”) to these machines. This was actually sort of unexpected as I haven’t been really following Ubuntu’s latest efforts. I’m aware of Canonical’s push to the mobile market: their case to bring Ubuntu to cellphones and other devices received high praise in the media. That is, if Canonical can deliver on speed (UI) and speed (Roadmap).

The reason why I bring up Ubuntu Touch is that Canonical is aware of the slugginess of their current Unity interface. I’m pretty certain I brought this up in an earlier post (when I installed/upgraded to 11.10): it’s by default, a memory hog. What keeps me switching back to KDE or say, Gnome 3 is that Unity is heavily supported by Canonical. This is the main reason what keeps me away from other Ubuntu-descendants like Mint.

Anyway, what I mean to say is that 13.04 is supposed to be having most of the optimizations of Ubuntu Touch. As the release notes say:

Unity 7 brings a lot of performance improvements, reduced memory consumption and a great number of small UI fixes to bring a better overall shell experience.

Unity does feel like it has been improved (besides the fancy new icons for apps and the changes to the launcher): memory wise, I can’t tell the difference. It just generally still feels bloated. Time permitting, I’ll check out Gnome’s state at a later stage.

Update 1: Rebooted back in Gnome 3 and my first impression is that Gnome desktop takes a lot less memory than Unity.

I‘ll be honest: I’ve always been partial to AMD’s processors after buying my very first 386 PC clone in the early 90s. I’m pretty sure the PC came with the AMD 386 DX40 processor: at that time, nobody fell for the Intel SX chip trap. Intel chips were too expensive, too slow (intentionally) and mostly, required more power than the AMD processors.

AMD, sort of, always surprised the tech. market. While not the first to have created a dual-core processor (that honour befalls IBM of course), they were the first one to put a server-based dual-core chip on the market. Intel, feeling the heat, rushed out a dual-core processor for the desktop market. If I recall correctly, Intel’s form of dual-core processors were literally Pentiums soldered on a single board (with external logic processors) as opposed to AMD, where their Opteron platform was from the get-go designed to support multiple processors on a die (wikipedia).

AMD’s ATI take-over was another surprise. By now, ATI’s technology has literally been integrated into AMD’s processors in the form of AMD’s so-called APU line (wikipedia). That is a feat that has Intel still smoldering for an answer: I mean, technically, their integrated Intel 3000/4000 HD processor was a half-hearted response.

Which brings us to the now: You’ve heard that AMD is going to provide chips for both the PS4 and new Xbox. AMDs long goal and plan has always been to move the FPU to the GPU leaving the main CPU just for integer processing (reddit discussion), not to much success and adoption from developers though. Now that both Microsoft and Sony are adopting AMD’s chips and the possibility of true cross-platform game development this is going to change. I have this feeling that nVidia will somehow end up in Intel’s hands. Not that it will help Intel, now that the market seems to be going towards low-powered CPUs. Nvidia’s only good move was to branch out to the mobile market with their RISC-based Tegra line.

A week ago, I noticed that the Unofficial SXSW torrent site had started to distribute music for some of the major SXSW acts this year (site). Once again there are two torrents involved here: part 1 is the big 6 gig one, with over 900 files). Part 2 has a limited set of around the 200 music files.

Once again, I will be listening to (or attempt to) all the files in both sets: this year with slight interest tho, meaning with scarce commentary. Document 1 covers the first torrent file. Document 2 covers the last torrent file. To this date, I’ve listened to a total of 176 files or so. I’ve not yet heard amazing music yet: that is the wow factor is fairly low-key this year. We’ll report back in another couple of weeks.

One other thing that I keep forgetting is the part of how I export specific MP3 tags. Yes, I don’t type all the song names, artist names and duration of songs manually. Since most of the (legal) torrents are downloaded on my Linux laptops (previously), obviously I use Linux tools to take care of this. I use a tool called ‘exiftool’, which you may need to add to your package manager. For Ubuntu it would look something like: apt-get install exiftool. To extract specific tags I run the following command in a terminal session:

exiftool -csv *.mp3 -sourcefile -title -artist -duration > tags.txt

Note that you can export other MP3 tags as well: I’ll leave that to yourself to find out.

update 1: All related items are filed under the tag SXSW

Earlier this month, a meteor exploded (I guess, literally) above the Russian town of Chelyabinsk causing plenty of injuries and damage. Thanks to car cams installed in (many) Russian cars, amazing footage was captured of the meteor’s entrance and explosion in the upper-regions of our atmosphere (video).

Coincidentally, around the same day, an asteroid was supposed to ‘near-miss’ our planet and various space agencies were quick to report that this meteor had nothing to do with that asteroid. However, initial calculations put the size of the meteor in the 17 meter range with an approximate weight of 10K metric tonnes. Just a couple of days ago, astronomers in Columbia traced the meteor to the Apollo asteroids (full Wikipedia analysis).

Obviously, this event has been compared with the Tungunska explosion (wikipedia again) and it has raised awareness of the dangers of extra-orbital objects and apparently, the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (link) has suggested the possibly set up an “action team for near-Earth objects”. Tracking these objects is extremely hard tho: detecting a 17 meter object in space hurling at us with a speed of 18 km/s is nearly impossible.

Oh OK. It’s that time again for Canada’s favourite annual contest, Roll up the Rim, which we, at xsamplex, faithfully cover. We might just as well jump at and do some sleuthing at this year’s numbers. A grand total of 260,959,840 winning cups have been produced this year: this is about 25 million (MILLION) less than the year before. Every region is losing here, that is, except for Quebec: it’s gaining almost 4,000,000 more cups. The biggest loser this year, however, is Ontario. The Maritimes however, like 2012, 2011 and 2010, are losing out again: by over 6 million cups this year.

Prize-wise, it looks like Tim Horton’s is going back to the 4 major prizes: We have a car again (the Toyota Rav4 again, which was last sighted in the 2010 contest), pre-paid Mastercards (no electronics and/or TV this year!), the traditional gourmet set and of course, the 100 dollar Tims’ cards. The Prize/Region ratio shows an almost similar distribution as the amount of winning cups: Two regions lose out (Ontario and Atlantic provinces), not including the US. Secondly, there are a whole of less prizes to win than last year. 2012 and 2011 had 5 major prizes. In 2013, it looks like Tim Horton’s is going for a lot less.

My advice this year is like the ones before: if you win a monetary prize, please donate 80% to me. Thanks.

Previous entries: 20122011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003 and 2002. Or click this tag for all posts tagged with ‘Roll Up The Rim’.

Acouple of days ago, the Dutch queen Beatrix announced that she is going to abdicate the throne in favour of her son Willem-Alexander (WSJ).The queen has been on the throne for 33 or some years: In the Netherlands, abdication (to make room for a new generation of royalty) is a fairly common thing. In contrast: the last time a member of the British royalty abdicated was because of a scandal, I believe.

Note that I’m not typically a monarchist: while I generally think that monarchies are left-overs from the medieval times, I’m not typically an anti-royalist either. I do recall that there were protests when Beatrix took over the throne from her mother Juliana, way back in 1980. I was a slight teenager and I’m pretty certain that I enjoyed the day off, possibly watch TV for the official (live) events. Looking back; I think Beatrix did fairly well as head of state. Rumour has it that she frequently discussed matters and personally engaged (challenged) the Dutch prime-ministers, that is, politically speaking. I hear that the monarchy did lose their power to appoint a ‘formateur’ (a person who after the general elections is appointed to help form a new government).

So, yeah: that’s it then for Dutch queens for now. For the next 30 or so years, the Dutch will have a king. Typically, female Dutch heirs do better. Well, generally. I think. Whichever.

When we were younger, my dad bought a set of racing bicycles, which were used by my older siblings and then eventually handed over to me and my twin-brother. Generally, every Spring/Summer, we biked either to the “Holterberg” (which is the only mountain in the eastern part of the Netherlands) or to the Veluwe. I’m not sure why my dad ended up getting racing bikes, but there was a general interest in the Tour de France: we sort of grew up watching the Tour as it was always broadcast live on television. I slowly lost interest in “the Tour”: this was around the mid nineties, when the American cyclist Armstrong kept winning the Tour and suspicions about doping abuse became more prevalent in the news.

So yeah: I have followed the Armstrong myth for the last decade. That is, even in Europe there were subtle hints that his team and him were just cheating the tour. I was not surprised when Armstrong finally admitted that he used doping (Oprah interview @ the Guardian). I’m sceptic about Armstrong’s motivations to finally open up after two decades: mainly, he has been vehemently denying dope usage since he started winning the Tour. His speech after his last Tour win (2005) perfectly shows what Armstrong is really about. Attacking his critics whenever he could in front of the media (article at the Daily Beast):

“For the people that don’t believe in cycling, the cynics and the skeptics, I’m sorry for you, I’m sorry you can’t dream big. And I’m sorry you don’t believe in miracles.”

Technically, he was correct I guess: EPO does do miracles.

Now that vacation is sort of settling in, the following links attracted my full attention. In order of interest and heritage. I think.

The Dutch language is a very ‘adopting’ language: as opposed to the French, the Dutch language allows for the use of foreign words in public publications. Eventually, if foreign words become popular, they may become part of the Dutch vocabulary. There’s an organization handling the official word list and semantic rules: The TaalUnie (“Language Institute”). Just recently, I noticed the following sentence in this Dutch article:

Game of Thrones meest gedownloade serie

For some reason, the sentence looked silly to me: however, apparently it’s correct Dutch. I tend to think that by 2020, there won’t be such thing as a ‘Dutch language’.

On the Internet, mob mentality is the new democracy and while the word ‘mob’ has a negative… sound to it, on the Internet it’s sort of a good thing. Take for example your favourite home page: Reddit. A few weeks ago, the EA devs for SimCity 2013 (or whatever it’s going to be called), did an AMA (“Ask Us Anything”) about the upcoming city simulator. Within seconds, the most upvoted question was the one asking about the game’s hated ‘Always Online’ DRM (permalink to question):

What will happen to the game if I am playing and lose my internet connection – will the game still be playable and update the servers when my internet connection resumes or will it pause and wait for the connection?

The EA devs never really responded to the question and the rest is history (permalink to comprehensive ‘will not buy if’ thread).

A similar thing happened to the game WarZ, which was officially released on Steam last week. It’s a game that purports to put you into a post-zombie-apocalypse setting. The game was inspired by the popular DayZ mod for Arma2 (Arma2 on xsamplex). However, the game (WarZ) obviously didn’t deliver. The first Reddit thread that noted that the WarZ devs were less (say) truthful about the product can be found here, and obviously, it also targets Valve for allowing this game to be sold on ever popular Steam:

Honestly, some of the blame falls on Steam for this one. Obviously the info was written by the WarZ guys and then sent to steam, but it’s obvious no fact checking happened.

The follow-up thread (after the producer changed the description/feature list on Steam) still cried foul and eventually, Steam decided to stop selling the game (Forbes link), offering people refunds. The whole incident reminds me of the ‘Sword of the Stars II’ farce that happened last year (previously on xsamplex).

The moral of the story is that, if you publicly over-sell your over-promised games on the Internet, you will not get away with it. I guess, that Reddit users (and gamers) are a force to reckon with.

Mass Effect 3, then. Shepard and EDI, at it[/caption] So yeah: by now you may have already read my review of Mass Effect 2. If you didn’t, go read that first.

Mass Effect 3 was released this year (wikipedia), with plenty of fanfare and controversy. First of all, there was the spat about DLCs that featured extra footage (scenes so you will) that were crucial for the storyline. Secondly, EA, owner of Bioware, decided to bring out Mass Effect 3 for their digital content delivery system, Origin, only, therefore ignoring requests from many fans to deliver the game thru Valve’s Steam. Thirdly, many game reviewers jumped the gun by calling this the best game of the year, which it isn’t. So what’s new and what’s not new?

The game is once again heavily scripted, dumbed down and generally, feels shorter than ME2 (I finished the game in 26 or so hours). Maps and levels, generally don’t take long to finish and worst yet, when leveled up, feel easy to take on. You hear that right: it feels shorter and it feels easier. I think, there were only two maps/missions that were fairly tough only because both of them pitted you against banshees. My general feeling about ME3 is that you can’t really call it an RPG: the choices that you have to make during many cutscenes generally have two answers: you can either pick evil or not so evil. Even that is sort of a step back from ME2, let alone ME1.

However: the story line is epic and while hard-core fans didn’t agree with the ending, I feel this game is an appropriate end to the Mass Effect lore. Sure you knew Shepard would die eventually (well, if you play it in a specific way you can actually have Shepard survive, but this implies that you gathered every ‘war assets’ that you can find). And that’s, I guess all I wanted to mention in this posting: Mass Effect 3 is a worthy game if you already played the earlier ones. If you haven’t played the first two games, you might miss references. Dumbed down and what not: my general feeling after finishing this game was a sigh of relief. I’m not sure what Bioware is planning and cooking up, but I surely hope they leave the Mass Effect world alone now. If not, I’m certain I will not buy into their crap any more. And that’s all I’m going to say about this.

More…

Back when I was a youngling studying civil engineering in the Netherlands, the question of a direct railway connection between the cities Zwolle and Lelystad (“Hanzelijn”) was a popular discussion subject. If you’re not familiar with the topography of the Netherlands: for years, to get to the ‘Flevopolder’ by train, one needed to travel to Amsterdam first. Just recently, I noticed that the queen had finally (officially) opened the long needed shortcut to the ‘Flevopolder’.

Just yesterday, a lone gunman killed 20 or so kids in Newtown, Connecticut, which led to a many emotional scenes of parents, relatives, authorities and the US president: During the official White House statement/briefing, Obama had a hard time holding back tears. CBC had a long discussion with their reporters if this would finally break open the US gun registry laws: alas, most of the reporters were pessimistic about future US gun laws and restrictions. However, I’m not sure how the NRA is going to defend this gun massacre: what’s next? Have kids carry guns?

You are Kim Wilde, a legendary 80s popstar. You’re slightly drunk and joined by your brother on the train back to, well, wherever you headed to. How not to make an embarrassment out of yourself? Do not sing and serenade your fellow passengers. Wilde herself about her one-time performance:

Truly, I am overwhelmed and confused at such a huge reaction to my night out on the tiles. Making me giggle a LOT

Now we only need quotes from people who were actually on the train during this ordeal.

I‘ve been playing Civilization 5 (wikipedia link) now for a while and I’m still mixed about it. If you played and loved Civ4 (Earlier here): it’s nothing like it. The game designers drastically changed several game features: First of all, everything plays now on a “hex” map. Secondly, stacking up units is not allowed any more. Most importantly, politics has changed. This is actually the part that bothers me the most. Since Civ 1, choosing your nation’s political affiliation resembled known types of political structures we’ve seen in recent history. You wanted to focus on trade, surely you could choose to lead your nation as a Republic or Dictatorship. Civ 5′s political system feels extremely dumbed down.

So, that being said: the game’s graphics, music and general presentation are top-notch as always. To get the most out of the game, you would probably need to get a PC that has more than 2 cores and an extremely capable graphics processor. Anything lower than a third generation i5 or i7, will most likely feel a ‘grind out game’. Turns generally seem to take longer (compared to Civ4). At the launch of this game, Firaxis claimed that their Civ 5 engine was their most scalable game engine, able to use multiple cores: If you have the time for it, witness Meier’s presentation. Upon release, however, the game was buggy as hell. Only 4 or 5 months after release, Civ 5 sort of became playable. Add to the fact that the DLC “Gods and Kings” finally added Religion and Spying mechanisms, you can say that Civ 5 is sort of turning into a classic: Mind you, a reluctant classic if you compare it with Civ 4.

Civ 5, however, does battle pretty well. Battles now feel sort of ‘real’: You’ll need to plan the location of your cities so you can take advantage of the terrain and force possible bottlenecks upon your enemies. To conquer cities, you’ll find you have to push your cities to max to generate a steady stream of cannon fodder. Additionaly, cities now have basic defence mechanisms.

Would I recommend it? Reluctantly, but only if you get the “Gods and Kings” DLC: Besides adding religion and spying, it changes several core game play mechanisms. It seems to be a lot more playable in higher levels as well. My frustration score is obviously higher: I’d rate a solid 6. God, the game so obviously needs more peddles. But besides the frustration, winning the game is absolutely rewarding. With the release of Steam Workshop, people can now even create their own mods for Civ 5. “A+ would plai agian”, as they’d say on the Internet.

More…

So, it looks like Obama indeed won the presidency, much to the world’s delight or fright, depending on your political views.

As posted earlier, I only slightly followed the elections. At ‘Election Night’, I turned off the TV the moment I saw that Obama was ahead in battleground state Ohio. It generally looks like that at the end, Nate Silver’s prediction (“Obama wins without any doubt”) was right on the money. If you believe the press, the election result came as a surprise for a many Republicans and even the Romneys. I think the problem was that Republicans were not looking at the numbers and the facts, which is highlighted in that now famous Rove/Fox News video where Fox News called the presidency for Obama and Rove (apparently) was in self-denial.

Did the best candidate win? It all depends on your definition of ‘best’. I’m certain that in the coming years, Obama will become a target for everything between right and left. In the mean time, it’s going to be an interesting 4 years: To win the next presidency, the Republicans have to move to the center. If they can’t appeal beyond their current election base, they’ll be toast for years to come. On the other side of the spectrum: At the end of the Obama’s presidency, the Democrats will have to figure out if Obama has become ‘persona non-grata’ or if they’d need his help.

Earlier, I was under the impression that this year’s hurricane season would end up fairly, unremarkable. Luckily, I’m far from being a meteorologist: Just last week, Oct 29th, hurricane Sandy made landfall in NJ, USA, causing major outages and damage in New Jersey, New York and other areas on the Eastern US coast. Portions of Canada (mostly Ontario and Quebec) were on heavy rain and wind alerts: Over in SJ, the only thing we saw was high winds and plenty of rain.

As it stands right now, there are still millions of Americans without power, which is what 3 days or so before the US presidential elections? That’s right: the ultimate elections in the world is about to come to its climax. Will it be Romney or will Obama cling to his job?

If you believe the media, this seems to be a tight race: if you believe Nate Silver (of FiveThirtyEight fame), Obama has nothing to fear. As it stands Silver predicts that Obama will have 305 electoral votes and Romney 232.

I have no high opinion of “the politician” Romney: New York mayor Bloomberg (an independent) said it perfectly last week when he endorsed Obama:

In the past he (ed. Mitt Romney) has also taken sensible positions on immigration, illegal guns, abortion rights and health care. But he has reversed course on all of them, and is even running against the health-care model he signed into law in Massachusetts.

This is also what Mitt Romney’s opponents pointed out in the Republican primaries and generally the impression is that Romney will say anything for votes. Worst yet, I think I’ve pointed out at one stage that when Romney does speeches, it always appears he rants about anything unsubstantial.

If Romney will be elected, it’s going to be fun times for the writers of Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show.