I should be posting technical stuff from my everyday experiences here, but I haven’t had the time. I have time to play with the site today, so here goes.
A few days ago, I licensed a personal copy of Intel’s C Compiler for Linux* after reading an article about it. I did a compile of a few benchmarking applications, and decided to benchmark POV-Ray with it. With the compiler flags I used on that day, I acheived a speedup of about 50 seconds over GCC C compiler on a 200 second render of ntreal.pov at 2048×1536 resolution with maximum AA, which was remarkable. The binary worked great on AMD Athlon CPUs as well, better than GCC generated code. So I tried to reproduce the results, and perform a proper benchmark on real-world applications. So I downloaded the source code of MegaPov and tried compiling it with different optimizations. The results were startling. The output from the Intel compiled MegaPov binary was corrupted! There are sample images of how the output from GCC compiled MegaPov and the output from the Intel compiled MegaPov looked. The speed difference between the renders was not large either, to justify using the Intel Compiler (although for simulations taking many months, it may be useful). Both the GCC compiler included in Redhat Linux 7.2 and GCC3 produce fast code (the former’s code was faster for me). I guess it must’ve been certain optimizations the Intel Compiler performed which generated buggy code.
Fractint! Who can forget that program. My god. A couple of days ago, someone in #gimp mentioned Fractint, and I went back in time…. was so incredible, the first time I lay my eyes on the Mandelbrot set.. the plasma displays, learning how there was a Julia set for every point which made the Mandelbrot set.. learning how it worked, the complex plane.. and immediately sitting down and program to plot the inverse Julias as one moved the mouse. Today, after all this time, you ask me to explain the mathematics of it, and I will with glossy detail 
Some things cannot be forgotten.. lots of times my friends say “those were the days”. They were every bit the days.
I bought a new flat-bed scanner.. have been playing with it since then, scanning hand-drawings. Setting it up under Linux was a chore. Scanner support is sucky under Linux. Anyways, all that is done, and it now works fine. Here’s an example of a small concept-logo I created one evening for a conference. I also got a new 120 gig hard disk. Why did I need a new hard disk? If you know me well, you know I adore chess. After years of playing with GNU Chess, I looked around for a good chess engine and found Crafty. I’m glad I searched for one. Crafty is the best darn free engine one can find for *nix. On ICC and FICS, Crafty is rated 2500-2700, which puts it at almost GM level. One of the things which Crafty comes with, is its huge database. I didn’t realize it when I started downloading it. After downloading about 7 GB of these files, it was still going on. Then I checked the directory and saw files well over 1GB each. New hard disk time.
Recently, people at work have taken to playing Quake. We tried Quake1 initially, and then Quake2 for a bit. A few days ago, after going to the DC, me and Raf went to a computer game store and we found Quake3. Now we only play Quake3. Q3 kicks ass. It’s incredible. Its worth every cent of the 20 bucks I spent on it. I feel sorry sometimes I didn’t start on it earlier.. but better late than never. A lot more of our friends on the net also join in to play and it’s simply a new and incredible thing I’ve been introduced to. I think I might buy a new video card cause of this game. The ageing Nvidia card at work needs an upgrade, and so does this Matrox G450 on my home machine. With RTCW next in-line, I better upgrade.
Hmm.. what else? Rob of Debian Planet fame came down to the office for a short stay. Richard Stallman came to lecture at the univ. There are a few pictures here. It was OK. He spoke as expected. We met people from Linux User magazine.
Pngcrush is a handy utility. It works great. All PNGs on this site were compressed by about 20-40%. There are some site updates I want to do, like re-introduce the news section, and also put up my resume, and other stuff. It’ll happen slowly.
The more number of people, who see the sights and sounds of Auroville from me, the more they want to settle down there. My friend Karthik says, Auroville is like the movie The Beach without the last 15 minutes. I tell them they should accept what is there, and not expect what they have in mind. It is a township community, and requires hard work and dedication to be a member of. People will see almost nothing of it with a week’s visit.
* A lot of people blindly follow software for which source code is available. This was a topic of discussion a few days ago when I had the opportunity to meet LinuxUser magazine’s editor Trevor Parsons. There is a lot of good quality closed-source software I use everyday, such as Acrobat Reader, Intel C compiler, Blender, Quake3, etc. Using free software is good as a principle. But if the argument is that one uses open source software cause one trusts it more, I have an argument. Do you personally verify every single line of code for all the software you use everyday?