Upgrade Samsung Galaxy Gio to CyanogenMod 10.1
After about a year of Gingerbread (2.2.3) and CyanogenMod (7.2), I thought it was time again to look at further upgrades to my Galaxy Gio. This was apparently enough time for developers to work out problems involved in dealing with Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0.x) and Jelly Bean (4.[1-2].x) such as no ICS (or greater) libs and codecs from Qualcomm for the MSM7x27 family of chips for hardware acceleration.
Thanks to the Samsung Galaxy Gio community at xda-developers, we now have CyanogenMod (10.1) which is based on Jelly Bean (4.2.2) that is usable for every day use. There are a few things that I’ve noticed that are not perfect, but it is a fully usable ROM. Before you do anything suggested below, it is wise to first backup anything you think important and not just to your SD as it will be overwritten to support an extra ext4 partition that can be used to store your applications and save valuable space. Make sure your SD is rated 6 or better.
Worldsynth 0.10.0 released
Worldsynth version 0.10.0 is released and can be found on github. This is our first “official” release in which the result should work, out of the box, with a usable and familiar GUI instead of the pygame environment. This is provided by Qt4 via PySide. We have even tested Worldsynth on Windows XP to validate that it is indeed cross platform.
As for 0.11.0, we are looking to unlock size of terrain to be of any variable width and height instead of the basic power of two. We are also investigating fluvial erosion.
Latency simulation over long fat network
One of our clients asked us how we handle latency, and not just a few ms across racks but 2 and even 3 digit ms latency that indicates geographically separate locations across continents, not just a country. Not only that, the “pipes” involved are 10Gbps and we had to fill them. We have the theories and made models of how it would work. We perhaps might not be able to fill a 10Gbps fully with one stream, we could fill it with multiple streams but we had to validate this conclusion.
The question now becomes, how do we test this. We’ve done our research and there are only a few commercial solutions available like the Netropy 10G2 which is a 4 port, 2 lane hardware latency simulator for $30,000 new. Not only is that outside my budget, it is still limited to simulating 2 10Gbps pipes while we need at least 3 lanes (6 ports) and possibility to expand to more as necessary. We decided it was cheaper in terms of total cost to put the research into creating our own Latency Simulator.
Wireless BCM4312 with the 3.6, 3.7 and 3.8 kernel
As a follow up to , I’ve also tested the Broadcom hybrid driver with the 3.6, 3.7 and the soon to be released 3.8 kernels with success. There have been no major changes that should effect the operation of this driver.
To verify that everything is working as expected on the software side, when modprobe or insmod wl, you should get a similar dmesg output:
[ 307.560347] lib80211: common routines for IEEE802.11 drivers
[ 307.560353] lib80211_crypt: registered algorithm ‘NULL’
[ 307.564524] wl: module license ‘unspecified’ taints kernel.
[ 307.564529] Disabling lock debugging due to kernel taint
Properly ripping DVDs and adding subtitles in Ubuntu
There are occasions where you legitimately need tools to help that would otherwise be considered the domain of “pirates” and “ne’er-do-wells”. In this particular scenario, my grandparents send a DVD from the United States (Region1) to us in Belgium (Region2). Not only will the DVD not play back on a region locked DVD player, there are also no Dutch subtitles.
There are however technological solutions to this type of problem, including such programs as dvd::rip, vobsub2srt and a few websites dedicted to crowdsourced subtitles.
