Kombatant's Lair

I've used Ubuntu for the past few years, and I've watched it become more and more bloated, to the point that it was almost unusable on my work PC (P4, 2GB RAM). So I took a friend's advice and installed Debian Squeeze, and oh boy, what a difference it has been! More snappy, and half the RAM. Anyway, since then I've been adding stuff to my installation, and Plymouth was one of them. Here are the instructions to get it installed just in case someone actually uses Debian:

0. Install v86d package.

1. /etc/default/grub
Replace GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="..."
by GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash nomodeset video=uvesafb:mode_option=1280x1024-24,mtrr=3,scroll=ywrap"
Replace #GRUB_GFXMODE=640x480
by GRUB_GFXMODE=1280x1024

Notice that grub2 supports different resolutions so you can put there a list
and grub2 will choose the first working one. (debian-edu grub background
image should be updated)

2. /etc/initramfs-tools/modules
Add a line containing: uvesafb mode_option=1280x1024-24 mtrr=3 scroll=ywrap

3. echo FRAMEBUFFER=y | sudo tee /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/splash

4. sudo update-grub2
sudo update-initramfs -u

Now you have the default setted theme.

sudo /usr/sbin/plymouth-set-default-theme --list (list available themes)
sudo /usr/sbin/plymouth-set-default-theme THEME (change theme)
sudo update-initramfs -u (apply to initramfs)

So I was looking for a tool that will enable me to blog easily from Ubuntu - Windows Live Writer is sorely missed, and unfortunately there is no way to make it run with Wine (yes, I've tried).

On the other hand, I found Gnome Blog, which is a nifty Gnome Panel applet, which connects to your blog and lets you post whatever you like easily. It supports all the popular blog platforms like Blogger and Wordpress, and it just works :) Hopefully this will enable me to blog more :p Here's the link: Gnome Blog

Wow, haven’t updated my blog in ages! I have promised to do so about one million times, so this one is no different :p For those of you that are interested, you can also catch me on Twitter, on http://www.twitter.com/kombatant :)

So I am off tomorrow morning to Georgitsi, a beautiful village in the Taygetos mountain near Sparta. I’ll be heading there with some friends to have a good time, and spend the Easter holidays. So unless excessive amounts of food and alcohol take up all of my time, I plan to do some reading as well; I’ll take Dexter by Design with me, the new novel by Jeff Lindsay, to see what happens when Dexter returns from his honeymoon in Paris

I return to Athens on Monday, but I don’t plan on sticking around. I’ll probably go to Larissa on Tuesday, and then to Kavala on Thursday to meet up with the gang there. And, of course, on Saturday, 25/04 I’ll be in Thessaloniki. The reason?

Yup, one week after ASOT 400 Armin van Buuren is back in Greece, this time in Thessaloniki and I plan to be there. A night to remember for sure, as only Armin can deliver. My next blog post will probably contain lots of info about that particular event, so until then, I want to wish everyone a happy Orthodox Easter and see you soon!

To be honest, it has been a while since I’ve played any game – mainly due to the fact that I got tired of them. You will of course argue that there have been many titles that deserved my attention the past year, and I fully agree. The only game that actually got some attention was NBA 2k9, and that’s because I could simply play a couple of games, leave it be for a while, and then pick it up again. It was funny, because even thought I was aware of all the new releases, I never actually played any of them; I used them for benchmarking, comparative analysis as far as IQ is concerned, but game playing? Nope. Even after I got myself lots of free time, I couldn’t find myself willing to install a game, and just play. Hence, I watched all 7 seasons of 24 in about 20 days (but that’s a different story altogether )

Well, a week ago I decided that this was going to change. I spoke to a dear friend of mine (and Catalyst beta tester) that I know is a game-a-holic, and asked him for suggestions. He recommended several titles, and I thought I should start with Wanted – Weapons of Fate. It seemed like a good choice, so I started playing, and I quite enjoyed it I must say. But then one day, I was browsing the Rage3D PC Gaming section, and one game was getting rave reviews : Braid. So I said, what the heck, I’ll try that one too, see if it’s any good. So I got it from Steam, and started playing. It was only when I looked at my watch and realised that 5 hours had passed, and it was 6am, that I knew this one was a true keeper.

For those of you not in the know, Braid is a platform/puzzle game. With a twist: you manipulate time. And that exact manipulation is what makes the puzzles brilliant, you have to manipulate things to your advantage, so that you can get all the map puzzle pieces. While you progress, you encounter even more complex puzzles, more time-manipulation variables (I am on World 4 right now, and when i go right, time goes by normally, when I jump, time freezes and when I go left, time rewinds; crazy ). Its graphics are excellent (you really need to see it in motion to appreciate it), and the music is also very atmospheric. Definitely one of the sleeper hits of the year, it’s getting rave reviews everywhere. So check it out and you will definitely get hooked, just like I am right now

As many of you know, I haven’t been a part of AMD PR for the past three months. The economic crisis that hit out industry took a toll in my (former) company as well, and many capable people were left without a job. So these three months served as a much-needed break from all this; after all, when your beloved subject becomes your job 24/7, sometimes you need to step back away from it all in order to fully appreciate it again. So, apart from some posts in Rage3D’s Off Topic, I stayed away from everything, on purpose.

Well, that’s about to change. I intend to start writing again, just don’t know whether it will be for a magazine, website or just post thoughts in this blog, which I have neglected the past two years. We’ll see. I do want to write a piece about the current state of the graphics card industry, so that’ll probably appear here first, and we will see where that takes me.

So all I wanted to say is that, I am back, and intend to be back :) I also updated the blog theme again, so bear with me while I customize it to my heart’s content as usual.

After quite a while, I decided to ditch the old blog template - I like this one much better. Of course it's still largely uncustomized, so I'll update it in the following days.

... and yes, I'll try to update more often :D

So, with the cat (or should I say Spider) out of the bag, here are my impressions of the whole thing. I believe that, what AMD presented in Warsaw is the beginning of a new way of thinking for many consumers. These days, believe it or not, consumers buy products based not how much performance they'll get for their €. Meaning, they decide that they have, let's say €500 to spend, and then see what's out there that can give them more performance.

Let's start from the foundation of the whole thing: the motherboard. AMD's 790FX is probably one of the best motherboards out there, bar none. It's definitely feature-packed, and it has support for several technologies that are to become mainstream soon, like PCI-e 2.0. But, the beauty of it, lies in its backwards-compatibility. So let's just say that you have an Athlon64 X2 right now, and you want to upgrade to the latest and greatest. You also don't have the money right now to get both a new CPU and a motherboard. What you do? Easy. You get a new AMD 790FX mobo, and you breath new life into your Athlon64. Better yet, initial testing show that this particular combination makes the Athlon64 overclock to heaven and back, with some impressive results hitting the net. Couple that with AMD Overclock, which is an excellent tool that will allow you to play and tweak at your heart's content, and the combination is surely promising, to say the least. Plus, if you don't want to invest in a Phenom right now, and would rather wait until AMD releases a higher-clocked version, you can.

Second thing, is the processor. The Phenom is the very first true quad-core processor out there, and many were disappointed with its initial clock speeds. But, I say, just look at the big picture. Did you actually see the prices these chips were released at? Affordable quad-core for everyone - plus, together with the 790FX you have some exciting stuff like un-ganging the memory, and so on and so forth. You probably saw in the various reviews around the net that memory performance was lacking - well, the truth is that several benchmarks don't actually recognise the Phenom's new architecture, and they think they're dealing with an old Athlon. Hence the low results. As for overclockability, I can only speak for the 2.4GHz Phenoms we had in Warsaw - each of them reached 2.8GHz easily, so I doubt that would be a problem.

Last but not least, the HD3850/HD3870. It's a midrange attack from AMD - these chips are cheap to produce, consume very little power and their performance/€ ratio is excellent. Plus, you get scalable Crossfire configuration with one to four cards (in the FX mobos). We had Crossfire X systems on show, which are working already, and the drivers should be released when the new year arrives. A special surprise was on show too, with a system running HD3870 X2 cards in Crossfire, showing how scalable this architecture really is.

But let's get back to the Spider platform. The beauty of it is that these three components actually work together. Meaning you actually see performance advantages by pairing all three together. It's the first release of its kind, and I didn't see many reviews on the net stretching that fact. I believe when reviewers have more time on their hands with the new platform, they will appreciate its advantages. I will post some benchmarks and impressions too as soon as I get a Spider system here to play with.

You can find all the crappy pics I took here: http://picasaweb.google.com/kombatant/SpiderLaunchWarsaw2007

After five days of hard work in Warsaw, I am finally back in Athens. We put some long hours there, making sure that everything was great, and I believe the AMD team did a great job. I do have some pictures of the event, but that will have to wait until Monday - but bear in mind that I am a lousy photographer :p

Oh I had missed England, I'll give you that :) Two days that involved lots of work, but I believe everything worked out great. I do believe I was in hardware heaven :drool:

In a few hours I will be flying to Warsaw for more work. Five days ahead of me, that I believe will be lots of fun, I will get to see familiar faces and friends again, and, of course, will help launching some solid products.

For those of you who are interested, here's a cool wallpaper for you, at all its 2560x1600 glory, so resize accordingly :)

One of the reasons I started posting in my blog often, believe it or not, is the new Windows Live Suite, which was released a few days ago. The Live Suite includes programs such as Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Writer, Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Gallery. Here's a snip from the report eWeed did:

Microsoft has officially taken the beta moniker off the next generation of its Windows Live services, which it launched at events in New York and Los Angeles on Nov. 6. This new generation of Windows Live will be available in 36 languages and 59 countries across the world, and is the first integrated release of the services, Brian Hall, general manager of Microsoft's Windows Live business group, told eWEEK.

Windows Live is designed to focus on three main things: putting the user at the center, providing an integrated experience across everything that Microsoft does on this front and bringing the best of the Web to Windows, he said.

In line with that strategy, this release brings enhancements to popular services such as Windows Live Hotmail, Messenger and Spaces, while introducing new services for sharing digital photos, planning and sharing events, publishing to the Web, and staying in touch with people, Hall said.

Windows Live Writer in particular is a very handy application, and it's the one I use to update this blog - it works with all popular blogging sites, such as Blogger, Windows Live Spaces etc and offers an easy way to make posts. So I recommend it to those of you who don't need something fancy :)

My schedule is kinda crazy lately, I'll admit it. So it's London fist, this Friday, and then Warsaw on Friday. At least I'll get some Dr.Pepper with me back to Greece ^_^

It's been ages since I've updated this blog; I know. But I believe this is about to change. Anyway, lots of good stuff coming up next week, plus I have a certain trip to do ;)

On a totally unrelated note, I really wanted to install Windows Home Server yesterday - I had even assembled an older PC (AthlonXP 3000+, nForce4-SLI mobo, Radeon 9700 Pro :heart:, 2GB DDR1) for that; but my 40GB Hard disk felt unloved since the OS requests 65GB on installation. A big wtf from me to MS for that :confused:

On the gaming front, I am trying really hard to like NBA Live 08. It's certainly one of the buggiest games I've ever played, that's for sure. There are various issues that infuriate me, mostly the fact that every time I load my season I have to go and change the keyboard layout and customize the camera when the game starts because for some strange reason they don't get saved! When an opposite player is at the free throw line, you can forget getting a rebound after a missed free throw because your player is glued to the floor. And other annoyances. The biggest one of all though should be the 3-pointers. I can't for the life of me score outside the 3-point line, and you are talking to a guy who had mastered the run-and-gun style of play, with pick-and-rolls to get the free player etc. So now it's more of an inside game for me. Plus, the game seems easier for some reason now, the CPU is less of a challenge; I've played 10 season games with the Phoenix Suns, I have a 10-0 record so far (I am playing on Superstar) and the usual wins are by 15+ points difference. I really hope they'll fix the obvious stuff with a patch, but I am not holding my breath :bleh:

AMD's X2000 launch in Tunis was a success in my opinion, and here I am, back in Greece. Now the difficult part begins, where I have to be in constant contact with everyone before the NDA lifts, but it's fun :)

Once the NDA lifts I am going to post pictures and several other stuff, but until then, hold on to your horses!

I was in Munich from Monday to Wednesday, and it was a fun trip - I met up with Lars Weinand and we discussed strategies, where AMD currently has the upper hand and what we need to do to commute that to the press and the public. It's an exciting thing for me, basically because times are continually changing and with a position like mine, I have to constantly adapt to new challenges. I believe I can handle it though :) I loved the trip for one more reason: I hadn't spoken any Deutsch for about seven years, and this was a perfect opportunity for me to see whether I remember anything. Well, to be honest, the first day was hilarious because I could understand maybe 10% of what I heard, but the second day was much better, with the percentage rising to 60%! That actually made me hopeful that I'll be able to converse in German again very soon, which is good.

As an added bonus, I met up with Terry Makedon on Tuesday night and we went out for some dinner (thanks again Almut for the recommendation!). I hadn't seen him for over eight months, so it was catch up time mostly. Oh, and I also fell in love with the waitress that served us :heart:

Apart from all that, it's business as usual. I went to see the progress of my car today, and I am hopeful that by early next week the comrad shall be mine again :)

Counter was not working. Fixt :)

An era comes to an end when this month closes. The reason is simple: I quit my job over at Siemens. It was a great year, in which I learned many new things, and hopefully I helped my colleagues and the company I currently work for. But, I can hear you ask, what are you going to do? Well, the reason I quit is because I got a job offer I simply could not refuse. Obviously some people who talk to me privately already know what this is all about, but I'd rather not reveal what I am going to do yet.

Stay tuned next week for updates; same Bat-time, same Bat-blog :D

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