Wednesday 31 October 2012

The Waterfox Project!

Just wanted to leave a quick post here about a new browser i've been using. Ever since firefox was getting updated, i seemed to get a lot of crashes. So I switched to Google Chrome on my desktop, and found it to great successs! I had a better browsing experience, absolutely no more crashes and a much more efficient way to browse the internet. Until ..... Waterfox!!


I have found this browser over 1000% better then chrome and firefox. It loads up SUPER fast. Loads pages MUCH faster. It proves to really get your socks off. It supports all current extensions for firefox unlike other firefox variants! ONE THING THOUGH. It's a windows software!

Take care!

SBR600 Update!

So i have found the gitorious page where the official open source mali drivers have been posted.
One thing tho, they are geared to work in the Android environment.

https://gitorious.org/lima

Upon downloading the master.tar.gz file, i expanded it and got the source code. I attempted to compile it as is, and ran into some errors because i do not have the Android SDK.

make all -C limare
make[1]: Entering directory `/home/ahmad/Downloads/lima-lima/limare'
make all -C lib
make[2]: Entering directory `/home/ahmad/Downloads/lima-lima/limare/lib'
~/android/toolchain//bin/arm-linux-androideabi-gcc -O0 -g -Wall -I../../include   -c -o bmp.o bmp.c
/bin/sh: /home/ahmad/android/toolchain//bin/arm-linux-androideabi-gcc: No such file or directory
make[2]: *** [bmp.o] Error 127
make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/ahmad/Downloads/lima-lima/limare/lib'
make[1]: *** [lib] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/ahmad/Downloads/lima-lima/limare'
make: *** [limare] Error 2
I will have to look more into getting this to work on the Fedora Environment. I hope to get more progress within the week! Because the .1 version presentation is going to be on November 7th! Hope to blog soon!

Friday 26 October 2012

New board from Samsung!

Sem-related to my SBR600 Project regarding the Mali drivers, Samsung just released the Arndale Package-A Boards! I am excited to the Mali GPU being used in this next board release! Hopefully one day i can see my package being used on such hardware!

FSOSS 2012

Well what a day it was. Unfortunately I couldn't stay for the last 3 talks, but I made the best of the first 3.

I first attended the LTSP talk. This talk was very informative to how LTSP worked, and how its helping countries which aren't too wealthy get technology up and going. I believe we can see a lot more of these kind of settings in the future, such as classrooms with very efficient systems, and much more centralized control for administration and monitoring of activity. Elementary schools can adopt this technology to make sure that students at a young age can have a safe browsing experience and computer usages.

The second talk I attended was the Automation of Video Editing. I thought it was brilliant how Raul Suarez had designed scripts to automate repetitive tasks in video editing. I can see this used in broadcast environments, and really opened my eyes up to how we can automate even more.

Finally the Open Source Career's presentation by Robert Russel was quite informative. I learned quite a bit about how to approach finding a job now, and the correct attitude to have towards it. It has really motivated me to be more enthusiastic out on future endeavours.

I wonder what next year holds!

Tuesday 23 October 2012

Python: A neat little addition!

In diving into the python lab, I have kind of fallen in love. Python is a very easy language to learn, in minutes i was understanding import functions and loops. I hear that it is very important to have python under your belt which makes me glad that I liked it.

script.py  Ran this with 644 u+x permissions.

As for a project update, I have begun attempting to compile the mali drivers which i have found online! I have posted research links on my project page: Here

Hope to update more !

Wednesday 3 October 2012

Repo Man!

I finally got around to getting my repo fully completed. Professor Chris Tyler in our last class stated that using the --secret-keys option with the gpg export command would actually be exporting your private key and use that to sign your RPM's. Which is what i was doing unfortunately, and caused me the inability to install my RPM's from my repo because of the error: Package could not be installed, this RPM is not signed.

This drove me insane, so thanks a lot Chris Tyler for your assistance!

My repo is up and running at: http://matrix.senecac.on.ca/~ataychouri/rpms/
my repo file looks like this: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=HeiipR2W
my RPM release package: http://matrix.senecac.on.ca/~ataychouri/rpms/ahmad-0.0.1-1.fc17.x86_64.rpm

And to make sure i only used my own repo when testing the progress i always issused these switches with my yum command: yum install --disablerepo=\* --enablerepo=ahmad gzip

I hope to be throwing in weekly updates from now on regarding my Project for SBR. I hope to be doing the Lima drivers for the Mali cards in the snowball and oriegen boards. Hope to see you guys soon!