Rise of Netbooks and Ubuntu Netbook Remix

My initial idea was to do a little blog on UNR. However, the more I put off publishing it, it seemed to drift out to other related areas and get lengthier. So, before this blows out of proportion here I go... :)

The proliferation of netbooks and associated technologies

With Web2.0, person to web based application interaction has become richer and easier. In addition, due to concepts of Green Computing, organizations are trying to go for systems like Cloud Computing, virtualization and more centralized processing thus bringing the total number of processing entities to a minimum which would result in a smaller carbon footprint and significant cost savings. Therefore, the current trend is headed towards us going back to the area where processing happens in a ‘cloud’ of which we do not know much other that how to get the service. Loosely speaking, we are going back to the days of the good old main frames and dumb terminals with of course many differences in terms of performance, user experience, richness and complexity of operations and services.

Due to all of the above reasons, notebook manufacturers started coming up with low power, low cost devices which were coined as ‘netbooks’ by shrinking localized performance and improving connectivity, robustness and user interfaces. Ideally these devices had screen sizes of 5”-9” inches, 1GB RAM, Few GBs of Solid State Disk space and an Intel Atom processor. Furthermore, it is easy to use slight variants of the Oss we currently have, since these too are based more on the x86 architecture.

The Asus Eee PC was the first commercial success for Netbooks and the different netbook brands and models of that followed have become more compact and better in performance. Personally speaking, based on the configurations and features currently available in netbooks like the Eee PC, I would feel happier to start using one of those for my day-to-day computing needs.

The Wikipedia article about netbooks has a pretty comprehensive explanation worth checking out by any enthusiast.

UNR at a glance

Ubuntu has been talking for ‘remix’ versions of their products for a while, and now we have such a ‘remix’ up for grabs. Remixes are specials editions that have been created targeted at a specific purpose. Therefore, Ubuntu Netbook Remix(UNR) is an optimized variant of Ubuntu which is targeted to run on low power low cost devices like netbooks and other low power laptops.

Below is a couple of screens from the UNR I tried out.

Features of UNR

Being pretty aggressive when it comes to modernization, Ubuntu took steps to come up with a respun verison of Ubuntu geared towards these kind of devices. This is pretty similar to the approach taken by Xandros Linux which is a customized Linux OS that was shipped with the Eee PC. The Easy-Peasy OS is also similar to this.

Underneath UNR can have Ubuntu 8.04 or higher, but the UI is optimized to run on smaller screens. I took hold of the 9.10 version of it, which was released about 2 weeks ago, and tried out on a virtual PC on my Virtual Box instance, and it was pretty striking in the first go.

When the UNR initiative kicked off, it was few packages that made this all happen. You can simply get hold of the special packages that give life to UNR and install them on top of your existing Ubuntu instance. So, basically it was more of a UI related optimization that had been done in contrast to a whole new optimization done in the kernel level to achieve performance and efficient resource utilization on low end devices.

Windows7 boasts of its heavily efficient resource usage and ability to track energy hogging applications and although Fedora has managed to keep the energy meter at a lower level, Ubuntu has had some issue when it comes to retaining battery power. PowerTop can be used to track the energy utilization of your Linux system. However, guys at Canonical are working hard on that collaborating with the Mobilin project which aims at forming a resource efficient OS and application stack for mobile internet devices. This is essential since resource efficiency would be a key factor when Ubuntu or UNR is to be a mainstream OS on low power devices (Canonical is taking steps to ship UNR preinstalled on most netbooks). Xandros Linux which comes with Eee PC claims to be pretty efficient on power consumption, but I did not find any statistical evidence for that (I didn’t search much J ). Anyway it is cruel to ask for too much from UNR since it is a ‘remix’ and not a ‘netbook edition’ as such.

However, when it comes to UNR 9.10, the there seems to have been a significant leap. The packages that used to power previous UNR version are deprecated, and it has been built from ground up to take the best of the speed and power features of the chipset.

Minimum Hardware Requirements:

• Processor: Intel® Atom™ processor

• RAM: 512 MB

• Storage: 4 GB Flash disk (SSD) or hard disk

Let me summarize some features of UNR I came across. Some features are present in the Ubuntu 9.10 standard edition too.

• A vertical left nav menu based user interface: This is an optimal way of producing output in small screens. The ordinary desktop is replaced with a set of tabs on the left and the context content appearing in the remaining space. The applications are categorized in to these tabs based on the utility.

• ‘Ubuntu One’ access : This is an awesome option which gives the user access to his personal cloud with 2GB capacity for free (capacity can be increased if you are willing to pay for it). With this, backing up, synchronizing and sharing data becomes ever so easy.

• Empathy IM : Pidgin has been replaced by Empathy IM which additionally has better audio/video support as well as built in SIP support.

• OpenOffice 3.1 : The good old open office that all of us know of.

• Rhythmbox : A simple yet fully fledged player inspired by Apple iTnes which has comprehensive support for a gamoot of audio formats, sync capabilities with devices, rip and burn capabilities and support for Internet Radio and podcasts.

• And many more…

Looking forward to get hold of a netbook and join the hype ASAP!!!

Reporting from Chennai...

After being within the oceanic boundaries of my dear motherland Sri Lanka, I finally got a chance to travel abroad since I had be part of a two man team to work onsite on a client engagement of Virtusa. Anyway, this was not far away. It was just Chennai, India which is so close to us, geographically speaking and the 4th largest city in India. By the time I type this is, it has been 11 days since we got here and there a loads of interesting stuff to talk about despite the fact that Chennai does not have many tourist attraction compared to most of the other main cities in India.

First of all, I must say that the stereotypical view of Chennai as a very dirty city is not totally true now. There have been some serious development projects that have taken place over the years and they seem to have really paid off. You can see gigantic buildings coming up in huge vacant lands in the city as well as in suburban areas. The development in the IT sector has happened big time here. Apart from the many BPO companies in the city (including Virtusa :) ), Chennai has also reserved a 25km stretch along one of their trunk roads as a complete IT park. Our client (Standard Chartered Software Solutions) is also located in this park, and this area has thousands of acres of free land and the sight is simply amazing!

However, Chennai is more famous for its automobile and mechanical industry. It is known as the ‘Detroit of Asia’ and produced 30% of India’s automobiles. Although we were expecting to see Ambassador, Maruti and Tata cars, about 50% of the vehicles comprised Chevrolette, Ford, Hyundai and Toyota vehicles. These are all produced in Indian plants.

Apart from that, Chennai has an impressive outlook towards public infrastructure. After landing on the 21^st September when we headed to the city, the first thing we came across was the giant butterfly flyover. This is an amazing piece of engineering and it gives a warm welcome to anyone who enters the country through the Chennai airport. This is known as the Kathipara flyover and earlier it has been just a huge roundabout which had been a major reason for the traffic build-up.

See how the old junction looked and how it looks now!

One more thing that overwhelmed me was the size of the city and the amount of free space they have in suburban areas even after doing mega constructions! The place is huge!!! No wonder India can house so many organizations and manufacturing plants.

Anyway, after I got to Chennai I started respecting the drivers in Sri Lanka. These guys here drive like insane!!! The traffic lights barely manage to keep them from messgin up the junctions. Even if two cars brush past each other, they would just yell “Ei!!!” and move on. Most cars do not have side mirrors, and even the cars that do have side mirrors have retracted them. On every commodity vehicle you can find the wording “sound horn” written on the rear of the vehicle. The simple interpretation for this is, “I will not give any signals, I will drive as I want. If you need to overtake me just blare the horn!”.

One great memory I am going to carry home is the scrumptiousness of the South Indian food. Still the food keeps surprising me daily and I am really enjoying the authentic biryani, parota, puri, chapathi and the list can go on! (Yummy!).

The people I met so far in Virtusa Chennai ATC, Standard Chartered and in the places where we stayed were very hospitable. It made my life very easy to move around with the little amount of Tamil I knew J

With all this said, I still cannot resist saying, “I love Sri Lanka and I miss it sooooo much!!!”

'Chicken Ala Carte' - A bitter truth!

It is not something new to hear that millions of people in the world find it extremely hard to find a slice of bread or drop of water to survive. Here are some statistics to emphasis the extent of the issue.

• 963 million people across the world are hungry. [ref]

• Every day, almost 16,000 children die from hunger-related causes. i.e one child every five seconds! [ref]

• Around 27-28 percent of all children in developing countries are estimated to be underweight or stunted. [ref]
  
  
• In 2005, almost 1.4 billion people lived below the international poverty line, earning less than $1.25 per day. [ref]

Statistics can go on for pages. But, until you see something like what is shown below, you would never actually feel what it is like.

This is a short film which was directed by Ferdinand Dimadura, that won the Short film Competition of the 56th Berlin International Film Festival. Once you watch it, you'll realize if this could not win, what will.

Quoting a synopsis about short movie, "this film is about the hunger and poverty brought about by Globalization. There are 10,000 people dying everyday due to hunger and malnutrition. This short film shows a forgotten portion of the society. The people who live on the refuse of men to survive. What is inspiring is the hope and spirituality that never left this people."

I'd generally say "enjoy" when sharing a video with anyone. But, with this I'd say, "try not to end up with a tear in your eye". I'd rather not comment on any content in the video since you should see it for yourself. This is the most touching video production I saw in the recent past.

Google Wave – The next revolution on the web!

When you hear the word Google, it has probably become yet another WWW with its amazingly broad range of web based product stack. What started off as a highly versatile search engine has turned out to be a multi million dollar company. Google search was its first hit. Then it was continued by other initiative like GMail, Google Apps, Google Chrome etc. The next big thing from Google is just around the corner – GoogleWave!

What is Google Wave? Simply put it is the next generation real time communication and collaboration solution from Google. With everything moving to the web space, real time, high quality collaboration was increasing becoming a crucial requirement. There have been many initiatives which were focused on enabling collaboration for more focused aspects. However, with Google Wave, it seems to be a total solution which combines an amalgam of collaboration mechanisms spanning from email through IM, web chat, wiki, social networking to project management. This is a brainchild of the brothers Jens & Lars Rasmussen, the creators of another magical app - Google Maps. Their initial step for Google Wave was a project codenamed 'walkabout' which aimed at eliminating the boundaries between different types of communication methods.

The most interesting features of Google Wave include real-time operation, embeddability, playback functionality, extensibility and obviously being open source. Now you might be thinking what the word ‘wave’ means. Is it just a catchy word for marketing? Well, not really. A wave is the highest level of abstraction in this platform. Along with the term ‘wave’ there is a small jargon which contain some other terms as well. Let me put them very briefly as I understood. Starting with a ‘wave’, a wave is one threaded conversation which can be of any form like a multi-person chat, a collaborative whiteboard etc. A wave is made up of ‘wavelets’ which are also threaded conversations like waves, but they form a subset of a wave only. The next level of granularity is a ‘blip’, which is a single message. This would be like one line in a chat. Next comes the term ‘document’. This is what bundles in all the content of a blip. Next, there are ‘extensions’ which work within a wave, which are accessible for the participants operating in the wave. Extensions are twofold – ‘gadgets’ and ‘robots’. Gadgets are applications like Facebook apps, and robots are autonomous participants within a wave. Finally, although it may be obvious ‘Embed wave’ is the action of embedding a wave to your own web application.

Learan more about Gadgets and Robots.

The Google Wave Federation Protocol is the underlying protocol which makes the concept works.

This video taken from Google I/O explains what it is all about.

When it comes to Google, they have really played their cards well. Just think for a moment the work they did. First they conquered the web space. Then took the desktop apps to the web, through Google Docs, Google Calendar etc. Now that they have the communication channels as well as the tools that need to be collaborated, basically, it’s matter of consolidating them and enabling real time communication between them. However, with Google Wave, they have really taken it to the limit and all the stuff sounds really interesting. This is said to be opened for public access by the end of the year, and I am soooo looking forward to it. I’m pretty sure these ‘waves’ are going to make a tsunami in cyber space!!!

T20 World Cup - Being the bridesmaid for the second time…

So ended the World T20 Cup finals of course in a way that does not bring much joy to our hearts. Being unbeaten and inventive throughout the series, our lions were the favourite team to win the finals and bring the second world level trophy home. But, what happened at the finals? Just like the ODI World Cup in 2007, we turned out to be the runners-up.

I am no expert in cricket. But, at least I know the difference between black and white, and such incidents were seen in the final. First of all, what has always been biting me is the question, “what on earth is Mubarak doing in the squad?”. Seriously, I don’t see any value addition he does to the team when required. It is true that he has a handful of pretty interesting contributions. But, I’m sure Sri Lankan cricket has better resources than that. For an example, Indika De Saram had to just hang around in the bench throughout the tourney as if he was taken just to get rid of the media frenzy surrounding him being ignored by the selection committee. I really admire Dilshan as a player, but I don’t think it is wise to try to depend on the ‘Dilscoop’ so much. Specially not as a shot to open scoring like which made him go back to the pavilion for a duck in the T20 finals, when at least a contribution of at least 20 from him would have saved the game for us.

Anyway, my point is, the unwanted influence on the sport as well as embracing unorthodox stuff too soon is very likely to hold back Sri Lankan Cricket. The politics looming above the selections should stop and make way for Cricket to flourish.

Anyway, with that said I am not going to stop by just being critical like most of us would do. There are many good things that happened during the tournament. As always our team played like real gentlemen, and although Sanga needs more experience to get that extra edge as a captain, his drive so far has been superb! Not only as a cricketer but also as an ambassador for the country and cricket. It is extremely inspiring how he uplifts the morale of the players and the spectators through his eloquent speech and I really loved the way he thanked the Sri Lankan supporters in his mother tongue in the end. The performance shown by all the players throughout especially Dilshan, Malinga, Mathews, Mendis, Sanath, Murali was amazing and it was a real treat to watch the ball soaring past the boundary line and wickets being smashed off by the bowlers. Furthermore, we were able to chase away the giants in Cricket like Australia and the West Indies. Therefore, we actually we totally rocked the show out there in England although the ending was not as colourful as we expected it to be.

With the new air of freedom in the country, I wish our lions to get a warm welcome once they reach Sri Lanka despite the fact that they could not win the cup, because, after all we should have the temperament to accept victory and defeat alike. Anyway, the new T20 champs will be here soon. So let’s return the favour, shall we?

Bravo SL Cricket!!!

Independence v2.0 - Released

This post should have come few days back. But, I was having problems hooking up to the internet. Anyway, it’s late better than never. So, here goes…

Getting to the point, all I can say is “Whoopee!!! Good Riddance for bad rubbish!!!”. The monster that brought chaos to the country and the region is finally gone to rot in hell! It is not only for the thousands of lives he killed, thousands of people he made homeless, thousands of children who were made fatherless or motherless or the millions of dollars worth of damages he did to the country. It is also because of the mess up he did to the mindset of the entire world bringing disgrace to the country and the Tamil community which he claimed to be the soul representative of. Finally, the barbarian who was supposed to be invincible was eliminated and the millions of sighs of relief shed irrespective of the nationality, religion and political party, and the thousands of national flags which were hoisted in all corners of the country vouched for the true feeling of Independence V2.0 of the country.

With all the high spirits about the elimination of the ruthless LTTE, the leadership and courage shown by His Excellency the President was truly incredible. A million ‘thank you’s for you sir for being a true Sri Lankan and showing the so called International Community that we can stand tall as one nation. Furthermore, I am ever grateful to the Secretary of Defence and Commanders of all forces for the amazing dedication they put in to bring the country under one flag. Most importantly, I bow down to all the soldiers in the line of duty not only because of the valiant efforts made by them to get rid of the LTTE, but also because of the professionalism and care shown in rescuing the displaced people. Hats off for all of you!!!

So, with the path cleared, what do we have ahead of us? It is nothing else but sheer development, and show the world that a phoenix is in the rising! It is time for all the nationalities… umm... let me rephrase. It is time for all ‘Sri Lankans’ to get together and march forward for the sustainable development of the country with harmonious co-existence across diversities. Who knows, we might start off beating Singapore! It is not impossible! :)

Bravo mother Sri Lanka!!!


PS : I was trying to focus only on the positive side of this, but anyway as a final note to all those national and international scoundrels who tried to spoil our nation I’d like to say: “I don't consider you all vultures. I consider you something a vulture would love to eat.!!!!”

‘Milli’band adds to the Mega pain…

Let’s start with a fact. LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran is a bloodthirsty terrorist who created enough havoc for this country as well as the region, and should be eliminated!!!

With that said, I find it pretty surprising and disgusting to see how the so called ‘world icons’ are partnering with the LTTE to protect it when it is at the verge of being erased from the face of our country. The most recent stunt was pulled off by the UK Minister of Foreign Affairs Mr. David Miliband, where he held hands with his French partner Bernard Kouchner and came to persuade the GOSL to go for a ceasefire due to the ‘humble’ and ‘pure’ intention of making safe passage to the innocent civilians trapped in the war torn area. Now, this seems rather paradoxical since all these guys are asking the government to stop eliminating the terrorists while the terrorist leader is using a human shield to protect his ... you know what.

The govt is doing a tremendous operation out there rescuing over 200,000 people and when ‘Milli’band walks in and tries to be the ‘Angel of Salvation’ that looks an absolute joke. This doesn’t end there. Even the UN Secreatary General is not doing his job right. From the beginning he has tried to point the finger at the govt, and even now when there are enough other burning issues in the world where his attention is needed, he comes and says to find the murderers of Mr.Lasantha Wickramathunga which is an indirect pressure put on the govermnment. Take the The US-led ‘Tokyo Co-Chairs’. What a nerve they had in asking to provide amnesty to the LTTE!!! Why can’t they provide amnesty to Bin Laden?! When Prabhakaran killed so many innocent civilians, no foreign minister came or put pressure on the LTTE. Where were Mr Miliband, Mr. Moon or the Tokyo Co-Chairs? Were they hibernating? They are just wasting time to fulfill their own electoral political dreams.

Although they have smartly registered the phrase ‘ethnic conflict’ for the problem in SL, it is really not an ethnic conflict any more. Now it is an eradication of a deadly terrorist group. I myself know that multi cultural and multi racial people can peacefully co-exist since I’ve been in such a school, a University and even my current workplace provides a peaceful environment to all employees where your capabilities become the only factors that signify you from another. So, it is just a matter of breaking out of the shells that we are trapped in, and embracing the fact that the significance is in what you say and do and not in the social division or group that you belong to.

The President, Secretary of Defence and the Army Commander of the country are being commendably strong amidst the ruthless forces which are trying to benefit out of the long lasting conflict of this country. We have been also unfortunate to have hundreds of leg pullers in the country itself including some top ranking players in the so called opposition party.

However, as a final note I have to say, this is the last chance we have to bring a definite end to this burning issue, and if the leadership of the country backs off now, there’s not going to be another chance. My plea for all the factions who have been devouring out of the ‘ethnic issue’ is, please stop being vultures. You’ve had enough of your share. Please let this country prosper and reach its true heights at least now.

MOINC - Yes. It Scales!

The MOINC gang was in high spirits after the successful completion of presentations and a fully set up demonstration of a MOINC deployment as part of our final year project evaluation. We were so overwhelmed by the way things went and we were certain that what we tried to achieve by coming up with the architectural prototype - MOINC was definitely going to drive future web services deployments big time!

With that highly ambitious perception, we wanted to try and press MOINC to its limits in a small environment within our control and actually see how scalable it can be. So, once the final year exams were over and before we set off on our industrial career paths, we thought to give it a shot using a number of computers from a lab of our department – the Department of Computer Science & Engineering (CSE), University of Moratuwa.

By the way, in case you are new to MOINC, in the most concise way I can put it, “it is an attempt to blend Web Services with Grid and Volunteer Computing concepts in order to make future Web Services deployments highly available and scalable while bringing the computing costs down and making use of unused computing power.” Hmm… I guess that covers it. :)

We got together on 13th March 2009 and managed to get access to the Advance Computing Laboratory of CSE which houses around 60 computers. In this phase our plan was to make as much as concurrent requests to a highly computationally intensive web service and see how the web services deployment can scale to cater the requests. We used a web service which performs an Insertion Sort on a collection of 75000 numbers.

We installed the MOINC Agent application on 20 computers in the lab, and ran the MOINC Server and service client on one laptop, the default WSAS node on another laptop and the URL repository and Server Manager on another laptop. The we gradually increased the number of concurrent requests and at the point of total failure to respond, we increased the grid size and restarted sending in requests in an increasing order.

The results were amazing, and turned out just the way we wanted!!! It was really electrifying for us to see the MOINC screen saver running on all monitors when the deployment was running on full capacity. We collected a set of statistics and will be coming up with a research paper about our working prototype pretty soon.

Check out what Hiranya has to say about our test session in his Tech Feast.

Here are few snaps of what happened on that day.

- MOINC Agents running...

- default WSAS node (running on my lappy ;))

- Just about to join the grid.

- 50% of the team. (L to R)Dinusha, Isuru, Rusiru, Aravinda (me) & Hiranya


Take a look at how scalability increases with the size of the grid.



My heartiest thanks go out to all the MOINC team members who turned up for the test and I would also like to thank Mrs. Vishaka Nanayakkara – Head, CSE and Mr. Ananda Fransiscu who is in charge of the Advance Computing Lab for all the support given to this test session.

MOINC has proven its capabilities, but this is not the end!

It has a long way to go. A VERY long way…! Oh yeah! ;)

Complimentary review of my portable pal…

The mobile phone market is a maze today. Finding the right phone to fit your needs has turned out to be a true gamble. After losing three phones within a couple of months, there came a point where I had to buy a phone and make it my next best buddy. I am very keen on the overall performance of a mobile phone and especially expect the audio playback quality to be of top quality since I am a little bit of a music junky on the move. In addition, I prefer to go for wacky and unconventional designs when it comes to tech stuff. Thinking of all that, I finally chose to buy a Sony Ericsson W550i on one fine day in October 2006. Being a phone of SE’s Walkman series, its music capabilities really swung it for me.

>>> Manufacturer's overview

As at now it has already been under my hard usage, and despite the fact that it has been tortured to its limit, it still continues to rock on!!! I don’t care what others have to say about this, but the performance is simply amazing considering the time which it was launched.

This was just the second walkman released by SE, and they have given it the wacky swivel action to reveal the keypad. I still enjoy it when people who get hold of my phone try to open it like a slide-up or flap phone since the usage is not obvious. Well, yeah. It is quite bad in terms of UI design principles. But, what the heck! I like it that way :)

Let me point out what is really awesome with this phone. The sound quality and bass enhanced by MegaBass^TM was simply amazing when used with the ear plug type earphones. No matter how old the phone is, it beats the hell out of the Nokia NSeries phones and even the ExpressMusic models. Specially in terms of bass. It is also noteworthy to mention the quality enhancement by Stereo Widening, which gives a real 3D feel. The W550i has a ‘music only’ mode of operation, which transforms it in to a pure walkman. So, if(when) I am to switch to another phone one day, I will still have this running in the music mode as my walkman :)

Next comes the battery. This houses a more robust Li-Po (Lithium Polymer) battery which was an innovative step taken during the time this was released replacing the Li-Ion batteries. It has amazing battery life and even today it can run for over three days after a full charge with my normal operations.

Display – totally cool. Most displays cannot be viewed under direct sunlight because they tend to turn dark. But, this has a reflective panel within it, which uses the sunlight itself to show the contents quite similar to having the backlight. Moreover, the display cover is scratch proof which still remains smooth and clean when the rest of the phone has been scratched and ‘bruised’ and looks like the surface of the planet Mercury at a distance.

Convenience never ends! This was one of the few phones which could be charged via USB by the time I got hold of it. I still remember the few times I charged my phone off my laptop while travelling home by bus coz I needed to notify my father to come pick me up. However, I have been mainly using this feature to annoy my friends using Nokia mobiles ;)

There are many other good things about it like the dedicated keypad lock toggle switch, stereo speakers, enhanced web browser inspired by the browsers on Symbian, VideoDJ, Remote Control, Java support etc which I’d not comment on simply coz I don’t want to make this too long. With all the good things it has to offer, there are definitely areas to improve. But, we mustn’t forget that we are paying nearly peanuts to get all these practical features from the W550i.

However, don’t get me wrong. I am not recommending anyone to buy this right now; simply because there are enough feature rich phones in the market, and this was a kind of a gracious review for the W550i for being with me throughout, and I don’t see the death of it anywhere in the near future ;)

Viva El W550i!!!