All posts by kobaan

Archive, Operating System

Beryl, a fork of compiz 3D desktop for Linux

Yeah, me again, and again 3D desktops,
I’m sure you’ll ask yourself where’s the difference between compiz
and beryl.See it this way, what options do you have if you want to check
something on your desktop or another window, if a window is already
placed on top of it.

Sure, you can minimize the window, move the window or even close
it. You may use taskwitching, window transparency might work as
well.
But how about, just taking a quick look behind a window border or
corner, like what you would do if it’s just a piece of paper. Watch
this:

Beryl is a fork of the compiz 3D
desktop composition manger for Linux.

Archive

Free blog translations

Many bloggers blog in their own
language, thus limiting readers and contacts to only this
language.
The reason why I started to blog in english (as I am german and
living in germany) was, to improve my english, or at least keep my
english active.
I never saw a problem in my friends and parents not being able to
read my blog because of its english language, but in their lack of
internet connectivity.Now, things have changed, internet connection is everywhere, even
my non-tech parents got internet, language translation can be done
on the fly, almost.

So, this is the time I include hot links for translating my blog in
“maybe your language”.
Check it out on the menu to the right.

Please let me know, if you’re missing YOUR language, but I think I
got most of my friends languages covered.

Archive, HPC

SUPERCOMPUTING 2006 Tutorial on GPGPU on november 12th

Right in time to this years
supercomputing conference 2006 GPGPU will release lots of tutorials on how to use
graphics cards GPU’s for computation in supercomputer scale.
Most interesting will be the direct use of NVIDIA’s CUDA respective
ATI’s CTM, both a C-like programming language, which should make it
easy for he average joe to use the mighty processing power of GPU’s
for the homeuser.You may also checkout and/or join Stanfords latest development in
F@H
protein folding, as they now support multiple GPU’s (Crossfire
or SLI) in their latest client.
saver2

See further details on supercomputing for everyone on http://gpgpu.org or for the more business
type here: http://sc06.supercomputing.org.

Archive

My favourite podcast channels

As podcasts are becoming more and more
professional and entertaining I want to take the chance and share
some of my favourite podcast channels/sites with you.Ehrensenf:
one of the best german daily
podcasts
Geek Brief TV:
the most of the time Mac side of
life…
Rocketboom:
the long traditional internet
podcast
CinemaTech
G4TV: focussed on latest computer
games
Lynne’s SciFi
News: all about the latest
developments in the SciFi scene
FrenchMaid TV:
focussed on, of course, french maids
Winking
Galacticast:
a SciFi comedy
show
img_screen
For subscribing to these podcasts channels you can either use
iTunes, or as I recommend you the free and opensource Democracy player available
for almost any platform.

Have fun…
Kobaan.

P.S.: Leave me a note if you know amazing and popular channels that
I’ve missed so far…

Archive, Operating System

Linux with Compiz + Xgl – beating the Apple desktop

Apple’s Aqua graphical user-interface was the absolute leader in
eye-candy desktops for home computers. Now Linux can offer a quite
similar but also further extended desktop environment like on
Mac’s. The new XServer with integrated OpenGL support Xgl, enables
owners of 3D graphics cards in their computers to use the new
compiz
framework to draw their favourite desktop like Gnome or
KDE in a
3D context. Thus enabling beautiful window-effects and workspace
usage-features never seen before. Check it out here:

WARNING: The only distribution at the moment which enables compiz
by default on supported hardware at the moment is the latest Fedora
Linux. Although you can easily enable compiz on Gentoo Linux,
Ubuntu and others, there’s still some things to do by hand which
requires a lot of reading howto’s, especially if you want to
fallback to your old “working” configuration.