StratoSector redesign

I think it was about time to do that. I don’t know if everybody knew but i started my web venturing with stratosector (i think you must have figured it out from my old blog link). So there i had a portal going since day one back in April 2006. As i say on my new site:

So, it’s been fun 2-year long ride. Actually two years and a bit more. The portal has been up all this time and i must admit i had a blast. Tournaments, hall of fame, friends and family, e107 plugin support and many many more has gone down all these years.

Really people i mean it, it was entertaining and educative also. But, since i started this blog back in February, (actually a bit earlier i must admit) the site was on a deadlock. I couldn’t maintain both sites and to be honest there was no reason. All i do now is mostly blog and a bit code. I am not into arcade gaming any more and the stuff that the portal offered. Moreover, e107, the platform that the portal was based on, has become somewhat obsolete. You must remember my attempt to migrate it to joomla (and it was a complete failure what so ever).

So, since it was starting to be something that it sits there, i started thinking what i want to do with it. And this is what i came up with. From now on, stratoSector, is going to be my “portfolio” site, the one i’ll index all the things i am up to at any given time. All my projects, sites and interests. I put some work on the design and i hope all you guys like it. Feel free to browse and let me know what you think about it. Go on! Visit it here!

nVidia and the most promissing CUDA

I’ve been reading here and there lately and yesteray i bumped into this amazing article by my friend and kong technology. He writes many interesting stories and tutorials and i must admin i am a fan of is blog. The title of his latest blog post was eyecatching: “CUDA: Breaking the Intel & AMD dominance“. Now what is CUDA and how is it possible to break the mentioned dominance?

Well for starters let me say this. When you are playing a super cool game that has very good graphics nowadays, you must know you are putting alot of stress on your graphics card… Now with this on their mind the graphic cards designers have put alot of computing power on the card. My friend at kong technology notes:

while your PC may have dual core, or at best quad cores, GPUs are approaching in excess of 600 cores in a single chip

What he says after that is most important

However, unlike traditional Intel and AMD CPUs, these cores are smaller and less able to perform complicated tasks. So you still need CPUs around to run all the heavy processing for you.

Now, let’s break it down a little… Graphics is all about complicated mathimatical equations of vector processing and matrix multiplications. These calculations, most of the time, need alot of process power and they can be parallelized. So, the Graphic Processing Units (GPU, that’s what we call the CPU’s on the graphic cards) should only be capable on solving those math problems very fast and efficiently and if they need anything more that’s what a CPU is there for.

Now what if we can harness this power for other processing needs other than complicated graphics? Here is where CUDA comes in. Actually, this is the C like programming language that one can use to make a program that can run using these GPU’s. Here is what you need to do that:

• nVidia powered graphics card 8 series or later.
• The driver for the card with CUDA support.
• The CUDA development kit.
• The CUDA SDK.

All these (and many more information) can be found here. An amazing application  is a plugin they developed for Matlab. Just the perfect one i suppose. They say that it speeds up the processing very much.

Anyway, i think there is one huge catch there (one that caught me to what matters). As i said you need an nVidia powered card of 8 series or better. All those cards are PCI-Express which narrows down to a PCI-Express enabled motherboard. That one right there is my problem I suppose i have to upgrade my hardware to check it out but sometime i’ll have to do it anyway.

All in all i think nVidia is outdoing it’s self and realy standing up from the others. I’ve always been a fan of those cards instead of ATI or others but now this gives me one more reason. We shouldn’t get ahead of ourselfs and say “who needs cpu’s gimme a graphic card”, that would be wrong. But the way we empower our desktop experience is definitely going to change. A new era on personal computing is around the corner and God am i happy to be here to witness it!

Position absolute and the Z index: Creating some cool effects

I remember my self when i first stumbled uppon a site that on the login link it would blur the site and “popup” the login form. That was neat i must admit. Yesterday i was talking with my friend #FN$# and he was asking how he can show an image over a link when hovered. This second one is somewhat a part of the first one.

When you place a component on the page you are creating, most of the time, you define either a margin or a padding for it. You might also define a width and a height.

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A small logo redo

It seems that my friend #FN$# did not just do the work and get it over with. He came back to me with a new set of logos. With a small discussion we had he imroved it and here it is! The best thing with this one is that it has the moto on it and also the letters look slightly better on the background. I just wanted to blow the whistle and let you all guys know what happened on the top of the blog Take the opportunity to congratulate him since it’s a thing he does just for fun and he is doing a nice job. Hope you all like it!

Azada: A very nice puzzle game ($0.99 sale!)

Now this is a nice game. I’ve been a fun of big fish games since they started or so. I enjoyed “Virual Villagers”, “Build-a-lot” and many more. This is a one i found yesterday on a $0.99 (+ Tax) sale. It is on till tomorow, August the 15th. It is a puzzle game with many types of puzzles like point and click (not the annoying kind of ones), blocks. find the same etc. Very nice graphics and a pleasant and relaxing gameplay. Colours are bright and shiny and the interface is appealing to the eye. Moreover the navigation and gameplay is not hard since the clicks are not close one to another making your life easier. Anyway i strongly recomend it and rush for the sale that is on! You can get it from here.

Let the games begin