Installing JDK on Vista 64-bit

I needed to work on some Java SE application and all the machines I have now run Vista 64-bit, I downloaded the JDK 6 update 6 for Windows x64 from the Sun website but it doesn't seem to work at all, the setup went okay but then, Eclipse craches just after showing the splash screen and the NetBeans installer says that it can't find the jdk on my computer, I installed the 32-bit jdk and everything worked fine.

update: I gave it another look and I found that the Eclipse I got was 32-bit and I read on the web that the NetBeans setup has issues and some say that you can ignore the installer, extract the zip and run, so maybe there was nothing wrong with neither the JKD nor Vista, it was just different configurations that didn't match.

Nile University: Wireless Intelligent Networks

For the last three days, I've been attending the conference on wireless intelligent networks organized by the Nile University in the Smart Village. The conference was held under the auspices of Dr. Tarek Kamel, the minister of communications and information technology. Ohio State and RICE universities also contributed to the conference. The conference was followed by a WARP workshop, but only a limited number of the attendees was invited.

It was a great initiative from the Nile University to introduce this interesting field to the academic community in Egypt. University students were also invited to get exposed to the ongoing research in wireless networks and get in touch with the world leaders in this technology. You can find all the information you need about the event on the conference website. The conference presentations should be available soon.

The conference was more oriented to EE topics. As a CS undergraduate, I had some difficulty following up with some talks, but it was a good experience after all. I talked to some of the speakers about the role of CS students in this field and here is what I got:

"The middle east is going to become very powerful both using and developing technology. There is going to be a tremendous need for better ideas," said Prof. A. Paulraj. He also mentioned some topics of interest regarding mobile technology including: powerful processes that consumed little power, new architectures that saves power using techniques like clock gating, more user friendly interfaces suitable for dealing with more data, security and clean slate internet.

"You should take your studies very seriously," said Prof. A. El Gamal.

"Go outside traditional education. Think outside the box. Whatever you learn isn't just courses, you should find points of interlinking between the things you learn. Think about the applications of what you study. Think about services and how it can be provided in a systematic and organized manner," said Prof. M. Eltoweissy.

"If you want to make something outstanding in networks, you have to combine the knowledge from both EE and CE. Without understanding the physical layer, your work will be rather theoretical," said Prof. A. Abozeid.

Finally, I would like to mention Prof. Hesham El Gamal and the Nile University students for their efforts in organizing this conference.

Native Deen - Reviving Islamic Rap

Muslim brotha's did it again. Native Deen are a Muslim musical group from the United States. They consist of three young Muslim men who were born and raised in America. Joshua Salaam, Naeem Muhammad, and Abdul-Malik Ahmad who grew up in Washington, DC. Their music seeks to inspire young people to keep their faith amid the pressures and temptations of modern life.

Many Muslims believe that string and wind instruments should be avoided in Islam. In order to please the widest audience, the group does not use any string or wind instruments in their music. The main instruments are drums, synthesized percussion instruments, and vocals.

Check their home page http://nativedeen.com/ and don't miss the clip: I am not afraid to be alone, if ALLAH is by ma side (lyrics). If you found yourself interested, you can watch that one too: Small Deeds (lyrics) - put a dollar everyday in the sadaka, it maybe small but you do it for the baraka - these combinations produced a very interesting culture.

Their music is produced under the Mountain of Light label, which was founded by Yusuf Islam (previously known as Cat Stevens)

Keep it goin' brotha's!

Source Wikipedia.

Probabilistic Chips

watch this interesting video! i liked the speaker way too much...

do you think it's really important that every calculation you make gives a correct result? of course it is !! but maybe not for all applications, let's see...

for example, if you're making a bank transaction, does it really matter the number of pennies or cents? what about computer simulations? it's already based on probabilistic models, so maybe a little bit of randomness in the results won't hurt too.

still not convinced? think about a DVD player generating many frames per second, if it messed up some pixels in a number of frames, it won't degrade the overall viewing experience, so maybe signal processing and sensor applications can find advantages to that new technologies.

but why should we bother developing new technologies given the undertaken risks in tolerating the incorrect results? that's because this can significantly reduce the power consumption without compromising user experience.

researchers are now developing a new type of transistors called PCMOS or Probabilistic-CMOS that will be available in 5 years, by making hardware a little bit unstable, we can realize the required randomness while significantly reducing the consumed power. actually this topic is very new that i can't find many articles about it, maybe you can check these links about a new embedded system architecture based on PCMOS, and a demo of PCMOS based DSP.


i think that's a very revolutionary approach in chip design, don't you agree?

Setup your Symbian C++ Development Environment on WindowsXp

this semester, we're studying Symbian OS Development for mobile phone software, the course started with C++ development using Carbide C++ and will move later to J2ME, we are currently interested in the S60 platform.

preparing for my next lab assignment, i invite you to join me in installing Carbide C++ on my WindowsXp PC, we'll proceed as follows:

1. install ActivePerl-5.6.1 (required to build your projects) (this setup adds some env variables).
2. install S60 SDK for Symbian, i don't recommend beta versions.
3. install JRE (required by the Carbide Eclipse-based IDE).
4. install Carbide C++.
5. for console apps to run, you'll need to add "textshell" in a separate line at the beginning of your "{SDK_PATH}\Epoc32\Data\epoc.ini" file.

then open the Carbide C++ and create a new Symbian OS C++ project-> Generic Symbian OS-> Basic Console Application(EXE) build and run. Let's call this first project "Test"

Troubleshooting:

1. when i first tried to run, i got this error "BLDMAKE ERROR: Platform ARMV5 not supported by \Symbian\Carbide\workspace\Test\group\BLD.INF" i found that the BLD.INF file contained the project information specially the platform details, as a windows user you expect that to be: "PRJ_PLATFORMS WINSCW GCCE" i found it was "PRJ_PLATFORMS DEFAULT" u can change it manually but to avoid doing that everytime i found it can be customized in the Carbide under Windows-> Preferences-> Carbide.C++-> Platform Filtering Preferences where i unchecked everything except WINSCW and GCCE.
   
   update: i found later that you can choose not to install the ARMV5 and GCCE in the SDK setup and everything will still work fine for you - as far as we are concerned.


2. Windows Vista users may face other problems but i can't cover everything here, however i can say that the Symbian online community is very active and you're likely to find the solution to ur problem after a simple search, just be patient it may seem difficult at the beginning.

next time we'll go through our first console application! have fun!!!

Hardwood Solitaire III - A Revolutionary Card Game

"A revolutionary collection of solitaire card games with engaging full-color graphics, original music, intriguing sound effects, and captivating 3D game play." Download here.

i really liked this game, i'm not that interested about card games but what got me hooked was the fascinating MIDI music in the background, like a medieval epic or a fairy tale, that always reminds me of the sweet vague thoughts of the past, i had that game when i was a kid and i got it again last year, i open it from time to time to listen to the music and remember my childhood :)

Enjoy the game.

Write Parallel Code

i was reading through the Computer Architecture textbook - Computer Architecture A Quantitative Approach, 4th Edition, when this caught my attention just on the 4th page "Whereas the compiler and hardware conspire to exploit ILP implicitly without the programmer’s attention, TLP and DLP are explicitly parallel, requiring the programmer to write parallel code to gain performance."

well, i've been hearing a lot of talk about parallelism and multi-cores during the last month, like when we had a session about Parallel Lock-Free Programming to talk about the advanced synchronization techniques the Microsoft PFX team is working on, also the Computer Architecture course this semester is specially interested in this stuff - as it was upgraded to the advanced level.

all that kept me thinking for some days what can we do to really exploit the power behind multi-core computers? this is a big question that i'm sure some of the smartest minds are working on and i find myself interested in the subject.

the sentence i quoted up there inspired me about a tool that will help programmers harness the power of multi-cores in the same way they do their normal work, the tool should help the programmer to write parallel code by viewing multiple code areas like in the compare editor and adding compiler directives, also it should support debugging support and auto-tests/suggests concurrency control. This should handle a variable number of cores for the target machine and maybe a variable platform too, regardless of the developer machine. The plug-in can be published as an open source project so everyone can benefit and contribute.

i didn't forget to check what have been done so far and i was not amazed to find that there is some work in this field but the Google search didn't return that many matches, that's a very new and open approach and we expect to witness a lot of achievements in the next years. I'd like to mention Model-Driven Development Tool for Parallel Applications and The Grid Compute Server Plug-in for NetBeans IDE besides the Microsoft PFX. You can also check this paper, it was published in 1989 and provides a theoretical treatment of the subject.