So, I got interested when I heard some people talking about Windows 7 and that it's pretty usable (gnuwhores may disagree but meh) already. Well, what's the best way to confirm what others say? Finding out about it yourself of course! So that's exactly what I did, grabbed a beta (build 6801) of W7 and installed it on my lovely laptop.

The OS was installed on a laptop with the following specs:

• CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo T8300 @ 2.40GHz
• RAM: 2GB 667MHz DDR2
• HDD: 160GB Hitachi, SATA
• GFX: Intel GMA X3100

It's supposed to run Vista well (out of the box it didn't quite!), but my experiences were different. But 7 has so far been working pretty nicely.

Installing 7 is somewhat identical to that of Vista, ie. clean-looking and easy. I did experience a little quirk during the installation though; first installation attempt failed horribly. I noticed the memory card reader light was constantly lit (why? I was installing from a DVD to the HDD) and the 'expanding files' stage was stuck at 0%. After hitting cancel, removing the placeholder from the memory card slot the installation went fine. After installation, it immediately scanned for WLAN access points and asked which one I'd like to use. Nice OOBE ;)
First boot into 7 and you can clearly see it's based on Vista (duh). I like the Aero look, so it's not exactly a bad thing (maybe under the hood but dunno). The system feels pretty snappy and responsive. I like how they made UAC a lot less annoying, now it doesn't do a huge popup over the whole screen and flash it like crazy, it's just another dialog box like the rest.

That's enough for day one. I'll use 7 for the whole December and see if it sucks that bad, despite being a beta. I use my laptop at school so it'll get a fair lot of use. Maybe I'll grow to hate it in the end. ;)

EDIT: Oh yeah, a screenshot. Spot the differences between 7 and Vista.

I was bored in the weekend (big surprise huh?), and decided to do something I haven't done in a long time. I dug out my loved PSP and installed the pspdev toolchain on my laptop. After a lovely while with Hot PXL (hey, games which are obsessed with eating pink can't suck!) I compiled a fresh version of psplinkusb from PS2DEV SVN and started thinking what I could do.

Well, I hadn't done one on the PSP - a true classic, the Mandelbrot fractal :D After digging around for a good way to draw a pixel on the screen, I decided to ditch the PSP graphics API (bleh, too much code and math for one damn pixel!) and opted for poking the framebuffer directly. Looking through some old example code I found the perfect way: 0x44000000 + (PSP_LINE_SIZE * y + x ) = color :)

So yeah, porting the old mandelbrot I had written using SDL was a breeze. But then I got an idea. The PSP has a nice little VFPU (vector float-point processing unit) which can perform all sorts of float-point calculations quickly, like 4x4 matrices and such. I hadn't used inline assembly before, and the current psp-gcc lacked support for optimizing for the VFPU so I had a perfect excuse to try to squeeze a little bit power out of the little machine and use inline assembly :)

All the hard work (figuring out the VFPU instruction set) was done by other people, so a quick "HAY GUISE WHAR I CAN HAS VFPU DOX?!!?!" in IRC yielded a few links: http://wiki.fx-world.org/doku.php and http://mrmrice.fx-world.org/vfpu.html. It didn't seem all that hard, at least for what I was doing. Sooo, after reading a bit, I got to work.

After a while the first version of code was done, well, I noticed how stupid I was. The drawing loop is pretty much like while(x * x + y * y < 4 && iterations < 100). So what could you possibly do wrong? Well, like, executing the calculation once and then stepping into the loop, and then not putting the code into the loop too (*duh*). After fixing that, it worked fine. :)

Well, code speaks for itself, if you wanna read. Get it here: http://kapsi.fi/matiaz/psp/psp-mandelbrot.c If you want to compile it, the makefile from the pspsdk PRX template works fine ;)

The fall is here, leaves are yellow and falling on the ground, combined with rain they make driving a motorbike more like extreme sports than a way to get from place a to place b. School's been fine, don't worry, not gonna rant about it (at least now ;)).

So, ever since my last post in, uhhh, exactly six months ago, not much has happened:

• got a summer job as a sysadmin helper, loved it and didn't want to leave
• went to Assembly for the first time, now I must go there every year
• bought a lovely laptop, Lenovo V200, and now I want a new one
• College (or more like the Finnish equivalent, 'lukio') started, *mumble*

Well, that's pretty much it. I'll try to remember that I *do* have a journal here, so maybe I'll post when something happens.
Enjoy.

[EDIT] Oh yeah, I got a haircut today!

Geez, thanks a lot to wouter for starting the endless (hopefully not) flood of random uninteresting bullshit. Blame him.

I'll (try to) keep this updated whenever I feel like it, don't expect too much updates anyway. Now I should go to bed though, it's almost 1AM and I've got exams tomorrow (today) -_-