Every AT&T mobile phone (except the iPhone) comes with a ton of crappy AT&T branded applications (henceforth known as crapps or crapplets). These crapplets generally don't add any functionality to your phone since they either duplicate exiting [better] solutions (e.g. AT&T Maps ) or are generally useless (Mobile TV). My new Android powered Samsung Captivate came with a bunch of them too:

Since I have always hated the fact that I could not remove these apps from my phone I decided to root it and remove them. This is what you can do to free yourself:

1. Root your phone. It took me less than 5 minutes to root my (AT&T's Galaxy S variant) using instructions found on the internets.
2. Launch the super user application (Ninja icon)

There are two ways to continue: With the Android SDK and without.

If you have the Android SDK:

3. Connect your phone to your computer and open a shell into the phone using the adb shell command.

4. (optional) Make a backup of the files using the File Explorer feature of the Dalvik Debug Monitor (ddms:

   

5. Type su in the shell and you should see the Superuser Request box on your phone.

   

6. cd /system/app and delete the application packages you don't want, such as AT&T Maps, AT&T Navigator, YP Mobile, What, IM service, and MobiTV using the usual shell command rm.

If you don't have the SDK:

3. Get Connectbot the Android SSH client

   

4. Connect to a local root session:

   

5. Type su in the shell and you should see the Superuser Request box:

   

6. cd /system/app and delete the application packages you don't want, such as AT&T Maps, AT&T Navigator, YP Mobile, What, IM service, and MobiTV using the usual shell command rm.

   

Some crapps lead to web address but those still live in /system/app you just have to use something like AStro File Manager to figure out what is what:

On my Captivate AT&T Family Map was called androidlauncher2.1-61x612010_06_11t15_49.apk and AT&T Hotspots was called WISPr_v41.apk

Anyway eventually you end up with something like this:

One of the things I've been working on lately involves smooth particle hydrodynamics (SPH) with OpenCL... anyway last night I tried to simulate 100k particles on my GeForce 9800 (and naive memory management)... it ran out of resources and crashed resulting in total and massive screen corruption:

Everything still worked and I could use the KDE 4.4 with compositing and everything but the whole screen was speckled. The problem only cleared up after I rebooted the machine (i.e. restarting X did nothing).

A Google query for "OpenCL python bindings" makes it seem that the only option for using OpenCL from Python is the Python-OpenCL library. However the better option, and the one listed on the Khronos OpenCL resource page, is PyOpenCL.

I tried Python-OpenCL but it didn't actually work and there is no documentation... even the auto-generated docs point to missing pages. PyOpenCL on the other hand seems fairly active, well documented, works, and uses Boost::Python. Anyway save yourself an hour and use PyOpenCL.

Today an RPM Fusion update brought the 195.36.15 NVIDIA driver and with it the OpenCL and CUDA libraries and headers that I have been waiting months to use under Linux. My desperation for OpenCL was so powerful that I even tried using the binaries provided by NVIDIA... which didn't end well.

Anyway here's a screenshot of the NBody demo

NVIDA's has a bunch of other cool samples on their OpenCL portal

To be honest at some point in the last month I had working OpenCL but I have no idea if it was due to the NVIDIA binary installer or if the OpenCL shared library accidentally slipped into RPM Fusion... but then the library vanished. Hopefully it will stay around until I have time to play with it.

I haven't used Blender for months but since I am in need of some 3D graphics for a presentation I decided it was a good time to try out the new 2.5 version. Building blender from source is usually quite painless so after following the Fedora 12 guide (and using the pre-built Python 3.1 rpms) I was surprised to discover that running the binary caused an error:

found bundled python: /home/stou/src/blender-svn/install/linux2/.blender/python
Fatal Python error: Py_Initialize: can't initialize sys standard streams
ImportError: No module named encodings.utf_8

The problem was the existence of the empty blender-svn/install/linux2/.blender/python directory... maybe it was causing blender to think that it should use the bundled version of python3.1 instead of the system default one. Who knows, deleting the directory (rm -rf /home/stou/src/blender-svn/install/linux2/.blender/python) fixed the problem:

Oh and the relevant lines of my user-config.py file are:

BF_PYTHON="/usr/lib64/python3.1"
BF_PYTHON_LIBPATH = '${BF_PYTHON}/lib-dynload'
BF_PYTHON_VERSION = '3.1'
BF_PYTHON_INC = '/usr/include/python${BF_PYTHON_VERSION}'
BF_PYTHON_BINARY = '/usr/bin/python${BF_PYTHON_VERSION}'

By the way if you run blender but none of the tools show up:

you are missing the .blender directory