Thought of the day

Whilst the following was said in the context of mobile ad-hoc network (MANETs) I believe it can hold of many situations that life throws at us.

Efficiency and quality are of equal importance!! Both come from experience, not from study. Study as you go, don’t assume that you’re ready for the real world because you studied first.

—Jon Davis

What I am working on today? Optimisation Algorithms

I often get the question – a what am I working on today? Some of the things I can’t discuss in an open forum, but some I can. Those that I can, I thought it was best to share via my blog and do quick small posts on it. Will this become a new series? Well time will tell – depends on how much bandwidth I will have.

This weekend, I am researching Optimisation Algorithms – both Deterministic and Probabilistic. Specifically interested in Swarm Intelligence (which are a type of Monte Carlo algorithm) and in that in Ant Colony and Particle Swarm routing are the main ones I am researching.

Suggestions for a new Camera?

Our current camera (Canon IXUS 860 IS) is on the last dying leg – the camera itself works OK, but the screen is going to give up any day now – there are big holes where the pixels are dead (looks like a black hole). We love this model and want something along the same form factor and not interesting in anything fancy. One of the options was the new Canon IXUS 240 HS which has a built-in Wifi connection and has just been released, though is not available in all the markets.

As it happens I am going to be flying through Singapore soon and was thinking of picking one up at duty free. Does anyone have any recommendations for a model along the same lines? Want something decent enough in a small form factor.

Enabling Win 8 Metro on a Netbook

When you install Win 8 on a Netbook the screen resolution would be too low for Metro apps to run which is a bummer. One way to get around this and “fix” this is to update the registry (and you thought that was so XP!) :).

Run Regedit and search for “display1_downscalingsupported” (without quotes). Find all occurrences of this entry and change its value from 0 to 1.

Reboot when finished and you should have more options on your Screen Resolution choosing which will allow you to run Metro. 🙂