Recently, revision 0.9 of the Extensible Host Controller Interface was announced in support of the USB 3.0 architecture. USB 3.0, also known as Super-Speed USB, will be 10 times as fast as USB 2.0 (High-Speed) due to the addition of a fiber-optic cable. Various groups, including AMD, Dell, NEC, and Microsoft, support a common xHCI specification and are likely to adopt Intel’s standard.

The draft specification is available under a royalty-free license in accordance with an xHCI contributor agreement. This should help promote the success of the new standard, and we should be seeing USB 3.0 devices within a year or two.

Intel’s press release is available here.

Okay, so I watched The Dark Knight at an IMAX cinema with a few friends yesterday morning. It was my first viewing, so I found the immersive experience rather overwhelming. I thought it was on par with the earlier Batman Begins, but most of my fellow viewers thought it totally blew them away. I must say that the characters were very well played and the progression of events was both rapid and fluid. However, the movie was less than fulfilling in some ways, and I had been trying to put my finger on it all day.

Something Batman Begins had that The Dark Knight is missing is sufficient character development. I understand that the sheer number of action scenes in the movie makes it difficult to completely flesh out each major character, but I feel that the movie might not have needed so much action. As such, The Dark Knight presents a moment frozen in time. To have a thorough understanding of the story, one must have additional information and processing time. There were scenes in the movie that exposed the workings of human nature quite well, and I would have liked to see more.

The Dark Knight had huge ambitions; for a two-and-a-half-hour-long movie, I think it made the best of its tight time budget. Nonetheless, I felt the movie was worth watching, and the IMAX presentation does it justice; so instead of exposing its details, I’d recommend interested readers to watch the movie personally.

KDE 4.1 is now available for general use. This first major update to KDE 4 brings the KDE PIM suite, various Plasma improvements, and many other features. Plasma can now replace the KDE 3 shell for most casual users. Indeed, the whole KDE 4 can now replace KDE 3, as it’s gotten so polished.

Get it while it’s hot! Packages are already available for various distributions such as Kubuntu.

The performance issues with NVidia’s proprietary driver still exist, however. Engineers at NVidia are aware of this problem, but they have not yet issued a fix.

KDE 4.1.1 is due on September 3rd, and KDE 4.2 will arrive at the end of January next year.

Since it takes so long for me to install new software every time I reinstall, I figured that I’d create a metapackage that pulls in all the software I need. After I’ve done that, I was thinking, “what about setting up a repository too?” It’s not necessary, since dpkg is sufficient for working with metapackages, but somehow working with apt-get feels cleaner. I’ll be putting other packages up as well that may be of public interest.

A new HAL was recently released that allowed MadWifi to support the AR5007/AR2425 devices by Atheros. Last month, there were still some hiccups with the code, but it seems smooth enough for general consumption now. The new driver supports both 32-bit and 64-bit environments, unlike the older 32-bit-only hack. As a bonus, I successfully patched the code for injection.

The commands required to checkout, patch, build, and install the driver are rather simple. I’m posting it here both as a note to myself and for public benefit.

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