Diablo 3 Nvidia 310m Optimus issue

While the server is down, I'm gonna blog about an issue I found in my Optimus-enabled laptop. For those who don't know, Optimus is a technology by Nvidia that allows the laptop to shift between the discreet video card and the built in intel video card in real-time depending on the need of the system in order to save on precious battery life.

The issue is Diablo III doesn't use the Nvidia card and continues to use the Intel card resulting in poor performance. I've verified this using GPU-Z. I was surprised that even the login screen is choppy / laggy.

The workaround: Right click the Diablo 3 icon / executable > Run with graphics processor > Select Nvidia card. This significantly increased the performance of the game.

If you don't see the option "Run with graphics processor" option in your context menu, go to Nvidia Control Panel, click "View" menu then select "Add Run with graphics processor to context menu" option.

My Specs:
Asus UL80JT
Nvidia 310M Optimus / Intel GMA HD
4gb memory

[update] For those experiencing crash, lockups, freeze, hangs in UL80JT. Try to update your BIOS to version 215.

Ok, I freaked myself out a bit

Below is a letter from my past self written four years ago dedicated to my present self. It kinda blew my mind because this is the first time I'm reading it again after I wrote it way way back in my Multiply blog. Luckily I saved this one. I'll include my inline replies, so here it goes...

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A letter to Manny Part II

Jun 12, '08 11:23 PM

This is one of the weirdest things I've done in my entire life.  3 years ago, I wrote a letter to my future self (10 or 20 years ahead) and I just read it now and it's really freaking me out, well for one because of my picture there, black and white, it's like I'm already dead or something haha!  The blog is located at http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-MKYBCjc8eqgPYzjyae797.OBrQ--?cq=1&p=119 for those who're interested in this weirdness.

[2012 manny] Ok, our Yahoo 360 blog doesn't exist anymore, I don't know if we saved it. I wish we did, and the fact that I'm referring to us in plural form is freaking me out! 

I want to write another letter, to my past self and to my not so far future self about 3-5 years in time so here it goes...

[2012 manny] Not bad :))) So before before it was black and white, and this one is sepia. Still look dead to me lol, next time I should use a colored one, or maybe effects like this is okay for added .. uhh ... effect. 

To my past self... technically that letter is not meant for me yet because I'm still the +3 years version of you.  Reading that letter again after a while made me realize how optimistic and passionate you were, and you still are, but in this time you are a little weary with the things that are happening around you.  I really like it when you said "because you might end up giving all your heart to her. If you lose her, you'll lose everything, andyan pa naman si God eh, don't forget that, when men fail you, God will not", and in this point in time I'm holding on to that truth.  

[2012 manny] Thank you for reminding me about this one.

I've disappointed you with the things I've done, I know, and I'm not proud of it.  My convictions have fallen to the ground but I'm slowly picking up the pieces. 

[2012 manny] Ok, I've done worse.

Funny I still am concerned with my simple joys and the littlest of things, how I still believe in "magic" and serendipity.  Still a hopeless romantic.  Mababaw lang naman tayo eh, and I think this who you are and it won't really change much.  

[2012 manny] Agree 100%, we'll be forever like this, gift and a curse thing.

Beyond the tragedies of life, I can still say that I'm doing good here, well in work, currently I'm slumped but pay is good and I still enjoy at what I do best, and in love life... hmmm wag nalang.  

[2012 manny] Would you believe I still work there, LOL, talk about loyalty.

I know you have tons of circle of friends there, and you still do here although you'd be surprised because what you thought were impossible like losing some friends, breaking hearts, and the likes took place here.  All hope is not lost though... sabi mo nga "Continue to be on fire for God there, remember, you cried your heart out because of His love"... Yep, I still remember.

[2012 manny] :)

Lastly for the coffee, because we love coffee and we continue to search for great coffee, right now I'm really loving Starbuck's Cappuccino, so much that I want to know how I can get to replicate its exact taste and aroma hehehe.  Maybe someday 

[2012 manny] I'm over Starbs cappuccino, I'm liking CBTL more.

To my future self, around 3-5 years in time...

[2012 manny] Yes; me time!!! It's been almost 4 years

It's almost midnight here, and here I am again, writing a letter.  If you can still remember, you were here in your Kuya's crib staring at your widescreen lcd monitor with your ever faithful computer named Lemon. 

[2012 manny] It's 11PM here, nakalaptop na ko ngayon, d ko na nagagamit si Lemon.

You already sold the old one, then painstakingly researched for the high end but affordable computer part by part and assembled it yourself and it was good.

I really do not have much to say to you, just a summary of what I learned here and I tell you, don't forget to love yourself, that's one thing you were struggling to do here, and don't lose yourself again because you drag people down along with you, you're like a virus and you become a menace to society hehehe.

[2012 manny] I'm starting to love myself, thankfully. I've already learned so much, and have better self control this time, well.. most of the time, just avoid getting too drunk.

As my past self said, continue holding on to God's promises.  You are currently single here and I don't know how long you can stay single because I know you always want a witness to your life.  

[2012 manny] Wow you're like a mind-reader, but I'm, once again, single.

You enjoyed one on one talks, not necessarily dating but just talking about stuff with another soul.

[2012 manny] If I enjoy talking with my past self, how much more with a present soul, LOL! It's just hard for me to find someone of the same wavelength, I'm a bit weird. hehe

You just watched a movie by yourself here (remember? Kung Fu Panda!) and found out it was not good doing it alone hehehe, so most probably upto your time there you haven't watched another movie without someone else by your side hahaha!

[2012 manny] Oh em, I remember. And yes, you are correct! I won't ever repeat that experience again!

Still haven't found the ultimate steak house, the one with thick, juicy yummy yet affordable steak, I know it's hard to find that, just like finding yourself if you can still vividly remember, but don't stop trying, you'll find it.

[2012 manny] Subic meat plus is good, House of Minis C5, Bugsys, and Gullivers are also good but no bestest steak ever, yet.

I trust you future manny, that you are now much better than what you were and you continue to bring life to the people around you.  Your life may not be as simple as it used to be, but it shouldn't let you down.

[2012 manny] Definitely became more complicated, but going back to the simple but happy life :)

This version of me is not really the most encouraging one don't you agree, but I'll get there, and move forward to who I'm destined to be... and destined to be WITH bwahahahaha! Woot! 

[2012 manny] Dar n, I need encouragement at this point in time but it's okay. Overall I'm happy with what I wrote 4 years ago. Maybe I'll write a similar letter again soon. I don't know if this thing is a disorder, like, am I on the verge of schizophrenia? Who cares, I enjoy this haha!

ICS for my Xperia Arc S is finally available

Just checked Sony Mobile's blog and found out Ice Cream Sandwich (Android version 4.0 ) is now available for my Xperia Arc S with SI Number 1254-0652. I'm excited to update!

True enough, it showed on my PC Companion when I connected my phone. Hope everything goes well; this is an early birthday gift for me. Backup backup backup! A bit sad that my Coin Dozer will most likely return to level 1.

Testing Bloggeroid for Android

I'm writing this blog from my phone using Bloggeroid for Android. Let's see if I can add an image..



Hmm, I'm not sure if the image is added, so I must publish this first and view the result. I can't see the image, it's just a text placeholder. It should be a picture I took from my office window.

Interface is simple, there's no clutter and I can focus on the important stuff: Writing. I like it. Downside is you have to memorize the formatting because there are no controls for them like bold, italic, links etc. They're easy to memorize so it shouldn't be much of a problem. I think there's no built in functionality to align the content e.g. Left, center, or right aligned, my guess is you can use HTML tags to accomplish this. Let me try:

<div style="text-align: center">This line should be centered</div>

Anyway, you can post it as a draft and edit in your computer before publishing so that's a good feature. So for the final test, I'll publish this post and see if it's as I expected it to be.

[Update] Image post is successful but the alignment using HTML tags is not. It was cleaned, which is not a bad thing. There's a raw edit in Bloggeroid which I haven't explored yet which I think it is possible to insert HTML tags.

I didn't say what Bloggeroid is for. It's an alternative tool to post blogs to Google Blogger. Google has an official mobile app for Blogger, but it's not very good so I can't really recommend it. Bloggeroid does not support other blogs so if you're on Wordpress, there's the Wordpress mobile app which is excellent.

Check out Bloggeroid on Google Play, happy mobile blogging! There's certainly a lot of room for improvement.  As of writing, I haven't seen a polished app to post blogs to Blogger but Bloggeroid should be sufficient for my basic blogging needs.

My first 1000+ visits in one month

I'm quite happy today that I'm blogging during my lunch break. I have not visited my Google Analytics page for a while and I was surprised to to learn that for March 2012, I hit the 1k+ page visits on my website. I know it's not stellar, but in my own little world it is, since I only get around 50-200 visits in a month.

2011-2012 statistics

For March 2011 - March 2012 I got a total of 8,388 page views and 3,441 unique visitors. Again, this is minuscule as compared to Google who has a daily traffic of more than 1B! I'm thinking of experimenting to increase my traffic.

I was inspired to dig deeper, and checked my Alexa ranking. For those who doesn't know, Alexa ranking is a popular ranking for websites which gives an estimate where you are positioned in the vast cloud we call the internet. Cool, I'm in 9,118,259th place hahaha! AFAIK, I was in the 12M+ before. I wonder when will I reach 6 digits and below.

Above information is from mvergel.com's homepage and albums page only. For my three blogs: Personal (Spacing Out), Programming (Dead-Simple Solutions) and Food (Hungreh) I have different set of statistics. I feel that most of the visits to my homepage come from users reading my Programming blog since it is the blog getting the most traffic among the three. 

"Enterprise Ready", what does it even mean?!

I was researching about a software product and it stated in its description that it is "enterprise ready". Sure it sounded classy and awesome to be called enterprise ready or enterprise level or in whatever enterprisey manner, but I asked myself, "What does it really mean?", "How do you consider if a product is ‘ready' for enterprise".

So my research detoured a little bit for another research, this time, about the term "Enterprise Ready".

There is no exact wiki for "Enterprise Ready" but "Enterprise software" should be similar and Wikipedia defined it this way:
Enterprise software, also known as enterprise application software (EAS), is software used in organizations, such as in a business or government, contrary to software chosen by individuals (for example, retail software). 

Okay, so as long as it can be used in an organization, big or small, then the software can be tagged as Enterprise? So why does big software companies (*ehem* Oracle) use the term like it's a big deal? It's like "Ooohh, look at our cool enterprisey software!" Okay maybe not like that but the point is, the impression that people are getting when the term “enterprise” is tagged in a product is that it can be used for overly complex business solution for huge companies.

Oracle must be really pissed when Apple called their products enterprise ready. Why not, many people use iPad in the office anyway, thus the enterprise readiness I guess.

So what's the conclusion? I don't know and I think it doesn't matter too much. The meaning of enterprise ready may highly depend on the context it is used. So bring out your gradeschool memories when you were taught to look for contextual clues to get to a plausible meaning of the word. I leave you with one statement to think about: “Manny is enterprise ready.” LOL


Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_software
http://www.enemyofthestatement.com/but-is-it-enterprise-ready
http://lowendmac.com/ed/fox/08ff/apple-enterprise-ready.html

I miss the time when...

...I wrote whatever's on my mind. Everything was simple then, no overly complicated scenarios, well there were circumstances, but they didn't stop me from blogging my thoughts. I miss the naive me of writing everything; I was unafraid of what people might gonna think. I even wrote about my first real break-up in my public blog, and I remember my colleague telling me "dude, why did you write that, are you insensitive?" or something like that in Tagalog, and my reaction was, "umm I don't know, I just felt it so I wrote it down." I was like Abed in the TV series Community and I think I, too, have case of Asperger's but a milder version of it, either that or I might just be hypochondriac LOL.

I entered into a phase of hiding things; I started to care more about my image, which is not really that great to begin with anyway, so I don't know what drove me into that state of mind. I even deleted my Yahoo 360, Multiply, Facebook accounts, and made a lot of excuses about how unproductive they were, although it helped me spend less time on the net.. until someone taught me to tweet. And for those who don't know about Yahoo 360... naah forget it.  Anyway, it's not the real reason I deleted them, I just wanted to hide and forget but then I realized my life doesn't work that way; I can throw everything away and hide as much as I can, but there's no off switch to hide things from myself or a shredder to disconnect those neurons and magically forget things, especially those that matter.

A good friend shared me an old blog of mine, which I thought I included in the list of "Things to delete", apparently I didn't. Reading it was weird, very weird, because it felt like a whole new other person writing those entries. I thought "I was this passionate about writing, about loving, about life, about God?" And now I have 3 types of blog: Public, Protected and Private, and I have more than one blog for each type, crazy! To think I don't even write that often.

Before, I was too young to care, now that I'm getting old, I'm relearning to not dwell on what people think about me because at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter; family will be there for you and true friends will support you and occasionally wake you up when you're having a real-life nightmare.

Sometimes, God has a funny way of reminding us about Him. I believe this is for the better and just when I thought I knew everything, I'm back to square one. Realized that finding yourself or knowing more about yourself is not a phase, it's a life-long journey and my narcissistic self is excited to learn more!