Month: October 2013

x86 Emulator in your Browser

kyriakos

For me, this one-man project is like magic. A fully-blown x86 emulator which runs a real-world BIOS (SeaBIOS). This means it can run regular x86 16bit OS’s as long as the browser allows it enough resources. It goes a long way to show what’s possible in the browser these days (well to be honest, this could have been done 3-4 years ago if Javascript was taken as seriously as it is today). It obviously runs slower than native performance but it is quite usable, especially with command line interface. There is no real practical use at the moment but maybe with further development something similar can be used to emulate x86 on ARM based devices in the future.

Take a look for yourself at http://copy.sh/v24/. There’s 4 OS images you can load directly from the page, including FreeBSD, Linux, FreeDOS and KolibriOS which is GUI based. You can also load your own ISO images to boot in the emulator. KolibriOS works fine so does FreeDOS, which even has some playable DOS games like Tetris and Snake which brought back memories of my MS-DOS days.

For experimental purposes only I also downloaded a Windows 3.1 ISO CD image off piratebay and tried to run it but it didn’t really work (I think the problem was with the image not being properly bootable rather than the emulator – after all Windows prior XP was first booting MS-DOS and then running Windows). I also attempted to load TinyCore Linux but I didn’t get far with that one either. TinyCore’s ISO is just under 15MB with GUI included. It took around 10 minutes to boot on an i7 laptop but never made it into the GUI.

Anyway if you don’t have the time to fiddle around you can view the following 5 min video I made running the emulator in Chrome:

Cyprus Broadband and Mobile Marketshare (Q2 2013)

kyriakos

According to statistics released by the Cyprus Office of Electronic Communications & Postal Regulation (OCECPR) the broadband market share for the 2nd Quarter of 2013 are as follows:

Broadband Marketshare Cyprus 2013 (2nd Quarter)

Cablenet seems to be the winner of that period with a 2.7% increase while Cyta continues to be the loser with a 2.9% decrease. During this period the broadband penetration in Cyprus was 69% (down from 71%, same period last year). This is the first time it decreased since broadband connectivity was first introduced to Cyprus. This can be accounted to the economic situation (a lot of businesses closed down, taking their connectivity with them) and the fact that a lot of people use mobile connectivity for their basic internet fix.

On the mobile battlefield, the percentages are as follows:
Cyprus Mobile Marketshare 2013 (2nd Quarter)

Google Web Designer – my take

kyriakos

Google Web Designer

Yesterday Google released a new design tool going by the name ‘Google Web Designer’. I installed it and played around a bit. It seems like they got carried away with the title cause it certainly isn’t a web design tool in the sense of Dreamweaver, its more of an animated banner creation tool. Its output is an ‘HTML5’ document (sorry for the cliche) and uses both Canvas 2D and 3D elements to create banners in a user interface that reminds me of Adobe’s Flash (still have nightmares of that) and Adobe’s new animation tool Edge Animate. If you ignore this app’s bad title, its a pretty decent tool for making banners for AdSense or other purposes. The code produced by the tool is not the leanest but works on modern browsers, and even on mobile. To see the extend of how much overhead is included check out this gist on github; the author created a new document, drew a rectangle with a sold color and saved and that was the result. This means that if you are making a very simple banner, the CSS and Javascript overhead can be substantial (consider that each banner on a page will be running on its own IFrame); on the bright site it can do things without coding that you’d normally need flash for without losing mobile compatibility. Moreover it allows you to create responsive ads; a feature that Google’s own AdSense product now supports (after many years of publisher requests).

Even if it’s destined for ads, it doesn’t mean you can’t use it to put together a single page website, but lets hope that Google Web Designer won’t be the beginning of another ‘Flash’-like era where Canvas is used instead of the Flash container plugin leading to bloated, hard to maintain, and non-indexable websites all over again.

You can have a look of how it works here:

and download it for free here: