Info
2008-10-30 ubuntu 8.10
It's out! Go get yourself a copy at www.ubuntulinux.com, also, OpenOffice 3.0 came out a couple of days ago. Can I just say that Rochade is excellent! Nice work.
I've been thinking about how to deal with the huge backlog of mail that I've got in my Maildir, and I might have just about cracked it. It's not elegant, but it's some sort of archival system.
2008-10-28 user interfaces
How can MS Office be rated as more usable than OpenOffice.org (OO.org)? For MS Office one has to get a CD (or DVD these days?) and go through the truck load of installation process. With OO.org I just extracted the compressed file and ran
find . -name '*.deb' | xargs sudo dpkg -i
on the directory and that was the job done, pretty simple in my eyes really.
So why does MS Office get all the press of being something that's user friendly? It's quite beyond me, really.
2008-10-27 windows refund
The Advent 4211 that I'm currently working from came with Windows XP Home - and I'd like to get that refunded but before I can do that I must find out who the heck Advent really is. The best so that that I can find is that it's something to do with PC World. There was sweet FA in the box that came with the Advent.
2008-10-22 update
O2 have added this to my contract: GPRS bar
After phoning the O2 customer services people (dial 202, then key 3 twice) they assure me that they will remove the bar. What annoys me greatly about this is that they sent me a text message and then a few hours later they remove my connectivity. This is bad service from my point of view. I had to phone them to try and discover what the nature of the message was all about, then call them again to find out what the bar was all about - when I paid additional money for this service.
2008-10-21 o2 web unlimited (uk browse and download)
Way back in March or April I took out a contract with o2 for a Simplicity SIM card and Unlimited Web "bolt on". I recollect clearly that I was informed that this would be an unlimited account where I could use it as much as I liked without any limit. This seemed quite reasonable to me as the phone is capable of EGPRS and therefore could not really run away with huge downloads etc.
Today I received a text message along the lines of:
"O2: Your data usage is outside the Web Bold On fair use policy; please reduce your usage or move to a bigger Bolt On to avoid a restriction on your account."
This seems rather harsh to me. Why should I now be informed of limits on the usage? If I choose to use a certain amount of data for my purposes then why shouldn't I? It's not like I'm jamming up their peering contracts through 100kbyte/sec download via HSDPA?
To make matters worse the person who I spoke with at o2 today didn't really know much about gigabytes or megabytes and was telling me one thing in one unit and meaning another - this must have been the customer service manager or some other non-tech person who is being spoon-fed information.
This really grinds my gears, it's not that it's a bad service, it's just that I want a service that I could rely on to use in the way that I want. If today I choose to download the OpenSolaris DVD or something else that's a bit bulky then why shouldn't I? I might not use it much next month, just checking my mail over ssh or doing sharing some weekend snaps.
2008-10-20 some things undone
Its hard to get everything done. There are so many things on my todo list that it's getting beyond a task list and more a list of things that I'm never going to complete.
I found a descent mutt aliases handler on the net today called mail2muttalias.py, although it required minor tweaking it should be OK to start building an address book file with (which would then have another mutt hook to be handled).
2008-10-14 in the mail
Today there were two things waiting for me in the mail, a letter from Sun and another mail. The letter from Sun was a bit of a mystery until I remembered filling out a form for OpenSolaris on a DVD. The other letter I knew all about - it was my 100 Billion $ bank note from Zimbabwe where they have hyper inflation which devalues the $. Say what you like about it being a bad investment, I don't care, it's unlikely that I will have the chance again to say that I had a billion dollars!
2008-10-10 advent 4211 cycles
Something I keep reading on the net about the advent 4211 is the battery life (and I myself have commented on this). Since the netbook is mostly waiting on IO, why not tune the CPU cycles down a little? Here is a script that will obviously do just that should you want to hook this into a on battery state then you have my blessing:
for i in 0 1 ; do cpufreq-selector -c $i -f 50000 ; done ;
(Of course that should be changed if you have four processors and so on).
Why not test this against the random number generator to see what performance you're likely to get from the processor:
root@ed-loptap:~# for i in 0 1 ; do cpufreq-selector -c $i -f 1600000 ; done ; root@ed-loptap:~# dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/null bs=8192 count=1 0+1 records in 0+1 records out 128 bytes (128 B) copied, 0.000293412 s, 436 kB/s root@ed-loptap:~# for i in 0 1 ; do cpufreq-selector -c $i -f 50000 ; done ; root@ed-loptap:~# dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/null bs=8192 count=1 0+1 records in 0+1 records out 128 bytes (128 B) copied, 0.000589757 s, 217 kB/s
From what I can see from this, it doesn't look as though the CPU freq is a linear scale, that is, the rating doesn't match the performance. There are probably other factors at play here such as the memory bus and other parts of the system that are going to be operating normally despite the CPU cycle degradation.
Something else that I noticed about the Sun Blade "64" bit boxes that I was using at the training centre is that their CPU integer (at least the OS integer) was 32 bits, a far cry from the PA boxes of many years ago that have 64 bit integers. You might also recall from earlier posts here that the amd_64 linux also has 32 bit integers. Both systems report that long int, long long, and long long int are 64 bits however. For anyone who works with C should be aware that int might vary in size from build to build - but it's almost safe to bet that it's going to be 32 bits.
2008-10-09 ipf
It seems that openbsd/pf and sunos/ipf share a lot in common. The openbsd/pf stack contains a pfsync utility that, when used with CARP allows for a nice firewall failover setup (although, in a few years I've only needed this once or twice).
The documentation for ipf is available here.
The firewall set seems rather familiar but there are somethings that I wonder about such as forwarding packets to a given gateway interface and tagging. Only more admin experience and reading can answer this.
Some things about SunOS are really cool, other things just plain suck. Why, so many years on, is Sun still putting an ancient version of tar in their OS? Everyone who's used a UNIX in the past 5 years has probably become familiar with GNU tar, which has -z and -j flags (among many other parameters) for g/b (de)compression. Why should people, realistically have to pipe their data through a compression tool before the tar tool?
Perhaps it's possible to argue that unix should do one thing and do it well, that might be the case, ok I'll accept that argument for a moment, but what about the services tool that SunOS now has, 'svcs' - isn't that a contradiction, something that replaces a bunch of scripts and abstracts away some utilities. More to the point, didn't Dan Bernstein create such a utility with very similar names in daemontools? What about the recreation of init, by the upstart team too - isn't this just more reinvention of the wheel.
More on the advent 4211
I hadn't realised this (and shame on me for not looking first but it wasn't a huge concern), the Adveent 4211 has a snazzy processor, see below for the stats, I'm very impressed given it's relative size and weight:
processor : 0 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 28 model name : Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N270 @ 1.60GHz stepping : 2 cpu MHz : 800.000 cache size : 512 KB physical id : 0 siblings : 2 core id : 0 cpu cores : 1 fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no coma_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 10 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts pni monitor ds_cpl est tm2 ssse3 xtpr lahf_lm bogomips : 3204.96 clflush size : 64 processor : 1 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 28 model name : Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N270 @ 1.60GHz stepping : 2 cpu MHz : 800.000 cache size : 512 KB physical id : 0 siblings : 2 core id : 0 cpu cores : 1 fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no coma_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 10 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts pni monitor ds_cpl est tm2 ssse3 xtpr lahf_lm bogomips : 3200.22 clflush size : 64
Anyway, thats the proc/cpuinfo.
2008-10-08 battery life
Yikes! Realised once I got to the (blocked) level crossing in Thatcham that I did not have my wallet. The petrol tank is showing about 1/4 full and previous experience tells me that this is going to warn me that I'm running low very shortly. Well, at least I can read my email on the move, so it can't all be bad...
Today on the course we finished looking at ZFS and began to look at DTrace. Not that I have anything against these two subjects or the SunOS zones, but why the heck should Sun produce things that are not capable of interacting well in the free OS world? They're really cool ideas (even though BSD had jails before zones).
This might seem like a pointless rant and it might be - it's great the ZFS has patents so that other proprietary systems cannot implement it - but this could be a little like the reason why Apple wouldn't include Vorbis OGG in their iPod players - since there are patents around it - who can guarantee that some day Vorbis won't decide to ask for fees for using OGG?
Personally I'd love it if ZFS and DTrace could be dual GPLv2/3 and CDDL licensed, then it'd probably be possible to implement it in the 2.6 kernel and the world would be sweet because we'd have nice standards and programs that can be used on a whole variety of platforms. As it stands, it's currently a lot of work to create ZFS pools using fuse as there are lots of dependencies which have to be catered for.
2008-10-07 set down
Got to the training centre in good time, shame about the Basingstoke road and the M3 again, they appear to be jammed like a desert storm radar.
Consume N number of processes, perhaps forked onto different CPUs, however the scheduler wants to do that:
#!/usr/bin/perl
die if( !defined( $ARGV[0] ) );
my @pids;
for( my $i=0 ; $i< int( $ARGV[0] ) ; $i++ ) {
my $pid = fork();
if( $pid == 0 ) {
print( "$$\n" );
for( ;; ) {}
}
else {
push( @pids, $pid );
}
}
for( my $i = 0 ; $i<scalar( @pids ) ; $i++ ) {
waitpid( $pids[$i], 'WEXITED' );
}
Todays lunch was pretty good, tuna steak and spaghetti with two puddings and coffee - not too bad but the canteen said having two main courses would mean paying for one.
The whole facility here is top notch i even noticed a gym here which might be possible to use after training one day perhaps but that'd be unlikely.
2008-10-06 on tour
This week I've been allocated time on a Solaris 10 course for experienced admins. It should be good and I've been told by someone else who has been to this site that the food here is excellent - so that's great to look forward to. Right now it's 08:58 and I'm sat in my car using the Advent 4211 with o2 unlimited web SIM through the Huawei USB 3 modem (unlocked from eBay I think).
The course was advertised as starting at 09:15 - I got here in good time following the Basingstoke road, then M3 J4a to Farnbrough. It's literally just off the junction which make this site very easy to find (I came here at the weekend with my girl friend to make sure that I could find this place (at just under two grand for the week I'd hate to loose five minutes of course time).
For what it's worth, Ubuntu really has it's act together. The kernel for this release has everything thrown in, including the kitchen sink as I'm dead impressed with the ease of setting up the Huawei modem - it's simply a terminal device and copying the ppp scripts (changing the interface line) made connectivity so easy.
It's a dead shame that only GPRS is available here. There's still some tweaking for battery life that's desirable.
The indicator on this Huawei modem is flicking between blue and green which appears to mean that I'm on the edge of getting HSDPA and GPRS (which doesn't appear to be Edge). Downloading an ISO from a good mirror appears to be flitting between 5KBytes/sec and 60KBytes/sec - a little annoying but an interesting test here as the coverage appears to be better than in my home town.
It's very nice when HSDPA is available - otherwise it's a bit painful to use. Things like mutt/vim still take their toll, maybe VT100 would be a little more compatible with GPRS.
Since I've become familiar with my current environment which I love so dearly I might well create an RC files section to this site so that others and myself can benefit from what I think is a nice working environment.
As an obvious observation with perl, the following are not identical:
%articles = %{ $sth->fetchall_hashref( 'linux_news_id' ) };
while( my $hr = $sth->fetchrow_hashref() ) {
my %h = %$hr;
$articles{'linux_news_id'} = $h{'linux_news_raw_article'};
}
The first line would fill a hash with rows from a DB, while the second would iterate and consume less memory. The former would free the DB quicker though (providing nothing has to swap).
fetchall_hashref is great for small data sets.
The stories about the restaurant at the Sun training centre are true, it's probably got the best kitchen that I've ever eaten at - today I had a hot curry for lunch, cookies and chocolate pudding, it's really top notch.
As I seem to keep moving accounts to new desktops all over the place, I've felt compelled to create a Makefile that I can use to copy my essential .rc files from system to system. It's just one short tar command really, but does help to keep things a little more organised than they are at the moment. There are things missing here, such as bookmarks as there are better ways to sychronise monolithic files than the method here:
sys_settings: echo $(HOME) tar -cvpf home.tar $(HOME)/.gnupg $(HOME)/.mutt* $(HOME)/.vimrc $(HOME)/.xbindkeys* /etc/ppp/*o2* /etc/ppp/peers/*o2* $(HOME)/Makefile $(HOME)/.profile $(HOME)/.bashrc
2008-10-03 advent 4211
I'm pleased to say that this laptop is very good and portable. It caters for all my mobile computing needs and after a few silly mistakes of my own it seems to do the job very well. The guide at msiwind.net covers most of the setup required - including creating the pendrive boot media.
More on this later - but for the 279quid that it costs, this is a very worthy buy.