The Design and Implementation of laffer1

http://wiki.xtronics.com/index.php/Raid

See the difference? 

After my little rant, I decided to backup my claim about FreeBSD.  Here are some articles on setting up gmirror in freebsd

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/geom-mirror.html

http://www.freebsddiary.org/gmirror.php

I just went through a day of hell today; it's name was Linux.  Ubuntu server does not properly support RAID either with "fake" raid as in the Intel Matrix RAID controller on my core i5 development server at work or with the Linux kernel's built in RAID.  Ubuntu cannot detect if a drive has failed, read from either disk for performance improvement or even detect their was a read failure and silently switch.  Your box has to crash for you to know a disk failed.  Worse yet, it doesn't even install.  It tries to use EXT4 file system which does not support GRUB.  GRUB2 can't work with RAID yet which is the default.  So Ubuntu server is a useless piece of shit.  

So after wasting time with three installs of Ubuntu server, I went on to look for another Linux distro with working RAID.  All of them required insane hoops to get it to work and each distro was different.  Suse has a nice gui installer, but with a DVD download and several duplications of partitions, it was just not what I wanted to deal with.  FInally, we ended up with Debian which is working ubuntu.  (it's the distro ubuntu is based on)  The RAID support works in Debian but requires some rediculous steps.  Vamsi installed debian (first) and then we had to make an identical partition table on the second disk, initialize md for EACH partition on that disk, rsync over the files (we had 3 partiitons including swap) , fix GRUB (not GRUB2), and /etc/fstab, reboot, then add disk 1 to the array (each partition actually) and then wait for Linux to copy all the shit back over from the second disk.  Not to mention fixing the md config file.

In FreeBSD, this would have been a 10 minute job including installing the OS.  Even Windows or Mac OS X server can do this without a problem.

Conclusion: LInux is not ready for the desktop or server room 

http://schemasync.org/

This tool lets you "diff" mysql schemas and generate a script to update an old database to a new one!

http://stupidfilter.org/main/index.php?n=Main.About

Someone sent this to me at work.  It's a project to write a filter for "stupid" english.

I just got my first solid state disk.  It's an Imation 32GB SATA 2.5 inch drive.  For comparison, I put the disk in Caryn's desktop.  It's final home will be in a new server I'm planning to build next year.  

According to diskinfo, the disk seek times are .029 compared to 16 or so on a Western Digital Sata drive.  That was to be expected since there really is no seek time on a SSD or at least it's fairly constant as no platter has to move.  What I was most interested in was raw transfer rates.  The WD generation 1 sata drive best case was 57000 kbytes/sec whereas this new drive read over 100000kbytes/sec as well as averaged around 100000.  My newer seagate hard drive peaks at 110080kbytes/sec, but inside only reads at 51842kbytes/sec.  

The consistency of this new drive is it's best asset.  The drive is MLC, but very lowend.  I can only imagine what a high end Intel SSD can do.

At work, I've been working on some software to generate a newsletter.  The software required several formats including PDF, HTML, and text.  Each one used a different template.  The input is from RSS feeds.

For the PDF generation, we went with a commercial product called PDF Reactor.  It's a java library that allows one to create PDF documents from HTML and CSS.  It runs on top of iText and does several post processing tasks.  As part of the process, it uses one of three configurable HTML formatters.  We chose to use the default which has problems with malformed HTML in some cases.  An open anchor tag causes grief.  Since the input is random and from the internet, we needed a way to clean it up.  I setup JTidy to process the input when it's HTML.  That way the HTML is always wellformed going into the system.

 PDF Reactor is licensed per cpu core.  They do check the core count.  We tried to run it on an i5, assuming it would just not take advantage of all the features, and it went into evaluation mode.  We had to physically disable two cores on the CPU to get the system to work.  This only requires 2 lines in /boot/loader.conf in FreeBSD. 

The odd part of this project was importing from Joomla.  I had to take data from various Joomla installs, and import select categories into our new system, then create newsletters from this data after it was cleaned up and categorized.  This meant selecting all the data from Joomla's content table on certain sections and categories.  The sections were constant within the install.  I also had to take the section and categories names and tag the articles in the new system with them.  If the names were duplicates, we had some problems.  The system was overloaded to use categories as two different levels.  It's caused some complications as joomla categories are not this flexible.  

If I had more time, I would have tried to create the PDF generation from HTML myself using iText.  This is something I would like for just journal where I use iText for PDF and RTF generation now.  

I have been busy working lately.  With the weather change, I haven't felt much like using my PC.  Today, I booted up Windows VIsta to lookup a book on my ebook reader.  Five different programs started downloading updates at the same time.  When I started the ebook reader, another download began.  

I think Microsoft and Apple should develop a software update framework for their operating systems.  This framework would be usable by all software.  It would allow updates to be downloaded in turn, throttled, scheduled, and offer one place to manage them.  I'm sick of having a bunch of programs running in the background just to check for software updates.  The java update scheduler, real player, acrobat, flash, steam, antivirus, xfire, msn, ... it's just got to stop.  

There is also a security advantage to this idea.  One could go into a single application and see that all their software is up to date.  I'd also like the software to easily wait until I reboot to install.  I don't want a nag message every ten minutes or even four hours.   

I've been reading for years about the future of software.  Most people believe software as a service will take off.  In some ways, it already has.  There are a few fatal flaws with this model.  It requires trust.  Companies have the resources to purchase software as a service and then lose access to it.  It is costly, but they can afford to move to another provider.  If a home user (end user) purchases access to Microsoft Office over the Internet, they expect to be able to access it at any time.  Their child may have a report due the next day.  They maybe working from home to finish a report for the CEO on Monday.  If the software is not available due to a network outage, downtime at the provider, or a billing dispute, the home user is out of luck.  Worse yet, Microsoft could stop offering the service during the middle of the year.  They've done this with Encarta Online, MSN, and other services in the past.  What do you do if the company goes out of business?  

The antivirus industry has moved to this model effectively.  You purchase software with a year subscription now.  At the end of that subscription, your computer is no longer protected.  It's a great model for them.  Your computer may get infected during that time and then their software or another product will look like it just found a bunch of viruses the previous version could not.  Most people don't move quickly on buying new AV software and it's often hard to remove.  

My company has been considering housing our data storage at a third party location.  My concern with this is what happens if there is a falling out with the provider.  Is our data at risk?  People talk about cloud computing like it's this amazing service, but in reality it's just web hosting that might be distributed.  You're still counting on one provider to protect your data and make it available to you just as the home user is expecting MS Office to work.  It's a large risk which involves trust.  Your business future is hanging in the balance of this one provider.  What if they go out of business, get sold to a company that doesn't care about the cloud, have a network failure during a big time in your business cycle? These things can happen to a self hosted solution as well, but you can do something about it.

I'm not trying to pick on Microsoft.  I've never used office online so I don't know what it's like.   

 http://www.tvgrapevine.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=5865:monk-mr-monk-and-the-end&catid=53:si

Sometimes I'm amazed that my family doesn't tell me when their sick or in the hospital.  The excuses I hear are baffling.  I've come to the conclusion that they don't understand me at all.  Should I just stop caring? 

Yesterday, I went to the EMU job fair for CS and CIS.  I wasn't looking for a job.  I had to interview students for two positions.  It was a very strange experience.  A year ago, I was at that job fair looking for a job.  I had a few people I knew from EMU come up for jobs.  It was a bit awkward for me.  Some of them are good people, but not necessarily qualified for this position.  We did find a few people that  might work out.  

I just didn't picture myself interviewing people a year ago for anything. 

I ended up with three piles of resumes.  Those that could be candidates for the programming position, those that could do the tech support job, and those that I won't be contacting again.  I totally understand why people do that now.  

The most amazing thing to me was the number of candidates who didn't try to sell themselves.  I got a great deal of "I'm not good at that" or "I put that on my resume, but it's because I'm interested not because I understand..."  Wow.  There were several interesting stories, but I don't think it's all that appropriate to get specific on a public blog.   

So I finally got a call from the Apple store yesterday to pick up my iMac.  I was told 5-7 days if they had to order a hard drive.  I was expecting them to replace the hard drive.  I get there, and they have not replaced the hard drive.  They used a third party program to partition the disk and some how got 10.5 on it.  They claimed it was good to go.   I was a bit skeptical because I know how to work on a Mac myself and if it was indeed just a simply formatting problem I would have felt very stupid.  At 75 dollars, I felt a bit ripped off anyway.  I mean, they just formatted the drive and put 10.5 on it.  Why did it take 6 days to do that?  

I brought the iMac home.  It did boot into 10.5.8 and run through the setup wizard.  I was a bit annoyed already because I told the guy I had snow leopard.  My time machine backup is for snow leopard!  I noticed the drive seemed slow, but it did get on the internet and things appeared to work.  I rebooted onto snow leopard media to install snow leopard.  It failed.  I then tried to reboot and format the drive.  That failed with an IO error!  I got a bit pissed and did a format while zeroing the drive and went to bed.  That actually completed.  I started the 10.6 install and it failed after about 2 minutes.  It's obvious that my iMac is not functioning correctly.  I would assume it was a compatibility problem with 10.6 except that it worked fine since release day and the apple store employee booted 10.6 on it at the store in front of me the day I brought it in.  So either there is a massive bug in snow leopard or my hard drive is failing.  I'm assuming the latter.  

Thus apple ripped me off for 75 bucks and I'll have to rip the damn thing apart myself which I wanted to avoid.  Lesson learned: Apple store can't fix macs.  I just wonder what totally clueless people do with these situations.  I lost a week of time with my iMac and i have to go look for suction cups and torx screwdrivers today plus buy a hard drive.  I'm not happy.  

Of course we bought a new mac at the store yesterday for caryn.  She's upgrading her laptop to a new MBP.  I feel annoyed that we gave them a sale.   

Pystar lost their case with Apple regarding the sale of Mac clones.  The EULA was upheld in court.  Most people assume EULAs would not hold up in court.  You can't read them before purchase, and many including Pystar assumed that first sale doctrine would protect them.  This legal victory is a new era in software distribution because the software industry has been given the green light to write very nasty EULAs. 

I did not agree with Pystar selling Macs.  I had hoped they would previal on the EULA aspect of the case as it would have been better for consumers.

So I had a hard drive failure in my Mac today.  I looked into upgrading the drive in the iMac previously.  It involves using suction cups and some other fun tricks to get the display out.  I thought I could do it, but it would be a real pain in the butt.  Thus, I decided to get apple to do it for me.  I hadn't bought extended apple care for it, so it was a bit of a sticker shock at the store.  However, apple did cut labor costs since the system was "so new".  I bought it February 2008.  I gatherered there have been problems with 250 GB WD drives put into those Macs.  He was not at all surprised the system had a drive failure.  The new drive will be a 320GB disk so at least it's a slight bump in disk space.  I've been running on 11GB of fre space for awhile.

Call it laziness, but after the 52 screws in the iBook I upgraded, I just haven't had the joy to do this one.  I saw my old boss destroy an iMac trying to replace a hard drive.  The LCD was destroyed.  At 1200 dollars for a new lowend model, I just didn't feel like it was a good call to try it. I think this is the first time I've paid for a hardware repair ever. 

The worst part is that my mac will be at the apple store for a week.  The service rep was very nice though.  It did take us 30 minutes to speak to someone; we had an appointment too. At least he didn't charge me for labor.  At that price, I would have tried it myself.

I never expected to get a breather from work this weekend.  So far, things have settled down.  I don't know if we'll make our deadline for Monday, but there isn't a lot I can do about it right now anyway.  

I spent a little free time this week playing Wolfenstein.  First person shooters always have a way of letting me let off some steam.  

Caryn's been playing Aion this week.  We built her a PC out of some old parts and threw in a new GeForce GTS 250. The game looks quite good, but it's obvious they ripped off World of Warcraft in a number of places.  The video card performance in Half Life 2 is impressive too.  My Radeon HD 4550 crossfirex setup is almost as fast in HL2.  I think some of the AA is better in my setup, but the lighting is quite impressive with her card.  it's rather weird to watch per play another game besides WoW.  

Yesterday, I had lunch with my boss and several other coworkers at Grizzly Peak.  That place makes an awesome veggie burger.  Anyone stopping by A^2 should check it out.

I'm rather disappointed by Wolfenstein Multiplayer.  The play control is weak and it uninteresting compared to something like quakewars, ET, or even RTCW.  I've had more fun with quake live!

The graphics are nice. 

I've been using Windows 7 on two computers.  The first is a laptop.  Battery life and general usage is similar to windows vista home basic on the system. Windows update crashed on the first run and there were some errors during the installer, but after I got it patched it seems to work.

The second computer is a system Caryn and I have been setting up for her gaming.  It's specifically to play Aion and Half-life 2.  She essentially needed a "steam" system and did not want to pollute her Mac with windows.  The system BSOD'd today because of the cpu frequency adjustments for power management using EIST.  It's a pentium d 805 chip and windows 7 doesn't seem to like power management on this rig.

The directions for installing windows 7 are vague and in my opinion incorrect.  If you try to use it like windows 98 style upgrades, it works.  I think there were some problems with Microsoft's technical writers on this release.  

I wonder if windows 8 will be windows 7 sp2?  I'm already waiting for the next release and it just came out.  I feel like many people did about vista.  It's just not ready for prime time.  Service packs are a must.  

The worst feature of windows 7 isn't the buggy situations.  I think it's the click count.  From an HCI perspective, one should never need to click several times to do anything.  It's just pathetic.  Everything is hidden several clicks away from menus, to windows open in applications.  It makes task switching slow.  The vista style start menu is still there and i find it quite inconvenient.  The control panel is even more clunky and slow to find things.  

The hype behind this release has many people thinking microsoft did something innovative.  This is not a windows 95 or even XP release.  There is no big jump from vista.  I must say microsoft did learn from some of their mistakes with marketing vista, but not with the development of vista or the quality issues with vista.  

I understand how hard it is to release an operating system.  I give them some slack, but frankly the marketing push on this release has left a sour taste in my mouth for anything microsoft.  I feel that vista was more innovative than windows 7. I also feel like microsoft flat out lied to me.

The worst part is the windows 7 fan boys who keep trying to convince me that it's some amazing release.  I may grow to like it better, but it's not nearly as good as snow leopard on the Mac.  That release was a disappointment in terms of GUI improvements, but as a programmer I appreciate the under the hood tweaks.  

At the end of the day, i don't see a reason to upgrade my desktop and reinstall everything yet.  I will switch to 7 eventually, but not today.  

I played Wolfenstein for the first time tonight.  As a fan of Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Wolfenstein 3D, I figured this would be a great game.  The play control is significantly differently from RTCW.  It doesn't feel "id" style.  I was aware of the differences before purchasing.  The game is still enjoyable even though it's not another RTCW.  

So far I've only played single player.  The in game movies and graphics are amazing.  It seems to be taking advantage of my crossfirex configuration and multicore CPU.  It detected my system as "high" performance.  I'm quite happy with the speed and graphics.  The 5.1 surround has a few quirks.  If you're facing directly at someone, the audio is very quiet.  If you get at an angle, you can hear them well through one ear (aka one speaker).  

I was quite concerned about game performance due to the terrible quakewars gameplay on my system.  This game runs much better than quakewars or ET on this system.  

I did experience a video driver crash when exiting, but the display driver recovered ok.  This maybe fixed in a newer catalyst driver. 

It's not crisp like RTCW or Half-life; everything is "blurry" or antialiased to the extreme.  

 Windows 7 does NOT install.  The product activation key does not work and they're closed on saturday!