Yesterday, I noticed my wii power light was not on. I checked the power cables and everything was hooked up snug. I tried changing outlets with no luck.
I went in search of a new power supply. Amazon has many marked "official" with bad reviews about knock offs. I stumbled upon the "reset" solution. A wii power adapter has a thermal fuse that must cool down. Letting it sit unplugged for 30 minutes and reconnecting it solved the problem and saved me $20.
This magus run is looking a bit more promising. We've still get several important mports to fix and many more to update.
| 218 | 0.4 | amd64 | active | 2011-05-15 15:33:13 |
Linux is primarily used for servers and embedded systems, but some users use it on the desktop. One website has compiled a list of numbers by region as well as the top twenty countries running Linux on the desktop.
Linux is most popular in Europe, but the #1 country running Linux is Cuba.
I am not surprised by the observation that the US is at .73% market share. I only know one person running Linux as their primary desktop OS. College students tend to do it more frequently and there was that brief period where netbooks ran it.
After reading a NYT piece on tech purchasing advice, I've decided to share my own perspective on purchasing a computer.
Most PC users have very modest needs. Typically, surfing websites, playing simple games, watching video, word processing, and listening to music are the limits of the average person. Almost any computer sold is capable of these tasks without any serious performance problems.
A first step in buying a computer is determining your needs. Will you run any software that requires higher than average computing power such as games, high end video or photography applicaitions, CAD, software development or engineering applications? Most people will answer no to this question. That means you don't need to spend over $650 on a PC or $1300 on a Mac. If you answered yes, determine what type of applications you will run. Games require a moderate CPU and a good graphics card in the radeon hd or geforce family. CAD or design applications work best with a workstation class card such as the ati firegl or nvidia quadro line. Most people can get away with a budget graphcis card such as the integrated Intel graphics found on most consumer PCs.
Most of the public can get away with a $300 laptop. I'm typing on one right now. In my case, I am a power user but I have a desktop computer for those tasks. My laptop is very modest with a single core processor (Intel celeron 2.2Ghz), 2GB of RAM, and a 160GB hard drive. I purchased this computer over a year ago and it's still working well. I can stream netflix, play a few low resource games, and even run virtualization software (vmware player and virtualbox) for light software testing. It's great for word processing. It's a bit slow for writing software, but I have used it for work in the past. A low cost laptop does not necessarily mean netbook either. You can get a netbook or tablet for $300, but this is a full sized (15.6 inch display) toshiba laptop with a dvd burner.
If you are a Mac user, I'd recommend the 13in MacBook Pro or the Macbook Air. These systems are constructed rather well and tend to hold up. The regular MacBook is an OK machine as well, but the MBP is a better value. An iMac is acceptable as a desktop, but they are difficult to fix. Either way, get applecare. Apple's newer systems are hard to get into and not intended for user servicing or upgrades. You can usually upgrade RAM, but that's it. Even a battery replacement requires a trip to the apple store. If you plan on upgrading an iMac, I recommend going to an auto parts store and purchasing a suction cup to remove dents from an older car. These are great at grabbing the cover over the LCD display. You will also need some unusual screwdrivers were are under $2 at Sears. I replaced the hard drive in an iMac in about an hour using online tutorials to avoid damaging the display, camera, etc.
Like most gamers, i've found the PSN outage to be irritating. Today, I've run into another problem. I bought a copy of Crysis via Steam and the cd key doesn't work. Looking at a forum post, I found that many people are having this problem. In fact, there are 17 pages of people bitching about this problem. EA admitted to some it was an issue with their activation servers. I've contacted steam/value about it.
They're running an EA weekend deal where many EA games are on sale. I've been avoiding EA games for some time due to the activation issues with newer SIMS games and several other titles. I finally broke down and bought Crysis because I've been told it's awesome and it was only $10 for the game. Now I don't get to play the game. It may clear up in a few days, but it ruins my plans for tonight. Bummer.
Lesson learned: don't expect to play EA games after you buy them.
Guess who's fault it might be... sony! http://www2.securom.com/ They make the DRM.
I just finished watching The Social Network. The movie is an interesting look at a startup. Based on my own limited experience in Silicon Valley, I'd have to agree with the portrayal of the office environment shown at the end of the movie.
Funny thing is I agree with the movie zuckerberg regarding the difference between "The Facebook" and the Harvard site proposed. The latter ended up targeting a large audience and was in fact a different site. In the computer industry, it's common to rip off ideas. Look at Mac OS, Windows, KDE, or Gnome. Consider the similarities with various smart phones interfaces.
Was he a dick? Yes. Is it different from Paul Allen, Steve Wozniak or any other co-founders of large companies? Not so much.
It would be interesting to know what the movie got wrong.
I've been working on getting reverse DNS setup for my ipv6 block. I have a ipv6 tunnel setup on stargazer that lets me access IPV6 based websites. The process was a little annoying to setup, but it's worth it.
For those of you who don't know what IPV6 is, let me explain. Whenever you get on the Internet, you are assigned a unique address (called an IP ADDRESS). Geeks call these IPV4 addresses. We ran out of them. Many years ago, we saw this coming and came up with a longer address type called IPV6. It gives us a lot more IP addresses (32 hex numbers long).
To make things more complicated, there were hacks to get around the IPV4 problem. One of them is called NAT. Most of you use it everyday and don't even know it. If you have a router at home (for wifi maybe) and it's connected to a cable modem or DSL modem, it's probably using NAT. What this does is take one real IP address and link it to a bunch of internal ones that aren't used on the internet. This supposedly makes you more secure as well, similar to a firewall but it's really not.
Why should you care about this?
Most of your old computers can't do IPV6. Your blu-ray player, game consoles, cell phones, or other things connected to the Internet might not work with IPV6. It's been very slow to get people to switch but when it happens it's going to be as bad or worse as the TV transition. All those routers and modems you got from the cable/dsl providers might not work and you have to get new ones. You'll have to make changes to your computer setup to use them. You might not get to see everything on the Internet from this point on. Some websites in asia are ipv6 only and it will happen here next.
Until you can get IPV6 at home, you can use a service called a tunnelbroker to see the whole internet again. The one I like is called sixxs.net. It's COMPLETELY FREE. You run a program on your pc or mac and you can see the whole internet again.
This last week, Amazon's cloud services (AWS) went down in Virginia. This is commonly known as US-EAST. Many websites and cloud based services put all their eggs in one basket and got burned. The whole point of cloud computing is to pay for distributed services. In the US, this means US-EAST and US-WEST which is in California.
If their website went down, it's because they were cheap or idiots. There is no other explanation and it's not Amazon's fault.
A company we consult for went down for the last few days due to this outage. DEV and staging servers went out as a result. It stopped all productivity because they didn't pay for a redundant mirror. Don't be cheap people.
So I'm reading this PHP code today and I can't believe my eyes. There's a Box class that tracks boxes in a warehouse. They have a concept of an open box and a closed box. The latter means it's full and taped and ready to ship. Instead of adding a close method to the Box class, they have a completely different (and somewhat unrelated) class that calls Box::update() after modifying two properties (not setter methods) on the class first to make the closed by (person) and closed date.
To make it more interesting, the "open" command is called insert.
tags: wtf
I'm bored out of my mind. I've been waiting for three days to get assigned work. I managed to get multicast dns working on MidnightBSD. I can resolve .local entries on the network at home (like my iMac) now with ease. I shouldn't have enough time to do that at work!
Apple stopped supporting my iPhone so I can' t get security updates anymore. I have an iPhone 3G. I guess it's time to start thinking about an upgrade. What's irritating is that the phone still works well.
I've found that I missed several decent TV shows in the last few years. I started watching Chuck a few months ago and it's quite a good show. I also have been streaming Veronica Mars on Netflix. It's not too bad.
Caryn won some moon pies from Zingermans bake house. That's awesome.
I read about the new AMD/ATI Radeon 6990 that came out this week. It's got 4GB of RAM and 2 GPUs with support for 6 monitors. It requires 450 watts of power. That's more than my PC uses now just for the GPUs.
There was a funny story on slashdot about how PCs are killing game consoles. I read articles last year that PC gaming was dead because of consoles. This is a cycle people. When the PS4 and the next xbox come out, it will be all about the consoles again. I must admit that I play games on my PC more than my PS3 or Wii though. Starcraft 2 is a good game.
What a crazy evening with the server. I decided to switch over to a raid 1 setup for /home tonight. At first, I thought the rsync of the data didn't go according to plan. The java sites wouldn't restart. I got blank pages. tomcat reset the configuration on several of the sites when /home was unavailable.
Finally, I managed to get the sites up to find out that for the last three weeks the midnightbsd forum site has been getting spammed. Over 1800 fake user accounts and 20,000 messages! There were too many to weed out potential real posts. I just had to delete them all from users ids in this block. I enabled some additional hoops to setup accounts, but it may still mean spam is coming. The software I'm using sucks about ip blocks and banning users. I might have to look elsewhere.
I purchased a copy of History of the Berkeley Software Distributions by Marshall Kirk McKusick last month. It's a two part series exploring the history of BSD and the structure of the FreeBSD project. It includes 218 minutes of video taped at public speaking events.
Part I includes a detailed account of BSD at UCB including information predating McKusick's involvement. There are several anecdotes about Bill Joy and events during the famous lawsuit with AT&T/UCL. It concludes with the forming of FreeBSD and NetBSD from 386BSD.
Part II focused exclusively on the FreeBSD project organizational structure. Discussion of the core team, gaining commit bits, and the need for the FreeBSD foundation. I found this piece less interesting as I knew most of it anyway.
The video is worth the price for Part I. It's a well put together video with useful information for those interested.
Yesterday, I committed some new code to monitor the temperature on AMD K10 and K11 CPUs such as the Phenom. I had a FreeBSD amdtemp(4) in the kernel but it had a few problems and didn't work with the sensors framework I imported from OpenBSD.
For instance, in FreeBSD the temperature can be off due to rounding with the equation to convert celcius to kelvin. This is only .05 degrees, but when your reporting tool is accurate enough, it can be odd to see the CPU at 27.05C.
Normally this back of the envelope calculation stuff drives me up a wall, but it's a freaking temperature sensor! I want it to be accurate.
After my bad experience with SSD last year, I went back to traditional hard drives. Today, I finally got around to taking the drive apart to see if anything physical happened. Everything looks fine so far. Then I started searching on part numbers. The failed Imation 32GB SSD contains Samsung 919 K9GAG08V0D chips with a JMIcron JMF602. Searching on the Samsung chips was difficult because most references to 919 refer to a Samsung cell phone. However, the JMicron controller turned up many hits like this one. This article discusses performance problems with the JMF602. It has a small cache that limits write combining and performance. I used this drive in a server and the low cache might explain what happened. If the drive was not aligned on a 4K boundary and it can't combine writes, it could have been doing some crazy things that wore out the beginning of the disk.
The problem I experience might not have been Imation's fault aside from their dealings with this controller. OCZ had to abandon the JMF602 controller for their drives because of the performance problems. If I were to look at reviews of drives during the time period OCZ used this controller, they may also have had some reliability issues.
As I can't determine anything about the Samsung chips, it's also possible the combination of the JMicron controller with these model Samsung parts was a perfect storm of unreliably. Consider that a defect causing lower than expected write cycles combined with misalignment and a poor JMF602 killed the drive in 3 months.
According to the Tom's hardware article, Intel uses another controller with 256KB cache in their drives. That might explain the differences in benchmarks. That article was written in 2009 so it's even quite possible all of these companies got their acts together by now. It doesn't fix my drive.
Imation was nice about an RMA process, but I decided not to send the drive in because it was still read only at the time. As it was a server drive, I didn't want to take the risk someone could read the data off it. I still have the drive because I haven't come up with a good was of destroying it yet. I'll probably just smash it to bits one of these days.
I've been strangely absent from my blogging lately. Mostly, I've been microblogging on Twitter. I broke 600 tweets this month. That's nothing right?
It's been a crazy month so far. I've seen a number of coworkers depart including the guy who was going to train me on iPhone development. I'm probably stuck with PHP now. Several recruiters call me every day bugging me about job openings all over. I've had people contact me about jobs I posted for in November this week. The amazing part is that they think I'm still available like there was no chance I could have found something in all this time. I've been asked if I"m looking for something out of the state by my supervisor recently. Is the universe trying to tell me something?
I admit PHP development isn't my favorite. I find the language to be rough, inconsistent and broken between versions. It's very easy to learn and anyone with a CS background knows how bad it really is. Many non programmers can pick it up easily. Several of my coworkers don't have computer science or engineering backgrounds. It shows. Code quality isn't what I'd like to see. Logging the same data to two places in the database in the exact same way, loading *DAOs inside a for loop, storing everything in an associative array and then memcaching all of it, these are just a few of the examples I've seen.
*DAO stands for data access objects. It's a design pattern that's become popular with web applications where you store all your data access code (going to a database) that's related in a common class so you don't duplicate code. You do your select, delete, insert and update statements in there. Often times, you also create a data transfer object (DTO) to move data between the DAO and the middle tier. In there case, it's always associative arrays.
Apparently my father went into the hospital this month for several days and I found out the week after. I don't speak to him anymore due to his inability to be a decent human being or love someone without strings like buying him things or giving him money. Still, it sucks he's having more heart problems. Most people think I'm the dick because I don't talk to him. I don't really care anymore. They don't know half the story.
There are moments I'd like to put my life story in a blog post or book. I really think people would be shocked. Of course that would irritate my whole family. Sometimes I think getting it out would make me feel much better. I suppose I try to be rather boring now because of all the crap that happened to me. It's just easier to avoid surprises.
There was a whole lot more I was going to say, but I think I'll just get the midnightbsd release started and play starcraft 2.
I've been working on creating the next MidnightBSD release since November, 2008. Finally, it's getting tagged in CVS right now.
I just wish I didn't feel so terrible so I could get smashed to celebrate this rediculous, time consuming event's conclusion.
Remaiining steps include building the final source and making ISOs for i386 and amd64 architectures, writing the release notes, and announcing it to distrowatch and freshmeat.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html
I don't agree with the last point about making someone write code during the interview. I find that insulting, but I do understand the underlying point that you have to make sure someone can code. I did start requiring code samples when I was responsible for hiring.
Egg nog. Check.
Upgrade mysql while drinking. Check. MySQL 5.5 is fast.
Caryn bought me Fruit Fucker for chistmas. (@see penny arcade) Check.
I just broke down and bought some parts to update one of my servers. It's one of the oldest systems here and yet I do most of the compiling for MIdnightBSD on it .
Going from a Core 2 Duo E6420 (2.13Ghz) to AMD Athlon II X4 3.0Ghz. Considering this is my magus, tinderbox and MySQL server, it's going to be a real bump up.
Magus is the build software for MidnightBSD packages. It takes about 2.5 days to do a run right now on this machine. This includes downloading everything and compiling. I can run it in parallel and some ports now support parallel make operations too. Four cores actually make a difference here.
It amazes me how expensive processors are right now. Intel had some insane prices. They want $120 for a dual core chip (core i3). Considering I just bought a quad core for $99, I don't think that makes sense. I realize AMD chips aren't as fast as Intel, but it's not that different. A socket 775 Q8300 was like $150 and that's old technology and FSB memory access. No thank you.
I've been playing starcraft through lately and had some trouble with the last two levels of the Terran campaign. Resource gathering is essential but timing also is. I found some cheats and walkthroughs that have helped a bit.
I had less trouble with starcraft 2.