February 28, 2005
Interesting places to visit
Jerusalem's old city, Isreal
Angkor, Cambodia
Snorkelling in the Red Sea at Dahab, Egypt.
Fez, Morocco
Kasbah du Toubkal, Morocco in High Atlas.
Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia
Lake Baikal, Russia
Three Gorges, China
Thorsmork, South Iceland
This is a place holder of interesting places to visit. Lake Baikal I'm sure looks like Canada, but besides that the rest sound sufficiently exotic.
February 25, 2005
How Linux may actually be better than a MAC
This is from a Wall Street Journal Article which shows Mac isn't for everyone. After reading the article it turns out that Linux is actually better than Mac on most of these points. So lets look at them.
"People who depend on their company's IT department to manage and support their home computers may find themselves locked into Windows. Most corporate computer staffs support only Windows and know little or nothing about Macs."
Honestly - these staffers are hard pressed to know about anything. But I would say these days there are more IT staff who have tried an install of Linux than have sat before a Mac.
"Similarly, if the principal use of your home computer is to remotely link up to your company's Windows network, stay with Windows. The Mac has gotten much better at doing these remote linkups, but they are still easier on Windows."
Linux actually is better at this - still not perfect but SMB4K, Suse, and several distros have made it quite easy. Apple is simply reusing Linux software for this functionality and they are a bit behind the curve. I've used it seamlessly many times.
"If you love Microsoft Outlook, you should also probably stick with Windows. There is no version of Outlook for the current Mac operating system. Instead, Microsoft includes an e-mail and organizer program called Entourage in the Mac version of Office. It's similar to Outlook but just different enough to bug Outlook lovers."
Evolution 2.0.4 is a better clone of outlook and can access your Outlook mail. I prefer Thunderbird with my service provider. If you really love Outlook it runs under linux fine using wine or codeweavers ($30). As does MS Office as a whole.
"If you use your PC mainly for games, avoid the Mac. While there are more games for the Mac now than there were a few years back, the number still lags behind Windows badly. And the hottest computer games come out first, and sometimes exclusively, on Windows."
Cedega comes to the rescue for this - for $5 a month, which you can stop paying at any time and keep the software.
"People who rely heavily on financial software may be unhappy with the Mac. Microsoft Money doesn't come in a Mac version. The Mac version of Quicken isn't identical to the Windows product, and converting Windows Quicken data to the Mac is a bear. Many specialized financial-analysis and stock-trading programs aren't available for Macs."
Gnucash is quite good - and free. If you want to use commercialware quicken and money both run under wine in linux. Not the latest version mind you.
"If you need an ultralight laptop for traveling, you're out of luck with Apple. The Mac laptops are great, but the lightest one weighs 4.6 pounds, compared with three pounds or less on the Windows side."
Linux works fine here. Hardware requirments are the same - and a bit less than windows.
"If you use a portable music player other than Apple's iPod, or love the major subscription music services, Napster and Rhapsody, which work only on Windows, you won't be happy with a Mac."
Probably the same under linux. iTunes, Napster will require wine and work ok but not perfectly. Rhapsody doesn't work but Real may be offering it in the future. Personally I prefer to stick with companies that provide music in mp3 or ogg format or ripping CDs, which linux does very well with grip or other tools.
February 24, 2005
Ultimate Linux Database server
The HP Proliant DL595 is a very mean machine when running 64 Linux. Perfect as a Postgresql/MySQL/Oracle server.
The Specs are as follows:
* 4x AMD Opteron 2.6GHz CPU w/ 1MB L2 cache
* on-board 2.6GHz memory controller for outstanding performance and scalability
* 1GHz HyperTransport technology delivering 8GB/sec CPU to CPU
* RAM - Up to 64GB of PC2100 @ 266MHz (32GB @ 400MHz)
* 8 PCI-X expansion slots, a dual-port Gbit NIC
* Smart Array 5i Plus controller with Battery-backed Write Cache enabler
Price :$32,000+ USD
Almost as nice is Sun's v40z:
* 4x AMD Opteron 2.6GHz CPU w/ 1MB L2 cache
* HyperTransport technology delivering 4.6GB/sec CPU to CPU
* RAM - 32 GB of registered DDR1-333 SDRAM
* 7 PCI-X 66-133 Mhz expansion slots
*a dual-port Gbit NIC + management NIC
Price: $30-38K fully decked out. RAM drives up the price.
Similar (but not quite as nice) machines are available from Appro, iWill and Tytan. However, what I'd like to see as the basically the DL595x10. At a good price.
Here is what I'd like to see as the "ulimate linux database server".:
* 20-40x AMD Opteron 2.8GHz CPU Dual Core w/ 4MB L2 cache
* 10 GHz HyperTransport technology delivering 80GB/sec CPU to CPU
* 4 Ghz Front side bus
* RAM - Up to 320GB DDR3 @ 1066 MHz
* 8 PCI-X 2.0 533 Mhz expansion slots
* a dual-port 10 Gbit NIC
*2x 10 Ghz iSCSI/FC controller with Battery-backed Write Cache enabler
*HD 20,000 RPM with 80 MB Cache, 2 ms access, NCQ and the use of asynchronous I/O.
Hot-swap CPU, memory, I/O , power, fans, etc.
Note - this dream machine isn't that far off, a CPU with similar specs might be available next year (sans 4 MB cache). The HyperTransport and Front Size Bus may take a while. Most mainframe style servers (e25K) have about I/O of 25 GB/sec. It would have enough enough memory to load your average regional bank's customer database into memory. You could throw out your z990 and save yourself $3 Million per year.
February 23, 2005
Toronto Python Users group
Yesterday I went to the PYGTA users group. It was an informal meeting with no topic but we discussed several interesting things.
1) ZopeZen - plone/zope website seems to be hemoraging memory since they moved to a dual cpu machine. Dell server, Adaptec controller, and the memory is never reclaimed after plone gets quit.
2) Is there anything comparable with Ruby on Rails for python?
Lots of frameworks but nothing directly comparible.
3) I did a quick demo of ipython
4) Lots of talk about the upcoming pycon which I may attend.
5) A short discussion of Decorators. Mike is doing a presentation at pycon. Couple of people recommended this weblog.
After the meeting we got into a long discussion about Postgresql replication and how Slony-I didn't meet the requirements of a POS application. Also what a mess it is to write drivers for proprietary X.25 networks (Datapac in this case).
February 22, 2005
Open Source RDBMS XA Support
The system model of having a standardized api for independent transactions was created by X/Open. This allows databases and different transaction managers to interoperate. XA and 2PC do have a fair amount of overhead but for me this defines "Enterprise Ready".
Who supports XA Transactions?
MySQL - No
SAPDB/MAXDB - No
Postgresql - No - in the works (8.1/8.2?)
Firebird - Yes
Berkeley DB - Yes
Ingres - Yes
An extensive discussion of the use of XA Transactions can be found on the Server Side Review
February 11, 2005
Tool for Monitoring Linux Performance
Here is a nice vmstat replacement named dstat. It is written in python so is easily customized.
Pieter Bruegel (a favorite)
February 04, 2005
IE down to 58% share on this site
Did a tally of last months visits and after I removed the search engines MS IE was down to 58% of visitors. Not bad, less than a year ago it was still over 80%. Why are the 58% of users visiting a weblog about linux using IE?
Personally I'd like to see an open source day, where every webmaster in the world who has benefited from open source software (that is virtually every webmaster) runs a banner for firefox/open source and open patent free standards.
Burning an iso should be easier in linux
Tried a couple of times to burn an iso in Gnome Toaster - but each time it appeared as file.iso - not the way I wanted it.
Why can't I just click on the iso and it ask me if I would like to burn it or mount it?
Anyway the easiest way is on the command line
The first step in using cdrecord, is to find the address of your CDR-RW device.
Enter the following command:
$ cdrecord -scanbus
you get something like this
0,2,0 0) 'CD-RW ' 'CDR-5W48 ' 'VSG3' Removable CD-ROM
test run with:
$ cdrecord -eject -dummy dev=0,2,0 -v warty_4.1.iso
To burn this to a CD, I enter the command:
$ cdrecord dev=0,2,0 -v warty_4.1.iso
Or
$ cdrecord -v speed=4 dev=0,2,0 warty_4.1.iso
where -v is verbose
speed=2 (I specify a slower speed so I don't get so many errors).
Mount the iso file in the /mnt/temp directory:
# mount -t iso9660 -o ro,loop=/dev/loop0 ./myiso.iso /mnt/temp
Why can't nautilus and kde do this automatically (perhaps they can in newer versions).
February 03, 2005
Postgresql 8.0 What's missing?
Aberdeen wrote some analysis of Postgresql and came up with missing features - lets see what has been fixed in this issue.
Features desired according to users:
Gui control centre
- Yes - not quite as good as SQL Server's gui - but really quite good.
Improved Replication
Slony1 has replication
Slony2 will have multi-master (most oracle installs I've seen don't use it)
Two-phase commit
- patches available -probably will be included in 8.1.
They list what they think is missing from postgresql compared with
Oracle/db2/MSSQL
PostgreSQL does not offer the following key features typically
provided in enterprise databases(according to Aberdeen):
• Incremental and parallel backup/restore
-PITR done in 8.0 Incremental you can use Slony-I 1.1 when it comes out
• Encryption (security)
Has SSL, pgcrypto and passwd encryption.
• Deadlock detection
-fairly well done
• Row-level locking (typically required by large packaged
applications)
— PostgreSQL does offer alternative sub-table locking schemes as well as row level locking if desired
• Bit-mapped indexing (for large data warehouses)
-not likely for a while although there are people working on it
• A single GUI administrative interface
-Done
• View update/insert/delete
-not sure about this one
Oracle runs 4 times faster on 64 bit Linux
from a friend:
"I did it on Athlon 64/SuSE 9.2 and a new 4 x Opteron-CPU system (loan for
tests from HP) with SLES8 SP3. The only very little problem was to find out
that the glibc-devel-32bit rpm-package is needed. All is going without any
problems up to now. I've done an oracle CPU stress test (orabm). Therefrom
our Opteron system is nearly 4 times as fast as the CPUs from expensive SUN E15k (1.2 GHz CPUs). "
Postgresql 8.0 gaining momentum
Postgresql has definitely been gaining momentum as more and more companies support it. This interview goes over the work that has gone into version 8.0. Fujitsu is the 1000 lbs (US$10.1 billion) new contributor. Other contributors include Red Hat, Afilias, Software Research Associates, Inc., 2nd Quadrant, and Command Prompt Inc as well as the database company Pervasive Software.
Postgresql is the DNS backbone for the .net and .org domains. The only big features missing are fully integrated multi-master replication (Slony already does master-slave and slony2 is doing this) and some features on the backup.
Oxford University is scrapping oracle and moving everything to postresql in '05.
One of my favorite features is that you can write your triggers in python.
In terms of scalablity they have done a lot of testing on systems with 4,000-4,800 transactions per minute and improving large system performance. It wouldn't surprise me if Sun picks up Postgresql as a project if Oracle and IBM keep up their difections to linux.
The real driver I think will be that Postgresql now runs in windows so the PHP community will be more likely to use it for development work. The Admin GUI has come a long way as well.
The other thing I think would help Postgresql is a migration tool from sqlite. So that developers could prototype their app in sqlite and then easily move to postgresql when they need to scale up.
I think that someone should try to get SAP donate developer resources - as this project is in their interest.
I find that Oracle and DB2 dbas typically dismiss Postgresql as lacking "Enterprise" features. I feel like most of these features are irrelivant if you have very good middleware developers who write quality applications.
Banks lived for years and years on flat file databases and less features rich database server (Oracle 6.x eg) and didn't have features like Integrity constraints, stored procedures and triggers. Did the banks have larger outages or have a lower return on equity due to this? No - smart developers made apps that worked.
February 01, 2005
"Nice" for I/O - linux tool valve
Copies data while enforcing a specified maximum transfer rate in bytes per second by pausing between data blocks and limits detriment effects to other applications and/or users. It can be thought of as the equivalent of the Unix nice command for I/O.
Interactive Python (ipython)
Wow - interactive python seems to have a lot of tools that will make rapid protoyping in python even faster...
It took me 20 seconds to install with kdesu synaptic (debian app mgmt tool).
What else would be cool? Better integration into the OS - so that you could manage processes etc easily. Manage 100 machines as if they were one machine.
So you could do this:
for i in range(500):
mkdir d_${i}_d
and it would execute on n number of machines concurrently.
Other things I would like to do with it is keep a history of every command ever entered (probably configurable). Also I'd like to see a directory of user defined scripts for system mgmt.
Overall very cool tool - and will become part of my toolkit.