Sorry about the lame pun. I couldn't resist.

How will the Sun acquisition affect Redpill Linpro and it's products? It's not quite clear yet, but I have a few ideas.

Hopefully, the Unbreakable Linux (OEL) thing will go away. Oracle just got a hold of Solaris. OEL doesn't add any value to the RHEL source and should just go and die somewhere. Don't get me wrong - OEL isn't a huge threat, it's just annoying.

If Oracle doesn't quickly state what it will do with Java - there might be a lot of uncertainty and therefore damage. Microsoft would benefit from this and try to take advantage of the situation.

Openoffice will live on and might even get stronger under Oracle. Openoffice does real damage to Microsoft and Oracle loves damaging Microsoft. Go Oracle!

MySQL is a bit odd. They started out as a very simple database - but lately they have, unsuccessfully, tried to make their database into a really complex product. Oracle will probably make it very clear that MySQL shouldn't compete with Oracle and it should do what it does best - being simple, fast data storage with and SQL interface. Oracle will hopefully push MySQL in the directing the drizzle fork is going.

Solaris will of course live on to slowly die together with the other Unix dialects.

I've been longing for ext4 for a long time now. ext3 has a really broken implementation of fsync(2). Each fsync() turns into a sync(). If there is some activity on the file system your computer will slow to a halt. firefox uses sqlite and sqlite uses fsync() quite a lot. Ubuntu 9.04 will be released in about a month. I thought I might help out and test it and finally get a sane fsync(). Thirdly there a few really annoying bugs in Ubuntu 8.10 I hoped would be fixed. Great, I thought.

Upgrading is really quite simple. "sudo upgrade-manager -d" in a shell, press "next" a few times and you're done. If you're really crazy you want to convert file systems to ext4 as well, here is how you can do this.

First, find some sort of live linux distribution. I prefer PLD rescue. It's small, fast and it has all the tools and file systems you'll need. Make sure it supports ext4. If you don't want to convert your root file system you can skip this.

Boot the rescue system and get a root shell. Now you need to enable all the features that turn an ext3 system into a ext4 system:

# tune2fs -O extents,uninit_bg,dir_index /dev/DEVICE

Replace DEVICE with the real name of your, uhm, device. tune2fs did tell you that you'll need a fsck after you enabled the new features.

# e2fsck -fyD /dev/DEVICE

Rince and repeat for every filesystem on the system. Do a search/replace ext3/ext4 in /etc/fstab afterwards. Now you can reboot. You don't have to fuzz with the initramfs since the nice Ubuntu people finally built the ext4 support into the kernel. I guess they did this to save time on boots - but the fact that the whole system now autodetects what kind of root file system you have doesn't hurt.

Eject the live CD and reboot. Voila!

At some point a wrote a currency calculator. It downloaded a list of current exchange rates from a bank, somewhere. The draw back was that it could only convert to and from NOKs.
I decided to give it a brush-up. After tinkering a bit with it I realized that google has quite a nice exchange rate calculator in its generic calculator. I wanted something I could operate from the command line so I went a found the WWW::Google::Calculator module on CPAN. On my ubuntu laptop this module is packaged in libwww-google-calculator-perl. The module does everything I needed, really, I just needed to to call it. Anyway, here is how it works:

perbu@thimk:~$ googlec 100 USD in EURO
100 U.S. dollars = 78.976465 Euros

The code is suprisingly simple:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use WWW::Google::Calculator;
my $calc = WWW::Google::Calculator->new;
print $calc->calc(join(' ',@ARGV)),"\n";

As a bonus it does all other sort of calculations:

perbu@thimk:~$ googlec "5*9+(sqrt 10)^3"
(5 * 9) + (sqrt(10)^3) = 76.6227766

Cool, eh?

Yesterday we assisted in migrating one of Norway largest IT portals,digi.no from Squid to Varnish. The attached smokeping graph showing the response time says it all.
Can you spot the migration? :-)

From the Novell bugzilla:

perbu@thimk:~$ GET -Used http://rudd-o.com/ | grep Varnish
X-Varnish: 301823638
perbu@thimk:~$ 

Who would have thunk it?

Some people claim dump is irrelevant. Linus Torvalds claimed at some point that dump was a relic of the past. The real issue was that there was no way in Linux to synchronize a file system at the time due to a silly bug in the kernel.

Well, a lot of people still find dump a useful tool. Its easy to use and its fast. In fact its really fast. tar and just about every other backup tool accesses the filesystem through the directory structure. The filesystem on disk is not ordered in the same way as its directory structure and the result is a lot of time spent seeking. dump opens the underlying device and accesses the data in its native order.

I ran a primitive benchmark just now:

1. sync the filesystem (an ext3 filesystem on a encrypted volume).
2. flush out the page and dentry caches (echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches)
3. run the backup

I did this for four different backup jobs:

1. full backup with tar
2. incremental backup with tar
3. full backup with dump
4. incremental backup with dump

The results:

results

Command	Time
tar cf - /home/perbu	37m 55s
tar --after-date 2008-11-01 -cf - /home/perbu	3m 59s
dump -f - /dev/vg0/perbu	13m 22s
dump -f -T 'Fri Nov 01 00:00:00 2008 +0100'   /dev/vg0/perbu	2m 22s

The results are quite clear. Dump is far superior to tar performance-wise.  A lot of sysadmins have problems making the backup stay within its window and dump is a very useful tool to those people.

I would guess that on a SSD the results would more or less be the same as the seek times are more or less zero. If someone gets me an SSD I'll make a post abount it. :-)

However, there is a price for this performance. If your filesystem is very active there might be changes that are not yet flushed out to disk - these data might not be backed up completely. To be 100% sure everything is backed up you might want to take a snapshot of the devices and dump this.For a personal computer however, the risk in negligible.

Happy dumping!

Last week I saw the following post to the ifolder-dev-list - "HELP!". I'm not sure if its sent in error - but it illustrates the state of the iFolder project.

The iFolder community is dead. Sad, really, as iFolder is a really, really cool project. Unfortunately it got bitten by the same virus as everything Novell touches. Kind of a inverse King Midas syndrome - everything they touch seems to turn into crap (Word Perfect, Corel, Quatro Pro, Netware). Well, maybe not crap, but the software gets forgotten. iFolder could have ruled the world, more or less. Well, it could have taken a huge bite out of Microsofts Sharepoint revenue, at least. If they teamed up with some producer of SMB NAS boxes it would have been a huge success, I'm sure.

A few years ago iFolder was a pretty cool, and quite simple application, written in Java and able to run under most app-servers. Then this De Icaza character comes along with his patent-infected Mono crap and Novell suddenly feels the urge to reimplement iFolder in Mono. iFolder then gets seriously broken and Novell spend a couple of years getting iFolder back into a working condition. Along the way I think they reorganize a few times and suddenly iFolder is now a closed source project developed inside Novell. They didn't even bother to notify the mailing list or say something on the Wiki.

Blargh. Sad.

I love Wikipedia. I use it several times every day. All of mankind working together towards a common goal - creating a complete encyclopaedia containing most of our knowledge.

There is a problem. Wikipedia is often considered to be the truth. So, having control over a certain set of Wikipedia articles gives power. Since Wikipedia allows you to hide behind a pseudonym your motives for editing the article might be very well hidden. Wikipedia tries to counter this by settling conflicts of interest in the appropriately named "conflict of interest board". This is not enough. First of all, a conflict of interest is really hard to spot if you don't know who has written the article. An unsuspecting journalist might run a background check on some topic and may be given a bias towards a specific topic. An controversial figure running a whistleblower campaign again some powerful entity might be smeared by an article making him pariah to the press. The Register ran a story which illustrates this well.

Secondly, there has a least been one account of people in the board having a conflict of interest themselves (see this article on The Register) making resolving the conflict rather difficult.

As long as Wikipedia allows editors to hide behind a pseudonym in cannot be considered a credible source for controversial topics. Wikipedia must change and become more transparent.

I got my self a "networked media tank" also known as Popcorn Hour. It's a strange device. The people who have created it are complete geeks. When installing a harddisk you get the choice of formatting the drive as ext2 or ext3. What a strange thing to ask people. Anyway - you can install telnet onto the thing.

/ # uname -a
Linux PCH-A110 2.6.15-sigma #2215 PREEMPT Tue Sep 9 15:09:05 MYT 2008 mips unknown
/ # 

Cool.

A few months ago a wrote a litt utility a called zensync - to synchronize my mp3s with my (Creative Zen) mp3 player. I have added a few features and cleaned it up a bit and it is now in a state where I feel the rest of the world can have a look.

It's a trivial program - but it does exactly what it is supposed to. :-)

If you need to synchronize several subsets of your mp3s to several mp3 players and you are not afraid of the command line I invite you to have a look.

Feedback is welcome. You can find the program here.

MySQL won a lot of its current user base being a really, really simple database. The did a great job delivering just what the people wanted. There has been a lot of critics, also. Today, as MySQL is looking more and more like a real database, many of the critics have gone silent, except of course for the duracell powered slashbots.

What did people want? They needed a simple database to store data for their home-grown application. Being SQL92-compliant never was an issue. At the time I was making a living as a system administrator and I was really happy with the no-nonsense attitude of MySQL.

A lot of stuff has happened to MySQL since. They where on their way towards an IPO and ended up being sold to Sun. In order to increase profits they stopped releasing binary and source releases of their software. In order to get the latest and greatest release of MySQL free of charge you now have to look to third parties. Percona is my favorite and seems to do a really good job. As ad added bonus they've started throwing in some community-provided patches.

Anyway, while MySQL struggles to find back to open source roots along comes Drizzle. It's a fork of MySQL 6.0. They are removing what they regard as cruft in the MySQL code base. They are removing spatial data types, fulltext indexes, views, stored procedures, triggers, grants and quite a few backends. What have they gained? Simplicity and speed. Simplicity and speed used to be the two major selling points of MySQL. Ironic, isn't it?

I am really looking forward to the first release. MySQL might be in for a bumpy ride if they don't get back in touch with their community.

The FSF community blog has a entry where they are listing 5 reasons to avoid the iPhone 3G. I agree wholeheartedly and would like to add a 6th reason - Apple has a really bad reputation for treating its customers like dirt (see Nicolais blog - it's in norwegian - but you can probably convince google to translate it if you are interested).

Endelig ser det ut til at de første små, billige bærbare (UMPC/netbook) kommer til Norge. Et søk på prisguiden viser at MSI sin "Wind" vil bli solgt for rundt 3500,- inkl. MVA. MSI Wind fikk 95% score på The Register sin test. Ikke verdens billigste laptop - men ikke langt unna. Synd den ikke blir levert med SSD, dog.

I've got a X60 Thinkpad running Ubuntu Hardy. Mostly - it's been working really well with Ubuntu. I suspect this might be because Mark Shuttleworth owns one - at least he did at some point. Anyway, with Hardy this changed. The wireless network performance is sometimes really, really bad. Suddenly the throughput would drop to ~700kbit/s and latency would rise dramatically. I'm not alone. A search for "iwl3945" and "performance" shows quite a few others having trouble. Since I newer use wired networks this is quite bothersome for me. I am kind of disappointed in Ubuntu that the bug was allowed to slip through - this could really destroy someones first impressions.

I've been trying to fix this for a few months now. I had similar problems with Gusty but solved them by automatically unloading the ipw3945 module before suspending. In gutsy the slowdown happened only after a suspend/resume cycle.

Yesterday, I installed the "linux-backports-modules-hardy" package which contains a newer version of the iwl3945 module. So far it is working beautifully. The little lamp which indicates the wireless is active is working again and the throughput is steady. Finally! Its a bit sad that Ubuntu is unable to resolve this problem in a way that the general population can benefit from, though. :-(

I've got a Creative Zen MP3 player. A whopping 16GB of flash. So far I've been using Amarok to play and transfer mp3s. All though Amarok is a really nice program - it's a pain to choose among the mp3s in a GUI.

A few weeks ago I found mtpsync. Its more or less a specialized rsync. It can run in non-interactive mode - great. You just point it to your mp3 folder and it will transfer it all to your Zen. Cool - just what I wanted. The only problem is that I've got more than 16GB of mp3s.

So, I've written a little Perl script. It searches through my mp3 collection. Each time it finds a file name .zensync it hardlinks every mp3 file in that folder and every subfolder into another folder - appropriately named zen-music. This folder is then fed into mtpsync each time I connect my zen.

After using it for a few weeks it works great. If you wan't to try it out you can get it here, Here is how to use it:

$ zensync --src /misc/mm/music --src /misc/mm/podcasts --target /misc/mm/zen-music

This will search through /misc/mm/music and /misc/mm/podcasts and create hardlinks in /misc/mm/zen-music.  You can add a --verbose or two if you want details. Feedback and patches are more then welcome - please send them to perbu (at) linpro (dot) no or leave a comment.

They've got the word "Windows" but not "Linux". Bastards! It's a conspiracy, I tell you!

Google makes a lot of money and I believe 99% comes from adsense. When you make such an enourmous amount of cash you would be stupid not to invest in other possible revenue streams. So, google spends a lot of time and money spewing out one web-based service after another. One of these is Google Analytics. GA is based on Urchin, a company Google purchaes in 2005. So why would Google offer free web site analysis? The answer if obvious if you know how GA works and are able to add two and two together.

How does GA work? Well, you include a snipplet of code on your site which makes your browser download and execute a bit of javascript for every web page you view.

How is this scary? Google already knows what you're searching for. They might also have your email, your documents, your calendar, a map of your social network (at least if you live in south amerika, where everybody is still using orkut). What you maybe didn't think of is that they are able to track you on every site that uses google analytics. So they know what pages you've been looking at and when you did so. Shocking.

Of course - this is done in the name of creating better searches, better advertisement and making more money. Thats what all the other spyware creators say too, I'm sure.

How to foil GA. Edit your hosts file - add the following lines:
127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com ssl.google-analytics.com
or install adblock and block out *.google-analytics.com

Now where did I put my tin foil hat?

The Creative Zen has a buildt in calendar, contact and task manager. After some prodding I've found out it uses a standard iCalendar data file. So, if you can get your groupware thingy to generate an iCalderdar export you should be able to have a read-only copy of your PIM data.

Here is a really simple shell script that downloads an iCalendar file from our openXchange server and pushes it onto my zen:

#!/bin/bash
FILE=6651416.ics  #whats up with the file name?
TMPDIR=/tmp
ICS="$TMPDIR/$FILE"

wget --no-check-certificate --user=perbu --password=xxxxxxxx -O $ICS https://oxserver/servlet/webdav.ical
unix2dos $ICS
# delete the old file first.
mtp-delfile -f "My Organizer/$FILE"
mtp-sendfile  $ICS "My Organizer/$FILE"
rm $ICS

Useful? The calendar GUI on the zen is kind of sucky - but its not awful.