I use Mandriva as my preferred distribution. The *drak* stuff isn't that big a deal for me, I prefer the command line, usually, and it still isn't easy to add an ethernet interface alias via drakconf (actually, I don't think I see how to do it at all, although you can do it with webmin). I'm *really* in love with the urpmi stuff though (and mainly the command line urpmi, although rpmdrake is very good too).
I thought I'd try suse though, either the evaluation version, or opensuse. But I can't afford to overwrite my laptop since I don't want to have to reconfigure everything (openvpn to two different networks, etc). So I thought I'd try it with vmware. When I downloaded the DVD ISO, it wouldn't work in vmware. It kept giving some sort of boot error. I thought maybe the DVD download was corrupted so I downloaded again, same problem. Next I downloaded the CDs. Same problem. It looks like opensuse (or the suse evaluation version) just won't install in vmware. That's a shame, since I'm certainly not going to switch to it if I can't test drive it, and I just don't have a spare computer to test drive it on. Ah well.
Sunday, December 25, 2005
Saturday, December 17, 2005
Bloglines and Google Reader
I looked at bloglines last night, partly because of a post here, or on a mailing list about how it's so much easier to use than google reader. too lazy to put links there.
I think I *will* be switching to bloglines. It does seem much faster than reader (although that might just be because I've got digg in reader and there are a heck of a lot of entries in there for reader to load). It's also got subfolders, feeds are subfolders on the left (useful for ignoring digg until i've got enough time to waste, on reader everything is in the same place and digg overshadows everything), and it's got "Mark all read" (which I sometimes need to resort to if I've been away for a few days and there's no hope of reading everything that digg has found).
There's probably some way to filter things in digg (which is still too useful to drop, despite the inconvenience of having so much there), but I don't see how to do it in reader yet. I thought maybe digg would have a feature where the RSS feed is identified per user, so that my preferences in digg (what I want to see, which is not everything) would be what I'd see in my RSS reader, but even if there were a per user RSS feed, there doesn't seem to be any way to have preferences in digg similar to preferences in slashdot, where I'd only see articles in categories I'm interested in.
So it's bloglines I'll be using for now. When reader catches up and gets faster, I'll look at it again.
I think I *will* be switching to bloglines. It does seem much faster than reader (although that might just be because I've got digg in reader and there are a heck of a lot of entries in there for reader to load). It's also got subfolders, feeds are subfolders on the left (useful for ignoring digg until i've got enough time to waste, on reader everything is in the same place and digg overshadows everything), and it's got "Mark all read" (which I sometimes need to resort to if I've been away for a few days and there's no hope of reading everything that digg has found).
There's probably some way to filter things in digg (which is still too useful to drop, despite the inconvenience of having so much there), but I don't see how to do it in reader yet. I thought maybe digg would have a feature where the RSS feed is identified per user, so that my preferences in digg (what I want to see, which is not everything) would be what I'd see in my RSS reader, but even if there were a per user RSS feed, there doesn't seem to be any way to have preferences in digg similar to preferences in slashdot, where I'd only see articles in categories I'm interested in.
So it's bloglines I'll be using for now. When reader catches up and gets faster, I'll look at it again.
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures
i saw the Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures long ago, posted on a mailing list. Saw it again on digg.com just today.
I didn't graduate CS, so a lot of this is new to me. I wish there were a more structured way to browse it though. alphabetical is doable, but doesn't link concepts very well together. alphabetical plus following related links (see also, etc) works a bit better, but that has its own problems. Heh, I'm being characteristically lazy and I want a tutorial that covers everything in there :-). I doubt if even Knuth covers everything in there and if he were to try, he'd need the immortality pill from The Myth.
I didn't graduate CS, so a lot of this is new to me. I wish there were a more structured way to browse it though. alphabetical is doable, but doesn't link concepts very well together. alphabetical plus following related links (see also, etc) works a bit better, but that has its own problems. Heh, I'm being characteristically lazy and I want a tutorial that covers everything in there :-). I doubt if even Knuth covers everything in there and if he were to try, he'd need the immortality pill from The Myth.
Sunday, December 11, 2005
visayan on mailing lists (KLUG)
I see that sacha is looking into learning bisaya. I don't know why that would be, it's not like she's not got enough on her plate already. It's certainly a good thing, learning languages is good.
I hope, though, that it's not so that she can decipher things like this. And that she doesn't try to learn things from that and similar posts on some mailing lists. Almost all visayan posts on that list are like textingese in tagalog or english, essentially illiterate. That's not to insult the poster, that's just students communicating lazily in whatever language they use. It's not their fault, it's cultural. There are wonderful, literate visayan posts somewhere on the Net, i'm sure, but they're not on mailing lists populated by students who don't care enough about their posts to try to spell correctly.
Not that spelling is an easy thing in visayan. There's no given orthography, and the examples in sacha's post feel sort of archaic, although that's better than the illiteracy that passes for communication these days). Sounding archaic isn't a big deal though. Visayan varies from place to place, people will just assume she learned visayan with people who spoke classical visayan.
I hope, though, that it's not so that she can decipher things like this. And that she doesn't try to learn things from that and similar posts on some mailing lists. Almost all visayan posts on that list are like textingese in tagalog or english, essentially illiterate. That's not to insult the poster, that's just students communicating lazily in whatever language they use. It's not their fault, it's cultural. There are wonderful, literate visayan posts somewhere on the Net, i'm sure, but they're not on mailing lists populated by students who don't care enough about their posts to try to spell correctly.
Not that spelling is an easy thing in visayan. There's no given orthography, and the examples in sacha's post feel sort of archaic, although that's better than the illiteracy that passes for communication these days). Sounding archaic isn't a big deal though. Visayan varies from place to place, people will just assume she learned visayan with people who spoke classical visayan.
National Geographic Pics
Huh, in the preceding link to Google Video I wasn't quite sure whether it was a *good* way to waste bandwidth. So there's no qualifier there. On the other hand:
Pics from National Geographics and
ScubaDiving.com cannot possibly be considered a waste.
Lots of other good photo sites out there. for instance, APOD, Astronomy Photo of the Day.
All those sites better than webshots or screensaver software that installs adware and spyware on the computers of the gullible. I think so anyway (wouldn't really know, don't use windows anymore, maybe there are webshots or screensaver freeware that aren't evil).
Pics from National Geographics and
ScubaDiving.com cannot possibly be considered a waste.
Lots of other good photo sites out there. for instance, APOD, Astronomy Photo of the Day.
All those sites better than webshots or screensaver software that installs adware and spyware on the computers of the gullible. I think so anyway (wouldn't really know, don't use windows anymore, maybe there are webshots or screensaver freeware that aren't evil).
Google Video
Huh, I see that Google Video is up. What a way to waste bandwidth:
Asian Backstreet Boys
How men screw up romance
lots of useless stuff there too. i wouldn't be surprised if there's some pr0n there though, somewhat like that smart telecom's post your phonecam pictures here site (too lazy to find the link).
tiger
Asian Backstreet Boys
How men screw up romance
lots of useless stuff there too. i wouldn't be surprised if there's some pr0n there though, somewhat like that smart telecom's post your phonecam pictures here site (too lazy to find the link).
tiger
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
Try ruby not working
I saw a link to Try Ruby! (in your browser) and thought, why not.
It's not working for me though. After the first few things to try, I get to the "Jimmy".reverse example and I get:
PHP already has most of what I need and I'm interested in trying Win Binder, a native Windows binding for PHP. I don't know what that's like yet, but if it's reasonable, then I may use that to write some quick windows programs (anything to get away from the horror that is Visual Basic).
Hay, so much to learn, so little time. I need to delegate.
It's not working for me though. After the first few things to try, I get to the "Jimmy".reverse example and I get:
>> "Jimmy".reverse
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<title>500 - Internal Server Error</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>500 - Internal Server Error</h1>
</body>
</html>
PHP already has most of what I need and I'm interested in trying Win Binder, a native Windows binding for PHP. I don't know what that's like yet, but if it's reasonable, then I may use that to write some quick windows programs (anything to get away from the horror that is Visual Basic).
Hay, so much to learn, so little time. I need to delegate.
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
swsusp very useful
I was on a long bus trip recently and I decided to see if the new laptop supported swsusp. I had given up on swsusp on a previous laptop (also a Winbook, but a slightly older one, since sold) because it didn't work there. It would try to save and then would fail on trying to halt mysql. Or if i stopped myself myself, it would try to save, and then on restore it would try to save again (instead of restoring), and then give up and reboot (or something, it was confusing, which is why the account above is a mess).
I'm very happy that it now works on the new laptop though. I've got three batteries for the laptop. They only last around 45 minutes at the full 1.7Ghz AMD speed (something like 2300-2400+ intel equivalent, i think), but in combination with cpufreq and setting the speed to the slowest CPU frequency available (around 600Mhz AMD, so maybe around 800+ intel equivalent?), the individual batteries last around 1.5-1.7 hours.
But I didn't want to shutdown and swap batteries since starting up takes some time and all of that time is at 1.7Ghz, eating battery life. Swsusp is a lifesaver since, when battery gets low and the laptop starts beeping, i just run a script that tells the laptop to suspend. It writes its status to swap. The laptop turns off. I swap batteries. And when I turn the laptop on it restores from swap, switches to 600+Mhz automatically and gets back to X in far less time than it takes to boot.
I think I'm going to swsusp all the time now, even when not trying to save battery, just because it starts up so much faster when restoring.
I'm very happy that it now works on the new laptop though. I've got three batteries for the laptop. They only last around 45 minutes at the full 1.7Ghz AMD speed (something like 2300-2400+ intel equivalent, i think), but in combination with cpufreq and setting the speed to the slowest CPU frequency available (around 600Mhz AMD, so maybe around 800+ intel equivalent?), the individual batteries last around 1.5-1.7 hours.
But I didn't want to shutdown and swap batteries since starting up takes some time and all of that time is at 1.7Ghz, eating battery life. Swsusp is a lifesaver since, when battery gets low and the laptop starts beeping, i just run a script that tells the laptop to suspend. It writes its status to swap. The laptop turns off. I swap batteries. And when I turn the laptop on it restores from swap, switches to 600+Mhz automatically and gets back to X in far less time than it takes to boot.
I think I'm going to swsusp all the time now, even when not trying to save battery, just because it starts up so much faster when restoring.
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
A constant state of insecurity
Another link from schneier has:
A Constant State of Insecurity
Good God.
On the other hand, I admit that I do use several levels of insecure passwords for free but insecure web based services. Any service that requires registration for free access will get one of my fake (I lied about everything, including what country I'm supposedly from [I don't know where Anguilla is, but it sounds pretty]) identities with my lowest level password (I don't mind giving it away to anyone, although I don't actually post it on a blog or anything either :-).
Maybe some of those people were doing something like that. On the other hand, well, if companies are exposing FTP or POP3 on the internet (or maybe even ssh with their users having the same ssh password as their POP3 password), well, this is depressing my donkey. I wonder if anyone learns anything at those security seminars. Maybe they're Windows security seminars and the lessons have to do with which buttons to click to turn the firewall on. A lesson that is instantly forgotten because the listeners are Windows security professionals.
As a security professional, my friend often attends security conferences and teaches security classes. She noted that the number of passwords she collected in these venues was higher on average than in non-security locations. The very people who are supposed to know more about security than anyone appeared to have a higher-than-normal level of remote access back to their companies, but weren’t using any type of password protection.
A Constant State of Insecurity
Good God.
On the other hand, I admit that I do use several levels of insecure passwords for free but insecure web based services. Any service that requires registration for free access will get one of my fake (I lied about everything, including what country I'm supposedly from [I don't know where Anguilla is, but it sounds pretty]) identities with my lowest level password (I don't mind giving it away to anyone, although I don't actually post it on a blog or anything either :-).
Maybe some of those people were doing something like that. On the other hand, well, if companies are exposing FTP or POP3 on the internet (or maybe even ssh with their users having the same ssh password as their POP3 password), well, this is depressing my donkey. I wonder if anyone learns anything at those security seminars. Maybe they're Windows security seminars and the lessons have to do with which buttons to click to turn the firewall on. A lesson that is instantly forgotten because the listeners are Windows security professionals.
Schneier this week
Schneier in the current installment of Crypto-Gram has some interesting links. This month's installment seems very good. More interesting than previous months. Although they're all worth reading.
He gets something wrong though about the manila times and profiling of terrorists (male, between certain ages, cellphone, uneasy). Maybe that's just because he needed a short tagline. The article attributes the profile to the NCR Police Office (from which stupidities like this are expected).
The article certainly doesn't sound as stupid as schneier's comment makes it sound. That there is some controversy in the police organizations about the usefulness of the stereotype would normally be a good thing. Except that might just be normal intra-governmental infighting with no good reason behind it.
In the same issue of Crypto-Gram though are a whole bunch of links related to the Sony DRM rootkit (heh, it can be used to avoid WoW spyware (what's that doing, maybe just checking for piracy and such?), a trojan uses the Sony rootkit/trojan to hide, Sony has given up on it and Microsoft will detect it and remove it. Heh.
And There's an interesting weblog on malware from F-Secure, found it linked to from Schneier. I may look at it every day now. Or maybe add it to an RSS aggregator, if i can figure out how to do that :-) Huh, madali lang pala, using reader.google.com. Too lazy to try other RSS readers.
Hmmm, now to figure out how to get a feed from TechScene (kind of bass ackwards, since I could just get feeds direct from the people, but I'm lazy or too busy at work to remember too many feeds or URLs, or both).
There's also a link to an article discussing the prank article on aluminum foil hats previously discussed here. It looks like some heavy handed humor back and forth, but I'm not so sure about that zapatopi link. Some people are nuts about this stuff, and he might be one of them. He *does* have a book on practical mind control protection with aluminum foil beanies but I haven't read that, so I don't know if it's just a relatively long lived prank feeding on the paranoids and taking their money :-).
Lots more articles, all of it interesting. Every 15th of the month (well, 16th in the Philippines) is a huge time sink (but only about 33% a waste of time) because of this monthly email :-)
He gets something wrong though about the manila times and profiling of terrorists (male, between certain ages, cellphone, uneasy). Maybe that's just because he needed a short tagline. The article attributes the profile to the NCR Police Office (from which stupidities like this are expected).
The article certainly doesn't sound as stupid as schneier's comment makes it sound. That there is some controversy in the police organizations about the usefulness of the stereotype would normally be a good thing. Except that might just be normal intra-governmental infighting with no good reason behind it.
In the same issue of Crypto-Gram though are a whole bunch of links related to the Sony DRM rootkit (heh, it can be used to avoid WoW spyware (what's that doing, maybe just checking for piracy and such?), a trojan uses the Sony rootkit/trojan to hide, Sony has given up on it and Microsoft will detect it and remove it. Heh.
And There's an interesting weblog on malware from F-Secure, found it linked to from Schneier. I may look at it every day now. Or maybe add it to an RSS aggregator, if i can figure out how to do that :-) Huh, madali lang pala, using reader.google.com. Too lazy to try other RSS readers.
Hmmm, now to figure out how to get a feed from TechScene (kind of bass ackwards, since I could just get feeds direct from the people, but I'm lazy or too busy at work to remember too many feeds or URLs, or both).
There's also a link to an article discussing the prank article on aluminum foil hats previously discussed here. It looks like some heavy handed humor back and forth, but I'm not so sure about that zapatopi link. Some people are nuts about this stuff, and he might be one of them. He *does* have a book on practical mind control protection with aluminum foil beanies but I haven't read that, so I don't know if it's just a relatively long lived prank feeding on the paranoids and taking their money :-).
Lots more articles, all of it interesting. Every 15th of the month (well, 16th in the Philippines) is a huge time sink (but only about 33% a waste of time) because of this monthly email :-)
Saturday, November 12, 2005
Aluminum helmets *help* the government spy on You!
although on average all helmets attenuate invasive radio frequencies in either directions (either emanating from an outside source, or emanating from the cranium of the subject), certain frequencies are in fact greatly amplified. These amplified frequencies coincide with radio bands reserved for government use according to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). Statistical evidence suggests the use of helmets may in fact enhance the government's invasive abilities. We theorize that the government may in fact have started the helmet craze for this reason.
On the Effectiveness of Aluminium Foil Helmets:
An Empirical Study
IVRS must die
I see that Edong (he also has a "Ka", but I'm not on that side of the political spectrum) has a post on IVRS (interactive voice response system.
IVRS was all the rage in the US when I was there. It saved labor cost because the operator could be partly replaced by a machine voice. Instead of hiring 2 or 3 operators, a company could keep one receptionist/operator and fire the rest.
I can't stand IVRS though. Whenever I hear automated voice prompts I immediately hang up.
It's not the impersonality of it. I work with computers, I sort of like impersonal. What I can't stand about IVRS is the inefficiency of it, and the fact that, if it's to be used efficiently (memorize the call tree and type the digits in directly instead of waiting to hear the prompts), *I*, the customer, have to expend extra effort to remember. I have enough trouble memorizing my name, some days. I don't need to buy from a company that forces me to either waste my time listening to a ridiculously long call tree. And even if I wanted to memorize the direct route to where I want to go, no company I'm buying from is important enough to spend that much memory real estate on. Even if I had that real estate to spare. Any company that tries to communicate with me through IVRS is (1) going to lose a sail, (2) going to earn a rant, either in person, when I get to talk to someone in management, and/or a blog entry, for being more concerned with cost than customer experience. If they want to save cost, let them relocate their call center to the Visayas or Mindanao, salaries there are 1/2 to 1/3 what they are in Metro Manila and it'll help the economy and decongest the capital.
Which reminds me, is it still Metro Manila or did that go out with the Marcoses? No one mentions the Metro much anymore. Although there's still that extra M in MMDA.
IVRS was all the rage in the US when I was there. It saved labor cost because the operator could be partly replaced by a machine voice. Instead of hiring 2 or 3 operators, a company could keep one receptionist/operator and fire the rest.
I can't stand IVRS though. Whenever I hear automated voice prompts I immediately hang up.
It's not the impersonality of it. I work with computers, I sort of like impersonal. What I can't stand about IVRS is the inefficiency of it, and the fact that, if it's to be used efficiently (memorize the call tree and type the digits in directly instead of waiting to hear the prompts), *I*, the customer, have to expend extra effort to remember. I have enough trouble memorizing my name, some days. I don't need to buy from a company that forces me to either waste my time listening to a ridiculously long call tree. And even if I wanted to memorize the direct route to where I want to go, no company I'm buying from is important enough to spend that much memory real estate on. Even if I had that real estate to spare. Any company that tries to communicate with me through IVRS is (1) going to lose a sail, (2) going to earn a rant, either in person, when I get to talk to someone in management, and/or a blog entry, for being more concerned with cost than customer experience. If they want to save cost, let them relocate their call center to the Visayas or Mindanao, salaries there are 1/2 to 1/3 what they are in Metro Manila and it'll help the economy and decongest the capital.
Which reminds me, is it still Metro Manila or did that go out with the Marcoses? No one mentions the Metro much anymore. Although there's still that extra M in MMDA.
Thursday, October 27, 2005
Large copies to USB 1.0
I've got a laptop that only has USB 1.0. This is great for my USB keyboard and mouse (there are no PS/2 ports at all, so external input devices *have* to be USB, I've never heard about PCMCIA keyboards or mice :-) and also for my USB bluetooth and memory sticks, but it's terrible for a USB hard drive.
Recently I was copying multi gigabyte files to the USB drive and I couldn't stand that it was taking so long and that the laptop would pause and block for tens of seconds. I thought what was happening was that the data was being buffered and then, when the data was actually written down to the hard drive the kernel was so busy handling interrupts (or polling, or whatever) that the computer blocked.
I came up with two workarounds. The first workaround was to set the buffer flushing period to very short, so that the laptop wouldn't block completely for tens of seconds but instead would just get slow every few seconds.
update -3 32 -f 1 -s 1
The second workaround was to limit the bandwidth going down the USB pipe. Rsync is a great tool. This time I couldn't use it to do incremental syncing since in the configuration given checksumming would be far slower than just copying the data file over directly. I didn't want to fill the pipe though since I thought I'd noticed the laptop choking a bit even with the update trick. So what I did was use rsync as a slow cp. Rsync has a --bwlimit option for app level bandwidth limiting which works even within the same computer. So:
rsync -a --bwlimit=384 [srcfile] [dstfile]
limits the amount of data transferred to 384 kilobytes per second. The link can handle up to around 1 megabit per second, but limiting the copy bandwidth keeps the laptop usable and then I just hid the rsync window so that I could continue using the laptop.
rsync --bwlimit wouldn't be enough here. Without the update trick (making buffer flushes shorter and smaller) the buffers would still get filled with hundreds of megabytes of data which would then take around one second per megabyte to go down the wire. With update and no --bwlimit, I was finding slowness and inconvenience. Together though, they made the laptop usable while it was copying large files in the background.
Eventually though, I'll just have to use a laptop that's got USB 2.0 :-).
tiger
Recently I was copying multi gigabyte files to the USB drive and I couldn't stand that it was taking so long and that the laptop would pause and block for tens of seconds. I thought what was happening was that the data was being buffered and then, when the data was actually written down to the hard drive the kernel was so busy handling interrupts (or polling, or whatever) that the computer blocked.
I came up with two workarounds. The first workaround was to set the buffer flushing period to very short, so that the laptop wouldn't block completely for tens of seconds but instead would just get slow every few seconds.
update -3 32 -f 1 -s 1
The second workaround was to limit the bandwidth going down the USB pipe. Rsync is a great tool. This time I couldn't use it to do incremental syncing since in the configuration given checksumming would be far slower than just copying the data file over directly. I didn't want to fill the pipe though since I thought I'd noticed the laptop choking a bit even with the update trick. So what I did was use rsync as a slow cp. Rsync has a --bwlimit option for app level bandwidth limiting which works even within the same computer. So:
rsync -a --bwlimit=384 [srcfile] [dstfile]
limits the amount of data transferred to 384 kilobytes per second. The link can handle up to around 1 megabit per second, but limiting the copy bandwidth keeps the laptop usable and then I just hid the rsync window so that I could continue using the laptop.
rsync --bwlimit wouldn't be enough here. Without the update trick (making buffer flushes shorter and smaller) the buffers would still get filled with hundreds of megabytes of data which would then take around one second per megabyte to go down the wire. With update and no --bwlimit, I was finding slowness and inconvenience. Together though, they made the laptop usable while it was copying large files in the background.
Eventually though, I'll just have to use a laptop that's got USB 2.0 :-).
tiger
Monday, October 24, 2005
600+ kBps!
I downloaded OpenOffice.org 2.0 just now and I was shocked at the download speed. I downloaded through bittorrent and I was getting 600+ kilobytes per second. that's one advantage of going with an ISP that doesn't do bandwidth capping. I use destiny cable internet and while I've never before seen 600+ kBps, i regularly see 100-200 kBps.
I guess someone else in the destiny network was seeding the torrent. Or maybe there's just a whole lot of bandwidth available on monday morning and I got all the benefit of it.
I downloaded the SUSE 10 eval DVD ISO a week ago and that came down at around 60kBps on average. There's something to be said about downloading an ISO via the official torrent too. When SUSE 10 was very new I tried to download with the official torrent and that was so slow (2-3kilo*bits* per second) i decided to download it over the edonkey network instead. That download completed but the ISO was bad, so it was quite a waste of time. When i downloaded from the official torrent again, it slowly went up to around 60 kiloBytes per second. So official torrent+wait+a+few+days is the right thing to do I guess.
Possibly, too, downloading other (more popular)distributions would be better via the official torrents. I've done my bit at misinforming people about SUSE licensing (old information from when it was still SUSE and not novell). Probably people stay away from SUSE because they still have the impression (as I did, until I was gently corrected by a SUSE/novell representative) that SUSE is not yet freely distributable. Well, the eval edition *is* now freely distributable.
Anyway, I'm waiting for Mandriva 2006 to become available to see what the download rate on that will be :-). I'm the second worst type of ISP client, really, downloading things sometimes only to see what the ISP's performance is like. The worst type, of course, are those guys with huge hard disks who download movies, games and mp3s as if there were no tomorrow.
tiger
I guess someone else in the destiny network was seeding the torrent. Or maybe there's just a whole lot of bandwidth available on monday morning and I got all the benefit of it.
I downloaded the SUSE 10 eval DVD ISO a week ago and that came down at around 60kBps on average. There's something to be said about downloading an ISO via the official torrent too. When SUSE 10 was very new I tried to download with the official torrent and that was so slow (2-3kilo*bits* per second) i decided to download it over the edonkey network instead. That download completed but the ISO was bad, so it was quite a waste of time. When i downloaded from the official torrent again, it slowly went up to around 60 kiloBytes per second. So official torrent+wait+a+few+days is the right thing to do I guess.
Possibly, too, downloading other (more popular)distributions would be better via the official torrents. I've done my bit at misinforming people about SUSE licensing (old information from when it was still SUSE and not novell). Probably people stay away from SUSE because they still have the impression (as I did, until I was gently corrected by a SUSE/novell representative) that SUSE is not yet freely distributable. Well, the eval edition *is* now freely distributable.
Anyway, I'm waiting for Mandriva 2006 to become available to see what the download rate on that will be :-). I'm the second worst type of ISP client, really, downloading things sometimes only to see what the ISP's performance is like. The worst type, of course, are those guys with huge hard disks who download movies, games and mp3s as if there were no tomorrow.
tiger
Friday, October 14, 2005
rsync and --partial
rsync --partial doesn't do what I thought it would do. In fact, for large files (my current project involves rsync of half gig files over relatively slow networks, and often networks which are relatively unstable) it can actually make the destination file lose so much information if the rsync dies early that it would become necessary to re-download practically the whole file.
I was under the impression that --partial did something smart, e.g., maybe it would be truly incremental. That is, if a large file was to be downloaded (from source to dest) but the download died somewhere in the middle of the file, that all the *good* data from the source half that was correctly downloaded would be saved AND THEN the other half (on the dest) would be *APPENDED* to the partly downloaded half. This way, if the download were to be continued, then the already good half would all hash correctly and the download would start at the first wrong block.
Or maybe --partial would keep all of the good downloaded file in those temporary .[real_filename].[random_letters_and_digits] files and the temporary would not be removed so that the next download would use the same temporary file.
Unfortunately, --partial doesn't do either of those. It's pretty good if you're downloading a completely new file (the destination didn't exist before or it's *much* smaller than the original). In that case, the file is partially downloaded and when the rsync dies, the partially downloaded file is kept. If you tried to do this with a large file already downloaded, and the new download died before it got to the size of the already downloaded file, you'd *lose* data since the short newly downloaded file would *replace* the old, larger, already downloaded partial file.
So --partial is very useful when downloading files from scratch, but it's not useful (in fact, may be very harmful) when syncing files which you've already partly downloaded before. For that, just use the regular rsync parameters and don't use --partial.
As good as rsync is, I think there's quite a bit of improvement yet to be done for the case where the bandwidth is slow/unstable and the files to be transferred are very large. And either of the suggested mechanisms above might be a good thing to implement.
I was under the impression that --partial did something smart, e.g., maybe it would be truly incremental. That is, if a large file was to be downloaded (from source to dest) but the download died somewhere in the middle of the file, that all the *good* data from the source half that was correctly downloaded would be saved AND THEN the other half (on the dest) would be *APPENDED* to the partly downloaded half. This way, if the download were to be continued, then the already good half would all hash correctly and the download would start at the first wrong block.
Or maybe --partial would keep all of the good downloaded file in those temporary .[real_filename].[random_letters_and_digits] files and the temporary would not be removed so that the next download would use the same temporary file.
Unfortunately, --partial doesn't do either of those. It's pretty good if you're downloading a completely new file (the destination didn't exist before or it's *much* smaller than the original). In that case, the file is partially downloaded and when the rsync dies, the partially downloaded file is kept. If you tried to do this with a large file already downloaded, and the new download died before it got to the size of the already downloaded file, you'd *lose* data since the short newly downloaded file would *replace* the old, larger, already downloaded partial file.
So --partial is very useful when downloading files from scratch, but it's not useful (in fact, may be very harmful) when syncing files which you've already partly downloaded before. For that, just use the regular rsync parameters and don't use --partial.
As good as rsync is, I think there's quite a bit of improvement yet to be done for the case where the bandwidth is slow/unstable and the files to be transferred are very large. And either of the suggested mechanisms above might be a good thing to implement.
Monday, October 03, 2005
Resumes with no email address
I received a resume a few weeks ago and the candidate is very interesting. It's in the U.S. style, two pages with only relevant information in there. the philippine style, with parent's names, religion, and picture, is useful for discriminating against people based on surface characteristics. I discriminate against people based on stupidity, and while that can sometimes be seen in resumes, more often I have to wait until the interview for that.
Many of his skills are just what we need, and he's interested in learning other skills that we need that he doesn't quite have yet. That he studied at Mindanao State University and Ateneo de Davao and graduated from the University of the Philippines at Diliman doesn't hurt either.
But his resume doesn't have an email address. Or a celphone number either. Maybe HR got this from JobsDB or similar and they need to pay extra money to get his contact information. Whatever the case, I dropped the resume and the positions have since been filled.
Resumes with no convenient contact information is just not going to be seen. Well, by me, anyway. He's got a snailmail address there too. But it's in Los Angeles, CA, for some reason. Now that's another filter. If he's in the U.S., he's either immigrating (legally or otherwise) or he's just visiting. If the first, why submit a resume to a philippine based company? If the second, he should put down his philippine snail address since a U.S. address is instantly off-putting. Why waste time considering someone who is probably already making more money in the U.S. as a busboy than he would make in the Philippines?
Of course there are exceptions. There are people who go to the U.S. for a few months, work there as computer consultants or software developers for very small (t<6 months) projects and come home. But there should still always be an email address or at least a chikka-able number, so that the employer can check whether any such exceptions apply.
Many of his skills are just what we need, and he's interested in learning other skills that we need that he doesn't quite have yet. That he studied at Mindanao State University and Ateneo de Davao and graduated from the University of the Philippines at Diliman doesn't hurt either.
But his resume doesn't have an email address. Or a celphone number either. Maybe HR got this from JobsDB or similar and they need to pay extra money to get his contact information. Whatever the case, I dropped the resume and the positions have since been filled.
Resumes with no convenient contact information is just not going to be seen. Well, by me, anyway. He's got a snailmail address there too. But it's in Los Angeles, CA, for some reason. Now that's another filter. If he's in the U.S., he's either immigrating (legally or otherwise) or he's just visiting. If the first, why submit a resume to a philippine based company? If the second, he should put down his philippine snail address since a U.S. address is instantly off-putting. Why waste time considering someone who is probably already making more money in the U.S. as a busboy than he would make in the Philippines?
Of course there are exceptions. There are people who go to the U.S. for a few months, work there as computer consultants or software developers for very small (t<6 months) projects and come home. But there should still always be an email address or at least a chikka-able number, so that the employer can check whether any such exceptions apply.
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
Finally, bluetooth on Linux
I've finally got Bluetooth working in linux. For a while I was just looking at bluez and I couldn't figure out how I was actually supposed to transfer files. I could connect, the pin was right, but I didn't know how to send or receive files.
I installed gnome-bluetooth-manager and I still couldn't figure it out. All that did was see the phone. I couldn't do anything to the phone connection or find a way to transfer files.
Finally though the kdebluetooth RPMs finally made it to my urpmi server and after i did urpmi kdebluetooth I'm now able to transfer files. It took a while to figure out which programs to use (didn't realize that they'd be in the icewm menus too, I'm a moron). But finally found kbtobexclient and was able to transfer a demo java game (J2ME with the wireless toolkit makes development easier, not easy [yet, but i haven't worked on it much yet except to look at the demos], but easier) and actually run it.
I installed gnome-bluetooth-manager and I still couldn't figure it out. All that did was see the phone. I couldn't do anything to the phone connection or find a way to transfer files.
Finally though the kdebluetooth RPMs finally made it to my urpmi server and after i did urpmi kdebluetooth I'm now able to transfer files. It took a while to figure out which programs to use (didn't realize that they'd be in the icewm menus too, I'm a moron). But finally found kbtobexclient and was able to transfer a demo java game (J2ME with the wireless toolkit makes development easier, not easy [yet, but i haven't worked on it much yet except to look at the demos], but easier) and actually run it.
Moving Tech blog entries here
My main blog is at Bounding Overwatch. I've created this new blog as my tech blog though (struggling very hard to avoid using some amusing yet faux latin for the blog name) and I've copied most of the tech related blog entries from the old blog to here.
The entries are still there too though. Didn't want links to break if people are linking to me there or search through google.
I wonder what the result of all this moving will be for jijo though. His Filipino Tech blog aggregator picks up posts via RSS. But if I posted all of these entries this morning (except I used the original datetimes), will his aggregator be suddenly inundated with all my entries? Or will only this first entry make it?
It's probably the second, but it'll be interesting if it's the first. Hahaha.
The entries are still there too though. Didn't want links to break if people are linking to me there or search through google.
I wonder what the result of all this moving will be for jijo though. His Filipino Tech blog aggregator picks up posts via RSS. But if I posted all of these entries this morning (except I used the original datetimes), will his aggregator be suddenly inundated with all my entries? Or will only this first entry make it?
It's probably the second, but it'll be interesting if it's the first. Hahaha.
Thursday, September 08, 2005
Dynamic DNS in Linux
That title is a bit over the top, of course. I only looked at one solution, and when that worked for me, I stopped looking.
I've got a sort of static IP. My internet provider, Destiny Cable Internet, as of this writing, uses the ISC DHCP Server. That server tries to allocate the same IP to the same requesting MAC if the IP is still available. So the IP is pretty stable. However, there is no promise that the IP will never change, so it's semi-stable.
I thought I'd be OK with just assuming that it was stable, but I changed my mind. It *might* change and when it does, then I'll have to go to everywhere that assumes it's stable and fix it. And then it might change again.
Instead I decided to use a dynamic DNS server. For the client software, I first looked at EZ IP-Update and, since there's a list of dynamic dns servers at that site, I chose DynDNS. Both choices were pretty random, but I'm happy with both of them.
ez-ipupdate took around 20 minutes to set up (there was a minor compile error, something wrong in the ./configure script's deciding how to use errno, so I had to figure that out and fix it, it's a quick and dirty hack though, not good enough to propagate upward, but I may email the ez-ipupdate maintainer so that he can look at his configure configuration) and DynDns took 2 minutes (plus the less than a minute to wait for the email to arrive).
So I've got dynamic dns working now. bopolissimus.homelinux.net
I've got a sort of static IP. My internet provider, Destiny Cable Internet, as of this writing, uses the ISC DHCP Server. That server tries to allocate the same IP to the same requesting MAC if the IP is still available. So the IP is pretty stable. However, there is no promise that the IP will never change, so it's semi-stable.
I thought I'd be OK with just assuming that it was stable, but I changed my mind. It *might* change and when it does, then I'll have to go to everywhere that assumes it's stable and fix it. And then it might change again.
Instead I decided to use a dynamic DNS server. For the client software, I first looked at EZ IP-Update and, since there's a list of dynamic dns servers at that site, I chose DynDNS. Both choices were pretty random, but I'm happy with both of them.
ez-ipupdate took around 20 minutes to set up (there was a minor compile error, something wrong in the ./configure script's deciding how to use errno, so I had to figure that out and fix it, it's a quick and dirty hack though, not good enough to propagate upward, but I may email the ez-ipupdate maintainer so that he can look at his configure configuration) and DynDns took 2 minutes (plus the less than a minute to wait for the email to arrive).
So I've got dynamic dns working now. bopolissimus.homelinux.net
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