Search Results: "ana"

13 December 2008

David Welton: Startups and Work: Europe vs the US

Michael Arrington of Techcrunch comments on the US vs Europe in terms of startups: Joie De Vivre: The Europeans Are Out To Lunch It's a pretty rough and coarse-grained view of things, but there's a grain of truth there. I've written about this a little bit before. It's something that I feel qualified to talk about, having lived and worked in both the US and Europe (Italy and Austria to be precise), and in that time, generally gravitated towards startups. Here's my quick take on a list of what's good and bad about each. Please note that these are of course not true for everyone, that things are changing, but are still things I think are generally true, even when I could think of several counterexamples for some of them myself. Also, it's very important to keep in mind how diverse "Europe" is, so most of what I write is really about Italy, and to a much smaller degree, Austria. I'd be very curious to hear your own experiences in the comments. Europe Bad

Less of a startup culture and mentality. It's more typical to get a "job for life" and hang on to it for all you're worth. Many Italians are tremendously creative, industrious, inventive people, but are going to find it more difficult to express that in some form of business.
The side effects of this mean that there are fewer people to talk with, and network with, fewer potential employees willing to risk a startup, and so on. For instance, people are at times more suspicious of a new company - both clients and suppliers.
As I mentioned in my other article, it takes a lot more money to get started in many European countries - something like 10,000 Euro in Italy. Other places like the UK are cheaper, and apparently Germany is introducing some legislation to ease the burden on new companies. I really hope this changes in Europe because it's such an easy change to make: don't extract money from companies until they're making it.
More bureaucracy. I think that higher taxes, once you are profitable, might be worth paying for the social system you get in Europe, but the cost of sorting out paperwork falls inordinately on smaller, newer companies. Big, established firms can hire people to deal with all the rules and regulations, and probably have contacts in the government that can help them out in some cases. Smaller firms are the ones whose time is really going to be wasted running around to different offices trying to figure out what they have to do.
Smaller, fragmented markets. Localization is not a lot of fun in some ways, and trying to translate everything into all the languages of the European Union is a huge undertaking. In the US, you get a huge market with just English and the US Dollar. Even beyond language issues, the culture changes less in the US from place to place, meaning that you have a more homogeneous target.
Lack of acceptance of failure, both culturally and institutionally. If you go bankrupt in Italy, it's a very serious problem. Apparently (although this is second hand, I'm not 100% sure of it - maybe someone can confirm whether it's actually true?), you can even lose the right to vote. Plenty of people in the US try several times before they get it right.

Good

Even if your undertaking fails, you still have health care. Likewise, there are other bits and pieces of social support (that change from country to country) that mean you're probably not going to land quite so hard on your rear if things go wrong.
Lots of smart, educated people. I never lacked for plenty of smart people to talk shop with in Padova, and didn't miss the California bay area at all from that point of view. Open source is really big in Europe - perhaps, in part, because for many people it's a better avenue for their talents than creating a business, when doing so is difficult and less common.
Work/life balance. Sorry Mike, but the amount of people who are truly going to strike it rich is pretty small. If they want to work hard, great, but it's nice to have some other options, in terms of good, lasting friendships (rather than everything revolving around work), knowing plenty of people from outside your field, people living in and belonging to a community (how many people spend their whole lives in the bay area?). When I moved from San Francisco to Padova in 2000, I went from a world gone mad with money and the dot com craze to one where there were rich and poor, families, young people, old people, and many people who were not working for some dot com. That's not to say that people don't work quite hard in Italy - two hour lunches are a thing of the past for most anyone I know.
Smaller fragmented markets can be an advantage, too. By the time some valley-based startup finally gets around to noticing that languages other than English exist, it's possible to capture a smaller market. Ok, so you won't be the next Google that way, but there's good money to be had in doing so.
In some ways, the staid, established, don't rock the boat way of doing things in some industries may present big opportunities for outsiders to come in and pull the carpet out from under everyone. This is especially true of internet/web companies that can get started quickly and cheaply.

US Bad

If you're not careful, you can get completely sucked in to work - your life revolves around it, your friends are mostly work friends, and if something happens to your job, a lot of that goes poof. This is especially true in places like the bay area, where so many people are 'transients' - just there for a few years, without any real roots in the area. This is ok if you'll potentially make a big pile of money, but long term it's unhealthy.
Less of a sense of building for the long term. Personally, I don't want a "job for life", but I think there is some value in loyalty (the genuine sort, not the sort created by legally not being able to lose a job) between employer and employee that has been lost in the US. Being able to count on someone growing with your company, and as an employee, knowing that your company will do what it can to help you out even in tough times are things that capture some value. The US seems to be heading towards a "Coasian" world where everyone is a freelancer, and while that efficiency is hard to deny, I wonder what is lost in the process.
The competition is tough. Sure, it is in Europe too, but in Europe everyone may compete quite hard during the year, but still all take that one month vacation (although that is becoming a bit less common, especially amongst people my age), whereas in the US almost no one gets that kind of benefit - even if you wanted to take unpaid time off, people would look askance at that kind of behavior. That said, if you need to stay open in, say, August, in Italy, to compete, you are in big trouble, because for many businesses it's simply impossible because it's a chain reaction: all your suppliers and clients shut down, so you really have no choice.

Good

There are certainly bureaucratic obstacles in the US, but are much more maneageable, and don't hit smaller/newer companies quite so badly.
It's cheap to get started. As per my other article, the actual state filing fee in Oregon for an LLC is $55, and that's all you really need.
The culture is definitely there, especially in the right places like the Bay Area, but even in plenty of others.
You aren't bound to employees for life, and it's easy to find freelancers. I know I'm contradicting myself, but I think it's actually a complex issue, and there are definite advantages to not having people who expect or at least want to find that job for life.
A large target market. Go online in one state, and you can, for the most part, deal with customers all over the US, in one language.
Things turn around faster. I have more of a sense that when there are problems, they get fixed. Companies (the debacle of the automakers notwithstanding) are more often allowed to fail, or at least put in Chapter 11. Sometimes this means that when things are bad, they get really bad, but also turn around and get better sooner.

Conclusions An interesting example of all this from my own experience was Linuxcare. The company was, culturally, a Bay Area startup, with the headquarters in San Francisco, founded by very startup oriented guys (one of whom, Dave Sifry, went on to do technorati, and is currently working on yet another venture). However, most of the actual open source talent was in our satellite offices, in Australia, Italy and Canada, places where, perhaps, people were not so distracted by the prospect of "make money fast!!! hurry!!!" that they had time to work, learn, and create some really great open source code. To be honest, I find myself torn. Business-wise, I prefer the US. However, outside of that, there's a lot to be said for Europe. I also think that some of what's good about business in the US is coming to Europe, albeit slowly in some cases, in Europe. People my age here can see what's going on elsewhere, and try and copy what they like. A lot of what's good about Europe, though, might be more difficult to import into the US, especially the livability of the cities. In any case, I can conclude that it's a complex, difficult topic best discussed over a glass of wine.

Mike Hommey: Shared subtrees

As reply to my previous post about per-process namespaces, Russell wrote about pam-namespace and shared subtrees. As he reports, pam-namespace (that I discovered by the occasion) can do what I was suggesting would be nice for pam-tmpdir. Anyways, I was actually already planning to write about shared subtrees and how they can be useful with namespaces. In this first post, I will introduce shared subtrees, while in a follow-up post I will introduce how they can usefully be used with namespaces. As a preliminary note, you should know that while etch’s kernel supports shared subtrees, etch’s mount doesn’t support the necessary options. Lenny’s mount is unfortunately uninstallable on etch due to its dependency on a newer libc. But you can find a smount utility’s source code in Documentation/filesystems/sharedsubtree.txt in the kernel source, where other explanations about the feature are available. So, you can either backport lenny’s util-linux to etch, or build smount to replicate what I will be doing below. If you are using smount, just replace

mount --make-type path

with

smount path type

As seen in my previous post, bind-mounting allows to attach a file hierarchy at some other place in the virtual file system.

mount --bind / /mnt

will make all the contents of / (/bin, /etc, …) available through /mnt (/mnt/bin, /mnt/etc, …). On the other hand, sub-mounts will be ignored in such a case. For instance, /usr is usually a different mount point from /. It means /mnt/usr will be empty (provided it is empty in the underlying physical filesystem), instead of containing the same as /usr:

$ mount --bind / /mnt $ ls /mnt/usr $ ls /usr bin games include lib lib32 lib64 local sbin share src X11R6 $ umount /mnt

If you also want /usr to be bind-mounted, you must use --rbind instead of --bind:

$ mount --rbind / /mnt $ ls /mnt/usr bin games include lib lib32 lib64 local sbin share src X11R6 $ ls /usr bin games include lib lib32 lib64 local sbin share src X11R6

Obviously, sub-sub-mounts will also be propagated. Since recursively bind-mounting will create a bunch of mount points, unmounting can become a hassle. You can use the following command to unmount everything:

$ awk '$2 ~ /^\/mnt/ print $2 ' /proc/mounts sort -r xargs umount

Now, this is where shared subtrees come in. After the bind mount has been done, if you mount something on either side of the bind mount, the new mount is not propagated. This is called private subtrees, and is the default. But before doing anything else, let’s setup our testing environment:

$ mkdir -p /a/a /b $ touch /a/b /a/c $ ls /a a b c $ ls /b

After, bind-mounting /a onto /b, let’s see what happens when mounting something under /a, then under /b:

$ mount --bind /a /b $ ls /b a b c $ mount --bind /usr /a/a $ ls /a/a bin games include lib lib32 lib64 local sbin share src X11R6 $ ls /b/a $ umount /a/a $ mount --bind /usr /b/a $ ls /a/a $ ls /b/a bin games include lib lib32 lib64 local sbin share src X11R6 $ umount /b/a

As I said earlier, these new mounts are not propagated. Note that I used bind-mounts as sub mounts, but it would work all the same with other kind of mounts (device, fuse, etc.). There are 2 other modes that allow to have some propagation: shared and slave. shared allows mounts on both ends to be shared. Note you need to set the mode before bind-mounting:

$ umount /b $ mount --bind /a /a # This is needed because /a is not initially a mount point and you can only apply subtree modes to mount points.
$ mount --make-shared /a $ mount --bind /a /b $ mount /dev/sda1 /a/a $ ls /a/a config-2.6.26-1-amd64 grub initrd.img-2.6.26-1-amd64 System.map-2.6.26-1-amd64 vmlinuz-2.6.26-1-amd64 $ ls /b/a config-2.6.26-1-amd64 grub initrd.img-2.6.26-1-amd64 System.map-2.6.26-1-amd64 vmlinuz-2.6.26-1-amd64 $ umount /a/a $ mount /dev/sda1 /b/a $ ls /a/a config-2.6.26-1-amd64 grub initrd.img-2.6.26-1-amd64 System.map-2.6.26-1-amd64 vmlinuz-2.6.26-1-amd64 $ ls /b/a config-2.6.26-1-amd64 grub initrd.img-2.6.26-1-amd64 System.map-2.6.26-1-amd64 vmlinuz-2.6.26-1-amd64 $ umount /b/a

You can even mount on one end and unmount from the other:

$ mount /dev/sda1 /a/a $ umount /b/a $ ls /a/a

slave allows mounts on the “master” end (/a in our case) to propagate to the “slave” end (/b), but not the other way around. The “master” end need to be shared :

$ umount /b $ mount --make-shared /a # Only for completeness, we already set /a as shared earlier.
$ mount --bind /a /b $ mount --make-slave /b $ mount /dev/sda1 /a/a $ ls /a/a config-2.6.26-1-amd64 grub initrd.img-2.6.26-1-amd64 System.map-2.6.26-1-amd64 vmlinuz-2.6.26-1-amd64 $ ls /b/a config-2.6.26-1-amd64 grub initrd.img-2.6.26-1-amd64 System.map-2.6.26-1-amd64 vmlinuz-2.6.26-1-amd64 $ umount /a/a $ mount /dev/sda1 /b/a $ ls /a/a $ ls /b/a config-2.6.26-1-amd64 grub initrd.img-2.6.26-1-amd64 System.map-2.6.26-1-amd64 vmlinuz-2.6.26-1-amd64 $ umount /b/a

There is a third mode, unbindable, that does something different:

$ umount /b $ mount --make-unbindable /a $ mount --bind /a /b mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /a, missing codepage or helper program, or other error In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try dmesg tail or so $ mount --bind /a/a /b mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /a, missing codepage or helper program, or other error In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try dmesg tail or so

As you can see, it disallows bind mounting of /a and its subdirectories to some other place. Finally, to put back the default mode, you can use:

$ mount --make-private /a

Similarly to --bind, there is also a recursive version of each: rshared, rslave, runbindable and rprivate, to apply these to sub-mounts.

12 December 2008

Russell Coker: Christmas Toys for Children

It’s almost Christmas and time to buy scientific toys for children. Here are some random ideas, of course it’s probably too late for the online stores to deliver - but there’s always next year. The MikroKopter is a kit helicopter based on four propellors (two rotating in each direction) and is capable of semi-autonomous flight while carrying a decent payload (such as a digital camera) [1]. The parts cost over E700 and the skill involved in assembling it is significant, but it would be an excellent present for anyone who is 14+. Of course the type of helicopter described in my previous post [2] is a much more affordable present and can be used by a young child. The scitoys.com site has a good range of scientific toys for sale [3], they are assembled into kits. The United Nuclear site has a huge range of chemical supplies and related things [4] that can be used for making some great science experiments and toys. They also have really detailed information about the potential hazards of the things that they sell (not that I was planning to buy Cesium or Uranium anyway). If buying exotic alloys elsewhere it’s probably a good idea to check the United Nuclear site for the hazard information (not all sites provide as much information as they should). Professor Bunsen is an Australian site selling similar produces to SciToys [5]. The range is slightly different, and if you are in Australia then it’s safer to buy locally - there is a significant amount of stuff on the United Nuclear site that would be unlikely to pass Australian customs. The Spirograph is a good way to introduce mathematical concepts to children [6], it would probably be a good present for children who’s parents are not interested in maths and science. Lego [7] is always good, but there are also other similar products to consider. Meccano is good for older children, but the ranges for younger children have some deficiencies (the 2+ stuff requires the finger strength of an adult to assemble all parts). The Italian company Quercetti has some great products [9]. Unfortunately their web site is only in Italian and they have no links to sites in other countries/languages (they do have the names of some distributors who may have web sites). Their products includes a gears set (suitable for teaching children as young as 1yo) and a model car with an engine that has pistons moving inside a clear plastic case, a two-speed gearbox, and a fully functional differential (designed for 2yo+). For more hands-on tasks that require supervision (not something that can go under a tree) one good option for ages 3+ is to disassemble a variety of computers and computer parts. CD-ROM drives are good because you can connect a 9V battery to the head assembly motor or the tray eject motor to make it work. Hard disks have insanely strong magnets inside them - don’t give two such magnets to a child. A multi-meter is a great educational toy that can be used for many great experiements (as well as for practical tasks such as determining which battery of a set is flat) [10]. The parts from a hard disk can be used to demonstrate how a generator works (the mechanism to move the heads provides you with strong magnets and a coil that fits them). Note that an analogue meter is needed for such experiments as the amount of electricity generated is small and AC - a digital meter will average it out to zero (at least for the more affordable meters that I have used). It’s probably best to own both a digital meter and an analogue one, the minimum age for owning such a meter is probably about 10, the minimum age for using one with supervision is about 3. An oscilloscope is a great educational toy [11], unfortunately they are quite expensive (Ebay seems to have nothing below about $450). They can be used for all sort of fun tasks such as measuring the speed of sound. The wikipedia page notes that you can get PC based Oscilloscopes (PCO) which are cheaper. I wonder if they have Linux support for such things… The OLPC is a great computer for kids in developing countries [12]. They are now available in Australia [13]. For most children in first-world countries a second-hand laptop of a more traditional design is probably a better option. There are a significant number of old laptops gathering dust which can easily have Linux installed with a variety of educational software. Buying an OLPC on the “give one get one” deal costs $400US plus tax and shipping, while a second-hand laptop can be purchased for significantly less than that. While giving an OLPC to some random needy child is a good thing, as the person who gives a laptop locally is probably going to provide support for it there are some benefits to giving a regular laptop. Conferences often have bags of random junk to give out to delegates, and trade shows always have lots of little toys with company logos on them. Such things are usually of little use - but children like them. Also the trinkets that computer companies give away are often educational. If you have a cupboard filled with such things then unloading them on some children is a good idea - of course you have to make sure that anything you give to young children can’t be swallowed and has no sharp points.

[1] http://www.mikrokopter.de/ucwiki/en/MikroKopter

[2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/12/11/toy-helicopter/

[3] http://scitoys.com/

[4] http://unitednuclear.com/

[5] http://www.profbunsen.com.au/

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirograph

[7] http://www.lego.com/

[8] http://www.meccano.com/

[9] http://www.quercetti.com/

[10] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimeter

[11] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscilloscope

[12] http://laptop.org/

[13] http://www.olpc.org.au/

10 December 2008

Julien Danjou: telak in awesome

Some years ago I wrote a little tool called telak in order to display remote images on my wallpaper and have them updated regularly. Yesterday, as a challenge, I rewrote this as an awesome module, in Lua using wget. I simply used a wibox and a widget from awesome API to display the images. It's called telak, as the original, and is in the awesome next git branch, which will be the 3.2 version of my favorite window manager.

David Welton: Slicehost vs Linode

Since hosting is the major expense for DedaSys LLC, and obviously a critical part of much of what I do, getting the right one is very important. Naturally, "the right one" for me may not be the right one for everyone. I am a fair sysadmin for small numbers of machines, so I don't mind doing that myself - I don't need, nor want to pay for hand holding.

Since this post has become fairly popular, I am going to link to my Linode affiliate URL if you'd like to sign up with Linode - thanks! Other than running my sites there, I have no other affiliation with Linode. And, if you're more a fan of Slicehost, here is my referral page on Slicehost.

I recently moved everything over to Slicehost on the recommendations of friends, and am so far fairly happy with the experience. It's cheaper, simpler, and more flexible than Layered Tech was. To boot, I also like the fact that Slicehost is run out of St. Louis, Missouri, rather than some really expensive tech center like San Francisco or Boston. Hosting is basically a commodity, and much like you wouldn't want to put a factory in San Francisco, you don't want your hosting their either. However, I discovered something annoying about Slicehost: they use x86_64 servers, which, per se, doesn't really matter to me - I use open source code that can run on any number of architectures. The problem is that this particular architecture uses more memory than plain old x86. Significantly more. My Layered Tech server with 1 gig of memory was hitting the swap space a bit, but the same code on a slice was swapping quite heavily, despite the fact that I'd moved PostgreSQL off to its own slice. Since I pretty much exclusively run Rails, I decided to look into Phusion's "Ruby Enterprise Edition", which is basically just some nice hacking on Ruby's garbage collection mechanism. What they've done is nice, and I may end up using it, but ultimately it's buying me space that I would also gain from simply moving back to x86. With that in mind, I decided to take another look at what appears to be emerging as one of Slicehost's main competitors, Linode, who *do* use x86 servers. Here are my results, which are admittedly not all that scientific, but what the heck - you're getting them for free, and they were pretty quick to whip up. Service, Support, Setup But before we begin with the numbers, I want to add a few words of caution. One of the big things about hosting, to me at least, is how they deal with unexpected random negative events. Connections going down, disk breakage, DoS attacks, and so on. It's really hard to get an idea of just what sort of people you're dealing with until you've "ridden the river together". I don't really know what sort of response times, uptime, and all that either Slicehost or Linode have, so there are potentially some big intangibles there that are not quite as easy to draw pretty charts for. In terms of the console/setup/management tools, I liked Slicehost's simplicity more - Linode gives you more options, but they're a bit fiddly and cluttered feeling at times. For instance, Linode lets you pick how much swap space to give your disk image, but doesn't include a bit of javascript to balance out the swap and regular partitions, so that if you type in a larger swap number, you have to do the math and subtract that from the other number. Annoying, but not a big deal. Linode lets you pick various data centers in the US (no Europe, yet). Slicehost gives you the option to do backups of your disk images, which is nice, and something that Linode lacks. Comparing plans Since I'm interested in comparing hardware and machines I actually have access to, here are the plans I am currently signed up with, and the salient numbers:

	Slicehost 1024	Slicehost 512	Linode 720
Memory	1024	512	720
Bandwidth	400	200	400
Disk	40	20	24
Cost	70	38	39.95

Memory / Dollar:

Bandwidth / Dollar:

Disk / Dollar:

Linode mostly comes out ahead, but not by that much, except for bandwidth. However, let's take a crude look at x86_64 vs x86 memory usage. First, ./script/console (a Rails console) for the same code base on two different machines, showing the virtual memory size (VSZ) and resident set size (RSS):

And just to look at something else that's a bit smaller, I ran the following script:

puts File.open("/proc/self/status", "r").read

And got the following data:

Being charitable with those numbers, we get x86 taking up 77% the memory that x86_64 does. So let's add that to our comparison of how much memory you're getting per dollar on Slicehost and Linode:

Wow! That's a fairly significant difference. Performance That's most of what we can glean from published numbers, and running a few simple experiments. However, there's another factor that's important: performance. "Virtual Private Server" systems, or simply VPS's, got a bad name in the past because they were "overbooked" - too many virtual servers competing for the same CPU resources on one machine. Slicehost and Linode both look like they want to avoid that kind of bad reputation, and so far all the systems I have used have felt snappy and responsive. Now here's where we get really unscientific... I decided to try and do something, even if it wasn't much, to get some kind of objective measurement of what kind of CPU I was getting on the machines. This is really unscientific, because the machines do have other duties (I don't have the cash, time or inclination to set up random servers just for testing), and of course, who knows what else is sharing the computer with my systems: if you get a relatively unused computer, you can apparently pick up extra cycles for yourself, over and above your guaranteed minimum. But c'est la vie, and so I decided to do some numbers anyway. I picked a C implementation of mandelbrot from the language shootout more or less "for the hell of it" (I'm going to keep repeating "unscientific" and invite someone to do better tests than I have). I ran this code every 20 minutes for a couple days, and then averaged out the run times:

As expected, the higher power Slicehost 1024 machine wins out in terms of raw speed (less time is better), but not by that much over the Linode system. Indeed, when we factor in the relative prices, Linode comes out ahead, again:

So it looks like we're not paying a CPU penalty for having more memory, bandwidth, disk, etc... Notes

Nothing in these statistics is indicative of future directions that both Linode and Slicehost might take. Slicehost was recently acquired by Rackspace, and that could have effects on the service they provide. Maybe one or both will come under financial pressure and start "overbooking" their servers.
The spreadsheet I used is available via Google docs, for the curious. I did most of the work in OpenOffice, and then uploaded it though, because working with the web spreadsheet was kind of painful. Unfortunately, you can't select non-contiguous data ranges in the Google spreadsheet, so the labels are interspersed with the data. Yuck. Also, Google docs doesn't handle 'time' values nicely, which is what the performance data was originally. The spreadsheet is here: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pVDeZF6ire2YwATBYb4mBKQ
The standard deviation on the processing times is higher for both slices than the linode system. Not quite sure what that means in terms of what's going on under the hood, but I thought it was interesting.

Russell Coker: New version of Bonnie++ and Violin Memory

I have just released version 1.03e of my Bonnie++ benchmark [1]. The only change is support for direct IO in Bonnie++ (via the -D command-line parameter). The patch for this was written by Dave Murch of Violin Memory [2]. Violin specialise in 2RU storage servers based on DRAM and/or Flash storage. One of their products is designed to handle a sustained load of 100,000 write IOPS (in 4K blocks) and 200,000 read IOPS per second for it’s 10 year life (but it’s not clear whether you could do 100,000 writes AND 200,000 reads in a second). The only pricing information that they have online is a claim that flash costs less than $50 per gig, while that would be quite affordable for dozens of gigs and not really expensive for hundreds of gigs, as they are discussing a device with 4TB capacity it sounds rather expensive - but of course it would be a lot cheaper than using hard disks if you need that combination of capacity and performance. I wonder how much benefit you would get from using a Violin device to manage the journals for 100 servers in a data center. It seems that 1000 writes per second is near the upper end of the capacity of a 2RU server for many common work-loads, this is of course just a rough estimation based on observations of some servers that I run. If the main storage was on a SAN then using data journaling and putting the journals on a Violin device seems likely to improve latency (data is committed faster and the application can report success to the client sooner) while also reducing the load on the SAN disks (which are really expensive). Now given that their price point is less than $50 per gig, it seems that a virtual hosting provider could provide really fast storage to their customers for a quite affordable price. $5 per month per gig for flash storage in a virtual hosting environment would be an attractive option for many people. Currently if you have a small service that you want hosted a virtual server is the best way to do it, and as most providers offer little information on the disk IO capacity of their services it seems quite unlikely that anyone has taken any serious steps to prevent high load from one customer from degrading the performance of the rest. With flash storage you not only get a much higher number of writes per second, but one customer writing data won’t seriously impact read speed for other customers (with hard drive one process that does a lot of writes can cripple the performance of processes that do reads). The experimental versions of Bonnie++ have better support for testing some of these usage scenarios. One new feature is measuring the worst-case latency of all operations in each section of the test run. I will soon release Bonnie++ version 1.99 which includes direct IO support, it should show some significant benefits for all usage cases involving Violin devices, ZFS (when configured with multiple types of storage hardware), NetApp Filers, and other advanced storage options. For a while I have been dithering about the exact feature list of Bonnie++ 2.x. After some pressure from a contributor to the OpenSolaris project I have decided to freeze the feature list at the current 1.94 level plus direct IO support. This doesn’t mean that I will stop adding new features in the 2.0x branch, but I will avoid doing anything that can change the results. So in future benchmark results made from Bonnie++ version 1.94 can be directly compared to results that will be made from version 2.0 and above. There is one minor issue, new versions of GCC have in the past made differences to some of the benchmark results (the per-character IO test was the main one) - but that’s not my problem. As far as I am concerned Bonnie++ benchmarks everything from the compiler to the mass storage device in terms of disk IO performance. If you compare two systems with different kernels, different versions of GCC, or other differences then it’s up to you to make appropriate notes of what was changed. This means that the OpenSolaris people can now cease using the 1.0x branch of Bonnie++, and other distributions can do the same if they wish. I have just uploaded version 1.03e to Debian and will request that it goes in Lenny - I believe that it is way too late to put 1.9x in Lenny. But once Lenny is released I will upload version 2.00 to Debian/Unstable and that will be the only version supported in Debian after that time.

[1] http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++/

[2] http://violin-memory.com/

9 December 2008

Wouter Verhelst: Rails: followup

I received quite some comments on my rant about Ruby on Rails a few days ago; I guess I must have received some inbound link on a ruby-fanboy-website or some such. Most of it is just bashing me since, I'll admit, my post wasn't very constructive (and which according to my policy of only blocking spammers I've not moderated away), some of it just posits another opinion about packaging (which is valid), and one Eric Anderson gave a good and constructive set of arguments that I just have to reply to. First of all, yes, I hate RubyGems more than I hate Ruby on Rails. However, Ruby on Rails is the major success story in the Ruby community, and the main reason why people use that language; it's not unfair to say that I won't use RoR because of RubyGems. But perhaps I should've been clearer. Anyway. Eric mentions that RubyGems "solves two problems that other packaging systems are not addressing": the ability to install two versions of the same library, and the ability to install a single package on multiple operating systems. Well, first of all, the latter one simply is not true. There's CPAN.pm, which does much the same thing as RubyGems; but much of CPAN can be easily turned into a Debian (or RPM, or whatnot) package. The few cases where it can't, you're usually dealing with a broken CPAN package, anyway. There are similar things for Python (egg), and, heck, even TeX (CTAN). The fact that other scripting languages have proper and working packaging systems only outlines that there really isn't an excuse for the horrors of RubyGems. Second, the fact that you even need to be able to install multiple versions of a library really shows that there's a problem with your development ecosystem. C, Perl, and Python programmers are used to stable APIs, and prefer not to change their APIs all that much. Most packaging systems reflect that preference, and deal with incompatible API changes the way they should: as the exception, rather than the rule. The people in the Ruby ecosystem clearly have a different opinion on that, which probably results in the difference in packaging system requirements. Personally, I prefer the non-Ruby way—I'll leave the discussion about "what happens when you need to do an urgent security update of one of your libraries but the API has changed three times since you last looked at it and now the library update breaks your application" as an excercise to the reader. In closing, I'd like to reply to this one sentence that Eric put in his comment:

And of course there is no reason software cannot start as a gem (for people close to the ruby community) but as it's popularity increases packages can be created that are more tightly integrated into the native package manager.

Well, in an ideal world, he'd be right: there would be no reason. Unfortunately, in the RubyGems world—which is far, far away from an ideal world—the fact is that packaging RubyGems in a sane way so that they'll integrate with the rest of a Debian system is simply impossible. You simply cannot currently go from a gem and create a package out of that, because of how gems are done. That, more than anything, was what I was objecting to. I can understand that many Ruby developers do not care about this much; that they are used to RubyGems, and that they can geet anything they need using that system. However, they should understand that different people have different preferences, and that packages for systems other than RubyGems is going to be necessary if their software is to become popular beyond the select set of people who care enough about Ruby. I personally know of plenty of people (myself included) who prefer things to be installed as operating-system level packages on the Linux systems they install; and even if it's not your personal preference to do things that way, you should at the very least not stand in the way of those who do.

8 December 2008

Gunnar Wolf: Apt-get and gems: Different planets, right. But it must not be the war of the worlds!

Thanks to some unexplained comments on some oldish entries on my blog, I found -with a couple of days of delay- Rubigem is from Mars, Apt-get is from Venus, in Pelle's weblog. And no, I have not yet read the huge amount of comments generated from it... Still, I replied with the following text - And I am leaving this blog post in place to remind me to further extend my opinions later on.
Wow... Quite a bit of comments. And yes, given that the author wrote a (very well phrased and balanced) post, I feel obliged to reply. But given that he refered to me first, I'll just skip the chatter for later - I'm tired this time of day ;-)
Pelle, I agree with you - This problem is because we are from two very different mindsets. I have already said so - http://www.gwolf.org/soft/debian+rails is a witness to that point.
But I do not think the divide is between sysadmins and developers. I am a developer that grew from the sysadmin stance, but that's not AFAICT that much the fact in Debian.
Thing is, in a distribution, we try to cater for common users. I have a couple of Rails apps under development that I expect to be able to package for Debian, and I think can be very useful for the general public.
Now, how is the user experience when you install a desktop application, in whatever language/framework it is written? You don't care what the platform is - you care that it integrates nicely with your environment. Yes, the webapp arena is a bit more difficult - but we have achieved quite a bit of advance in that way. Feel like using a PHP webapp? Just install it, and it's there. A Python webapp? Same thing. A Perl webapp? As long as you don't do some black magic (and that's one of the main factors that motivated me away from mod_perl), the same: Just ask apt-get to install it and you are set.
But... What about installing a Rails application? From a package manager? For a user who does not really care about what design philosophy you followed, who might not even know what a MVC pattern is?
Thing is, distributions aim at _users_. And yes, I have gradually adopted a user's point of view. I very seldom install anything not available as a .deb - and if I do, I try to keep it clean enough so I can package it for my personal use later on.
Anyway... I will post a copy of this message in my blog (http://gwolf.org/), partly as a reminder to come back here and read the rest of the buzz. And to go to the other post referenced here. And, of course, I invite other people involved in Ruby and Debian to continue sharing this - I am sure I am not the only person (or, in more fairness, that Debian's pkg-ruby-extras team is not the only team) interested in bridging this huge divide and get to a point we can interact better - And I am sure that among the Rubyists many people will also value having their code usable by non-developers as well.

Anand Kumria: Coughing up blood

Normally, those would not be the search terms I would plug into Google, first thing in the morning. But they were appropriate, today. Because that was what was happening. When I was younger, I used to have asthma and, as part of that, I would invariably contract bronchitis periodicially. Over the past years, even though my asthma has receeded, I would still get bronchitis at the interface between seasons. It did not matter if the season change was hot to cool, or cool to hot. Whatever the change, I would get it. I've been used to this. It is, in it's own way, comforting. I can watch the seasons change, and notice that are changing earlier. It's like I have an in-built global warming detector! This latest bout came on about 3 weeks ago. So, as usual, I thought nothing of it, bought my normal supply of strepsils and went about my life. It was not until I was doing some training, and was left exhausted and wondering why that I decided to head to the doctor. He could not hear anything wrong with my lungs. We did a few peak flow tests; my best of 3 being 250. Typical values for a health person are 600+. His conclusion: Your asthma has recurred. . A week later and I am still short of breath, but also coughing up blood. So after some searching on the interwebs, it appears that this can be normal with excessive coughing. And that the best ways to control excessive coughing are: codine¹ (paracetamol / panadol) and chocolate ² So, I've been indulging myself in both. I'm off to get a chest X-Ray just in case this is more serious and the blood re-appears tomorrow. But now you know that chocolate is good for you (and your cough).

7 December 2008

Joey Hess: haskell and xmonad

I came back from Thanksgiving in California to find my copy of Real World Haskell had arrived. I've spent the last several days making my way through it up through chapter 10. I'd read a few of the first chapters last year when I was struggling to learn Haskell, and posted enough comments that I'm amoung the (many many) people credited in the Preface. Amusing, since I still don't consider myself proficient in the language. Reading back through those and on through Chapter Nine has swapped back in the basics I learned last year, and built on them. I was able to get all the way to Chapter Ten before hitting real brain-melting stumbling blocks. That's progess! I can't help but feel that Chapter Ten should come later, perhaps after monads are covered. Only other quibbles so far are some typographical problems introduced in typesetting the book, and a few bugs and problems that were pointed out in comments on the web site, but not fixed in time for the first edition.

Anyway, I know more than enough Haskell now to configure xmonad. While I'm still perfectly happy with awesome, xmonad has some cool things going for it. Playing with it this evening, I especially like:

Being able to compile my xmonad.hs and rely on Haskell's type checking to make sure I wrote it correctly and it will work.
Xmonad's integration with gnome. This was a nice suprise, and being able to just use the gnome panel in xmonad, rather than building my own panel, has made it a lot easier to get started with.
gnome panel showing xmonad workspaces
The power and beauty of xmonad's layouts. Start with the usual simple sorts of layouts like tiled, full screen and floating. These can be transformed in a myrid of ways (ie, rotated, decorations added), and can even be combined together to create more complex layouts. So I was quite easily able to configure it to alternate between a tabbed desktop layout that plays nicely with panels, and absolute unadorned full-screen mode:
```
myLayout = desktop   noBorders Full
where
  desktop = tabbed $ ewmhDesktopsLayout $ avoidStruts $ twoPane
  tabbed = addTabsAlways shrinkText myTheme
  twoPane = Tall 1 2/3 3/100
```
(And it wasn't too hard to enhance this with a special-purpose grid layout for the workspace I run pidgin on.)
That my xmonad.hs is small, easy to understand, and doesn't contain any boilerplate beyond main = xmonad $ gnomeConfig.
It lets me muck about with doing something real with Haskell without having to commit to using it in some project of my own.
It supports cycling all windows on screen so that each in turn moves into the main viewport, via XMonad.Actions.RotSlaves.rotAllUp. An action that has been on my window manager wish-list for ages. Implemented in an easy 3 lines of code.

My current set of gripes with xmonad is small:

mod-shift-space is documented somewhere, but not where you need it.
I applied addTabsAlways to a Tall layout, and got title-bar like "tabs". But how do I add multiple windows as tabs to a given frame, like in ion? Can't figure out how, or even if it's possible.
Moving the mouse cursor over one of the above title-bar-like things doesn't focus its window. Very annoying!
Mouse support is very lacking. I'd like to be able to drag tabs around the screen, and maybe drag a border between frames to resize, couldn't find modules implementing any of that.
Theme configuration is only partly factored out, some of it is scattered in several different places.
Reloading the config file takes ages. 1.9 mb executable has to be built and run.
The lack of a dynamic language shows; there's no way to open a prompt and type Haskell into the window manager. I rarely speak lua to awesome or ion3, but it's nice to have the ability there. I think it should be possible to do this with Haskell (see ghci).

Biella Coleman: Nerds, Geeks, and Nerd/Geek Grrrls

I have not sat behind the helm of teaching for very long but I already have a few tricks up my sleeve. One of them is that I assign some of my favorite readings at the end of the semester so as to counter the downtrodden and tepid spirit and mood (not to mention attention) of my students, which drops precipitously with each passing day. Let’s face it post Thanksgiving, we are all a little tired and I try to find the readings, which uplift, intrigue, and challenge cherished assumptions about marriage and sex. So far it seems to pay off and I often can tell because the conversational pitch and excitement in class is high and the student writings are good, great, even exceptional, which, again, is hard to produce/induce this late in the semester. Readers of this blog would probably be most interested in one of these lively readings, Ben Nugent’s American Nerd (and it might be interesting to hear how the European Nerd story would diverge or converge with this one). One of my students, an audio geek and Free Culture President/Free Software junkie, by the name of John Randall produced a very nice little response (not research) paper on the Nugent reading as well as a short piece by Sarah Seltzer from Bitch Magazine
The(Girl) Geek Stands Alone (and thanks to Joe> for cluing me into this piece). Seltzer piece basically argues, in her own words, the following:

Imagine this scene from a comedy: a group of female friends sit around smoking a bowl and working on the Wikipedia page for Lord of the Rings. Their fashion sense is decidedly iconoclastic and several sport thick-rimmed glasses. Without a trace of self-consciousness, they have a hilariously ribald discussion on the relative traits of elves and orcs.
Awesome as it is, you’ll never see this scene onscreen. No mainstream movie or TV series would dare group so many female nerds together, or celebrate them so unabashedly

So John’s whole response paper is here and here is the pdf. In the paper, he makes a number of excellent points but what I loved most about it was his very geeky move at the end of the paper to prove Sarah (somewhat wrong) by listing all the girl geeks that do and have appeared in mainstream (and not-so mainstream) entertainment venues/shows, etc. They are as follows and in his own words:

I will now showcase my own geekiness through my knowledge of geeky female characters. Why? Because I can. But also because I want to demonstrate that if you look hard enough for representations of female geekyiness in pop culture, you will find plenty. Moreover, if you pick the right ones, you can make them support your argument about gender relations, whatever that argument might be. Some of these charters and personalities are hardly gendered, some are hyper-sexual. Some are incredibly attractive but completely asexual. Some undergo a transformation into/out of geekiness, while others to not. Some are powerful, while some are powerless. Some (most?) celebrate their geekiness, others are tortured by it. They are all geeks take your pick: Aeon Flux, a sexy geek who’s technological gadgets give her super powers (Comic drawings then Charlize TheronAeon Flux) Wonder Woman, attractive pilot of an invisible plane Lara Croft, a female Indiana Jones in short shorts, wielding guns and cracking computer codes (CGI and then Angelina Jolie in Tomb Raider) She-Ra, who was way smarter than He-Man (Masters of the Universe cartoons) Gadget Hackwrench, beautiful chipmonk technician for Chip and Dale (Rescue Rangers cartoon) Velma, featuring eyeglasses, awkwardness and brains (Scooby Doo), Hermonie Granger, a geek who is temporarily rejected because she is a geek, remains a geek, and finds love and happiness (Harry Potter) Barbarella, who, through comic strips and a 1968 film, helped introduce science fiction and sex to young women (Barbarella) La Femme Nikita, a skillful, savvy, and very feminine girl who doubles as a covert spy Kate Libby, aka ‘Acid Burn’, uber-sexualized hacker (played by Angelina Jolie in Hackers) Kathryn Janeway, smart and powerful captain of the USS Voyager (Star Trek Voyager) Starbuck (Battlestar Galactica), Dana Scully, FBI agent with encyclopedic media knowledge. The bizzare subtex of non-realized sexual tension was part of the magic The X-Files. Willow Rosenberg, geeky sidekick turned geeky supervillian (Alyson Hannigan in buffy the Vampire Slayer) Michelle Flaherty, hyper-sexual band geek (Alyson Hannigan in American Pie series) Dr Ellie Sattler, heroniene scientist (Jurrasic Park) Ellie, scientis hero (played by both Jenna Malone and Jodi Foster in Carl Sagan’s Contact) Dawn Wiener (Heather Matarazzo in Welcome to the Dollhouse Enid and Rebecca (Thora Birch and Scarlett Johanson in Ghost World) just about every charater ever played by Jenna Malone (Donie Darko, The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, The United States of Leland, Saved!, etc) half of the charaters played within the last decade by Jodi Foster (Panic Room, The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, Flightplan, The Addams Family half of the charaters played by Christina Ricci (Mermaids, The Addams Family, Little Red Riding Hood, The Ice Storm, Buffalo ‘66, Prozac Nation, Pumpkin, Speed Racer) half of the characters played by Natalie Portman (The Professional, Mars Attacks!, Star Wars, V for Vendette, The Darjeeling Limited, Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, Garden State) Molly Ringwald. characters played by Molly Ringwald. Rock musician Ani DiFranco and geeky Riot Grrls everywhere. Sarah Vowell, NPR commentator celebrating her geeky life. Voiceover for geeky cartoon characters. Rachel Maddow, for being Rachel Maddow.

First, awesome list, though he forgot a few (like one of my favorites, Bionic Woman and a more recent one, Juno) and it is nice to have it in one compact place. But, I have to say, I still agree to some degree with Sarah Setlzer, though I also agree with John. On the one hand there are representations and it is as important just to strut this stuff publicly as it is to claim that there is not enough female geeky representations in mainstream media. This is what John has done quite nicely. One the other hand, as he himself says ” if you look hard enough for representations of female geekyiness in pop culture, you will find plenty.” I think those words, “if you look hard enough” also speaks volumes of the continued disparity that does exist. One should not have to look “hard,” and the only blockbusters, so to speak, which feature a female geek, is Tomb Raider, which for being so hyper-sexualized is not so geeky to me, no matter how good she is with the gadgets. That said, what I find so important, and have emphasized in different contexts, is the need for what I think of simultaneous positive and negative form of critique, the former being about pointing to already exisitng examples to get people jazzed and excited and to put things in perspective. The later form of critique, negative critique, identifies a lack, a void to fill, just the type of excellent commentary in the Seltzer piece… But now for the most important question, who has John overlooked?

Jon Dowland: 1984

The UK now has it's own equivalent to China's great firewall. My current ISP "bethere" is one of several which have opted into using it. If I try to access the wikipedia article on the Scorpion's album "Virgin Killer" I receive a "404 not found response" which does not originate from Wikipedia. This album had a controversial picture of a young girl naked on the cover. The censoring proxy has blocked access to both wikimedia's copy of the album cover but also the entire article about it (including discussion about the album cover controversy). There are two things in particular that really annoy me about the way this has been implemented. Firstly, the response I get for a censored page is an unadorned 404. At the very least it should be an explanation of why I cannot access the material, and who to contact if there has been a mistake (no doubt in the eyes of our moral superiors there are no mistakes). Secondly, my ISP has signed up for this and implemented it without telling me. I will shortly be moving both my broadband and that of my parents away from them. The scary thing for me about George Orwell's 1984 was not just the total control but how ruthlessly efficiently it was implemented. So far this has been implemented predictably poorly, first of all it's trivial to circumvent the block on wikipedia, at least; secondly, they've inadvertently buggered up editing Wikipedia for those affected.

Kapil Paranjape: A double blow

On the 26th of November 2008, there was a double blow. It had been raining almost all night in Chennai and we put on the TV to figure out what the weather was going to be like only to find out that there had been attacks with guns and bombs in multiple areas in Mumbai. The attacks in Mumbai and the rain in Tamil Nadu continued over the next 36 hours or so --- with disastrous effects all around. All this was more than a week ago and so it feels as if one can write about it with a modicum of objectivity. The cyclone that hit Tamil Nadu was not man-made, but many of its consequences were. The attacks in Mumbai were carried out by people who were human beings once upon a time, but they had their humanity stripped by those who run the camps which trained them. So to some extent it feels as if we have suffered from a natural disaster --- but one which could have been mitigated by humans. The Indian state and people seem to be returning back to "normal" and this is said be a sign of our resilience. On the other hand that may only be because we suffer a thousand cuts every day --- self-inflicted. Indeed, each one of us is a minor terrorist carrying out little acts of rebellion against the state; acts that also threaten the well-being of our fellow citizens. Some examples follow:

we throw plastic bags and paper cups into the canals and drains around our cities.
we evade taxes and even pride ourselves on reducing government power as a consequence.
we throw lavish "rave" parties where drugs and alcohol flow freely.
we destroy public roads and public spaces for our own private needs.

The list could go on and on ... All of these acts weaken our state and our people to the point where we cannot act swiftly in an emergency:

garbage blocks the canals, which leads to floods during heavy rains.
the lost taxes means reduced training and equipment for our police and other emergency forces.
the drugs and alcohol that are distributed at the "rave" parties are bought from the same smugglers who also bring guns and RDX.
public roads are in no shape to supply things required during emergencies.
public spaces are not available for relief efforts since they are illegally occupied or damaged beyond use.
our under-paid police force has its hands full dealing with the thousands of little violations that we commit.
our police force is so used to looking the other way while our top brass and gold-laden classes are violating the rules that they can be forgiven if they cannot distinguish them from the "real" terrorists.

This is what makes us a "soft target for terror". If the Indian government were to indeed go after all those who are weakening it and terrorizing its people, then a good percentage of our citizenry and an even larger percentage of our well-off citizenry would find itself in the cross-hairs. To paraphrase what an assistant commissioner of police once said: If 100% of our citizens are 2% terrorists then it is very hard to catch the 2% of the citizens who are 100% terrorists.

6 December 2008

Lior Kaplan: liorkaplan

When you build a server architecture for a project, your often want to test the performance afterwards. That’s true especially when the only way to know the application needs is to test them. Most distributions already come with the needed tools to measure your performance of the operating system with tools like top, free, vmstat, iostat, mpstat and sar. The latter is usually configured to run periodically through cron to collect statistics all the time. But when you want to analyze the data, creating a graph is much better way to do it. I found two ways to do that easily:

Using kSar, which reads the sar files and lets you choose which graph to show. As this is a java application its platform independent and can be using everywhere.
Using sar2rrd and RRDTool.

I used the first method as it lets the user creates the graphs with a GUI, and makes my life easier. kSar also support creating a PDF report from the raw data, and thus lets the user/me to send an easy report for others to review. If you need to follow graphs for many systems over time, I would advise you to install Cacti, which collects the data and summarize it nicely with a web intreface.

5 December 2008

Martin F. Krafft: forcedeth: nVidia network chips are broken

Yesterday, I removed my new server from the rack and brought it back home, after the problems with the nVidia network chip (forcedeth) took down the NIC to the point that the IPMI chip, which is routed through the primary interface, wasn t reachable anymore. Even though a soft reboot fixed the problem, a bit of large-packet traffic, like downloading via IPv6, broke the card again. Since IPMI is also affected, I cannot remotely manage the machine and thus can t leave it in the rack. In fact, I am strongly considering to make use of the try&buy contract and return the thing. I cannot rule out a software problem, but given that the NIC goes into a state in which it gets unusable even to the IPMI system, which is completely independent of Linux, I somewhat doubt it. Instead, I suspect a hardware error, beyond the known problems with nVidia network chips and segmentation/checksum offloading. On the other hand, it s not news that drivers can break hardware, and the fact that I am using Linux is reason for hope. One alternative, which would allow me to potentially help in fixing this bug, is to use a riser card to stuff a different network card into the server. This would mean I didn t invest all the time into the server for nothing. Unfortunately, this workaround comes with extra costs, and would require Init Seven to allocate another switch port for the IPMI card, which I am not sure they ll be keen about. The bottom line of the story is that I will avoid nVidia even more in the future, and you might want to do so as well. Companies that produce crap hardware and do not cooperate with people writing free drivers for them do not deserve the money. Unfortunately, almost everyone out there uses the MCP55 chipset these days, and deny any problems with it. I guess I will take a look at HP and IBM, although I d really prefer not to pay for their brands, and not to enslave myself to their customer support standards. NP: Neil Young: Dead Man

Junichi Uekawa: Presentations with movies.

Presentations with movies. I wanted to prepare a presentation with movie image. accentuate, a fork of keyjnote and impressive, the renamed version of keyjnote looked promising, but does not seem to work with video. Although very impressive, keyjnote development isn't too active. I don't like the design requiring the extra '.info' files for managing extra effects in PDF. latex-beamer could just dump special PDF commands into the PDF file and let keyjnote parse it?

4 December 2008

Jon Dowland: planet spamming

I've just migrated hosts for my website and managed to spam at least one aggregator in the process. (I think this is because git does not preserve timestamp metadata for blobs but I haven't investigated properly yet). Apologies to those affected. Luckily, I have my feed configured to only show the most recent 5 items, so the impact was quite small. I think this should be the default for applications that generate feeds for precicely this reason: It is for blosxom (#373570) and pyblosxom (#373658), and ikiwiki specifies a limit, at least. Asides from feeds, I think blog web pages that display an enormous number of posts on the front page (or inside category pages) are demonstrating some pretty bad usability. I thought that Jakob Nielsen may have included this in his Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes, but he didn't. Thomas Watson writes we have celebrated with finally scrapping our blog archive. Instead we are now just showing the latest 50 articles on the front page, followed by a link to the previous 50., which pretty much the opposite of what I'd advise. The point he makes, though, is that the alternative (an ever-expanding "archive", accessed by calendar) is bad form, too. That is one of the points in Nielsen's list. Jonathan Boutelle describes an interesting compromise which he calls the "Mullet style" - a short list of full posts followed by a list of older posts, containing only their titles and date.

David Welton: Won't fix... why?

I discovered a minor Rails annoyance today, and, looking around for an answer to the problem, I found this, which is a perfect description of the issue, and includes a fix: http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/5123 Unfortunately it has marked as "wont fix" with no reason specified. Perhaps there is a reasonable answer that was perhaps discussed elsewhere, and just didn't make it into the bug report, making it invisible to people like me who find it via Google, which is pretty annoying. The other explanation is more along the lines of "don't wanna" (or fuck you, as the case may be), but at least come out and say so. "We're not going to do it, as it's not part of our English-centric vision" or what have you. Being a native English speaker, even when doing stuff for Italian or Austrian or whatever clients, I tend to code in English, because it's 1) fast, 2) easy and 3) it's pretty much universally understood by programmers. However, I can see the case for specific things to be in a particular language, and on the surface, this one line patch makes that a little bit easier, and doesn't appear to be costly, so why not? Just closing the bugs of people who have taken the time to try and help (this is clearly not just a "dude, it's, uh, broke" bug) is the twin of the equally annoying people who don't bother to take 30 seconds to send an email or bug report about software they're using, and both are things I greatly dislike.

David Welton: Won't fix... why?

3 December 2008

Runa Sandvik: Mischief managed

I now have virtualbox running with windows xp, service pack 3 and windows live messenger with a working webcam. Also, itunes is happily chewing away on my ipod.

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