Col’s Tech Stuff

If you’re ever had concerns about the effect of noise on your disk performance, let Brendan Gregg put your mind at rest. Thanks to the brilliant Analytics (aka Dtrace with a brilliant web interface) on the a Sun Storage 7410 we can clearly see noise does have an effect, and in this extreme case (don’t try this at home work), quite a large effect:

Now that is cool. Lets see NetApp or EMC show us that kind of real time proof.

Brendan has a full report and some screenshots of the Analytics output here.

I’ve had to push out a minor update to HB-Cumulus as I’ve just discovered a little bug which causes the HB-Cumulus settings to be deleted when another plugin is deactivated.

You can get the latest revision from the HB-Cumulus project page.

As this is a new release, I’ve closed comments on the 1.0 post. If you encounter any problems, please ensure you update to rev 1.1 and if the problem still exists, leave a comment here.

I’m quite excited about the recent news of Toshiba’s agreement to ship OpenSolaris. This can only help expand the usage of OpenSolaris in the business community with Toshiba being one of the laptops of choice in this market.

One thing I really hope that is implemented into OpenSolaris is the tablet functionality, specifically the screen rotate and handwriting recognition functionality that I’m using to write this post - I’ve just discovered this whilst playing with the wife’s Toshiba laptop (sadly running Windows Vista) and I think this is really cool and definitely something I’d love to see is OpenSolaris.

I have no idea what tablet support there is in Linux, but I suspect it’s a lot more than there is in OpenSolaris. I hope this changes PDQ.

Links of interest for 12 Dec 2008 - 24 Dec 2008:

• Sun boosts OpenSolaris on Atom - Oooo. When this becomes a reality without any hoop jumping, I may just have to get myself a small Atom based netbook.
• It’s recession time and Sun has the best recession kool aid. - Who needs Oracle and BEA when you can have MySQL and Glassfish, and you can even use Ruby on Rails. I agree with the final comment in the article - Sun just isn#039;t selling the whole idea very well. I hope someone sees this post and takes it#039;s content to heart.
• OpenSolaris 2008.11: Its Time Is Coming - Good review. I like the football analogy at the beginning which finished off quite appropriately with quot;Before parting, you ask him if he#039;ll play every week and he says he can#039;t because he#039;s moving to Australia on Monday. And you are left wishing you had discovered him much sooner.quot;
• Sun and Micron extend flash life - This is really crucial in what I think is going to be the quot;big thingquot; on the storage front in 2009. One thing to remember, the figures mentioned are at a cell level, not for the entire SSD - people always forget this in the spinning disk vs flash/SSD debate.
• StorageMojo » Many-cores hit the memory wall - Good read here about the problems encountered with the ever expanding number of cores on a CPU. This is exactly the reason the UltraSPARC T1/2 processors have been designed the way they have. The CPU is multithreaded so whilest we wait for memory for one thread, the others can carry on. See http://www.sun.com/products/microelectronics/pdfs/Sun-Microelectronics-WindRiver_DS.pdf for more details.

I was just browsing through the menus of my Nevada snv_103 and I stumbled upon an entry I’d not seen before - Terminator. So I ran it. At first I was quite disappointed as it just looked like a normal Gnome terminal; then I right clicked and saw the options to split horizontally and vertically. Wooohooo!!! A “multi-terminal in one window” terminal, with tab support too:

This has instantly been promoted to my terminal of choice and replaces a script I wrote that opens 4 terminal windows and then uses wmctrl to resize tile them on my desktop.

All I need to do now is find out how I can get Terminator to open 4 equally sized terminals in one window, in one command, and I’ll be even happier.

I used to be a text editor PHP/HTML/CSS developer. By text editor, I mean I only ever used a basic editor like Vi/Vim (via ssh), jEdit (at work) and TextMate (at home) for all my development. I’ve tried several PHP specific IDEs, but could never find one that I felt comfortable with, and that would work with a certain degree of consistency across platforms. However, that’s now changed thanks to NetBeans.

Continue reading ‘NetBeans 6.5 is a Great PHP IDE’

Ladies and gentlemen, may I present to you my first Habari plugin: HB-Cumulus.

HB-Cumulus is a Flash-based tag cloud for Habari that displays your tag cloud in a rotating sphere just like the one shown here.

HB-Cumulus is a port of the brilliant WP-Cumulus by Roy Tanck and supports pretty much everything WP-Cumulus does.

Further details, and download links can be found on the HB-Cumulus project page.

If you encounter any problems or have any queries, please leave your comments on this post.

Links of interest for 2 Dec 2008 - 8 Dec 2008:

• Sun shows Microsoft how it’s done - Now I would never had predicted this: someone saying that Sun has done something on the desktop environment better than Microsoft. I must admit the Time Slider is pretty damn awesome and I think it may put Apples Time Machine to shame too.
• Contributing OpenSolaris Packages at OpenSolaris.org - More information on the new OpenSolaris repositories, how pkgs are being automatically added and how you can contribute to the repository.
• Webcast of What’s New in OpenSolaris 2008.11 - Some cool new features demonstrated here, including details of the new available pkg repositories.
• Apple deletes Mac antivirus suggestion - Apples says "Nevermind, you don't need an anti-virus on a Mac afterall". Can't say I was too bothered by the initial story anyway.
• Apple pushes anti-virus for Macs - Is this really a threat or is Apple lining it's pockets courtesy of the anti-virus makers? That said, you can use ClamAV for FREE on OS X - clamxav.com

I’m a little late on this, but OpenSolaris 2008.11 is now available for all to download and includes loads of new things including Fast Reboot and a really cool feature - Time Slider - aka Time Machine for OpenSolaris, but using ZFS.

Links of interest for 14 Nov 2008 - 1 Dec 2008:

• Replacing high-end Unix with enterprise Linux? Not so fast - It's nice to see some people are actually looking at the merits of Solaris 10 and it's Containers (aka zones with provisioning) in comparison to a Linux/VMware alternative.
• Ubuntu vs. OpenSolaris vs. FreeBSD Benchmarks - Interesting benchmarking of these 3 popular operating systems, and believe it or not OpenSolaris (or Slow-aris as it was once coined) does pretty well.
• Code Instructions: Java Performance - A good read if you still have doubts about Java's performance. Java is much much quicker than it used to be.
• What Sun Should Do - Good breakdown of where sun should, could and are heading.
• The story on Sun’s Q1FY09 results - a loss, or a fresh start? Sun and the future - Finally as glowing review of Sun's Q1 results and the direction the company is heading. Someone outside of Sun is actually seeing the bigger picture of where Sun is heading.
• Is your (website’s) underwear showing? - Oooops, I'm guilty of forgetting to set a background colour on my websites. It's not something you think about much if you're developing a site with a white background.