Computer Lore

httperf and libevent and the future of everything

2008-07-14T16:57:00.003-06:00

Firstly, congratulations to Adrian Chadd for starting the httperf port to libevent. Already we have seen some massive performance enhancements. CPU usage on my opensuse 11.0 workstation has improved about %3000 percent.

Certainly there is some stability work to be done. I am currently getting segmentation faults with very high request loads.

The current implementation does not use a persistent event loop, which means that the other useful features that libevent provides are not available (timers for example).

Something I want to see developed going forward is an asynchronous http client library around. The http work already done with libevent is certainly a start to this, but is far from complete. Essentially, what I want is a client api where I can perform some http client action asynchronously without needing to deal with any messy details.

The intention here is to foster a deal of code-reuse between http implementation projects that all use libevent at the core. After that, portability sits firmly on libevent's shoulders (where it belongs).

Open source home renovations

2008-07-13T20:42:00.007-06:00

On June 30, 2008 I took possession of my very first property. It's an 800 square foot, two-bedroom condo in South Calgary (Alberta).

Given that I am a massive geek, part of the renovations I am taking on in preparation for moving in, is a robust home network. This includes (at least) seven cat5e, and six rg6 cable drops. For this I have used a fancy product by Leviton. Their Structured Media center items appear to be exactly what I need to marshal my assorted cables, and send them along to their eventual end points.

This allows a lot of flexibility towards future home renovations, and lets you easily re-design the layout of the network at a future point in time. As far as I am concerned, this sort of cable organization is the best way to go.

In any case, all this work is being completed with the intention of designing an ideal open source home. My routing, media distribution, work bench, telephony and data storage system have all marshaled into a single room. The original analog telephony network is untouched in case a future owner doesn't want to use the fancy system that I have built.

Anyways, I have been doing this upgrade as part of a behind the scenes project that I have been playing with to develop a home running entirely on open source software. More on this later, expect interesting developments as the year goes on.

-Ted

Lotus Symphony 1 Experience

2008-06-04T13:43:00.003-06:00

The glitzy look of the recent IBM Lotus Symphony release got my attention pretty quickly. While trying it out on a couple of tasks I rather rapidly started hitting various bugs. That said, I think the OpenOffice folks could take some hints in usability from this project.

The biggest issue that I ran into was with Bold, or Heading text not showing up on a page. Technically the the word processor thinks that the text is there because I can move my cursor through it, however it just shows up as white. Closing and re-opening the document will show the text for a few moments, but it will disappear again pretty quickly.

This is a deal breaker for me. So I won't be recommending it to anyone for the time being. Too bad really.

On the Radio

2008-05-16T08:38:00.002-06:00

On the Radio!

Earlier this week, I was minding my own business, working away and listening to one of the periodical podcasts that pass through my filter of media to consume.

The podcast in question is LugRadio, episode 100.

At about the exact moment of 76:02 into the show, they started reading an email that I had mailed about a month ago. Promptly, the guys made fun of my name, bemoaned my own bemoaning of linux support for the iriver clix (now resolved of course), and then congratulated me on a job well done. I suppose.

Anyways, I am glad to have made a difference, been laughed at, and been mentioned on the radio. Who knew.

As a side note, a passer by just noted that I am running openSUSE on my laptop. Good for him. Wooo community.

Enough for now.

My initial experience with pfSense

2008-05-13T13:49:00.003-06:00

As good as OpenBSD has been as my gateway router OS, I am pretty sure that I am going to move away from it to one of the pre-packaged routing systems.

Specifically, I am talking about pfSense. pfSense is a distribution of FreeBSD that uses the pf packet filter technology originally from OpenBSD, and actually had its origins as a fork of the m0n0wall project which uses ipfilter. Both systems are extremely powerful, and importantly, easy for me to use, and because I want to stick with pf as my underlying packet filter, I have chosen pfSense.

Installation onto my compact flash driven Compaq Evo D300 Small Form Factor, was very straightforward with the assistance of my card reader, dd, and a null-modem serial cable (after I figured out that installation is done via a serial terminal rather than the screen). Certainly, anyone ready to do an embedded installation of pfsense just with parts lying around their house deserves major geek cred points.

Right now, only 64Mb of the 2Gb flash card is partitioned for use (from the default image), which actually is not really a big deal since its a router. I'm not exactly going to mess with it very often. Maybe. I am forever tinkering with this stuff. But I think that I will leave it until the next distribution update.

Compaq Evo D300 SFF as a router

2008-05-12T11:34:00.004-06:00

About 6 months ago I purchased a reasonably cheap second hand Compaq Evo D300 Small Form Factor PC.

Originally, the machine was intended to become a dial-up router and http proxy for my moms small gallery business in Empress, Alberta. After repeated failed attempts to get OpenBSD to actually dial into the ISP, I gave up on that train of thought for the time being and brought the machine back to Calgary.

Jumping forward a bit, I decided to start using the machine (named evo on my network) as my own gateway instead. Fine. OpenBSD installed just peachy, and configuring dhcpd and dns took a couple hours. Poof, instant router. However, one of the machines problems is that unless a keyboard is attached, it will fail to boot. Despite all my rummaging through the bios, I was unable to turn off the darned "halt keyboard missing; Press F1 to continue error".

This is a problem for server hardware which run headless (like a router should be able to), since if there is a power failure, I will need to manually hook up a monitor and keyboard, and press F1, and verify it is booting. Gah, No thanks; I would rather run a crumby linksys. Sure enough, Google came to my rescue. Apparently, the ignore missing keyboard option is available on the machine, however, both a power and bios password need to configured to make it available in the BIOS.

Silly.

That said, the machine is more than capable for a SOHO router, and now I am keeping it for myself.

I want less hardware

2008-04-24T13:12:00.003-06:00

I have been seriously considering reducing the number of computers in my life. In the good old days, I ran a fairly powerful Pentium 4 desktop for gaming and general computer work. The machine is still my central desktop, but I have found that I rarely use it these days. That said, I promised my brother that he can have the machine.

I've been thinking about what I want to replace the desktop with, and the more I think about it, the more certain I am that I no longer really want a desktop.

My laptop (Dell Inspiron 700m) performs the majority of the tasks that I need, has open source drivers for every piece of hardware on the machine and is also very easy to bring with me where ever I go. And from personal experience, the machine is a spectacular conference laptop. Avoiding the need synchronize the machines is very appealing.

So. Is this the way I want to go?

Maybe.

For May, my plan is to pack up the desktop, give it to my brother, and see if just using the laptop works for me. At the end of the month, I will review if this was a success or not and choose whether or not to buy a new desktop.

More bugs in openSUSE 11.0 Beta 1

2008-04-21T14:46:00.003-06:00

Although I haven't done another major test run at openSUSE 11.0, I did have noticed that Bug 343858 (gdm packages downloaded with control-center upgrade use resolution specified for external monitor) is mostly fixed. I did hit the problem with maximized windows in metacity not filling the screen in certain circumstances. All should be well on this front.

Having xrandr extend my desktop to an external monitor is currently not possible without explicitly using the Virtual keyword in xorg.conf. I filed bug 381765, however the problem is apparently inherent with RANDR 1.2

Oh well.

I still have not grasped how the new pulseaudio stuff is supposed to let me record things from my microphone. There are too many switches to play with for my emotional well-being (or something... Anyways I haven't learned it yet).

Testing a SD card in the 700m's onboard reader was problematic. An icon for the card flickered on and off the desktop about 100 times with lots of pop up windows trying to let me know of deep seeded grief, and checking dmesg shows numerous IO errors. I have not filed a bug yet, but I will sometime this week.

Anyways, it seems that the system is starting to now formally stabilize; and while this release won't meet my every wim (working nouveau? autoconf 2.62? ifolder? bongo?), I will definitely be migrating most of my machines after the release. Unless something dramatic occurs, the media server probably won't change until support concludes from Novell for 10.3.

More later.

-Ted

openSUSE 11.0 Beta 1 on Dell 700m

2008-04-19T11:56:00.004-06:00

My laptop is in the process of updating to the latest Factory release of openSUSE 11.0.

Certainly I have been hitting a couple major bugs:

Bug 376742 - Wireless doesn't work (wpa_supplicant doesn't get run)

Bug 343858 - gdm packages downloaded with control-center upgrade use resolution specified for external monitor

Since Alpha 2, I have been running the weekly (zypper update -t package).

Certainly things are starting to stabilize now. For instance, I have no problem using the machine as a workstation.

I have to say that the Dell 700m laptop is well supported along with a good portion of my other extraneous hardware, the majority of the core functionality works very very well.

That said, I notice that Hibernate and Suspend/Resume used to work in SUSE Linux 10.1, it doesn't anymore. I wonder if there is a way to revert to whatever mechanism was being used before...?

Also, I am unsure if the SD Card reader works or not. By working I mean, I plug an SD card into the onboard reader and a windows pops up in GNOME and asks what it should do with it. I'll test this again tonight; I think that the last time I looked into this was back in the 10.2 days, so things may have changed since then.

Next is the modem. I have never been able to successfully establish a dial-up connection with the modem. I am really not quite certain as to what the problem is. Again, this will be something that I will test out tonight.

I have also never tested the firewire port. Does anyone have a firewire external harddrive that they want to lend me?

Hmm, the last thing is the microphone. On the 700m there is a defect in the motherboard design that creates static on the microphone port. I have tested this a couple of years ago with a Windows XP install. There is certainly some sort of configuration problem with 11.0b1 and esd which won't let me turn on gnome-reclevel so I can't test this properly at the moment.

Certainly I need to do some research into the new pulseaudio stuff.

Meh.

That's a problem for another day.

Anyways, that's my experience with openSUSE 11.0 and my laptop.

Yahoo and Microsoft? Thoughts

2008-04-14T10:27:00.003-06:00

In reviewing some of the old yahoo/microsoft news clips of the past several months, I came across this note about yahoo shareholders suing yahoo for rejecting the initial Microsoft buyout deal.

My thought is these guys are out of there minds if they think a Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo is good for them.

I simply cannot see Microsoft being capable of stewarding a transition of this type in a way that would actually work. Nevermind the completely divergent technology base and skill base. If Microsoft feels they are not able to develop their Live platform to rule the day on it own, why should anyone trust them to steward the integration of a completely different platform?

It's not that I am against Microsoft here. AND, I don't get that they know what is missing with their own strategy to begin with.

So I wonder what the Michigan’s Wayne County Employees’ Retirement System thinks they will get out of the Yahoo/Microsoft deal.

openSUSE 11.0 and autoconf 2.62

2008-04-13T23:27:00.002-06:00

So autoconf 2.62 missed the boat just by a couple weeks to be included in openSUSE 11.0.

Sigh.

I have been anticipating this release for quite a while now. 2.62 has a number of enhancements that affect what I do.

openmp support, along with support additional tests for the c99 stuff are a couple changes that jump mind.

hmmm

Anyways, I guess I'll be waiting for either SLED 11 or openSUSE 11.1.

Sorry httperf, you'll have to make due with 2.61 for another release.

Sigh.

hahaha

Thoughts?

-Ted

Installing opensuse and some thoughts

2008-04-13T22:49:00.002-06:00

So I am just wrapping up my third opensuse 10.3 installation of the evening.

Certainly the installation can take quite a while (about 2.5 hours for a GNOME desktop with along with updates).

That is of course just for the base system.

After that comes, the (inevitable?) binary nvidia driver, media codecs, dvd playback and then the various development tools that I use to do what I do (icc for example).

This entire process wraps up in about 3.5 hours, and I have a working system that does pretty much everything that I could want a system to do. Notably, this takes about 2-4 hours less to complete than a comparable installation of Windows XP.

If the US would ever get its software patent nonsense in order we could finally see quicker and easier installs, and I would feel comfortable giving a disk to my parents with the expectation that they would be able to install a working system.

For me, the biggest bug that I am running into is the lack of good built-in support for the nvidia cards that seem to proliferate my life. This is one of the reasons that I am strongly considering diving into the nouveau project.

Lastly, I just want to point out that I have absolutely no complaints with opensuse. The project has been very good to me and my needs.

Thoughts?

-Ted

nvidia quadro nvs 280 cards

2008-04-13T21:53:00.004-06:00

So I have recently purchased a number of PNY Quadro NVS 280 (nvidia) graphics cards across a variety of bus flavors.

I have a number of thoughts regarding the cards. They support dual-DVI and are passively cooled.

While they are certainly not very performant cards, they can reliably support any activity that a typical workstation would need to do.

Besides keeping a number of the cards, for myself, I think I will forward a couple of them off to the nouveau project. At some point in the near future I would love to be able to throw one of these cards into a machine of my choosing and have a 3d capable system at my finger tips.

Lastly, since I own a number of nvidia cards anyways, I have been VERY strongly thinking of getting involved in the nouveau project myself.

I will be moving later this summer to a place with a garage that I can certainly see converting into an open source development workshop.

-Ted

Pizza and video cards

2008-04-10T18:05:00.003-06:00

So I am just sitting down for dinner in a local pizzeria with great expectations of enjoying a very scrumptious dinner for one.

Being a complete nerd, I naturally have my laptop with me, and have connected to the restaurants wireless connection. The fact that this situation is possible, really speaks to our ability to be communication. Like really.

Even 5 years ago, what I am doing right now, would have been relatively rare. Now, however I am only one of several people in the restaurant playing with various wireless devices.

Cool hey!

Anyways, I just left my favorite computer store here in Calgary with three rather sexy video cards.

The cards are as follows:

PNY Low-Profile Quadro NVS 280 AGP with DMS-59 (Dual DVI-I)

PNY Quadro NVS 280 PCIe with DMS-59

Matrox G550 with DMS-59

All the cards are passively cooled, and will find loving homes in the various re-incarnated computers that pass through my life.

autoconf 2.62 is now released

2008-04-09T14:56:00.002-06:00

Autoconf 2.62 has now been released.

I have been anticipating this release for more than a year now due to its support for openmp and a number of C99 compiler check enhancements.

This will be the last autoconf release under the GPL version 2; going forward we'll be seeing GPL version 3.

Spiffy.

So what's going on with ifolder?

2008-04-09T14:27:00.003-06:00

The ifolder project is a really interesting way of synchronizing data between users and locations. I personally used the project for over a year against SuSE Linux 10.1.

Back in 2006 I filed an enhancement request for openSUSE 10.3 to include the open source ifolder server with the distribution. There was fair degree of interest on the mailing list.

To date, there has been no action by Novell to include this software with their open source distribution. This is interesting because they wrote it in the first place. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I would think that they are holding it back from the open source community just so that their enterprise distribution (OES for example) would be more value added than their community distribution.

Lucky thing I could care less about conspiracy theories.

So Novell has not put more than a token response into this request since the original request was made. Indeed I have just spent the day on IRC (#openSUSE-factory) waiting for a response to this question.

I'll try to be on their next status meeting to pursue this further.

Drafting software in the free world

2008-04-09T09:19:00.002-06:00

So here at the new job with Rising Edge Engineering, I have been learning all about electrical drafting, document control and the meaning of life.

One of things that I see that is missing in the open source universe is suitable open source drafting software. Inkscape, and OpenOffice.org Draw are not designed for this stuff. So is there anything out there that can be used for something resembling real drafting...?

The other thing I see is missing is some sort of document control server that OO.o, inkscape, and other document apps can plug into to deal with revisions. It would be great to set up something that sits on top of ssh that is designed to deal with the various intricacies of document management stuff.

Really I want an end-to-end enterprise document creation/storage system.

Any Takers?

Career's a go

2008-03-19T22:05:00.003-06:00

So I found myself an absolutely amazing engineering job!

A couple weeks ago I had an interview with a company by the name of Rising Edge Engineering. For those of you without an electrical background of sorts, a rising edge is the part of a digital electronic signal where the voltage rises from low to high, off to on, or 0 to 1.

The interview was absolutely amazing. The way that the conversation went was something like "I don't know how to do anything that you guys do! And, I am absolutely committed to learning what it takes to do this".

Their response was something along the lines of "Ooooo! I want that!"

So here I am, employed as an Engineer in Training in the discipline of Electrical Engineering for Rising Edge Engineering.

Fun Hey!

Job search ahoy!

2008-01-19T12:47:00.000-07:00

So I am bringing my post-graduation sabbatical to an end and am now fully into the creation of my engineering career.

I spent the past six months since graduation working in the construction industry with an awesome residential framing company known as LPT Construction. The owner and manager has been really great to work for while I was working through school, and was totally willing to work around whatever crazy school schedule I had.

I really have learned an enormous amount about construction, management, safety and productivity from the years of part and full time work in this industry.

Nevertheless, I am now really interested in starting my software engineering career; after all, I attained my degree for a reason right!

Anyways, so I am available for hire! If you want to take a look at my resume, please have at it!

-Ted

Dual monitor goodness

2007-12-10T00:01:00.000-07:00

About 2 years ago I purchased two monitors for a dual monitor setup on my home workstation. Unfortunately, I was thoroughly disgusted with the image quality of my mythtv system when I was using my traditional CRT as a monitor. So I sacrificed my second monitor and have been using it as my television for the past long while.

That all changed this week when I purchased a new 26" LCD television to use and the monitor for my mythtv media server.

Now that I finally got my second monitor out of so called bondage, I took the time to configure a dual monitor setup on my main workstation.

I was surprised at how straightforward this was with OpenSUSE 10.3. Originally I had expected that I would need to do at least a little bit of manual configuration inside my xorg.conf. Well, it turns out that dual monitors was far easier than I had expected and I am now working on httperf across the dual monitor set-up.

As a side note, I am using an nvidia 7800GS with the proprietary driver.

OpenSUSE 10.3 Package Management and some other stuff

2007-09-13T19:25:00.000-06:00

Well, I have been using the development versions of OpenSUSE 10.3 since alpha 5. The operating system has certain stabilized quite a bit now at Beta 3.

In one week (Sept 20) the first release candidate will be pushed out the door. I am expecting only a few changes between now and then.

One of the real big *Behind the Scenes* changes, has been with the package management system. If you have been following the development of the OS since 10.1, you will surely have heard that there have been numerous complaints with the system.

Primarily the complaints have been associated with the the integration of the red carpet technologies into the software management stack.

Essentially in 10.1 and 10.2, there were two package managers. The traditional yast stuff, and the newer red carpet stuff (zmd/rug). I personally blame a lot of the problems on the necessity to synchronize (and failure thereof) between the two technologies.

Anyways, with 10.3 looming in just under a month, the *new* package management stuff seems to have more or less hit its stride.

ZMD has been removed from the OpenSUSE distribution and the old yast and red carpet packaging stacks can finally be said to have a full grown healthy child. zypper. So far, I have no major complaints here at all, although some of the error messages are somewhat oblique.

Also in the news is that the people at AMD have released a good chunk of the specifications for the ATI R500 graphics chips. Currently the documentation (894 pages so far) mostly reflects the necessary information for implementing proper two dimensional support for applicable cards. Supposedly, the three dimensional register information will be available some point next week.

I am by no means an expert at graphics driver implementations, but from what I have read, this seems to be fairly promising. One could certainly hope that it will be possible to make the applicable cards *less evil* as time moves along.

Anyways, I won't be making any purchase in the graphics card domain for the foreseeable future.

Keep on swimming :)

My iriver clix gear - Oh the joy

2007-09-12T15:56:00.001-06:00

So I recently gave away my iriver clix cradle because it was never really mine to begin with... Does that make sense? Anyways, whatever.

So last sunday I was moping around with no way to listen to music without an external set of speakers or headphones and feeling generally sorry for myself. To rectify it, I hopped onto eBay to search for a new cradle to call my own. Sure enough, I found someone in Canada selling one of these rare beauties and put a bid down on it. Not even a minute later, I discovered that this seller also had a matched FM Transmitter (AFT-200) up for auction as well. So I bid on it too!

Anyways, a few minutes ago, they both arrived safe and sound, and now I am relaxing with blissful tinny (is this a word?) music echoing around my apartment.

Thumbs up for the iriver clix, a great product.

Thought you should know.

-Ted

OpenSUSE 10.3 and mythTV and how to do it

2007-09-12T15:46:00.000-06:00

I was recently passed a link as to how to install mythtv on OpenSUSE 10.3. As I migrate from my current SUSE Linux 10.1 setup to a shiny new 10.3 installation I will be submitting contributions to that page.

Come to think of it, I had better migrate to the schedules direct tv listing service pretty quickly here because I only have scheduling information left for 3 more days... eep!

-Ted

openSUSE bug slashing weekend wraps up

2007-08-12T21:50:00.000-06:00

So the opensuse bug slashing weekend has wrapped up. The original purpose of the exercise was to get a lot of community involvement into addressing persistent older defects in earlier editions of the distribution. However, since the release of opensuse 10.3 beta 1 was on friday, the weekend also focused on testing.

The builtin reporting abilities of bugzilla are unfortunately quite dismal so producing accurate reports on the number of bugs opened and closed is a little difficult. However, I estimate that approximately 200 new bugs were filed, and about 160 were closed against all products since 10.0. Pretty good if you ask me.

Hopefully we can do this again before the release of 10.3.

How soon is too soon?

2007-07-25T21:41:00.000-06:00

I have a small confession to make.

I am unfortunately one of those folks that rather likes new features in their software...

Since I have been developing httperf, I been trying to find the balance between modern and historical features that I should reliably be able to depend on.

The httperf tool was primarily written in the late 1990's and probably was developed against the GCC 2.7 or some version of EGCS, in conjunction with the HP C compiler. Obviously, things have moved quite a bit since those days, with the EGCS/GCC merge, and now the most recent release of GCC 4.2.1. Moreover the auto-tools have taken big steps since those times. New elegant features abound, and I am very much tempted to use them.

But should I?

While openSUSE doesn't mind the bleeding edge of gcc 4.2.1 for the upcoming 10.3 release, the OpenBSD project will be sticking with the gcc 3.3.x compiler for a while. Moreover, some prominent users of httperf are still using FreeBSD 4.x with gcc 2.95.x.

This puts me in a vaguely tough position. For one, I believe that more modern compiler features can dramatically improve httperf on a whole. But this is counter balanced with the need to not alienate existing users that are locked to an older platform for the time being.

So my decision? No change... Sort of.

For the time being I will commit to maintaining existing (working) code enclosed in conditional compilation flags to make sure existing users can still use the software. Along side with this I am developing new functionality which I will try to integrate into the old code base as feature compatibility permits.

Check out httperf cvs

-Ted