veracity

GemFire Enterprise: http://gemstone.com/products/gemfire
The premier in-memory distributed data management platform now with VMware/SpringSource.

Nokia’s N900: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N900 and http://maemo.nokia.com/n900
Runs a 600 mhz ARM Cortex A8 (65 nm, 32 bit RISC TI OMAP 3430) CPU and 256 MB RAM.

After installing mmjre and bash on the N900, let its console output do the talking:


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Nokia-N900:/opt/gfe6032/product/quickstart# uname -a
Linux Nokia-N900 2.6.28.10power37 #1 PREEMPT Wed May 26 00:24:03 EEST 2010 armv7l unknown

Nokia-N900:/opt/gfe6032/product/quickstart# java -version
java version "1.6.0_10-ea"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition for Embedded (build 1.6.0_10-ea-b39)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 11.0-b15, mixed mode)
Evaluation version, 90 days remain in evaluation period

Nokia-N900:/opt/gfe6032/product/quickstart# cacheserver start cache-xml-file=xml/BenchmarkServer.xml
Starting CacheServer with pid: 0
CacheServer pid: 4291 status: running

Nokia-N900:/opt/gfe6032/product/quickstart# java -Dbenchmark.number-of-samples="15" -Dbenchmark.operations-per-sample="5000" -Dbenchmark.payload-bytes="1024" -cp /opt/gfe6032/product/lib/gemfire.jar:classes quickstart/BenchmarkClient

Client/Server benchmark example.


Benchmark configuration:
benchmark.number-of-samples = 15
benchmark.operations-per-sample = 5000
benchmark.payload-bytes = 1024
Please wait... this may take several minutes...

Finished run. Collating benchmark totals now.

Client/Server Cache Benchmark results:

Total Time = 95.082 seconds
Total Puts = 75000 put operations
Total Samples = 15 benchmark samples
Total Kilobytes = 75000 kilobytes

Average Puts Per Second = 788.7928314507478 puts
Average Kilobytes Per Second = 788.7928314507478 kilobytes of data
Average Operations Time = 1267760.0 nanoseconds per put
Average Byte Time = 0.001238046875 milliseconds per byte of data

Best Puts Per Second = 902.5270758122743 puts
Best Kilobytes Per Second = 902.5270758122743 kilobytes of data
Best Operations Time = 1108000.0 nanoseconds per put
Best Byte Time = 0.00108203125 milliseconds per byte of data
Note: Best sample is representative of performance after JVM warms up.

Closing the cache and disconnecting.

Please stop the cacheserver with 'cacheserver stop'.

Nokia-N900:/opt/gfe6032/product/quickstart# cacheserver stop
The CacheServer has stopped.
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I don’t know which is the cooler product here

One-line executive summary: If you face slowness, hangs, filesystem corruption and/or lots of dmesg errors about ata try adding ” libata.force=noncq ” to your linux kernel boot options.

I recently bought a Crucial branded 128 GB solid state disk (SSD) model CT128M225 of the M225 range because they’re the hot new thing to get.
See http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001304.html

The disk would work well with my copy of Windows 7 RC but to my dismay Linux would spew a lot of disk error messages as you can see here: http://pastebin.ubuntu.com/347122/

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I’ve previously blogged about my very brief encounters with open source development here and here.

Recently I came across the following blog posts on Planet KDE which inspired me to write this blog post:

Road to KDE devland Step 0
Road to KDE devland Step 1
Road to KDE devland Step 2

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Ever since Windows 7 and KDE 4.2 were available I started placing my taskbar vertically to the left of my widescreen LCD. On Windows 7 it works and looks great but on KDE 4.2 the running application icons are of a small size and the title text is hardly visible with only a couple of letters being shown as you can see in the following screenshot.

I couldn’t find a setting in KDE to change it and even posted a suggestion to the KDE Brainstorm forum section. But this was really annoying me. What if they reject the suggestion? What to do in the mean time anyway?
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I regularly work with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 with SP1 on my Pentium 4 single-core non-hyperthreading based PC and occasionally run some builds on an Athlon 64 X2 dual core based PC. I noticed the compiler (cl.exe) is a single process with a single thread running, even on the dual core.

I did some digging around to see if I could enable parallel (multi processor) builds to take advantage of the extra idle core to speed up my builds and came across the following links:

Visual Studio 2005 tour and MSDN multiprocessor project builds

I was glad to find the /Mx  option where x is the maximum number of project builds you want to run in parallel. I dug around the codebase and realised the build script already had /M8 specified as a parameter to the call to vcbuild.exe. I even opened up the project in Visual Studio 2005 and the setting was at 2 (since this is a dual core)  as expected.

But the build still seemed to be running a single thread and not using the extra core

I then re-read the links above more carefully and saw that the option is for parallel project builds so it would only work for multiple projects and not for many source files in a single project.

I did the customary STFW/JFGI and found the new /MP option which is a part of the new Visual Studio 2008 and this option enables source level multiprocessor parallel builds.

But what about VS 2005? I did some more searching and, lo and behold, found this blog entry which says the /MP  option is also available, but undocumented, in Visual Studio 2005!

Adding it to the build script’s parameter list for vcbuild.exe didn’t work, but adding it in the “additional options” window in the Visual Studio 2005 project worked and now doing a build would launch three processes of cl.exe, one which had 45 threads but took very little CPU cycles, and the other two were single threaded and utilised a CPU core each to the fullest! That was my Homer Simpson “woohoo” moment of the day

I’d been using this multi-protocol chat program called Miranda which is for Windows and is open source. It has a nice plugin called “Webaware” which allows you to store your current chat status on your website so you can display it on your webpages.

Recently another piece of open source software which is also cross platform called GAIM was renamed to Pidgin and got a lot of publicity so I thought to try it out. It’s a fun/cute program and I decided to move to it especially since the same program works on Windows as well as Linux. The only problem was that there wasn’t (or I couldn’t find) a similar plugin as Miranda’s Webaware which was a bummer for me.

So I tried to write a Pidgin plugin myself which would do the same work as the Miranda Webaware plugin. I thought why not just make it open source, and thus came about my first bit of GPL code! I’d previously never really done programming at home, just at work, and as Larry Augustin (VA Linux Systems founder) said in the movie Revolution OS I felt that tremendous sense of empowerment working with open source

It feels good being able to easily download powerful software to which you have access to the source code. I started off by reading the C plugin HOWTO and using the helloworld.c plugin as a guide to write my own plugin called webaware.c. I later needed an easy way to do FTP uploads of my chat status data and someone suggested I use cURL library which I indeed found to be useful. The compilation was failing for me and I quickly realised I needed to provide double-quotes to the echo calls in the lib’s MinGW32 makefile and off it went.

I had earlier compiled the plugin on openSUSE Linux which came with all the tools already. This week I thought to try compiling on Windows to test that it worked on both platforms. This involved downloading software such as Cygwin, MinGW and a bunch of others which is really a pleasure to not be restricted by “free” versions or the prohibitive costs of commercial tools.

I get to do fun stuff at work but it’s been a blast actually working with open source at home. The plugin resides at http://lahsiv.net/code/ , and as they say, “it works for me” ™ !

Well, Happy Diwali!

Today I tried out this fun software called Synergy which is open source (GPL) and cross platform. It’s for virtual screen, keyboard and mouse sharing.

See the Synergy2 SourceForge webpage for more information about it.

It took about 15 minutes to download, install, configure and run on three devices, a Windows XP desktop as the “server” (called blackbird) placed on the left side, a tablet PC with openSUSE Linux (called silverbird) placed in the middle and an Ubuntu laptop (called vaiobird) on the right. I believe it works with Windows Vista as well. Real nifty and a cool toy to play with!

I just had to manually add the positioning information to the config file’s links section as follows:

section: links
blackbird:
right = silverbird
silverbird:
left = blackbird
right = vaiobird
vaiobird:
left = silverbird
end

Read this post on Microsoft-Watch and this post on EWeek.

What do you think?

I wonder if some Microsoft employees will blog about this and try to explain it away

A bunch of new GNU/Linux distributions’ releases are coming up and will coincide with my plans to buy a new desktop and a new tablet PC for home use.

OpenSuse 10.3 is coming October 4th, Ubuntu 7.10 (codename: Gutsy Gibbon) is coming October 18th and Fedora 8 is coming November 8th. I plan to install and play with each one and decide on which distro to settle. My current preference is Ubuntu even though I like KDE better than GNOME. I’m currently running Ubuntu “Gutsy” Beta on my home desktop and “Feisty Fawn” (Ubuntu 7.04) on my work desktop and am very impressed with things.

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I just came across Bug # 1 for Ubuntu Linux on Mark Shuttleworth’s blog and it gave me a good laugh. See https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1