July 31, 2008 at 8:26 pm · Filed under Tumbled
Develop 08: Elite IV ‘very nearly there’
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Archive for July, 2008
Coding Horror: Understanding The Hardware
July 28, 2008 at 8:57 pm · Filed under Tumbled
Coding Horror: Understanding The Hardware
Great article from Jeff Atwood that echos my views and opinions about what hardware to buy for what reasons, though I learnt a couple of new things from it: it’s better to go for a high-speed dual core for the time being for most cases, and RAM speed has very little influence on overall performance – instead bigger is better (though I think saying “there’s no reason not to get 8GB” is a bit extreme, but from a developers point of view I can see where he is coming from)
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Back to the Grind in WoW — and Loving Every Tedious Minute
July 28, 2008 at 7:44 pm · Filed under Tumbled
Back to the Grind in WoW — and Loving Every Tedious Minute
Great article explaining why ‘we’ love grinding.
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Dan Lyons on Steve Jobs’s behaviour
July 28, 2008 at 7:37 pm · Filed under Tumbled
Imagine, seriously, the response if Microsoft pulled shit like this. Or any company. Imagine Jeffrey Immelt at GE doing this. Or Alan Mulally at Ford. Or Rupert Murdoch. Can you imagine any of those guys, or any of those companies, behaving in this way? Of course not.
Dan Lyons on Steve Jobs’s behaviour towards Joe Nocera. I retold this story to my Dad (who incidentally works for GE) and he agrees. And Dan has a point, though as John Gruber points out, this is only valid if Jobs’s health issues aren’t embarrassing or private – both of which I think are good reasons to go off-the-record but still want to ‘announce’ that he is OK etc.
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Slight redesign
July 28, 2008 at 1:11 am · Filed under The blog
I’ve adjusted the header for the blog today – made it a lot more compact. Overall the blog now feels very compact – which is the intention; I wanted there to be a very small amount of space before you hit actual content. It will no doubt cause a 100% bounce rate, but as it’s a tumblelog I’m not too bothered by that. The only problem is now I have no ‘About’ page, and I’d like there to be a link to one (or at least some information about me) somewhere. I’m thinking of adding a hand-drawn style arrow from the ‘jalada’ in ‘tumble*jalada’ from the word ‘who?’ also in a hand-written style, and placed off to the edge of the blog. Clicking it would cause some sort of AJAX popup or something. The only problem is making it obvious the ‘Who?’ is a link.
I just want to aim for a very minimal feel, and ideally want to keep the blog to just one ‘page’ right now.
Suggestions?
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Testing twitterfeed and phpMyID
July 27, 2008 at 11:50 pm · Filed under Tumbled
I finally understand what OpenID is about, and it seems pretty cool, and phpMyID certainly makes me feel better, as the only person I have to trust with my username & password is myself! If only all sites used this, I wouldn’t have to worry about insecure sites storing my passwords…
Also, this should appear on Twitter.
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Inquisitor 3. Spotlight for the web.
July 27, 2008 at 11:00 pm · Filed under Tumbled
Inquisitor 3. Spotlight for the web
via mashable.com
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The Most Interesting README File Ever?
July 27, 2008 at 12:54 pm · Filed under Tumbled
The Most Interesting README File Ever?
via freenode/#phoronix
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Ubuntu 8.04 32-bit Host versus KVM benchmarks
July 26, 2008 at 10:33 pm · Filed under Linux
Phoronix Test Suite makes it just too easy to run benchmarks. I decided to run some benchmarks on Tombraider (my Linux server) and the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) setup I have.
Tombraider is an AMD Athlon 4200+ with 2GB DDR2-667 RAM. Lots of things are running in the background all the time, which were not cancelled for these tests, so don’t treat them as hugely accurate. The KVM was created using ubuntu-vm-builder and uses the special JeOS kernek. It was freshly created for the benchmarks so was not running anything else.
I ran the entire suite of command line benchmarks, unfortunately some failed to run for whatever reasons (missing packages on the KVM, and some also failed to run on Tombraider – no idea why), however it still provides a wide range of results. because there are so many graphs, I have decided to upload the XML file containing the results where you can view all of the graphs and figures, and get more details about the software setup. As I say, they are not highly accurate so don’t take them too seriously.
The results are impressive. All of the encoding tests were very close indeed, which is nice to know because I use a Windows 2000 KVM for encoding my TV shows. However the KVM was let down in the compiling tests and compression tests. Composite tests and RAM tests were also very good. Its important to remember that the KVM had only 512MB of RAM available to it, whereas Tombraider had whatever was spare (probably around 1GB), which I expect would have an effect on the compression tests at least.
I’m hoping to add some VMware Server benchmarks alongside these results sometime in the near future. I recently migrated from VMware Server to a KVM setup, so I hope to see KVM outperforming VMware Server (though there were other reasons for migrating too e.g. clock drift).
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