Category: Rant

Since putting in the new colo box, we (myself and the two “tenants” on the Xen user domains (domU)) have noticed it being very slow. At times it seems like the first time you try something it will be very slow, but if you try again immediately it will run quickly. For instance, sometimes a page load will time out, but you hit refresh and it will load quite quickly. I’ve started to suspect the problem is the disks, because the CPU is pretty fast. In order to pin point the problem, I’ve decided to try and benchmark the colo box against my home computer. Both computers have SATA 3Gb/s disks in a software RAID-1 (mirror). Both computers have dual core CPUs (although the home one is a Core2 Duo at 1.86GHz and the colo is a Xeon at 3.0GHz). However, the colo is also running tons of other stuff and it’s running in a Xen domU, so that might slow things down a bit.
Continue reading “Houston, we have a problem”

My laptop has been in the shop because it couldn’t connect to wireless networks with any sort of consistency. It wasn’t preventing me from doing my work, but considering I have surgery next week and my AppleCare expires in two months, I figured now was the time. So for a week now, I’ve been using Linux as my desktop. I’m extremely glad to be back to the Mac.

But not really because of anything wrong with Linux. As soon as I started using the desktop on the Linux box, it told me I should upgrade from Ubuntu 8.04 LTS to Ubuntu 10.4 LTS, which was time consuming, but afterwards a persistent problem I’d had booting any kernel newer than the one I’d installed it with went away, and it recognized my Wacom Bamboo which it hadn’t before. I had to struggle a bit to get my VPN set up, and it was a struggle to get it to treat the “Caps Lock” key as a control key. And because my Linux box is a server, I’d originally set it up with XFCE4 instead of KDE or Gnome, so it wasn’t as functional and beautiful as it could have been.

No, the real reasons I was glad to be back on the Mac are because:

• The Linux box doesn’t have speakers or a microphone, so I had to set up Skype on a netbook, which made for fun when somebody sent me a file or a url.
• The cut and paste functionality is quite different in Linux, and required some getting used to. It wasn’t very consistent between apps.
• The RDC client I was using on Linux didn’t translate the local printer so that it appeared as my default printer on my Windows session like the Mac RDC client does.
• I couldn’t figure out how to switch desktops with a keystroke, especially not when I was RDC’ed into work.
• Without my Mac, I couldn’t listen to my podcasts, and I couldn’t pay bills.
• Most importantly: because my laptop has a 17″ 1920×1280 screen, and I also plug it into this 20″ 1080i screen, but with the laptop gone I only had the one screen to use for Linux, I felt very hemmed in.

So I’m glad to be back. But I’m having to retrain my fingers for cutting and pasting with Command instead of Control.

I’ve been reading Slashdot since the very late 1990s. But as of today I just unsubscribed from its RSS feed. It is probably long past time. The comments have been unreadable for 4 or 5 year now, but I kept up with it because the articles had some merit, or at least most of them did.

But today was the last straw – first there was an article that was going all hysterical about the changing of the runway numbers at Tampa airport, suggesting it had something to do with the recent bird deaths, and/or with the ridiculous and easily discredited “Pole Shift” rapid magnetic pole shifting hypothesis. Then if that wasn’t too crazy, there was another story, this time asking what equipment would be useful in a ghost investigation. So much for “News for Nerds, Stuff That Matters”.

Sorry, I know a number of people who believe in ghosts, and people who watch those ridiculous “ghost investigation” shows, but it’s neither news nor technology.

My laptop’s Airport (wifi) is kind of flakey. It reports a good connection and gets a proper IP from DHCP, but then stops being able to talk to the rest of the network. I’m able to keep using it because while it’s at my desk I can plug it into the wired network.

But the laptop is still covered by AppleCare, at least for the next 60 days. So I should bring it in to get it fixed soon. But I can’t leave it at Apple because every day it’s away from me is a day I can’t work. So before I can take it in, I have to figure out how to do my work from my old Linux box, or if that doesn’t work, where to borrow a Mac to work on.

Let’s see, to do my work on a Linux computer, I’d need the following things that I don’t currently have:

• speakers (I think I have some around, I’ve just never configured them)
• microphone (I’ve never installed one on Linux, that could be tricky)
• Skype
• Dropbox
• Chrome
• Remote Desktop Client (if such a thing exists and works)
• VirtualBox and a Windows environment (which might take care of the Remote Desktop Client)

That will probably be enough to get me going. But it’s obviously not as nice as having my own MacBookPro, or even a loaner machine that I’ve cloned my TimeMachine backup onto.