Ubunchu!

For those that don't read LWN, this is so awesome, an Ubuntu-Manga, about a high-school's sys-admin club! Totally hilarious, and being a Manga, of course two thirds of the sys-admin club are cute girls, clearly using Linux and MacOS X (in fact, the brunette works only on terminals and hates anything non-text-based), while the lone dude is a Windows user.
Just a little excerpt: "W-- What sorcery did you use?" (to install Ubuntu so quickly) "The magic of click forward, click forward, and... click finish?" ROFL! And it just gets better. Have fun reading!

Posted by Luca Longinotti on 20 May 2011 at 13:38
Categories: CompSci Comments



Arr! Ye olde Facebook!

Ahahaha, thanks to a couple of friends, I found out today that you can set "English (Pirate)" as a language in Facebook, which results in a really unique experience, totally awesome!

I also added a Blogroll on the right, where I link to other blogs I follow myself, pretty much all of them very technically oriented.

Posted by Luca Longinotti on 17 May 2011 at 19:41
Categories: Longi, CompSci Comments



SSD crazy fast!

Finally replaced the old HD with a SSD I bought in January on my workstation, an OCZ Vertex 2 in 3.5" format, so that it fits in the hot-swap trays I've got.
It's actually surprising that so few vendors have 3.5" editions, as that's what practically all desktops, workstations and servers do have, especially considering hot-swap trays and similar drive bays.
Sure, with 2.5" you can pack more stuff into new-generation servers, but those are still incredibly expensive, and it makes sense on laptops, but that's pretty much it.
Anyway, the results are there: disk operations are crazy fast compared to before. Boot is incredibly fast, actually with OpenRC now, so fast that getting an IP via DHCP was the dominant factor, and changing to a static IP eliminated that one too.
I'm very satisfied with this, and ext4 with the 'discard' option (TRIM support) seems to work perfectly fine.

On the Rig front, I've not done much: some more work went into testing, the typeinfo stuff was completely removed, and a few more checks with regards to sizes and permitted flags were added.

Another project that I'll probably tackle soon is writing a build system that doesn't suck, and that tries to really be minimal, and not support the world and more, it just needs to generate Makefiles (and Visual Studio/Eclipse support probably too). The build itself is left to the relevant tools, this just really needs to gather info about where we're running and the features we want, make that info available to the user (some header file), and generate appropriate Makefiles, which don't depend back on the generator itself, so that you can also just generate generic Makefiles and not need to have the generator installed on every system with all its dependencies. I mostly want to get rid of CMake and its horrible mess of half-baked modules. Anyone wants to help here? It's going to be in Python, and it should support only C/C++ builds.

Posted by Luca Longinotti on 13 May 2011 at 10:10
Categories: Hardware, Rig, Software Comments



Rig 2011/05/02

This week's Rig status update:

  • MLOCK/MRWLOCK: added functions to discover if a lock is held or not, clarified documentation wrt recursive locking, and fixed a possible wrap-around bug in MLOCK and an incorrect error return in MRWLOCK
  • SMR: ported it to use MLOCK instead of its own micro-lock scheme
  • Changed rig_thread_id() to start at 1 for the main thread and not to use 0 at all. This aligns it with some OS implementations, leads to better performance, and fixes a bug in MLOCK, which uses the 0 ID to signal "no-thread-owns-me"
  • Changed default hash algorithm to MurmurHash 3
  • Added support for tests, using the great Check framework for C Unit-Testing, and using CMake's CTest to run them
  • Added optional testing support to the Gentoo ebuild (USE=test + FEATURES=test)

Posted by Luca Longinotti on 02 May 2011 at 08:00
Categories: Rig, C99 Comments




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