Hello Eggo

It’s here, it’s here! My Asus G51JX-A1 is here! It arrived via UPS this morning in a giant box. Inside that box was another plain brown box. Inside that contained the laptop box. Inside that, it’s precious cargo: Eggo. It’s too early to give a review, but the initial impression is very positive! Thing thing’s chewed everything I’ve thrown at it. I installed the Halflife 2 demo and was able to run it at full resolution (1920×1080). It has no problem playing HD trailers from the Apple website either. It looks like this’ll be pretty solid. It’s a quad core, but each core has hyperthreading, so it shows up with a logical 8 cores. With 6GB of ram and a 1GB dedicated graphics card, this should last me a while!

More pictures and articles will follow.

Edit: Oops, the resolution is 1920×1080, full 1080p

I Can Relate

It’s in Hamilton Ontario

RIP Waffle

So I was using my laptop this week when it randomly died. Just out right shut off. It’s done this for a while, over a year. I’ve learned not to disturb it, but something must have pushed it over the edge. I tried for a long time that night to try and breathe new life back into it, but eventually I had to call it quits. Sometimes it would make it past the BIOS screen, but sometimes not. Consistently though it would shut itself off pretty quickly.

Lets be honest here, the laptop is 4 years old, and has been pretty roughly used. It’s come with me every day to class, and has travelled back and forth from Ottawa and school, as my parents said, it owes me nothing. While it’d be nice to get it working again (not hopeful), it’s likely time for it to move on. I had hoped it was going to last 5 years, but 4 years isn’t bad.

I unplugged it and took out the battery and let it sit over night, but still no dice. I started searching for a new laptop quickly that suited my needs. For a long time I’ve been forced to deal with a crappy resolution – 1280×800 – which is pretty crappy for writing code. One of the requisites for a laptop is to have a NVidia graphics card and a high resolution display. After searching I eventually found a match, the Asus G51JX-A1, packed with everything that I was looking for. I’ll let you click the link for the specs, but in short it comes packed with a 1080p display, 15.6″, Intel i7, and 6GB of ram. It also seems to run Linux and OSX very well (in fact, it had the HIGHEST score Geekbench in late June of all the OSX machines. I’m a bit dubious of this, but it’s interesting.

I must say that I was infact looking at the MacBook Pro 17″ with i7, but the price was out of my budget at $2700. It’s also a dual core (vs the Asus quad core) and comes with less memory. The Asus checked out after shipping at a cool $2100.

I ordered it today, so I’m going to assume it’s going to ship Tuesday (as monday is a holiday in Canada), and arrive Wednesday. For the meantime, I’m using my roommate’s MacBook Pro. They’re pretty solid machines and I want one, just out of my price range. I’ll write another article soon as I’m up and running.

PS: Waffle incase you’re wondering is my laptop’s hostname.

Here’s some more waffle related posts:

• Random Freezups
• Struggle for More Pixels
• Ubuntu?
• Wrapping up Vista
• Continued Vista Testing
• Vista

Edit: Wow grammar fail.

New Toy!

My new Arduino Mega

Long time no see folks! I got a new toy this week, an Arduino Mega. Cute lil thing isn’t it? So what is it? The Arduino is a completely open source 8bit RISC controller and board package. Part of the Arduino package is it’s fairly easy to learn library. Since it’s in C++, it’s very easy (for me) to rapidly design little hardware projects. I’ve planned that my first project will be a fan controller for my hard drives. I have two external hard drives and at times, they get a little warm, so I want to write some code for this that communicates with my laptop over USB (serial interface) as to when to turn on the drive fan or not, with manual override of course.

But this is only the surface of what you could do. There are add-ons for the Arduino by a variety of different manufacturers for wifi, ethernet, GPS, bluetooth and even GSM. While the build in Arduino functions have lots of advanced things to play with, you get full control over the processor with the avr-libc library (such as sleep modes). I’m looking forward to seeing what kind of projects I can come up with. Currently, I have two LEDs hooked up via a breadboard that fade back and forth (it has both analog in and out, via PWM) every 30 seconds, or manually if you send it the correct command over serial.

qZDL Alpha on Windows

Compiled with only a little bit of makefile magic needed.
Edit:Yes it does support Windows themes correctly, I just use Windows classic

Git Based Backups, a Followup

I’ve been using git based website backups for a while now. In my previous post, I talked about how my backup system works. So far, it’s worked fairly flawlessly, but there have been lessons learned.

The first lesson I learned is that you CAN dump a MySQL database and keep it in git, however, you have to do it the right way. Turns out, by default, mysqldump puts everything on one line, including new data. This makes for extremely large database dumps, and makes it almost useless to tell what’s new and what’s old. By using “–complete-insert”, it splits each row into a separate SQL command. This makes the initial version quite a bit larger, but subsequent versions smaller. My database 41MB when the dump is complete, which is quite large.

The second lesson I’m now learning is that git stores the entire history locally inside the .git directory. This initially doesn’t take much space, as it’s compressed, but it grows. I have limited space on my host, and currently my .git directory is pushing 131MB. My entire blog directory is now 191MB, so really, the content is just 19MB. That’s a LOT of space (I blame it all on the database, the actual content doesn’t change much), although each individual diff is about 500K. I did some digging, and the kernel.org folk said:

In general, git is not a viable solution for the the case of a large repository with relatively small individual checkouts. However, if developers do not intend to clone, fetch, push into or push from their repositories, then use shallow clones

Well that certainly limits the usefulness now doesn’t it! Unless I’m missing something, it’s basically saying that if you use ‘shallow’ copies, then you can’t really do anything with them unless you create patches locally and apply them in a full copy and commit. In a large team, I would say this makes git almost useless. Back to my situation, it means that it limits the usefulness of backups to almost zero.

So is git the best way to go? Well maybe. Perhaps backing up the database in the method I chose is the best way. I probably would have been better compressing it, naming it, and shipping it to another server. But hey, I had to find this out right?

Git Based Backup

Hey Everybody, sorry about the extended absence. I’ve been very busy of late! I’ve recently decided to try out the newest thing in SCM (Source Control Management), Git. Lots of people are getting on the git bandwagon, and I’m not sure if I’m totally on board yet. One of the things that appealed to me, however, is the ease of setting everything up. I’ve decided, after years, to have an actual backup solution for my website. I’ve been left without backups before, and it’s bitten me in the arse recently. As you can probably guess where this is going, yes, I’m doing git based backups of my website – database and all.

This lets me do some interesting things. First of all, I can have nightly backups, and ‘checkpoints’, points where I could easily roll back changes if I screw something up. Another is a site that only is a snapshot of the live site, whether for testing or redundancy (via branches). And lastly, it lets me have a log of recent changes that I make, and look at changes and have the ability to revert changes that I may have done while working on a script. I typically commit and push changes to a script with a detailed message when I make changes, outside of the nightly backup cycle.

At first, I was curious to see how MySQL dumps would do inside backups. So far they seem to do very well, and don’t mind being in SCM. It gets dumped to text, so stuff that doesn’t change… well doesn’t change. I back up data to one spot regularly, and then semi-frequently to another. This is how it’s laid out:

The live website is denoted with a 1, and the attached database is also pictured. This is where the general traffic and changes are, aka, the critical data. Every night, the data gets replicated to computer 2, which is completely in another country. Unfortunately it’s on a slow link, and not 100% reliable, but hey, at least it’s somewhere right? Computer #3 is my laptop, which is where I may or may not make changes to some files and testing, before committing them. On the server (computer #1), changes are pulled and merged into the repository automatically (if they’re non conflicting), before the fresh changes are committed. I’ve been running this nightly for about a half a week for my low traffic sites, and recently moved it to my blog. The scripts that run will let git automatically add new files, and delete deleted files, having a perfect snapshot of the blog. I’m going to continue testing this on more of my websites, before I make it available to the websites that I host, including a control panel type feature for managing snapshots.

It’s also worth noting that the connection between my server and the main git repository is secured by key based SSH authentication. I haven’t had any issues with this so far and has been an excellent solution.

I like to give credit, where credit is due, so I’m going to give mad props to my webhost, who processed my request for a shell within 15 minutes, installed git within 15 minutes, and fixed the git installation in 15 minutes. Their level of support has been truly remarkable. A big thanks to you guys! Check them out (A Small Orange). If you like them, and decide you want to sign up, don’t forget to use the referral link on my blog .

ZDLSharp/qZDL Preparing for a Beta Release

It’s been some time, but the ZDLSharp Qt beta is nearing beta release. ZDLSharp 3.0.5.3q fixes issues that the C# version of ZDLSharp had. While still in beta, it will be referred to as ZDLSharp, but rebranding will take place once 3.0.5.3q leaves beta to qZDL. It’s currently only available in SVN (See the page for the version for access details), and should compile on all 3 major platforms (Windows, Linux, OSX) without many issues. Bug reporting may be done via the SourceForge Project Page. It’s currently only tested on x86 but there is evidence to support that x64 also works. Testers would be appreciated for all platforms/architectures. To compile, Qt 4.3 or greater is required (Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Hardy Heron or greater for example).

Update: Here’s a screenshot of the DMFlag picker running on Ubuntu 9.10.

qZDL DMFlag Picker

Happy New Year!

Goodbye 2009 (which was a good year in my opinion) and high hopes for 2010!

RSS Readers

I’m not sure why, but lately Akregator has been behaving poorly. Sometimes when it updates a feed, it adds articles from other feeds into the feed and marks them as unread. This gets extremely annoying and every attempt I’ve made to fix the problem has not proved to be fruitful.

Akregator Showing the Articles in the Wrong Field

To solve this, I didn’t create a bug report with KDE nor tried to fix it myself. I’ll have to admit that sometimes I’m not a very good member in the Open Source community. I simply don’t have time to fix the problem. I looked through Gentoo’s package manager Portage for some RSS readers. The selection wasn’t very great, but I installed a few of them. The first one, Blam Newsreader boasts to be simple. Unfortunately it was TOO simple for my use. I went down the list, and found Liferea (I don’t like the name much, it sounds a bit too much like urea). I copied all my feeds from Akreagtor to Liferea and so far so good. It has all the options and features I want from an RSS reader. I’ve been using it for not very long, so I’ll update this later with more comments. Here’s the interface…

Liferea Interface Reading a Web Comic