Technology for Mortals

There has been some news regarding the new Western Digital “EARS” series “Advanced Format” hard drives and the associated performance problems. While these drives can be faster than older drives because of the larger sector size, a partition formatted without the correct alignment can slow to less than a third.

Read on for brief instructions on how to fix the problem in Linux and Windows XP.

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White space backhauls – A penny wise and a pound foolish

When government gives away super valuable 700 MHz mobile spectrum, it gets wasted on wireless backhaul which could have used 5 GHz. While 700 MHz might save a little money on backhaul costs, it saves a lot more money on access and mobile networks. Commercial operators that paid billions of dollars for 700 MHz spectrum would never waste valuable spectrum like this.

When Google spokesperson Dan Martin called White Spaces the “Wi-Fi on steroids”, he had the right analogy but drew the wrong conclusion that this was somehow a good thing.  Unlicensed Wi-Fi on 700 MHz would be more like wireless on “roid rage” where unlicensed 700 MHz radios would smash everything in a 50 meter radius resulting in a tragedy of the commons.

I have been struggling with a problem with ActiveSync for ages now, I kept getting a 401.2 error sent to the client when they would try to get their mail (but they could get their calendar). The problem was in the ISA server configuration. When I changed ISA’s access rule to be set to “Basic” authentication instead of “No delegation, but client may authenticate directly” the problem was solved.

J.Ja

Earlier last month, I found that YouTube’s HTML5 beta wasn’t even worthy of being beta.  Three weeks after that, Jan Ozer ran some CPU performance tests between YouTube Flash and HTML5 on Mac OS X and Safari and found that CPU performance was better on HTML5.  However, my tests (using same 720P video posted by Jan) on Windows with Google Chrome showed that both are equally bad CPU hogs, but HTML5 was also very buggy and still had very bad image quality.

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Something that has been driving me bonkers in Windows 7 is that apps that used to minimize to the system tray, like Skype and Live Messenger, now have a full taskbar icon. I never could figure out how to get this solved, but I came across a solution today… go to the program’s executable, and bring up the properties. Select compatability mode, and choose “Vista Service Pack 2″. Restart the application, and it will now properly minimize to the system tray. This has been my one major annoyance with W7 so far, which is a pretty good track record in my book.

J.Ja

Fry’s (San Francisco Bay Area stores only) has a great deal on an Intel i3 540 CPU and Gigabyte H55m-S2H motherboard for just the cost of the CPU.  That basically saves the cost of a $90 motherboard (price at Newegg) and the cost of shipping if you live near a Fry’s.  Here’s a positive review of the Gigabyte H55m-S2H motherboard in case you’re wondering if the motherboard is worthwhile.

This is a low-power Intel “Clarkdale” system with a 32nm dual-core Westmere-class CPU and a 45nm Intel G55-class graphics processor built into the CPU package.  Power consumption is very low for idle and peak and Clarkdales are known for extreme overclocking potential.  The motherboard has DVI and HDMI so it is a great HTPC candidate.

The Clarkdale graphics is has full dual-stream 1080P offload and probably more than double the 3D performance of the older G45 based graphics from Intel.  That’s still not good graphics performance by any stretch of the imagination, but decent for an integrated part for casual gaming like World of Warcraft type games but not too good 3D shooters.

Top: DVI, bottom: HDMI

HDMI is a digital standard for transmission of audio and video, often used in Blu-Ray players. Unlike speaker cables, an HDMI cable of a recent spec (like HDMI version 1.3) and of a reasonable length either works or it doesn’t.

But it may not be that simple.

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A few days ago, a vendor gave me a demo using Mikogo (good service, by the way). Like many similar screen sharing systems, it set my system to the “Windows Basic” settings and turned off Aero. Unfortunately, after I quit the application, it was still keeping my system in Windows Basic. A restart didn’t solve it. The Aero troubleshooter said that there was something using a mirror diver, but it wouldn’t say what, and no suspicious apps were running. After doing some research, I found an article about programming with mirror drivers that gave me a clue. On a hunch, I went to Device Manager, and sure enough, two new display devices had been added (bother said “Mirage Driver”, and one was showing an error). After uninstalling both devices and restarting, Aero worked fine.

J.Ja

MSI PineTrail-based Atom N450 Netbook for $260!  Comes with 1 GB RAM, 160 GB HDD, and 802.11n.

Intel dual-core Core2 processor (Celeron E3200) with G31-based motherboard (with graphics) for $40 (and additional $10 rebate).  This packaged deal is $10 cheaper than just the processor which sells for $50 by itself at Newegg.

The Oracle/Sun merger is old news, even the approval of it is old news. All the same, I am a bit surprised by how little people fought against it. Look, if it was Microsoft buying Sun, there would be picketing outside the SEC by a zillion people begging for the deal to be halted, on the basis of monopoly. But somehow the protests seemed rather muted. In any event, it is now a done deal, so let’s look at the results.

With the acquisition of Sun, Oracle has just made an end run around IBM to become the big Java shop out there. The big difference is, Oracle hasn’t capitalized well on Java so far. All of their Java related offerings fall under “also ran”, “never was”, and “wannabe”. In fact, the same could be said for just about everything else that Oracle makes, other than their core database product. They are a lot like Sun, in that regard. Other than Java, has Sun been a market leader in anything for the last ten or so years? Nope. That’s why they were going under. Oracle stays in business by extracting gigantic license fees from their mostly unwilling victims… I mean… customers. Given the choice, which do you prefer? Oracle, or Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, or PostgreSQL? Probably not Oracle. Would you rather deal with Solaris or Linux, a BSD, or Windows? Probably not Solaris. Which makes more sense, using “real” Apache or IIS, or Oracle’s hacked up version which is always ages behind? And so on.

Another thing the two companies have in common in the utter ugliness of their products, in terms of living with them. The only installer worse than Solaris’ is the Oracle installer. You know, the installer that for years puts the wrong permissions on the files it installs under Windows, and makes you wrestle with a million Java errors just to get the install going. I have never met someone who actually said, “I like Oracle”. Every single person I spoke to despises it. The only positive thing people have to say about it, is that it is so hard to use that they can justify charging $250/hour as an Oracle consultant. The situation is about the same for Solaris, except few people will be a consultant for a whole OS; instead, Solaris admins get paid such a premium that no one wants Solaris in their server room.

So what we have here is the merger of two really ugly parents who have some good looking kids with behavioral problems (I’m thinking of a mix of The Brady Bunch and House of 1000 Corpses).

And then there is the MySQL end of things. Oracle just went from being one of three major DB players to two of three. That’s pretty scary, and almost makes me want to buy a SQL Server license just to keep things fair. All joking aside, it says a lot about MySQL that folks are considering it just as big of a prize, if not bigger than Java. The fact is, Sun messed up with Java pretty bad. When they kept the development close to themselves, they did the usual “Sun’s magic touch” where they created a marvel of technical wizardry that met no one’s needs in reality. Somehow, Java survived long enough for folks like Spring and Apache to bring enough inovation to the table to make Java an attractive platform, despite all of its problems. Meanwhile, Microsoft, the 80,000 lb. gorilla, has been able to do enough interesting things with .NET that there is relatively little third-party open source for .NET because there just is not enough necessity to birth any invention. Luckily for Oracle, Sun didn’t have MySQL long enough to wreck it.

All the same, one has to wonder what will happen to MySQL with the awful combination of Sun and Oracle’s collective ineptitude when it comes to customer satisfaction. I would not be surprised to see a fork of MySQL at some point, but at the same time, you have to realize that very few people work on MySQL for fun or in the spirit of open source, relative to the number of developers working on it. It’s just one of those projects where people are paid to work on it, because everyone hopes to exploit it somehow. Hopefully, enough people will consider MySQL to be a critical piece of infrastructure (and it is, despite all of its flaws) that they’ll manage to keep Oracle from trashing it or reserving all of the important features for paying customers.

J.Ja