Martin @ Blog

Today, my server instantly seems to be unreachable. It turned out, however, that some mistake in my named.conf file of Bind (DNS-server) made the wolkje.net domain unreachable. I accidently didn’t specify a zone-file in my named.conf. This error must exists for atleast two weeks, but maybe more. The domain, however, was still reachable until today. Weird.
It is now fixed. I also discovered some other errors in my server setup. The server cannot be ping’ed and when my internet connection goes down, I’m also not able to ssh from my local network to my server.. especially this last one need some fixing.

Today I sold my Canon Powershot Pro1 camera.

Fosfor.se has a top-ten of weirdest USB-drives ever. There are some very funny USB-drives in the list, for example a shrimps-drive a ‘thumb’-drive and a dimsum-drive.

This morning a package was delivered by DHL. Unfortunately I was taking a shower, but our neighbour was kindly enough to receive it an carry it up four stairs. It turned out that I received the yearly christmas present of my employer: A fatboy!

Last weekend we also ‘celebrated’ Sinterklaas (a Dutch tradition). I got some very nice presents:
Alicia Keys – Unplugged

A very good cd (maybe her best cd this far)

Also I got a DVD of Genesis: The Way We Walk Live in concert:

I got also a tripod for my camera, but unfortunately the one I got (Hama Traveler) was not heavy enough to support my Canon EOS 300D camera, so I got my money back for that one. Now I’m looking for a suitable tripod.

I forgot to mention one other present:
🙂

Today I did some work on a new design for my weblog, mainly HTML and CSS coding. First, I’m still searching for a decent HTML editor for Mac OS X. There are several freeware texteditors and even HTML editors, but these don’t even come close to the editors which are freely available for Linux, especially Gnome. Using Gnome, I normally use Bluefish or just Gedit for editting PHP and HTML files. Fortunately, it is possible to use Bluefish on Mac OS X, using Fink, however, this isn’t as integrated as for example Inkscape or The Gimp for Mac OS X. Maybe I should fix that when I have some spare time left.
My new design is mainly a new CSS file for the default Kubrich design which is used by WordPress. It turned out to be very simple to change the layout when you’ve become familiar with the CSS file. I also tried to get the design working on Internet Explorer 6. This turned out to be a little more difficult than expected. The Kubrick-theme for WordPress isn’t already working flawlessly on IE 6. This is caused by the crappy CSS implementation on CSS. Looking for a solution for my problem, I learned about ‘quircks’-mode and the lack of support for some CSS attributes on IE. Especially the missing min-width and max-width on IE is very annoying. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seems to be an easy solution for fixing this bug.

Obviously, the development of Gnome is still going on. This evening, I read a weblog article about search integration in Nautilus written by Alexander Larsson. The article contains some screenshots of a search implementation in Nautilus which is powered by the search code of Beagle. The new functionality implements ‘smart folders’, which enables one to save search queries. I think this kind of functionality is really essential in order to stay in competition with the other ‘desktop environments’ such as Mac OS X and the upcoming Windows Vista. Since I’m using Mac OS X with Spotlight, I developed the habit using Spotlight for finding files when I know (part of the) name of it. This is way faster than manually navigating to the folder in which the file is stored using Finder (or Nautilus or whatever filemanager).
Now, there only need to become a solution for the patent problems regarding Mono/C#… but didn’t I wrote that a year ago also?

CoolTechZone has a review of the Hewlett-Packerd Business Inkjet 1000 printer. According to HP this printer prints normal monochrome pages for only 0,02 cents per page. This is in the price range of Laserprinters and thus very interesting in my opinion. The reviewer of CoolTechZone wants to check HP claims and did so using the supplied cartridge. The final verdict is that the printer almost is as good as a (cheap) laser printer with a price per page of about 0,038 cents (which is a little higher than HP claims). On one 34 dollar cartridge it is possible to print over 1000 pages. The printing speed is impressive with 3 seconds per page (black/white) and 100 seconds for a photo. The purchase price of the printer is also reasonable with approximately 150 dollar. I think this is a good development. My OfficeJet 6110 All-in-one is a little slower but the price per page is in the same range I guess.

A student in (where else?) America has been suspended from the Marquette University because he wrote negatively on a weblog about students and professors, without mentioning their names. The student is not allowed to finish the current year and should do the current semester again next year if he wants to finish his education. A semester costs 14.000 dollars.
I think this is pretty sad.

Unfortunately, Firefox 1.5 is not yet integrated in Ubuntu Breezy Badger, and according to messages from developers on the Ubuntu Forums it will probably never be backported to Breeze Badger because of the large number of dependencies for Firefox. The next version of Ubuntu, however, will ship with Firefox 1.5 and the development version should be equiped with the new version of the browser.
Today, I read about E4X which is an XML extension to JavaScript (officially ECMAscript) and enables webdevelopers to directly use XML in Javascript. I think this is pretty cool. An example on the weblog of Jamin Philip Gray shows that it is possible to put XML in an ordinary variable and then access the data in the XML easily using standard JavaScript operators.
I think this behaviour should be implemented in other languages as well, because it simplifies working with XML. Java and PHP developers should look at this 🙂

It was already obvious that Sun Microsystems was changing. Recently, the company started to make several software products open source and still keeps saying that the ultimate goal of the company is to make all software it develops open source. Change is necessary for the company, because financially the company is still not doing very well.
Yesterday, Sun announced a new product which indicates that Sun is changing and taking risks in order to become succesful. The company introduced the new UltraSPARC T1 ‘Niagra’ processor and two new servers which incorporate this new UltraSPARC-product. Additionally, Sun is pretending that apart from software, it also is making its hardware open source. According to the site, all the hardware design files are given away to the open source community. Currently, there is not yet anything available, but according to the FAQ the Verilog design, ISA and a verifcation suite should be available by march 2006. Sun has not yet decided about the license under which everything will be given away, but also according to the FAQ it will be an OSI approved one. However, it will be questionable what the value of this action will be. Designing a processor is not something which everyone can do in a short period of time, and therefore there will be a limited numbe of possible contributers. According to the FAQ of the OpenSPARC project, there is already interest from universities, small embedded system companies and network specialists. I think that there are not many more groups of people which are interested in open source processor hardware. Still, I think it is a good initiative of Sun which underlines the new strategy the company is following.

On the hardware site, the Niagra processor is a rather innovative design. Unlike current available processors, the UltraSPARC T1 consists of at most eight cores which are able to process four threads simultaniously each. In total the processor is capable of processing 32 threads simultaniously. The processor is (obviously) entirely 64-bits and has 3MB of cache on board which should be shared by all eight cores. Also, the energy consumption is very low with a default energy consumption of 72 Watt which can raise to at most 79 Watt. Unfortunately, to enable the low energy consumption, Sun has to simplify some parts of the processor. For example, the cores are based on the UltraSPARC II design (which is a little bit dated) and there is only one FPU which has to be shared by the eight cores. Apart from that, I think Sun deserves some compliments for taking the risk of designing a processor which breaks with the tradition.

Of course there are downsides of the approach Sun has taken. The design is optimized for multi-thread applications, which are not very common, because most current processors are optimized for at most two or four threads simultiously. However, for some server applications, the ability to process a large number of threads simultaniously has big advantages. Think of webservers (Apache uses a thread for every incoming connection) or database servers. The floating point performance will be poor, because there is only one FPU. The opponents of Sun are trying very hard to let the customer believe that Sun is taking the wrong direction (however, the don’t state it in such harsh words, because it is not very likely that it actually is the wrong direction) and are trying to take customers from Sun to their server platforms. HP has even put up a entire webpage to point out that Sun has created a innovative design of which the success is unknown.