JDPFu.com 2013

We’ve all felt screwed before. Today, I’m listing the computer/tech items that I felt unsatisfied buying after a little use. These items really go beyond unsatisfied and enter into the completely screwed over or forever hate category.

Watching Olympics on NBC

I’m addicted to Olympics. I admit it. As I watch them on my OTA setup, the fluffers, you know, the announcers between sports, are constantly saying to watch all the events Live by visiting nbcolympics.com. I’ve been there a few times and been disappointed.

Sorry, this becomes a rant.

A few years ago, I dropped an expensive cable TV plan to get limited basic service. This is just the local channels, public access and a few shopping channels. No CNN, no basic cable channels, just the local broadcast ones – or at least close enough. The cable TV bill is $29/month for this, which sucks. In total about 25 stations come in, but 10 are shopping channels and 5 are wacko religious channels – you know, the channels you remove from the TV? Yep, those.

Below I’ll detail my antenna trials and more importantly what I think I’ve learned about antennas that none of the sites with the plans talk about.

In short, we were getting 19 channels, but now have 58.

I wanted to update my Acer Tablet, an A500, to ICS Android v4.x, but knew it would mean losing all my data, programs and root access. Today, the desire for MKV video support on the tablet finally overrode my desire to retain all that other stuff, and I started the update process.

This new article is about KVM and disk I/O performance based on this other article. It is for a smaller shop, not an enterprise with SAN storage.

I implemented one of the suggestions on my Windows7 Media Center virtual machine and saw about a 100% disk I/O throughput improvement even after already using virtio drivers. Going from 20MB/s to 40MB/s is pretty easy. Keep reading for the details.

Where is Curiosity?

I attended a local Ruby Meetup last week where they showed how to get all the dependencies for a smart RoR setup on Ubuntu. I’ve only tested it on 12.04 myself, but something similar should work for 10.04. I have doubts whether installing on 8.04 is this easy for the current versions of RVM, Ruby and Rails.

The installation instructions came from a gist from Cajun_Code. Following those instructions makes this process fairly straight forward. We’ll install RVM, Ruby v1.9.3, Rails, SQLite3, nginx and thin to get started.

There are lots and lots of IDEs out there. An IDE or Integrated Development Environment has been around for 30+ yrs. Many programmers my age remember Borland’s Turbo C IDE or Turbo Pascal. These had an editor, compiler and debugger built into 1 tool. They were small and fast AND very capable. Along the way, IDEs became more complicated and difficult to learn. They added connections to version control systems like

• SCCS
• RCS
• Visual Source Safe
• CVS
• Subversion
• git
• Bazaar

A modern IDE like Eclipse or Visual Studio needs a college level class just to understand how to use it. With all the added complexity, we’ve lost something. Issues with the IDE prevent programmers from coding all the time. I know this first hand – by trying to get Eclipse setup to work for shared Android development with a friend running it on MS-Windows. It was too complex. When I was a development lead, my guys were always having slightly different IDE configurations that caused issues for the other members of the team. This problem is common in team environments.

There are lots of options for lighter IDEs, geany is one. Geany isn’t exactly lite at 139M of RAM, but compared to most other IDEs, it is a feather. There’s a joke about Eclipse needing a Core i7 and 32GB of RAM to run well. I suspect even THAT will not help.

Geany is based on Scintilla like a few other very popular editors.

Every few months, I decide to install a newer version of Oracle’s VirtualBox on my laptop. Usually, this is really easy and everything goes well. Whenever I load up a new clientOS, I have to remember all the dependencies required to get the guest additions to compile and link. I always forget something or end up doing it a less-than-perfect way.

When I got up this morning, I noticed that Zimbra 7.2.0 was eating 100% of the available CPU on a KVM server. Some quick searches point to a Java leap-second bug AND a fix.

\#  /etc/init.d/ntp stop

\#  date `date +"%m%d%H%M%C%y.%S"`

\#  echo “/etc/init.d/ntp start” | at now + 12 hours

It was amazing to see the CPU use drop immediately when the date command was run. Didn’t even need to restart any of the Zimbra processes. Amazing.

Life with Zimbra is good again. I’m just glad I was looking at the performance. If I hadn’t just done a Zimbra upgrade, I would never have bothered.