JDPFu.com 2025

So, I should have kept my mouth shut. After writing that last story, my laptop gets stuck during boot. Of course, it waited until I was on vacation. Leading up to that point, it had been fixable with a full, detailed , 3 hour scandisk. Now, it won’t get that far in the boot sequence. “Fix my computer” gets stuck. “Safe Mode” gets stuck.

Did I mention that Vista sucks?

I’ve performed the hardware tests. No issues. I think it is a logical problem with Vista’s file system. It get stuck loading crcdisk.sys when I watch the drivers being loaded.

Linux rescue disk … GO! I need to get my data and virtual machines off that machine before I can attempt to force it back to factory settings (assuming I can get to a boot prompt at all).

fixed … 11/30 … perhaps

I renamed crcdisk.sys and rebooted. All is well. Vista problem solving said that the problem is with Dell WiFi drivers. Google searches implied this driver file was for the built-in Creative Webcam. I find that very easy to believe, since Creative drivers have always been less than impressive to me.

12/4 Update

So, I thought the issue was fix. It wasn’t. I rebooted this morning to clear up a network issue and the BSOD happened in the same way again. Enough was enough. Out to the Dell Support site to get all the available patches, 22 of them. They range from a BIOS update to video drivers, to webcam drivers, to system information application updates, to DVD burner app updates. Anyway, they all appear to have installed cleanly, even the BIOS and my reboot was clean. I’m writing this from inside an ubuntu virtual machine running on the laptop. I’ve rebooted a few times, but not after VirtualBox has run. That is my last concern, is virutalbox leaving the system in a bad state or corrupting random drivers?

Everything is fine. No news. Both of them are just working.

VirtualBox 2.0.6 was released this week. I haven’t updated.

Xen on Ubuntu 8 LTS is working better and better. Performance is fine. Networking is fine. I have 6 VMs running on a single box. Most are 64-bit images. The list:

1. Zimbra
2. Alfresco, Apache, mediaWiki, dotProject, samba, mySQL
3. Typo (32-bit)
4. SugarCRM
5. PKI
6. Monitoring

Automatic full backups happen nightly and get mirrored to 2 other disk subsystems. The total size of the TGZ files are under 9GB, so network traffic is fairly trivial on our GB network.

Most of the full VM backups take 6-8 minutes. Zimbra takes about 25 minutes. That’s a full VM shutdown, copy to another disk, VM startup. rsync of the VM files should get this to just a few seconds for each. That’s the next phase to improve our backup system.

As far as VirtualBox goes. I boot WinXP once a week to get patches and run a few WinXP only apps. The rest of the time, it runs Ubuntu 8 desktop – very happily. Video transcoding, rsync, testing new software before deploying into the Xen infra, open office, surfing, rss, email … all the normal stuff we use computers for.

Anyway, everything is fine. Nothing to see here. Move along.

So, I’ve been hiking a bunch this year and searching for waterfalls is a hobby. If you have access to my photo gallery, you get a feel for the lengths that I’ve gone thru to find them.

Anyway, as I was planning my next trip to NC, I came across this site: http://www.northcarolinawaterfalls.info/ FANTASTIC! It places markers on a google map for where all the waterfalls are located and occasionally provides links and directions.

It has more waterfalls which appear to be accurately located on a map than anyplace I’ve seen before.

So, I’ve had a TiVo series 2 with lifetime support since 2003-ish. When wireless support became useful – TTG – I bought a supported D-Link USB 122 adapter. I’ve been using that adapter until today. It still works, but doesn’t support WPA and is only 802.11b – WEP. It was kinda slow too. 350kbps – uh, on a wireless network that should have a REAL speed of about 2500kbps.

Anyway, I broke down and ordered the TiVo branded G device a few weeks ago. It arrived today. I didn’t believe the instructions.

1. Plug it into the USB port.

That’s it.

Damn, if it didn’t work. No reboot. No reconfigure of wifi settings.
Most impressive – my download speed has doubled to 650kbps. Oh, and that’s with a connect to TiVo test going.

The other scary thing is that my signal has gone from 85%-good to 100%-excellent. All I did was unplug the old USB wifi adapter and plug in the new. That’s it.

Happy. If I knew how easy this was, I would have changed years ago.
Later, after my current download finishes, I’ll change my wifi network from WEP to WPA. My network-mooching-neighbors are gonna hate me.

VirtualBox has a way to share host file directories with client VMs. Under Windows, it is fairly intuitive. Under Linux client OSs, the steps are less than clear. I don’t know whether they are documented in the users guide or not. I don’t recall it however.

1. Load the Client OS Extensions.
2. Verify that `lsmod | grep vbox` shows the vboxfs module.
3. Configure the extension to export a directory – I told it to share c:\Data from my Vista-64 host as “Data”
4. sudo mount -t vboxsf Data /Data – yes, the device is just the plain “Data” and it doesn’t show up in /dev like it should.

Run that last command and BAM, it mounted. I updated the /etc/fstab with the necessary info, dismounted the drive and ran `mount -a` to test it. Yippy!

I have access to 150GB+ of data storage on my laptop that is shared with the host and all guest machines. Sweet! This Virtual Box thing is good, but you already know that I’m easily amused.

I’m currently running VirtualBox 2.0.4.

I read yesterday that AVG on Vista had been causing network issues for some people. I’ve had some of those issues with my WiFi connectivity – disconnects as often as every 15 minutes. Usually, it stays connected about 45 minutes then disconnects unless I force the connection to stay active by moving files around my network. Sadly, moving large files started failing about and hour into the move – disconnection.

Last night, I de-installed AVG from my Vista-64 host. At the end, a reboot was required, but the machine refused to come back up, BSOD, twice. Safe mode boot did work so I forced a checkdisk. Over 2 hours later, the system rebooted and seems to be working. I haven’t been wifi disconnected at all since then. Everything seems just a tiny bit faster. I’m not really worried about viruses on that box since it is used to run virtual machines, VirtualBox. I’ve been running an Ubuntu VM for about 3 hours now. No issues.

Update: About an hour later, the network got slow and I lost my ssh connection to another box on my network. This issue never existed with WinXP. It appears that AVG may not be the cause … just Vista-64 Home Premium remains. That OS sucks.

Show your CEO the cost savings between Microsoft solutions (MS-Office, Exchange, AD, CALs) as you propose replacing them with Open Source Software, OSS, that include commercial support.

• MS-Exchange —> Zimbra
• MS-Exchange Calendaring —> Zimbra
• MS-Active Directory —> OpenLDAP
• MS-Outlook —> whatever client you like that’s free; Try Thunderbird or whatever Apple gives away or Enlightenment
• MS-Sharepoint —> Alfresco
• Shared Drives —> Samba and/or Alfresco
• MS-Print Servers —> Samba/CUPS with printer driver support
• MS-Office —> OpenOffice

Add up all that you’re paying for this stuff. Spend 2 hours researching what commercial support for the FOSS stuff costs – estimate $15k for each except those items that just work like OO, Samba and OpenLDAP.

MS Costs	FOSS Costs
$4.5M	$60k

Enough said? No? Ok, use Xen to host all these things. Your disk costs for EMC/NetApp/Whatever won’t change. Your clustering costs will require consultants … 1 time to setup until your team becomes knowledgeable.

Hardware? Use this as the call to virtualization that your organization needs already. When you’re all done, you’ll have half as many servers as before. You’ll probably save many, many more in actuality.

Training? When the CEO shares the overall cost savings with his team and it gets out to the every day workers, they may still complain a little, but they were complaining about MS stuff before.

Outcomes:

• huge cost savings for very minor changes to capability – you’ll need to judge that for yourself
• 2x hardware (or more) reduction
• ongoing software license costs cut by over 50% (just the MS stuff here – this doesn’t save on your CRM, SAS, Oracle costs)
• No Vista upgrade looming
• No desktop CAL and no desktop MS-Office licenses; well, you’ll probably have to retain a few. Or perhaps the CEO will mandate 1 Exchange server for him and his team, but everyone else needs to migrate to Zimbra.

Further, if you can replace WinXP with Linux (not everyone can), you’ll see

• No more “hardware is too slow” upgrades
• “Hardware broken” replacement cycle every 5-7 years
• Employees will use work computers for work, since the same programs they use at home won’t run without tinkering at work.
• There are many, many excellent FOSS programs that businesses use today. MS-IIS —> Apache; PBX —> Asterisk; many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, others.
• WINE will run many, many Win32 programs.

All of these replacements have support contracts available, so there is strong commercial support, should you need it. OTOH, if you have a small team of experts, you can probably get the FOSS versions up and running in less than a week and never need to pay anyone for support outside your current staff. This is idea for proof of concepts and other trials. If you are an enterprise looking for support, that’s fine – compare $15k-$30k per year to what ever you’re currently paying MS. I worked at a place where we paid MS over $5M/yr in support and licenses just for desktops (OS, MS-Office, CALs, AD).

Best of all, all those replacements don’t require MS-Windows. They work with whatever clients you like … well, that isn’t entirely true. Zimbra FOSS doesn’t do any calendaring with Outlook 2003 and perhaps 2007. Is that a bad thing?

Lastly, use this swap as a way to improve the way your company does things. Don’t just replace shared folders with samba – use a document management system like Alfresco and migrate users into it. To start, they can use it just like shared folders. Over time, you’ll get better as it and implement triggers for when documents arrive or leave the system. For example, you can have every document loaded into directory XYZ automatically converted into HTML and dropped into another folder. Or implement document review work flows. Start small but grow into the full capabilities.

The key thing with all these solutions is that the data is yours. It isn’t locked up in some proprietary format.

• Don’t like Alfresco? Connect to the repository with CIFS and copy all the documents out and load them into Documentum or back to shared drives.
• Don’t like Zimbra? The message store is just IMAP. Calendars can be exported with ICS. Contacts can be exported too. I haven’t found where the distribution lists and aliases are stored, but the DBs are OpenLDAP and MySQL. How tough will it be?

Whatever … it’s your data.

I feel bad for those who can’t throw MS completely out for whatever reason. For example, many of the telephony, scanning and fax servers only run on Win32 servers and only connect with Exchange.

Blackberry users – take heart – Zimbra has a Blackberry interface. Many other smartphones also have interfaces and there is a generic J2ME interface for all the rest.

How to install Zimbra on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

Another gmail outage
this week …. this is exactly why you shouldn’t trust a service provider with this sort of stuff without an SLA.

• Sure, it’s free.
• Sure, it’s in beta … and has been for 4 years.
• Sure, nobody cares that you AND your users can’t get your email.

Let’s not forget that google stores and searches all your email and builds a profile. I saw an estimate that had google making $245 per profile per year on targeted ads due to that extra information. You may not be paying for google apps, but you are paying for them with your privacy.

Java programmers have had a bad rap for years. Your programs are slow and use too much memory has been the cry from compiled binary language programmers.

It is less true today. A good JIT compiler will be within 10% of the speed of C++ for an equally skilled programmer. That doesn’t say that an excellent Java programmer can’t make better code than a poor C++ programmer, they can. It just isn’t as likely for programmers of similar skill in their selected language.

Most of the time, code speed isn’t really that important. 80% of programs are used by less than 10k users, so the performance will be key only where I/O is concerned, not in calculations or GUI code. Calling a function 10k times when you only need to call it once is bad in any language – that’s understood.

In summary, Java programs are less efficient than C++ which is less efficient than C which is less efficient than ASM – provided that all are efficiently written.

Speed will be greater and memory use will be less as you move towards ASM. This is obvious.

OTOH, the speed of development, complexity management and platform flexibility that Java has is probably greater than the other choices and (in your environment) may outweigh the speed and memory differences.

There’s an old programming rule … don’t bother optimizing code that only runs once. Spend 80% of your time optimizing only the code that needs optimization.

Personally, I like cross-platform C++ code as the best of efficiency, memory footprint and code portability when a complex program is being created. But more and more, Ruby, Python, PHP or other scripting languages are faster to create than lovingly crafted C++ or Java and get the job done. That’s what programming is all about – getting the job done.

So, we are finally shown the new Chevy Volt last week. The key differences between it and all the prior cars are:

• electric drive train
• charging is performed by
  • power outlet in your home
  • on-board gasoline engine (1.6L turbo)

Why is this smart?

• The on-board charging method can be swapped out later with different technologies like solar, hydrogen, CNG, whatever.
• Electric motors have extremely long timetimes; basically, they don’t break and don’t require any maintenance
• Short trips are 100% electric
• The look of the Volt is nice, unlike other competitors. The Opal/Saturn version is interesting too. Opal uses a turbo diesel engine for charging.

I’ve written previously on car, home and hydrogen power solutions … a few times:

• THCE e + H2 Car
• “THCE Components”:
• Total Home and Car Energy
• Home Energy Station
• Thoughts On Energy