Necroses Feast 17 Januari 2009

Looking forward to this event, 100% I'm gonna be there :D  ¶ 13:16 0 reacties Links naar dit bericht

  Benchmarking hard drives and USB flash memory

Some months ago I was a bit bored so I decided to waste a bit of my time trying out the excellent program HD Tune and benchmark some hard drives, usb sticks and SDDR memory. A lot of interesting results came out of it, and I'd like to share them.

HD Tune test on a Western Digital hard drive.

Since these tests were just done out of curiousity and no definite conclusions can be drawn from it you should take the results with a grain of salt, and if interested, conduct some tests by yourself.

I've used two systems, one of them being my crappy but trusted Acer Travelmate C300 laptop (at the time writing this the screen is almost broken, hanging on 2 writes and a scrap of metal) and some HP Desktop computer at work of which I don't have the specifications here. Anyway, since these tests are not meant to be accurate and more give a generic view of the differences between storage hardware I think it's not so important.

First I tested the harddrive that is by default installed in my laptop, and the results were like the ones shown in the screenshots of the official site where you can download HD Tune. It simple means that data on the outer rings of the harddisk takes more time to be accessed.

Looking normal

This also makes it clear why defragmenters usually move often used files to the inner rings of the harddisk, and sparse files that aren't used regularly to the outside. If you want to defragment your drive and have more control where files are placed I recommend using JkDefrag, an excellent free program written by Jeroen Kessels. It's more complex than the builtin defragmenter in Windows, but it's definately worth using.

Next victim was my Verbatim Store'n'Go U3 USB stick, since it has no such things as movable parts like a harddisk has, I assumed I would get a very stable troughput and access time. On the left you see the results when tested on my laptop, on the right on my desktop PC. There was not a very big difference in read time, but clearly my desktop could access the information much faster, almost half the seek time than my laptop needed. My laptop also required a lot more CPU usage, which might explain the difference in speed.

Verbatim Store'n'Go U3

I also had some SD cards roaming around, and since my laptop has a slot from them I decided to give it a go and test them as well... Crap, my SD card reader or SD card itself is slow as hell.

This I didn't expect. Apparently the SD card reader in my laptop is quite old and slow to nowadays standards, or my SD card was a rotten nut. I wanted to know the cause, so inserted it in my SanDisk SD to USB converter and try it again.

Apparently, my SD card reader is the culprit.

I am not sure wether this the case with all computers or if it's just my laptop that has this huge difference in speed, but this showed me I can better use my USB connection and the SanDisk adapter for handling SD cards than the builtin card reader. If you suspect your system might have this difference in speed too you'd better do some tests yourself.

When I wanted to test my 6 gigabyte MicroSD card which is in my mobile phone, my laptop didn't recognize it in my card reader, so I could only test it using the USB adapter. The results were not so remarkable, except for the fact that it was roughly about twice as fast as my 1 gigabyte card and also needed about twice the time to access parts on the card. For comparison I also tested both the memory cards on my desktop PC as well using the USB adapter. I expected that the results would be approximately the same as when I tested them on my laptop, and this was almost the case, except that when I tested the 6 gigabyte card there was a sudden negative spike that I couldn't quite explain. I assumed the system probably was busy with something that used quite a lot of processing power, which influenced the performance of reading out the SD card. I was right, but it wasn't because of some software issues, it had to do with a hardware defect, as I later found out.

When I started testing my harddrive in my desktop computer at work I immediately saw something was very wrong with it, it looked like it was on the verge of collapse. I already noticed it sometimes slowed down tremendously, but I blamed it on the huge amounts of data it had to process, not a possible defect hard drive. I've done 4 tests and the results were so different from each run that it clearly showed it was not good at all. Thanks to HD Tune I spotted it in time and got the drive replaced by a spare before it completely collapsed.

This harddisk is a goner.

When pillaging my hobby room I found an old MP3 player of 1 gigabyte I haven't used for years and was collecting dust, so I was curious how an old piece of hardware would perform on these tests.

What I suspected, here the bottleneck is the MP3 player, not the test machines I used, but that's logical because I've bought the thing when USB 2 wasn't invented yet (or at least not mainstream like nowadays). Oh well, it served me well at the time it was still a novel thing and enjoyed listening to music when biking or walking, now my phone replaced it, like it has replaced the need for wearing a watch.

Another thing I wanted to test is an external harddrive that I occasionally use to make backups, but I could only test it at home, I don't think my employer would be happy or maybe even suspicious if I'd arrive with a 320 gigabyte USB drive at work.

Crap! It bailed out on me with a read error! I can't even trust my backups devices anymore, how many backups do I need to have to be absolutely sure that I won't lose any personal stuff' I'm getting nervous by the mere idea I would lose all my photos and other personal things that I now use several online storage sites besides my regular backups. I have accounts at Box.Net, DropBox, Mozy, LiveDrive, Syncplicity and BoxStr for storing things, as well as places like Flickr, Picasaweb, Diigo, BlinkList, Ovi, YouTube and other services. Call me paranoid, but having once lost about 6 years of photography once in a double harddisk crash I decided better to be safe than sorry.

The next victim to put to the test was an USB flash stick of 64 gigabyte I purchased through Ebay.

Double crap! It appears that there is some kind of error on this stick, so I started testing and when having put about 8 gigabyte of data on it is starts to give me semaphore errors, so I can't trust this as a backup medium either. So now it got demoted to carry songs which I can play in my car stereo, which has an USB slot.

At this point I had only two devices left to test, my media box that has a 500 gigabyte storage and a Western Digital Passport drive of 120 gigabyte. At when testing it it worked ok, but now the USB connector has problems and it doesn't get recognized anymore.

Western Digital Passport 120gb

Conceptronic media box

Conclusion: I can't draw much conclusions from these tests, except that I'm looking forward to solid state drives and am curious how they will perform when booting off them and running an operating system on it instead of just using them for storage, and that I'm an unlucky bastard concerning the reliability of my hardware devices.

  ¶ 03:14 0 reacties Links naar dit bericht

  Finally found the time

When browsing my photo's and video clips I found I have a lot of stuff that I haven't shared yet, so now I'm trying to organize things a bit and publish them. Better late than never, right?

At Graspop 2008 in Belgium I've seen Morbid Angel and recorded a part of their gig. I must say that I'm surprised that the quality is quite acceptable, I've heard/seen worse recordings done by a mobile phone. If you are a fan of Morbid Angel I think you will like this clip:

More to come later.

  ¶ 19:11 0 reacties Links naar dit bericht

  Final attempt to contact Bloglines or affiliate. If you've read my previous post about Bloglines you've seen I've tried to contact the company responsible for it in several ways. I've now decided to write an email to operations@iac.com as a final resort and hope I'll finally get some kind of answer.

Here's the mail I've sent:

Message-ID: <4954e1a1.2000002@xs4all.nl>
Date: Fri, 26 Dec 2008 14:52:33 +0100
From: Richard-William Loerakker
To: operations@iac.com
Subject: Bloglines flushed down the drain? Ask.com as well?

Hi there, I'm sending you this mail as last resort since I've tried all
other ways of reaching you guys, except for phone which isn't feasible
since I live in The Netherlands.

I've requested numerous times using the feedback form of Bloglines to
have my account closed since I've moved to Google Reader after some
serious issues with Bloglines. I never received an answer, besides 4
automated ones out of the 7 requests I've sent.

Then I tried mailing info@ask.com mailing my request (I later noticed
Ask.com purchased Bloglines), but my mails never arrive because that
mailbox is full!

So here is my final request to have my account pulled from Bloglines,
and I would like to know what the hell is going on. If you guys want to
kill Bloglines, please inform your users so they will have a chance to
export their OMPL list and move to another RSS reader of choice.

As a final suggestion I'd like to say that if you care about your users
the least you can do is listen to their feedback. If you look on Twitter
or use the Blogsearch of Google you will see the outcry of many people
having problems.

I got so fed up with this situation myself that I finally have written a
blog article about it
(http://www.loerakker.org/2008/12/signs-that-bloglines-is-fucked.php)
and am submitting it to high traffic sites like Reddit and Digg to warn
other users about your lack of commitment to your end users.

Situations like these make me reluctant to join other affiliate sites
like Vimeo, because if you can do this to Bloglines I see no reason why
you won't let other sites go down the drain.

I hope this time my voice will finally be heard by you.

Richard
--

What do you think? Will I get an answer? I doubt it seriously.

  ¶ 14:51 0 reacties Links naar dit bericht

  Merry christmas everybody

Everyone a very merry christmas and a happy new year!  ¶ 15:58 0 reacties Links naar dit bericht

  Signs that Bloglines is fucked I've stopped using Bloglines in favor of Google Reader as RSS reader. Bloglines too often messed up my feeds, marked thousands of items as unread again, generally making a mess out of it. Since it has been purchased by Ask.com I have the feeling it goes down the drain and deliberately gets crippled so they can shut it down soon. Here are some more signs that Bloglines is an abandoned project and in my opinion heading to the Deadpool soon.

"We have created several forums to discuss the Bloglines Web Services and to announce new developments."

http://www.bloglines.com/forums/

Not Found
The requested URL /forums/ was not found on this server.
Apache/2.2.9 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.9 OpenSSL/0.9.8b Server at www.bloglines.com Port 80

Apparently they provide no service, have nothing new to announce and don't want feedback at all. If one of you Bloglines guys ever come to read this (because you don't read my mails and submitted feedback forms), your forum is gone. Fix it.

http://www.bloglines.com/about/jobs
"If you're interested in the position, please apply on-line! If you think you know someone who would be perfect for the position, please send the job along."

Redirects to: http://www.askcareers.com/askjeeves/jobboard/JobDetails.aspx?__ID=*9F2F921F592636B2

Careers
The specified record could not be found.
Please try the operation again specifying a different record.

So they have a link on their main page "We're hiring!" with a job offer, yet it links to something where you can't apply and the job isn't even there anymore. I assume they don't need developers anymore, or they desperately need on that can fix links.

Used feedback form on http://www.bloglines.com/contact 7 times now
Received 4 automated responses, no user action whatsoever (They *LOVE* feedback, really!)

Email sent:

Onderwerp: Bloglines heading to the deadpool?
Van: Richard-William Loerakker
Datum: Fri, 28 Nov 2008 12:51:25 +0100
Aan: information@ask.com

Hi,

I'm wondering, I've sent by now 5 times the request to Bloglines.com to have my account cancelled and removed. During these course (2 months by now) I still haven't received any answer besides the dreaded automated response that I will be contacted in 2 business days (which apparently should read 'months').

There are no updates on blog.bloglines.com as well since the end of september, and when searching in Twitter I see many people having problems.

If you want to let the product die, just announce it so that people can export their OMPL lists, but don't let them hanging like this. I think it's very unprofessional not answering to my (or others) repeated requests.

Anyway, your lack of feedback/help made me decide to change to Google Reader, and I think I'm not the only one making that decision.

I can see from the Alexa ranking http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/bloglines.com a lot more people are moving away from Bloglines.
I hope that this time I finally manage to reach one of you guys and get a response concerning my repeated requests to remove my account from Bloglines.

Response:

This is the mail system at host mail3.csmailserv.com.

I'm sorry to have to inform you that your message could not
be delivered to one or more recipients. It's attached below.

For further assistance, please send mail to postmaster.

If you do so, please include this problem report. You can
delete your own text from the attached returned message.

The mail system

(expanded from ):
cannot update mailbox /var/spool/mail/ainformation for user ainformation.
error writing message: File too large

Twitter users about Bloglines: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=bloglines

Bloglines also stopped updating their own blog, and there is no news about their new "improved" beta version.

Also Alexa is showing that the pageviews of Bloglines are in a steady decline, apparently I'm not the only one abandoning Bloglines.

My conclusion: Bloglines is fucked. If you need a RSS reader, don't subscribe to this "service" because you are on your own. It is not possible to have your account removed, I've requested them several times to remove my name, login account, settings and all, but I've never got a response. I'm deeply disappointed in Ask.com and how they treat their users. Even though Bloglines is a free service it doesn't mean you can care less than shit about your users.

Edit: it appears as outsourcing and a failed auction killed Bloglines: http://thenextweb.com/2008/10/21/outsourcing-to-china-and-failed-auction-killed-bloglines/

Edit: as final resort I've sent an email to operations@iac.com.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Destruction Of Bloglines Now Complete; Founder Prepares To Switch To Google Reader

  ¶ 13:39 0 reacties Links naar dit bericht

  My first encounter with Google Chrome

Ok, as a novelty junkie I had to try out the much hyped Google Chrome, a new browser in the arena. My first impression is not positive, and while I as I write this even haven't tried out the features I already have a kind of aversion against it. Normally I'm quite positive about the services and software Google releases, but this one got me in a coughing fit on startup. Let me show you why:

Call me old fashioned, I never liked the default new look of Windows XP, and when doing a clean install of it one of the first things I do when the installation is complete is configuring it that it has the old Windows 98 look, because the blue rounded borders disgust me. Don't even have me started on Vista, I think it's full of shit.

So to my big surprise when I started Google Chrome it showed me those ugly borders I dislike so much. It didn't even take my settings into account and like some wise ass portrayed itself to me like the programmers thought would be cool and didn't even care how I wanted it to look, that is uniform and in sync with my other programs.

I know there are a lot of people who like to skin applications and want to make their system look so that you are unable to tell what OS they are running, I'm quite the opposite, I want everything as plain as possible. Well, in this case neither of us will get what he/she wants, Google Chrome does it its own way.

I hope I can soon elaborate more on the features that should make it interesting, but my first encounter ain't positive.

  ¶ 23:39 1 reacties Links naar dit bericht

  Unsure what to choose. For years now I've programmed a lot in Perl, and although a lot of people frown upon the language I think it is a great language. An often heard complaint is that it is a write-once-read-never language. I must admit, it is a very suitable language to write the most incredible obfuscated code (this 99 bottles of beer version is an excellent example), but what I like about the language that it leaves it up to the programmer wether he wants to write clean code or not. When I use it at work and my scripts need to be used or maintained by someone else, I try to write it as readable as possible, eventually commenting the parts that somehow are a bit more complicated to comprehend in a moment, but when I use it at home for my own purposes I want to have the freedom to write sloppy code. Perl gives me this choice. Python doesn't. Don't give me wrong, I think the language has great concepts, but my bias to Perl is a personal one.

Anyway, as you already probably have guessed from this post title, I have the intention to learn another programming language. One of the reasons is that I have the feeling that Perl is becoming less and less popular as programming language. Perls module library is immense and covers almost any field, but lately I see that whenever something interesting is released to the public, it's mostly written in Python, like Googles AppEngine. Perl is starting to lag behind with interfaces to interesting concepts like that. Well, it's not really the fault of the language, but rather diminishing support of people writing modules for it. When I say that I realise that I am one of them and you probably think "if you want is so bad, write it yourself then", on which I can partly agree. But in that regard I herald the three virtues of Perl, Laziness Impatience and Hubris. Another reason why I think it's time to look to another language is that the development of Perl 6 takes way to long in my opinion. Besides that, I personally don't agree with some of the changes, especially syntax.

As the title states, I'm unsure which language to choose. There are a lot of possibilities, but I must take into consideration that some languages are more popular than others, and therefore, there are more possible places to get stationed for work. Nevertheless I want to learn a language that is fun, offers a lot of possibilities and gives me a good amount of freedom in how I want to write my code. Here I'll write about a few that crossed my mind, and what I like in them and what I dislike.

PHP

I've programmed quite a few things in PHP 4, and it is a very nice language for writing dynamic web pages, but I've rarely used it for anything else, with the one exception of a 99 bottles of beer song generating obfuscated tiny code.

Besides not being popular as being used as a generic purpose language, PHP 4 is phased out recently and no released will be developed. The language surved my purpose, but I think I better learn a generic purpose language that also can be used embedded in web pages instead of taking the trouble learning the changed syntax of PHP 5 and only use it for web pages.

JAVA

Java is a very popular language here in The Netherlands, and if you can write software in it you are quite wanted by companies. The syntax is quite clean, but yet I think it has some severe shortcomings compared to a language like Perl. One of my gripes is the in my opinion the archaic way of working with strings and arrays. I think I have been spoiled with Perl and its easy way to concatenate strings, whilst in Java you have to fiddle around with the StringBuffer class. Another thing I don't like is that you have to catch an exception when you reached the end of an array.

A third reason cannot be blamed on the language, I have developed an aversion against the mass of frameworks built on frameworks built on frameworks on top of it. It gives learning it a very steep curve, compared to other languages. It took me days to be able to display a richfaces component in a seam generated page, although I at first thought this should be a piece of cake. Afterwards it appeared I tried to use some new yet not completely documented component and that the version of Richfaces included in JBoss Seam didn't support it yet. This nasty adventure and the storm of buzzwords like Hybernate, Beans and such made me decide to put this one on the list of less favorite languages.

RUBY

The first time I saw Ruby I liked the clean syntax, the ease of constructing classes (Perl is quite more complicated with that), and that it is completely object oriented, yet doesn't require you to write a main class like Java. Alas, Ruby isn't very wanted here in The Netherlands for commercial things, but I'll sure keep an eye on this one and perhaps give it a try when I'm writing some tool for myself.

PYTHON

Well, I already kind of gave a negative remark about the forced identing of code in Python, which I'm quite unused to because up to now all programming languages I've worked in allowed me at least some freedom concerning formatting code, but one of the core features of Python is its mandatory indenting, which is in my opinion a blessing as well as a curse. Code written with the intention to be maintained by somebody else must be properly and clearly written, documented and idented, but in my free time, it is my playtime and if I want to write sloppy unformatted code I want to be allowed to do that. Neverthelesss, Python has a strong following, being backed by Google as well as various companies, so I still think it's worth to take a look and and try to set my prejudice about forced identing aside. What I dislike hover is that I've so far been unable to find a good book about a Python/MySQL combo, whilst I stumble over the PHP/MySQL and Perl/MySQL books... Please prove me wrong and send me some links to some online books covering Python and MySQL, so far I've been unable what is the de-facto standard MySQL library for PHP whilst if you know Perl you'll find out in an instant you need to use DBI with the DBD::MySQL plugin... Or maybe thats just my years of experience in Perl saying that, because I can'tn remember in what year I've learned how to use MySQL in conjunction with Perl. Anyway, to make a long story even a little bit longer, I've decided to leave Python in my list of language I must consider trying, it still has more to offer and it would take from me, most importantly the support it gets from Google compared to other programming languages.

HASKELL

I've checked on the syntax of Haskell, and I must confess it looks really nice. It's a functional language, and I liked how structured the code looks... But yet so far the support looks very slim compared to languages like Ruby, Perl and JavaScript, and it isn't very known in the commercial world here either. Definately Haskell has my interest and I will surely keep an eye on it, but without a strong backing support I'm afraid I will decide again learning this language unless it has a more commercial support

As you can see, each language has it's pros and cons, and as of writing I'm still unsure what path to follow. If you have any pro or cons again any language I'd be happy to learn about it, but so far I'll probably stick to using Perl 5, since until so far it never failed me expressing myself with code. For my work I don't need AppEngine or Django, if I'm able to write code that processes that data that I have to in a few lines of code and make it readable (the previous code would have been a worthy contender for TheDailyWtf, but then again, I can completely understanding the what the previous developer has been through with hasty patches and assignments), but anyway I would like to give them a try and see how useful they are compared to Perl and how quickly I will get submitted to learn it.

When looking back to this article (I haven't written this in one day, really, I really had to think about all this), I think the most probably choices are Ruby, Python and Java, in that order.

Ruby has a very nice syntax, offers me almost the same amount of freedom as Perl, and proves to be very readable (even if you have to look at code programmed by someone else). Python has a tremendous amount of support (I consider Google to be a big player in this) and Java is backed by quite some companies.

Darn, this is difficult...

Maybe I should settle for JRuby?  ¶ 22:34 0 reacties Links naar dit bericht

  Small update - cataract surgery went ok Last Thursday I've had my second cataract surgery - this time my right eye - and it looks like it went ok. It doesn't hurt, the first time it did more and I assumed it was normal, apparently not. Now that both eyes are fixed I now have to get used to reading glasses, I'm not able anymore to read text on my PC or mobile without them. Lucky enough my mother (I'm at my parents place now) had some glasses stashed somewhere, so I tried them and much to my relief they help a lot.


The timing for all this is excellent, today is mothers' day and tomorrow it's my fathers birthday, on which he will turn 65. I also took the opportunity to catch up with a few friends I haven't spoken for quite a while and it was nice to see and talk to them again.

One of them came by and gave me a small present which he accidentally found on some market where they sell old stuff, and I was surprised and touched he thought of it. Remember that I blogged quite some time ago that Carlo Sinke, also known as Alf of the "New Generation Crew" (this is from the time when Commodore 64 still was one of the most popular computers) has passed away? My friend Tim found a kind of "business card" still from that time. I wonder wether anyone else still has these cards, they must be about 20 years old now. The card itself is unremarkable, but for me it still holds great emotional value, because Carlo is one of the guys who triggered my interest in programming on the C64 and helped me learning mastering the C64.


Now I'm gonna sign off and enjoy the beautiful weather outside, it's way too nice to spend time behind a computer inside, and I still have to get accustomed to wearing glasses, it somehow feels a bit odd to have something resting on your nose when you aren't used to it.  ¶ 15:23 0 reacties Links naar dit bericht