number 9

I’m on Ubuntu for most stuff (though I escaped from GNOME a while back). Here’s a question:

Why does totem think it can play any content at all?

Whenever I go to a webpage with quicktime/real/anything video, it pops up “Totem could not play ‘fd://0’”.

Totem, we know. As we’ve established, you are fucking useless. The only shame is that you persist in trying.

Mplayer can play any video format ever, from the command line, with about 30 alternative output mechanisms for audio and video (watching star wars in an xterm is highly recommended).

Rather than put this in the base, Ubuntu decided it would be more fun to have me
alternate between swearing at ‘plugger’ and resorting to ‘view source’ and wget.

So, if you’d like to watch video on ubuntu, you need to:

1. enable the ‘multiverse’ repo
2. sudo apt-get update
3. sudo apt-get install mplayer mozilla-mplayer
4. sudo apt-get remove totem-mozilla

Then go to the mplayer site ,download the right ‘Binary Codec Packages’ for your architecture (these work on any UNIX). It untars to make a folder called something like:
’essential-20061022’ – rename that to /usr/lib/win32 and you’re done.

No idea how to get quicktime and realplayer to do the same,

So Google are now selling apps which I suppose is good news for people who don’t believe software is worth using unless they have to pay for it.

I only use Gmail (and analytics – They are watching you right now) but that’s proof they can make it work – the only webmail system that doesn’t stink (threading, ‘conversations’, keyboard shortcuts, taggable messages, anti-spam that works, stop me when I find something Groupwise/Squirrelmail can do).

I’d jump at the chance to edit word docs/excel spreadsheets online with a decent ajax interface (openoffice is enormous, memory hungry and, frankly, shit).

Rather than wasting time writing a client with ‘enhanced’ functionality, they get the webapp right.

the wonderful thing about Tiggers Gmail

It’s the only one.

You add a feature once and it’s everywhere.
Google talk just appeared one morning, so did spellcheck.

Fixing the recent contact list vulnerability didn’t involve deployment frameworks, software updates or remote imaging.

All users get the fix at once (the number of machines infected with 4 year old outlook viruses is unbelievable). You don’t have to worry about supporting old versions. Piracy is an impossibility.

And people still wonder if Microsoft should be worried?

If you’re dealing with lots of small files, a
NFS and ZFS combination
can run slower than you’d like.

For example, untarring the apache source tree on the NFS client:

planb:$ time tar xvf httpd-2.2.4.tar.gz
real    2m9.594s
user    0m0.356s
sys     0m0.508s

Ouch.

BenR mentioned turning off the ZIL
(ZFS intent log ) to speed up ZFS+NFS over aggregated Gbit ethernet – I doubted my 100Mbit link would have the same bottleneck for anything,
but it was worth a go.

Tell the ZFS/NFS server to switch off the ZIL:

vera# echo 'set zfs:zil_disable=1' >> /etc/system

Then either reboot, or run:

vera # echo ‘zil_disable/W 1’ | mdb -kw
vera # zpool export tank
vera # zpool import tank

In my case, I might as well reboot.

planb:$ mv httpd-2.2.4 outoftheway
planb:$ time tar xzf httpd-2.2.4.tar.gz
real    0m4.862s
user    0m0.368s
sys     0m0.440s

Holy crap.

There are some
implications to the ‘correctness’ of this from the NFS clients point of view but on the ZFS box itself it’s non-lethal, so I think
I’ll keep it (I’m snapshotting the share three times a day, so I’m
reasonably safe if when Linux shits itself).