Chris Easton » Computers

The internet, is it still a series of tubes?

Chris Easton — Fri, 06 May 2011 07:06:50 +0000

It looks like congress had a hearing about net neutrality and they still don’t understand the issue: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/05/a-rube-goldberg-theory-of-regulation-net-neutrality-hearing-gets-testy.ars. What options do you have with limited options or in some cases a monopoly? How can you say one doesn’t exist when your DSL provider is limited to 256k upload download and the only cable company in town caps your monthly internet usage at 50GB? I’m fortunate to live in an area with Fios, with a pretty damn speedy 15mbps/5mbps connection for a reasonable price. But my parents are limited to Time Warner Cable and DSL clocked at 1.5mbps/256k for the same price I pay for my internet. I keep reading stories about the caps in Canada, as low as 50GB and in New Zealand, as low as 50GB. How can we have another Apple of internet services that starts in the garage if our home broadband is so expensive? And we’re still behind some other countries like South Korea where you can get a 100mbit/100mbit connection for US $30/month. But there is still hope! If only each city would invest like it does for water and sewer systems and bring in Fiber to the Home where an ISP can hook you up for no or minimal cost? And finally treat the internet like it is, a utility and not a service. Its the future for heaven’s sake! Just look at companies like Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Netflix, and Amazon. If we allow the ISPs to do what they want with the monopolies they have where we don’t have any options of anything comparably different we’re screwed. I like what some cities in Utah have banded together to do, which is what I said before, that the internet should be a utility and open to competition. The city invests in the infrastructure and leases it out to ISPs when someone signs up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Telecommunication_Open_Infrastructure_Agency. Or is that too close to socialism or some other stupid argument?

Of course when you propose competition, the current monopoly steps up: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/10/want-50mbps-internet-in-your-town-threaten-to-roll-out-your-own.ars

Android tablets

Chris Easton — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 16:22:44 +0000

So many new android based tablets are hitting thematket. A lot of them are overpriced, like the Motorola Xoom, others will be dirt cheap, like the Asus Transformer. But there are also hidden tablets, waiting to be unleashed. I recently bought a Barnes & Noble Nook Color for $200 on sale. With a little effort I now have vanilla android running on it. I can still read my books, my daughter and I can play angry birds on it, and I can type a blog post. This is by far the coolest thing and it makes me love and appreciate technology and innovation so much. There is a community of hard working volunteers that has put this together, which is just awesome. Props to everyone in the android hacking space.

Fixed a strange Eclipse and Ubuntu error

Chris Easton — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 07:02:03 +0000

I started to develop some applications via Eclipse using Apache Wicket. I’m using the maven plugin for eclipse and using the wicket archetype to setup the project. One issue I have on Linux that I didn’t have on Windows is that I was unable to run on server, so I couldn’t debug or view my code changes live. I’m using Eclipse Helios, Java JDK 1.6.0 Update 21, Ubuntu 10.04. One issue perhaps is that I’m using the amd64 version (x86_64 or whatever its now called). After reinstalling Java and Eclipse multiple times I finally found out the problem. Out of the box I have to change the project settings. Under the Properties for a project I click Project Facets and change Java 1.5 to Java 1.4 and amazingly, that fixed it. If you’re running into a similar problem, try that out! It took my a while to figure it out, and I don’t know why it works but it does.

Fisheye/Crucible Performance Solutions and a DbException Error Workaround

Chris Easton — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 02:31:08 +0000

Indexing a repository in Subversion takes a very long time. Especially if you have the Subversion repositories stored on an NFS and the size is over 15 gigs. Below are some performance improvements that worked for the repositories I’ve dealt with and some workarounds that might not have been previously documented.

For performance, if you have the repository on an NFS share that is also pointed to by the serving mechanism you should duplicate the repository locally using svnsync. This helps remove some of the overhead when dealing with the live filesystem on the NFS share.
Additionally, using PostgreSQL or MySQL in place of HSQLdb is always helpful! The new versions support these external databases, this reduces CPU usage immensely.
If you have a ton of code (who doesn’t?), tag versions, then remove the versions at some point in a single merge you’ll have to reduce the block size of the repository as it will eat a lot of Memory as it indexes all the files that have been deleted.

If you run into the problems with certain revisions not being indexed and the scanner getting hung in an infinite loop, and get exceptions like this:
com.cenqua.fisheye.rep.DbException
com.cenqua.fisheye.rep.RepositoryClientException
com.cenqua.fisheye.util.VisitorException
com.cenqua.fisheye.rep.DbException
sun.io.MalformedInputException

What you need to do, in Linux anyway, is set the LANG environment variable to UTF-8 and restart the Fisheye server. I had this problem and it took forever to find a solution to it. The environment variable was previously set to: UTF-8.en_us on the server I was dealing with.

You probably didn’t notice the server down last night.. But if you did…

Chris Easton — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 00:08:23 +0000

I host this server with another person and we’ve been running low on disk space every couple of months and had to jump in and clear up some web logs. This has been happening for years. So I had the bright idea of last night stopping the server and expanding the space of the main drive. It appears our host had given us some extra space so it looked perfect. I shut down the system and started expanding the drive. After waiting 20 minutes I eventually fell asleep. I awoke at 2 am to find myself sleeping with the laptop and lights on. The laptop had lost juice (or the will to stay on) and needed a recharge. But I fell asleep again before going to recharge it, I wanted to rest my eyes for a minute or two more. But in the end the person I host with started the server and I checked and started the Apache server in the morning. Now all is well. Next time I’ll be sure to get started earlier or wait until the weekend.

ATI Radeon 5770 Issues

Chris Easton — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 01:51:45 +0000

I recently upgraded my computer to take advantage of a great deal at Fry’s. Plus the darn thing was running slow sluggishly even after upgrading the RAM to 6 gigs. I upgraded from an Athlon X2 3200+ to:
Intel Core i7 860
MSI X58 Pro-E Motherboard
6GB OC-Z DDR3 Ram
ATI Radeon 5770 1gb From XFX
Windows 7 Professional x64

When first assembled everything seemed fine. I ran memtest86+ to make sure the ram and everything was fine. I ended up getting a bad stick of Ram and had to send in an RMA to get it replaced. I will probably never buy OCZ Ram again, it seems so sketchy after my previous encounters with them. In any case, the computer is running much much better now and seems generally more responsive. I can run multiple Virtual Machines without problem whereas previously it’d slow down for the first and struggle with anything more than one. But I’ve got a small problem; see, the video card apparently has a problem that ATI is looking into (I will post my sources later) whereas the graphics are a bit glitchy and will eventually cause the computer to lock up and gray screen. This is really unfortunate because its been two weeks since the last revision of drivers and I’m currently stuck with a malfunctioning computer. I found a workaround though that might not work for everyone. I noticed the problem when running fullscreen 1920×1200 on my 24″ monitor but not at lower resolutions. When the screen was filled the top part of the screen would get random glitches/refresh problems and after about a day of running it actually crashed on my. I lowered the resolution to 1920×1080 and besides the black bars at the top and bottom of my screen everything is running well. So that might work if you have the same problem. Now to hope they fix this issue in the next driver release…

Update! The recent drivers fixed the problems. Now I’m back to full resolution without flicker and no crashes (yet).

Dell M1330 Problems (again)

Chris Easton — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 08:09:04 +0000

My Dell M1330 laptop I bought around last May (in 2008) broke again. The first problem it had was the Video Card was toasted. I found this out when the laptop booted with vertical white lines sometime in early October or late September. After Googling for hours, I came across the problem others were having with the Nvidia card and some possible solutions. I opened a ticket with Dell and they had an extended warranty for the Nvidia card found in my notebook. They happily fixed the problem and sent me my laptop back last month. A couple of weeks following the return, and maybe 5 or 6 uses, the laptop stopped charging and nearly drained the battery because I didn’t notice the laptop was “unplugged” since it was plugged in. I was able to plug it in and bend it slightly up to get the battery to charge a little, but shortly after that, it would not charge anymore. So I’ve been stuck with a brick for 2 weeks. After chatting shortly with a Dell Rep and finding out the motherboard needs to be replace, which won’t be covered, and searching for a new laptop but not being able to spend the money on a new one. I decide to contact Dell again about this problem to plead my case. Finally talking with a nice support representative, they offered me a $179 “special warranty” that would send a tech out to fix the laptop and cover it for another year. This offer would not be put into writing to be thought over, and could not appear again if I called back. Okay, thats not very cool, you kind of have me stuck though, what am I to do? Try again… After telling the problem over and over again, which is basically the motherboard needs to be replaced again, they were able to accept it back for a motherboard replacement. Luckily the logic that: The motherboard was replaced for the Nvidia-card problem, the motherboard’s DC plug was broken and the motherboard needs to be replaced, they are linked and it should be covered. So they’ll (hopefully) be sending me another box and fix the problem and the laptop will be happy for another couple of years. I promise to take it for walks.

System Monitoring Tools

Chris Easton — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 06:51:47 +0000

I came home from work and my computer is making a whirring sound. I think it might be dust in one of the fans that is causing the sound as it usually is. I then remember what happened with my Dell Laptop, the video card fried after the fan was on all the time. After researching that issue it turned out to be a faulty video card from nVidia and it will be replaced. But I remembered a name of some software people were using to monitor their systems during the debacle. I finally decide it was a good time to try it out and I’m really glad I did because I found another tool to add to my computer-arsenal. The tool is called Speedfan and you can get it Here.

Basically it monitors fans and temperatures and allows you some access to Hard drive SMART statistics. The SMART stats tell you the health of your drives and can indicate a failure pending or generally how your drives are doing. You can do an in-depth analysis and get some pretty interesting stuff. Here’s one for my drive: HD Report Card — Good to know I might be needing one soon!

Why Microsoft, Why!

Chris Easton — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 08:11:19 +0000

They've copied just about a billion other internet video sites (and Youtube!). Why can't they be somewhat original. Oh well, they have a funny video on there, which is right here.

Registerfly Madness and FUNNIES

Chris Easton — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 04:55:31 +0000

Okay, this is more directed towards eNom than it is towards Registerfly. I've had 4 domains for quite some time on Registerfly, they were happy. But then something happened, someone got angry and then my domains got sent to Limbo. They weren't killed but were forced to hang out and be free from belonging to anyone. They went from Registerfly to eNom, whom doesn't know what to do with them. I've been waiting a week after sending in precious information trying to get these domains back before they expire. We'll see if they do.

This is the first to go..

Now, for funny vids!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iYBmAVuBns
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZrr7AZ9nCY