Somewhere out there!

An interesting set of stats pulled from: Mac Forums – Pentium M and Yonah Processors in Upcoming Macs?

With HT enabled, I can run two copies of the job, but they each take 3 CPU hours (and the two finish in 3 wall clock hours).

So, in a day, I can run 12 jobs without hyper-threading, or 16 jobs with hyper-threading. My Opterons do about 13 per day per CPU. (3.6 GHz/1MiB Xeon, 2.6GHz Opteron)

Is it slower with HT – by one measure, yes. Is it faster with HT – by a different measure, yes.

Mike Calligaro has posted a very interesting discussion about ROM/RAM battery usage in PDAs.

The requirement was that, at the point where we decided the batteries were “critically low,” they had to still have enough power to keep the RAM charged for 72 hours. The idea there was that you could discover that you were out of power on Friday on the way home and you’d still have your data on Monday when you got back to your charger.

A typical battery holds 1000mAh of charge. 128M of RAM takes about 500mAh to stay resident for 72 hours. 64M takes about 250. This is why you never saw a 256M WM 2003 device. It would have run for a minute then decided its batteries were critically low.

This is why switching to Persistent Storage can radically improve your battery life. With PS, we removed the 72 hour requirement.

I happened to have two IBM WinXP laptops on my desktop tonight as I was installing the NX client on one of these machine before my brother goes to China at the end of the week.

Anyway, I had a remote NX desktop running on his machine to my colo Xen machine about 256kbps (50ms) DSL away and on mine I had the local NX desktop which I’ve been using as a test install for the past two weeks. Compression was set at modem speeds for the remote and LAN speeds for the local desktops. I decided I need a test to show off NX off to him and figured a quick look at my gallery would be good. And it was. It surprised even myself.

The remote desktop loaded this page faster than the local desktop. There was a definitely noticeable difference in page display speed in Firefox. The quality of the remote desktop on the two screens was hardily different. The thumbnails on the remote were slightly blurry, but not by much.

The remote machine is sitting next (Xen-wise) to the gallery web server and obviously my local desktop load the thumbnails over the DSL link. So this is a certain testament to NX’s performance given that same page and images were rendered and presented faster from the remote location.

Detailed HOWTO on seting up Freenx on Fedora. Some comments about getting Gnome to work. I think Ubuntu has the same problem, but unfortunately doesn’t have the xkb config files mentioned. Will have to investigate further.

For a while I haven’t been able to get spellbound working. Today I got annoyed and discovered the following hint: Re: Firefox & Spellbound & Hoary – Solved.

The following worked for me:

* unzip spellbound\_lib\_linux_1.0.2.xpi
* cd bin/component/
* sudo cp \* /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/components/
* sudo mkdir /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/components/myspell
* unzip spell-en-NZ.xpi; rm install.js
* sudo cp * /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/components/myspell
* finally install spellbound as normal

I’ve just finished reading the latest two books from Richard Morgan, Broken Angels
and Market Forces. With these two books is now pretty much on my default for consistent quality buy list, along with Greg Bear, David Brin, Peter Hamilton, Robin Hobb and David Zindell.

Read the rest of this entry »

I was trying to figure out how to launch X11 based OO2 (v109) open-document format files from Finder. Initially I found this useful OSX/X11 FAQ, but the particular item on “Launch X11 applications directly in the Finder” was good only for applications and not associating file types with an application. After hunting around a bit more I discovered X11 Extension.

X11 Extension is a background application that makes it easy to X11 apps, X11 documents, Window Managers and Desktops.

Basically X11 Extensions has a pref menu for setting up file types with X11 applications (ie dot-ods with …/program/scalc), you then associate in Finder the OSX application “X11 Extension”. This acts as the loader, which checks it’s X11 file type association list and loads the appropriate application.

Now by next is to figure out how to manage remote filesystems and map uids from my NFS mounts to my OSX uids. It would be nice if I could do this without having to change (find -uid #uid -exec chmod #nuid {} \;) all the uids associated with my current OSX user.