The ravens are looking a bit sluggish. Tell Malcolm they need new batteries.
Monday, February 25
Almost, But Not Quite
The
Samsung Galaxy Note 8 ticks most of the boxes where the Nexus 7 is wanting:
- Stylus
- Rear 5MP camera
- 2GB RAM
- MicroSD slot (up to 64GB)
There's a couple of things that could be better. The CPU is a quad-core 1.6GHz A9, up from the quad 1.3GHz chip in the Nexus 7, but the new A15 core in the (Samsung-built) Nexus 10 is significantly faster. And despite the slightly larger screen, the resolution is still 1280x800; I really want to see 1920x1200 at this screen size. 1280x800 is adequate, but a little short of ideal. I've heard that the screen resolution is limited by the Wacom digitiser - the Note 10.1 is 1280x800 as well, where the Nexus 10 is precisely double that, 2560x1600.
It sounds great for my tablet use (reading, games, and note-taking), but we'll have to wait and see on price.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
09:43 AM
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Ermagerd.
I'm looking at upgrading my current 1GHz/4.3" phone that's about two years old. I'd love the Note 2, but I can't quite afford it, so I'm looking at the GS2/GS3. It doesn't seem like there's a huge difference in performance between them beyond the shipping OS version; if I got a 2, I'd probably root it and put JB on it if a custom ROM is out yet.
Posted by: RickC at Wednesday, February 27 2013 11:39 AM (WQ6Vb)
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The big difference is that the S3 is 1280x720 and the S2 is 800x480.
The S4 is expected to launch pretty soon, and will probably be 1920x1080.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, February 27 2013 12:20 PM (PiXy!)
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Yeah, and there's like a .25" diagonal difference as well.
My current phone has the same resolution as the S2, so the effect is that I just don't have the higher resolution. I'd love an S4 (or preferably a Note 2 (or 3, because that's probably coming soon too) but I'm not sure I can swing the cost. Could just wait a while, I guess.
BTW, you have an amusing spam comment at the moment: "When I initially commented I clicked the "Notify me when new comments are added" checkbox and now each time a comment is added I get three e-mails with the same comment. Is there any way you can remove people from that service? Thank you!"
Obviously that's not appropriate to here, but it would be funny if it were actually true, and I guess you have to grudgingly give them a point for not using the typical lame comment. But you have to take a point off for not realizing this would happen (notice the commenter's "name".)
Posted by: RickC at Thursday, February 28 2013 02:55 AM (A9FNw)
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Friday, February 22
WFT?!
So exactly how long has my network switch been subtly broken?
I've been a bit down on the cheap LaCie NASes all this time because they just don't deliver the claimed performance. At least, not on RAID-5.
LaCie claim 70MB/s. I only ever got around 20MB/s.
Until I swapped out my network switch just now. Bang. 70MB/s instantly. On RAID-5. The NAS was never the problem.
The new switch is the exact same model as the old one, except, apparently, that it's not horribly broken.
Now I'm just a bit down on the cheap LaCie NASes because the two new ones I bought (without disks) just plain don't work. They power up and get an IP address (I can see them on the DHCP server), and I can ping them, but they don't do anything else. You can't even turn them off - the power switch has no effect. Behaviour is identical on both devices, whether they're configured with just one disk, a full five, or none at all.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
04:25 PM
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So, note to self, don't dabble with the LaCies either.
(We went through Freedom9s and Iomegas and DLinks and Drobos (NOT CHEAP) before settling on the QNAPs. WE LOVE QNAP.)
Posted by: GreyDuck at Saturday, February 23 2013 12:51 AM (xbP2x)
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Aside: RAID-5? Stinky, especially for writes. (Anecdote: years ago, I was contracting for a company who contacted their database vendor for some performance tips. The vendor came in, looked around, and said "call us back when you're off RAID 5." Another anecdote: I once moved the database off a RAID 5 SAN onto a pair of mirrored drives that lived in the server. Nobody ever noticed, performance-wise. In both cases, these were databases with a lot of updates.)
I'd assume Pixy knows this, but for everyone else who uses, for example, transactional databases with a lot of I/O, ignore the hardware vendors. You don't want RAID 5.
Posted by: rick c at Saturday, February 23 2013 02:12 AM (A9FNw)
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That could have been me on the other end of that call.
I was application support rather than database support, but we all said the same thing: Get off RAID-5 before you talk to us, and yes, the hardware vendors
are lying to you.
For file storage, though, RAID-5 it's fine. And for databases on SSD, it's probably fine too, because SSDs are so much faster than disk on random writes that it doesn't matter unless you're at the far, far end of the curve.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, February 23 2013 05:55 PM (PiXy!)
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Pixy, I need an application of the ban hammer, please.
My spammer just returned. I tagged his most recent spam as "hide" so you could look at it. Here's what I could determine about him:
Name: muhammadali
email: muhammadali.ca4@gmail.com
home page: safdsfds.mee.nu
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Sunday, February 24 2013 12:52 AM (+rSRq)
5
I saw that you'd done a lot of work (including hammering my spammer, thank you ) and this morning there seemed to be no new spam. It was like a headache being gone.
But now I see they're back again. It is a pity...
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Monday, February 25 2013 04:51 AM (+rSRq)
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Yeah, I think there's a bug somewhere that's letting spammers through. I'll be taking a look at that later today. I may also be implementing a simple captcha for unregistered users.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, February 25 2013 09:31 AM (PiXy!)
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I think a captcha may be the only solution. Go for it!
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Tuesday, February 26 2013 07:37 AM (+rSRq)
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Wednesday, February 20
Akismet Deployed
Just deployed Akismet as a second-source spam filter for Minx. It only needed a little tweaking and is now running happily.
If you get blocked - you shouldn't, but if you do - please email me.
Update: In unrelated news, I accidentally deleted all my comments. That's the comments I'd posted myself, not the ones on this blog. I've put 99.5% of them back where they were; the remaining 9 are in the system but floating about detached from the posts. I'll fix those later.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
07:04 PM
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FWIW, I actually had to take one of my own comments out of "junk" status on my own blog.
Posted by: wonderduck at Thursday, February 21 2013 10:50 AM (plIxv)
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It should be better now; let me know if you have any further problems.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, February 21 2013 12:23 PM (PiXy!)
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Spam still getting through; tweaked some more.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, February 21 2013 02:09 PM (PiXy!)
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I think it's probably impossible to stop it all, sad to say. Even requiring a login doesn't work 100%; I had a couple of spams about two weeks ago.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Thursday, February 21 2013 03:19 PM (+rSRq)
5
They're
really persistent.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, February 21 2013 04:47 PM (PiXy!)
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What's even worse is I've been seeing ones that indicate a human who actually read the blog post, has troubled themselves to create a login, and has made a
relevant comment followed by a spammy link. In one case, it was a comment on a blogspot blog, and the person had a Google+ account.
Posted by: rick c at Saturday, February 23 2013 02:15 AM (A9FNw)
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Monday, February 18
Oh Look, A Brick
My Nexus 7 is not a happy bunny. It won't even boot in recovery mode.
Also, either my network switch, or my LaCie NAS - or both - are playing up.
Fun.
Update: Found the super-double-extra-secret Android factory reset menu, and Android factory resetted it. It's working again! Now all I need to do is reload 300 apps and 600 books. Interestingly, it reset to Jellybean 4.2.1, not the 4.1.0 that it originally shipped with.
My saved games are gone, but I wasn't in the middle of anything, so no great drama there. Well, my capital city in Triple Town is toast, but okay. I still need to see if the Kindle app restores the magazines I'd downloaded or if they've expired; I was wondering what would happen if I got a new tablet, and now I get to find out without even having to spend $299 first.
Update Twi: Yep, magazines are good, but it looks like it wants me to download all 600 books again one by bleedin' one. The Android Kindle app leaves a certain amount to be desired.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
10:48 PM
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Actual Kindles aren't much better for reloading a library. I crashed my Paperwhite the day it arrived by rapidly queueing up multiple downloads.
-j
Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, February 19 2013 03:41 AM (+cEg2)
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When I got my Fire HD, it handled the reload just fine. (Of course, my library isn't as huge as Pixy's.)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Tuesday, February 19 2013 07:11 AM (+rSRq)
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I really pity Pixy these days, about the latest spammer. Working on the site must be like working in a cloud of mosquitos.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Wednesday, February 20 2013 03:44 AM (+rSRq)
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Yes, they're beginning to get on my nerves. Just a little.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, February 20 2013 06:06 PM (PiXy!)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, February 20 2013 06:46 PM (PiXy!)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, February 20 2013 06:54 PM (PiXy!)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, February 20 2013 07:02 PM (PiXy!)
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New spam filter is alive!
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, February 20 2013 07:02 PM (PiXy!)
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Not perfect, though. Still tweaking.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, February 20 2013 09:09 PM (PiXy!)
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Friday, February 08
Mongodex
In other database-geeky news, MongoDB 2.4 has hit RC (release candidate), with 2.4.0-rc0 quietly sneaking onto the download site.
This is the first version of MongoDB to support full-text indexing. That's currently labelled
experimental; it will be interesting to see how well it works and if it's ready for not-quite-enterprisey use, say, to pick an example entirely at random, in a multi-user blogging system.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
03:01 PM
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Thursday, February 07
No Going Back
Intel's DC S3700 SSDs - the followup to the reliable and affordable but otherwise unremarkable 710 series - are now shipping.
Why they couldn't just call them the 720 or 750 or something I don't know, but if you work with enterprise databases at all, you want these drives.
Random read performance increases over the 710 series by 2x.
Random write performance increases over the 710 series by up to 15x.
The S3700 also comes with a consistency guarantee - with a queue depth of 32, 99.9999% of writes will take less than 20ms. (At an average of 36,000 IOPS, using 4KB random writes over the entire device capacity.) If you look at load graphs of older drives under heavy load, you see very noticeable drops in performance at irregular intervals as they run out of free blocks and have to reclaim space. This just doesn't happen with the S3700.
It's also 40% cheaper then the previous model.
If you're still running databases on spinning disk, it's past time to move on.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
06:40 PM
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Agreements, but then I work for Fusion-io, so naturally I would say that.
BTW - what's with the sexspam?
Posted by: d.k.Allen at Friday, February 08 2013 11:02 PM (NxEfC)
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Wednesday, February 06
MeeSQL 5.6
MySQL 5.6 is out today. This one has enough enhancements to be worth a 6.0 version number, though hopefully without the usual .0 bugs. In particular, it's the first version of MySQL to ship with full-text index support for InnoDB, previously only supported in MyISAM. It also supports live table migration for InnoDB, another thing you could only really do with MyISAM before.
The problem with MyISAM is that its concurrency support is miserable. It doesn't have real transactions, and while it can support as many simultaneous reads as you like, writes lock the entire table.
The problem with InnoDB, at least, if you look back five years or so, is that it is significantly slower and larger than MyISAM. These days, though, neither of those is true any longer.
I tested copying 100,000 posts from Minx into nearly-empty tables built with MyISAM and both compressed and uncompressed InnoDB. I say "nearly" empty because MyISAM has an optimisation trick for loading data into empty tables, and benchmarking it that way doesn't give you realistic performance figures.
- MyISAM: 75.63 seconds / 64M data + 74M indexes = 138M
- InnoDB Uncompressed: 34.6 seconds / 152M
- InnoDB Compressed (8K block size): 49.41 seconds / 76M
So InnoDB uncompressed is 10% larger than MyISAM but over twice as fast, and InnoDB compressed is 40% smaller than MyISAM and 50% faster. This is on a table with 63 fields, ten regular indexes, and three separate full-text indexes, so it should be exercising the storage engine pretty thoroughly. More write-optimised tables would of course be faster to load.
At that rate, it only takes about an hour to load the whole mee.nu post and comment history into InnoDB - so that's exactly what I'm planning to do.
Those benchmarks above were actually timed while that full load was running, which would likely slow InnoDB down a bit; I'll re-run them once the load finishes. But it's not an unreasonable thing to do, since one of the major points of InnoDB is that it can run multiple write threads simultaneously.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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