oscar.hellstrom.st :: weblog

One crucial thing the average computer user doesn’t understand about the Linux community

oscarh — Tue, 22 May 2007 11:11:11 +0000

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes wrote an article on why the average computer user does not run away from expensive OS to a free one, (mainly Windows to Linux, but there would be alternatives in both ends) and what the “Linux Community” does not understand. I’m quite sure that this is not a problem of understanding what the average computer user wants, but rather what the Linux hackers wants. I myself do not really care if the world’s computer users would run Linux, BSD, Solaris, OS X or whatnot. As long as the hacker community can have a nice OS to play around with it will do that. This is a fundamental part of what drives the community, even though “the market” does help. Linux came to exist when a Finnish guy wanted to learn more about his 386 processor (and he was fed up with MINIX). He spent a considerable time in his room hacking… and why? well not to get the world to use his operating system. Most OSS project (that is not started by the so called open source corporations) are created because someone is fed up with the current state of some software, or because someone is curious how to make things better, or even if it is possible to do it yourself rather then using what others have done.

Kingsley-Hughes writes that there are too many distributions and that this is a problem for the average user since he or she cannot just choose to install Linux. Well, this shows another interesting point of the “Linux Community” (or actually what they call the “Open Source Community”). It shows that there is not one community. Every one who is in to software and is in to sharing what he or she has accomplished is not automatically part of a community. There are a lot of individuals writing software, and if they don’t like the way it’s done today, they’ll change it. Since there are usually others who want to change things, some changes ore done in collaboration, and creates a new product. No one really cares if this confuses Mr. Anderson over in Texas.

I don’t really have fire crucial things that the average computer user could come to understand about the Linux community, but I think this one is enough. We build software because we like it, not to attract the worlds computer users. Some projects even want to scare the average user away. There are several programs you need to change the actual source to configure. The choice for this is of course not to enable anyone to learn a bit of programming. So at the end of the day, the average hacker don’t care about the average user.

ICFP Contest

oscarh — Mon, 21 May 2007 14:49:15 +0000

Last summer I and some other folks from ETC participated in the ICPF Programming Contest. Even though our result wasn’t the greatest, we still had a lot of fun during that weekend. This year I’m already looking forward to the contest and will probably participate with some people form ETC again. Everyone who is interested in reading some information about organising the contest would find the contest’s chairman, Johan Jeuring’s blog very interesting.

Taggedmail.com

oscarh — Mon, 21 May 2007 10:22:29 +0000

Taggedmail.com claims to be

a premier social networking destination and an ideal place for advertisers to reach their target audience.

This nice explanation of their service does however fit quite well with what my impression of the site is, they’re harvesting emails for what they call advertising… which would be Spam according to me. I’ve now received several email from this “service” and I’m quite sure that it is some email harvesting system. The first two email’s seemed legit, since they included proper names in the title, such as “Maria has tagged you”. I was however suspicious, since I don’t really know any Maria that well. The last four of them have however been from names such as “TackTackTack” (Would be ThankThanksThanks in English), and the actual website does not exactly give an impression of a usable online community/forum. My normal take on these unknown sites who wants you to sign up and give them e-mail addresses of you friends is to ignore them. Well I usually try to not confirm my email to any spam systems anyway.

Kinesis Contoured Keyboard

oscarh — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 16:05:30 +0000

Today I received my Kinesis Contoured keyboard. Enough has already been written about the keyboard by others, but it is a programmable ergonomic keyboard, which is quite different to type on compared to “normal” keyboards. After having it for a day I’m starting to get a bit more used to typing on it, though I still feel very clumsy. A bummer is also that my specialized keyboard layout does not really work very well on this keyboard, so I will have to rework that some day in the future. Though I should probably be a bit more used to the keyboard before I can figure out where I want to put the keys. I’m also trying to come up with any good use for the macros on the keyboard, which can store up to 48 macros.
All in all it feels a bit like the first week with the Dvorak layout, with frustration and all. Learning to use the Contoured keyboard will probably not take me very long though.

Entering BSD Land

oscarh — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 14:00:23 +0000

After long enough, yet another developer has entered into BSD Land. This one took the way by FreeBSD. Right now I’m mostly benchmarking Erlang applications on FreeBSD, which so far is a bit disappointing, since kpoll is disabled for FreeBSD. Apparently FreeBSD has issues with kqueue and pipes, at least according to the OTP folks. I will try to compile the ERTS with kpoll support anyway, and see what happens. An interesting observation so far is that Ejabberd is spending much more time in kernel-space rather than user-space or this FreeBSD connection. The time spent in kernel-space could probably (?) be shortened with the support for kpoll.

UPDATE:
By hacking the configure script and forcing it to compile with kernel polling support on FreeBSD I noticed really nice performance, until the VM hung for quite some time. It seems that the combination of Erlang, FreeBSD and kqueue indeed have issues.

Benchmarking with Tsung

oscarh — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 09:41:02 +0000

At the moment I’m running a lot of benchmarks with Tsung. The funny thing with this is that I’ve had more problems getting the client machines to cope with the pressure than the server. I’m running two clients, which are hitting a server, trying to get as many active concurrent connections an possible. Not knowing too much about the inner workings of the Linux TCP/IP stack, I’ve so far run in to ENFILE and EADDRINUSE. The first was kinda expected and is solved by bumping up the allowed file descriptors for the Erlang process. The second however, var rather unexpected, since the clients do not bind to any port. It however turned out that the range of local ports available for non-privileged processes were way to narrow. This magic range is however easily changed with sysctl (net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range) or /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_local_port_range.

The server has so far suffered from too few file descriptors, but keeps up rather good :)

OCaml-9P

oscarh — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 07:01:48 +0000

OCaml-IXP is now called OCaml-9P…

There was never such a thing as an IXP protocol, it was rather a clever name of another implementation.

ocaml-wmii (updated)

oscarh — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 21:30:59 +0000

ocaml-wmii is an OCaml replacement for the default wmiirc (used to control Window Manager Improved 2) and has now reached what we call version 1.0. ocaml-wmii does everything that the original wmiirc does, plus some extra features.

If you would like to try it out, get OCaml-9P from here and ocaml-wmii from
http://personal.oscarh.net/stuff/ocaml-wmii-1.0.tar.bz2. You also need an OCaml compiler.

1) Install OCaml-9P
2) Unpack ocaml-wmii
(3) Edit src/wmii_conf.ml, only if you feel the need. Check out the plugins if you chose to edit this.)
4) Compile ocaml-wmii
5) move the wmiirc binary to a place where wmii can find it.

I believe there are more thorough instructions is the README in the package.

OCaml-wmii

oscarh — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 16:21:22 +0000

OCaml-wmii sources is now published at http://ocaml-wmii.otur.se/hg! Who knows, maybe there will be a “home page” some day :)

Repositories

oscarh — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 17:31:52 +0000

I have published a so called collection of source code repositories at http://personal.oscarh.net/repos/ where I will publish a few of all the hacks I do :)
Also check out smergos, which is a bit more serious project.

Feel free to check it all out and comment on the content!