October 17th, 2008 • Comments Off on Visualization
Ever heard of Ben fry? No? – You should 🙂 he did some great stuff with visualization. For example visualizing the pacman source code. Or a tool for visualizing the evolution of software projects in revisionist. He has some other great stuff on his homepage. Also interesting is the tool processing, which is also used in code_swarm. Some samples of his data visualization:
…to play around with the new VirtualBox Version. In the next version hopefully it will be possible to use SATA disc images with a OpenSolaris client. Then I could test ZFS with several disc images…Useful? no – but fun. To play around with hotspares, delete disc images on the host, RAID-Z, RAID-Z2, test thumper disc configurations (which does not make sense I do not have to think about hot spots, where to position disc :-))
October 6th, 2008 • Comments Off on Mercurial – and how it helps to find bugs
The simple question is: how can you use a source code management system to find bugs? First of start by using Mercurial (As you might know: always try to use distributed source code management systems :-))And then install the bisect extension. It is very similar to the version in GIT.
The Basic idea is the following. Take a bug free revision and a revision which has a bug in it. Then use bisect to get a revision in the middle. Test this revision and look if it is bug free or not. Then do a bisect in the higher or lower half. And so on…Until you find the revision in which the bug appeared. Pretty neat he?
Here is another GTD tool. It will greatly improve they way you work. I only Tab Options+Space on my Mac I can instantly do thinks. For example search on google maps, write emails, looking in wikipedia, searching withour opening new tabs typing addresses and stuff. Great tool – it is alpha but worth a try!
It is already some days ago that I joined Sun Microsystems and now I finally gave ZFS a shot. You probably all know about the nice features ZFS has – so no more summary here. Feel free to browse to the website of ZFS to look for that.
More impressiv to me was the video I found on google video from the systemhelden guys. I must admit that it is somehow funny, there is still some nice info in it.
There is also a English version around somewhere. I like the idea and doing it as a demo is nice but a real practical solution might look different. USB sticks are not your first choice when you think about data security. The memory chips are not really high quality stuff and fail after so-and-so-much read and write operations. But anyhow nice idea – and I like the blinking of the USB sticks 🙂