December 5th, 2008 • Comments Off on My first SSD drive
After ordering my first Solid State Drive on Tuesday, it arrived on Thursday and today was the day I first tried it. It’s a patriot 64GB Warp v2 drive. And I got it for a reasonable price. Here is a nice picture of the drive. It’s quite light and looks nice, but that is my opinion.
About speed: You can feel the performance increase, and if you look at the numbers the increase is quite impressive. The systems boots twice as fast as before, applications launch faster. Although I must admit that the Intel disc might be faster. Here is the output of hdparm:
Before
/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 1768 MB in 2.00 seconds = 884.39 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 121 MB in 3.00 seconds = 40.66 MB/sec
After:
/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 1660 MB in 2.00 seconds = 830.30 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 278 MB in 3.02 seconds = 92.07 MB/sec
The noice reduction is also very good – if the fan is off, you hear nothing, and by nothing I mean nothing. You here only your own typing 🙂
Also the power consumption seems to be much better – in normal mode I can use my notebook 45 minuter longer.
Only negative points are the size of the disc and sometimes the performance is rapidly down for some reason, I have to investigate that further. But for now it was a real good deal!
Categories: Personal • Tags: Tech • Permalink for this article
December 4th, 2008 • Comments Off on Python 3.0 released – Juhu!
http://www.python.org/download/releases/3.0/
Categories: Personal • Tags: Python • Permalink for this article
November 26th, 2008 • Comments Off on Doing it the cloud computing way
Sun has many cloud computing initiatives e.g. network.com. Playing only a underpart is the work done in the RESERVOIR project. RESERVOIR stands for Resources and Services Virtualization without Barriers and is part of the Framework 7 program of the European Union.
Sun is part of this RESERVOIR project and provides great technologies to the project. Besides working on standards for upcoming Cloud Computing frameworks Sun will
- setup and configure the Sun Grid Engine so it is able to run in Cloud Computing environments
- Develop a application container which allows it to handle Java based applications the Cloud way.
The first part is pretty straight forward, while the second part involves more software development. The goal is it to provide a application container which allows the deployment of different kind of Java applications. Those services should then be managed e.g. based upon predefined SLA definitions. Service can then be started, migrated, suspended, consolidate/distributed (if more instance are running) and stopped.
Sun is therefor developing the Virtual Java Service Container with the project name Floccus 🙂 More details are coming up.
Categories: Work • Tags: Cloud • Permalink for this article
November 25th, 2008 • 1 Comment
I have been a great fan of pushing the degree of automation to a limit. And as stated in this blog post: and as a follow up of and OSGI Best practices: I now present the consistency and OSGi dependency checker 🙂
The setting is a multi modul maven project for a OSGI based application – with all the nice maven features turned on (reports (all kind off), scm, issue tracker, mailinglist, etc) – so to speak of a complete Software Development Environment.
The broken window principal says:
"Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it's unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside.
Or consider a sidewalk. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of trash from take-out restaurants there or breaking into cars."Source: wikipedia
And to prevent the broken window principal I implemented a small tool doing some of this stuff:
- Checks what kind of dependencies are available between the OSGi Bundles
- Detects cycles (which is bad :-))
- Looks for unused imports and exports
As a result you get e.g. a report and a graph.
The second part of the tool is maybe even nicer 🙂 Beside all the good reports and tools you can use like findbugs, pmd, checkstyle, and others; sometimes I’m missing the very basic stuff. I implemented some consistency checks which can check for the following stuff, and verify the consistency of your project:
- Look if all needed Unittests are available
- Look for old unused code
- Look for old empty packages
- Test if the 80% code coverage mark is reached by the Unittest (and if methods are tested for sanity, failure, and success)
- Look for files which are not included in the binary build (they might be obsolete)
You could integrate those checks in the build systems or even force them on checkin like svnchecker does. Or you can use it to generate reports.
Categories: Work • Tags: OSGi, Software Engineering • Permalink for this article
November 25th, 2008 • Comments Off on Amazon gives access to public datasets :-)
http://aws.amazon.com/publicdatasets/
Categories: Personal • Tags: Cloud • Permalink for this article