grack.com

Blog

nprof and ACT for profiling

Happy Canada Day! Klaus Salchner authored an excellent article on using NProf and ACT for profiling. It’s a good introduction to profiling and optimization techniques.

Still working on 0.9, but there’s not a great deal of time to get it polished for a release. Since there are thousands of downloads for 0.8b, I want to make sure that 0.9 is stable for general use.

Forumzilla for Thunderbird

From a suggestion in one of asa’s posts, I just took a quick look at Forumzilla.  My first impression is that it’s a pretty cool concept - it would allow me to reduce my number of running applications by one.  I’ve been running SharpReader for some time and it’s certainly a memory hog, especially when you get a fair number of feeds in it. 

Forumzilla has a different concept than SharpReader, however.  Instead of each feed having its own, individual, leaf-type folder, Forumzilla lets you pick one of your mail folders to drop a particular feed in.  While this is a cool concept, I think I would prefer to have something similar to the new bookmark manager for handling the feeds:

I’d imagine that you would display the available folders on the right without feeds and have the folders on the right contain the actual feed locations.  You could drag and drop the feeds to the existing mail folders on the left and right side, allowing you to quickly add and organize new feeds.

What do you think?

Software Storage Virtualization?

Is there a good cross-platform, storage virtualization application available?  I want a magical, automatically-clustered-and-redundant service that concatenates all of the free space within an entire network into a single “megadrive” and makes that available as a shared drive to all systems.

Ideally, it would allow you to “hotswap” computers in and out of the ad-hoc array, mirroring the data between nodes as necessary to ensure that more than one copy of all data is available at all times.  I suppose this is similar to the approach that Google has been taking with their distributed file system.

You could combine all of the storage within your network into a massively-redundant shared drive.  Every night, you could even move all of the data closer to the nodes that request it most often.

If you run out of space on the ad-hoc array, just run out and buy a couple of drives and USB 2.0 enclosures to get by in the meantime.

I suppose I can keep on dreaming, but true storage virtualization would be an amazing feat.

Afterthought: I’d like a clustered filesystem that ran over TCP/IP/Ethernet rather than the expensive fibre-channel stuff.  I’ll take mega-storage over mega-performance in this case.

Far Cry in Transgaming Cedega

Far Cry works great in Transgaming’s Cedega.  Chalk up another (recent!) game for Linux.

Make sure you use the Loki Installer rather than the .msi-based setup program.  It’ll copy the files to the correct spot on your drive and create a launcher executable for the game.  Fire it up and enjoy!

Fahrenheit 9/11 Post-Mortem

Saw F9/11 last night.  Good flick, certainly could have been longer - probably a ten-part mini-series with all the info in it.

The interesting part was how Moore discussed the constant, elevated fear level of the US.  Flipping around CNN, I found this story (FBI warns of possible deadly floating material).  There have been so many “terrorist warnings” without actual attacks that it makes you wonder why they even use the phrase “credible intelligence.”