Thoughts on operating systems, software engineering and beyond
I really do not like this trend of animated GIFs (again!). The animations are overly intrusive and on pages like Google+ it has become a nightmare!
But there is a magic option in Firefox, and it is all detailed here: Configuring Firefox animated images option (animated_images)
I have set mine to “none“, no animations/annoying-distractions at all! Free again!
A quick comparison of average speeds for my daily commute, these numbers are average moving speed.
Note: Bulls is the brand name of my standard trekking bike, Raleigh is the brand name of my wife’s pedelec city/confort bike (electrical pedal-assist up to 25 km/h) and Peugeot is the brand name of our car.
Each of these modes of transport has 2 average speeds. For bicycles, one should understand the “easy” one as going slow enough to avoid too much sweating, whereas the “fast” one is when trying to be as fast as possible. For the car, it is the lowest and highest measured speed (depending on traffic).
For more information on pedelecs: Wikipedia article on Pedelec.
What service do I want to run on my Home Server?
I do have a NAS already which has the following services: File Sharing (Samba, AFS and NFS), Media Streaming Server (DLNA), VPN Server, Cloud Sync Repository. So I do not intend to have redundant services on my Home Server. What is left?
My Home Server could support:
*: FreeBSD support is uncertain.
As one can see, I could use Linux or BSD based OS or a mixture. However, ZFS is so compelling that I am seriously considering to go for FreeBSD+jails and basta cosi! February will be the month where I try to set-up a FreeBSD server.
The number of errors you find in forums or user groups is sometimes amazing. Here in this thread, the first answer mix up file system journaling with indexing, the second rightly tries to correct the thread but adds more errors by stating that ZFS is a journaling FS, which it isn’t. It is a transactional copy-on-write file system.
And this other thread on Ubuntu Forums is even worse. First, people do not exactly answer the question, some just express opinion/beliefs without facts, finally some are trying to base their answers on facts but those are incorrect. Example: “NTFS does not have a journal, neither is it 64 bit like Ext4.” (it is pretty hard to have that many wrong facts in one sentence, bravo!) Thanks, some users are trying to sanitize this thread (e.g. Udayakiran or falconindy), sadly their answers are flooded in the mass of bad/wrong ones.
I’m moving the blog to the root of the web site. So this is the latest post you will receive via RSS/Syndication/Feed (aka Google Reader and al) unless you update your feed settings.
All previous links should still work.
The new feed URL is: https://www.berthon.eu/feed
Il y a quelque temps j’ai eu l’occasion d’écrire pour Libre et ouvert un article en deux parties sur la synchronisation des données (historique, cookies, etc.) sous Firefox (version 4.0 et suivante) : 1er partie et 2e partie.
Adobe released yesterday a preview of Flash Player “Square”. It includes native 64bit support and IE9 hardware acceleration enhancement. Yes, you’ve got it! Adobe is again supporting a 64bit release of their plug-in and for all 3 platforms: Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.
I have updated my previous article on surfing the web in 64bit with the new details.
To get more information, jump to Adobe Labs.
Note: there is a free (libre) alternative to Adobe Flash product called Gnash, however it is still far from being stable enough on all web sites to be widely use. But anyway, it is a highly interesting project which have made recent huge improvements towards reliability and speed. You should try Gnash first and if it doesn’t work for you, then go for Adobe.
Update: Flash Player “Square” is now Flash Player 11, and there is a second beta released this August 2011.
We are on the edge to write a new Icelandic saga. In a few days, we will embark on a plane direction: Iceland.
10 years ago we were leaving Iceland after an incredible time there. Now we are going back with our bicycle to explore it differently.
Iceland is an amazing place, but it is a difficult one too, especially on a bike. The weather is harsh, the wind strong, the roads are tricky and bridges only exist on road #1! But Iceland is a magical place, it’s wild, it’s colourful, it’s warm and cold.
Just let’s go exploring it!
Continue reading “An Icelandic Saga”
How do computer geeks have fun?
Warning: If you are not a geek, you better not read further for 2 good reasons:
While installing a software, I stumble on this small message:
If you are a hardcore computer nerd staring at this file through your favorite text editor, you are probably hunting [the build instructions!] Well it’s not here. […] Because all the build instructions are now in Apache’s cool web-site.[…]
Continue reading to learn more about the context.
Since Google released its Public DNS, I was curious about how it would really perform. Thus, I have looked around and I have found a script on the internet that I ran at home, here are the results:
+------------------+--------+--------+--------+ | Domain | My ISP | Google | OpenDNS| +------------------+--------+--------+--------+ | lifehacker.com | 17 ms | 68 ms | 68 ms | +------------------+--------+--------+--------+ | facebook.com | 18 ms | 69 ms | 68 ms | +------------------+--------+--------+--------+ | manu-j.com | 19 ms | 79 ms | 70 ms | +------------------+--------+--------+--------+ | reddit.com | 58 ms | 88 ms | 66 ms | +------------------+--------+--------+--------+ | tb4.fr | 16 ms | 64 ms | 67 ms | +------------------+--------+--------+--------+ | bbc.co.uk | 55 ms | 65 ms | 67 ms | +------------------+--------+--------+--------+ | lemonde.fr | 58 ms | 63 ms | 78 ms | +------------------+--------+--------+--------+ | dailymotion.com | 58 ms | 66 ms | 68 ms | +------------------+--------+--------+--------+ | faz.de | 57 ms | 65 ms | 99 ms | +------------------+--------+--------+--------+ | gmx.de | 56 ms | 62 ms | 68 ms | +------------------+--------+--------+--------+
Google Public DNS and OpenDNS performed quite similarly. However, my own ISP is still quicker to respond, a possible answer is that Google DNS in Europe are located in Frankfurt, Germany.
N.B.: these tests were performed on a wireless link under Mac OS X Leopard in Toulouse, France. If you want to run the script on a Mac, you should change the first line of the script to #!/bin/bash
Update 2009.12.10: