I'm a web developer, not a web designer. I use Ubuntu with Sublime Text 2 at both home and work. I use Linux for heaps of reasons:
sudo vi /etc/hoand do it entirely using my keyboard in about 3-5 seconds. In Windows it's stored in some bizarre location in the Windows folder (including in a "drivers" directory!) and takes me longer. If I want to view or edit my FileZilla sitemanager.xml file I can do it in Linux by typingless .fi. On Windows it's in my user folder, under either AppData or Application Data, and then in something like Local or Roaming. I'm confident any log I want to view or config file I want to edit can be done faster in Linux than in Windows. I can open large logs usingsi lesswith minimal load time, whereas in Windows the IDE will likely become unresponsive..
Showing posts with label linux. Show all posts
Showing posts with label linux. Show all posts
Monday, December 31, 2012
GNU Linux over Microsoft Windows, re: From the perspective of a developer
The following is a copy and paste of a comment made on reddit at this post here. This comment was authored by reddit user named, RyanDwyer. I decided to re-post it here on my blog because I wanted to share an advanced Linux developer's assessment of the advantages that GNU Linux has over Microsoft Windows. RyanDwyer writes:
Monday, March 5, 2012
2600: "More Active Gamers Should Become Activist Hackers"
In this article featured in the Winter 2011/2012 edition of The Hacker Quarterly, Snugglepuff argues that young people should abandon gaming in fantasy worlds and instead et their minds to something more useful like hacking to make the world a better place. Source link.
By: Snugglepuff
snugglepuff (at) operamail (dot) com
I am fortunate to personally know many talented thinkers, many of whom are avid gamers. Some are also particularly brilliant and have solved programmatic problems I can barely understand. Some spend countless hours shut off from the realities of a world they admit is broken to play in a world that mostly isn't. For so many people I associate with, the understanding of a problem and the talent to tackle it with software coexist but remain separated from any effort to do so. Some won't care until a problem reaches them personally, others just don' t give much thought to the idea that problems like corruption, censorship, and the digital divide can be tackled with code.
Far outside the scope of most of the intelligent programmers I know are the growing number of people I know because of my involvement with writing software for privacy activists. Despite having few technical skills, they are passionate about doing anything in their very limited power to make the only world they live in a better one. Armed with nothing but hope and drive, they read and comment on news articles and write letters to their elected officials (and when was the last time you did that?). They spend countless hours blogging and podcasting their ideas into the ether hoping that someone will listen and do something -- anything.
The world is run by machines. They aren't using us as batteries because there's no reason to, with us being so willing to bum coal for them. Decisions are made with data which is or should be transformed into meaningful information and whether that information is accessible or not is less a matter of policy and more a matter of engineering. Elections in democratic countries are won by a fickle "swing vote" of voters with no ideology to predict their vote with. Their decision is composed slowly by a trickle of information about their choices until literal bits of information pull them harder in one direction than others. The control of information by censorship, misinformation, media bias, and lack of basic access to and understanding of technology resources are by and large engineering problems with engineering solutions. In a post-Wikileaks world, to believe that one can't make a serious impact in a world increasingly governed by software as a software developer is completely ridiculous and illustrates a disconnect from reality that seems to grow the longer one escapes from it.
Serious coding takes time. So does serious gaming. Both can be enjoying and frustrating, but ultimately the act of creating something leaves behind it a measurable value of utility that can be shared with the world as infinitely as people can access it. When someone has the ability to do one or the other, that person should realize, with whatever part of their conscience isn't governed by virtual currencies, that they are choosing to neglect the potential use of their skills for more than a few meaningful purposes. If you're already spending your weekends or weeknights helping people help each other, whether by programming or traditional volunteering, good for you. Welcome to the choir! For everyone else, hear ye:
People desperate to see change happen in their lifetimes across the world don't give a shit about your level 60 night e l f. Time is life. If you value your life outside of gameplay, it might be time to start looking for ways to prove that value in the greater context of history. Start hacking.
By: Snugglepuff
snugglepuff (at) operamail (dot) com
I am fortunate to personally know many talented thinkers, many of whom are avid gamers. Some are also particularly brilliant and have solved programmatic problems I can barely understand. Some spend countless hours shut off from the realities of a world they admit is broken to play in a world that mostly isn't. For so many people I associate with, the understanding of a problem and the talent to tackle it with software coexist but remain separated from any effort to do so. Some won't care until a problem reaches them personally, others just don' t give much thought to the idea that problems like corruption, censorship, and the digital divide can be tackled with code.
Far outside the scope of most of the intelligent programmers I know are the growing number of people I know because of my involvement with writing software for privacy activists. Despite having few technical skills, they are passionate about doing anything in their very limited power to make the only world they live in a better one. Armed with nothing but hope and drive, they read and comment on news articles and write letters to their elected officials (and when was the last time you did that?). They spend countless hours blogging and podcasting their ideas into the ether hoping that someone will listen and do something -- anything.
The world is run by machines. They aren't using us as batteries because there's no reason to, with us being so willing to bum coal for them. Decisions are made with data which is or should be transformed into meaningful information and whether that information is accessible or not is less a matter of policy and more a matter of engineering. Elections in democratic countries are won by a fickle "swing vote" of voters with no ideology to predict their vote with. Their decision is composed slowly by a trickle of information about their choices until literal bits of information pull them harder in one direction than others. The control of information by censorship, misinformation, media bias, and lack of basic access to and understanding of technology resources are by and large engineering problems with engineering solutions. In a post-Wikileaks world, to believe that one can't make a serious impact in a world increasingly governed by software as a software developer is completely ridiculous and illustrates a disconnect from reality that seems to grow the longer one escapes from it.
Serious coding takes time. So does serious gaming. Both can be enjoying and frustrating, but ultimately the act of creating something leaves behind it a measurable value of utility that can be shared with the world as infinitely as people can access it. When someone has the ability to do one or the other, that person should realize, with whatever part of their conscience isn't governed by virtual currencies, that they are choosing to neglect the potential use of their skills for more than a few meaningful purposes. If you're already spending your weekends or weeknights helping people help each other, whether by programming or traditional volunteering, good for you. Welcome to the choir! For everyone else, hear ye:
People desperate to see change happen in their lifetimes across the world don't give a shit about your level 60 night e l f. Time is life. If you value your life outside of gameplay, it might be time to start looking for ways to prove that value in the greater context of history. Start hacking.
2600 Reflecting on the Role Hackerdom Played on the Rise of 2011's Social Movements
The following editorial I copied and pasted from the Winter 2011/2012 edition of 2600 The Hacker Quarterly. The source link here is not from the official 2600 website b/c they don't post the articles up online. The source link is from some random site I found with Google.
Original Title: "Movement"
Original Title: "Movement"
2600 Editorial Team
While we can only speculate on what 2012 will bring, it seems fairly certain that 2011 will be remembered as a year when individuals worldwide began to feel empowered and when, more than ever before, the old guard was put on notice that its policies need to adapt and change with the times - or risk becoming extinct.
We've gone on at length before about the value of the individual, how we all have so much more power than we're led to believe, and how it serves the status quo to have us all convinced that we can't possibly make any difference. Our belief in this has never wavered, but it's essential to have it borne out in practice, as the theoretical can only go so far. After the last year, we can point with certainty towards various key examples that show how much individuals can accomplish with a little dedication, coupled with a degree of mastery in the world of technology. We can also point to the reaction these people get from those in charge as proof of the threat they pose to their power structure.
Freedom and empowerment are concepts that, once unleashed, spread quite rapidly. We saw that earlier in the year, as the Arab Spring took hold. I t all started with Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor in Tunisia who became so fed up with the constant corruption and humiliation that made it impossible for him to earn a living that he sacrificed his own life as the ultimate form of protest. The outrage from fellow citizens mushroomed and led to massive protests and the actual fall of the government less than a month later. According to The New York Times, "The protesters, led at first by unemployed college graduates... and later joined by workers and young professionals, found grist for the complaints in leaked cables from the United States Embassy in Tunisia, released by WikiLeaks, that detailed the self-dealing and excess of the president's family." The government had its state-run media to whitewash the news. The people had social networking and cell phones to get and share updates. I t was no contest.
The unrest spread to neighboring countries, leading to significant conflicts in no less than 16 of them, the most significant being Egypt, Libya, and Syria. The tensions had always been there. But once the fuse was lit, there was no turning back.
Domestically, we've witnessed much in the way of stress and hardship, but nothing that comes close to events in other parts of the world. However, while we may not have had security forces killing demonstrators or a repressive regime that tolerates no dissent at all, we, like all humans, have a sense of justice and can only be pushed around so much before something snaps. That appears to have been the case with September's Occupy Wall Street movement, a simple protest inspired by our friends over at Adbusters magazine, which wound up getting bigger and bigger before eventually spreading to hundreds of sites throughout the country and across the world. While the mass media initially mocked, ridiculed, and basically ignored these protests, supposedly due to the lack of a clear list of "demands" from the demonstrators, the movement actually became strengthened as a result. Since there wasn't a clear agenda, anyone who felt that the system wasn't working was able to join and help determine what path to take. Alliances were thus formed that wouldn't have been possible had all of the answers been laid out from the beginning, as would be expected in a typical political movement. It was an unusual tactic, but clearly an effective one. And the media's agenda of ignoring what was going on became painfully visible, which led to more outrage and an eventual about face on their part. Suddenly, the movement became front page news everywhere.
The concept of a group that had no leadership was very similar to that of Anonymous, an online entity which has become increasingly active in the "real world" as well as on the net. The Guy Fawkes masks they embraced were quite visible worldwide at many of the Occupy sites. But anonymity was only an option, not a main ingredient in what was going on. The lack of a hierarchy and the development of the
Occupy Wall Street General Assembly enabled any individual to speak to the crowd through the ingenious use of a "human microphone," created out of necessity due to an arbitrary ban on megaphones. This adaptability and desire to bypass unfair restrictions using clever tactics
is something we're all familiar with in the hacker world.
At press time, there have been a number of violent crackdowns on these groups by the authorities. While all kinds of excuses were given, ranging from health concerns to reports of crimes and illegal activities within the camps (much of which was echoed almost verbatim by mainstream media), many firsthand accounts dispute the degree of such problems. Actions caught on video clearly show that the people targeted were posing no threat to anyone, other than refusing to obey orders. Whenever we see this kind of reaction displayed by an authority figure, we know what it means, whether it's a high school principal expelling a student for some mischief on a computer, a corporation firing an employee for discovering a security hole, or a parent sending their kid to reform school or feeding them drugs because they're "out of control." It means the authority figure is desperately afraid of no longer being in charge of the situation. They begin to act increasingly irrational and they view the individual as the sole source of the problem. This is always the wrong course of action.
Listening to, learning from, and opening a dialogue with an individual is the only way to take positive steps. This is true regardless of how much or how little we agree with what they're saying or doing. For us in the hacker world, this is old news. But what's different is seeing this sort of thing playing out on
a different stage and seeing how those in charge are truly afraid of the kind of dialogue that empowers individuals. That alone is a milestone.
We've also seen tremendous growth in the use of technology by individuals for truly worthwhile goals. While social networking and smart phones were never designed to foment civil unrest, used properly they are invaluable tools in a movement gathering steam. Overseas, people used Facebook and Twitter to quickly organize mass demonstrations before the authorities knew what was happening. Attempts to restrict access to these services backfired badly. In the States, similar tactics were used by demonstrators, with the addition of numerous live video feeds from cities all over the country. When something happened, the whole world could literally be watching. Live. When the crackdown occurred in New York City, there were no less than four separate live streams being fed by people's smart phones, all with surprisingly good video quality and relatively decent audio. Well over 50,000 people were tuned in to these feeds, with many more picking them up from secondary sources. As interest in what was going on swelled, the mass media even joined in, simulcasting these streams since they hadn't been able to get behind the police barricades themselves. The people had literally
become the media.
We've learned a great deal from these events. The hacker world, the ideals of full disclosure, the distrust of governments and corporations, the embracing and manipulation of high tech, the desire for free speech, the empowerment of the individual….these are all intrinsically linked together. It really does all
matter.
But there's a flipside. There will always be people and entities who see all of this as a threat and who will try and control it. That's a battle that will never end and which will be fought in a variety of arenas. We see it every day in the form of corporate copyright abuses, antiquated business practices that fight technological advances, increased government secrecy, or the suspicion that's injected into the populace towards anyone who doesn't quite think, act, or look like everyone else.
In other words, individuals may have shown their ability to manipulate technology in a way that benefits them with these actions of 2011 . But those opposed to this sort of thing have been taking notes and will be better prepared to counter this ingenuity the next time around. As hackers and developers of new technology, we need to always have this on our minds, as the true future of freedom, both here and abroad, can be greatly affected by what we choose to consider as a priority.
While we can only speculate on what 2012 will bring, it seems fairly certain that 2011 will be remembered as a year when individuals worldwide began to feel empowered and when, more than ever before, the old guard was put on notice that its policies need to adapt and change with the times - or risk becoming extinct.
We've gone on at length before about the value of the individual, how we all have so much more power than we're led to believe, and how it serves the status quo to have us all convinced that we can't possibly make any difference. Our belief in this has never wavered, but it's essential to have it borne out in practice, as the theoretical can only go so far. After the last year, we can point with certainty towards various key examples that show how much individuals can accomplish with a little dedication, coupled with a degree of mastery in the world of technology. We can also point to the reaction these people get from those in charge as proof of the threat they pose to their power structure.
Freedom and empowerment are concepts that, once unleashed, spread quite rapidly. We saw that earlier in the year, as the Arab Spring took hold. I t all started with Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor in Tunisia who became so fed up with the constant corruption and humiliation that made it impossible for him to earn a living that he sacrificed his own life as the ultimate form of protest. The outrage from fellow citizens mushroomed and led to massive protests and the actual fall of the government less than a month later. According to The New York Times, "The protesters, led at first by unemployed college graduates... and later joined by workers and young professionals, found grist for the complaints in leaked cables from the United States Embassy in Tunisia, released by WikiLeaks, that detailed the self-dealing and excess of the president's family." The government had its state-run media to whitewash the news. The people had social networking and cell phones to get and share updates. I t was no contest.
The unrest spread to neighboring countries, leading to significant conflicts in no less than 16 of them, the most significant being Egypt, Libya, and Syria. The tensions had always been there. But once the fuse was lit, there was no turning back.
Domestically, we've witnessed much in the way of stress and hardship, but nothing that comes close to events in other parts of the world. However, while we may not have had security forces killing demonstrators or a repressive regime that tolerates no dissent at all, we, like all humans, have a sense of justice and can only be pushed around so much before something snaps. That appears to have been the case with September's Occupy Wall Street movement, a simple protest inspired by our friends over at Adbusters magazine, which wound up getting bigger and bigger before eventually spreading to hundreds of sites throughout the country and across the world. While the mass media initially mocked, ridiculed, and basically ignored these protests, supposedly due to the lack of a clear list of "demands" from the demonstrators, the movement actually became strengthened as a result. Since there wasn't a clear agenda, anyone who felt that the system wasn't working was able to join and help determine what path to take. Alliances were thus formed that wouldn't have been possible had all of the answers been laid out from the beginning, as would be expected in a typical political movement. It was an unusual tactic, but clearly an effective one. And the media's agenda of ignoring what was going on became painfully visible, which led to more outrage and an eventual about face on their part. Suddenly, the movement became front page news everywhere.
The concept of a group that had no leadership was very similar to that of Anonymous, an online entity which has become increasingly active in the "real world" as well as on the net. The Guy Fawkes masks they embraced were quite visible worldwide at many of the Occupy sites. But anonymity was only an option, not a main ingredient in what was going on. The lack of a hierarchy and the development of the
Occupy Wall Street General Assembly enabled any individual to speak to the crowd through the ingenious use of a "human microphone," created out of necessity due to an arbitrary ban on megaphones. This adaptability and desire to bypass unfair restrictions using clever tactics
is something we're all familiar with in the hacker world.
At press time, there have been a number of violent crackdowns on these groups by the authorities. While all kinds of excuses were given, ranging from health concerns to reports of crimes and illegal activities within the camps (much of which was echoed almost verbatim by mainstream media), many firsthand accounts dispute the degree of such problems. Actions caught on video clearly show that the people targeted were posing no threat to anyone, other than refusing to obey orders. Whenever we see this kind of reaction displayed by an authority figure, we know what it means, whether it's a high school principal expelling a student for some mischief on a computer, a corporation firing an employee for discovering a security hole, or a parent sending their kid to reform school or feeding them drugs because they're "out of control." It means the authority figure is desperately afraid of no longer being in charge of the situation. They begin to act increasingly irrational and they view the individual as the sole source of the problem. This is always the wrong course of action.
Listening to, learning from, and opening a dialogue with an individual is the only way to take positive steps. This is true regardless of how much or how little we agree with what they're saying or doing. For us in the hacker world, this is old news. But what's different is seeing this sort of thing playing out on
a different stage and seeing how those in charge are truly afraid of the kind of dialogue that empowers individuals. That alone is a milestone.
We've also seen tremendous growth in the use of technology by individuals for truly worthwhile goals. While social networking and smart phones were never designed to foment civil unrest, used properly they are invaluable tools in a movement gathering steam. Overseas, people used Facebook and Twitter to quickly organize mass demonstrations before the authorities knew what was happening. Attempts to restrict access to these services backfired badly. In the States, similar tactics were used by demonstrators, with the addition of numerous live video feeds from cities all over the country. When something happened, the whole world could literally be watching. Live. When the crackdown occurred in New York City, there were no less than four separate live streams being fed by people's smart phones, all with surprisingly good video quality and relatively decent audio. Well over 50,000 people were tuned in to these feeds, with many more picking them up from secondary sources. As interest in what was going on swelled, the mass media even joined in, simulcasting these streams since they hadn't been able to get behind the police barricades themselves. The people had literally
become the media.
We've learned a great deal from these events. The hacker world, the ideals of full disclosure, the distrust of governments and corporations, the embracing and manipulation of high tech, the desire for free speech, the empowerment of the individual….these are all intrinsically linked together. It really does all
matter.
But there's a flipside. There will always be people and entities who see all of this as a threat and who will try and control it. That's a battle that will never end and which will be fought in a variety of arenas. We see it every day in the form of corporate copyright abuses, antiquated business practices that fight technological advances, increased government secrecy, or the suspicion that's injected into the populace towards anyone who doesn't quite think, act, or look like everyone else.
In other words, individuals may have shown their ability to manipulate technology in a way that benefits them with these actions of 2011 . But those opposed to this sort of thing have been taking notes and will be better prepared to counter this ingenuity the next time around. As hackers and developers of new technology, we need to always have this on our minds, as the true future of freedom, both here and abroad, can be greatly affected by what we choose to consider as a priority.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Stephen Fry on GNU
In the YouTube video embedded below, in celebration of GNU's 25th birthday, Stephen Fry explains what an operating system is and the two titans in the Free and Open Source Software world: GNU and Linux. This video that I stumbled upon the other day serves as a perfect introduction to Linux and GNU for those who only know about Microsoft Windows. Check it:
XTerm CLI colour change
So today I was running a relatively fresh install of Slackware in using virtualbox on Linux Mint and I wanted to change the background colour of my xterm from white to black, making it easier on the eyes to read. So I Googled configure xterm background colour. One of the first links was this site. Here was the solution:
For all [xa]term, put something like the following in your
~/.Xdefaults or ~/.Xresources:
! Defaults for all xterm clients
XTerm*background: yellow
XTerm*foreground: darkblue
XTerm*highlightColor: red
Then run
xrdb ~/.Xresources
"man xrdb" and "man X" and search for "Resources" for more
information.
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
How to search for files using the Linux CLI
I navigated to the directory that I knew the files with the text I wanted to search was and I entered this command:
The following command returned more results because it ignored case distinctions:
$ grep -r fizz *
The following command returned more results because it ignored case distinctions:
$ grep -ri buzz *
Sunday, July 10, 2011
Configuring SciTE and the whereis command
So I was getting my text editor of choice -- SciTE -- ready for me to learn python with and I couldn't figure out how to get the text editor to display the line numbers at start up. Before, I had to select Line Numbers in the View menu every time SciTE loaded. So I joined the Google Groups for scintilla and asked there. Here was my e-mail correspondence with someone on the mailing-list named, Philippe Lhoste. I said:
Philippe said:
Now the hard part for me was finding the user properties file.
According to aeon-ltd in #Ubuntu on FreeNode, he suggested I use "whereis scite" at the command line to find the location of the program, which printed the following:
So I navigated to /usr/bin/scite and found SciTEGlobal.properties . With that file open using the sudo prefix it looked the line.margin.visible part looked exactly like this :
So I removed the hash-mark and voila! SciTE now shows line numbers on the left hand side automatically at start up....
Thanks goes out to Philippe Lhoste and aeon-ltd for the help!
I don't want to tick "View" --> "Line Numbers" every time I open
SciTE. How do I permanently set SciTE to show line numbers?
Philippe said:
Well, perhaps by starting to search "line numbers" in the SciTE doc?
I did it for you, and found you have to set line.margin.visible=1 in your user properties file.
Now the hard part for me was finding the user properties file.
According to aeon-ltd in #Ubuntu on FreeNode, he suggested I use "whereis scite" at the command line to find the location of the program, which printed the following:
daniel@natty:~$ whereis scite
scite: /usr/bin/scite /usr/share/scite
daniel@natty:~$
So I navigated to /usr/bin/scite and found SciTEGlobal.properties . With that file open using the sudo prefix it looked the line.margin.visible part looked exactly like this :
...
#line.margin.visible=1
...
So I removed the hash-mark and voila! SciTE now shows line numbers on the left hand side automatically at start up....
Thanks goes out to Philippe Lhoste and aeon-ltd for the help!
Friday, May 27, 2011
Facebook Open Sources Its Servers and Data Centers
By Stacey Higginbotham
Apr. 7, 2011, 10:05am PT
Facebook has shared the nitty-gritty details of its server and data center design, taking its commitment to openness to a new level for the industry by sharing its infrastructure secrets much like it has shared its software code. The effort by the social network will bring web scale computing to the masses and is a boon for AMD and Intel and the x86 architecture. Sorry ARM.
At a news event today Facebook is expected to release a server design that minimizes power consumption and cost while delivering the right computer workload for a variety of tasks that Facebook does. Unlike Google, which is famous for building its own hardware and keeping its infrastructure advantage close to its vest, Facebook is sharing its server design with the world. Much of the approach mirrors the scaled-down ethos of massive hardware buyers that requires stripped down boxes without redundant power supplies that have hot swappable drives to make repairs and upgrades easier.
But Facebook has added some innovations, such as newer fans that are larger (the entire server is 50 percent taller than the traditional 1 u sized box) and fewer of them (a design tweak introduced by Rackable, which is now SGI). Those fans account for 2 percent to 4 percent of energy consumption per server, compared to industry average of 10 percent to 20 percent. Ready for more? Here are more key details on the server-side:
>>The outside is 1.2mm zinc pre-plated, corrosion-resistant steel with no front panel and no ads.
>>The parts snap together: the motherboard snaps into place using a series of mounting holes on the chassis, and the hard drive uses snap-in rails and slides into the drive bay. The unit only has one screw for grounding. It’s like Container Store does cheap servers and someone at Facebook built an entire server in three minutes.
>>Hold onto your chassis because the server is 1.5u tall about 50 percent taller than other servers to make room for larger and more efficient heat sinks.
>>Check out how this scales. It has a reboot on LAN feature, which lets a systems administrator instantly reboot a server by sending specific network instructions.
>>The motherboard speaker is replaced with LED indicators to save power and provide visual indicators of server health.
>>The power supply accepts both A/C and D/C power, allowing the server to switch to D/C backup battery power in the event of a power outage.
>>There are two flavors of processor with the Intel motherboard offering two Xeon 5500 series or 5600 series processors, up to 144GB memory and an Intel 5500 I/O Hub chip.
>>AMD fans can choose two AMD Magny-Cours 12 and 8 core CPUs, the AMD SR5650 chipset for I/O, and up to a maximum 192GB of memory.
But wait! There’s more. Facebook couldn’t just unleash its server plans to the market. The social networking site has also shared its data center designs to help other startups working at webscale build out their infrastructure in a manner that consumes as little power as possible. Yahoo has also shared its data center plans, with special attention going to its environmentally friendly chicken coop designs and Microsoft has built out a modular data center concept that allows it to build a data center anywhere in very little time.
Facebook has combined that approach in its Prineville, Ore. where it has spent two years developing everything that goes inside its data centers — from the servers to the battery cabinets to back up the servers — to be as green and cheap as possible. For example, Facebook uses fewer batteries thanks to its designs and to illustrate how integrated the whole compute operation is, the house fans and the fans on the servers are coupled together. Motion-sensitive LED lighting is also used inside.
The result is a data center with a power usage effectiveness ratio of 1.07. That compares to an EPA-defined industry best practice of 1.5, and 1.5 in Facebook’s leased facilities.
Some of the server design decisions allow the equipment to run in steamier environments (the Prineville facility runs at 85°F with a 65 percent relative humidity) which in turns lets Facebook rely on evaporative cooling instead of air conditioning. Other innovations are at the building engineering level such as using a 277 volt electrical distribution system in place of the standard 208 volt system found in most data centers. This eliminates a major power transformer, reducing the amount of energy lost in conversion. In typical data centers, about 22 to 25 percent of the power coming into the facility is lost in conversions. In Prineville, the rate is 7 percent.
In the waste not want not category, Facebook is using the warm air from the servers to heat the outside air when it’s too cold as well as the offices. In the summer the data center will spray water on incoming warm air to cool it down. It’s also designed its chassis and servers to fit precisely into shipping containers to eliminate waste in transport. The plan is to run those servers as hard as it can, so it doesn’t have to build out more infrastructure.
The social network has shared the server power supply, server chassis, server motherboard, and the server cabinet specifications and CAD files as well as the battery backup cabinet specification and the data center electrical system and mechanical specification. While not every startup needs to operate at webscale, the designs released by Facebook today certainly will give data center operators as well as the vendors in the computing ecosystem something to talk about. Infrastructure nerds, enjoy.
For more on green data centers check out our Green:Net event on April 21 where we’ll have infrastructure gurus from Google and Yahoo talking about their data center strategies.
Source
Apr. 7, 2011, 10:05am PT
Facebook has shared the nitty-gritty details of its server and data center design, taking its commitment to openness to a new level for the industry by sharing its infrastructure secrets much like it has shared its software code. The effort by the social network will bring web scale computing to the masses and is a boon for AMD and Intel and the x86 architecture. Sorry ARM.
At a news event today Facebook is expected to release a server design that minimizes power consumption and cost while delivering the right computer workload for a variety of tasks that Facebook does. Unlike Google, which is famous for building its own hardware and keeping its infrastructure advantage close to its vest, Facebook is sharing its server design with the world. Much of the approach mirrors the scaled-down ethos of massive hardware buyers that requires stripped down boxes without redundant power supplies that have hot swappable drives to make repairs and upgrades easier.
But Facebook has added some innovations, such as newer fans that are larger (the entire server is 50 percent taller than the traditional 1 u sized box) and fewer of them (a design tweak introduced by Rackable, which is now SGI). Those fans account for 2 percent to 4 percent of energy consumption per server, compared to industry average of 10 percent to 20 percent. Ready for more? Here are more key details on the server-side:
>>The outside is 1.2mm zinc pre-plated, corrosion-resistant steel with no front panel and no ads.
>>The parts snap together: the motherboard snaps into place using a series of mounting holes on the chassis, and the hard drive uses snap-in rails and slides into the drive bay. The unit only has one screw for grounding. It’s like Container Store does cheap servers and someone at Facebook built an entire server in three minutes.
>>Hold onto your chassis because the server is 1.5u tall about 50 percent taller than other servers to make room for larger and more efficient heat sinks.
>>Check out how this scales. It has a reboot on LAN feature, which lets a systems administrator instantly reboot a server by sending specific network instructions.
>>The motherboard speaker is replaced with LED indicators to save power and provide visual indicators of server health.
>>The power supply accepts both A/C and D/C power, allowing the server to switch to D/C backup battery power in the event of a power outage.
>>There are two flavors of processor with the Intel motherboard offering two Xeon 5500 series or 5600 series processors, up to 144GB memory and an Intel 5500 I/O Hub chip.
>>AMD fans can choose two AMD Magny-Cours 12 and 8 core CPUs, the AMD SR5650 chipset for I/O, and up to a maximum 192GB of memory.
But wait! There’s more. Facebook couldn’t just unleash its server plans to the market. The social networking site has also shared its data center designs to help other startups working at webscale build out their infrastructure in a manner that consumes as little power as possible. Yahoo has also shared its data center plans, with special attention going to its environmentally friendly chicken coop designs and Microsoft has built out a modular data center concept that allows it to build a data center anywhere in very little time.
Facebook has combined that approach in its Prineville, Ore. where it has spent two years developing everything that goes inside its data centers — from the servers to the battery cabinets to back up the servers — to be as green and cheap as possible. For example, Facebook uses fewer batteries thanks to its designs and to illustrate how integrated the whole compute operation is, the house fans and the fans on the servers are coupled together. Motion-sensitive LED lighting is also used inside.
The result is a data center with a power usage effectiveness ratio of 1.07. That compares to an EPA-defined industry best practice of 1.5, and 1.5 in Facebook’s leased facilities.
Some of the server design decisions allow the equipment to run in steamier environments (the Prineville facility runs at 85°F with a 65 percent relative humidity) which in turns lets Facebook rely on evaporative cooling instead of air conditioning. Other innovations are at the building engineering level such as using a 277 volt electrical distribution system in place of the standard 208 volt system found in most data centers. This eliminates a major power transformer, reducing the amount of energy lost in conversion. In typical data centers, about 22 to 25 percent of the power coming into the facility is lost in conversions. In Prineville, the rate is 7 percent.
In the waste not want not category, Facebook is using the warm air from the servers to heat the outside air when it’s too cold as well as the offices. In the summer the data center will spray water on incoming warm air to cool it down. It’s also designed its chassis and servers to fit precisely into shipping containers to eliminate waste in transport. The plan is to run those servers as hard as it can, so it doesn’t have to build out more infrastructure.
The social network has shared the server power supply, server chassis, server motherboard, and the server cabinet specifications and CAD files as well as the battery backup cabinet specification and the data center electrical system and mechanical specification. While not every startup needs to operate at webscale, the designs released by Facebook today certainly will give data center operators as well as the vendors in the computing ecosystem something to talk about. Infrastructure nerds, enjoy.
For more on green data centers check out our Green:Net event on April 21 where we’ll have infrastructure gurus from Google and Yahoo talking about their data center strategies.
Source
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Bashing Microsoft 'like kicking a puppy,' says Linux Foundation chief
Linux has already defeated Microsoft, Linux Foundation chief says
By Jon Brodkin, Network World
April 05, 2011 01:31 PM ET
Two decades after Linus Torvalds developed his famous operating system kernel, the battle between Linux and Microsoft is over and Linux has won, says Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin.
With the one glaring exception of the desktop computer, Linux has outpaced Microsoft in nearly every market, including server-side computing and mobile, Zemlin claims.
"I think we just don't care that much [about Microsoft] anymore," Zemlin said. "They used to be our big rival, but now it's kind of like kicking a puppy."
While Microsoft's stock has stagnated over the past decade, open source torchbearer Red Hat has soared, Zemlin notes. And Linux software is everywhere, he says, as proponents of the open source project prepare to celebrate its 20th year of existence.
"I think that on the 20th anniversary, it's worth reflecting back on where we came from," Zemlin said in an interview with Network World. Linux had a "humble start as a project for a college student in Helsinki, to something today that runs 70% of global equity trading, something that powers, really, the majority of Internet traffic, whether it's Facebook, Google or Amazon."
Linux can be found in consumer electronics devices, like Sony televisions and camcorders, the Amazon Kindle, and in smartphones and tablets as part of Google's Android. Linux leads the market from the tiniest embedded systems to the largest supercomputers, with more than 90% of the Top 500 supercomputing sites in the world running Linux.
"Linux has come to dominate almost every category of computing, with the exception of the desktop," Zemlin said.
Windows still powers roughly 9 out of 10 traditional desktops, with the rest going to Mac and Linux. Linux's failure to capture desktop share is "disappointing to many," Zemlin admitted. But "the good news is the traditional PC desktop is becoming less important, and areas where Linux is very strong in terms of client computing are becoming more important."
That, of course, is a reference to smartphones and tablets, where Microsoft has struggled to unseat Apple and Google's Android. However, a recent IDC research note predicted that Microsoft's new Windows Phone 7 devices would overtake the iPhone in worldwide market share by 2015.
When asked about this prediction, Zemlin responded with what can best be described as several seconds of hysterical laughter. "Oh my God, Steve Jobs! Short Apple stock!" he joked.
Zemlin's optimism stems from the success of Android, which uses a kernel derived from Linux. Android devices are now more widely used than the iPhone, and HP's webOS is also a viable mobile contender using Linux.
Zemlin believes that as smartphones and tablets draw people away from their desktop PCs and laptops, Microsoft's hold on the computing market will diminish. "Today people use smartphones more, in many ways, than they may use their traditional PC," Zemlin said. "In that case, Linux really does have dominant market share through things like Android or other versions of Linux that are out there in the mobile space." (See also: "Most Android, iPhone apps violate open source rules.")
On the tablet front, though, Apple's iPad is far and away the leader, which poses a problem to those who prefer open source technologies.
"Apple is your worst enemy and your best friend if you're an open source guy," Zemlin said. "Apple in many ways has done a lot of good things for open source and for Linux. It changed the definition of what client computing is. That has been good for Linux. Apple also has a lot of open source components within their products and tends to work very well, in some cases, with the open source community. But I'm not going to argue that they don't have a very closed system as well."
Linus Torvalds started developing the Linux kernel in 1991 as an open source alternative to Unix. Combined with the GNU software created by Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, it forms the core of many operating system distributions. (See also: "Cell phones are 'Stalin's dream,' says free software movement founder.")
Depending on one's point of view, Linux began either on Aug. 25, 1991, when Torvalds posted a message saying he was creating a free operating system as "just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu," or on Oct. 5, 1991, when the first Linux code was released. Linux enthusiasts will celebrate both dates, but the main activities will take place Aug. 17-19 at the LinuxCon North America conference in Vancouver, Canada. The Linux Foundation is also holding a big event this week in San Francisco, the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit.
The Linux Foundation, of which Torvalds is an employee, is dedicated to accelerating adoption and development of Linux, and bringing people together to collaborate and boost technical innovation around the kernel. Created in 2007 and based in San Francisco, the foundation counts as its members and financial supporters many of the biggest names in the tech industry, including IBM, Intel, Oracle, Cisco, Google, HP, Red Hat and dozens of others.
"It's basically everybody but Microsoft," Zemlin said. "We get money from corporations and we get money from individuals who just believe in Linux and use it day in and day out."
Despite Zemlin's sunny outlook, he notes there are still challenges. Patent lawsuits and legal uncertainty might prevent some people from adopting open source, even though these problems aren't unique to open source, Zemlin said. "We have to educate producers of products how to comply with open source licenses in a low-cost and efficient way. That's a challenge," he said.
And, of course, there is that issue that Microsoft still dominates the desktop software market. When asked why Linux has failed to build desktop share, Zemlin said, "There was this monopolist who just kept everybody else out of the marketplace."
Others, like GNOME creator Miguel de Icaza, have argued that Linux and open source developers "don't seem to get our act together when it comes to understanding the needs of end users on the desktop."
But while Microsoft has sold 300 million Windows 7 licenses and reported record second-quarter revenue of nearly $20 billion, Zemlin said Linux people aren't giving up on the desktop market just yet.
For one thing, the desktop operating system itself is becoming less important as people do more and more of their work in the browser, he notes. In the future, you just may need a browser running on top of a lightweight operating system. While Microsoft's Internet Explorer runs only on Windows, major open source browsers such as Chrome and Firefox run on Windows, Mac or Linux.
"The reality is that the fat lady hasn't sung yet," Zemlin said. "Operating systems in general are like huge tides that ebb and flow very slowly over time, it's almost glacial. It takes time for people to realize that they may not need that set of computing requirements for the desktop anymore, and get used to different ways of using a computer."
Follow Jon Brodkin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jbrodkin
Source: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/040511-linux-vs-microsoft.html?page=2
By Jon Brodkin, Network World
April 05, 2011 01:31 PM ET
Two decades after Linus Torvalds developed his famous operating system kernel, the battle between Linux and Microsoft is over and Linux has won, says Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin.
With the one glaring exception of the desktop computer, Linux has outpaced Microsoft in nearly every market, including server-side computing and mobile, Zemlin claims.
"I think we just don't care that much [about Microsoft] anymore," Zemlin said. "They used to be our big rival, but now it's kind of like kicking a puppy."
While Microsoft's stock has stagnated over the past decade, open source torchbearer Red Hat has soared, Zemlin notes. And Linux software is everywhere, he says, as proponents of the open source project prepare to celebrate its 20th year of existence.
"I think that on the 20th anniversary, it's worth reflecting back on where we came from," Zemlin said in an interview with Network World. Linux had a "humble start as a project for a college student in Helsinki, to something today that runs 70% of global equity trading, something that powers, really, the majority of Internet traffic, whether it's Facebook, Google or Amazon."
Linux can be found in consumer electronics devices, like Sony televisions and camcorders, the Amazon Kindle, and in smartphones and tablets as part of Google's Android. Linux leads the market from the tiniest embedded systems to the largest supercomputers, with more than 90% of the Top 500 supercomputing sites in the world running Linux.
"Linux has come to dominate almost every category of computing, with the exception of the desktop," Zemlin said.
Windows still powers roughly 9 out of 10 traditional desktops, with the rest going to Mac and Linux. Linux's failure to capture desktop share is "disappointing to many," Zemlin admitted. But "the good news is the traditional PC desktop is becoming less important, and areas where Linux is very strong in terms of client computing are becoming more important."
That, of course, is a reference to smartphones and tablets, where Microsoft has struggled to unseat Apple and Google's Android. However, a recent IDC research note predicted that Microsoft's new Windows Phone 7 devices would overtake the iPhone in worldwide market share by 2015.
When asked about this prediction, Zemlin responded with what can best be described as several seconds of hysterical laughter. "Oh my God, Steve Jobs! Short Apple stock!" he joked.
Zemlin's optimism stems from the success of Android, which uses a kernel derived from Linux. Android devices are now more widely used than the iPhone, and HP's webOS is also a viable mobile contender using Linux.
Zemlin believes that as smartphones and tablets draw people away from their desktop PCs and laptops, Microsoft's hold on the computing market will diminish. "Today people use smartphones more, in many ways, than they may use their traditional PC," Zemlin said. "In that case, Linux really does have dominant market share through things like Android or other versions of Linux that are out there in the mobile space." (See also: "Most Android, iPhone apps violate open source rules.")
On the tablet front, though, Apple's iPad is far and away the leader, which poses a problem to those who prefer open source technologies.
"Apple is your worst enemy and your best friend if you're an open source guy," Zemlin said. "Apple in many ways has done a lot of good things for open source and for Linux. It changed the definition of what client computing is. That has been good for Linux. Apple also has a lot of open source components within their products and tends to work very well, in some cases, with the open source community. But I'm not going to argue that they don't have a very closed system as well."
Linus Torvalds started developing the Linux kernel in 1991 as an open source alternative to Unix. Combined with the GNU software created by Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, it forms the core of many operating system distributions. (See also: "Cell phones are 'Stalin's dream,' says free software movement founder.")
Depending on one's point of view, Linux began either on Aug. 25, 1991, when Torvalds posted a message saying he was creating a free operating system as "just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu," or on Oct. 5, 1991, when the first Linux code was released. Linux enthusiasts will celebrate both dates, but the main activities will take place Aug. 17-19 at the LinuxCon North America conference in Vancouver, Canada. The Linux Foundation is also holding a big event this week in San Francisco, the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit.
The Linux Foundation, of which Torvalds is an employee, is dedicated to accelerating adoption and development of Linux, and bringing people together to collaborate and boost technical innovation around the kernel. Created in 2007 and based in San Francisco, the foundation counts as its members and financial supporters many of the biggest names in the tech industry, including IBM, Intel, Oracle, Cisco, Google, HP, Red Hat and dozens of others.
"It's basically everybody but Microsoft," Zemlin said. "We get money from corporations and we get money from individuals who just believe in Linux and use it day in and day out."
Despite Zemlin's sunny outlook, he notes there are still challenges. Patent lawsuits and legal uncertainty might prevent some people from adopting open source, even though these problems aren't unique to open source, Zemlin said. "We have to educate producers of products how to comply with open source licenses in a low-cost and efficient way. That's a challenge," he said.
And, of course, there is that issue that Microsoft still dominates the desktop software market. When asked why Linux has failed to build desktop share, Zemlin said, "There was this monopolist who just kept everybody else out of the marketplace."
Others, like GNOME creator Miguel de Icaza, have argued that Linux and open source developers "don't seem to get our act together when it comes to understanding the needs of end users on the desktop."
But while Microsoft has sold 300 million Windows 7 licenses and reported record second-quarter revenue of nearly $20 billion, Zemlin said Linux people aren't giving up on the desktop market just yet.
For one thing, the desktop operating system itself is becoming less important as people do more and more of their work in the browser, he notes. In the future, you just may need a browser running on top of a lightweight operating system. While Microsoft's Internet Explorer runs only on Windows, major open source browsers such as Chrome and Firefox run on Windows, Mac or Linux.
"The reality is that the fat lady hasn't sung yet," Zemlin said. "Operating systems in general are like huge tides that ebb and flow very slowly over time, it's almost glacial. It takes time for people to realize that they may not need that set of computing requirements for the desktop anymore, and get used to different ways of using a computer."
Follow Jon Brodkin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jbrodkin
Source: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/040511-linux-vs-microsoft.html?page=2
Friday, February 5, 2010
unmerging packages + updating etc files on Gentoo
To uninstall a package, the unmerge command is:
For example if I want to uninstall my nvidia drivers, here is the command and it's output:
To update all the etc files in Gentoo, use this comand:
emerge -C
For example if I want to uninstall my nvidia drivers, here is the command and it's output:
localhost # emerge -C x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers
x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers
selected: 185.18.36
protected: none
omitted: none
>>> 'Selected' packages are slated for removal.
>>> 'Protected' and 'omitted' packages will not be removed.
>>> Waiting 5 seconds before starting...
>>> (Control-C to abort)...
>>> Unmerging in: 5 4 3 2 1
>>> Unmerging x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-185.18.36...
* Removing x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-185.18.36 from moduledb.
Switching to xorg-x11 OpenGL interface... done
* GNU info directory index is up-to-date.
* IMPORTANT: 1 config files in '/etc' need updating.
* See the CONFIGURATION FILES section of the emerge
* man page to learn how to update config files.
* IMPORTANT: 1 news items need reading for repository 'gentoo'.
* Use eselect news to read news items.
localhost #
To update all the etc files in Gentoo, use this comand:
etc-updateand:
dispatch-conf
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Note To Self: Linux CLI Commands
On Digg today, there's an article with 743 diggs that reads: Explained: 9 useful Linux commands everyone should use! Of all the commands mentioned, this is the only command that I didn't know:
At the end of that Digged article, there were links to the Ubuntu Community Documentation for the Terminal, which introduces new users to the command line, and a Unix commandline cheat sheet.
The following commands are new to me and will serve me well in the future:
This one is worth a million dollars:
$ free
At the end of that Digged article, there were links to the Ubuntu Community Documentation for the Terminal, which introduces new users to the command line, and a Unix commandline cheat sheet.
The following commands are new to me and will serve me well in the future:
ctrl+a or Home
Moves the cursor to the start of a line.
ctrl+e or End
Moves the cursor to the end of a line.
ctrl+b
Moves to the beginning of the previous or current word.
ctrl+k
Deletes from the current cursor position to the end of the line.
ctrl+u
Deletes the whole of the current line.
ctrl+w
Deletes the word before the cursor.
This one is worth a million dollars:
There are so many times when I scroll up looking of a command I used days ago that I used, but can't recall the full syntax. ctrl + r should remdy this problem. Here is another guide to Bash which clarifies how to use the CTRL + R feature:ctrl+r
Searches for commands you've already typed. When you have entered a very long, complex command and need to repeat it, using this key combination and then typing a portion of the command will search through your command history. When you find it, simply press Enter.
1. Easily recall previous commands
Bash keeps track of the commands you execute in a history buffer, and allows you to recall previous commands by cycling through them with the Up and Down cursor keys. For even faster recall, "speed search" previously-executed commands by typing the first few letters of the command followed by the key combination Ctrl-R; bash will then scan the command history for matching commands and display them on the console. Type Ctrl-R repeatedly to cycle through the entire list of matching commands.
Friday, August 8, 2008
Note to self: gnome themeing
When I fix Ubuntu, use this gdm theme and try this cool gnome panel, both of which are found at gnome-look.org.
Monday, July 7, 2008
Compiz Fusion cube maps
Here are some excellent cube maps for compiz fusion I wanna try (when i get a working PC)
Friday, June 13, 2008
ecomorph + e17
Check out this link I found on Google for the highly experimental ecomorph built with compiz-fusion and e17.
Here is the detour (DTR) project.
The work Alberto Castro and Hannes Janetzek do is really impressive.
Here is the detour (DTR) project.
The work Alberto Castro and Hannes Janetzek do is really impressive.
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Plato's Self Help
"One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being ruled by your inferiors." Plato (Republic, Book I, 347c) Plato's quote is applicable to free software. The penalty for refusing to use Linux, is you end up being ruled by the chains built into Microsoft's inferior proprietary products. Plato's quote implies self help and self reliance.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Customizing Ubuntu
Check out this blog post which explains how to customize Grub, Ubuntu splash theme and gdm theme.
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Slackware, Summer Reading List, Slamd64 Tonight, Papers
I wrote three philosophically important papers in the last month of my final year at Trent
* Review of Goldman's Imperial Nature, on resistance to the IMF.
* Contemporary Just War Theory breeds violence, which reinforces The Secret teachings
* Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals as it applies to sub prime mortgage crisis in America
* JS Mill and Singer's article on African poverty and income distribution and molotov cocktails
* Spinoza's link to the environment (maybe this essay wasn't so great)
In other news: Today I was crying because I don't have the programming skill to fix compiz-fusion myself. I wish I could make compiz-fusion more stable. Maybe I'll feel better if I nuke and then reinstall win32 before I install Slamd64 12.1 and install e17 using Stratera's SlackBuilds.
In other news, ##slackware idlers on FreeNode suggest new users read Slackbook at least twice. My summer reading list grows again. Here is what my summer reading list looks like now (sorry for the screwed up formatting):
* Review of Goldman's Imperial Nature, on resistance to the IMF.
* Contemporary Just War Theory breeds violence, which reinforces The Secret teachings
* Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals as it applies to sub prime mortgage crisis in America
* JS Mill and Singer's article on African poverty and income distribution and molotov cocktails
* Spinoza's link to the environment (maybe this essay wasn't so great)
In other news: Today I was crying because I don't have the programming skill to fix compiz-fusion myself. I wish I could make compiz-fusion more stable. Maybe I'll feel better if I nuke and then reinstall win32 before I install Slamd64 12.1 and install e17 using Stratera's SlackBuilds.
In other news, ##slackware idlers on FreeNode suggest new users read Slackbook at least twice. My summer reading list grows again. Here is what my summer reading list looks like now (sorry for the screwed up formatting):
* Lost in Space by Mike Dooley* Happier than God by Neale Donald Walcshe
* Chaim Perelman, Realm of Rhetoric as I promised Tindale I would
* Slavoj Žižek, (1989)The Sublime Object of Ideology --> This book might be fun to read because of this note. (More here)Žižek writes:
It is my belief that these three aims are deeply connected: the only way to "save Hegel" is through Lacan, and this Lacanian reading of Hegel and the Hegelian heritage opens up a new approach to ideology, allowing us to grasp contemporary ideological phenomena (cynicism, totalitarianism, the fragile status of democracy) without falling prey to any kind of postmodernist traps (such as the illusion that we live in a "post-ideological" condition). (The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 7
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Friday, April 11, 2008
cubereflex
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