Monthly Archives: March 2008

Mac.com email sillyness

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You’d have thought Apple would know how to do email right, but sadly it appears not. A message I sent to the Beowulf list today generated a bounce from a mac.com email address back to me rather than to the envelope sender – very naughty as RFC-2821 says:

If an SMTP server has accepted the task of relaying the mail and later finds that the destination is incorrect or that the mail cannot be delivered for some other reason, then it MUST construct an “undeliverable mail” notification message and send it to the originator of the undeliverable mail (as indicated by the reverse-path).

I wonder if they read their Postmaster email ?

It’s raining!

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What’s all this wet stuff falling out of the sky ?

The Bureau of Meteorology warns that, at 9:55 pm, severe thunderstorms were detected on weather radar near Craigieburn, St Albans and Werribee. These thunderstorms are moving towards the east. They are forecast to affect Caulfield, Dandenong, Footscray, Frankston, Glen Waverley, Greensborough, Melbourne City, Preston, Ringwood and Rosebud by 10:40 pm and Healesville, Pakenham and Phillip Island by 11:25 pm.

Hmm, I think this is what they mean..

BoM weather radar for 2008-03-24 10:50pm

ZFS-FUSE Bonnie++ benchmark update

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After the previous benchmark of btrfs I thought it’d be interesting to revisit ZFS using FUSE under Linux, so after updating to the current tip (02d648b1676c) in the Mercurial trunk I created a 30GB LVM volume for testing and gave it a go. Now you can’t compare it to previous results as this is completely different hardware, but the numbers look quite respectable in comparison to the in-kernel file systems tested yesterday.

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btrfs 0.13 and XFS benchmarks

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Back in February Chris Mason announced btrfs 0.13, so I thought I’d give it a quick go as I’d not touched it since testing btrfs 0.5 back in August. Back then, on some pretty meaty hardware, there was a considerable difference between XFS and btrfs and I was curious as to how they’d compare now.

The test hardware this time is a quad core Intel box with 8GB RAM and a pair of 750GB SATA drives in a RAID-1 mirror. It is running Kubuntu Hardy Heron (now in beta) with a 2.6.25-rc6 kernel.

A quick blast with Bonnie++ surprised me, btrfs matched XFS for read, writes and rewrites (though with higher CPU usage, presumably due to the fact that it’s checksuming all the data) and then blew XFS away for meta-data operations.

Operation XFS btrfs
Block write (KB/s) 50572 42087
Block rewrite (KB/s) 23739 23296
Block read (KB/s) 52512 53108
Sequential creates (/s) 4095 23569
Sequential deletes (/s) 3404 15901
Random creates (/s) 1819 27919
Random deletes (/s) 1397 21561

Here are the full results:

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Upgraded to WordPress 2.5-RC1 (Updated)

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Well I’ve just completed an amazingly painless upgrade to the first release candidate ofWordPress 2.5, the only thing that caught me out was an old functions.php file left over from a previous release that caused a PHP5 error about redefining a function!

There’s bound to be some hidden breakage that I’ve not yet spotted, so leave a comment (if you can) or drop me an email as chris (at-the-domain) csamuel.org with the details please.

Update: After a few days of playing around with it I’ve got to say I like it the new admin interface. I’m finding it much easier to navigate and compared to the other WP 2.3 sites I admin the dashboard seems a lot less cluttered and that ever-so-subjective word, “clean”.

The only niggle I’ve got so far is that now in the widgets view you can only see the one column of widgets at a time, so if you’re using a 3 column theme (as the current one here is) you can no longer move a widget directly from one column to another. But I can live with that.