Category Archives: Internet

First Alpha Release of ZFS Using FUSE for Linux with Write Support

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Ricardo Correia has announced on his blog about porting Sun Solaris’s ZFS to Linux using FUSE that he has an alpha release with working write support out:

Performance sucks right now, but should improve before 0.4.0 final, when a multi-threaded event loop and kernel caching support are working (both of these should be easy to implement, FUSE provides the kernel caching).

He might be being a little modest about performance, one commenter (Stan) wrote:

Awesome! I compared a zpool with a single file (rather than a partition) compared to ext2 on loopback to a single file. With bonnie++, I was impressed to see the performance of zfs-fuse was only 10-20% slower than ext2.

Stan then went and tried another interesting test:

For fun, check out what happens when you turn compression on and run bonnie++. The bonnie++ test files compress 28x, and the read and write rates quadruple! It’s not a realistic scenario, but interesting to see.

Ricardos list of what should be working in this release is pretty impressive:

  • Creation, modification and destruction of ZFS pools, filesystems, snapshots and clones.
  • Dynamic striping (RAID-0), mirroring (RAID-1), RAID-Z and RAID-Z2.
  • It supports any vdev configuration which is supported by the original Solaris implementation.
  • You can use any block device or file as a vdev (except files stored inside ZFS itself).
  • Compression, checksumming, error detection, self-healing (on redundant pools).
  • Quotas and reservations.

Read his STATUS file to find out what isn’t working too (the main one there I spotted was zfs send and recv).

Caveat: this is an alpha release, so it might eat your data.

Dysfunctional Techno-habits

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New Scientist has a nice little article called “Just can’t get e-nough” about habitual problems some people get from using the Internet.

The web in particular has opened up a host of opportunities for overindulgence. Take Wikipedia. Updating the entries – something anyone can do – has become almost a way of life for some. There are more than 2400 “Wikipedians”, p 36 – you know where to look it up if you don’t know what it means – who have edited more than 4000 pages each (“see Confessions of a Wikipediholic”, below). “It’s clearly like crack for some people,” says Dan Cosley at Cornell University in New York, who has studied how websites such as Wikipedia foster a community. To committed Wikipedians, he says, the site is more than a useful information resource; it’s the embodiment of an ideology of free information for all.

Favourite terms – crackberry and cheesepodder (( someone who goes hunting for those cheesy old numbers for their iPod )) . 🙂

An Amusing Collection of Quotes

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From Shelley about IE7:

Writing Learning JavaScript and now Adding Ajax, as well as creating web page applications such as my photo popup has led me to an epiphany: Microsoft really doesn’t want us to use IE. No, I’m not being facetious–the company would probably prefer that people move to another browser.

(Those looking for an alternative might want to try Firefox)

Shelley also mentions how she has to test with IE6 now, using a Virtual PC image:

According to the IE weblog, this VPC image will only function until April 1st, 2007, but I think the April Fool’s joke is getting people to reserve both memory and disc space–as well as having to go through Microsoft’s validation process–just to test against a browser. What happens after April, then? Are all the Windows 2000 installations going away? There will be no need to test for IE6?

But there seems to be a problem with those images, as Paul Morriss found out, Microsoft seems to think they’re dodgy knock-offs, even though they came from them originally:

Just for fun I then decided to upgrade IE on the Virtual PC to IE7. When it got to verifying whether the copy of Windows on the Virtual PC was genuine it concluded it wasn’t.

He’s got a screenshot as proof..

Then, as a final funny thought, this worked example from Sterling W. “Chip” Camden derived from a theory by Shelley that “Every spec should be written like it was going to be read by VB developers.”:

See Dick and Jane play tag.
See Dick forget his namespace prefix.
See Jane throw an exception.
Run, Dick, run!

🙂

Richard Dawkins website blocked for being “occult” and “religious”

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This is a classic from the New Scientist Feedback section (25th December) where Eliot Attridge let them know that when he wanted to read more about Richard Dawkins:

Unfortunately, the school has installed a net filter called Netsweeper which, Attridge discovered, blocks access to www.richarddawkins.net on the grounds that it is an “occult site”.

To add insult to injury when Eliot tested with Sonicwall that described his site as “religious” – I wonder which wrong label would infuriate Dawkins most ? 🙂

Google Earth Overlay of DSE Bushfire Updates in Victoria

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Back in January 2006 some clueful person came up with the idea of creating a Google Earth overlay to monitor bushfires in Victoria.

It pulls in the latest image from the Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE) from their current incidents page about fires and overlays it on the satellite imagery.

Red circles are controlled fires, red stars are contained fires and red fires are “going” (i.e. not controlled or contained).

Unmaintained Free Software Wiki

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The free software world, as in any other field of human endeavour, has people and their interests come and go over time. This can leave projects unmaintained, but it is not necessarily the end of the world. Because of the licenses that are used others are quite free to take up the reins and resurrect a project (as myself and Brian have done with the Vacation program).

The real issue is people knowing about the projects in the first place, and so the Unmaintained Free Software Wiki was born.

Few people seem to know about the site though; Jon Corbett at LWN puts it like this:

Unfortunately, this project itself looks like it could benefit from a bit of maintenance. Only seven projects have been added since the beginning of the year, and only two (Gnome Commander and khtml2png) are listed as having been adopted. Perhaps the problem is simply one of awareness; If relatively few people even know that this site exists, few are unlikely to make use of it. If that is the case, then, hopefully, this article will help a bit.

So I’m hoping that this will help spread the word as well. If you like the idea of this then I encourage you to blog about it too and, if you have the skills, enthusiasm and Copious Free Time, take on a project yourself!