T.E. Lawrence on Mesopotamia (Iraq)

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After reading the sleeve notes for “Lots of oil” on Yelp! by the Mrs Ackroyd Band I went looking for the letter of T.E. Lawrence to The Times in July 1920 that is mentioned. It appears an archive of his papers is available at http://telawrence.net/ with the texts of his out-of-copyright writings available and in that I found his letter to the editor, The Times, 22 July 1920. I also found a later editorial in the Sunday Times (22 August 1920) which has a rather topical quote:

The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Bagdad communiqués are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record, and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are to-day not far from a disaster.

Script to Migrate Postnuke to WordPress 2

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Almost a year ago now (Jan 2006) I migrated my blog from PostNuke to WordPress and to do that I used a hacked version of Bryan’s PHP migration script (which I found here thanks to Rich Boakes), but I never got around to publishing my changes. 🙁

Changes applied:

  • Migrate PostNuke topics to WordPress categories
  • Update comment counts in the WordPress database
  • Update category counts in the WordPress database

Just had an email from someone asking about it, so I’ve decided to publish it now, so here is my hacked version of a Postnuke to WordPress Migration PHP Script.

It assumes a blank WordPress 2 install, and I last used it with WordPress 2.0.0 so caveat emptor!

Licensed under the GPLv2 (or later), as per the original.

Internet Explorer 2006 – 9 Months of Vulnerability

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If you use Internet Explorer (IE) on Windows it appears that you spent 9 months open to being hacked on your computer.

For a total 284 days in 2006 (or more than nine months out of the year), exploit code for known, unpatched critical flaws in pre-IE7 versions of the browser was publicly available on the Internet. Likewise, there were at least 98 days last year in which no software fixes from Microsoft were available to fix IE flaws that criminals were actively using to steal personal and financial data from users.

On the other side, Firefox had a single 9 day window of vulnerability to an exploit.

ZFS Disk Mirroring, Striping and RAID-Z

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This is the third in a series of tests (( the previous ones are ZFS on Linux Works! and ZFS versus XFS with Bonnie++ patched to use random data )), but this time we’re going to test out how it handles multiple drives natively, rather than running over an existing software RAID+LVM setup. ZFS has the ability to dynamically add disks to a pool for striping (the default) mirroring or RAID-Z (with single or double parity) which are designed to improve speed (with striping), reliability (with mirroring) and performance and reliability (with RAID-Z).

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ZFS versus XFS with Bonnie++ patched to use random data

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I’ve patched Bonnie++ (( it’s not ready for production use as it isn’t controlled by a command line switch and relies on /dev/urandom existing )) to use a block of data from /dev/urandom instead of all 0’s for its block write tests. The intention is to see how the file systems react to less predictable data and to remove the unfair advantage that ZFS has with compression (( yes, I’m going to send the patch to Russell to look at )).

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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.