2010 January archive at Robert Pogson

Archive for January, 2010

PHP

Published by Robert Pogson January 31st, 2010 in technology. 0 Comments

Not one of my favourite languages but very popular for rapid development of web applications, this interpreted language does a decent job on the front-end/ web facing/user-interface. However, it is interpreted which is extra work for the server. Caching can help but the answer is a compiler. Use PHP as it is to debug/develop rapidly your site but compile the code into machine readable stuff for faster execution. That is the obvious way to go and I did think to do such a project years ago, but it never amounted to anything. My concept was to rewrite important PHP scripts in Pascal so that they could compile properly.

The trolls here have pooh-poohed this idea, citing Facebook as an example of a high-powered/busy site running lots of PHP. Low, and behold, there is a story out that Facebook is working on a compiler for PHP.

“

Rumpus: So what will be the net effect of running the site on Hyper PHP?

Employee: We’re going to reduce our CPU usage on our servers by 80%, so practically, users will just see this as a faster site. Pages will load in one fifth of the time that they used to.

“

Facebook agrees. PHP is too slow as an interpreted language. QED.

Now, there are aspects of PHP that do not lend themselves to compiling like loose/flexible typing. The compiler has to make a choice at compile-time. This could be a fork of PHP or a new interface. We await the news.

Update: I tested the Roadsend PHP compiler against “Hello, World!”. My Pascal version executes in 0.001s according to time. The Roadsend version takes 0.1s. The difference? The statically linked version is 5.8MB! while my Pascal binary is 0.1MB. Maybe Hello, World! is not the best benchmark but it is an indication of problems with PHP compilers. Perhaps this is not an issue for FastCGI.

Update: Facebook has announced their project, HipHop,

“HipHop programmatically transforms your PHP source code into highly optimized C++ and then uses g++ to compile it. HipHop executes the source code in a semantically equivalent manner and sacrifices some rarely used features — such as eval() — in exchange for improved performance. HipHop includes a code transformer, a reimplementation of PHP’s runtime system, and a rewrite of many common PHP Extensions to take advantage of these performance optimizations.”

They have tweaked the language a bit and the runtime and compile it in C++ instead of interpreting the code. They get a 50% reduction in server load doing that so it pays in a big way. They will release the code as FLOSS later today. 50% may be no motivation at all for a light-weight site but for Facebook, it probably will save them millions annually in operating costs. For me, it could cut response time which is a great thing in a web app.

- Robert Pogson

Copenhagen Climate Council Promotes GNU/Linux on Thin Clients

Published by Robert Pogson January 31st, 2010 in technology and Uncategorized. 0 Comments

The London Summit must agree that investment in low-emissions technology and infrastructure must be integral to government recovery packages in order to create jobs, foster innovation, and achieve energy security through the 21st century. Governments should individually implement and document their efforts in this regard.

see Their letter to G20 leaders.

If that is not a promotion of GNU/Linux on thin clients, I do not know what would be more clear. Energy produced by fossil fuels runs many PCs. If we replace the PCs with terminal servers and thin clients we can save a lot of power consumption:

typical thick client consumes about 100 watts apart from the monitor, keyboard and mouse
typical thin client can be 20 watts or less
the difference is about 80 watts saved per conversion to thin client, perhaps 75 watts because we need a terminal server which runs a bunch of thin clients
75 watts saved times 1000 million PCs is 75 gigawatts

We can also save on production/waste costs because thin clients can last several times longer than most PCs.

On top of that we get ease of management and better performance with shared memory and file caching, no downside except video, which is why we can still have a few thick clients or televisions.

- Robert Pogson

First They Ignore Us…

Published by Robert Pogson January 28th, 2010 in Uncategorized. 4 Comments

It’s still happening. IDC puts out PC processor statistics while ignoring ARM and non-x86. Then PCWorld publishes an apocalyptic tale of life after that other OS. It’s so weird. ARM is growing very rapidly and is huge in the mobile space. To ignore it in PC processors is silly. Many of us already enjoy life after M$ and it is just fine. The report expected today on M$’s latest quarter may tell us how they have done in the same quarter that everyone else says is a rebound. If we are truly on the way to being free of M$, their numbers should be sad for the client division. I predict that up-selling will not work very well. I see machines recently purchased equipped with Vista which is going out with fire-sale prices. That cannot help profitability for a monopoly. They had the same trouble with XP only now the problem is with retail. How big is the stock of Vista machines?

Update The figures are now in. That other OS client division brought in $2.8 billion more revenue than in the same quarter last year. The sad thing is that $1.7 billion of revenue counted this quarter was deferred income from sales of Vista (with upgrade rights to “7″). That means they got a 20% increase in revenue when PC production returned to normal from the slump. That means no “pop” in the quarter in which “7″ was released. The CPU and PC sector saw 30 and 15% increases. Up-selling is just not working…

Just before reading the report, I noticed my favourite supplier of computer stuff has decided the netbook will be here to stay and created a netbook category in the database, full of XP, Vista, and “7″ starter. The prices range from $300+ for XP to $500+ for “7″ starter. HOOHAHAHAHA… How sad for a monopoly not to be able to force the customer to take those little extras. Now, if only my supplier realized there are other OS out there and non-x86 CPUs… That will come in the real world of 2010.

Update For another analysis of the numbers see El Reg.

Update: IDC does it again. While trumpeting that Android will be the #2 OS on smartphone by 2013, they announce Linux will trail badly… I guess they don’t know that Android is a GNU/Linux distro.

- Robert Pogson

Is an IED or InternetExploder more Dangerous?

Published by Robert Pogson January 27th, 2010 in technology. 0 Comments

There has been a lot in the news about IEDs used by irregular forces in Afghanistan but InternetExploder affects more of us personally if not lethally. After years of reporting serious vulnerabilities in IE, it is still no more secure. The latest revelation will be published at BlackHat this year. It’s the same old thing. By exploiting a chain of vulnerabilities in IE and its OS, the webmaster can see everything on your PC…

I have already advised users of my system to stop using IE. I guess now it is time to install FF everywhere and time to remove IE. Those who have switched do not seem to mind. It’s just more work and time wasted eliminating it.

The nightmare of IE never seems to end. When Bill decided to integrate IE into Lose ’95 in order to lock out NetScape, he set in motion no end of feature bloat that violated all notions of security. There is a way to do many things with a browser. One uses standard interfaces that, if compromised, can be fixed in a localized manner. Integrating everything with everything means nothing can be changed without unintended consequences like opening more holes. The K.I.S.S principle works in IT.

Update: Rather than remove it, I disabled user access. Users were still able to access it. Another re-re-reboot fixed that. Now the blue “e” is gone. Now to change the images and push.

- Robert Pogson

LSE and Intel

Published by Robert Pogson January 25th, 2010 in Teaching. 0 Comments

There’s news that the London Stock Exchange plans to move to GNU/Linux within 12 months. There is also a story on Groklaw about GNU/Linux meeting the needs of Intel better than that other OS ten years ago. GNU/Linux is a great OS.

The recent LSE move includes the purchase of a MilleniumIT from Sri Lanka. They are hiring staff with C++ experience now. The goal is millisecond transaction time with superior reliability. The cost of buying the company was much less than the cost of an upgrade made recently, and the hours of downtime they have had recently.

- Robert Pogson

Weblog of an ISP

Published by Robert Pogson January 20th, 2010 in technology. 2 Comments

One of the annoying things about web stats is that the published ones from NetApps and others do not show the sites visited very well. There is always the possibility of bias. I have been looking for something more open and stumbled upon the weblog og an ISP. They should have a reasonably unbiased sample. I was playing with the “visitors” package from Debian and thought to look it up on the web.

I found this site reports 4.4% GNU/Linux visitors from their webloag. The site is a dial-up ISP and co-location service so they may have more visitors who are techie but at least we know that up front. It shows MacOS at 4.7%. Now to find reports far and wide, wherever Debian goes…

http://stats.kore-nordmann.de/ a web/php dev site reports 14.82% in Germany
http://www.cnpaf.embrapa.br/ government agriculture 1.1%

That’s not much but at least it is a different story. GNU/Linux is widely used and by more than 1% globally.

- Robert Pogson

FLOSS in Government

Published by Robert Pogson January 18th, 2010 in Linux in Education and technology. 0 Comments

Public education is often provided by government so many of the issues, motivations, and advantages of FLOSS are the same for both. I received a link by e-mail that discusses the views and involvement of SUN in this issue. Thanks, noreply, whoever you are.

Of course, SUN sells a lot of hardware, software and services so government is likely one of their big customers. Providing customers economical FLOSS can be difficult as SUN well knows but they seem at times good stewards of FLOSS (OpenOffice.org, VirtualBox, OpenSolaris, Java, etc.).

One thing that governments and large organizations seem to miss about FLOSS, though, is that, instead of paying for licences for software or not, they should consider actually participating in the generation of FLOSS by hiring some coders. These large organizations can thus be self-supporting. As SUN found out when they replaced M$ Office with StarOffice, a large organization can buy a whole company for less than the total bill for licences to a monopoly like M$. Government is not in the business of producing software but it is less costly to do this with FLOSS and they reduce the anxiety about who will maintain the software if they have a hand in its production. They can also have the features they want and can get the bugs out sooner. Education in Canada is fragmented with federal, provincial/territorial, municipalities and school divisions all having a hand in running and funding education so it may be harder for education to contribute to FLOSS generally but government at national levels is always big so they should choose FLOSS and contribute to it. In education, some large institutions and a few dedicated individuals do contribute but all can benefit from FLOSS.

TFA is not specific about how governments are using FLOSS but certainly on the server there is huge uptake. The desktop will come but it takes time. Even Munich which decided to go FLOSS in 2004 is still in the process of migration. The larger the organization the longer it takes to migrate because of complexity. Smaller ogranizations can migrate on a weekend. The larger organizations perhaps should set some standards for interoperability and allow their sub-units to migrate individually. Munich had 12 departments. The central IT guys are still finding stuff in corners… It might have been much faster for the central guys to require FLOSS by a set date and provided resources to each department rather than trying to make a central plan that fit everywhere. I know if a truck arrived here with 100 PCs and everything needed to make them run FLOSS, I could have it installed over a weekend. On the other hand, to get every school to participate in the planning and implementation of a one-size-fits-all system, it would take years just to do the talking.

- Robert Pogson

2009

Published by Robert Pogson January 15th, 2010 in technology. 2 Comments

There are reports coming in that 2009 was a turn-around year for the PC with 90 million shipping in the 4th quarter. Acer surpassed Dell globally in units shipped. Netbooks are still climbing with huge share in China, particularly. “7″ did not drive sales… That means a lot of GNU/Linux system were released upon the world. It was the Year of GNU/Linux on the desktop. Despite M$ and its partners trying to “upsell”, the world clamored for low-priced PCs. That’s why Acer surpassed Dell. That’s why M$ will report another poor quarter for the client division.

see

Digitimes
Gartner
“Shipment growth was largely driven by low-priced consumer mobile PCs, both in regular notebooks and mini-notebooks. As economic weakness continued, buyers became extremely price sensitive. Low-priced PCs were good enough for many average consumers,” Ms. Kitagawa said. ”Windows 7 was launched during the fourth quarter of 2009. Though the new operating system launch did not create additional PC demand, the launch was a good market tool during holiday sales.”

- Robert Pogson

Who are the Real Pirates?

Published by Robert Pogson January 9th, 2010 in technology. 0 Comments

M$ has a EULA. Folks are supposed to follow it. So is M$… No. That would be too simple. M$ is now saying that if you rent a PC or rent time on it, they want a piece of the action in spite of the EULA saying it is OK to let people use the software on your PC. Read the comments following this article: “Microsoft ends Windows and Office 2007 rental restrictions”

Truth is stranger than fiction when M$ wants to earn steal more money from their customers. The EULA is incomprehensible. Following it is impossible and it costs you dearly to try. Go Free. Use FLOSS instead.

- Robert Pogson

Clonezilla Stomps That Other OS

Published by Robert Pogson January 9th, 2010 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

That other OS is very popular but I am tired of “fixing it”. M$ keeps making life harder for fixers:

WGdisA
entering product keys from Hell
re-re-reboots
updates upon updates

I have been doing my part to help M$ keep its empire going but I am tired of all these silly things that have to be done above and beyond installing and running the OS. I have been using dd and ssh to distribute images of XP around the building and updating keys but today, M$ decided one of my machines did not deserve to run. This was compounded by a mysterirous delay upon reboot and failure of the firewall to run. After wasting a lot of time, I decided to wipe the machine. I was using it as a repository of images but I could do that with Clonezilla and not have to bother with the “Activation” thing.

I made a minimal installation of Debian Lenny, about 400 MB. I even deselected the “standard install”. I only took 14 files form the web for updates. The rest came from drbl.sourceforge.net. APT brought in drbl and drbl scripts brought in clonezilla. Installation is clunky but the system works/feels just like Ghost when it runs. I started accumulating 5gB backups for these systems. The beauty of it that now that I have “perfected” the image I want to distribute, it is a fairly simple matter to turn Clonezilla loose and re-image a bunch at once. Clonezilla can broadcast to the LAN and the clients can boot PXE to slurp it up. I can either command the operation from the client or the server.

Even better, if staff choose to migrate to GNU/Linux, I can have it cloned around the building in an hour or so. All the teachers use one of two models of PC. I could also just change their BIOS to boot PXE and give them a choice of configuration with DRBL like running one distro or another or acting like a thin client from the server. The complexity of Clonezilla pays off when you have a complex system. Our needs are fairly simple so using Clonezilla to install a bootloader or changing the BIOS to boot PXE would be all that we would need.

Thanks, steven_shiau and partners, for a wonderfully useful tool.

- Robert Pogson

Et tu, HP!

Published by Robert Pogson January 8th, 2010 in technology. 0 Comments

Wintel is a huge monopoly. It serves to steer people like cattle through a chute to slaughter. Because people are caught in the current of humanity, they have to pay what the monopoly asks at the gate. Imagine the horror on the face of the monopoly when HP shows off a SnapDragon-powered netbook at a big consumer electronics show. This thing has no Intel chip and doesn’t run that other OS. HP is also a huge “partner”. What fun to watch the monopoly cracking. Will it crumble in 2010? Maybe. The monopoly is so huge it may take a few years just so existing PCs die off to change things. ARM CPUs will change things quite a lot in 2010. It will be a good year.

This is a sign that OEMs are looking at backup plans for what to do when the monopoly crumbles. If the market for that other OS dries up, they have GNU/Linux to lean on. They may have to advertise it a bit, but they can. If the market for x86 dries up in preference to ARM for power/price, HP and others need an alternative. If they will not supply ARM and GNU/Linux, others will. The market is beginning to finish the process of curing the anti-competitive acts of the monopoly. It is about time.

- Robert Pogson

Want to be Our Customer? Suffer!

Published by Robert Pogson January 8th, 2010 in technology. 0 Comments

I have met a lot of users of PCs lately that hate M$. They hate the re-re-reboots, the malware, the BSODs, the slowness and pausing. They hate the ever-increasing complexity of everything about M$, including the apps, the licensing, the OS, etc. These are the little people far below M$’s tax bracket. I would expect such a supplier would at least take care of their seriously locked-in, biggest contributors, large businesse. No. That’s not M$’s style. They jerk those folks around with ever-changing policies, complex licensing and discounting schemes. This takes the cake, though. M$ shut down their volume licensing site for extended maintenance. Volume licensing. You know the licensing for those who have more licences than they know how to use. These customers are conveyor belts full of cash flowing towards the monopoly. They pay on schedule like Pavlov’s dogs salivated on signal. Why would M$ do anything to risk shutting down that conveyor belt?

It passes all my understanding, but they did that over the Christmas season.

M$ really cares nothing for their customers. It’s all about what M$ wants, as if they were a three-year-old child instead of a mature corporation. All the bloat, re-re-reboots, complexity, lock-in, cost, etc. is not a problem for M$ so they do nothing about it. They have tricked the world into paying for faulty products and they will continue as long as people continue paying. People need a choice and they have one, GNU/Linux. No fooling around. GNU/Linux ia all about running your PC the way you want it to run, not M$. Free Software is freedom from abuse.

I maintain some XP machines here for the time being. They make work for me. I need to keep four separate images because XP does not come with drivers needed for many common systems. No kidding. I needed to add USB mice to the images… GNU/Linux has worked smoothly with USB mice for 5 years or more. Wait! XP is from 2001. It’s obsolete and M$ replaced it with Vista, the ultimate in bloatware. People are waking up to this abuse. They are seeing GNU/Linux as an alternative. Folks who see it for the first time are amazed that things can be done three times faster using the same hardware. They wonder why they put up with this stuff so long. I wonder, too.

I did not get to deliver my presentation today. There was a scheduling problem. Next week will be good. Folks here are so ready. I have shown a few staff and students privately the wonders of GNU/Linux and got nothing but positive response. Oh, the students resented that Internet access is blocked during school hours but they loved the performance and the web resources hosted locally. This community is ready to change and the sooner the better. They have a ton of PCs with a few years more life in them that work very well with GNU/Linux but sloooowwww dddooooowwwn with that other OS.

- Robert Pogson

Archives by Month

My Mission

My observations and opinions about IT are based on 40 years of use in science and technology and lately, in education. I like IT that is fast, cost-effective and reliable. I do not care whether my solution is the same as yours. I like to think for myself.

My first use of GNU/Linux in 2001 was so remarkably better than what I had been using, I feel it is important work to share GNU/Linux with the world. I have been blessed by working in schools where students and school systems have benefited by good, modular software easily installed in most systems.

I have shown GNU/Linux to thousands of students and hundreds of teachers over the years and will continue in some way doing that until I die in spite of the opposition.