Sergei Mutovkin’s Rumbling Mumbling

During the last Dell’s “Days of Deals” I’ve bought myself a new USB flash drive. My old but good Patriod 8Gb started to fall apart and there was a need for a more rugged flash disk. Also needed some more storage to move all the files I have for home and work. Even though it claims amazing 200x (what is their 1x?) speed my benchmarks are as follows.

Read speeds:
hdparm -tT /dev/sdf
/dev/sdf:
Timing cached reads: 5326 MB in 2.00 seconds = 2663.99 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 68 MB in 3.02 seconds = 22.53 MB/sec


Write speeds (for ~512Mb):

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdf bs=1024 count=500000
512000000 bytes (512 MB) copied, 11.5051 s, 44.5 MB/s

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdf bs=8192 count=65000
532480000 bytes (532 MB) copied, 13.6919 s, 38.9 MB/s


Conclusions
So format your disk either 1Kb or 8Kb blocks to achieve maximum speed of about 40MBytes/s write speed and read speed around 50Mbps.

Benchmarks were performed on Kubuntu 9.04 AMD64 edition. Note: benchmarks are not really accurate (as OS caching might be involved here and there) but give clear guidance about which block sizes I should avoid with this drive.

Finally we bought a beautiful new 2009 Nissan Altima 2.5S. I’m not a big car reviewer, but if anyone even considers buying Camry - they MUST test drive Altima on the same day right after they test drive Camry.
You will understand that Camry is a couch for elderly with a steering wheel. Anyway, today I’m here not to write a review - I have a question. With only one car garage it means one of my beloved cars will stand outside in the awful weather offered by Southern Ontario. For the four years I had X-Trail I did not want to protect it with something like Krown spray or similar - what a mess. I find this solution way too antique. For the longest time I was looking, but delaying installation of an Electronic module that would protect my car all around.
Google search being my right hand tool uncovered a few choices that I can find in Canada, though I’m still looking for the actual place that will install them.

One is Final Coat with a Canadian office located in the neck of the woods - in Concord.

Another device is sold at Canadian Tire - CounterAct.

The third is a device I would have to order online, but which has some limited “trust level” is RustStop. Low trust level is mostly due to this informative article.

Unfortunately, I can’t find real independent source of information, like Consumer Reports that independently tested these “gadgets”… so I’m asking you - my dear visitor to contribute your thoughts. I really want to know which one is better? Did I miss one that is worth checking out?

Tired of having jerky YouTube video playback on your AMD64 version of Ubuntu Linux 8.04? Want Flash release that promises to be hardware accelerated? Wait no more, you can get latest beta from the Adobe Labs website, currently version is dated from August 11, 2008.

How are we going to do it? Let’s tee-off from Adobe Labs Flash download page. And download latest version for Linux in TAR.GZ format. (I assume that you had previously installed Ubuntu’s flash-nonfree package which contained version 9 of the flash player).


wget http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/flashplayer10/flashplayer10_install_linux_081108.tar.gz
tar zxvf flashplayer10_install_linux_081108.tar.gz
sudo cp install_flash_player_10_linux/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree/
sudo nspluginwrapper -i /usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree/libflashplayer.so


This should work in the perfect world, however we are not there yet, so you will be greeted with this helpful message:

*** NSPlugin Viewer *** ERROR: libcurl.so.3: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
nspluginwrapper: no appropriate viewer found for /usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree/libflashplayer.so


Yeah, that essential library is missing… but why? Because this is a new dependency on the Flash side which is a 32bit library and needs corresponding lib32 versions of already present AMD64 versions. Unfortunately, libcurl and other Flash 10 required 32 bit libraries are not bundled by Ubuntu AMD64 team. But that’s easy to solve.

Download latest i386 versions of the following libraries (download them to a clean folder which you can delete later):

• libcurl
• libnss
• libnspr
• libssl

Now you have to extract the files by performing the following operations:

ar x ./libcurl3_7.18.0-1ubuntu2_i386.deb
tar zxvf data.tar.gz
ar x ./libssl0.9.8_0.9.8g-4ubuntu3.3_i386.deb
tar zxvf data.tar.gz
ar x ./libnss3-1d_3.12.0~beta3-0ubuntu1_i386.deb
tar zxvf data.tar.gz
ar x ./libnspr4-0d_4.7.1~beta2-0ubuntu1_i386.deb
tar zxvf data.tar.gz


We will have to copy all these libraries to your lib32 storage location and create required symlinks.

sudo cp -a usr/lib/ /usr/lib32/
cd /usr/lib32
sudo ln -sf libnss3.so.1d libnss3.so
sudo ln -sf libnspr4.so.0d libnspr3.so
sudo ln -sf libnspr4.so.0d libnspr4.so
sudo ln -sf libssl3.so.1d libssl3.so
sudo ldconfig


Yahoo… we are almost done. Just a final command to make Linux browsers find our plugin.
sudo nspluginwrapper -i /usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree/libflashplayer.so

Now restart your browser and enjoy crappy YouTube video quality :); real man download .MP4 H264 versions of YouTube videos (but that’s another story).

I was struggling to find an application that would be as simple as Flickr native Uploadr but would provide me with an option to change permissions before pictures are uploaded. Finally I’ve found Ross Burton’s Postr - GNOME Flickr Uploader.

Ubuntu 8.04 already comes with package called “postr“, however it is a very outdated version 0.9 from more then a year ago and did not have the features I wanted. Current version is 12.2 and it has a much improved feature set. It definitely belongs to Ubuntu backports, but as always with Ubuntu you will have to wait until the next stable release Ubuntu 8.10 (codename Intrepid Ibex).

For now you will unfortunately have to install it manually from console

tar zxvf postr-0.12.2.tar.gz
cd postr-0.12.2/
sudo python setup.py install


A bonus is that this program is written in my favorite Python.

Again, just after finishing watching another Blu-ray disk - “Road Warrior” I was greeted with a message that a new update is available, this time it was 2.42. No details available, though I really hope that it will resolve choppy MP4/AVI file playback issue that plagued my Playstation ever since I’ve installed long awaited 2.41.

Other than that I still have to inform the great Internet why I was out of blogging for so long…

Today, Trolltech has released Release Candidate 1 of the featurefull Qt 4.4. Downloading it as I write this and I hope to play with its new Help Module, ultra cool feature removing the need to launch external assistant.

Now KDE 4.1 will be even faster and more stable.

It has been almost three weeks as AMD has announced the new chipset - 780G and a new power efficient CPU - X2 4850e. Motherboards are available for a couple of weeks already and are quite cheap. I’ve put my eye on this combo as my new server rig (with ASUS M3A78-EMH motherboard that features 6 SATA2 ports - feature that should be standard these days, but it is not). 4850e should be approximately as fast as 4800+ but only at 45W. Great? Isn’t it? But the CPU is nowhere to be found. Is this a paper launch again? Too frustrating…

All I want is a power efficient rig to run Ubuntu 8.04 Server LTS.

April 6, 2008 Update: What a disaster. I want to get AMD CPU first time in a VERY VERY long time and I can’t do it ANYWHERE on the internet one month after it has been announced. I totally miss the point of announcing it at all… It seems Dell is using it already in its business line, but nowhere else. If only there was any Intel based 6 SATA port motherboard I would have dumped AMD idea altogether. Then AMD complains that it can’t occupy its fabs enough… Now I know: it is because CPUs are not available at all, nobody can buy them to require any manufacturing at all. If only there was a cheap G33 based 6 SATA port motherboard except the expensive Supermicro board…..

One amazing piece of hardware, just put 6 SATA connectors on it and it is a perfect Linux server. Just 4 Watts (plus 3×10W for HDDs) instead of 100+ will make my hydro bill go down quite a bit.

Month after month I was checking Dell’s Canadian online store to see if Ubuntu pre-loaded laptops and desktops are available, but as everything here, ultra-conservative canadian Dell office refused to offer any cheaper and safer computing solution, instead forcing people proven expensive, proprietary and virus-laden Microsoft Windows systems. But…

The wait is over!

Now you can order Ubuntu 7.10 based laptops and desktops for approximately $50 cheaper then their Windows pre-loaded brothers and sisters. My favorite is M1330 which is the first slick laptop from Dell.

Get yourself a Dell!

Good buy consumer friendly but technically challenged (only 30Gb on two layers) HD-DVD. Toshiba is has discontinued its High Definition disk format! Good to know that HD-DVD only movies will be soon available in Blu-Ray on my PlayStation 3.