Sun, 05 Dec 2004
Gigabit Ethernet? Bah! I need REAL speed!
Although it actually sounds pretty fast, when you actually start
benchmarking it, Gigabit Ethernet isn't quite as good a solution as you'd
think. As more and more commercial deployments move to using SANs and NAS
for online storage and backups it's increasingly easy to saturate existing
LANs.
One possible solution as people start to look at 10 and 100Gbps networks is FireEngine (PDF), a set of architecture changes and improvements for Solaris 10. The white-paper linked to above provides a nice overview on what they've changed and some estimated (almost all benchmarks are lies ;)) performance improvements; all I need now are a couple of 10Gbps NICs!
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Posted: 2004/12/05 16:13 | /operatingsystems/solaris | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
The Devils in the Details
From an article called
Faster Python grabs programmers:
The new version of Python includes a new module that allows system
administrators to use small Python programs instead of shell scripts, said
Michael McLay, a consultant who is the resident Python expert for the
nonprofit Center of Open Source and Government. Shell scripts, written to
execute routine system administration tasks, have more security
vulnerabilities and offer less feedback when errors occur, McLay
said.
I'm pretty familiar with dynamic scripting languages and even I had to scratch my head at that one. My assumption (probably wrong) is that the new Python has some kind of compiling module included but in order to even make that leap you have to have enough experience with non-techs writing tech articles to understand what *they* think the difference between a program and a shell script is. If they assume you have enough knowledge to find the difference then why not spend another sentence and actually tell you some of the 'how' and not just the 'what'. I'm not a supporter of dumbing down news and reporting but a little but can we have some useful context please!
While I can understand not wanting to bog down the average reader in technical details it'd be nice if they provided enough information to aid in a Google search...
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Posted: 2004/12/05 16:13 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
PDFs, Word Docs and Linking to Web Unfriendly File-formats
I'm not a big fan of unmarked links pointing to resources that require an
external viewer. The worst of these formats, such as PDFs or the Microsoft
Office formats, cause the browser to pretty much halt for a couple of
seconds while the viewer is loaded and then change the behaviour of the UI
(if you are viewing a PDF in FireFox for example, Ctrl-W will not close
that tab) in a way that seems designed to annoy people who know how to use
the keyboard.
Fortunately there is now an extension, called TargetAlert, for FireFox and Mozilla users that changes the HTML when it receives a page load event and adds icons to highlight links like these.
It's also worth noting that you can customise (the default types) and toggle if they should display the icons or not.
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Posted: 2004/12/05 16:13 | /tools/firefox | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
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