june 9, 2009 : steve : 0 comment(s)
I was so excited to get Fedora 11 installed on my new laptop. I had the x64 Live CD and x64 DVD all burned -- ready to go. First, test with Live CD, then install with DVD (to get a custom install and all). Well, booting to the Live CD was where things started to go wrong.
I got the cool Plymouth boot screen, the little Fedora free speech bubble filled in and made that cute little "poof" explosion. Then, my screen went nuts -- splintering into two with boot text. The CD ceased to spin and the machine just hung there with a split-screen and a functional cursor. What? Maybe the Live CD is bad?
I boot from the DVD and after booting to the point where Anaconda detects the video card, same damn thing. So, I reboot on the DVD and choose to go with the "safe" video. Oh, it works now. It boots, the resolution is off (1024x768 instead of 1280x800) but I can install at least. After minutes of copying files and installing, I boot the system to find that my display resolution is still 1024x768. Grr.
Giving the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file a quick edit and swapping out "vesa" for the display Driver for "radeon" made a whole lot of difference (see Update 2 for better information). On reboot, my display worked and resolution was fine. I don't get the cool Plymouth boot screen -- and my guess is because I am not using the kernel mode-setting video stuff, but that is OK. Desktop Effects seem to work fine, so I am OK.
Actually, that is all that went wrong. Otherwise, things seem to be working fine. I have the x64 version installed, so I just wanted to note for myself how to get Flash x64 working. Download from here. Then untar/ungip and put the resulting .so file into:
/usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/
Done. I will write more about Fedora 11 as I explore.
Update: Things are a bit goofy and I think it is probably because of video. But, Firefox is not showing all pictures -- there are images that are black for some reason.
Update 2: Looks like the black squares/rectangles thing is a known issue with the radeon driver. I installed xorg-x11-drv-radeonhd and then changed the driver from "radeon" to "radeonhd" and that seems to have cleared things up on this front. Though, it looks like no 3D desktop effects using this driver plus the ATI x1200. Oh well.
Update 3: Presto differential updates is pretty nice. Usually it saves 80-90% in necessary downloading. Waking up from suspend does not quiet work with Fedora 11. My wireless card (Atheros) does not wakeup properly and I need to restart NetworkManager in order to get things working. At this point, I am reinstalling Ubuntu 9.04. Fedora 11 can live happily in a VirtualBox afterwards.
june 8, 2009 : steve : 2 comment(s)
This is stuff that the elite may already be using, but I wanted to document it for my own knowledge. I was trying to speed up my websites, just because speed is good. I found a few things that I could do and I recently implemented them.
To speed up page creation, I turned on mysql's caching functionality. I use mysql to drive ultramookie.com and mindof.ultramookie.com, so making mysql faster would make the websites faster. I edited /etc/my.cnf (for RHEL and CentOS) and added:
query_cache_size=24M
query_cache_type=1
query_cache_limit=2M
Most of the queries for my websites are to build pages and RSS feeds. This change has helped tremendously because my content does not change very frequently. In order to see how mysql is doing with query caching and memory usage, I can log into mysql and run:
show status like 'qc%';
The results look kind of like this:
mysql> show status like 'qc%';
+-------------------------+----------+
| Variable_name | Value |
+-------------------------+----------+
| Qcache_free_blocks | 2 |
| Qcache_free_memory | 19791488 |
| Qcache_hits | 237778 |
| Qcache_inserts | 6639 |
| Qcache_lowmem_prunes | 0 |
| Qcache_not_cached | 31 |
| Qcache_queries_in_cache | 4117 |
| Qcache_total_blocks | 8246 |
+-------------------------+----------+
8 rows in set (0.00 sec)
The other thing I did was use Yslow and Page Speed to see what I could improve on both my pages and server. There was one thing that I did that made an immediate impact on performance: Turn on gzip/deflate. It was not hard to do and if you want to, add this to your Apache2 conf:
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ \
no-gzip dont-vary
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \
\.(?:exe|t?gz|zip|bz2|sit|rar)$ \
no-gzip dont-vary
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.pdf$ no-gzip dont-vary
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
That will compress everything except for images before sending over the network to a client. It also forces compatibility with older browsers. This has made load times much quicker because the amount of data hitting the network is less than half as before. Nice.
There were two other big things done: To turn on etags and mod_expires for image; and add some dimensions to images that load often (mainly the administrative icons for both websites).
This should at least make page loads faster And on my end, the compression should drop the amount of network traffic for my VPS.
june 5, 2009 : steve : 0 comment(s)
HTC tried a few times to get the AT&T HTC Fuze firmware update online. It went live Wednesday night(ish) and I have been using it ever since. You can get the firmware update here. The update turns a decent phone into an awesome phone. Here are some things about the firmware that make it a must-upgrade firmware:
- Speed: HTC really tweaked this release. Everything is faster and much snappier. The original firmware on the phone was pretty laggy, but I didn't realize how laggy until I upgraded. Opera used to take a long time to load (I'd say 30-45 seconds). Now, it is instantaneous. Sending pictures from the Album application was a test of patience, now it is not too bad (though still slow). TouchFlo3D is now very smooth. Menus and windows now pop up instantaneous. Screen rotation is also much faster.
- Opera: I used to dread using Opera because it was so slow. It was slow to rotate. It was slow to launch. It was slow to load pages after clicking links. Worse, if I left it running in the background, eventually it would slow the phone to a crawl. Now, that has all changed. Everything is faster, a lot faster.
- Slide-to-Answer: The original firmware had a "Answer" and "Ignore" button pop up onscreen when a call came in. Now, they switched to a slider -- a nicer designed slider than the iPhone's. On the iPhone you slide to answer -- left to right. On the Fuze, the slider is in the middle. You slide left to answer. You slide right to ignore. Nice.
- Push-to-Talk Button: The Push-to-Talk button is finally reassignable without having to hack around on the phone.
- GPS Performance: The GPS functionality of the old firmware was horrible. It took minutes to get an A-GPS lock (ie. from cell towers). Then, it took a few more minutes to get GPS satellite locks. For this reason, I hardly used my location-based applications like Live and Google Maps. With the new firmware, A-GPS lock takes seconds, then GPS satellite locks take a few seconds more. GPS has become a lot more useful.
I haven't used the new firmware long enough to see what new bugs have been introduced. But, so far, it looks like HTC has done a bang-up job with this firmware upgrade. I have noticed that my battery life is shorter since the upgrade. Maybe it is because of me using the phone more, but it is definitely shorter. HTC have sped everything up and made this phone fantastic. Kudos to HTC.
june 5, 2009 : steve : 0 comment(s)
USA Network is quickly becoming my summer destination when it comes to TV. Two years ago, I started watching Burn Notice on USA. Very cool, funny and slick show. Last year, I started watching In Plain Sight on USA. Not the best last year, but still watchable -- and getting better this year. This year, they introduced Royal Pains.
I watched the premiere of Royal Pains last night and thought it was pretty good. The main character was a bit drab and boring, but the supporting characters are all pretty fantastic. The brother and assistant bring a lot to the show. The premise of the show is (thank you Bruce for this observation) a lot like Burn Notice.
In Burn Notice, we follow a spy who got "burned" and is now out of the game. This spy goes around using his skills to help normal people. In Royal Pains, we have a doctor who got "burned" by his hospital and medical group. He ends up in the Hamptons helping out rich people with his doctor skills.
It works for the show and the show is genuinely engaging. I am not sure how long they can keep the show going on just this premise, but it will be interesting to see. The only complaint I have about the show is the music. The music in the show is overbearing and very distracting. I hope the producers will tone down the music in future episodes.
Otherwise, cool show that I'll keep watching -- and this makes three guilty pleasure type summer shows on USA for me.
may 31, 2009 : steve : 0 comment(s)
I have finally entered the HDTV age. Yesterday, after waiting all day, the Dish Network guys showed up and installed a DuoDVR VIP 722k and two new dishes. I am getting the TurboHD Bronze package (not to be confused, which it was by the customer service rep, with the BronzeHD add-on) with the Locals and DVR add-on. The package is an HD only package.
There were two reasons for the move. First, our SDTV setup was starting to fail. It was having issues catching signal from the satellites daily. Second, and this is important, the HD-only package was $6 per month cheaper than our SD-only package. Yes, we lost a few channels (MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon and E! come to mind). Otherwise, all the channels that we watch are included. Total cost is $40 a month. That's not bad.
So, what do I think? I think it is great. It doesn't knock my socks off, but that is really because I have gotten used to watching Bluray movies. Still, it is really impressive when compared with SDTV. The picture is sharp and vivid; the audio is clearer; and the new DVR is fantastic. There are still compression artifacts, but I am guessing that is an issue with all HDTV providers.
The DuoDVR VIP 722k is a fantastic DVR. It is similar enough with our old one that the learning curve is almost nothing. It is fast, fast and...fast! Especially considering that it is recording and playing back HD content. There is new functionality that is interesting. I can hook up an external USB drive to backup content from the internal drive. I can have the DVR send all of its settings to one of the remotes in case I have to get the DVR replaced -- then send the settings back to a new DVR. DishONLINE has a lot of free (and pay) content that can be downloaded via the broadband link (including a lot of HD content). The only thing I don't like is the bright blue "HDTV" logo on the front of the DVR, it is quite distracting.
One big issue I am seeing is with aspect ratios. Some channels like Sci-Fi, USA, Discovery and A&E seem to understand aspect ratios. If the content is 4x3, these channels broadcast it 4x3. If the content is 16x9, they broadcast it 16x9. Then there are channels like History and Food that have decided that no matter what, they want the picture to fill up the screen. So, the apply a zoom, stretch and squish to the picture causing a fun-house mirror type effect to 4x3 content. This sucks. I wish they would just broadcast the content in its original aspect ratio and let the end-user decide how they want to view it.
Anyways, I can't wait to start watching my favorite shows in HD. Burn Notice is starting this week, I am hoping that it is in HD. Iron Chef starts in a few minutes, I am really hoping the new episodes are in HD -- else, I will have to record the SD version since Food Network will no doubt do the zoom, stretch and squish on it. I watched a rerun of a recent Mythbusters and it is fantastic in HD -- actually, anything on the Discovery Channel HD seems to be fantastic.