Present Perfect

I’m probably going to be doing some long flights pretty soon and I’d like to maximize my laptop time hacking on the plane.

Who of you have experience with big external batteries, what’s a good one to get, how long can I expect them to last and how long do they take to charge ?

Sometimes I get annoyed about a simple problem and want to fix it the right way and have it fixed forever. Right now is such a time.

Middle click stopped working. Not sure when – maybe on my last update or reboot ?

I know what’s wrong – xev tells me that clicking that middle mouse button tells me it thinks it’s button 6 when it should probably think it’s button 3.

Now, in the Old Days you’d tweak xorg.conf and add a funky option.

In the New Days Xorg is trying to be all about not needing xorg.conf and I support that vision. But, what is now the proper way to fix these issues ?

a) is this a bug, and should some hal file provide enough info for this mouse type to do the remapping ?

b) can evdev be configured on the fly and/or permanently to fix this mapping ?

c) which part of the stack is getting it wrong ?

If it helps, this particular machine is on Fedora 12, and the mouse is a simple Dell mouse with two buttons, a scroll wheel (the ‘third button’) and two up/down buttons.

Six years ago, we did the first large scale Ogg Theora stream from the 2004 GUADEC conference.

It was a dime on its side to get things ready for this year. I purposely removed myself from the organization, because for various reasons I’m not going to GUADEC this year, but I was hoping the rest of the company would do their part to get this working, and I just provided the necessary prodding along the way. I’ve been told one of the organisers in charge of this got ill at some point and communication went a bit south during that period, so I had some complaints from our support guys that they had to do last-minute rushing.

But the streams are live today, and a few developers here are giddily running around looking at the stream, the image, working on some typical bugs you get when you’re doing stuff like this for the first time (the artifacts on keyframes the encoder seems to have remind me a lot of the Theora bugs we had to squash back in the day, and obviously they are worse on still images, like, say, an empty conference room…)

Go check out the stream and make sure you have a WebM-enabled browser, like the Firefox 4.0 beta or latest Opera.

Congratulations to our intrepid hackers like Zaheer and Andoni for their hard work a few weeks ago on WebM, and I’ve been told Marc-André actually went to Holland just to deliver the encoders :)

Dear intarweb,

I’ve been searching all over for data on what these fancy Dell R815 servers (which can house 4 12-core Opteron CPU’s for a total of 48 cores in 2U) draw in terms of power.

This handy capacity planner from Dell doesn’t have this machine listed yet.

Anyone out there know where I can find this info, or have one of these babies actually running ?

For work, I’m re-reviewing servers and systems with the simple-but-not-easy goal of lowering the basic monthly cost per core. The world of racks, servers, CPU’s and cores is a more complicated place than it was a few years ago, since in a few U’s you can put anything from a bunch of small cheap servers up to monster boards with four CPU sockets and 12 core CPU’s for a total of 48 CPU’s in a 2U space. And a look at a Blade system still makes me drool, although I’m still not sure in what case a Blade really makes sense.

In any case, I tried to do a little comparison (which is hard, because you end up comparing apples and oranges) using Dell’s online configurator.

On the one hand, filling racks with Poweredge R810, 4 x 8 core 1.86 GHz, Intel XeonL7555 machines, gets the price down 26 euro per core per month. Doing the same with Opterons, which surely aren’t as powerful as the Intel ones, I can get a Poweredge R815, 48 cores quad Opteron 2.2 GHz, 6174, for 48 cores total, at 9.53 euro per core per month.

And then I thought a Blade would be an even better deal, but it turns out that it isn’t really. The cost per core, with similar CPU’s, really did come out pretty much the same as the R810 based solution. Probably not that surprising in the end since if you fill a machine with cores, the CPU cost will start dominating. But somehow I thought that Blades would end up being cheaper for maximum core power.

Maybe I’m approaching this the wrong way ? If the main concern is cost per core in a datacenter, how would you go about selecting systems ?