For those that haven’t read my previous posts on this topic, I’ve switched from Windows Vista to Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex (8.10) on my Dell Studio 17 laptop that I use at the office. Even though Ubuntu has a great ability to “just work,” often times it is difficult and unintuitive to get certain things to work. So, I decided to blog about all those difficulties so that I can have this information to rely on later and so others can benefit from my experience.

I couldn’t get Java to function with Firefox. The main problem here is that Sun hasn’t released an official plugin with support for the 64-bit platform. I found some workarounds that were not tasteful at all, such as: removing my current Firefox and replacing it with a 32-bit version, manually creating a bunch of complex wrappers to interface my 64-bit Firefox with the 32-bit Java plugin, and solutions that get even worse from here. I decided to ditch Java and hope for finding a solution sometime later. Keep reading though, because I did find a solution.

In order for me to play “restricted format” multimedia content, I had to enable new repositories and install additional software. Fortunately, there is a very handy guide to adding support for restricted formats for Ubuntu.

Must to my surprise, installing the “ubuntu-restricted-extras” package as recommended in the guide, automatically added Java support for me. I wish that they made this more clear, since I could have ended my search for Java support much earlier. This support is thanks to the IcedTea project which seeks to make a Java interpreter that doesn’t require any non-free code. My thanks go out to the IcedTea team for making adding Java support to my 64-bit Ubuntu system so easy.

Interesting function that I just discovered: Nautilus, the default file browser for Ubuntu, has tabs now. Press Ctrl+T, and a new tab will open. I have yet to find a good use for this as dragging between two seperate windows works well. Even if I don’t find a long-term value in this feature, I do find it very interesting.

With the system shut down, I removed the card and tried to see if I could fix the problem. The fan had some dust bunnies, but nothing worse than usual. I cleaned it off, removed the heatsink, applied some new Arctic Silver, put the card back, and powered the system on. I immediately realized that this wasn’t a dust problem. The heatsink fan had failed.

Why build a card that hits the market with a $300+ price tag, has the latest nVidia chip, and has high-end VRAM yet has a fan with an extremely-high rate of failure? I’ve owned around ten video cards from various manufacturers over the past few years. This makes the forth one to have a fan failure.

I immediately ordered a replacement from Newegg: a XFX GeForce 9800 GT. I know, it’s not going to shatter any records, but I go for price, not for performance. I rarely play any games these days as it is. Besides, it’s replacing a GeForce 7600, so it’s a nice upgrade.

The fact that I immediately ordered a replacement answers my earlier question. Why make a fan that lasts ten years when you can make them fail between one to three years and force the person to get an entirely new card?

Since that card won’t get here until Wednesday at the earliest, I had to find a way to keep the system running. That’s when I had the genious idea of doing a quick and dirty mod. I ripped the card out again, removed the cover on the heatsink, and zip-tied an 80mm case fan blowing directly onto the heatsink.

With the machine back together, I booted up, loaded TF2, and watched the heat go up. And go up it did. It started at a nice cool 46°C and jumped way up to 48°C as I gamed. I’d have to say that my jury rigging works better than the original fan ever did. So, remember kids, if you want a solution to keep your GPU frosty on the cheap, slap a case fan right on top of the heatsink.

Now that I think about it, the card is quieter now too. Maybe I should remove the fan from my old card and put it on my new card when it arrives.

Dual Monitors

The first issue didn’t take long to present itself. I have an external 24″ LCD that I have hook up to at the office. This morning, I did what I normally do, plug in everything, including the monitor, and then start up the machine. When Ubuntu came up, the LCD functioned, but it was a clone of main screen.

I went into System > Preferences > Screen Resolution to see if I could set the monitors to have independent content. Unfortunately only one screen was shown.

I rebooted with the monitor disconnected and then plugged it in when Ubuntu had loaded. This produced something new: The screens were still cloned, but the primary laptop screen always tried to “focus” or center on the mouse cursor causing large portions of the screen to be cropped off if I moved the mouse to any of the edges. This was a new situation. I restarted X (ctrl+alt+backspace), and the problem remained. I decided to ignore this until I found another solution.

I googled around, read at least a dozen forum threads, and still didn’t find anything to address the issue of using dual view rather than clone view. So, I did what any good computer user should (or shouldn’t) do; I started digging around the menus for a possible solution. It only took me a couple of minutes to figure it out.

The Dell Studio 15 and Dell Studio 17 use an AMD video solution (personally, I prefer nVidia, but I digress). If you install the AMD proprietary drivers, you get a program at Applications > Accessories > ATI Catalyst Control Center. From inside this program, I could select a specific screen, click on the Multi-Display tab, and tell it how I wanted that screen to behave. I selected the external monitor from the drop-down, clicked the Multi-Display tab and then selected “Big Desktop left of display 1,” which matched the physical setup of the screens on my desk. The screens reconfigured themselves immediately.

Since I’m using cubes with Compiz, I loaded System > Preferences > CompizConfig Settings Manager, clicked on “Desktop Cube”, and changed the “Multi Output Mode” option to “Multiple cubes” to give each screen its own cube.

Headphones

Since I work in a room with other people, I always have headphones in. As soon as I had my dual monitor issue taken care of, I loaded up some music and found out that the sound didn’t work. I unplugged my headphones and heard sound from the system’s speakers. I plugged the headphones back in and didn’t hear sound from the headphones or the speakers.

I think this issue is due to the fancy headphone outputs on the Dell Studio 17. There are dual headphone outputs. In Windows, a software package allows me to select how I’d like to treat the individual jacks. I can use them as headphone outputs or line outs. I think it’s this ability to switch the functionality of the jacks combined with the fact that there is more than one jack that causes Ubuntu to fail.

A bit of playing around later, I found that if I loaded the Volume Control (right-click the speaker on the panel by the clock and select “Open Volume Control”), selected the Switches tab, and checked the “Headphone as Line Out” option, that sound is properly sent to the headphones. However, this has a side effect as having a headphone plugged in no longer disables the speakers. I’m working around this by muting the sound for the Front outputs in the Playback tab while the headphones are in use. Not the best solution, but it works.

Also of note, only the middle headphone jack functions for headphones as the front jack seems to be unaffected by the line out option.

Accessing the Windows Partition

Since I loaded Ubuntu to dual boot with the existing Vista, I wanted to be able to access the contents of the Windows drive. Here’s how I did it.

First, I had to install a new package. I loaded up terminal and executed:

sudo apt-get install ntfs-3g

I then needed to find out which partition I needed to access. I ran “sudo fdisk -l” and received the following output:

   Device Boot   Start      End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1            1       19      152586   de  Dell Utility
/dev/sda2           20     1325    10485760    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3   *     1325    16001   117882777+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda4        16002    30401   115668000    5  Extended
/dev/sda5        16002    29810   110920761   83  Linux
/dev/sda6        29811    30401     4747176   82  Linux swap

Notice that /dev/sda3 is a bootable partition, is quite large (number of blocks), and uses the NTFS format. /dev/sda3 is my Windows partition.

I created a location to mount the partition called /mnt/windows  by running “sudo mkdir /mnt/windows“. I then modified the filesystem table (sudo vi /etc/fstab) and added the following line:

/dev/sda3  /mnt/windows  ntfs-3g  quiet,defaults,rw  0  0

The two bolded entries are what you will need to modify to match your own setup. The first option is the partition to mount. The second option is where you wish to mount the partition.

To load my changes immediately, I ran “sudo mount -a” to reload the partition mount instructions.

Now all my Windows files are easily accessible at all times at /mnt/windows.

Accessing Remote File Systems

Since I frequently access remote Linux file systems for my job and my hobbies, I thought that I’d take advantage of SSH Filesystem in order to make these file systems available as if they were local file systems. Thanks to the SSHFS AUTOmount on Feisty guide, I was able to set this up quickly and easily. Not only that, but the scripts provided automatically mount and unmount the filesystems when the internet connection goes up or down, which is really, really cool to play around with and watch.

I did make a modification to the /etc/network/if-down.d/umountsshfs script provided in the previously mentioned guide. This change may or may not be needed depending on your setup. I changed the last line to the following, note the bolded portion:

In case anyone is interested in my final /etc/fstab entry format, here’s one as a sample:

sshfs#servername:  /mnt/servername  fuse  comment=sshfs,
uid=1000,gid=1000,users,noauto,exec,allow_other,reconnect,
transform_symlinks,BatchMode=yes,ConnectTimeout=10  0  0

Note: I changed the actual server name to protect the innocent. Also, the uid and gid are specific to my setup. You can find your’s by running “id” on the command line.

You may notice the lack of username and other relevant parameters. I put those in my ~/.ssh/config file to make connections to the servers more easy. For example, here’s a sample entry from my ~/.ssh/config:

Host hostname
     User username
     ServerAliveInterval 15
     Port 23

An entry can be created for each server with specific SSH directives which allow you to keep connection information for often-used servers short and simple. Setting the ServerAliveInterval helps keep inactive connections alive (this may not be needed or recommenI have to ded in your setup). You can find a full listing of available options and their descriptions at the ssh_config NetBSD Manual Page. You might also find the SshfsFaq helpful if you try to set this up.

Misc Other Setup

I installed Crimson Editor to be my programming editor until I find one I like that is Linux based. I really like Crimson Editor, so it’s going to be hard for me to find a replacement. Running CE in Wine isn’t without its problems though. It seems that CE only remembers changes to settings if I exit by doing File > Exit. If I simply close the window, the settings are not saved.

I tried gedit earlier, and it is extremely close to what I want but is just enough off to make me not want to keep trying with it. It sounds silly, but if gedit just added the ability to make the tabs visible, I would probably use it as my main editor.

I installed jEdit, but it failed to load. I reasoned that since jEdit was built on Java that the JRE was missing, so I installed it. I find it odd that the JRE wasn’t installed by default when I installed jEdit. I’ll try it out later and see what I think.

I can’t use my favorite coding font, Dina, so I’m hunting for a replacement there as well. So far, I’ve tried Bitstream Vera Sans Mono and Monaco. They are both nice, but they just aren’t what I’m looking for. Oh well… Time to keep looking. Why or why can’t I just have my lovely Dina?

Remaining Issues

I still have massive problems with video. I’m starting think that AMD video hardware just doesn’t perform well in Ubuntu, even with the proprietary driver. Flash video is fine, but all other video is choppy or has a frame rate around 1fps. The performance is so poor, it seems like all video decoding and rendering is handled in software rather than hardware. I have yet to confirm this though.

I can increase or decrease the brightness using the Fn+Up/Down keys, but there are problems. The brightness indicator doesn’t go away, the keyboard stops functioning, and the panels no longer function. Every time I accidentally adjust the brightness manually, I have to restart X (Ctrl+Alt+Backspace).

There are odd times when X just seems to fail. It always happens in different ways, but every time it happens, the windows just stop responding properly or windows get stuck in odd places. As with the brightness adjustment issue, restarting X is a quick fix. I’d really rather not have to do that though as it closes everything I have open. Sure beats a complete reboot however.

The trackpad on the Studio 17 is really wide. I keep accidentally touching it with my palm, causing focus to shift elsewhere while I’m typing. I need to see if I can change a setting somewhere to ignore the touchpad as I type.

The mouse acceleration is much different than I’m used to in Windows, but I’m sure that I will get adjusted to this.

Performance overall seems a bit sluggish. For example, whenever I visit a WordPress site that has the snowfall thing going on (thanks Matt), scrolling is very choppy and closing/switching tabs becomes slow. I’ll have to see if I can find a site that has information about optimizing Ubuntu performance to get the mose out of the machine.

Final Thoughts

I have to admit that I’ve found more issues that I expected, and not all the problems have been readily solvable. Ubuntu has already given me the ability to do things that I just couldn’t do with Windows. Ubuntu has also presented some very core problems which may or may not be fixable, but at least I have the power to make changes and try to fix it while I always felt that Windows told me to “suck it up kid, that’s the way it is.”

I’ll be playing with the system more over the weekend. I hope to have it in fighting shape by Monday so that I can stop messing with my computer and start using it.

I first noticed this problem when working on a site that is hosted at Hostgator. The site completely failed to load and pings failed 50% of the time.

From what I can tell one of the primary switches that handles large loads for The Planet either failed, froze up, or is under extremely high of traffic loads. At first, my site wasn’t effected, but it seems like they are quickly shunting traffic away from the troubled switch, which is causing the other switches to be under greater stress. This has allowed some of the failed sites to respond after abnormally-long load times, but also has the side effect of causing the previously unaffected sites, such as mine, to degrade in performance as well.

I have been incredibly impressed with The Planet through my years of experience with their dedicated systems. Similarly, I have had nothing but the best experiences with Hostgator, which is why I still host my blog on their system despite having a personal dedicated server.

Best of luck to the network engineers as they get this problem sorted, and welcome to 2009.

Update

It looks like the problem is much bigger than I originally believed. It’s possible that a regional switch around the Dallas/Fort Worth area went down. So far, I’ve found that Layered Tech, The Planet, Rackspace, and most of the sites that I know are hosted in that region are either completely inaccessible or extremely slow to respond.

The problem seems to be getting better curently with many of the previously inaccessible sites now coming back up. Hopefully the problem has been resolved.

Update #2

I contacted The Planet, and the guy gave me two responses to my questions about the outage: “no” and “ok”. Not exactly helpful. I then tried to have a live chat with Layered Tech (who I have had great hosting experience with, so this isn’t knocking their service), but I just ended up sending off an email apparently. I contacted Rackspace (another great host who gets my recommendation), and I got a very helpful person who didn’t have any information on the outage but quickly started engaging me in a sales discussion (Tomas S, you sure do a good job with keeping on the sales talk). I then contacted Hostgator via live chat and was immediately given information that a cable provider was having large-scale outages that mostly centered around southern California but also was causing problems for the DFW area. The support person also indicated that the cable provider was slow to provide details and updates.

So, amazingly, the small fish out of all the companies I contacted not only had the fastest response but also was on the ball in terms of having and providing information about an issue that affects me.

Thinking back on each of the live chats offered, Hostgator was the only one that actually seemed to use the Live Chat for more than just sales. Once again, Hostgator proves that they truly do have great service and support.

I’m writing this post as I install and configure Ubuntu. This will make it easier for me to keep track of what I did in case I need to undo something later or if anybody reading this wants to make the switchover as well.

Installing

Ubuntu truly has an incredible installer. There isn’t much to talk about since it was so easy.

I even installed Ubuntu while keeping Windows intact. This used to be extremely difficult. That is not the case anymore. I simply used the “Guided - resize” option. This option allows you to easily resize the Windows partition to create a new partition from the freed space where Ubuntu will be installed. I easily selected to give Windows and Ubuntu each a 100GB partition. The resizing took about half an hour. My only complaint is that the progress bar went from 0% to done with no intervals indicating how much time remained.

Overall, the installation took about 45 minutes with most of that time spent resizing the partition. Not only did the installer resize the partition and easily install Ubuntu, but it also imported many settings and options from my user on Windows. If the installation is this easy now, I can only imagine how amazing the installer is going to be a few versions from now.

I didn’t test everything, but the machine seemed to be completely functional at this point. All graphics were fluid, I was easily able to connect to my WPA2 access point, and sound worked. Now it’s time get everything set up the way I want.

Configuration

Drivers

Two proprietary drivers were available after the system booted up: “Broadcom STA wireless driver” and “ATI/AMD proprietary FGLRX graphics driver.” I activated the Broadcom proprietary driver which was quickly installed. I then tried to activate the AMD proprietary driver, but it failed without an error or message. I decided that I might need to update the system first.

I ran System > Administration > Update Manager and updated all the installed packages. I then rebooted the system. After this, I was able to activate the AMD proprietary driver without any issues.

Firefox

I use a highly-customized version of Firefox. Unfortunately, these modifications didn’t transfer over so well from Windows to Ubuntu. When I loaded Firefox, I found that I didn’t have half of the menu, the address bar was gone, and the View menu was gone so that I couldn’t fix it. I closed Firefox and decided that Iwould come back and figure it out later. For some unknown reason, I started Firefox again, and amazingly, it had reset itself back to default. Odd things like this confuse me and I typically don’t like them, but this odd behavior had a really good result in that it gave me a functional browser.

In previous versions of Ubuntu that I’ve played with, adding Flash to Firefox was amazingly easy: visit a site that uses Flash, click to install Flash, and you’re done. For some reason, this is different in Ibex. When I visited Youtube, I got the following message:

Hello, you either have JavaScript turned off or an old version of Adobe’s Flash Player. Get the latest Flash player.

When I visited the link, all the options offered were for 32-bit systems yet my install was 64-bit. Needless to say, none of the options worked.

I ended up finding the following instructions to install Flash 10 easily on Ubuntu 64-bit.

$ wget http://queleimporta.com/downloads/flash10_en.sh
$ sudo bash ./flash10_en.sh

I then noticed that the backspace key didn’t take me to the previous page. Fortunately I found Fix Firefox Backspace to Take You to the Previous Page, which fixed the problem immediately.

So far, everything else seems to be working as expected, including the forward/back keys on my mouse  going forward/back in pages and middle-clicking opening up links in a new tab.

Packages

I installed the following packages:

audacious, compizconfig-settings-manager, emerald, mplayer, rar, subversion, thunderbird, unrar, vim, vlc, wine

Misc Changes

After getting those packages loaded, I loaded Sessions (System > Preferences > Sessions) and added a new program. I gave it a name of “Emerald” and put in a command of “emerald — replace”. This loads up Emerald each time Ubuntu boots. I then loaded the Royale Vista II Dark by dobee theme. I also configured Compiz using System > Preferences > CompizConfig Settings Manager.

I loaded up some videos and audio files and selected to install the required codecs. Due to having Compiz, the video flickered badly in MPlayer, so I switched the video driver to x11. I still have some video issues (such as the video not resizing when I change the window size), but I hope to have those issues taken care of soon.

I wanted to be able to use the Win key for creating hotkeys, and that requires a change in Ubuntu. Load the Keyboard Preferences via System > Preferences > Keyboard. Click the Layouts tabs and the “Other Options…” button. Expand “Alt/Win key behavior” and change it to “Super is mapped to the Win-key”. Now you can use the Win key for creating hotkeys. For example, I bound win+e to open the Home folder, win+c to run calculator, win+r to load the run dialog, etc.

I changed the workspaces from 2 to 4 in order to make it an actual cube. Just right-click the workspace panel in the bottom-right, select Preferences, change the Columns to 4, and click Close.

Conclusion

So far, everything is working very well. I haven’t hit any major problems except for the video codec issue, which isn’t a major issue currently since this is a work machine and not a general use machine. I’ll need to find a solution however.

I’m going to bring my laptop into the office tomorrow and see how well it does in actual use. Stay tuned for the “rest of the story.”

Two relatively-small features that most people would miss but make working with Crimson Editor a pleasure are as follows:

• Built-in macro ability with quick access keys - I have a number of pre-defined macros that do all sorts of tasks that I find take too much time without. For example, I have macros that duplicate the line that I’m currenlty on, replace all the white-space characters at the front of the line with a single tab (this makes reformatting files with spaces for tabs much quicker), comment out or remove he comment from the current line, and so on.The addition of a quick-record button makes doing a number of repeat tasks extremely easy. I once had to remove every third line from a document that was 500 lines long. It would take too long to do it line-by-line and wasn’t worth the time required to crank out a script to do it for me. Using the quick macro ability, I created a macro and had all those lines removed in less than a minute.
• Regular expressions in search and replace - A number of programming tools are starting to add support for this, but Crimson Editor was one of the first ones that I encountered with this ability. Even many of the newer editors that I have tried fail at reproducing the ease that Crimson Editor has when it comes to this extremely helpful ability. You can even perform the replace command on all the currently open files at the same time.
• Remembers what I was doing last time I had the editor open - This is a slick feature that some of the newer editors are starting to pick up on. When I’m done for the day, I close everything out. When I come in the next day and open up Crimson Editor, it opens up all the files that I had open last time. Heck, it even puts the cursor where it was in all the files that I had opened previously.

I think that editors these days try too hard. Rather than providing extremely robust syntax highlighting and a slick/customizable editor, they build in all these tools that are supposed to make my life easier. Unfortunately, most of these tools are touted as the “features” of the editor and cannot be disabled. Even more upsetting is that many of these tools actually decrease my productivity.

There are a number of trends in the current generation of editors that are coming these days that I really don’t like. Once again, it’s not that I think everything should be changed to accommodate me, I just think that the developers of these editors need to understand that not everyone wants feature X thus features that affect how editing works should be have the option of being disabled/enabled. I’ll pick on E-Text Editor as it is so close to being great, but it has some of these failings as listed below:

• Constantly adding characters that I didn’t type - This is a major point of frustration for me. So many of the modern editors that I have tried out want to “help” me write my programs. In their attempt to do so, they make mistakes and introduce syntax errors into my code. Those mistakes go by unnoticed by me as I can type out most of my code without looking and often am not looking since I’m looking at a terminal window, database output, or other information source while programming.For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, take E-Text Editor as a good example of this behavior. Whenever I create an open parenthesis, it automatically creates a closed parenthesis. This seems like a nice way to prevent from forgetting a close parenthesis, but what if you are putting together something that requires an open parenthesis but not a close (such as regular expressions or adding new conditional checks inside an existing conditional)? Suddenly you have new characters that you may forget were created peppered around in your code that will create syntax errors. Frankly, I produce fewer syntax errors because of forgetting to close a paren than I did because of unnecessary close parens added by my editor while using E.
• Smart tabs that get too smart for their own good - I enjoy smart tabs. I like automatically having my next line indented after adding an open curly brace. I don’t like it when my editor continuously tries to force what it believes to be proper tabbing after I finish typing out a line. If I want to break out of the standard tab flow for whatever reason, that is my business. E-Text Editor, like so many modern text editors, refuses to allow me to do this. I say refuse, but it’s not always a 100% thing, which drives me nuts more than anything. Every so often, if I start a new line outside the common tab flow in E-Text Editor, when I hit enter, the previous line gets auto-tabbed and my new line is tabbed to match. No! I do not want that line there. If I go back and correct the auto-correction, as soon as I arrow out of the line, E moves it right back to where it was before. If I explicitly go outside of the “smart” tabbing, my editor should no longer try to force its rules on me.
• Ability to remember some things but not others - As mentioned before, I love how Crimson Editor remembers to open up all the files as I had them last time it was run. E-Text Editor, as well as many other newer editors, also have this feature. However, I feel that they aren’t doing enough. E-Text Editor implements code-folding, which is a very nice tool BTW. However, if you have lots of files open with many areas of code folded and you close the editor, when E reopens, all the files won’t be as you had left them; rather, they all open up but all the code folding is now gone. Not restoring the code folding state seems to be a major oversight to me as I want to come back to not just the same files I had yesterday but to the exact same state that my editor was in when I closed it. I really don’t want to spend the first part of my day refolding all my files so that I can get back to work.

I suppose to some, these are not earth-shattering problems. I thought I could deal with them too and used E-Text Editor for the full 30 days of the trial. I fully expected to have my programming worldview changed and to fall in love with E. Instead, I was just as frustrated by the problems as I was on day one. I never got passed how I felt like some parts of E were just as annoying as Microsoft Word when it autocorrects things. At least in Word, you could disable autocorrect. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone tells me to just turn off smart tabs in E. It’s not that I don’t like the smart tabs, it’s that I don’t like how E’s implementation of smart tabs doesn’t let me modify the text as I want it. I want it to auto-tab as I type but not enforce its will when I’m manually formating.

I suppose the crux of the problem I have with E, and most other next-gen editors, is that the features that are supposed to make me feel powerful and productive all too often times make me feel controlled and frustrated. Who knows… E is still new. I very well may be a convert if it becomes a bit more flexable.

Lately, we’ve been having groups of friends over to the house frequently, and queuing up some AMV Hell on the HTPC is a great way to keep everyone entertained and talking. This has broken my fast and got me back into digging around for some great AMVs, and great AMVs are what I found. I had never Nostromo is my new-found favorite AMV creator. Checking out his deviantART page, I found that he’s from Paris, has a pretty sweet computer setup, creates some cool images, and is a fellow fan of The Big Bang Theory. Also, considering how he is younger than me by a few years and has created some awesome AMVs, I am incredibly jealous (even though I have no knack for creating AMVs and probably never will create one myself).

Nostromo, to you I tip my hat. You have some amazing work that not only has me hooked on AMVs again, but you also have me purchasing music because I enjoy your music selections so much. Thanks for introducing me to Watch Them Fall Down by DJ Spoke and Lifelight by Andy Hunter.

I’d have to say that two of his AMVs stick out as definite favorites of mine. I’ve included vids of them here so you can check them out.

Galaxy Bounce by Nostromo

Auriga by Nostromo

The Youtube vids don’t do adequate justice to the quality in his vids nor to the audio (even though I embedded the high-quality versions). You can find the full-quality versions of the videos on Anime Music Videos.org at the following links: Auriga and Galaxy Bounce.

If you haven’t been bitten by the AMV bug yet, what are you waiting for? Browse around the Anime Music Videos.org site.  You can search by song and by anime so you can find something that you are sure to enjoy quickly. After digging around for a while, start looking at random videos, you never know when you will find something that makes you want to watch an anime that you’ve never seen before or when you’ll discover an artist that you’ver never heard before.

Another great way to jump into AMVs is to watch the AMV Hell videos. Make sure you pay attention to the warnings as some of them have explicit content. AMV Hell 2 and 3 are definitely my favorites. They are huge movie-length videos that are composed of dozens of songs.

In closing, I leave with a short AMV that I enjoy that features scenes from Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. The video is called Project Xanthium by Niotex and features You’ll be Under My Wheels by Prodigy

As we toil to improve the performance of the applications and their snappy response times, it becomes easy to forget about how we can tweak settings on a low level to provide massive speed improvements on the front-end. For example, most people don’t know that you can configure MySQL to take better advantage of the resources that the server has available.

By default, MySQL is configured to consume a relatively limited amount of memory resources. Start giving MySQL more memory to work with, and your application’s performance can improve greatly.

Unfortunately, I’m not a MySQL configuration guru. I’ve never read through the source code or any low-level technical documents about how it functions. So most of the configurations options are a complete mystery to me, and I don’t know if changing a specific option could benefit me at all.

Fortunately, I don’t have to be a MySQL configuration guru to get better performance. There is an amazing tool created by Matthew Montgomery called the MySQL performance tuning primer script.

Matthew Montgomery’s script does an amazing job of giving me information about how my MySQL configuration may be inappropriate for the queries being executed and provides information about what variables to modify in order to better optimize my configuration. For example, the “TEMP TABLES” section of the output tells me the following:

TEMP TABLES
Current max_heap_table_size = 512 M
Current tmp_table_size = 512 M
Of 1684 temp tables, 10% were created on disk
Effective in-memory tmp_table_size is limited to max_heap_table_size.
Created disk tmp tables ratio seems fine

Previously, I had my max_heap_table_size and tmp_table_size variables set to default settings and had up to 60% of my temp tables created on disk. As much as possible, temp tables should be created in memory to reduce the performance penalty of using the disk for random access to such data rather than memory which is much faster.

Now this doesn’t mean that you should set your variables to the same settings as I have. The server that this is running on is dedicated to running a dispatching system that has many tables containing hundreds of thousands of rows each. The value of the script is that it will help you tailor your settings to best use your hardware without having MySQL consume too many resources that other processes (such as you web server) could use.

The script is provided as a standard Linux shell script. Download the script into a folder of your choosing and run “sh tuning-primer.sh“.

Good luck with your MySQL optimization. I hope that you get as great of results as I have. Keep in mind that if your table structures and queries are inefficient to begin with, that configuration optimization can only do so much to improve the performance.

Further Reading

• Tuning LAMP systems, Part 3: Tuning your MySQL server
  This is a great read that should help most novice database administrators understand some of the basics about tuning their database’s performance.
• MySQL Performance Blog
  A blog by the authors of High Performance MySQL (also highly recommended). This blog is updated frequently with great tips that will help you develop higher-performance apps.

A little more than a year ago, DNSStuff changed from free to a paid service. Since I found their tools so valuable, paying a few dollars a month for the service was a small price to pay. In fact, I was happy to pay for the service and quickly purchased a subscription for a year.

Over time, things changed. They continued to change their site format resulting in me having to constantly change my quick bookmark formats. All of these changes were to force people to buy subscriptions, but why was I being affected since I was a paying member? About half the time that I would try to do a query, it would take me to a page with severely reduced tools with ads all over the place telling me to buy a subscription. It was annoying, but I dealt with it. Then the frustrations went up another notch when they divided the service into two different subscription models. Suddenly, tools that I used to access for free and then could continue to access since I paid for them were no longer available. Every time I’d accidentally try to request one of those tools with my quick bookmarks it would tell me to upgrade. Furthermore, the tools that I could still access with my paid subscription became littered with ads telling me to upgrade. Around this time I also started to receive frequent email ads telling me to upgrade my service to gain access to other features.

My subscription ran out a couple of months ago. I was faced with renewing my subscription or finding something else. I decided that despite the irritations that I would renew since the tools were really that good. Then came the shock, the prices had gone up. To access all the tools I had purchased (and eventually lost access to) a year ago would cost me around twice as much as before. Not only would I be paying more, the site that I would pay to access would be filled with ads and would constantly send me emails pestering me to purchase yet even more tools that they invent. That’s when I decided to ditch DNSStuff and find a DNSStuff alternative.

After quite a bit of searching around and trying different tools, I settled on Ip Tools. Frankly, their tools aren’t as robust as DNSStuff’s tools and don’t offer the wealth of information either; however, they are still (at this moment) free and perform a good enough service.

My desire is to one day build up a tool that is as good as what DNSStuff offerred without all the constant ads in my face, that I can use just as quickly as the original DNSStuff tools could be, and that wouldn’t leave me with a feeling of being ripped off. This tool will most likely be a personal tool and be available to some friends of mine. If I get enough interest though, I might make it more robust and make it a public service.

Have you been burned by DNSStuff? Share your story.

What’s Happened

Shortly after my trip to Dallas for AnimeFest, I was hired by iThemes. As a programmer, my primary responbilities lie in developing code to help improve our WordPress themes. I’ve created a mission for myself with iThemes to ensure that the themes we produce are extremely easy to use. I’m working on some great code that should help set a new benchmark for easy to use, featured-filled themes.

Some of you may remember my desire to move over to Linux. That desire has only grown more intense recently as I have gone through daily frustrations with Vista on my new office machine. I just finished building a new machine, her name is Lumière, she’s going to help me transition in full over to Linux as Windows will never be installed on this machine. I currently have Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex, the pre-release beta version, installed and am loving it.

I’ve also started to get in touch with some fellow developers that I met at WordCamp Dallas 2008. It’s taken me too long to get in touch with fellow WordPress devs. Oh well.

I recently acquired the chrisjean.com domain. I feel a new site design coming :).

What’s Next

Here’s just a taste of what’s to come:

• My initial Ubuntu experiences.
• I’m developing a roadmap for WordPress. This roadmap will be able to list, in order, all filters, actions, includes, requires, etc. I’m still building the code that generates all of this. Due to what it does and how I do it, I can generate a roadmap for every version of WordPress but I cannot make this a plugin. Thus, the roadmaps will have to reside on my site.
• Updates for WP Easy Uploader are coming. One of the key features will be the ability for the uploaded files to be included in the Media Library.
• I’m sure I can fit a rant or two about Windows and now Dell here or there.