NightlyWTF...

Trying to access the web site of one of the biggest french telco company, I'm quite pleased to discover that they are using tomcat (well, an old version) on a Linux system :

It's a small planet...

Here is a very interesting - and scary - conference about global warming :

http://storage02.brainsonic.com/customers2/entrecom/20080227_Spie/session_1_uk_new/files/index.html

http://storage02.brainsonic.com/customers2/entrecom/20080227_Spie/session_1_fr_new/files/index.html

This guy is not one of those crazy ecofreak, he is quite sane and have worked with the ADEME, the french agency for environment and energy management. He has also been appointed by the french governement during what has been called the "grenelle de l'environnement", a big think-tank organized last year to forsee what we should do in order to cut by 50% our energy consomption by 2020.

His web-site : http://www.manicore.com/

Apache DS 1.5.3 is out !

For the first time in three years, we were able to release a new version roughly three months after the previous one : ADS 1.5.3!

Nothing special about this version, but a lot of bug fixes, and some improvement (mainly new installers, better performances, and a few more things).

We are now moving to the next release (1.5.4) which will be much more important, as we have done a _lot_ of changes in the core server. The idea is to be able to release a 2.0 table version around Q3, and I think we are still on schedule for this.

Thanks to the team, and to the contributors for their reports.

We are now expecting a new version for Apache Directory Studio (1.2.0) which will be release very soon !

Just don't do it !

Seems like some people are either pessimistic, or simply too tight with some oil companies :

http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/48619/story.htm

Like it or not, as we are (have ?) reaching a peak oil, and considering that demand for coal and gas will surge soon (China is building two coal plants EACH WEEK !), you better be prepared !

Having spent one week in Florida lately, I must say that I was surprized : I have seen no solar panel at all... And Florida claims to be the 'Sunshine state' ...

I'm not very pleased with what I see - or don't see - in France too. Compared to Germany, we are very late. Having build more than 50 nuclear plants make us feel comfortable. When you know that electricity is only 17% of our global energy consumption ... Politicians are just acting as if they just discovered the problem (make me think that they are not acting : they are reacting).

Anyway, facing an important problem and simply saying : "we won't be able to do it" is just irresponsible. Shame on you, Mr Watson.

Two interesting words

As I'm visiting Alex Karasulu in Florida (lucky guy !!), and enjoying the sun, sea and warm days, I wanted to point out those two words which have different meanings in USA and in France :

- Service : This is definitively not a french word. The french revolution has seen the privileges being abolished, and it's still remanent in waiters mind... You have to be known to be "served" in a restaurant in Paris. In Jacksonville - but this is also the case in all the US cities I having been -, service means something.

- Resources : Seems to be unlimited in US. Cars are pissing gaz crazy. Electricity is like for free, as you never switch off the bulbs, because, eh, the switch is on the other side of the room ! (like in USSR, where you never switch off the oven, as matches are more difficult to find than gaz :). Obviously, Resources is not a french word either...

Both combined makes life confortable in US. Much more than any european who never travel accross the ocean can imagine (this is always bugging me when I read gross approximation about "how hard is it to live in the USA for those who are not billionaires" : people seems to be pretty happy here...). The question is : for how long ?

Good to be with some good friend, sharing some good technical discussion about ApacheDS, with a glass of cool white wine (a french Chablis 1999 ;), in front of the ocean, while dolphins are jumping out of the sea.

Ubuntu 8.04 speeds up Java !

I have heard that the new kernel bring some improvements, and was expecting better performances on my local Apache Directory Server micro benchmark, but not that much.

I got a 15% speedup on my test ! FYI, this is a basic test doing some random searches into a server with 10 000 entries. I have a small injector running N threads, each one doing M search requests.

With Ubuntu 7.04, I reached 4296 req/s, and I know get 4924 req/s ! Not that bad :)

I still have to test if OpenLdap benefits from this speedup (with my previous Linux version, it was able to deliver up to 8900 req/s, so we are still two times slower).

PS: this is NOT a valid benchmark, I just use it to compare performances between to fixes, as it's fast and easy to launch. We have a better benchmark platform to do real tests !

Ubuntu ++

As Apache conference europ is now over, and ADS 1.5.2 has been released, it's time for an upgrade. I was an happy Ubuntu 7.0.4 user since last year, but I wanted to experiment some new flavor with Ubuntu 8.0.4.

The previous version was pretty OK, except that I had a few freeze from time to time (once a month), plus using a beamer was a PITA, as you had to reboot your laptop in order to get the screen resolution adapted, and back (thanks to Noel Bergman for the trick :)

At first, I tried the upgrade process... Not production ready, it seems ! Four failures, and it ended with a Kernel panic, with not that many option than a full install :)

Welcome to the pleasure dome ! At least, as I *knew* it will happen, I saved my /home somwhere where its safe.

So let's go for a burning session (actually, I dried 3 CD instead of one, thanks to some crappy DVD drives)

When done, the best part was that I was able to access my /etc/fstab to write down on a piece of paper the partition's names, as I have 10 of them, and didn't want to reformat all of them. Installation took 15 minutes (well, 30 minutes as I had to play it twice, due to a wrong username I typed). Pretty fast for a laptop installation. Btw, Canonical, it would be _very_ usefull if you suggest to use the previously existing /etc/fstab instead of just asking the user to type the mount points.


So far, so good. Booting is fast, the default background image (a heron) is crappy, but hopefully, it used my default one.

Suspend works like a charm, but thunderbird, xchat and gaim have been removed from my disk. I have evolution installed instead, not really what I want to use. The problem is that some repository are not installed by default (just because they want to offer a long term support, I guess). Not cool. But easy to fix (just add the repository in the update manager)

To get all the 'maccish' effects on my laptop, I had to install a new driver for my NVidia card, but I just had to click on the 'OK' button. Pretty slick !

Some default fonts are not really pleasant (like in terminal or in thunderbird). I will have to select my favorite courrier font.

Rebooting is FAST. Not that I use it often (It's linux, stupid !), but from time to time you have to.

What I miss is to be able to select my last user instead of typing my name when rebooting, like in FC8.

So far, so good. Five hours to get my laptop up and running, that's pretty cheap.

One last thing : Canonical, you have to try a little bit harder on the standard upgrade :)

Update :
Don't use the NVidia driver... I had to reinstall the full machine after having rebooted and got my graphic session totally blank : no icon, nothing, just the mouse.