He who conquers the left side

Move to Wordpress

2010-08-25T10:02:00.000-07:00

Not having gtk-key-theme-name = "Emacs" work in the Edit HTML tab for blogger is the final straw.

In the future, follow me here.

Also, Google's keyboard shortcuts feature works again. Yay!

2010-05-05T14:54:00.000-07:00

Did anyone else notice that Google got rid of Keyboard Shortcuts?

lame...

How to use oprofile correctly in Fedora

2009-06-17T15:23:00.000-07:00

First of all, there is no correct way to use oprofile. It's just that people using it w/o --separate=kernel are out of their minds. Very rarely do I want to profile the system as a whole, and frequently I want to look at an individual process. With --separate=kernel you can do both.

Installing kernel-debug info

First make sure your debug-info repo is enabled. You will find that in the /etc/yum.repos.d directory. Then,

$ yum -y install kernel-debuginfo $ rpm -ql kernel-debuginfo |grep vmlinux /usr/lib/debug/lib/modules/2.6.18-128.1.14.el5/vmlinux

Starting the profiler using opcontrol

opcontrol --separate=kernel --vmlinux=/usr/lib/debug/lib/modules/2.6.18-128.1.14.el5/vmlinux opcontrol --start

Obviously you must have the correct location of your vmlinux. Fedora and Red Hat based distros like to keep them in /usr/lib/debug/lib/modules/.

Do stuff

In my case, I'd like to profile the command:
# time dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/raw/raw1 bs=2048 count=100000 100000+0 records in 100000+0 records out 204800000 bytes (205 MB) copied, 10.6901 seconds, 19.2 MB/s real 0m10.692s user 0m0.036s sys 0m4.884s

Finish profiling

Now you should tell the profiler to finish:opcontrol --stop oparchive -o /var/lib/oprofile/samples/current/
oparchive tars all the necessary executables and debug info files such that it can easily be taken offline and analyzed on another machine.

Display results

In my case,
# opreport -l image:/bin/dd warning: /e1000e could not be found. warning: /ehci_hcd could not be found. warning: /ide_cd could not be found. warning: /libata could not be found. warning: /scsi_mod could not be found. warning: /sd_mod could not be found. warning: /uhci_hcd could not be found. CPU: Core 2, speed 2992.57 MHz (estimated) Counted CPU_CLK_UNHALTED events (Clock cycles when not halted) with a unit mask of 0x00 (Unhalted core cycles) count 100000 samples % image name symbol name 90680 61.5134 vmlinux do_generic_mapping_read 18997 12.8867 vmlinux iowrite16 12418 8.4238 vmlinux pci_iomap 2983 2.0235 libata (no symbols) 1633 1.1078 vmlinux gen_pool_add 1442 0.9782 vmlinux __pud_alloc 1218 0.8262 scsi_mod (no symbols) 974 0.6607 vmlinux __blockdev_direct_IO 727 0.4932 vmlinux .text.do_gettimeoffset_tsc 547 0.3711 vmlinux schedule 423 0.2869 vmlinux __link_path_walk 343 0.2327 vmlinux tcp_rcv_established 335 0.2272 vmlinux do_gettimeofday 320 0.2171 libc-2.5.so __read_nocancel
This list of symbols and events goes on for miles, so I'm not going to list the entire thing.

Each processor has their own flags to track things like L1/L2 cache misses, TLB misses, and other neat stuff. For extra credit, put some of your favorites in the comments section. Make sure to put your cpu model in with whatever flags you're including. I may update this with some more flags, or post about it later.

For more info, go to http://oprofile.sourceforge.net/doc/index.html

2008-02-04T23:38:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow, or actually today, is a big day,

First of all obviously it is super Tuesday. But then you have to remember that the Giants won on Sunday and they're having a parade tomorrow, so that's going to be crazy. It will be down Broadway in the Canyon of Heroes. That's right near the Red Hat office, so I'll basically be able to catch it during lunch. Also, there is a class that I want to take and another exam for this week. This all on top of an assignment to learn about database products that I've never had to deal with before.

It's going to be fun ;)

2008-01-28T13:23:00.000-08:00

Hey all, I just learned that Taviso's website is down at dev.gentoo.org. That means that all of the trusty configs and awesome screenshots are gone forever.

...or so I thought. I used the internet way back machine to great effect in order to get at his old pages. Here it is in the latest archive form:

http://web.archive.org/web/20070202002340rn_1/dev.gentoo.org/~taviso/

from the stealing upstream thunder dept:

2007-12-11T11:14:00.000-08:00

I've been trying to stay out of the whole Ubuntu vs. Other Distros thing for awhile, but I understand where some of the frustration comes from. Take this short sighted blog post for example. The guy goes on to list 8 features (you didn't know about) in _Gnome_, but totally centers on Ubuntu!

Where is the credit for the Gnome devs? Why is this post Ubuntu specific? It almost makes me want to:

1. create an "8 Features you didn't know about in " blog post
2. submit that to digg.
3. watch it get relativly few digs because it doesn't have ubuntu in the title.
4. ...
5. Profit!

Fedroa 8 NSPluginWrapper

2007-11-09T23:44:00.002-08:00

I just installed fedora 8 x86_64, and I must say, I'm quite impressed. I'll experiment/blog more tomorrow, but for right now it's safe to say that I'm really optimistic and in my experince it's MUCH better than f7. The 64-bit seems much faster too (I didn't know all Core 2 was 64-bit), though I don't know since it could just be performance increase in f8 itself, or it could just be perception.

One thing I did get stuck on was nsplugin wrapper. Fedora 8 tips and tricks helped out, though you might want to modify the instructions a bit. Here's what worked for me:

yum install nspluginwrapper nspluginwrapper.x86
mozilla-plugin-config -u

nspluginwrapper is probably already installed (it was for me).

PS Another thing I noticed were that the fonts were off, Havoc Pennington mentioned this earlier...

scene from The Red Violin

2007-11-09T08:33:00.000-08:00

Watching that video of Mark O'Connor practicing and getting better with each iteration of the theme reminded me of something... I just couldn't put my finger on it at the time.

Well I've been searching my soul and finally found it. Do you think the writer of The Red Violin could have been influenced by the Charlie Daniels Band? Who knows? We report, YOU DECIDE!

EDIT: My favorite part is when the kid says, "I want to be famous, yes sir, I really do." And the professor gets all exited like there could have been any other answer and hands him his violin.

Now all you people that are seen in comments praising this kid know what his life is really like. On a related note, I think that kid is in 2:48 of the Devil Comes Back to Georgia video. Check it out!

2007-11-05T19:48:00.000-08:00

I never understood what the big deal was with "The Devil went down to Georgia". It really isn't that much of an impressive solo. Now if Charlie Daniels could play like Mark O'Connor, that would be a different story.

Fedora needs a standard way to install SUN JVM

2007-11-05T15:02:00.001-08:00

Many people have said it before, but it's still cause enough for confusion (until we get a release of the FOSS version). We want to be able to do this in a distro and system centric way. This means using RPMS, and not having to hack around with default environments and muck about in /etc/alternatives. For anyone that wants to do this, here is my recommended method:

1. Download the sun jvm rpm, as of this post it's here.
2. Get the corresponding jpackage compat, which is http://jpackage.org/browser/rpm.php?jppversion=5.0&id=489
3. Install one, followed by the other.
4 ...
5 Profit!!!

Seagate pays out over gigabyte definition

2007-10-28T22:48:00.000-07:00

Article here. Basically, some stupid people sued seagate over the definition of a Gigabyte, (which BTW, is defined as 1,000,000,000 bytes in almost every context) because when they got their drives windows said it had less space than advertised. Well, to put it plainly, that isn't true. The OS and filesystem just counts the space differently. What's worse is that this has become the industry standard for hard drive capacity, and it's been known for YEARS that this happens. I'm afraid of a point in the future where I won't know what my hard drive size really is because they'll all be measured differently. Wouldn't that be great.

The manufacturer has NO WAY of telling how much storage space you're actually be able to use. There is a whole bunch of overhead involved in the filesystem and the partition tables. (alright, not a whole bunch, but still enough so that a measurement wouldn't be precise across all systems).

The thing that probably annoys me most about this is that now people are going to use this all over the place as an example of how bad class action lawsuits are. These people suing don't realize that they aren't empowering the consumer at all. Rather, the consumer now looks like the evil one, trying to sap the corporations for everything that they can get. Here's an idea, how about you sue over something important, like suv rollover or lead paint. You know, the kind of thing endangers your life and welfare because companies are cutting corners. I don't want to hear about how you thought you could store 100 more mp3's just because you were thinking like an idiot.

The worst part of the article is the comment at the bottom

Finally some sanity. How hard is it to simply make things the way they should be instead of dumbing down things to make them simple but not true? So don't tell us that a drive capacity is different based on your simplification of math. Stand up for what is correct even if it is not popular or simple.

Doesn't this guy realize that if the hard drive manufacturers were to cave they would be "duming down things to make them simple but not true?" 10 GB != 10 GiB. To call a GB a GiB would be making something "simple but not true"

He goes on:

Senator Larry Craig is a great example - he isn't homosexual (I take his word on that) but yet he was stupid enough to plead guilty to a crime he didn't commit to "make it go away" media wise. NEVER plead guilty to something you didn't do.

First of all, I don't know what Larry Craig has to do with this. The fact that this guy supports this jack-ass doesn't surprise me though. The funny thing here is that this guy is pointing out exactly why seagate was right AGAIN! By not admitting fault, seagate didn't "plead guilty" to misleading consumers. So, in his mind, they must have done right...

Eh, it's probably just a well crafted joke...

2007-10-18T12:36:00.000-07:00

This guy is pretty much a social networking app genius. Friendwheel is the only facebook app that has ANY merit; and if you've been sending me requests to become a pirate, ninja, jedi, or hug you and spank you, your apps don't belong in the same category.

Now all someone has to do is combine it with piespy, we would have something really awesome. I might even consider researching the possibilities between all the time I'm spending becoming literate in perl, all the projects I NEED to do for work, and all the projects that people WANT me to do for work (Mr. Logistics), and all the projects I want to do ahead of this, which includes getting nm-cli to use wpa2-psk so I don't have to log into gnome and then re-login to fvwm.

Hopefully that will come very soon, the psk hash functions need to be rewritten in python, that's the only thing stopping a commit. I think I might port to C to avoid that kind of thing in the future (because I'm lazy and don't like reinventing the wheel)

an akward moment

2007-08-30T13:55:00.001-07:00

The other day I was eating dinner with my mom at a steak house, and coming back from the car, this is what happened:

Drunk guy: That's one damn looking woman, you're a lucky guy!
My Mom: (nervous laugh) Thank you!
Me: (to the guy) She's my MOM!
Drunk guy: Doesn't matter, you're still lucky.

And so concludes one of the most akward encounters with a stranger in my life.

Handy DBus Tricks

2007-08-20T15:15:00.001-07:00

I've been experimenting a bit with DBus, first with X Input Hotpluging, then with Network Manager stuff. A common message I've been getting is:

Error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.freedesktop.NetworkManager was not provided by any .service files

Of course, org.freedesktop.NetworkManager can be anything, it was different when I got that message for X Input Hotplug. The question I had was, how can I tell which services ARE provided. Mailing list to the rescue! This a result of calling ListNames on my machine:]

# dbus-send --system --print-reply --reply-timeout=2000 --type=method_call --dest=org.freedesktop.DBus /org/freedesktop/DBus org.freedesktop.DBus.ListNames
method return sender=org.freedesktop.DBus -> dest=:1.21
array [
string "org.freedesktop.DBus"
string ":1.9"
string ":1.21"
string "org.bluez"
string "org.freedesktop.NetworkManager"
string "com.redhat.dhcp"
string ":1.0"
string ":1.1"
string ":1.2"
string "org.freedesktop.Hal"
string ":1.3"
string ":1.16"
string ":1.4"
string ":1.5"
]

Also, if you have any raw messages you want to send or any functions you want to call, just use dbus-send. This information was gathered from another Mailing list post. Here is another example:

# dbus-send --system --print-reply --reply-timeout=2000 --type=method_call --dest=org.freedesktop.NetworkManager /org/freedesktop/NetworkManager org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.getWirelessEnabled

I don't know yet how to pass arguments. If anyone knows, feel free to leave your comments, and thanks in advance.

irony

2007-08-02T09:28:00.000-07:00

A lot of people use the word irony incorrectly. This is a running joke between friends of mine. I think it all started when I was watching a baseball game and some announcer was like:

Well it's ironic that the manager here would bring in a left handed pitcher to face a right handed batter

or something wrong like that.

There's really nothing ironic about that. Baseball managers make decisions all of the time, and most of it is based on what the they think is a good decision for the team. If your left handed pitcher is a good choice for the time, why NOT put him in?

People do this shit ALL THE TIME, and it's all WRONG (by shit I mean use ironic incorrectly, not change pitchers). For some reason, sportscasters are the worst transgressors. I don't bother fixing it anymore. since every time I bring up the fact that someone is using the word incorrectly, I get a long winded explanation on how some example of happenstance or bad luck really is true irony, followed by a long winded argument that I get tired of in about 3 minutes.

And then there's these guys that think that it doesn't matter, and since people use the word incorrectly all the time then I should just accept it. From Wikipedia:

Descriptivists generally discount such self-proclaimed language authorities in favor of studying how individuals currently use the word.

Descriptivists can also suck my dick. People use the word incorrectly. If everyone started to say that 2+2 =5 would that make it correct? Of course not. But if I was a descriptivist I'd probably spend all my life trying to prove that, under certain conditions, 2+2 did equal 5. Also if I was a descriptivist, I would probably kill myself.

Maybe I should lighten up though, no one likes a guy with a holier than thou attitude. Imagine if you had a guy around the office that corrected people whenever they used a preposition to end a sentence. Oh wait...

At least I'm not the only one.

The reason I bring this up is that I just got on my lunch break, and while procrastinating by looking around for something awesome to pass the time I come upon this. From TFA:

Do it F***ing Now.

Don't wait. Don’t procrastinate. The winners in this world are not the ones who find the greatest excuses to put off doing what they know will make them more money. The winners are the ones that prioritize and seize the day.

As a result I had to watch that 7 minute video with Alec Baldwin, read all the articles he linked to, and write an entire blog post.

pages.xml in JBoss Seam

2007-07-30T08:58:00.000-07:00

I was looking for a really good reference to pages.xml in seam, something like a schema. The best page I could find on the topic was http://shrubbery.mynetgear.net/wiki/Seam_pages.xml#.3Cnavigation.3E. For some reason, I couldn't find anything reading like a reference from JBoss or Hibernate. Their howtos are great though, you can find them here: http://docs.jboss.org/seam/1.2.1.GA/reference/en/html/

This post was mostly a bookmark but if it helps out anyone else:
AWESOME!

2007-06-22T11:54:00.002-07:00

so I saw this article on digg and I must say it's pretty shitty. My guess is that Billy and the gang were sitting around in the studio one day with a bunch of shitty tracks going:

Billy: So, what are we going to do with these extra tracks?
Jimmy Chamberlin (drummer): What do you mean man, we're going to put them on the record, right?
Billy: Well, yeah, I would, but they're kind of shitty. This is going to be our first release in a 7 years, I don't want a few songs to reflect poorly upon the new album. Anyway, 15 songs is too much for a record.
Jimmy: Well I think they're good, maybe we can release them as B-sides or something? We DID go through all the trouble of getting them recorded and mastered.
Marketing Guy #1: Hey! I just got a great idea. Why don't we release them exclusively on iTunes. Then we can generate market buzz AND make money at the same time.
Billy: Hey yeah! Or maybe we can put them at the end of an album sort of like what they do with outtakes on Greatest Hits and stuff these days. I mean, everyone knows those songs were shit but market them as unreleased greats and all of a sudden people go ape shit over them!
Marketing Guy #1: Great idea. So we'll have maybe 3 special edition versions, each one with a different song that we shouldn't have released in the first place. I'll get on the line with Apple, Target, and Best Buy right away.
Billy: Awesome! *high five*

So, yeah. Don't complain TOO much Paul Thompson of pitchfork media. Those three extra tracks are probably shit anyway. And even if they aren't, you can always download them. I mean, it's illegal, but is it really unethical? IANAL, but you did PAY for the album, and really only got 4/5ths of the session. If I were you I'd go recover the rest from the internets.

2007-06-21T07:06:00.001-07:00

So, I took the train to Flatbush and then the subway to Wall Street today. A few of the things I noticed

1. The train to Flatbush is mostly underground.
2. The trains are less crowded.
3. The cars on the 2 train are nicer.
4. It takes less time getting into the city this way.
5. There's less walking to the office from the Wall Street station.
6. I feel way more corperate getting of at Wall Street and crossing Chase plaza than I do getting off at Naussa Street.

I think I'll do this from now on.

rainy world

2007-06-20T12:30:00.001-07:00

Today it was raining when I got off the subway, and I saw some girl in a doorway. She looked so sad. Kind of made me wish I had my camera.

Yankees and Mets, Latinos and Asians

2007-06-16T13:55:00.002-07:00

So, good thing the Mets got that game last night, I don't know if they'll be able to get another win this series. Right now they're losing 10-5.

Seems to me there are a few key differences in the Yankees and the Mets. The Yankees are a team steeped in heritage, and the Mets are like the new kids on the block. Yankees are known for left handed power hitting, where the Mets are known for good pitching. The Yankees are the ever present dominant team in baseball, and the Mets are the underdogs in whom you "gotta believe". The biggest difference, in my opinion, is with the fans. If you're a New Yorker and you're Italian, there is about a %200 chance that you're also a Yankees fan. My sister CONSTANTLY points that out, to the chagrin of my mother (1/2 Italian). Things have been changing though...

I read somewhere last year that the Mets are trying to increase they're presence in Latin America. They pointed to the tendency of Latinos to go to the game, not because they were fans of the Mets (per se), but because "their guys" were playing. It seems like half the team has the name Jose or Carlos. No wonder Banco National is the official bank of the Mets. Being a Latino baseball fan now must be like being an Italian when names like DiMaggio and Berra were running baseball in New York.

The Yankees seem aren't far behind with they're own up and coming fan base though. This article points out that the Yanks will soon be reaching out to China for new young talent. As I speak, the Yankees have two East Asians that I can think of on their team, Matsui (Japan), and Chen Ming Wang (Taiwan). The reason I got started on this post is because I saw this picture in a friend's facebook profile:

Can you guess her nationality?

5 points if you said Taiwanese. This girl doesn't know the first thing about baseball, except to say that she knows the best time to go to a Yankee game is when Wang is starting.

So if you're one of the two biggest immigrant groups in New York right now, you already know what team to root for. That is unless you're Chinese, but it looks like the Yankees are already covering that base (no pun intended). In 20 years all the New York Latinos will be Mets fans, and the East Asians will be Yankees fans (just my prediction).

In my opinion the Mets need to reach out to China too. I mean, look at their location. Flushing!!! Yeah, of course there's all that about prospects needing to be a good ball player and all, but think of the increase in fans and attention! One good Chinese pitcher, and you have the stadium filled, and Shea's not a easy place to fill. Just look at the added convince for a Chinese baseball fan too:

That's all I'm sayin'.

getting into work

2007-06-06T07:26:00.000-07:00

So I was late to work today, and I met this girl from Binghamton who is interning at the city. Thing is, she didn't appear to be late to work. My sister's friend interns in the city too, she takes the 7:53 am train out of Oakdale.

My point is, we all get into work about 10:00. What happened to 9:00 to 5:00? I remember my old job I had to get in at 8:00 every day, which meant that I was up at 7:00 and out at 7:45 (oddly enough I still have to get up around that time). And I was LATE most of the time! I knew people that would get in much earlier. Here I transcribed an interaction between a co-worker Jeff and me.

Jeff: I can't wait till our boss starts letting us make our own hours.
Me: Yeah man, I know, this schedule is so different from school.
Jeff: I'll start coming in at 6 and leaving at 3.
Me: (startled look of disbelief) What? I can't wait till I can get to work late!
Jeff: Yeah, well gotta get home to spend time with the kids and all.

Working upstate was so different. Everyone went hunting, and played horseshoes, and drove pickup trucks. And they loved getting up in the morning. They cared so much about their families and the additions to their houses, and how green their lawns were. I'm so lucky to have landed this position with Red Hat in NYC, I don't think I could have made it another year working in that sort of environment.

2007-05-25T11:49:00.000-07:00

Alright, so now I offically have a blog. I'll be updating periodically, and making it not look so bland and generic. Check back soon.