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Stats, Calc and Loadtests
By Jesse Morgan | June 29, 2009
Preface: Kids, PAY ATTENTION IN MATH CLASSES. YOU NEED IT.
So I’ve been spending a lot of time at work doing loadtests, and one question that keeps coming back is “what metric do we want to use to gauge progress?” We’ve been going with a simple throughput (pages/second), but that doesn’t take into account errors, average times, or samplecounts.
You can have 30 pages/second and have the following conditions:
- average page takes 10 seconds to load (300 threads over a 10 second period)
- 50% error rate (pages that spit out a 500 error can return REALLY fast)
- 30 threads, 1 second page load
That number doesn’t tell the whole story. There’s also the number of samples, overall error rate, and average, median and 90th percentile page load times.
So how do you come up with a number that covers all of that?
This is my current (unweighted) equation.
The short version is ‘the higher the better’. The longer version is:
- higher samples good
- higher throughput good
- high page loads bad
- errors penalize score
Missing from this equation:
- proper weighting
- KB/sec
- Min and Max times
- a unit describing it’s awesomeness
So that’s what I’ve done today…
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Jaunty’s Accidental Second Chance
By Jesse Morgan | June 22, 2009
So last week in an attempt to update… something (*shrug*, don’t remember what), I upgraded to intrepid, which bumped me up to kde4. It was a lot smoother this time around, but there were a few bugs left… mainly the fglrx driver didn’t like me. so I decided to go full bore and try jaunty again. it’d been 2 months since initial release, so it should be a bit more stable.
Well, things sorta exploded. fglrx still wouldn’t work. I ended up burning a copy and doing a clean install (my home dir is on another partition now so no data loss!) I got jaunty up and running fine with the radeon driver rather than the fglrx driver, and started getting everything into place. And by ‘use the radeon driver’ I mean remove all fglrx packages so it defaults to radeon (or whatever else).
Knetworkmanager still sucks, but the plasmoid worked properly this time and is quite nice.
When I got to work I burned half an hour trying to get dual monitors working (again, trying to get fglrx working) and found xrandr works great now. I used the following command to set up my dual monitors:
sudo xrandr –output LVDS –preferred –mode 1600×1200 –auto –left-of DVI-0 –output DVI-0 –auto –mode 1680×1050
and the following is the ONLY xorg config I have:
Section “Device”
Identifier “Configured Video Device”
EndSectionSection “Monitor”
Identifier “Configured Monitor”
EndSectionSection “Screen”
Identifier “Default Screen”
Monitor “Configured Monitor”
Device “Configured Video Device”
SubSection “Display”
Virtual 3280 1200
EndSubSection
EndSection
Note the only thing I added with the Display subsection. Anyone who’s been using Linux on GUIs for the past 10 years can tell you how amazing that configuration is, and how far Xorg, xrandr and linux as a whole have come.
Amarok gave me some problems, but I was just missing some codecs. I forced KDE to 96 DPI and the screen looks great. The one thing I’m missing now is a functional Quickaccess plasmoid (on that does vertical mode properly) and I’m good. maybe I’ll write about the plasmoids (widgets) I’m using later.
There are the occasional video glitches here and there- mainly flickers or lines that flash for a 10th of a second and then are gone for an hour or 3. The other thing is when I pop open krunner and begin to type, there’s a little noise in the box. over my text as it tries to resize the window.
Other that that minor annoyance I think I’ve been converted to kde 4. That’s an amazing turnaround.
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Keeping Busy
By Jesse Morgan | June 14, 2009
So I’ve been keeping busy with the outside of the house the past few days.
Cleaning the Shed
A few weeks ago I cleaned out the shed, but I still have a lot of crap in there. This past weekend I got around to hanging a shovel/rake tool organizer thing, plus a couple of J hooks so the floor is mostly clean. All that’s left is getting the stupid toilet and sink outta there.
Gate
The old back gate used to be too small (35″ in a 40″ gap), so the previous owner jammed a plank into the ground to block the gap and called it good. I ripped out the old gate, put in a new post and put in a new 42″ gate. I was afraid I shortened the rail a bit too much, but it worked out pretty well. I put a bigger latch in place to hold the gate and added a couple washers so it didn’t jingle around. It turned out pretty nice I think. The only crappy part is the yard is at an angle, so the gate doesn’t swing all the way open. Next spring I’ll get a roller and see if I can fix that, but for now it’s good.
Leveling and Seeding
Since it’s too late/dry in the season for rolling the yard, I leveled the ground another way- more dirt, more dirt, more dirt. Filling holes, laying down grass seed. yard is looking more and more level, and some of the worse ankle turning holes and valleys have been filled.
Moving Plants
so we had these flowering shrubs behind the house where I put my garden- I didn’t move them at first because I wasn’t sure where to put them- but once Jackie and I agreed that putting them by the back fence would work, I pulled those puppies up and transplanted them (after chopping down all the leaves). They look crappy now, but they’re out of the way, giving me more room to plant…
More Garden
Onions and Tomatoes. Jackie and I picked up some Beefsteak and roma tomato plants and some onion seeds, and planted those today. Garden will turn out crappy this year, I’m sure, but I’m just trying to get some experience at this point.
Tree Stump
There’s a dead treestump that is on the property line between me and the neighbors- it looks like it’s mostly on my side of the fence, and more importantly, the dead, hollowed out tops are on my side- I gouged them out, filled them with dirt and planted some oregano (and jackie planted some lavender). There’s already some stuff growing there, but I suspect it’s all weeds. I’ll see what grows though, *shrug*.
ok, time for bed.
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The appeal of Who Knows What
By Jesse Morgan | June 10, 2009
I watch Lost. From what I can tell, one of the appeals of the first season was the disconnect between characters. Their lack of communication drove the plot and drove the viewers crazy in the process.
I’ve come to a point in my book where I know what the catalyst is, and I know what the result is, I just don’t know how it gets from point A to point B. What’s the missing part?
Who knows what.
The Setup:
Ziggy is working as a stable boy for an Inn in a small, walled town (Devitt). The Innkeeper (Clayton) and his wife (Katherine) act as surrogate human parents for Ziggy as he acclimates to living with humans.
A powerful wizard (Leopoldo) rides into town and Ziggy, having never seen a wizard, follows him around, earning a stern reprimand from Clayton who fear overzealous retribution from the wizard. Ziggy opens one of the Wizard’s saddle pouches and finds a powerful amulet that he accidentally activates, raising an army of undead from the cemetery south of town. The way the amulet works, if the user is not powerful enough, the zombies attack the user, otherwise they become willing servants. Since Ziggy isn’t a wizard, the zombies stumble forth through the town, making a beeline for him. Since it’s mid-afternoon, the townsfolk react as you’d expect, immediately rushing to attack the zombies (who would have otherwise left them alone).
The Result:
Ziggy flees the town to the north (towards the capital city of Willis, which can handle this threat), knowing that the zombies will follow him. Ziggy feels deep shame, essentially running away. He never travels to Devitt again, and avoids all contact with the town.
The difficult part is figuring out what happens between those two bits of story.
In Between:
- The Wizard sees Ziggy, realizes he was the one who activated the amulet. Demeans him, gives exposition on how the amulet works and that the zombies are after Ziggy. Says He is responsible for the carnage that ensues, and he’ll deal with him later.
- After Ziggy flees, the wizard is killed by angry mob who thinks he was controlling the zombies, not trying to stop them.
- Clayton may or may not be killed in battle
Questions:
- Does Clayton know Ziggy betrayed his request?
- Does Ziggy think Clayton knew Ziggy betrayed his request?
- Does Katherine know Ziggy betrayed his request?
- Does Katherine blame Ziggy for Clayton’s death?
- Does Katherine (or Clayton) know Ziggy survived the battle? Do they know he ran to Willis? Do they care?
How do I tie this up in a way that leaves Ziggy in Willis?
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West Asset Management is Harassing me.
By Jesse Morgan | June 5, 2009
As I discussed earlier about AT&T Still Sucking, it turns out I’ve found a company that’s even worse- West Asset Management.
Now, just to be clear, I gave these guys a fair shake- If a Vulture sees you lying on the ground crawling, it’s expected that they’ll circle. It’s their nature, I won’t fault them for it.
What I WILL fault them for is continually calling me, trying to get me to settle even after I file the dispute charges. I just spent 5 minutes on the phone being berated by one of their telethugs- he
A) admit that I disputed the claims and they received the dispute
B) admitted that my dispute was being processed by them
C) they were waiting to hear back from AT&T
D) that continuing to harass me and attempt to collect while it was being processed on their end was standard operating procedure
So basically they’re going to harass me until I give them money (that I don’t owe) for someone who has admitted that I don’t owe them anything. My favorite part of the whole thing
[me] So let me get this straight- I filed a dispute as you asked me to, and you guys are processing it and waiting for a response back from AT&T. So in the meantime you continue to call me asking me to pay or dispute… do you see the failure of logic here?
[asshat] yes/no. In my experience we are never wrong in this blah blah I’m a moron jackass.
The worst part is he was purposfully antagonizing me- I nearly hung up, but quickly realized it might be one of their rules that hanging up is tantamount to admitting guilt so they’re allow to take further actions (calling at midnight, knocking on my door, etc). so I played it out and asked him (while he was continually berating me) “sir, what do you want from me?” he never answered. Finally after he ran out of steam I asked him if he was done, and told him that I was already disputing the claim and to have a nice day.
So Jackie and I will be looking for a nice attorney who will help us file a cease and desist or harassment charge- whatever it takes to get them to leave me the hell alone. This guy had an attitude problem, and I dearly hope that if this goes to court, they recorded the call so I can drag that shit out and he gets fired. grrrrr.
Ahh. I feel better. A waste of a lunch, but I feel better.
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nerd alert
By Jesse Morgan | June 4, 2009
I pride myself on being a geek, but every once in a while I do something that can’t be described any way other than “Nerdish”. Today I think I crossed that line again.
1) A while back I hooked up my old PC speakers (kinda nice) to my server in the basement, then streamed music through it. Well, this was fine and dandy for me, but jackie wanted “her” music.
2) I set up a web interface with several radio stations that jackie could select from with HTML “radio” buttons. This worked great, but it still required a laptop to hit the web interface to change channels.
3) A few years ago I bought a nice soundcard to attempt to record my guitar playing on my workstation- that never panned out, but the card came with an USB IR receiver and a dinky little remote for watching DVDs… well, I got the remote working in linux (on my server) with lircd. I then have irexec listening to the lircd socket for buttonpushes, and executing commands based on my config in /etc/lircrc which liiks like this:
begin
remote = Creative_RM-1500
button = Vol_Down
prog = irexec
config = amixer -c 0 -- sset Master playback -1dB+
mode = order
end
begin
remote = Creative_RM-1500
button = Vol_Up
prog = irexec
config = amixer -c 0 -- sset Master playback 2dB+
mode = order
end
begin
remote = Creative_RM-1500
button = Mute
prog = irexec
config = amixer -c 0 -- sset Master toggle
mode = order
end
The end result? it raises and lowers the volume and can mute the audio on the server… what’s next?
4) get Next and Previous to change stations.
Oh, and it’s all running as an unprivileged user rather than root, which makes me feel warm and fuzzy.
btw, here’s my /etc/lircd.conf:
begin remote
name Creative_RM-1500
bits 16
flags SPACE_ENC|CONST_LENGTH
eps 30
aeps 100
header 9078 4671
one 0 0
zero 0 0
pre_data_bits 16
pre_data 0x8322
gap 106974
toggle_bit_mask 0x0
min_repeat 4
begin codes
Power 0x000000000000619E
1 0x0000000000008B74
2 0x0000000000008F70
3 0x000000000000906F
4 0x0000000000008A75
5 0x000000000000847B
6 0x0000000000007887
7 0x0000000000008976
8 0x000000000000837C
9 0x0000000000007788
0 0x000000000000807F
CMSS 0x000000000000718E
EAX 0x0000000000008C73
Mute 0x0000000000006E91
Vol_Down 0x000000000000639C
Vol_Up 0x000000000000629D
Up 0x0000000000007B84
Left 0x0000000000008778
Ok 0x000000000000817E
Right 0x000000000000758A
Down 0x0000000000008D72
Return 0x0000000000008E71
Start 0x0000000000008877
Cancel 0x0000000000007C83
Rec 0x000000000000738C
Options 0x000000000000827D
Display 0x0000000000007689
Previous 0x0000000000007F80
Play 0x0000000000007986
Next 0x0000000000007A85
Slow 0x0000000000007D82
Stop 0x000000000000857A
Step 0x0000000000007E81
end codes
end remote
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Drains, Gardens, Grass Seed, Wii Fit and Darth Vader
By Jesse Morgan | June 3, 2009
Ok, so time for some updates:
About 2 weeks ago I got my CPAP mask, and boy is it uncomfortable. I feel like it does help, but I wake up in the middle of the night with a small panic attack that this thing is on my face and end up taking it off. The idea is it’ll keep me breathing properly all night which means better sleep -> more energy -> easier to lose weight, etc. I have noticed I have more energy, but that might just be placebo.
For mother’s day I got Jackie a Wii Fit, and have been using it steadily for the past few weeks- as a matter of fact, yesterday was the first day I missed. I’ve been doing some of the stuff in there to help with my balance and posture, which are totally screwed up because I’m a lazy SOB.
I’m also slowly getting into this whole home ownership thing- last night I spent 3 hours snaking the utility sink drain so the basement wouldn’t flood when jackie did laundry. She’s out of town for a few days so I had the opportunity last night to do some stuff that I couldn’t do with Ian around. If I had to guess, it looked like bits of candy wrapper or something from a pocket made it’s way out of the washer and into the pipes, where it caused clogs and was unaffected by the small fortune in draino I tried. Now the floordrain is draining like a champ. Hurray.
Also started patching the lawn- tried laying down grass seed in a couple places, but most of it washed away. Where it did come in it looked great (I’m using the el cheapo meijer grass seed in the white and green bag), so I tried again, but the soil quality was just crap. Fortunately meijer had super cheap bags of potting soil as well (more on this later) so I grabbed a couple and dumped nice black soil on the bare spots- grass popped through within a week- AWESOME.
So I did the entire back yard like that. All the damage that was done last year with the weed-b-gone/roundup mixup should be mostly fixed within the next month. I’ve also overseeded the whole backyard and frontyard with this seed because it was so good. $50 worth of grass seed and $15 worth of dirt went a looong way towards making the yard look nice; even then I have 2/3rds of a bag of seed left- I’ll save that for another month or so.
So, back to the soil- why was I looking at soil? because we decided to tear out the ugly landscaping behind the house and put in a small garden- chives, cillantro, hot peppers, jalapenos, watermellons, pumpkins, carrots- even a few stalks of corn. This was our trial run, so I’m not expecting much- mainly just trying to figure out what we can grow back there. I used a garden weasel type thing to tear up the ground, extended it out so it was relatively even for the length of the garden, then put in a little white fence to keep Ianasaurus rex from stomping everything flat (which almost works) I also dumped some potting soil on top of the garden, but too little too late I suspect- hence I’m making sure to put plenty of miracle gro on it to see if I can get stuff to grow.
While getting more soil I saw some asparagus roots and raspberries that looked pretty cool, so I decided to expand a bit- also picked up a cherry tomato plant. This time around I turned the rich, black potting soil into the ground before I planted, and another bag on top of the asparagus for good measure. On our way out Ian wanted a cantaloupe, so we ended up saving the seeds and planting that as well. I’ll try and get some pictures of it when Jackie gets back with the camera.
Oh, and while I was gardening, I knelt on a rock and tore up my knee and had to wear a kneebrace. Good times. I was supposed to get a ‘just in case’ x-ray this weekend but ended up having to go to a housewarming in Grand Rapids- by the time we got back, the pain was almost gone so we skipped it.
OH, and I got a weedwhacker with my refund money- hurray!
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AT&T still sucks 9 months after cancelling.
By Jesse Morgan | May 21, 2009
So I got a call from a company called West Asset Management the other day- they’re a collection company. AT&T apparently sent us to collections.
WHY, you ask? Because we had the audacity to cancel their service.
Let me take you back to the beginning:
- Had AT&T Phone + DSL at apartment
- Moved to House
- AT&T botched the DSL install, then canceled my contract and told me I had to sign a new one if I wanted DSL or pay 50% more for the monthly program.
- I told them that was unacceptable- gimme monthly because I’ll have a new DSL provider by the end of the month.
- Got cyberonic DSL a month later, spent three months working with them to figure out why the line sucked- the actual AT&T line was damaged, and AT&T refused to acknowledge it. NO DSL provider would ever work at this address.
- Canceled Cyberonic AND the phone line and went to cable.
- In September AT&T sends us a bill for $260 something dollars. turns out they were charging us DSL when we couldn’t have possibly been getting service for them (you can only have one DSL provider on the line at a time, nimrods).
- We pay the amount owed for phone ($57.31) and are told the other $210 will be credited to our account since we never received service.
- In November we get a dirty letter from them telling us we owe $210. We call them, the assure us it will be taken care of in the next billing cycle.
- In December, we get a dirty letter with threat of collection agency if we don’t pay. Jackie calls, they say everything is good and to call back on the 16th to make sure everything is good.
- She calls back on Dec. 16th and they say that everything is in process and good to go.
So we thought it was done, right? Wrong. The asshats sent us to collections. So I gathered up all my paperwork I could find and faxed it to the collection agency (who have so far been cool, other than calling me twice before their actual letter showed up). Hopefully they’ll side with me and I can be done with this stupidity.
Now for the fun part. Jackie and I have spent way too much time defending ourselves from AT&T’s attempted fraud and libel. As of December we had let the matter go, but now that we’re wasting time with an actual collection agency, I’m pissed. Once the collection agency sides with us, I will be sending AT&T an invoice. At our current consulting rates that equates out to about $330, minimum. Not only will I send them an invoice, but I will also complain to the Michigan Attorney General, Better Business Bureau, and Michigan Regulatory Commission.
Why will I pursue this? Because this is Fraud by Statistics. If you leverage these kind of bogus charges against 1% of your customer base, they won’t make enough noise to matter, and most of them won’t have the time or inclination to call them out on their abusive behavior. They’ll just roll over and take it.
To hell with that. They wanna start shit? Fine, BRING IT.
Topics: Rant | 1 Comment »
Clearing Clogs
By Jesse Morgan | May 17, 2009
I don’t wanna spend much time on this post because I’m in the groove for editing my book and still have to write two reviews for Literary Escapism.
Gutter Clog
Stupid birds built a nest in my downspout underneath the screen and wire grate that’s supposed to keep them out. managed to get it open, cleaned and happy before it rained friday night.
Basement Clog
When jackie runs the washer, the basement drain backs up. Tried running draino down it, tried snaking it, no joy on both accounts. yesterday I tried something new- shopvac down the drain. WTF was there gravel in there? big rocks as well. cleaned that out, immediately poured water back into the hole, and now it drains fairly fast (in comparison). Need to snake it again, try some heavy duty sewer cleaner.
Freezer Clog
Fridge has been leaking water at regular intervals- not through the bottom into the pan, but into the fridge and out the front door. Emptied the fridge and freezer over the past week, put everything left into a couple coolers with ice overnight and manually defrosted the freezer. This morning I found the drain in the freezer (still) frozen solid and managed to free it. Everything is back in place and the drainage is working properly. Woohoo.
And so that’s what I did this weekend.
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Jaunty out of the box.
By Jesse Morgan | April 26, 2009
As some of you know, I enjoy using Kubuntu on my desktop- I have been for the past two years. I’ve been using KDE since it was at 2.1, which was a lifetime ago (note- I remember how awesome 2.2 was in comparison). This past week the newest version of [K]ubuntu (9.04- Jaunty Jackalope) was released. Normally I wait a month or two before I try a new release of Kubuntu, but the previous release was so disappointing I decided to skip it. So today, I’ve decided to give Jaunty a try.
First impressions
Partitioning Issues
I’m not quite sure how, but when I attempted to customize the partition install, I locked up the application so that the edit and delete partition buttons no longer worked. Since there was no way to “back out” of the partitioning at that stage, I was forced to quit. Fortunately, rather than reboot, it dropped me to the live-CD desktop where I was able to rerun the installer and configure the partitioning properly.
Network Management Plasmoid
The first thing I do when I set up a freshly installed system is try to get online. KDE4 comes with a nifty networking plasmoid (widget) that looks very slick. Unfortunately I was unable to get it to work with my WPA2 network connection nor my neighbor’s unencrypted connection.
Defeated, I was forced to connected to the network cable in my wife’s office. Once I was online, I downloaded kNetworkManager, the application used in previous releases of Kubuntu to manage internet connections. Although slightly different than what I was using on the older version of Kubuntu I was running on my work laptop, it was easy enough to set up. I was unable to connect to my network (which my work laptop is currently connected to, btw), but I was able to connect to my neighbor’s network. This leads me to believe that there are 2 problems here- WPA2 in general is broke for Kubuntu Jaunty and the Network Management Plasmoid is also FUBAR’d since it can’t connect to a regular unencrypted network.
My Broken Alt/ Broken Shortcuts
When I attempted to launch kNetworkManager, I found that the normal Kicker command bar thing wouldn’t pop up when I pressed alt-f2. Nothing. I looked through the system settings for a place to actually set the shortcut to no avail. When I went into System Settings -> Keyboard & Mouse -> Global Keyboard Shortcuts, I received the following error message:
Failed to contact the KDE global shortcuts daemon
Message: Could not get owner name of ‘org.kde.kded’: no such name
Error: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NameHasNoOwner
Once I hit this, the Keybinding configuration was disturbingly blank. Exporting the scheme didn’t throw any errors, but it never created a scheme file for me to examine, so I’m marking the whole thing as a wash.
A while later I noticed alt-tab wasn’t working either, so I figured perhaps it’s a matter of the alt key not being mapped or a wrong keyboard menu. After switching off the god-awful kickoff-style Kmenu (similar to the obnoxious winXP jumbo menu), I went fishing some more under Settings -> Regional & Language -> Keyboard Layout, but found nothing of use. I did find however that alt-Left did make the page turn backwards, but I think that’s an application-level shortcut, not a global level shortcut. This means it’s not just a matter of the Alt key being physically broken.
Garbled display
I found… for lack of a better work, display corruption whenever I moused over buttons, tabs, boxes, etc in many of the system settings areas. Not sure what caused it, I just know that it’s easily reproducible.
Hardware Management
It’s worth noting that this is an IBM Thinkpad T43, and both video and wireless are intel chipsets. The hardware management utility that Kubuntu comes with told me there were no proprietary drivers I could use, so I’m presuming that the video and network issues aren’t caused by those issues. This machine has also run both Kubuntu 8.10 (which really sucked, but this stuff work, I thought) and Ubuntu 8.10 (I don’t like gnome, but at least it worked.)
General Kde Crashes
Although it hasn’t done it while I’ve been working on the article, I’ve had various KDE application fail while I’m been playing with it. I’d say maybe 5 crashes in the past 24 hours. Not really acceptable coming from KDE 3.5 where I’d get one maybe once a month.
Final thoughts
As the battery runs down on this machine while I’m connected to my neighbor’s unsecured wireless, I reflect back on how disappointing this release of Kubuntu has been. For a second release in a row, I’ve been unable to get to to work satisfactorily. The last release I was unimpressed by how inflexible widget placement was on sidepanels as well as missing the Quicklaunch widget I used so often. I didn’t even get that far this release.
Should I give up on Kubuntu? KDE in general? Perhaps I should switch to an RPM-based system.
Here are my options:
- Wait a few weeks/months and try again.
- Switch to another KDE-based distribution.
- Switch to Ubuntu proper or another gnome-based distribution.
Not sure where I’ll end up, but I think I’ll burn a copy of Ubuntu Jaunty and see if I can stomach gnome.
Topics: Uncategorized | 5 Comments »
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