Monthly Archives: June 2006

The box that provides many of the UK Linux User Groups websites and mailing list facilities is sick. Andy Smith mentioned this earlier in the week, and there seems to be further problems with it. Last night I went to see the machine, taking some replacement hardware with me with a view to replacing it.

Unfortunately due to the hardware being nothing short of “quirky” at best and “mental” at worst, I wasn’t able to achieve everything I set out to do. So it looks like I’ll need a further visit to the machine this week to replace the power supply and one of the mirrored hard disks. No data has been lost as yet, but we’re running in a degraded mirror setup so there’s always the possibility that disk could fail and lead to data loss. Andy is taking regular off site backups so in the event of total catastrophe.

I have an iRiver IHP140 (now called H140 by iRiver) “Multi-Codec Jukebox” – basically an MP3 player in colloquial terms. I’ve had it a couple of years now and I use it almost every day. It has a 40GB disk which currently contains the following split of data.

5.1GiB – Data – documents, spreadsheets and other personal matter.
6.4GiB – Music – traditional MP3/OGG based musical audio.
5.9GiB – Spoken Word – Mainly audio books but also some great comedy recorded off BBC Radio 4.
2.2GiB – Podcasts – I think I’m subscribed to about 50 or 60 podcasts. Some I only listen to irregularly, others I listen to the day they come out.

Chess Griffin has released a new episode of Linux Reality where he goes through Ubuntu 6.06 (LTS). It’s worth a listen as his podcast is pretty high quality and he’s good at targetting the Linux beginner / newbie. If you have a pdcast client you can add his feed to get the podcasts when they are released.

I have had an Apple MacBook Pro on loan for the last few weeks. One of my customers has a lot of Macs on the estate being used by creative type people. They have a corporate system for which the GUI doesn’t work on the new Intel Macs, but does work on the old Mac OS9 machines. I called up a mate who works for Apple UK and asked if he’d be kind enough to send me one for “evaluation” because we (in the tech team) didn’t actually have any Mac OSX based machines to test on. I specified that I’d like a MacBook Pro of some kind and he obliged.

I just had to sign a bit of paper and fax it off to the loan company, who said they’d deliver within a couple of days. Sure enough I got a call from reception a day or so later to tell me a courier had delivered a parcel from Added Dimension (awful website by the way).

Some time ago my friend Hugo came up with a noddy way of seeing how fast a machine is. It involves timing how long a machine takes to count to a very high number in perl. This is not a benchmark, just a bit of fun. You can find the results on my wiki and a copy on the Hampshire Linux User Group wiki too.

It’s by no means comprehensive, accurate or consistent, but it’s good fun, and runs on pretty much anything that has perl and time. A few of us have “benchmarked” our machines using that method and have put our results up on the above pages. If you’re okay with editing a wiki, feel free to test and add your own machine. So far the fastest machine that has been tested is based on a 3GHz Intel Pentium 4. If you’re not happy editing a wiki *boggle* email me the results and I’ll merge them in Don’t forget the details – CPU type and speed. To get the actual clock speed on a Linux machine you can cat /proc/cpuinfo, for Windows, uhm, there’s some GUI thing somehwere I’m sure