Tuesday, January 31, 2006

1GB RAM Finally Arrived in the Mail

The 1GB RAM finally arrived in the mail today. Installed it in less than a minute. There wasn't any noticible difference in speed up (had 368MB before), but pagings down to nil. Next, gonna install Virtual PC 2004, Oracle 10g on Linux and Asterisk@Home.

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

Kensington Repackaged Hynix RAM

Just bought two Hynix 512 DDR2700 SODIMM 333MHz RAM on ebay for AU$38 each, totaling AU$120 (incl. shipping/insurance). Talk about cheap.

Interesting thing about the RAM. The seller was selling the same spec RAM, one from Hynix for AU$38, and other from Kensington for AU$53. I heard of Kensington before, so I presume Kensington cost more because its better. But on zooming into the auction photo, the Kensington RAM is marked Hynix on the chip. What The?!?!?.

After some Googling, here's what I found. There are 4 major RAM manufacturers - Hynix (formarly Hyundai Electronics), Samsung, Infineon, and Micron. All other RAM manufacturer are not manufacturers. They buy their RAM from one of above 4, slap their sticker on it before putting it in a nice box, and sell it for twice the price. Why those bloody pirates!@#$%

Still I was doubtful. Maybe the Kensington's better because they test before packaging when a thought hit me. My laptop's Dell, which means Dell will go to the source to buy their parts. I opened the bottom panel covering the laptop's RAM and lo behold... it's Hynix!

So I got Hynix instead of the repackaged Hynix.

Sunday, January 15, 2006

Tomcat5 VS Jetty6

Since I've installed CruiseControl, I've been viewing my Continuous Integration report from CruiseControl using the bundled Jetty6 server.

Today, I replaced Jetty6 with Tomcat 5.5.12 and its fast as hell. What The!?!?! I expected it to be slower. Jetty6 is supposed to be a fast, light-weight servelet container, or so the author claims. If Tomcat runs the same thing Jetty6 ran faster, how can it be fast and light-weight???

Good thing of testing open-source on a PIII-600MHz with 64MB RAM is everything is so not blindingly fast that I get the feel of the application's performance just by listening to the server churn underneath my bed.

Lesson Learned: Never take the word of some low-life open source developer at face value again without independently verifying it.

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

CruiseControl 2.3.1

I've been trying to install CruiseControl 2.3.1 (Continuous Integration Server) on my Debian server. Everytime I try to compile CruiseControl, I keep getting the same error message "java exception NoClassDefFound: com.twmacinta.util.MD5OutputStream".

Google was no help. I went through the source code, but everything looked fine. Fast-md5.jar which contains the com.twmacinta.util.MD5OutputStream class was where it should be. Even checked if the classpath was called correctly. Nothing was wrong.

After several retries, I finally found the source of the problem - manifest.mf. The manifest.mf is used by ANT Build script to build the final cruisecontrol.jar file. The manifest.mf lists all the external libraries to be included in cruisecontrol.jar and it was missing Fast-md5.jar, hence it doesn't make a difference even if you include it in the classpath.

So edited the file to include Fast-md5.jar and everything works fine.

UPDATE: This has been corrected in the CVS repository of cruisecontrol and awaiting release with next version. You can download just that file from the CVS if you aren't keen on editing source code.

Friday, January 06, 2006

Snippet://Linux/Command/Summary

System
uname -a
cat /proc/cpuinfo
cat /var/log/messages

Network
ifconfig
arp
arp -d entry : Clear cache
ping -a ip
echo atdt3333333 > /dev/ttyS1 : Send modem command to COM1. Dials '3333333'

Sunday, January 01, 2006

New Year - 2006

Every year on new years' eve, I tend to look back in my life and compare what I've accomplished. The list is always long but undistinguished (according to me atleast).

Looking back, my mind began to wander all the way back to when I was 5 years. One fine summer day, my cousin took me for a walk in the park. After hours or so, we sat down by the river bank to take a rest when we noticed an artist painting on the other side of the river. We went across the bridge to see him paint and guess what we found... He was painting the part of the river bank where we were sitting and since we were also sitting there, he had painted us in too.

WOW... there's a painting out there in the world with me in it. I wonder if I'll ever come across that painting again. I wish I knew the name of the painter, so I could look it up. Oh well.