Comments for MrPointy's Weblog

Comment on High Altitude Balloon project by HABx hardware taking form « MrPointy’s Weblog

HABx hardware taking form « MrPointy’s Weblog — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 20:31:10 +0000

[...] readers (and you know who you are) will have seen a mention of the HABx balloon project from an earlier [...]

Comment on Introducing Clifford by Matt

Matt — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 03:41:46 +0000

I’ve found the TomTom’s aren’t particularly ‘useful’.
How old are the maps on the system?

I own a Garmin Nuvi 760…. and it works quite well.

We have also purchased Lifetime Map updates ($180AUD), and the maps get updated 4 times a year.

Whilst ‘directions’ at times can be ‘interesting’… it doesn’t send us off the road!

We find the directions can send you on a longer route (very occassionally — like coming to our own address) — it seems to be an issue with no only this model/maker — but the data provided by Sensis. :-/

All in all though, the maps are updated and have new ring roads, and roads as they are put in place (our current GPS has for example the Geelong Ring Road in there).

GPSes are indeed good.. but only as good as the maps they have, and the directions provided by those like Sensis.

Comment on Is KVM a type 1 or a type 2 Hypervisor? – aka – My Hypervisor is better than your Hypervisor! by Andrew Brehm

Andrew Brehm — Mon, 25 May 2009 14:29:55 +0000

I think one difference is that the host system of a t2 hypervisor knows about the memory used by guests (i.e. each guest system is represented as a normal process in the host system), whereas the root system of a t1 hypervisor knows not about the memory used by children (i.e. while there is a normal process representing each VM that process does not use as much memory as the VM really does).

I have here a Hyper-V system on a 4 GB machine. The VM (Vista) has 1 GB of RAM assigned to it. And it works well. But the root system doesn’t seem to know about the 1 GB used by the Vista VM.

I am wondering what would happen if the root partition tried to use that 1 GB of RAM. Since the memory is not owned by any process, it could overwrite it (and crash the VM). Or, if the hypervisor stops the root partition from overwriting that 1 GB, the root partition would crash because the memory would seem defective.

How does this work and is that the difference between t1 and t2?

Comment on nagios forked by geoffoc

geoffoc — Tue, 12 May 2009 02:57:32 +0000

To be honest, I haven’t been overly happy with nagios lately. It is a little stuck in the early 2000’s. To me icinga looks like it is promising changes – how they pan out will be anyones guess. Given my frustrations with nagios moving to icinga is a better step that moving to a completely different solution.

Comment on nagios forked by Jack Hughes

Jack Hughes — Mon, 11 May 2009 11:21:45 +0000

Will you be moving over on the first release or will you see how things pan out with icinga?

Comment on openssh crypto cipher performance by shaked

shaked — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 13:13:12 +0000

thanks.
this helped just now figure out relative performance between the different ciphers.

Comment on VLC – 1, MythTV Internal Player – 0 by Donovan

Donovan — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 04:56:14 +0000

I use MythVideo with a ton of DVD images, but not in ISO format; I’ve extracted each of them to their own directory. In my situation, Myth has never, ever, crashed playing back these videos, so the blame has to be either faulty handling of ISO files or something particular to your systems. I’m glad I can use the internal player, as it mirrors the on-screen display as used in television viewing.

Comment on Launching balloons by Matt

Matt — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 13:21:04 +0000

Very cool. Keep us posted.

Comment on VLC – 1, MythTV Internal Player – 0 by trainboy

trainboy — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 04:43:24 +0000

My opinion. The internal player is a piece of scrap. I use it to play ISOs off of a video server. Everybody is talking GigE and the load on the network is minimal when it works. It ain’t the server because it serves videos to other players just fine.

Half the time, the internal player crashes when you pick an ISO to play. Sometimes it just hangs. If you’re lucky, this won’t crash Myth but sometimes it switches to lay-in-wait mode and then crashes Myth later on. Sometimes you can see the frontend in the process list and kill it but other times not.

If you do get to see the menu, picking things off it sometimes works and sometimes not. Variations on the crash or hang are possible. Occasionally, the picture comes up with 1/4 of the screen, on the left, with the colors switched (an interesting effect).

Once it actually begins to play the ISO, it usually works pretty good.

It sounds to me like somebody forgot to initialize a bunch of stuff on startup and we’re just picking random values off the stack. For example, if you do see the menu and you move around the selections on it, this reduces the chance of crashing greatly.

Bear in mind that all of the ISOs will eventually play OK. Its just random chance as to whether its this time or next time. This pretty much proves that there’s nothing wrong with the ISOs.

Meanwhile, VLC plays them all flawlessly. So, if you are tired of the internal player’s crap, you might try VLC instead. It works way better for me.

Comment on Java vs Python performance by Cognitive Cow - » In Defense of the Java Giant

Cognitive Cow - » In Defense of the Java Giant — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 18:39:05 +0000

[...] is slow. No it’s not. Python is much much slower. The neat little features of Python do come at a price and a pretty hefty one. I [...]