New to Linux

The short version of the story is that I need a good link to a something on Linux performance tuning. Anybody who feels like dropping a link in the comments, or a book title and/or author will be much appreciated. My own reading thus far has been the first link from my google search, which is also the highest ranked in delicious.

Here's the long version for those who are interested:

So I went and downloaded Ubuntu and the installation experience was a whole lot less painful than I expected, in fact, easier than a windows install. I spent about a half an hour confirming what I had found out during a previous attempt at dual booting--that it wasn't going to partition my hard drive. I was willing to make a complete break with windows at this point. With my Compaq recover discs, it would take about a half an hour to do a wipe-clean and reinstall of windows. But then it would take a very long time to download all the updates and get everything set up right, and it would take less time than previously to again reach the point where I am now, the point where bootup times have multiplied by a factor of something obscene and the performance has gone to hell and it's time to consider re-installing windows or switching to Linux again. So I wipe the hard drive and dive fully into Ubuntu.

I don't count the half hour I spent determining that my hard drive isn't going to partition, so the Ubuntu install was about a half an hour. It found my internet connection without any input from me and I was up and running. Responsiveness all around has been a major improvement over windows.

Video, on the other hand, has been a bit wierd. Once I installed VLC, it played DVD's full screen with only a few hiccups. Windows played them without hiccups even when overall performance was in the toilet, but that's a reasonable trade-off. Now that I'm getting comfortable in linux-land, I can probably performance-tune these hiccups away. This is where it gets interesting.

I know only the little I learned in 303, and then what I've picked up doing most of my homework on lab machines when the assignment didn't require me to be on windows. So I know almost nothing.

I open up a terminal and type free:

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        449520     442172       7348          0      14376     183256
-/+ buffers/cache:     244540     204980
Swap:      1317288          8    1317280

What's up with this? I have 2 terminals and emacs running and it's ussing 442 of my 449 megs of RAM?

ps shows only bash running, I know that isn't the case, because I'm typing in emacs right now. I know that Ubuntu sets me up as something less than root, and that you use sudo to up your priviledges, but sudo ps gives the same result. That can't be right. I tried adjusting the kernel.threads-max on the advice of this page, the first hit on my search for "Ubuntu performance tuning". Making that smaller didn't seem to help my video playback, and actually seemed to make it a bit worse. Upping it didn't help either. This reminded me that I really don't know what I'm doing here and should do a bit more homework before I start randomly messing with things. I rebooted to get my original value back and decided to post this issue to the intertubes.

More like this please!

The Destroyermen is going on hiatus. I'm glad to see that there was a blog like this to hiatus from. It's the XO of an actual US navy destroyer who takes amazing photos. I do hope he gets back to blogging sometime soon. I also hope that more military units will start semi-official blogs like this sometime soon. Every bit of information that can be released to the public without compromising opsec should be, and that's a pretty substantial number of bits. Check out the archives. I particularly liked the pictures of the ships going into Singapore.

Update: They're back!! This is the coolest military blog I've yet found. I hope we get more like these from all the branches. Troops blogging on their own are cool, but officers blogging with their real names and ranks up above each post adds a much needed perspective. We need a good infantry batallion XO blog someday soon.

Pictures

Nikkou
Kuroiso
Taylor Place
Leaving Chicago
Nasu Yama
Tokyo
Penny Lane
Nasunogahara Park
First Japan Trip

Blogging news

Okay, I've been reading blogs since a time when many of my friends didn't know what they were. That wasn't very long ago. Now, I read in bits that there's a Nielsen online and that they are rating blogs now. Both these things are interesting news. Even more interesting is that, of the top ten most widely read weblogs in America, only one name is familiar to me.

I've also never heard of bebo. According to this post it's the social networking site that dominates in the UK. The interesting thing about that is, one might expect that without the language barrier, the established networking sites like myspace or facebook would have taken the UK market, but they haven't. It seems like old-style word of mouth may be a big part of how those networks grow. Now that I think of it, my own entry into each of the networking sites I have a profile on (Friendster, myspace, and facebook) was prompted in each case by someone either telling me about it face to face or by an email from someone physically not far from me. LinkedIn is the exception. I have a profile there, which I haven't touched in probably over a year. That seemed like a really good idea, but I don't know if it will amount to anything or not.

But it's interesting how in the online world language barriers are not the only substantial cultural boundaries.

If a particular website can dominate its market in the US, while another one holds on to its share of the UK market, it seems to follow that a site could hold a market share that matters in terms of dollars in just one region of the US against a competitor that holds the rest. I read an article about Elvis that talked about how there were such a thing as regional hits back in the 50's and early 60's but the music market had become a national thing and those were history. Could the web bring that back?

Owning stuff

Basically, I'm against it. I used to collect books, but moving on a limited budget made me aware of the cost of keeping heavy, dust-collecting things around.

The value of keeping a bookshelf full of the things that have meant something to you is now better available in Facebook applications and blogs. So there is no reason to have books around once I'm done reading them. Ditto for DVDs and CDs.

Once I tried reading books on my Dell Axim handheld computer with its little 3 inch screen, I found the experience better than printed books in every way, unless illustrations were involved. If everything I wanted to read was available in that format, I would have switched entirely over. But most of what's really good to read was published before Ebooks and is available much cheaper at used bookstores. That will continue to be the case for some time. But eventually, I won't have to deal with printed books at all and I'll be happy.

I found this interesting quote on the NY Times tech blog Bits, which I keep in my Google Reader.

Until now, Apple has scoffed at the idea of music subscriptions. Steve Jobs, its chief executive, has said that people want to own, not rent music. The company declined to comment.

Steve Jobs is right about most things, but this is surprisingly wrong. Everybody I know who has tried Rhapsody loves it. I think as more people try renting music, they'll look back and laugh at the time they wanted to own it.

The downside of Rhapsody is you can only listen to it on a computer with broadband. But a portable device that can do what rhapsody does would be ideal. I know such devices exist now, but they don't do anything else. If the iphone had that capability, I would want one even more than I already do.

But the main point is, read bits. Because, in the words of Samuel Faber, "Knowledge is good".

Faster please!

The Google blog is talking about a project to build a new high-bandwidth subsea cable system linking the U.S. and Japan. This would have been real handy when I was trying to look up example sentences on ALC

Keep at it

ROK Drop has more on Okinawa crime stats and US military crime stats. I'm so glad to see him still on that. The completely off-base idea of US troops as criminals and thugs which prevails in Japan and South Korea needs to be flogged mercilessly and deported back to North Korea where it belongs. The American media isn't going to do that for us since that would require that they be biased in favor of the truth rather than seeking balance between the agendas being fed to them, which is easier. GI Korea assures me that the US State department and USFK have consistently done the right thing and issued press releases protesting the unfair treatment of our troops in Korean and Japanese newspapers, but that these releases have been consistently ignored.

One nitpick: he describes the crime rates as "out of control" when they were double that of the local population. To double a crime rate that's reasonably low to begin with--while rightly unacceptable to a commander in charge of the unit--isn't really an "out of control" rate of crime.

I haven't looked at that graphic yet, but I noticed on the data table from Okinawa prefecture's website that the year that SOFA personnel crime rate finally dipped below that of the local population and then stayed there, was around 1974, two years after the draft ended. There's probably a connection there.

I also agree with ROK drop that restricting troops to the base is a good response to the smears of anti-American protest groups. I sure would have hated it when I was in Korea, and I feel for troops on Okinawa who are imprisoned by the policy, but it sends a clear message to those who do business with the military. You can sit silently and not speak out against your country's media when they smear us, but you can't count on our business with that attitude.

Update: ROK Drop has posted the mother of all GI crime in Korea posts. He even has footnotes. If the State Department or any of the commands in Asia who are actually professionally responsible for doing this kind of thing have done as well at publicizing this issue, I would like to see the link. ROK Drop showed me one link concerning the armored vehicle incident, but I can't think of a good reason why all of this information is not easily accessible by a search of the State Department website. There might be a relatively innocuous reason, but it's very hard for me to imagine a good one.

On an unrelated note, nothing is accessible at all from the main page of the USFK official site. They could have called for volunteers from the special-ed class of the Yongsan post elementary school and gotten a better job done on it. I'm sure that at least one in 10 brand new recruits could code some functional HTML, if the special-ed students were too busy. I hope they didn't pay too much for the design.

Another Update: More on the Okinawa post restriction.