LeeNukes

I noticed that in one of the scenes in Date Night, Joe Miletto(Ray Liotta) picks up a phone which looks very much like an iPhone 4.

Given this movie came out before the iPhone 4 was officially announced, I wondered if they had given any units to the production crew to use as product placement.

It could be that the props people had seen the leaked phones and made something similar for when the iPhone 4 did come out.

Here is an image (Click on it for full size):

I’ve read lots of release information about the upcoming Android 2.2 release Froyo which has now started to roll out to the Google Nexus One and I’m wondering if it will bring 802.11n to the HTC Desire.

People have managed to hack a kernel together for the HTC Desire and get 802.11n already, I just hope it comes officially with Froyo. And soon…

Just installed the Android Wordpress application and all I can say is WOW! This is my first post using it. It’s free and it gives you very easy access to create posts and moderate your chmments. Cool doesn’t even begin to describe it.

You can even add photos using the phones camera :)

Just ran a yum update on my server and found that CentOS 5.5 is out, the giveaway was the 110 packages I all of a sudden needed to update.

It seems to have gone well, I’ve not tested everything but I assume its all working.

Something I’m hoping is now fixed is VMWare Server 2.0.2 as the web interface (vmware-mgmt) crashes frequently with the old glibc file.

This is all documented here: http://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=3884

The work around just didn’t work for me. So here’s hoping the upgrade is the fix. I’ve got two servers to test it on, and this came just in time if it does work.

Release announcement here: http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2010-May/016638.html

Recently at work I’ve been assisting in migrating us over to Google Apps. We have the premier package, so we pay for our Google as opposed to some of the recent reports about Google Apps Usage being mainly free (Google says it has 25 million Google Apps users, but almost all of them are non-payers. )

I then logged into my home ISP internet Virgin Webmail and found that they too had moved to Google Mail. Virgin Media Webmail accounts are now Google Apps accounts. There isn’t much there, you don’t get Docs with it for example but you can get access to the Google Page.

Do this:

You should see a more traditional Google Apps page:

As I mentioned, there isn’t much you can do from here. Also, the traditional pages appear to redirect to, so you can’t goto for example: http://mail.google.com/a/ntlworld.com as what it actually does is sign you out.

Oh well, nevermind.

Google have changed their search page. It now looks more like when you do a News search.

I didn’t see any fanfare about this one, all of a sudden the searches I did were different. We’ll see how I get on with it. It appeared to get changed about 5PM on Thursday GMT.

It’s a RackMount HP DL140. It’s quite noisy, so I’ll need to work on making it quieter, and it uses considerably more juice then my old desktop server, which is to be expected.

Here is the nbench output though:

BYTEmark* Native Mode Benchmark ver. 2 (10/95)
Index-split by Andrew D. Balsa (11/97)
Linux/Unix* port by Uwe F. Mayer (12/96,11/97)

TEST                : Iterations/sec.  : Old Index   : New Index
                    :                  : Pentium 90* : AMD K6/233*
--------------------:------------------:-------------:------------
NUMERIC SORT        :          1028.5  :      26.38  :       8.66
STRING SORT         :           101.8  :      45.49  :       7.04
BITFIELD            :      5.0336e+08  :      86.34  :      18.04
FP EMULATION        :          166.17  :      79.74  :      18.40
FOURIER             :           18412  :      20.94  :      11.76
ASSIGNMENT          :          36.077  :     137.28  :      35.61
IDEA                :          3586.6  :      54.86  :      16.29
HUFFMAN             :          1614.8  :      44.78  :      14.30
NEURAL NET          :          27.837  :      44.72  :      18.81
LU DECOMPOSITION    :          1252.3  :      64.88  :      46.85
==========================ORIGINAL BYTEMARK RESULTS==========================
INTEGER INDEX       : 59.957
FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 39.310
Baseline (MSDOS*)   : Pentium* 90, 256 KB L2-cache, Watcom* compiler 10.0
==============================LINUX DATA BELOW===============================
CPU                 : 4 CPU GenuineIntel Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 3.06GHz 3066MHz
L2 Cache            : 512 KB
OS                  : Linux 2.6.18-164.15.1.el5
C compiler          : gcc version 4.1.2 20080704 (Red Hat 4.1.2-46)
libc                : libc-2.5.so
MEMORY INDEX        : 16.536
INTEGER INDEX       : 13.880
FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 21.803
Baseline (LINUX)    : AMD K6/233*, 512 KB L2-cache, gcc 2.7.2.3, libc-5.4.38
* Trademarks are property of their respective holder.

It’s only 1U so it sits easily under my spare bed. Now the big question is, what can I do with it now I have 2x 3GHz processors running in Hyperthreading mode :)

You gotta love the new Street View using 3D anaglyph mode.

See the following pictures for two examples:

I’ve witnessed my first DEFINITE cheat on Mario Kart Wii. The cheat I saw was they could basically choose any powerup they wanted, at any time they wanted.

So, the race went like this:

1, 2, 3, START. Blue shells flies past me and blows up first place. Odd, I thought, we’re not even at the boxes yet. Clearly someone was cheating, then another blue shell, until 4TH ALEX got to 1st. Then they stopped. A little later down the track, 4TH ALEX was sat there with green shells firing one, after another. About 30 of them. There was also another guy who appeared to be cheating, his player name is pictured, I couldn’t get my camera out in time photograph the other guy.

Clearly these people are so poor at playing Mario Kart that they would rather cheat at it. Losers!

So, I’m back onto looking at an alternative to my old P3 based server.

I wanted to know the hardware specs of the Sheeva CPU though as even though its 1.2GHz I don’t think its going to be as fast, so I thought I’d check.

I found a page online:
(http://computingplugs.com/index.php/SheevaPlug_Performance)

I had some problems compiling nbench on my desktop, so I had a look around and found one result which helped, it was in Danish, but essentially I had to change this line in the Makefile:

# generic options for gcc
CFLAGS = -s -static -Wall -O3

to this:

# generic options for gcc
CFLAGS = -s -Wall -O3

then ran make and it was fine.

Here are the results from nbench on my server:

BYTEmark* Native Mode Benchmark ver. 2 (10/95)
Index-split by Andrew D. Balsa (11/97)
Linux/Unix* port by Uwe F. Mayer (12/96,11/97)

TEST                : Iterations/sec.  : Old Index   : New Index
                    :                  : Pentium 90* : AMD K6/233*
--------------------:------------------:-------------:------------
NUMERIC SORT        :          381.96  :       9.80  :       3.22
STRING SORT         :          35.155  :      15.71  :       2.43
BITFIELD            :      1.3172e+08  :      22.59  :       4.72
FP EMULATION        :          46.504  :      22.31  :       5.15
FOURIER             :          7791.5  :       8.86  :       4.98
ASSIGNMENT          :          7.2354  :      27.53  :       7.14
IDEA                :          1442.2  :      22.06  :       6.55
HUFFMAN             :          483.19  :      13.40  :       4.28
NEURAL NET          :          9.0077  :      14.47  :       6.09
LU DECOMPOSITION    :          364.16  :      18.87  :      13.62
==========================ORIGINAL BYTEMARK RESULTS==========================
INTEGER INDEX       : 18.079
FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 13.424
Baseline (MSDOS*)   : Pentium* 90, 256 KB L2-cache, Watcom* compiler 10.0
==============================LINUX DATA BELOW===============================
CPU                 : GenuineIntel Pentium III (Coppermine) 797MHz
L2 Cache            : 256 KB
OS                  : Linux 2.6.18-164.11.1.el5
C compiler          : gcc version 4.1.2 20080704 (Red Hat 4.1.2-46)
libc                : libc-2.5.so
MEMORY INDEX        : 4.343
INTEGER INDEX       : 4.642
FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 7.445
Baseline (LINUX)    : AMD K6/233*, 512 KB L2-cache, gcc 2.7.2.3, libc-5.4.38
* Trademarks are property of their respective holder.

Here are the reults from nbench on my desktop:

BYTEmark* Native Mode Benchmark ver. 2 (10/95)
Index-split by Andrew D. Balsa (11/97)
Linux/Unix* port by Uwe F. Mayer (12/96,11/97)

TEST                : Iterations/sec.  : Old Index   : New Index
                    :                  : Pentium 90* : AMD K6/233*
--------------------:------------------:-------------:------------
NUMERIC SORT        :          1270.6  :      32.59  :      10.70
STRING SORT         :             276  :     123.32  :      19.09
BITFIELD            :      5.0967e+08  :      87.43  :      18.26
FP EMULATION        :             276  :     132.44  :      30.56
FOURIER             :           26984  :      30.69  :      17.24
ASSIGNMENT          :          35.888  :     136.56  :      35.42
IDEA                :          7378.1  :     112.85  :      33.50
HUFFMAN             :          2718.9  :      75.40  :      24.08
NEURAL NET          :           56.11  :      90.14  :      37.91
LU DECOMPOSITION    :            1779  :      92.16  :      66.55
==========================ORIGINAL BYTEMARK RESULTS==========================
INTEGER INDEX       : 91.588
FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 63.406
Baseline (MSDOS*)   : Pentium* 90, 256 KB L2-cache, Watcom* compiler 10.0
==============================LINUX DATA BELOW===============================
CPU                 : Dual GenuineIntel Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU     E6750  @ 2.66GHz 2667MHz
L2 Cache            : 4096 KB
OS                  : Linux 2.6.31.9-174.fc12.x86_64
C compiler          : gcc version 4.4.2 20091222 (Red Hat 4.4.2-20) (GCC)
libc                :
MEMORY INDEX        : 23.113
INTEGER INDEX       : 22.663
FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 35.167
Baseline (LINUX)    : AMD K6/233*, 512 KB L2-cache, gcc 2.7.2.3, libc-5.4.38
* Trademarks are property of their respective holder.

Here are the results from nbench on the Sheeva Plug:

BYTEmark* Native Mode Benchmark ver. 2 (10/95)
Index-split by Andrew D. Balsa (11/97)
Linux/Unix* port by Uwe F. Mayer (12/96,11/97)

TEST                : Iterations/sec.  : Old Index   : New Index
                    :                  : Pentium 90* : AMD K6/233*
--------------------:------------------:-------------:------------
NUMERIC SORT        :          309.72  :       7.94  :       2.61
STRING SORT         :          36.102  :      16.13  :       2.50
BITFIELD            :      9.8289e+07  :      16.86  :       3.52
FP EMULATION        :          71.075  :      34.10  :       7.87
FOURIER             :          356.63  :       0.41  :       0.23
ASSIGNMENT          :           4.207  :      16.01  :       4.15
IDEA                :          1146.3  :      17.53  :       5.21
HUFFMAN             :          452.41  :      12.55  :       4.01
NEURAL NET          :         0.49636  :       0.80  :       0.34
LU DECOMPOSITION    :          16.116  :       0.83  :       0.60
==========================ORIGINAL BYTEMARK RESULTS==========================
INTEGER INDEX       : 15.922
FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 0.646
Baseline (MSDOS*)   : Pentium* 90, 256 KB L2-cache, Watcom* compiler 10.0
==============================LINUX DATA BELOW===============================
CPU                 :
L2 Cache            :
OS                  : Linux 2.6.30-rc1-00002-g1758996
C compiler          : gcc version 4.3.3 (Ubuntu 4.3.3-5ubuntu4)
libc                : libc-2.9.so
MEMORY INDEX        : 3.317
INTEGER INDEX       : 4.549
FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 0.358
Baseline (LINUX)    : AMD K6/233*, 512 KB L2-cache, gcc 2.7.2.3, libc-5.4.38
* Trademarks are property of their respective holder.

I’m now not so sure if it’s worth upgrading. I’ll have to look into other factors. On the site above which benchmarked the SheevaPlug they state:

“From nbench’s website, the Sheeva Plug falls somewhere around a P3 800Mhz range.”

which is exactly what I’m running in my current Compaq DeskPro Server.