Linux compiles and massive IOWait delays, Part III

Remember the last IOWait delay entry, a couple days ago? If you took a look recently, you’ll have noticed a big WARNING! label on the top. There’s a good reason for that. Everything was going along fine, but I started noticing some little problems (such as, the restart button on the shutdown dialog wouldn’t actually …

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Linux compiles and massive IOWait delays, Part II

WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! The changes below are NOT RECOMMENDED! See part III for details! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! It’s been several weeks since I touched on this subject last, and I’m sorry to say that the solution I came up with in the earlier article just wasn’t good enough. It was forcing the system to swap, …

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“US killer spy drone controls switch to Linux”

So you’ve got an unmanned flying drone with deadly weapons, controlled by ground stations that could be hundreds or thousands of miles away. Of course you run it with the most popular and least secure operating system on the planet! I mean, what could possibly go wrong? I’ve said it before, in all-caps and bold …

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VMware Fusion vs Parallels

I’ve used VMware products literally for years. Without them, it would have been a lot harder to run my business. So when I ended up buying a MacBook Pro as my main machine, the first program I bought for it was VMware’s Mac offering, Fusion. It worked, mostly. And over the last couple years, it …

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Mac OS Upgrade

Those of you who care about such things might have heard that Apple recently released a new version of it’s desktop OS, 10.7, code-named Lion. It was inevitable that I would upgrade my current system (a mid-2009 model MacBook Pro) eventually, but I wanted to put it off for a while. I’ve talked before about …

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Ubuntu 11.04, a.k.a. “Natty Narwhal”

After seeing reviews like these for the new version of Ubuntu, I was a bit apprehensive about upgrading. But as usual and despite my attempts to wait, I did so anyway, several days ago. I figured they couldn’t have screwed up the GNOME interface too much, and no matter how bad the new Unity interface …

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Exasperating!

VMware Fusion 3 is a great piece of software, but it has some very annoying quirks. My Linux virtual machine was getting some very annoying delays at times that it shouldn’t have. Compiling a fairly small project resulted in a ridiculous amount of “iowait” time. Even switching folders in my current e-mail program could take …

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Project M, and Date Handling

First, for those of you who know and care about it: after seven years of work, the theory for Project X is successfully finished! (Hurray!) However, I haven’t found a simple — but not too simple — use for it so I could prove that it works. I’m not sure I’ll be able to commercialize …

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Upgrades Gone Bad

I’ve mentioned my love/hate relationship with upgrades before. Yesterday I had another check-mark for the “hate” column. I’d run into a minor compiler bug in my Ubuntu version of GCC. Since a new version of the OS had just been released the day before, promising even faster bootups and other improvements, I thought I’d upgrade …

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