Where am I?

Part 5 in a series by Mel Gorman describes how to measure the potential benefit from hugepages. The results match up reasonably well with CPU-intensive synthetic benchmarks on linux, which tend to show 10-15% improvement over ordinary pages.

The larger impact may be to application environments under heavy memory pressure. The OS can swap everything else out, but hugepage allocations are pinned. This is a double-edged sword. Preventing swapping may benefit some environments (cf vm.swappiness). But imagine a situation where you have 8-GB RAM and designate 4-GB for huge pages, but only use 2-GB. Now the OS has only 4-GB to manage, and the free 2-GB in huge pages are effectively wasted. If the system comes under memory pressure, that could lead to swapping or activate the OOM killer.

It wasn't rocket surgery, but blakeley.com now has an IPv6 stack and an AAAA record. If http://ipv6-test.com/validate.php can be believed, it even works. I had more trouble finding a server-side test tool than I had with the configuration.

Mine arrived around 22 November. It seems to be a very well-made laptop, and I'm enjoying its low mass and long battery life. I'm still getting used to the keyboard: I've remapped capslock to control, but occasionally I'll still try to use the fn key as a control key.

This marks my first attempt in about a decade to use OS X as a full-time environment. I've have a Mac of some sort since 1988, but for the past few years I rarely used the latest one (an iMac). I used it for a little audio work, and for the past year for iOS development. For productivity tasks it was usually easier to use my work laptop instead, which ran debian linux at Oracle and Kubuntu or Ubuntu linux at MarkLogic.

One reason for all this was keyboard accessibility. Apple clearly doesn't make this a priority. Even with Universal Access enabled, I'm constantly finding things that only work with the mouse or trackpad. ClipMenu and SizeUp help, but I'm always looking for more efficient ways to work.

I noticed this in the github pull requests for homebrew, and thought it looked interesting. We've all written a script that sends a command-line out to N hosts, right? Dancer's Shell looks like a nice way to automate that. It lets you place hosts in groups, and send commands to a group of hosts. The next time I need to work with a cluster, I'm planning to delve into this and see if it helps.

With some embarrassment, I concede that my name is now on a software patent assigned to Oracle. Apparently it was granted at the end of last month.

Web-based user interface for searching metadata-driven relational databases

It wouldn't surprise me if there is prior art for this - it's basically a SQL query builder driven by Javascript and an in-page data dictionary. Certainly we had all seen query builders before. But when we built the application, back in 2003, it seemed innovative to feed the query schema into a web page, with JavaScript that then presented the options to the user.