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Kristof Willen

Technology tinkerer. Electric unicycles. Star gazer. Whisky & synths.

Fedora boot process charted

Owen Taylor threw down the gauntlet :
Currently, the time to boot the Linux desktop from the point where the power switch is turned on, to the point where the user can start doing work is roughly two minutes.



Ideally, system boot would involve a 3-4 second sequential read of around 100 megabytes of data from the hard disk, CPU utilization would be parallelized with that, and all queries on external systems would be asynchronous ... startup continues and once the external system responds, the system state is updated. Plausibly the user could start work under 10 seconds on this ideal system.




The challenge is to create a single poster showing graphically what is going on during the boot, what is the utilization of resources, how the current boot differs from the ideal world of 100% disk and CPU utilization, and thus, where are the opportunities for optimization.



Two days later Ziga Mahkovec posted some cool-looking results.

Firefox 1.0

Firefox 1.0 has been released this week. If you're still not using Firefox, you really should give it a try : it's a fast, secure and feature rich browser, way better than Internet Explorer.




I upgraded my Windows machine at work to 1.0, but ran into some problems with tabs : tabs open, but do not display any content, which is rather annoying. The Find in text option does give me problems too. So I decided to downgrade to PR2, which apparently had this behaviour too. Further downgrading to PR1 resolved this. I do not know if it's a bug or something I did wrong while upgrading. Any hints ?

Extreme engineer projects

Veerle has posted some of the most extreme advanced projects that engineers are working on these days (real or still in concept stage). Of course, the space elevator is amongst them.

Purple America

Everyone on the web seem to have said his opinion on the 2004 elections in the USA, so I guess there's no need to add mine. Wallofsleep.com has a posted a nice colored card of America which shows how 'purple' (red for Republicans, blue for Democrats) the USA has become.

MIBdepot

MIBdepot.com is a search engine with over 6200 SNMP MIBs representing over 910,000 MIB object definitions.


No doubt, every admin must bookmark this site!

Moon names

For those who are curious about the names of the full moons they are listed below.


  • JANUARY - the Old Moon, or Moon After Yule

  • FEBRUARY - the Snow Moon, Hunger Moon or Wolf Moon

  • MARCH - the Sap Moon, Crow Moon or Lenten Moon

  • APRIL - the Grass Moon or Egg Moon

  • MAY - the Planting Moon or Milk Moon

  • JUNE - the Rose Moon or Flower Moon

  • JULY - the Thunder Moon or Hay Moon

  • AUGUST - the Green Corn Moon or Grain Moon

  • SEPTEMBER - the full moon of September is called the Fruit Moon. Usually it is also the Harvest Moon..

  • OCTOBER - As the full moon nearest to the autumn equinox [in 1982], this is called the Harvest Moon.. Other versions of the rule are that the Harvest Moon is the full moon at or after the equinox, or that it is allways in October... Farmers at the climax of harvest can work late into the night by the light of the moon...

  • NOVEMBER - the Frosty Moon or Beaver Moon. As the full moon after the Harvest Moon [in 1982] this is called the Hunter''s Moon...Since the fields have been reaped, hunter can ride across the stubble, and can see the fox more easily; also other animals which have come out to glean and can be caught for a thanksgiving banquet after the harvest..

  • DECEMBER - the Moon Before Yule, or Long Night Moon. In a December with two full moons, the second of these title should apply to the second of them.