Netbooks are laptops done right. I had no idea how true this was before I actually bought a netbook myself. While only being slightly larger than a DVD-cover, my eeePC-900 was so portable, I've taken it with me around the world, both for work and holiday trips. My eeePC has been indeed so successful, it has completely wiped out my need for my laptop, which has been mostly gathering dust since the netbook purchase.
However, a (first generation) netbook still has some serious disadvantages :

• disk is mostly a combination of SSD and SD, and very limited in space.
• the keyboard is way too small to type comfortably
• the battery is very limited in life expectancy.

My new netbook had to overcome those three limitations. Not a big deal, since most current netbooks deal with this already. In addition, I wanted a minimum of 2GB RAM and a CPU with virtualization possibilities. As I was very happy with the eeePC line, I almost opted for a eeePC-1201HA, which sports the Z520 CPU, which had Intel-V support. Unfortunately, the netbook got slaughtered in every review because of its slow performance. My final choice was the Samsung N220 Premium Plus, a N450 based laptop with 2GB RAM and a 350GB hard disk. As the laptop is red, I feared a bit for too much of hardware bling, but the color is nicely darkish red, so it doesn't scream out in a meeting room. So far, I've been really happy with the netbook itself. The following are only (very) minor annoyances, but indeed are things that could have been better :

• If some netbook manufacturer brands a netbook with a Premium label, I expect the least they can do, is to include a pouch with it. As a netbook gets carried along everywhere, you want a cover for it to avoid excessive scratching, unless it is not made in plastic. No pouch with my edition, though I've heard that latest Samsung netbooks come again with this addition.
• The Power button comes in some sort of a slide button, which is on the front of the netbook. A true button would have been better, and would have been better if been protected by the lid.
• If the lid is closed, it is very hard to see if the netbook has been suspended, as the LEDs are hidden by the lid itself.

What is exellent is that netbook is completely silent : the hard disk is perfectly mute, and the fan makes only a slight noise under high stress. The netbook comes with Windows 7 Home Premium Edition, which starts its installation when you power on for the first time. The good thing is that it lets you choose the partitioning, so the hard disk is split by default into 3 partitions :

• first partition carries the Windows7 OS
• the second partition is a 14GB restore partition
• the third is an empty D-drive, which can be used for data & installed programs.

In a next post, I'll describe what tweaks were necessary to install & use a 64bits Ubuntu on the 3rd partition.

Since the upgrade to Karmic on my desktop, graphic performance has gone down considerably. I solved this in the past by downgrading Nvidia, but since Lucid, this has become impossible. It's not that I cannot live without the desktop bling, but suspend-resume is impossible without running the Nvidia drivers. The problem manifest itself by very high CPU bursts by kernel processes (kondemand, ksoftirqd), which makes the desktop unworkably slow.
I tried everything, from disabling PAT, KMS modesetting, switching framebuffers, all without success. I even tried to enable Lenny's Nvidia drivers, but that pulled in a 2.6.26 kernel, which I cannot use, because my filesystems are ext4.
I eventually turned in despair to the Nvidia website, looking for older drivers. The 173 release was still available in the archive download section, which came as a ncurses-based installer. These Nvidia based drivers are famous for messing up a Linux system, so I was rather reluctant to use those. I still decided to give them a go, which rather went surprisingly really well.
Finally a performant system again !

Dear Nokia,
the times I give advice to companies are quite seldom, so please shut up & listen. The next time you announce an 'important phone software update' on my N97 mobile, make sure that :

1. I don't have to do the upgrade with my computer, especially if it's a minor update. FOTA will do fine, thank you.
2. when starting the Nokia software updater on my computer, I don't want to be forced to upgrade this POS 'software' called "Nokia Software Updater"
3. when upgrading this Nokia Software Updater software, I don't want to have to wait 20 minutes for it to finish - this is a dualcore with 2GB, not one of your Symbian turtles, for cryings sake !
4. after the upgrade of the upgrade software, I don't want to reboot my computer
5. after reboot, and starting the upgrade software, I don't want to receive a warning that OVI suite is already running.
6. No, for crying out loud, I don't want to upgrade OVI suite !!! Can we finally update my mobile firmware, pretty please ???
7. when finally be able to start the Nokia Software Updater, I do want you to find my USB-connected phone, it's the only USB-connected thingy, goddammit !
8. I don't want to reconnect my mobile 5 times before your POS software finally recognizes it
9. I don't want to see your 'important phone software update' to be the most minor upgrade I've ever seen
10. And most of all, when pressing the 'Upgrade' button, I don't want to receive a final message 'Phone software already on latest level' after this whole irritating procedure !!!

Nokia, please fire your Symbian QA management. It's incompentent !
Now where's my aspirin ?

If you like Anne Geddes, you need to check out Mila's Daydreams. A mother taking pictures of her dreaming baby in an arranged background, resulting in some surreal photos.

Proxmox OpenVE looks the closest to a VMCenter/VMSphere alternative based purely on Linux (Debian to be more precise). You can add pure virtualized environments a la VMware guests, or run container based Linux(-only) guests. It comes with a cluster option with live migration possibilities.


Two disadvantages on first sight :

1. It's 64bit only


2. It comes only in the form of an appliance-based installation (which will wipe your /dev/sda)

Apart from that, very promising.

The Ben Nevis distillery, now overtaken by the Japanese Nikka distillers, is named after & located at the foot of the highest mountain in Scotland (1334m). For one or other strange reason, Ben Nevis is called the Banana Whisky. My interest in Ben Nevis was sparked by my colluegue Peter B., who refers it as one of the best whiskies ever made, and very difficult to find. However, I had no problem locating it in my favorite dram shop.


The color : dark amber
The nose : orange with chocolate flavors. Some maltiness, then spices are flowing in.
The taste : *Very* malty, quite spiced, bit of pepper. Lots of dark chocolate, the very bitter taste of orange zest. Bit of spice & smoke. Smooth but very firm. Not complex at all, warm.


Where are the bananas ? Probably a referral to the littering of banana peels on the peak of Ben Nevis ?
This whisky has a very strong taste, especially empowered by the malty taste in combination with the bitterness of chocolate and orange. I'm sorry, Peter, too bitter for my cup of tea.

Temperatures are soaring outside, not really the time for a dram. Or is it ? Some people drink whisky at any season, others prefer a warm fireplace while the rain is pouring outside. Count me in the last group. However, duty calls, so here's a new tasting note. Springbank is the oldest independent distillery in Scotland, and created in Campbeltown. From a traveller's perspective, visiting the Campbeltown area is a small nightmare. One has to make a long trek to the Southern tip of the Kintyre peninsula on the Western coast of Scotland to reach Springbank - or the nearby Glen Scotia distillery. Except for the distilleries, there's not much happening in Campbeltown. And even for the people that want to 'get away from it all' for a few days, Springbank is a fairly poor destination. It's one of the few distilleries that isn't surrounded by the lush Scottish countryside - located in the middle of a busy town.


Springbank CV is an unusual whisky, for several reasons : first, it’s not quite clear what ‘C.V.’ used to mean. Some say ‘Chairman’s Vat – or Vatting’, others ‘Curriculum Vitae’... It contains a blend of different single malts between the age of 8 and 30, therefore presenting a 'taste visiting card' of Springbank. Then, there’s been several versions, notably an earlier ‘white cap’ version that’s the one we’ll have right now, and then a more recent ‘gold cap’ version. Second, it has a quite complex tasting :


Color : *very* pale gold, almost white wine.
Smell: complex. Spirits and grain. Spicy. Adding drops of water emerges a burst of pepper. Is that fruit there hiding in the back ?
Taste : oily, malt and more spices. So much pepper, it makes my mouth tingle ! Tears in me eyes. Again some fruit (lemon ? Pear ?) hiding in the pepper cloud. Lots of other stuff too, like liquorice, peat and some bitterness but almost killed immediately by spice and pepper.


Aaa-choum ! Did I mention the pepper ? This could have been a balanced complex whisky, but unfortunately too spicy for me.

Een kievit komt regelmatig in onze tuin op bezoek. Van ver lijkt hij op een zwart-witte duif met een uitgesproken kuifje. Bij het inzoomen echter blijkt dit vogeltje een mooi metalig grijs-groen vederkleed te hebben. Je treft hem aan in vochtige weilanden met kort gras, waar hij ook graag in nestelt. De kievit komt in het najaar in grote groepen samen om naar het warme zuiden te trekken, tijdens dewelke hij zwaar bedreigt wordt, gezien hij graag geschoten wordt, voornamelijk in Denemarken en Ierland. De naam is vernoemd naar zijn 'kievit'-achtige roep.

With flights STS-133 (launching at October 29th 2010) and STS-134 (Febrauary 29th 2011), the space Shuttle program will come to a halt. The program started in 1981, and was meant to provide a cost-saving alternative for the 'throw-away' Saturn rockets which were used in the 60ties and 70ties. The space shuttles Discovery and Endeavour will be the last shuttles going into space, delivering new scientific equipment to the International Space Station.


If you want to 'participate' in the last two shuttle missions, you can : through the Face in Space website, you can upload your picture, which will be taken on the shuttles, thereby be launched into orbit and "become a part of history".

We've tackled previously how to look at kernel dumps on HP-UX, let's have a look now how to perform them same on OpenSolaris. The kernel debugger is actually 'quite' user-friendly, and gives you mostly enough information how to handle a crash. If your Solaris is too stable to generate crashes, then use the

savecore -L 

command to generate one on the fly. This will generate a dump in /var/adm/crash. Let's have a look at it with mdb :

# mdb -k unix.0 vmcore.0 

Loading modules: [ unix krtld genunix specfs dtrace cpu.AuthenticAMD.15 uppc pcplusmp ufs ip sctp usba lofs zfs random ipc md fcip fctl fcp crypto logindmux ptm nfs ]

>

The ::status command will display high level information regarding this debugging session. This is mostly a one-liner, which reveals the reason of the crash.

> ::status

debugging crash dump vmcore.0 (64-bit) from hostname

operating system: 5.11 snv_43 (i86pc)

panic message: BAD TRAP: type=e (#pf Page fault) rp=fffffe80000ad3d0 addr=0 occurred in module "unix" due to a NULL pointer dereference

dump content: kernel pages only

The ::stack command will prove you with a stack trace, this is the same thing trace you would have seen in syslog or the console.

> ::stack

atomic_add_32()

nfs_async_inactive+0x55(fffffe820d128b80, 0, ffffffffeff0ebcb)

nfs3_inactive+0x38b(fffffe820d128b80, 0)

fop_inactive+0x93(fffffe820d128b80, 0)

vn_rele+0x66(fffffe820d128b80)

snf_smap_desbfree+0x78(fffffe8185e2ff60)

dblk_lastfree_desb+0x25(fffffe817a30f8c0, ffffffffac1d7cc0)

dblk_decref+0x6b(fffffe817a30f8c0, ffffffffac1d7cc0)

freeb+0x89(fffffe817a30f8c0)

tcp_rput_data+0x215f(ffffffffb4af7140, fffffe812085d780, ffffffff993c3c00)

squeue_enter_chain+0x129(ffffffff993c3c00, fffffe812085d780, fffffe812085d780, 1, 1)

ip_input+0x810(ffffffffa23eec68, ffffffffaeab8040, fffffe812085d780, e)

The ::msgbuf command will output the message buffer at the time of crash; the message buffer is most commonly used by sysadmins through the "dmesg" command.

> ::msgbuf

MESSAGE

....

WARNING: IP: Hardware address '00:14:4f:xxxxxxx' trying to be our address xxxx

WARNING: IP: Hardware address '00:14:4f:xxxx' trying to be our address xxxx



panic[cpu0]/thread=fffffe80000adc80: 

BAD TRAP: type=e (#pf Page fault) rp=fffffe80000ad3d0 addr=0 occurred in module "unix" due to a NULL pointer dereference



sched: 

#pf Page fault

Bad kernel fault at addr=0x0

One of the coolest commands is the cpuinfo -v command, which will show more information about the running processes at the time of the crash, including some nicely ascii-art style formatting :

>  ::cpuinfo -v

 ID ADDR             FLG NRUN BSPL PRI RNRN KRNRN SWITCH THREAD           PROC

  1 ffffffff983b3800  1f    1    0  59  yes    no t-0    fffffe80daac2f20 smtpd


            RUNNING <--+    +-->  PRI THREAD           PROC

              READY                99 fffffe8000bacc80 sched

           QUIESCED

             EXISTS

             ENABLE

Other interesting commands are the ::ps (info about running processes), and ::panicinfo, which will reveal thread information, which you can further investigate with the ::walkthread option.

In a following article, I'll write about the Solaris Core Analyzer, which is a Q4 comparabe tool on Solaris to walk through kernel dumps.