The first time I open Thunar (the default XFCE file manager) in fedora 17 it takes up to 30 seconds to show up. This is most likely due to Thunar trying – without being able – to mount a remote network folder, to solve the issue just open <em>/usr/share/gvfs/mounts/network.mount</em> and set <em>AutoMount=false</em>.

First of all, forget everything about the myth: Loonix, it just werks. Close to nothing werks out of the box, tho with a good amount of patience and a bit of tinkering there are good chances to make the whole thing working in a decent manner. First of all, the box I’ve here is a Thinkpad Edge 320 – 12983RG and I’ve installed Fedora 17 x64 with XFCE as DE. It comes with the integrated Intel HD3000, no discrete graphic card and UMTS module (I didn’t tested if it’s working or not). …

I still can’t believe I finally made it, I quite lost the count of the times I told myself I have to buy a damn pair of headphones but I never actually did it. Finally, after my usual one year or so of digging through specialized forums and stuff, 2 weeks ago, I bought my first pair of decent headphones. …

This month Hwbot.org’s competition is called October rush, it consists in 7 or 8 stages each one lasting only three days. Because of my last year or so in which I was close to completely inactive I don’t have anymore much hardware, one of the few things I still have is my socket 939 setup and a bunch of single core A64 CPUs. The third stage of the competition was 3DMark 01 with the limitation of using a socket 939 CPU, which is exactly what I have. …

Two weeks ago I gave my golden FX-55 Clalwhammer a run at LN2 but looks like I’ve not yet blogged about it; let’s do it then. Since the first try using the single stage the CPU proved to be a good one but being a 130 nm voltage whore didn’t made the pretesting easy. With the help of LN2 everything became easier and luckily the CPU loves volt and cold (the below result was made with a CPU temperature of around -100° C). …

I’m not so used to ESXi, it’s been a while since the last time I installed it and when today I had to do it I forgot where I have to put the damn license. VMware did a very good job hiding the menu and the official site is good at everything but giving useful informations, so after a while I found by myself where the license page was. Guess I should post the procedure here for future reference. …

Lately I had an interesting debate with a friend of mine, he works for a small company which works in the IT field. For obvious reason I will not write the name of the company nor who my friend is, anyway, what they do is the classical technical service and maintenance, servers machine deployment, system administration and so on. These days everyone needs some kind of IT Infrastructure, everyone needs an ERP system, etc etc; obviously they have quite a lot of work with small/medium business companies. Close to every machine they sell (except the classic desktop PCs) have a RAID; obviously I second that having a RAID is a must-have in every machine used for enterprise tasks but I also argue that there is RAID and RAID. Many of the HDDs they use are going into NAS or low level server machine, to keep the price low and don’t have to add an external RAID controller the HDDs need to be SATA. Nothing wrong with using SATA drives, but similarly as what can be said for RAIDs we can say that there is disk and disk. For instance, if looking at the Western Digital HDDs lineup, it’s clear that they have two completely different series: the desktop one and the enterprise one. These drives have different firmwares, different warranty policies and different error handling capabilities; so, another time, if the drive is going to be part of a RAID it’s very advisable to pick one of the enterprise series (Red, RAID edition or Velociraptor) because they are meant to be capable of working non-stop 24/7, they have 5 years warranty, they have a better error handling and on top they support TLER. So, how people who are supposed to know what they are doing sell NAS with Caviar Blue HDDs instead of Caviar Red/RE? Why they don’t know what TLER is? Why they keep using RAID-5 when everyone know it’s crap? My friend said they have more than 250 machines build with consumer desktop drives configured in RAID and so far they are having no problem; what they are failing to realize is that sooner or later the crap they are selling will explode under their chairs. The whole internet is full of people complaining about consumer disks with not TREL support being dropped from RAIDs, same can be said for RAID-5 in which a second disk fails during the array rebuilding. They remind me of the retards which use 4 HDDs in RAID-1 thinking that this way their data are safe, probably they don’t know that RAID is not a backup and that a broken controller or a much simpler file system corruption could possibly make their 4 disks mirror completely useless. Well, guess sooner or later they will learn it the hard way… …

Once in a while I happen to have to know how much time a certain function needs to be executed. While many programming languages have built in functions (time in Python, System.nanoTime() in Java and so on) to get this information, C doesn’t appear to have one. There is timec.h but it appears to be quite inaccurate, so if extremely high accuracy is needed we have to rely on something else; the downside is that these much more reliable libraries are not platform independent. For Windows platform Microsoft suggests to use QueryPerformanceFrequency method and so I did. Digging through Google I found a post in which a guy posted some C++ code he used to query system time, I’ve adapted it and used it in my program. For future reference I’m going to post it here. …