Briefly, as I understand it, hadoop is a distributed program which allows one to aggregate data by processing across a bunch (more than 2) of computers. The name apparently comes from the name the lead developer’s son gave to his stuffed toy elephant. It’s not just the name that I dislike though.
Uninformed opinions and rants here
March 19, 2010
Hadoop? What kind of a name is Hadoop?
December 27, 2009
My New Christmas Toy
This year for Christmas, my wife got me an Acer Aspire AS8940G-6865. I immediately set about installing Ubuntu 9.10 and all of my games.
Read more about Ubuntu on an Acer AS8940G
September 7, 2009
Tiny Linux Boxes
While cleaning out my um…. home office storage area (closet in the guest room) I came across a couple of gems which I had forgotten about, two Sharp Zauruses (Zauri?). One is a fairly old SL-5500. The other is a slightly less old SL-C3000.
More on the Sharp Zaurus
August 3, 2009
Overheating Shutdowns
My laptop recently started shutting down due to overheating. This would occur only when I play Oblivion (under wine). At first, I thought it was due to an upgrade to Ubuntu 9.04. It may still be related, but after much tweaking and forum searching, I finally opened up my laptop and cleaned all of the fans. That seems to have resolved the issue. According to my thermal monitor, the laptop runs about 10 to 15 degrees (Celsius) cooler then before the operation.
What’s the moral of the story? Do the obvious thing first instead of last.
July 22, 2009
New Wine problems with EVE
It seems like wine 1.1.25 and 1.1.26 have some bug which causes my system to crash randomly when playing EVE. 1.1.24 seems to work fine. The related bug, plus a look at some attitude issues can be found here.
June 26, 2009
Yes, a UPS is on my Shopping List.
The power fluctuations in my area have gotten really bad. Starting my blog server is almost a daily occurrence. The outages are usually less then a second, but it’s enough to power down my server. I must go get a UPS.
June 15, 2009
Blog Site Changes and Analysis
Site Analysis:
I use AWStats to give me statistics about what kind of readers I have. Amazingly, I do have readers and some of them are even regular readers. Here are some of the useless stats:
See the statistics and upcoming changes
May 25, 2009
Bluetooth GPS with Ubuntu 9.05
While going through my junk throwing stuff out or making excuses for not throwing stuff out, I came across a bluetooth GPS unit which I had forgotten about. This unit is the Holux GPSlim 240. It’s compact and it picks up sattelites pretty quickly. I decided to try connecting it to my laptop which runs Ubuntu 9.04. The most useful references I found were this Ubuntu forum post and this post for a holux specific problem. Below are the steps I took to get everything working:
Keep Reading about Bluetooth and Ubuntu…
May 5, 2009
Where are the blue lights?
Last night, my wife mentioned that she didn’t see the usual blue light in my closet…. Oops! Apparently, the power went out and the server on which this blog resides died. I still haven’t attached an APC, so every power fluctuaton brings the server down. I should add that to my list to fix.
April 28, 2009
Ubuntu 9.04 and EVE-Online
Below is a description of how I installed Ubuntu 9.04 from scratch and got EVE-Online,
EVEMon, EFT, and Ventrilo working.
System:
Dell XPM M1710.
4GB RAM
Intel 3950 Wireless
Nvidia 7950 GTX 512 MB
New 5400 RPM 250GB Segate HD.
Go to the boot menu (F12 on Dell) and select CD-ROM boot.
Choose your language at the Ubuntu language picker. The second boot option is install. Pick
that. From here, you can probably pick the defaults and end up with a reasonable base
system. I chose to partition my hard drive using the advanced partition option.
My setup:
50GB root ( / ) partition
8GB swap
The rest for /home
After the first reboot, I only showed 3.3 GB of RAM with the generic 64 bit kernel. This was
surprising and a little disappointing. I tried to install and use the server kernel, but the
video drivers won’t work with that kernel, so I’m stuck with losing 700MB RAM. Wifi worked
out of box. I updated the system and attempted to enable the nvidia proprietary drivers.
They didn’t show up in the hardware drivers list until after a reboot, so….
Reboot ubuntu. Go to System/Administration/Hardware Drivers in the main menu. Select the
newest nvidia driver (it should be the “Recommended” driver) and click “Activate”. This wil
require another reboot. After the next reboot, you’ll want to set your resolution. It’s
best to do this as root so the configurator can save the X config file permanently, so run
this:
$ sudo nvidia-settings
Select X Server Display Configuration on the left. Set the resolution to the one desired and
click “Apply”. Click OK to accept the resolution. Then click “Save to X Configuration File”
to make the settings permanent.
Wine which comes with 9.04 is ancient (1.0.1). I compiled the latest as of
now (1.1.20). I had to patch the source to make the 3d models visible in EVE.
1) Spark up a terminal window and run:
$ sudo apt-get build-dep wine
to get the compiler and other stuff needed to compile wine.
2) Get the source from http://winehq.org in the right nav area of the site.
3) untar the source with:
$ tar xf wine-1.1.20.tar.bz2
4) $ cd wine-1.1.20
5) I need the patch from http://bugs.winehq.org/attachment.cgi?id=20412
save it where you untarred your source for wine and run this from the
wine-1.1.20 directory:
$ patch -p1 < ../apocrypha.shaders.1.1.19.patch
6) $ ./configure
7) $ make depend && make
8) $ make install
9) go do something else for a long while.
10)install cabextract:
$ sudo apt-get install cabextract
EFT installs and works out of box.
Ventrilo installs and works out of box.
EVEMon requires dotnet 2. Install that by using winetricks. Get winetricks from
http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks (save page as winetricks).
To run it, do this:
$ sh winetricks
Select core fonts (needed for EVE) and dotnet2. dotnet2 takes a long while to
download and install.
You can now use the offline installer to install EVE. You will lose all of your settings
from windows. I’m sure you can copy the settings folder from a windows partition, but I
didn’t test this.
If you run 2 clients, you’ll want to do some further setup. First, set the graphics in EVE
to windowed mode and at some lower resolution then your whole screen.
Make 2 icons for EVE. The Commands for each should look like this:
env WINEPREFIX=”/home/jjorgens/.wine” wine explorer /desktop=1,1600×1050 “C:\Program Files\CCP\EVE\eve.exe”
env WINEPREFIX=”/home/jjorgens/.wine” wine explorer /desktop=2,1600×1050 “C:\Program Files\CCP\EVE\eve.exe”
Adjust the resolution to be the same as you set in the game. Run one launcher for one account, and the other for the other account.
Strangely, if I run the game with the graphics at full tilt, the laptop will overheat and
shutdown after about 10 minutes of play. After turning the graphics all of the way down,
the game runs fine. I needed to use these low settings for when I am in fleet engagements
anyway, so it’s no loss for me.