Tuesday, May 2, 2017

This is, obviously, a very personal thing, but a very happy one

Unfortunately, this picture was also the occasion for me to see that my DxO ONE has a problem, maybe a sensor issue.

Giving 'build' autoconf-like capabilities

Having spent a little bit of time tweaking it for Spice, I'm really tired of autoconf. I already had to fix one bug. It's bloated, it's complicated, it's slow.

So I decided to experiment to see if I could give build some autoconf-like features. It turns out it's surprisingly easy and fast. And compared to the autoconf, it's not just very simple, it also takes advantage of make capabilities, i.e. it rebuilds what it has to, and only once (who doesn't know the nightmare of autoconf scripts re-running the same checks again and again).

New PC

Received my new PC from Red Hat. This one will be called Turbo. Began installing it, ran into two issues very quickly:

• The M2000 card is not recognized by Nouveau yet, so during installation the screen goes blank. I went for minimal graphic mode, but that leaves me with 1024x768 resolution, and minimum acceleration.
• I have no network cable long enough to reach that computer from my switch. As advertised, the computer is silent enough to stay in my office. But then that means I need a new network cable from the switch in the next room.

While I was purchasing my cable, I ran into Francois Donze, a friend and old colleague from HP. He shared with me that he had been recently working on world-record TPC-H running Microsoft SQL server on Linux. He also make a nice video about it. This is with a 22-cores Xeon, no less.

Installation of Turbo went relatively smoothly. This time, I'm giving up on BTRFS. I have two machines to benchmark and test BTRFS already. I'll switch Turbo to BTRFS when I have no disk corruption within 6 months.