Vinay's Tech Stuff

Recently someone sent me a link to splashtop , in context of some work I was doing on Asus Eeepc. Splashtop is a OEM installed OS that boots off a embedded flash/hidden-partition device on your PC. It uses Bootsplash , SquashFS , Blackbox , SCIM and Linux kernel . Splashtop's raison d'etre is to provide instant-on/off experience to PC. Since PC boot times are slow, most people don't even turn off their machines. Splashtop takes about a second to show it's splashscreen right after BIOS on a Asus notebook. From this screen, you can launch virtual appliance'cified Firefox or Skype or boot Windows etc. One thing to note is that each of these operations in turn may take 5 to 25 seconds. I wonder if this is a feasible approach to solve this problem. Boot process which involves hardware initialization, OS initializtion, startup application initialization - all of these operations have to take "some" amount time. And we know that most of these are IO bound due to

Finally, the Guinness World Record results are out. Here's what is said on Download Day page. Thanks to the support of the always amazing Mozilla community, we now hold a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours. From 18:16 UTC on June 17, 2008 to 18:16 UTC on June 18, 2008, 8,002,530 people downloaded Firefox 3 and are now enjoying a safer, smarter and better Web. I even got a certificate for participating in the event!

Today www.linkedin.com HTTPS certificate expired. Seems they have forgotten to renew it. Quite shameful for a company that promises privacy and security of user’s information. Here’s what Firefox 3 told me when I visited the website and tried to sign-in. Logging in bypassing this cert security error is not an option for me. So, for all practical purposes, linkedin is down for me.

The release date for Firefox 3 has been announced. It is also the " Download Day " when Mozilla community will attempt to set a world record for most software downloads in 24 hours. You can pledge for the same here . Firefox 3 has some very good new features that makes it a compelling upgrade. Here's a field guide to FF3. Enjoy!

This test was done with Webkit's SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark on the latest versions of Firefox 3 and Safari available as of today. It overall the test results indicate Safari is faster. But the individual results need to be looked at and decided which tests really matter in real world and how they affect our daily browsing speed. TEST COMPARISON FROM TO DETAILS ============================================================================= ** TOTAL **: 1.07x as fast 3216.0ms +/- 1.8% 3003.4ms +/- 1.1% significant ============================================================================= 3d: - 393.0ms +/- 5.0% 377.8ms +/- 1.3% cube: ?? 131.4ms +/- 14.2% 140.0ms +/- 2.1% not conclusive: might be *1.07x as slow* morph: 1.19x as fast 136.8ms +/- 1.5% 115.4ms +/- 2.5% significant raytrace: 1.02x a

Windows Live writer is such a good blogging software that it alone justifies installing vmware fusion+windows on my Macbook. Apple really doesn't have any product that comes anywhere close to Windows Live Writer for blogging. For that matter nobody has. Among all products under Live brand this alone is generations ahead. Keep Rocking!

I've got a macbook at work. And for the last couple of days while trying to figure out how to do various simple tasks I have been thoroughly annoyed by this critically acclaimed OS. http://shiflett.org/blog/2006/feb/top-x-list-of-mac-os-x-annoyances This blog summarizes my annoyances very well. Is Apple listening to it's customers? If it wants to get more corporate customers or grow it's market share, they better do something about these things.

Knowing the effect of your application on the system and observing system performance while your application is going thru different scenarios can give you great insight about the bottlenecks and performance ceilings in your application. Today, lets look at some of the tools on Linux that will help us understand the system performance. dstat is a tool that shows various system performance parameters in real time. Install dstat on your Fedora system with "yum install -y dstat" or on your Debian based system with "apt-get install dstat"   Here's a screenshot of it working. Click on it to see the full image. Here, you can see various useful information that can tell you if system performance is throttled due to one or more of the resources being maxed out or if there is scope to improve performance by balancing the usage of the under-utilized resources. For example, on this specific system, you can see its resources are hardly utilized. It has capacity to

I'm a big fan of procexp and other sysinternals tools on Windows. Many people who use those and then come to Linux complain that there are no such tools in Linux. Most people are familiar with top and ps commands. I would like to introduce you to a bunch of utilities on Linux that are very useful while debugging issues. Lets start with htop, a better alternative to top. You can install htop on a yum based system like Fedora, Redhat, CentOS etc with "yum -y install htop" or with "apt-get install htop" on systems that are debian apt based like Ubuntu. htop is much better in displaying the process and resource information than top. It gives a more accurate and clearer picture of process memory usage than top. A screenshot of htop in action: It has many interesting features. It's display layout is refreshing different and nice. It can show tree view, a very important feature to understand the ancestry of a process. In the size column, the MB part is hig

http://openid.net/2008/02/07/evolving-the-openid-foundation-board/ 20 million to over 250 million adoptions in a span of 12 to 18 months for a concept that was born in a small community just 2 years ago without the muscle power of any large corporation is just amazing. More power to OpenID and all open standards - those are the only ones worth calling standards.