System Engineer specialized in web-development

So, who HAS NOT experienced a harddrive crash?! The answer is likely no one(either they know it or not).

The Problem
Since I experienced this lately I thought I write a tiny howto, to easy the pain and suffering for you. What happened to me was that I got delivered an external USB harddrive(WD 500GB Essential) and got told that “I NEED MY PICTURES BACK”….apparently after some digging into why it stopped working I found out it “might have been dropped or bumped while connected”. So this means theres a pretty good chance of errors! The harddrive was NTFS and were unable to mount at all – seemed there were no chance to get onto it.

What you need:
Computer running linux(I used Ubuntu Lucid 10.04)
The faulty harddrive connected
Software: testdisk/photorec
Note: You can also use a software called “foremost”, but on my drive it did a quick recover and skipped too much data. Ended up with about 3GB of pictures.

Target
Recover as much data(pictures) as possible!
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So, received my new iPad and thought I would post some guides on how to work around different problems I encountered.

Air Video on Ubuntu
So I found this lovely app that enabled me to live convert and stream my videos from my computer(s) to my iPad! So excited I took a closer look and found out that the server-software was only made for OSX and Windows. Luckily, the server software was made mostly in Java, which means a port to linux could easily be made.

Here is a guide on how to comile and install the required packages in Ubuntu: http://wiki.birth-online.de/know-how/hardware/apple-iphone/airvideo-server-linux
And here is a forum-post about the issue on providers website: http://www.inmethod.com/forum/posts/list/34.page

Another issue I encountered, was that the ahavi-daemon setup didn’t work – so I found a working one in the forum post. Create a file called /etc/avahi/services/airvideoserver.service – and add the following lines:

<?xml version=”1.0″ standalone=’no’?><!–*-nxml-*–>

<!DOCTYPE service-group SYSTEM “avahi-service.dtd”>

<!– $Id: airvideoserver.service 995 2010-04-12 15:06:53Z sam $ –>

<service-group>

<name replace-wildcards=”yes”>%h</name>

<service>

<type>_airvideoserver._tcp</type>

<port>45631</port>

</service>

</service-group>

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So, lately theres been a fair few problems with the UL30VT. This is a post to compile the general solutions to especially the hybrid graphics cards.

This guide is intended to the new Ubuntu release Lucid Lynx(10.04 LTS), but would probably work for the Karmic(9.10) release too.

Hybrid Graphics – The problem
First off, the hybrid drivers found in Windows 7 seems to be developed by Asus themselves. Another problem is that to be able to “hotswitch” between the Nvidia and Intel graphics card it need to be implemented into the Xorg core – and this I would imagine we will not see in a long time. As it stand in Windows, only Windows 7 is able to the “hotswitch”, earlier versions like Vista and XP need to same solution as Xorg – a service restart(re-login).

Hybrid Graphics – Solution
So there are several solutions depending on the outcome you want.

• Running only Intel
• Running only Nvidia
• Running “hotswitch” between Intel and Nvidia

Hybrid Graphics – Solution “Running only Intel”
So – this solution pretty much work out of the box. Since the Lucid install utilize the Intel card by default using the Intel drivers, this is the easiest solution. The only thing you need to do is pretty much install Ubuntu as you would on any other computer.
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As I hope you all know Zend is a big contributer within the PHP community. They provide debugging, server enhancement and framework to support your PHP-development. Since it has stated such a huge reputation within the PHP-circle, I figured I’ll go ahead and take a PHP5 certification. Also I don’t have any education underlying my 4 years of PHP-experience, so I thought this might be a good way to get some papers on what I already know.

So I went ahead and bought a Zend PHP5 Certification bundle package, which includes free test-exams, a book in pdf and paperback and the examination itself. The package came to about $165 USD.

I went ahead and fired up one of the test-exams too see if I actually were something of a PHP-developer at all, and luckily I passed on my first attempt. Although I did miss a fair questions, I’m not too worried since it was all related to the Soap-extension(I’ve used the nusoap library for my soap purposes, but might actually change back soon).

So there it goes, my exam is book for the 28th of August(Friday so I can hopefully go out celebrate afterwards, or drown my sorrows!). I was actually surprised of how much the certification exam coverd. Everything from design patterns, databases, security to OOP – sweet!

Have a look over at Zend Certification if you’re interested in using their services. It’s highly recommended to take a look at the framework they provide. It’s an easy and fast way for creating web-sites and services.

So, the news about Chromium(Google Chrome for linux/mac) is out. Personal I’ve been using the development build for a month already…and theres a reason WHY!

If you’re anything like me, you pretty much have Facebook up all the time – perfect place to procrastinate from whatever you are doing. So hey, whats wrong with that? I’ll tell you whats wrong – firefox memory build up! This does apply to several version of Firefox too, I’m using the newest stable release.

Firefox and memory

What happens to firefox after having facebook up for a while, is that it’s claiming all my memory, often we’re talking about up til 40% of my 2GB memory. No this is of course after my firefox have been open for about 2 days straight!(Why would you ever need to close your browser?!). So my main thought is that the javascript engine over at mozilla labs is not doing a proper enough job freeing up memory, which sucks!

Chromium the saviour?

So, can Chromium do anything about it? Hope so, at least looking promising now. Chromium is running the V8 javascript enginge coupled with the Webkit rendering engine, which apparently go well together in a bundle;) What happens to my memory consumption when running Chromium?

I’LL TELL YOU WHAT! After running it for several days straight(without crashing or anything) it still only claim about 4% of my memory, that is 10 times as little as Firefox would claim!

Why is this? Chromium on steroids?

I still havent figured out why! The question is more; what is wrong with who? Is Firefox javascript engined really flawed, or is V8 THAT good?…or is it something else?

I’ve been planning to investigate into this at a later stage, but for now I don’t have an answer for you. As soon as Chromium develops into a full blown and stable browser I’ll do new tests with proper data and see if it still is as fast and memory efficient as it is now.

Stay tuned..