Recalling the lambda notation…

Performance Gain of Factor 15 to 40
I knew the headline would draw your attention

I’d love it (and you’d love us) if these numbers were for the entire application suite, but totally unspectacular they’re for the import of huge formula loaded MS-Excel documents into Calc, which is nice enough to be delighted anyway.. Down on the floor and back to the facts: when loading a quite big Excel document, I’m referring to 25 MB of size, more than 100 sheets, a million cells and hundredthousand formulas, formula cells unnecessarily broadcasted their initial recalculation state to all dependents. Building up this dirty tree took most of the time and by replacing it with a document wide simple chain mechanism for this case, loading times went down to a fraction. The metrics from two different machines for that document are:

Small one processor system:
model name      : Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 1.80GHz
cpu MHz         : 1816.213
cache size      : 256 KB
bogomips        : 3617.58
Mem free        : 386488 kB (or somewhere near that)
old performance : 39:08 minutes
new performance :  2:37 minutes
performance gain: factor 15

Two dual core processors system:
model name      : Dual Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 275
cpu MHz         : 2194.038
cache size      : 1024 KB
bogomips        : 4393.64
Mem free        : 3388412 kB
old performance : 27:58 minutes
new performance :  0:43 minutes
performance gain: factor 39

This is from issue 68960, targeted to OOo2.1

Taken from this blog post.

JavaScript 1.7 support is available starting in Firefox 2 Beta 1, as well as in current Minefield (trunk) builds.

JavaScript 1.7 is a language update introducing several new features, in particular generators, iterators, array comprehensions, let expressions, and destructuring assignment. It also includes all the features of JavaScript 1.6.

For an exhaustive list, read this.

The PostgreSQL project released the first beta for PostgreSQL 8.2 for widespread testing on Monday. According to PostgreSQL core team member Josh Berkus, the 8.2 beta includes a number of new features, better support for the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) SQL:2003 standard, and numerous performance improvements.

Berkus says that PostgreSQL 8.2 will improve performance “around 20% overall” for high-end online transaction processing (OLTP) systems, and include “even larger gains in data warehousing efficiency.”

The changes in this release include “faster in-memory and on-disk sorting, better multi-processor scaling, better planning of partitioned data queries, faster bulk loads, and vastly accelerated outer joins.”

More here.

Steps to wollow:

1. Download the free and fast Foxit PDF Reader from here: http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php
2. Print to a PDF printer, like PDFReader: http://www.pdfforge.org/
3. Cut and past from the generated PDF file!

MS:    Microsoft Support. Good morning, sir. Can I help you.
IC:    I have a problem. My computer has halted with a message.
MS:    What’s the message, sir.
IC:    ReadStringFromInf: UpdSpGetLineText failed: 0xe0000102; Microsoft Windows is Not Present
MS:    May I have your product key, sir.
IC:    [gives completely valid product key]
MS:    I’m sorry, sir. That is not a valid product key.

[...]

Read the rest of the story here!

For who that wants to upgrade his “not supported from NVIDIA” video card, like my 5200 Go (on my DELL Latitude D800), he can download the drivers and the modified INF file from here.

I got a Commodore 64 for years as many geeks.
Only we know how this computer is treated by certain hardcore programmers.

Who remembers the famous 4K, 8K and 16K demos?

Who remembers some certain games that “were technically impossible” for our C64? (I’m referring to Out Run 2, for example).

But some guys have produced an Operating System for this 64K computer with chip Motorola 6502 running at 1Mhz.

It’s name is GEOS. It provided an API framework, a device independent system (printing, memory and mouse), GUI.

All this in a highly optimized kernel written entirely in Assembler.

OSNews has written a very good article.

Do you love Firefox?

Do you want to use it without mouse?

You can use this cheatsheet.

Do you know the infamous Windows BSOD?

Do you know that Mac OS X has its BSOD, too?

An article explains the history of BSOD in Mac OS X.

One of the areas where Linux is historically weak is around good Wireless Networking support. Intel has helped the effort lately by publishing mostly open-source drivers for their ipw2100/2200/3945 chipsets, but one vendor in particular is refusing to get in the game: Broadcom.

In fact, the only reason that a native Linux driver for any Broadcom chipsets exists at all is because a dedicated group of developer reverse-engineered
their hardware and are supporting the driver. Broadcom has done ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to help this effort. It is time to get them to do their part.

When Broadcom was contacted, they said (I’m paraphrasing to protect the innocent):

The thinking is that no one will use laptops with linux, so we do not need to support the wlan in that environment.

So, its time to tell Broadcom that we do care about open source, and we do use laptops with Linux.

There is a feedback form on their website: http://broadcom.com/contact/feedback.php

Please take a moment to fill it out. If your employer uses Linux on laptops, please mention that. If you have a personal laptop that you run Linux on, please mention that.

A suggested text (set the Subject to - Linux drivers):

Hello,

I would like to request that Broadcom develop and support open source wireless drivers for the Linux operating system. I use Linux on my laptop, and good vendor support for the Linux platform influences my purchasing decisions.

Thanks,

taken from here.

Get rid of Partition Magic, Partition Manager, etc and take this excellent disk partitioner!

GParted 0.3 is out with very interesting features:

• it is now possible to move the start of filesystems.
• much improved progressfeedback during move and copy
• you can now move and copy ntfs filesystems and still boot windows from them
• overall improved progressfeedback

The problem:

• I have installed on my Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake the FreeNX 0.4.4 packages;
• I have used the 1.4.x client from No Machine;
• The AltGR combination to produce @ key doesn’t work

The solution:

• Update your NX client to 1.5.x
• Set keyboard settings in your NX client to ‘default’

at least, it worked for me.

I recently made up an Ubuntu server with FreeNX installed.

Since we need it to run Grass in a multiuser environment, launching it we encountered this problem:

Application initialization failed: this isn’t a Tk application unknown color name  “Black”

The solution to this problem is here:

sudo ln -s /etc/X11/rgb.txt /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/

the nxagent application provided with FreeNX package searches for rgb.txt in an another location.

Watch it! Reccomended.