Author Archives: vbatts

Good Times

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This year has been a nice for socializing with nerds. Attending conferences is something that can get tiresome, if the content is something you do not find interesting or stimulating. Thankfully, I have no required conferences, so I can be choosy (schedules permitting). Naturally open source and languages would top the list of places to attend.

First off, was hanging out with the KDE folks in San Francisco, CA for CampKDE – April 4,5 2011. There were a number of good talks, and a great opportunity to shake the hands of names that I have seen around, as well as meeting many new folks. The kde-promo team has a YouTube channel, that they have published all the talks and interviews to. http://www.youtube.com/user/kdepromo
The talk I gave there is titled “Slackware: Quickly and Easily Manage Your KDE SC Hacking.” You can get the slides in [PDF] or [ODP], plus the videos posted on the kde-promo channel have the full talk (youtube.com/watch?v=Qs7vR3POHeo), as well as an interview afterwards by Wade Olson (youtube.com/watch?v=YIpUmPul1i4).

Next, was down to Spartanburg, SC for the SouthEast Linux Fest (SELF) – June 10-12, 2011.
This is the third year that I have attended SELF, and second time to speak, but what differentiated this year from any other speaking engagement (in the past, or distant future), was that it was a talk title “Slackware Demystified”, and none other than the founder of Slackware Linux, Patrick Volkerding was not only in attendance, but sitting on the front row! The slides from this presentation are available in [HTML] or [PDF]. Unfortunately, the videos have not been published yet. Hopefully they will actually get them published, unlike the previous two years…

Lastly … so far, was a local conference, that I did not speak at, only attended. JrubyConf – August 3-5, 2011. While I use MRI Ruby much more than JRuby, this conference was a great way to be around and hear from many brilliant folks (Like Wayne Seguin, Charles Nutter (headius), Nick Sieger, and Jim Weirich, to name a few), plus I felt that I needed to make up for missing out on RubyConf taking place in Baltimore, MD.

The KDE folks strongly encouraged making it to the DesktopSummit, which was hosted in Berling, Germany this year. While it was surely appetising to think of attending, it did not work out this time. It would have been nice to shake hands with some fellow contributors, like Eric Hameleers (alienBob). Better luck next year.

All good times, I look forward to next year, or event the rest of 2011.

Feel free to leave feedback on the talks.

Take care,
vb

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More 1337 for your Slackware-13.37 release

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If you are one that is not afraid to recompile your kernel, then here is a little treat for you.
http://slackware.com/~vbatts/things/linux-2.6.37.6-logo_slk.patch.gz

This patch applies to the Linux kernel source stored in /usr/src/linux of your Slackware Linux 13.37 install. If you do not have a ‘.config’ file present, then do

#> zcat /proc/config.gz > /usr/src/linux/.config
#> cd /usr/src/linux
#> zcat $PATH_TO_DOWNLOADS/linux-2.6.37.6-logo_slk.patch.gz | patch --backup -p2

Assuming there are no errors, then you can proceed along with

#> make bzImage
#> cp arch/x86/boot/bzImage /boot/vmlinuz-1337-2.6.37.6

If you are running the ‘-smp’ kernel, then append ‘-smp’ to the kernel version. To determine if you are, then run
$> uname -r

The assumption with this option, is that this new vmlinuz will be using the kernel modules provided with the package
‘kernel-modules-2.6.37.6*’.


IF you want to differentiate this kernel from the stock installed kernel, open the ‘.config’ file, search for the CONFIG_LOCALVERSION line, and set the value to something brilliant, like


CONFIG_LOCALVERSION="_1337"

This however, will require to (re)compile all the modules and the bzImage kernel. So then it may be just as easy to do


#> make tar-pkg
#> cd tar-install
#> rm -rf boot/vmlinux* lib/firmware/
#> ts=$(date +%s)
#> makepkg -l y -c y ../linux_2.6.37.6_1337-${ts}-$(uname -m)-1_mine.tgz
#> installpkg ../linux_2.6.37.6_1337-${ts}-$(uname -m)-1_mine.tgz

Explanation of events here:

  • the vmlinux-* is usually around 18mb, and primarily used when debugging.
  • the lib/firmware/ would clobber the stock kernel-firmware package. no need in doing that.
  • the ${ts} is just a timestamp of epoch time. nothing fancy.
  • makepkg will create a Slackware package with a distinguished name and version, so as to not interfere with the stock packages
  • change the ‘_mine’ in the package name, if you have your own tagging name for packages you’ve created for your own system.


In Either Event, you will need to:

  • create an initrd, with mkinitrd, if you use one
  • adjust your /etc/lilo.conf accordingly
  • re-run `lilo`
  • reboot
  • enjoy the l33t penguins


If You Want to fetch the kernel source, rather than use /usr/src/linux, download it here http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/linux-2.6.37.6.tar.bz2


Also, so that you are not suspect of malicious kernel patches. The patch adds ‘drivers/video/logo/logo_slk_clut224.ppm’, enables this logo image to be chosen with the config option of ‘CONFIG_LOGO_SLK_CLUT224′.

Then BEHOLD!


Take care,

vb

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More Red-Black Tree, but a little Ruby Benchmarking

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After hearing a bit about the improvements in the Rubinius ruby interpreter, I decided to test a handful of the interpreters against the Red-Black tree insertion script I last posted about.


As a forward, this is completely out of idle curiosity, and with no deep intentions. The results had distinct winners and losers, and for more rich benchmark, this would need to include multiple iterations and some other aspects as well. All that to say, this is not an all encompassing benchmark.
The results are the length (in seconds) of time for the execution.


So using the rbtree.rb, that I last blogged about, using rvm, I have just run it through the following ruby interpreters:

  • ruby 1.9.1p430 (2010-08-16 revision 28998) [x86_64-linux]
  • rubinius 1.3.0dev (1.8.7 5bd938b5 xxxx-xx-xx JI) [x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu]
  • rubinius 1.2.0 (1.8.7 release 2010-12-21 JI) [x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu]
  • jruby 1.5.3 (ruby 1.8.7 patchlevel 249) (2010-09-28 7ca06d7) (Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM 1.6.0_23) [amd64-java]
  • ruby 1.8.7 (2010-12-23 patchlevel 330) [x86_64-linux], MBARI 0×6770, Ruby Enterprise Edition 2011.01
  • ruby 1.9.3dev (2011-02-14 trunk 30873) [x86_64-linux]



From an early look at it, the Rubinius interpreter is on to something good. For this example at least, their current release branch (1.2) is smoking, compared to anything else.
To look at the values, that make up the graph above, here is the spreadsheet


Take care,
vb

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Kick off of playing with trees

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As I have stated before, I enjoy the speed at which I can prototype an idea in Ruby. Even if ultimately that idea runs better on another language. For the sake of my academics, it provides a super learning playground.

Earlier, this past week, I began reading up on papers and documentation of trees. All in an effort to differentiate the various implementations of trees, including their benefits and drawbacks. Finding AVL trees, B trees, 2-3 node, 2-3-4 node and RB trees. I decided to kick off the events with a Red-Black tree. Some of the papers I found are the generally available by Google searching.

After a lot of learning, and a little massage, I have the first of a an “academic” implementation of an RB tree (http://hashbangbash.com/~vbatts/rbtree.rb). I gravitated towards this tree first because of the type searches I am needing. While the population of this slows as it grows, the searches are ridiculously fast. I’ll get around to generating some instrumentation to graph it. For now I have the run_loop() to return @results of the populating trees. The sets are [ , , , ]

The insertion graphed was an O(N) climb. For doubling the number of nodes to be inserted (of random unique numbers), the time increase was just a tad more than double. The @results for run_loop(1,000,000) was
=> [[1000000, 43.4912700653076, 24, 16], [500000, 20.5859882831573, 20, 15], [250000, 9.5372850894928, 20, 14], [125000, 4.50037479400635, 21, 13], [62500, 2.01573848724365, 16, 12], [31250, 0.941669225692749, 14, 11], [15625, 0.435366868972778, 14, 11], [7812, 0.252951860427856, 13, 10], [3906, 0.0940215587615967, 11, 9], [1953, 0.043536901473999, 13, 8], [976, 0.0200107097625732, 9, 8], [488, 0.00921034812927246, 9, 6], [244, 0.00417494773864746, 10, 5], [122, 0.00190210342407227, 6, 5], [61, 0.000821590423583984, 5, 4], [30, 0.000351667404174805, 4, 3], [15, 0.000170707702636719, 4, 2], [7, 6.03199005126953e-05, 2, 1], [3, 2.57492065429688e-05, 1, 1]]

which resulted in a time climb of




Another interesting observation was the logarithmic oscillations of the depth of the left most leg.


At any rate, enjoy and feel free to send your thoughts.

Take care,

vb

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