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Well folks, again last week was a very hectic week for me and I didn’t get around to posting again, but that just means I have a lot to write about!  The last couple of weeks were a real blast because I got a bunch of days off, and used that time to really treat myself to some fun outings.  I have been mainly just chilling with my roommates, but I did get a chance to go mini-golfing at a pretty sweet course during the time between my last post.  If you don’t know me, then let it be known that I LOVE mini-golfing and go-karting, probably two of my most favorite things to do to hang out with friends and such like that.  The place was kind of expensive, but I had buy-one-get-one free coupons, so it turned out to be about average price.  I also got too take some time and actually get some sun down at the pool, and let me tell you, it’s probably the most relaxing sensation in the world to just lay out in either the direct sun, or a partly overcast day and be at peace with yourself and your surroundings.

Work’s getting tougher and tougher with longer hours, early mornings, late nights, and redeployment folks that don’t really want to be in their new location and learn how the new location works. I’m being placed as a point person more and more now, which is amazing.  I love being the leader of a stand and being able to control the flow of how things work, because I have definitely worked in stands where there’s no control or direction.  Now that I’m a point/run I am able to help my team work as a well oiled machine within at least 2 hours.  The start of the shift is usually a little rough because people don’t want to listen to me, just because I’m a college program student, or they’re extra hours or redeployment people and feel they’re exempt from learning anything new, but as soon as I inform them that they can either A) listen and work as a team or B) go home and lose the hours they’d be working that day, they usually choose option A and are glad they did.  I let them know that if it’s a new position for them that they’re on, I’ll be right there next to them to help them if they have any questions, as well as train them on how to work that position effectively and efficiently as possible.

I have also decided that I’m going to extend my program.  I just submitted my application to extend about an hour ago, and I’m really excited to hear the results back from them soon.  I either want to stay in my location doing QSR F&B (Quick Service Restaurant Food and Beverage) or move on to Attractions or even Parking.  We’ll see how things play out.  If I am accepted to extend my program, I’ll be down in Orlando until August 14th.  This is another 3 months added onto my program, which will be perfect because with work and classes right now, I have no time to really network myself and try to get myself into the professional internship, but this extra time on my program will put me in a position to where I can do that.  There’s just so much going on right now, and all of it good and that excites me!  Well, as the excitement continues, I’ll try to keep better track of what’s going on and keep all you kids back home updated!  Take care everyone and I hope you all had a wonderful St. Patrick’s Day!!!

Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackelope” is set for release in less than two months, and is currently in the “Alpha 6″ testing stage.  Arguably the hottest new feature is stable support for Linux’s new filesystem, ext4.  The new filesystem has been shown to have significant performance gains over any other Linux filesystem to date.  But think twice before you upgrade to ext4–many users have been reporting considerable data loss.  From a user’s comment:

This has happened to me twice, the first time erasing Firefox settings, and the second time erasing gnome-terminal settings. Both cases were caused by a kernel panic locking up the system. Also, both times the program whose settings were affected was in use during the kernel panic.

This has been a wide-spread problem, particularly for Ubuntu users testing the new Jaunty alpha releases.  It manifests itself after a system crash, where open files will simply be emptied and erased.  It is particularly prevalent in users’ settings files, such as those used for GNOME or KDE.  Fortunately, there cause of the bug is relatively well-known, as kernel developer Theodore Ts’o explains in his detailed comment:

OK, so enter ext4 and delayed allocation. With delayed allocation, we don’t allocate a location on disk for the data block right away. Since there is no location on disk, there is no place to write the data on a commit; but it also means that there is no security problem. It also results in a massive performance improvements; for example, if you create a scratch file, and then delete it 20 seconds later, it will probably never hit the disk. Unfortunately, the default VM tuning parameters, which can be controlled by /proc/sys/vm/dirty_expire_centiseconds and /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centiseconds, means that in practice, a newly created file won’t hit disk until about 45-150 seconds later, depending on how many dirty pages are in the page cache at the time. (This isn’t unique to ext4, by the way — any advanced filesystem which does delayed allocation, which includes xfs and the in the future, btrfs, will have the same issue.)

Essentially, the data for truncated and overwritten files is often cached in memory before actually hitting the disk, for performance reasons.  However, the file truncation doesn’t get cached, and if there is a system failure between the two operations, your files will simply be wiped clean with all previous and new data gone.  This happens frequently for desktop settings because hundreds of small hidden files are updated to maintain user preferences.  As a result, there is a relatively high probability that a truncation and rewrite operation could be happened at any time– including during a system failure.

By POSIX definition, this isn’t really a bug in ext4.  The state of a file after this type of crash isn’t clearly defined.  According to Theodore, it’s really a bug in the way desktop environments are writing their settings files:

[...] If your application is stupid, and has hundreds of dot files in your home directory, each one taking up a 4k disk block even though it is only storing 4 to 12 bytes of data in each singleton dot file, and you have to [write to disk] for each of your one hundred dot files — and worse yet, your application for some stupid, unknown reason is writing all of these hundred+ dot files every few seconds, then [writing to disk] will be very painful. But it is painful because the application is stupidly written — not for any fundamental filesystem fault. It’s like if you had a robot which was delivering mail to mail box numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and crossing the street for each mail box; on a busy road, this is unsafe, and the robot was getting run over when it kept on jaywalking — so you can tell the robot to only cross at crosswalks, when the “walk” light is on, which is safe, but slow — OR, you could rewrite the robot’s algorithsm so it delieveres the mail more intelligently (i.e., one side of the street, and then cross, safely at the crosswalk, and then do the other side of the street).

Regardless of what a permanant solution should include, there are a series of patches which are set to be included in the final Jaunty kernel to address this issue.  The patches are set to handle the crash situation similar to ext3– keeping the original version in-tact.  However, it comes at a price of performance.  Ext4 won’t be any slower than ext3, but the patch will negate many of the performance gains that ext4 previously achieved.

Once again, ext4 will likely be patched and fixed by the official Ubuntu Jaunty release.  However, it isn’t present in Jaunty Alpha 6, and hasn’t been pushed as an update yet (as of 3/12/09).  There is lengthy and ongoing discussion in the original bug report about possible long-term solutions.  In conclusion, be very careful if you choose to test out the new ext4 filesystem until it is patched.

After much anticipation, my new netbook (which I got a screaming deal on) was delivered this afternoon. It’s a Dell Inspiron Mini 9 Netbook with Ubuntu Linux, though this version of Linux is slightly different than your standard install. While it is technically Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy), it has its own interface which I will do a walkthrough of below, outlining all the differences I can find between this Dellbuntu (my own term) and a standard Ubuntu install.

This screen shot walkthrough will look at the unedited, uncustomized Ubuntu install on my Dell Mini 9. I’m sure I will do plenty of customization down the road, but for now you get the virgin version.

The Standard Desktop

The desktop is very clean and appealing to start off with. There are no folders or icons on the desktop itself, which will be quite a surprise for anyone coming from a Windows environment. The large bar across the top is called the Launcher and presents most of the essential programs in a graphical interface. Below are shots of each tab individually.

The Entertainment Tab

While this menu has the typical Music Player (Rhythmbox) & photo manager (F-spot), this is the first time we really see the net-focus on the netbook. Having a specific icon for LastFM shows the imporantance of working in the cloud…which is essential since the Dell Mini 9 comes with only 4GB of memory standard.

Also, notice how I had to specify that the music player and photo manager have actual names. Dell has completely debranded most default programs, which we will see more examples of soon.

The Games Tab

The games tab has many of the typical Ubuntu games so there isn’t a whole lot to discuss here, however there are a few things to note. First, and most disappointing, is that Wormux, my favorite of the Ubuntu standard games, is not included in this install. I’m not sure why they would do that while adding Potato Guy instead! Let me tell you, potato guy is one of the most annoying and pointless “games” I’ve ever run across. Stay away!

The Learn Tab

I don’t know who came up with the Learn tab, but I don’t think I’ll ever seriously use it. I guess the Japanese Study Tool and Stellarium might be good for a handful of people, but these do not seem like programs that were worth including in a default install. Actually, more interesting than that is the fact that all of these programs have Kubuntu-style names in the normal programs menu. What this means I’m not sure.

The Productivity Tab

The productivity tab includes all the default OpenOffice.org programs, plus a handy folder called “Dell Contract.” Of all things I want in a quickstart menu like the launcher, I DEFINITELY want fast access to my Dell Contract at all times. Thanks Dell!

The Web Tab

The web tab is probably the most interesting of all, which is to be expected from a netbook. Can you tell who Dell partnered with to bring netbook services to the Mini 9? Let me spell it out for you…Yahoooooooooo! Not only do they have an entire quicklaunch section dedicated almost entirely to Yahoo pages, but the “Web Browser,” or Firefox, defaults to Yahoo.com for the home page, has the Yahoo Toolbar installed, and defaults to Yahoo search from the quick search bar. While I have no problem with companies partnering with each other to do promotions, Mozilla is largely funded by Google search which is shown by defaulting the Firefox home page & quick search bars to Google. Without this funding, development for Firefox in general would be at risk. But this is an issue for a separate post.

The Keyboard

While the entire set of hardware behind the Dell Mini 9 Netbook is interesting and generally super high quality, what is worth sharing the most is the keyboard.

This keyboard is super tiny, but also extremely functional. My one problem, which I have yet to get over, is the positioning of the apostrophe/quotes key. Dell moved it from its normal position next to the colon key to the bottom row next to the left arrow. See it? Yeah, that will take some getting used to.

That’s it for now. I’ll update if I find anything else that stands out from typical Ubuntu installs. Until then, let me know if you have any questions in the comments and I’ll get back to all of them asap.

Shiver me timbers, tis be I, sir Brian of Orlando, here to drink your rum and leave you with the tab!  No, but seriously, I’m sorry for my hiatus, I’ve been VERY busy.  Since I last posted, I have done so much I can’t even remember it all!  All I remember is I’ve gone go carting at an awesome go-cart track with live gators, gone to Hollywood Studios MANY times, met up with my cousins while they were visiting, and even got the chance to meet up with my old band directors at Epcot while they were down here for Magic Music Days.  It’s been a crazy couple weeks and I’m getting so excited because Braves Spring Training has begun and that means pro athletes everywhere and lots of hours of working and more money!!!

Today was a fun day though.  I had the day off because of class this morning, so I decided to go to the Braves game afterwords.  I lucked out in it being Braves vs Yankees today which made it even more so exciting.  I took a special direct bus to Disney’s Wide World of Sports around 12:00 and went straight for the merchandise store and grabbed myself a jersey and a new Braves hat because I noticed I don’t have any Braves apparel to support them with.  When I finally got inside the stadium I grabbed myself a beer, a spicy chicken sandwich, and headed off to my comfy lawn seats to enjoy a wonderful day in the ball park.  I was surrounded by Yankee’s fans which kind of surprised me, but understandable cuz it’s way too cold in New York.  It started out to be a very brisk cool day, but by the end of the game, I took of the shirts I had under my jersey and was laying down in the grass, drink in hand, and enjoying the beautiful sunshine.  It was a pretty quick game, but an exciting one because the Braves won 3-2 when it was all said and done.

I’m really enjoying my stay down here, but as time goes on, I’m becoming more and more home sick and I miss my friends and family.  This scares me because I’m going to be turning 23 soon, and need to move out on my own eventually.  I still feel like I’m too young to be making adult choices, but too old to “party like a rock star” like I used to do.  Oh well, I’m sure I’ll come to terms with this eventually.

Wow, it’s already 12:30, where has the night gone?  Looks like it’s bed time!  Take care readers, I’ll post again soon!