I guess I should have read this before I bought the MSI RS480M2-IL m/b. It seem like there are loads of problem with this board and AMD64 in general with some chipset.

I was fighting the same problems mentioned:
1) skew clock
2) can't reboot

Problem 1) seem to be kind of fixed in 2.6.17, and problem 2) is now fixed with a BIOS update (which also add support for X2)

However, I am seeing new problems:
1) IDE "busy" failure causing kernel panic. This happen sometimes during CD/DVD burning (using k3b) when varifying the disk, or when torrent checking files. I changed something on my server, and now it seem reboot whenever I get into this.
2) Lost interupts and some funny "APIC error on CPU0: 40(40)"

I am going to upgrade to FC6 when it comes out, and let's hope 2.4.18 is better.

p.s. I don't need to set "noapic" and "acpi=off" (ACPI is disabled in BIOS, I think) in kernel parameter and the clock is not skewing.....

I still remember the day when I found friendster, thanks to Aug. It's all because of nice looking girl (BTW, which turn out later that not really her pic... I believed).

It's interested to read and noted that no matter what great idea you got, execution still the most important part. Failure to execute, plus aiming too high without realizing your problem cause darely.

I remember the time when the site not even coming up when I wait and wait, and it rumored switch away from java becasue of performance problem. I guess the solution come too late, and it indeeds failed to attract me back everyday.

Wallflower at the Web Party - New York Times

I have been thinking about upgrading my server for sometimes. I have a AMD Athlon 64 3000+ CPU when I bought my server last year. While it's nice, I was thinking to eventually replace it with a Athlon 64 X2 when the price come down. Then I will run this setup for 3 more years before retire it. After all, one of the advantages of socket 939 is able to run a dual-core CPU.

I started shop around in Hong Kong before I come back to Canada, but was not able to find a cheap one. The price was about the same when compare to in Canada. Actually, I missed a blow out sale just a month or so ago (~CAN $40 cheaper). I guess what happened is that they no longer make socket 939 X2 CPU as the new one are for socket AM2. But since I already have a socket 939 m/b, I have to stay with socket 939. So, I ended up coming back with no CPU. (and I have no space to bring it because my luggages are all full anyway )

Then I was in TO last weekend and search all Pacific Mall but again unable to find any 939 X2 CPU. I guess it's the same story in HK and TO. A bit disappointed, I dropped by RBC computing on Thur. and hope they have one in stock or able to order one for me. Luckily, they have one last 3800+ in stock. So, I happily take it (damage $210).



Installing the CPU was simple. I pop open the case, disassemble the heatsink/fan, swap in the new CPU. That's it. I already upgraded the BIOS a while back so it's already supporting dual-core CPU. I boot up the server to see whether the new CPU boots on Linux. Actually, I have been having problem booting the server with the latest kernel from FC4 64bit and have to run a old kernel. To my relieve, the single-core kernel boots up just fine. Then, I install the latest SMP kernel, reboot, and cross my fingers again. It's a real relieve when the kernel boot up and pass init. Now I have a SMP server!

So, how much performance boost I got from this upgrade? The CPU speed is up from 1.8 Ghz to 2.0 Ghz. The BogoMips (kind of a rough benchmark) is up from 3600 to 3900. It doesn't look that impressive? But the power comes in 2s! The server is now like (note, I say like...) having 2 CPU on it. So, applications can run at the same time, for real. Of course, this is only work if the bus is not overload and become the bottleneck. As for actually how much performance gain I got is yet to know. Maybe I will look into it later.

One improvement that is a side effect of the upgrade is that I am able to run the latest 2.6.17 kernel. That's mean I am finally able to use the latest ivtv driver 0.7.1. With the new driver, I am finally able to detect and use both WinTV pvr-250 and WinTV pvr-150 on the server. Now, I can use one capture card for TV recording and the other one for streaming. I can smell IP TV from admun.



To get a feel of the performance gain, I ssh into the box, start up a xosview to see in real time the system's stat. Then I run k3b and burn some data DVDs. The server barely break a sweat. This is running while other services like Apache, MySQL, sendmail, Torrentflux are running in the background. The impact on my blog is roughly from 0.37sec to 0.41sec of processing time. I don't have old number to compare to, but I guess it's alright.



Last, I noticed from xosview that Linux is able to distribute loads between both CPU, sometimes one CPU is running while the other one seem blocking (by I/O?), and often both CPUs are running task at the same time. That's the indicator of how a SMP system better than a single core one. The system responsiveness should improved as there is always (hopefully) a program is executing.

Finally download FC5 and install it on my IBM T30. I am happy to report it's continue to improve release after release.



Good
- finally allow WIFI setup during installation... and it detects my netgear W511 as usual. Of course, I still need to manually install the firmware in /lib/firmware
- build-in bluetooth works out of the box. I was able to send pictures from my O2 XDA II (just get it from my brother after he got a O2 Atom)
- SCIM is a better input method system, now I just have to learn to type in Chinese...

Not too good
- don't see the save session box on logout, even I check the "ask to save session" in session setup
- no longer auto start GUI for dig cam with USB plug.... maybe because F-Spot? fixed, actually there is a setting for it... and is disbaled by default.
- cannot share one network interface in multiple connections... than how do I setup my WIFI card for many networks (ie home, work)?
- no JRE for Firefox (I don't use JDK...) still, and no pre-build package to install easily, even from Livna).
- PC card subsystem seem less stable on T30, as sometimes my W511 is failed to detect. However, it works if I insert the card after bootup.

p.s. I think everyone knows already, GNOME is so much faster on FC5. It's awesome.

BTW, I am only using the default yum setup plus Livna for now. I am worried about running into rpm conflicts when I mixed RPMForge and other 3rd party repositories.

After some communication and real-time debugging with the dev guy, I am finally able to use the latest RC code of Gregarius (v0.5.4rc2). It turns out to be a bug related to cookie, I am glad to help them find it.



It's a pretty cool RSS reader, the speed on the new version has improved. I like it has theme and plugins, and build-in user authentication. FoF/FoFredux just falling behind more and more, compared to Gregarius.

However, it's not without its drawback, some of the plugins didn't work together.

Check it out @ here

I guess I am not that crazy after all when I think of this and this. p2p for content is the future, IPTV is just the start.

At least Robert X. Cringely think so too, quoted "... How big a data center do you need before you realize that no data center is big enough for some applications? Only a server-server or peer-to-peer architecture makes sense in the long run... ...Google and its distributed shipping containers might be right for this moment or next, but they can do the math and that math tells them that pumping tens of millions of simultaneous HDTV unicasts from a Google server is no way to make money. It is much better to use Google servers to seed video content, which is then shared by many peers...."

Rob did a much better job laying out how the market model works using Grid Networks (never heard of and can't find link.....) and iTunes as example.

Since I am heading to China soon, maybe I should really try out streaming TV from home in Ottawa to whereever I am. It will be cool to watch TV from thousand of miles away.

Since I come back from Boston, I've been using this PDA phone. I have the (un)pleasure to use a Kyocera before I get this Treo. Both of them are based on PalmOS, which is showing sign of not keeping pace with the product evolution, IMHO.

The reason this PDA is issue to us is to generate traffic on our CDMA 1xRTT live-air test network. So, it is important to run application that generate network traffic, a lot of them. The PDA has a few network applications installed, I often running Varichat (a IM client) in the foreground. On the other hand, a mail program is running in the bakground. The mail program swap to the foreground every few minutes to check for new mail. It returns to the background after it completed and the Varichat continues taking foreground. From a user point of view, this is annoying becasue the mail program keep distrubing user chatting on the IM client. Desplit of user annoyance, the application swapping is slow and create an opportunity for race condition. More than once I notice the PDA crash after the swap. The swapped out application is performing an operation that cannot be disrrupted, which result in fatal crash. For Tero, the failure handling has improved in PalmOS 5 that it automatically reset when encounter fatal problem.

PalmOS was designed for a small handheld device with a 33mhz CPU (Moto Dragonball) and 128k memory onboard. For such a limited system, the OS has to cut a lot of corners to fit itself into it. One such thing is a full functioning process scheduling subsystem. In many modern OS, we can often find a multi-tasking engine inside to manage program execution. Programs runs in a isolate enviroment and in a concurrent fashion.

However, PalmOS does not have such a process execution environment; Since there is no need for executing more than one application at a time on the original Palm, PalmOS is designed to give application CPU timeslice by swapping in/execute/swapping out. An application can generate an event to demand execution time. This event can trigger at anytime, and the current application might be in a critical region of execution. This result in fatal error on re-entry.

I hope the future version of PalmOS will finally introduce a proper multi-tasking execution engine. It is much needed for a PDA with rich functionality and network capability.

I just returned this PDA phone as I am going to be out of town soon until end of summer, hopefully we might get some new PDA phone to deploy that have better OS.

<update>
Did some reading on PalmOS 5 that is on th Treo, it seem to have the some sort of multi-tasking capability (as they claim). But I heard it from a palm developer that the same foreground/background issue still exist.
</update>

While Hong Kong is suing BT user, The BT guy is teaming up with Hollywood to block illegal materials on the net.

As I mentioned before (and here), BT, married with contents provider can make a big impact on how contents are distributed in the future. This announcement is one step closing.

If the pricing is right, I am sure such service will appreal to many. Me for one, likely willing to use such a service to download movie (Hong Kong and otherwise) and TV shows.

But such a scheme still have to deal with issue such as DRM and business model. It's really a suck idea if you downlaod a movie and it "expired" after a period, on the same time Hollywood need to enforce their right to protect their reverue.

One thing I am curious to know is how Bram C. going to do that. I believed the new generation of BT will be coming with a search infrastructure. Also, it might eventually become seedless (not sure it's still the plan...). It is a move to allow total decentralization of seeds and in a way making it almost untracable once a torrent is released.