Category: Software

Gnome desktop coming to Ubuntu :-(

Unity vs Gnome

I hate to think of myself as a tech Luddite.  Being an Ubuntu Linux fan has caused familiarization with the Unity desktop.  Recently, I have been playing with 17.10 to see what is coming in 18.04 LTS.  I never thought I would defend the Unity desktop as my earliest Linux days were split between the Gnome and KDE desktops.  But I wish I had my old Unity back. Yes, I know I can return to it in 17.10 – but it is becoming mostly unsupported.  Incremental scaling is essential with today’s 4K monitors.  Or I need Lasik.  Uber-Lasik in my case.

Why I like LTS.1

I never actually run the first point release of an LTS version.  I waited for 16.04.1 to get anything real live on 16.04 LTS.  It seems the Gnome desktop has a big memory leak and it likely will not be fixed in the 18.04 LTS initial release in April.

OK, scratch moving to 18.04 LTS in April on anything I need.  I already am a desktop memory hog as it is and finally upgraded my new desktop machine to 32GB of RAM.

A Gnome future in Ubuntu

I know this is all for the good.  That change thing.  Moving to Gnome in this case.  It is far more widely supported and used across more variants of Linux.   I used to be a CentOS champion as I loosened the evil grip of RedHat subscription fees back in my AOL cost cutting days.  I have since become almost an exclusive Ubuntu home data center.  Seems I will be straddling Gnome and Unity for a year or so.  One other word of caution, the Gnome 3.26 desktop (used in 17.10) does not truly support incremental UI scaling yet.  This is a problem for people like me with a 4K laptop screen or large 4K desktops.  There is a workaround.   However, it is not clear if fractional scaling will make it into Gnome 3.28 which ships with  18.04 LTS.

Happy times.  It is really hard to see my shell windows in a non-scaled up Gnome desktop on a 4K laptop screen.

Ted Cahall

Ted Cahall’s “new” tech blog

New Blog along with some old content

As a past media executive at companies such as CNET Networks, Microsoft’s MSN, AOL and the early social network Classmates.com, I have operated a  blog here and there over the years.  Mostly to test out SEO ideas and cross link my sites, etc.

Started on LiveJournal in 2004

One of my unfortunate SEO decisions was using LiveJournal.com for my tech postings.  In 2004 as CTO of CNET Networks, I was fortunate enough to meet Brad Fitzpatrick who invented LiveJournal (as well as memcached).  Since we made a (failed) bid to buy the site, I decided I should use it and get to know it a bit.  I had used it to blog about some of my non-proprietary experiences with technology and software from time to time.

My last post there was almost two years ago to the day.  I was musing at the intersection of my auto racing hobby and my technology hobby.  It was through a lack of automation of the points standing of my auto racing league that I had finally brought these two passions together.  This was all enabled by Open Source, the Intel NUC computers (home data center), and Amazon’s AWS hosting facility.   Resulting in the creation of the marrspoints.com race points tracking web application.

LiveJournal did not seem to get the SEO juice

Compared to modern blogging sites such as WordPress (which this blog is built on), LiveJournal never got the great SEO features that it deserved. Therefore today, I am moving my LiveJournal information over to a new home here at cahall-labs.com.   All of the posts have been successfully moved here as of this post.

Open Source and my Home Data Center

I have a few tech topics that are of interest to me. They include:

Cassandra and Hadoop

The marrspoints.com site was simple to build, but the back end tools to ingest all of the race data was a lot more work.  I occasionally look at ways to change the data ingestion or analytics.  Therefore I play with tools such as Cassandra and Hadoop on my NUC cluster in my home data center.  In general, I will try NOT to blog about racing in this blog.  That will move to a blog at either cahallracing.com or cahall.com.

Thank you LiveJournal – hello WordPress

So thank you to LiveJournal for the tools and time.  It was a good 14 year run.  There is also an old, outdated racing blog on WordPress.  It will likely be moving to a new home in the next month or two.  It will be good to get back to using the tool Matt Mullenweg built (WordPress).  I had the opportunity to work with Matt at CNET when he spent time there for a year on his way to becoming famous.  Clearly I wish I had made a blog tool.  Some day I may even blog about Gavin Hall and Alex Rudloff.  They built blogsmith.  Blogsmith powers TMZ.com and most of the AOL blogs.  I guess I met most of the people that built blogs…  Very, very smart and talented people.

Ted Cahall

The Intel NUC Computers, AWS, and racing cars

It has been over five years since my last post about software and technology.  It’s not that I stopped using it.  I just stopped talking about it.  Lately I have been on a bit of a streak.  I have been working on the MARRS Points tracking app in AWS for over a year now.  It will now be the official points tracking application for the 2016 season across all race classes in the Washington DC Region (WDCR) of the SCCA.  I have actually done something mildly productive with my spare time!

An AWS Project Was In Order

It was mainly by happenstance that I got the app going.  I wanted to work in the Amazon AWS cloud a bit to understand it better.  I had managed teams using it for years now at various companies.  So it seemed like a reasonable learning experience. I could have easily chosen Microsoft Azure or the Google Cloud, but AWS has the deepest legacy and I started there.  Once I logged in and started to play with AWS, they let me know my first year was FREE if I kept my usage below specific CPU and memory levels.  Sure no problem.  But what to build, what to do?  I remembered I had built an old Java/JSP app as a framework for a racing site for my brothers and I, called cahallbrosracing.com.  GoDaddy had taken their Java support down and it had been throwing errors for years.  So I decided that was the perfect domain to try, and grabbed the skeleton code.  It would be some type of Java/JSP racing application that used a MySQL database backend.  But for now, I just needed to see if I could configure AWS to let me get anything live.

EC2, RDS, a little AWS security magic…

I provisioned an EC2 node, downloaded Tomcat and Oracle Java and went to work.  In no time, I had the fragments of the old site live and decided I should put my race schedule online.  The schedule would not come from a static HTML page.  It would use a JSP template and a Java object to get the data from the database.  Then each year I would just add new events to the database and display by year.  Quickly the MySQL DB was provisioned, network security provisioned, DB connectivity assembled and the schedule was live.  OK – AWS was EASY to use and I now had a public facing Java environment.  I was always too cheap to pay for a dedicated host. Too cheap to sort out a real public facing Java environment that allowed me to control the Linux services so I could start and stop Tomcat as needed.  But FREE was right up my alley.

So there I was, developing Java, JSP and SQL code right on the “production” AWS Linux server.  Who needs Maven or Ant, I was building it right in the server directories!  Then I started to realize I did not have backups.  I was not using a source code repository.  It could all go away like a previous big app I wrote when my RAID drives both failed in the great 2005 Seattle wind storm.  Not a good idea.

Intel NUCs (and GitHub) to the rescue!

Enter the NUCs!!!  I had learned about the Intel NUC series and bought a handful of them to make a home server farm for Hadoop and Cassandra work.  These units are mostly the i5 models with 16GB of RAM running Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS.  I realized I needed to do the development at home, keep the code in a GitHub repository, and then push updates to AWS when the next version was ready for production.  My main Java development NUC has been awesome.  It is a great complimentary setup.  An AWS “production” environment in the cloud and a Linux environment at home with the source code repository also in the cloud.  I even installed VMWare Workstation on my laptop so I have Linux at the track.  This allows me to pull the code from GitHub down to my laptop and make changes from the track.  It’s almost like I have made it to 2013 or something.

Why software is never “done”

Well once I got going, I wanted to track my points in the MARRS races.  So I made some tools to allow manual entry of schedules, race results, etc.  This manual process clearly did not scale well.  The discovery of  Race Monitor and their REST APIs. solved that issue.  The code was written to pull the results back from Race Monitor and used Google’s GSON parser.  GSON let me marshal the JSON data to objects used in the Java code.  Unfortunately, Race Monitor does not pass a piece of critical data, the SCCA ID for each racer.  The next step was to work with the Washington DC Region and the fine people at MotorsportReg.com to use their REST APIs to get that data for each race.  This simple Java app has become complex with two REST APIs and tools to manage them.

The rest is history.  The tool can now also import CSV files from the MyLaps Orbits software.   A simple CMS was added to publish announcements and steward’s notes per race.  All of the 2015 season has been pulled into the application across all of the classes and drivers.  Many features, bells and whistles have been added thanks to Lin Toland’s sage advice. Check out the 2015 season SSM and SM Championship pages.  A ton of data and a lot of code go into making those look simple.

Racing into the future with MARRS

I am really looking forward to being able to help all of the WDCR MARRS racers track their season starting in April.  Let’s hope I can drive my car better than last year and race as well as I have coded this application.

It is kind of odd to think that my desire to play with AWS caused me to build something useful for hundreds of weekend racing warriors.  Now the next question, should I make it work for every racing group across the world?  I mean multi-tenant, SaaS, world domination?  Hmmm…  Maybe I should try to finish better than 6th this year…

Ted Cahall

Windows 7 – huge upgrade from XP

Nice hardware helps

I just realized that I bought my “new” Windows 7 machine way back in late January.  The thing is amazing: 8GB RAM, i7 860 Quad Core CPU, 3.0Gbps RAID-1 SATA drives, etc.  I recently went out and bought a 30 inch Samsung monitor so I could put the video card in 2560×1600 mode.  The speed, video, stability, etc. of this machine are incredible!

The most amazing thing is the OS.  I skipped Vista due to all of the bad press – coupled with the fact that XP mostly did everything I needed from a desktop OS.  Mostly was the key part of that sentence.  It really could not handle more than about 2GB of memory efficiently – and I had some leaky open-source apps that regularly gobbled that up since I rarely reboot…

Free Microsoft Software!

Additionally, Microsoft has tossed in some FREE apps that were not available under XP as part of their Windows Live Essentials program.  The most significant of those apps (to me) is Movie Maker.  I regularly edit and upload portions of my SCCA Club Racing videos using Movie Maker.  It is simple and easy – which fits my video skill level really well.  I am also in the process of adding in a TV Tuner card so I can really utilize the Windows Media Center software that came with my Windows 7 Ultimate version.  That should make it even more interesting to connect to my Xbox-360 (which now gives my AppleTV a run for the money in renting movies from the Internet).

Windows 7 handles memory well

I now regularly run over 3GB of apps without any issues on the machine whatsoever.  I have not added all the DB servers, app servers, etc. that I used to run on my various Windows desktops.  That is because I never retire my old machines and they are still on the network somewhere.  I finally have created what is mostly a desktop machine used as a desktop.

No question, Windows 7 is a really fantastic OS.  It will continue to be my main machine to access all the servers running in my in my home data center.

Ted Cahall

Kubuntu and Wubi

Linux  desktop variations

After playing with Debian and Ubuntu, I wanted to see what the latest in KDE looked like. I have mostly been a Gnome user and had read some interesting tidbits on KDE 4.3 in LinuxJournal. I did not want to “polute” my Ubuntu installation by downloading all of the KDE parts to it.   So I decided I would add a Kubuntu partition to my Ubuntu box.  I would do this as well as test Kubuntu on my 64bit Windows machines using Wubi.

I was surprised to see that the installers for Ubuntu and Kubuntu are not really from the same code base. The installation on my 32 bit Ubuntu box went off without a hitch. I had a spare drive on it and I used that for the new partition. I needed to manually change the partitions with the partition manager.  This is so it could leave the old Ubuntu 9.04 and 9.10 versions where they were. Even this was simple and straight forward.

Wubi letdown

I guess my biggest surprise was that Wubi does not install Kubuntu/Ubuntu to run “on top of Windows” as I thought it would. I had thought there was an additional VXLD layer or something that was written to let Linux run as a guest OS on top of Windows XP. This would have been really cool. Sort of like Cygwin on steroids. This may sound ridiculous, but a colleague long ago, Bill Thompson, wrote such a VXLD for Windows.  He did this back in the mid ’90s that allowed x86 versions of Unix to run on top of Windows.

I searched around the web and Facebook and LinkedIn to see if I could find Bill. With much digging I found him on LinkedIn. His start-up was called “nQue”. He was also a file system guru that wrote a lot of CR-ROM file system drivers, etc. after the start-up went south.

Needless to say, I think if that feature could be added to the Wubi concept, a lot more people might try Ubuntu.  Adding it right on their Windows desktop as an application environment without requiring a reboot. I know Wubi does not alter the Windows partitions.  So it is still a fairly painless way to try Ubuntu without risking much. Users can always uninstall it as they do any Windows application it if they are not happy with it. I just prefer to rarely reboot my systems if I can avoid it.

Ted Cahall

Windows, MacOS, and editing race cam videos…

Windows 7 solves so many issues

I finally got around to installing Windows 7 on a used Dell Precision 360 w/ 1GB RAM that I bought from work. During installation I somehow fried the AGP video card’s DVI port. I was able to still get the VGA port to work – and was impressed with the graphics and performance.

I went out and bought a new AGP card and am now really impressed with the “Aero” themes and video effects. The system is amazingly fast.

Windows 7 and video editing

I figured I would look at the Microsoft Live extensions including the Movie Maker download. I was able to get the software up, running, and edit one of the MPEG videos from my TraqMate race cam within minutes. This was really interesting to me as everyone says the Mac and Final Cut are the way to go. Movie Maker was FREE – while Final Cut Express was $199.00 at the Apple Store. 🙁

Mac Snow Leopard and Final Cut Express

I recently bought the Snow Leopard upgrade for my Intel based Mac and Final Cut Express 4.0 for editing videos. On Final Cut Express (not sure about Pro), the version of MPEG that the car cam shoots is not recognized. I need to read in the video with the software provided by TraqMate. The “fun” part about MPEG is that the file extension does not say it all.  There are 3 versions of MPEG videos… It seems that the TraqMate shoots MPEG2 and Final Cut only recognizes  versions 1 and 3. TraqMate makes a video conversion utility that I have not tried yet. http://traqmate.com/downloads/videoconverter/TQConvertInstall.exe.  There are several other free utilities out there as well.

A pay program from Apple should have at least the minimum features of the FREE program from Microsoft…

And a Ted Cahall Racing Video is Born!

When I was done, I went to post the video to YouTube.  But – YouTube was down! I first tried at 11:15AM ET today.   It was down for a while. It was back up when I checked back at 11:30AM. Movie Maker posts directly to YouTube. So here it is.

Ted Cahall

CentOS Rocks Good-Bye RHEL

Home Data Center saga

I upgraded my home “data center” recently with the addition of two used HP DL320s.  They both have 4GB of RAM and two 15k 36GB drives in a RAID1 configuration.  I build and buy hardware as a hobby to keep me close to the reality of managing corporate software systems and data centers.

From RHEL to CentOS

I decided to run CentOS 5.2 on these new home systems.  It is fantastic.  You have to love the GPL that makes this possible.  Some companies making their first foray into Linux might not feel comfortable using CentOS.  Mature companies that have been using some form of RHEL for a few years should feel very comfortable.  How many Linux OS support calls do you make in a year anyway?  Needless to say, we are migrating AOL from RHEL to CentOS at a significant annual savings.

I would have gone to Debian, as I needed a free alternative  to improve my company’s operating margins, but why not use CentOS when it is binary compatible with RHEL and FREE?  Easy decision.

Open Source Commoditization of Software

Similar to my decisions to move my previous companies off of BEA WebLogic to Tomcat and Sybase to MySQL.  It is almost hard to believe that companies payed for the Netscape Web Server now that Apache is ubiquitous.  Distant memories of companies paying for Alta Vista, Verity, or FAST search products now with Lucene and SOLR.  Thank you Open Source!

Ted Cahall