Computing
RIP WUXGA
What happened to 1920×1200 laptop displays? Why are all new laptops regressing to 1920×1080? That’s the most asinine, disappointing regression since the end of commercial supersonic transport. It is so sad to be living in a world that is moving backwards at an ever accelerating pace.
My first transportable computer was a Mac Portable with a 640×480 screen and I lived with that through a couple of generations. Eventually I got a Dell with 1440×900 pixels and could actually do some real work on it. About 10 years ago I got a Dell M70 with 1900×1200 pixels on a 15.4″ screen and found an acceptable resolution for portable work. Little did I know that the era from about 2000-2010 would be the apex of laptop technology. It is all downhill from here.
Once I looked forward to a bright future with 17″ displays sporting about the same generally usable pixel pitch (about 147 pixels per inch). If the world had continued to advance technically, if the now retired SR71 wasn’t still the fastest, highest flying plane ever built, if the now retired Concorde wasn’t the only commercial supersonic aircraft, if the retirement of the space shuttle didn’t herald the end of US’s manned space flight capability, if we weren’t living on the burnt out ruins of our former capabilities watching our technical competency spiral down the toilet, we’d have WQXGA (2560×1600) 17.4″ laptops right now. Maybe even QXGA 15.4″ options for those of us with good eyes.
But we don’t. We have bizarre stupid Vaio VGN-AW11M/H with kid friendly 104 PPI displays sporting useless 1680×945 pixels on an 18.4″ screen. That’s a pixel pitch straight out of 1990. Thanks for nothing.
Nobody even makes a reasonably sized laptop with a 15.4″ screen with more than 1920×1080 pixels any more (the only WUXGA laptop I can find at any size is the oversized kidz pitch 17″ macbook pro). I’m going to have to stick with my W500, or buy used ones for the rest of my life. Laptop makers – there’s no way I’m going to regress to a less productive smaller pixel count. That’s just stupid. Pull your heads out and give us pixels. The only thing that really matters for productivity is pixels. More pixels=better. Less pixels=worse. Don’t bother releasing a new laptop if it is worse. If you’ve lost the competency, just pack it up.
Apple: the 264 PPI pitch of the 3rd gen ipad is pretty good. If you build a 15.4″ macbook pro with that pitch in QFHD (3840×2160) pixels instead of the bizarrely large type kid’s book useless 1440×900 pixel resolution the current 15″ macbook pro is crippled by, I would actually buy one to run Ubuntu on. And maybe even have a bit of hope for the future.
(I’d suggest refraining from buying a laptop until 2013: ivy bridge will make 1920×1080 laptops as quaint as those 640×480 displays from 1990: the era from 2010-2013 may be known as the dark ages of laptops.)
p5-XML-SAX-0.99 Install Error
If you’re trying to install p5-XML-SAX-0.99 and get a
Can't locate XML/SAX/Exception.pm in @INC
error then you may need to
cd /usr/ports/textproc/p5-XML-SAX-Base make distclean make deinstall make install clean
Then you can
cd /usr/ports/textproc/p5-XML-SAX make distclean make install clean
And you should get an error free install. Apparently p5-XML-SAX-Base is a prereq that isn’t getting cleanly detected or updated in the make process for p5-XML-SAX.
PHP Startup: Unable to load memcache.so
I noticed the warning
PHP Warning: PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library '/usr/local/lib/php/20090626/memcache.so' - /usr/local/lib/php/20090626/memcache.so: Undefined symbol "php_session_create_id" in Unknown on line 0
in my apache logs. Googling for it, some sites suggested that old php.in
files might the cause. But this is a pretty fresh install so I looked a little further and found a nerdstock note describing a similar problem. I checked my /usr/local/etc/php/extensions.ini
and finding that extension=session.so
came after extension=memcache.so
I moved it to the top of the file and the errors went away.
Rsync corrupted MAC on input
I am migrating my FreeNAS 7.x to a 8.x, which means copying the ZFS tank as there isn’t a tool for migrating the disks right now and upgrading them to the version of ZFS in 8.x. Kind of a pain in the butt that was made worse by the endless recurrence of an error like:
Received disconnect from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx: 2: Packet corrupt
rsync: writefd_unbuffered failed to write 4 bytes to socket [sender]: Broken pipe (32)
rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (23734 bytes received so far) [sender]
rsync error: unexplained error (code 255) at io.c(601) [sender=3.0.7]
or something like:
Disconnecting: Packet corrupt
rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (581052724 bytes received so far) [receiver]
rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at io.c(601) [receiver=3.0.8]
rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (202 bytes received so far) [generator]
rsync error: unexplained error (code 255) at io.c(601) [generator=3.0.8]
I figured my 7.x install had to be fine as I’ve been RSYNCing my server to it without error for about a year now, so the problem had to be in the new box and poking around for “packet corrupt rsync” on google was turning up a lot of *shrug* maybe bad RAM or a bad NIC. Hmmm… I tried command line push and pull from both boxes via SSH to see if I could get better results, no luck: a few files would transfer, maybe 10 seconds, maybe 5 minutes, then blop, bad packet, broken pipe, oh so informative “unexplained error” at io.c, start over. No way I was going to be able to transfer 3.5 TB 100MB at a time.
Finally I found this and checked the lovely graphical status monitor on the FreeNAS 7 box. It has 4GB of RAM, whichhas been plenty so far, but looking at the graph it was using about 95% of that memory. It had been up for 59 days so I was reluctant to reboot it, I mean uptime is a competition after all. But I took a dive and rebooted. Now, even with CIFS/SAMBA cranking some backup files simultaneously, RSYNC is running flawlessly at a nice steady 300mb/s, apparently limited by CPU (seems to be single threaded, maxing out one CPU and leaving the other idle, hmmm… problem for another day). I feel bad for doubting my FreeNAS 8 box, it was never the problem.
So if you’re getting RSYNC problems consider rebooting the server to free up RAM or even upgrading. The new box will have 12-16GB, which is about what is recommended for ZFS (1GB/TB) and things are looking pretty good. My RSYNC was running just -a –progress, no resource intensive -z option.