Technical Details

I love Firefox its a great browser and the plugin options are awesome, but this latest update doesn’t seem to be working with secure sites like e*trade and even my.yahoo.com portfolios very odd. All of this just  led me to change my e*trade password thinking I had some sort of major brain fart, unfortunately it was Firefox and the QA folks who had the brain fart. It would be really nice if Firefox didn’t force you to upgrade on a restart or at least gave you the option to defer the upgrade.

So I’m installing Solaris 10 on a Sunfire V100 with 128MB or RAM, very slow to say the least. Sun has improved the install and they now give you the option to disable all the open services they normally embraced, good for admins bad for hackers.

But the real reason I’m writing this post is the fact that their default disk partitioning is the most brain-damaged thing I’ve ever seen. Picture this, a 130GB disk, select the default partition option and you get

I’m sorry but 5500MB for the whole OS and everything else, WTF. I guess I’ll never upgrade the machine, install new packages or run anything that generates large log files (God forbid) etc.

Unbelievable, I’m totally slack jawed at the incompetence, hopefully the OpenSolaris folks will knock some sense into the Solaris team.

A nice collection of slide shows on scaling your web 2.0, there are some pretty common threads in all of these like caching using memcached, dealing with your opensource DB and clustering user data.

http://www.slideshare.net/group/webapps-scalability/slideshows

This isn’t a review of either product, just a somewhat interesting observation on the performance impact of on product on another.

I’m a big fan of virtual computer technology (Solaris zones would be included in this as well) they are great tools for testing and pretty handy to install or test software on that you aren’t so sure you want to put on your primary computer (reduce the clutter).

I’ve been using Virtual PC (VPC) since it was a company called Connectix, it’s generally worked very well and migrating vm’s between different machines has been a breeze. I haven’t found that to be the case with VMWare especially when the underlying hardware varies significantly. I liken VPC to a Phillips screwdriver and VMWare to a Leatherman when all you have to do is drive a few Phillips screws, one tool is easy the other is awkward and can be uncomfortable for more than a couple.

The real point of this story is that, I have both products installed on my system, I’ve noticed that after a few hours my VPC performance would start to lag, screen repaints were slow and my system would be jerky. Looking through the task manager I had lots of VMWare processes running, after stopping the VMWare services, VPC performance is back to normal, very unusual.

I think VMWare has a place and purpose but its insistence on exposing significant amounts of the underlying architecture is both good and bad, worst of all, it really complicates setting up and using a virtual machine. For now I’m sticking with VPC easy to use and move virtual hard disks to different machines.

Well it’s sort of an emulator, it seems to have the most realistic rendering on FireFox and Safari 3.0, as always IE seems to be out to lunch when it comes to rendering the page.

I’ve done a quick rTunes skin for the iPhone it looks the best in landscape mode, no artwork in portrait mode. Unfortunately it will probably be quite some time before I get my hands on one of these little beasts to do any real testing. I’ll package up this release in the next day or two, there are also a couple of minor bug fixes as well.

Check out http://testiphone.com/ seen via DZone.com