tinman alley

There are so many companies now in this space.  The space itself is getting fragmented.  We have:

• Server based video streaming over Internet – this is divided into those requiring a box/appliance vs those streaming to your computer.  Some provide services to both (Amazon, Blockbuster, Netflix, etc.).
  • Require Appliance
    1. Amazon
    2. Blockbuster
    3. Netflix
    4. TiVo
    5. VUDU
  • Stream to computer
    1. BBC
    2. Hulu
• Video streaming OTA (Over The Air)
• Video streaming over cable (traditional like Comcast, Charter, Time Warner, etc.)
• Video streaming over satelite (Dish, DirecTV, etc.)

I am collecting links to Linux based Multimedia Live CD/USB distros.

• GeeXboX
• dyne:bolic
• ArtistX
• Amarok Live
• LiMP
• Mediainlinux
• Apodio

I learned over the weekend what an evil corporation Monsanto is.  I went and saw the movie Food Inc.

Here are some links about Monsanto and how it is destroying the environment, putting families out of business, essentially acting as a large, evil corporation.

http://www.organicconsumers.org/monlink.cfm

The movie Food Inc describes some of the nasty things Monsanto and other corporations are doing to us all.

http://greenupgrader.com/8020/monsantos-food-inc-facts/

I am a long time MySQL user, so Postgres administration is unfamiliar to me.  I did used Postgres a long time ago… when I first started my web hosting company, but back then (early 90’s), Postgres was young and not suited for our needs.  Discovered MySQL and never looked back.

Yeah, yeah, stop with the religious war already.  I believe that using the right tool for the job is more important than anything else.

Back to the problem at hand.  As a new, incoming admin, there is a lot of things I have to pick up on-the-fly.  There is a lot of historical knowledge that I do not have at new place.  Such as Postgres, which *work* uses and now I have to admin.  It seem that no one know the postgres user password, or don’t want to share ;->

I really don’t care for politics, just want to do my work!  So things break and I need access to system tables to fix it.  Can’t login to Postgres as postgres, yes, I have root and can su postgres, but still can not login via psql.

E.g. psql -h localhost -U postgress -d template1  ask me for password and I don’t know postgres user password

Searching (googling) found a lot of people asking for help, etc. but no specific way to solve the problem.  At least for a newbie Postgres admin like me.

Finally, someone pointed to pg_hba.conf…. reading the manual, backward, forward, sideways, etc…. and finally, finally, figured it out!

Here it is to save time for others.

Edit pg_hba.conf (usually in /var/lib/psql/data directory, at least on RH/CentOS/Fedora).

Add this line at top, first ACL match wins, so don’t worry about the rest there.

host all postgres 127.0.0.1/32 trust

Then at command line, run pg_ctl reload

Now you can psql -h localhost -d template1 -U postgres and login without password.  Change the password to something you know.

alter user postgres with encrypted password ‘newpassword’;

Exit and comment out the line you added to pg_hba.conf, then reload config via

pg_ctl reload

Tada!  All fixed.

It’s harder than it look, or perhaps I am just making it harder than it really is.  Anyway, I have needs to monitory performance of java based applications.

There are actually two types (to me) of Java apps.  There is the standalone apps that you run on your workstation (Eclipse, I count embedded web applets in this category), and then there is the server based types such as Tomcat/JSP/J2EE/etc.

The category that I am most interested in is the server based apps.  I need to be able to look inside the JVM they are running in, and also the container (Tomcat/J2EE/etc.).  I am not an expert in this area, so at the moment, it’s a blackbox to me.

I’ve been searching around (yes, started with Googling ) and found lots of information all over the place.  I am going to try to gather them into one spot for my benefits, and hopefully save others some time.  As always, if you have corrections, additions, please feel free to send them to me.

List of Java performance monitoring tools.

• this came from here
  1. jconsole comes together with JDK 1.5 and above. It is a Java Monitoring and Management Console – JMX-compliant graphical tool for monitoring a Java virtual machine. It can monitor both local and remote JVMs.
  2. VisualVM is a visual tool that integrates several existing JDK software tools and lightweight memory and CPU profiling capabilities. This tool is designed for both production and development time use and further enhances the capability of monitoring and performance analysis for the Java SE platform.
  3. HeapAnalyzer allows the finding of a possible Java™ heap leak area through its heuristic search engine and analysis of the JavaTM heap dump in Java applications. It analyzes Java heap dumps by parsing the Java heap dump, creating directional graphs, transforming them into directional trees, and executing the heuristic search engine.
  4. PerfAnal is a GUI-based tool for analyzing the performance of applications on the Java 2 Platform. You can use PerfAnal to identify performance problems in your code and locate code that needs tuning.
  5. JAMon is a free, simple, high performance, thread safe, Java API that allows developers to easily monitor production applications.
  6. Eclipse Memory Analyzer is a fast and feature-rich Java heap analyzer that helps you find memory leaks and reduce memory consumption.
  7. GCViewer is a free open source tool to visualize data produced by the Java VM options -verbose:gc and -Xloggc:<file>. It also calculates garbage collection related performance metrics (throughput, accumulated pauses, longest pause, etc.).
  8. HPjmeter
     • Identify and diagnose performance problems in Java™ applications running on HP-UX
     • Monitor live Java™ applications and analyze profiling data
     • Capture profiling data with zero preparation when using JDK/JRE 5.0.04 or higher
     • Run the HPjmeter console on HP-UX, Linux, and Windows® systems
     • Improve garbage collection performance
  9. HPjconfig is a Java configuration tool for tuning your HP-UX 11i HP Integrity Itanium® and HP 9000 PA-RISC system kernel parameters to match the characteristics of your application. HPjconfig provides kernel parameter recommendations tailored to your HP-UX hardware platform. It offers save and restore functions for easy distribution of tailored recommendations across your customer base. When given specific Java and HP-UX versions, HPjconfig will determine if all of the latest HP-UX patches required for Java performance and functionality are installed on the system, and highlight any missing or superseded patches.
  10. Java Out-of-Box Tool is a stand-alone bundle that upon installation will install startup (RC) scripts, modify kernel parameters, rebuild the kernel, and reboot the system. During startup, the startup scripts will modify system tunables, thus providing better “Out of The Box” behavior for Java.
• eclipse TPTP and Netbeans Profiler
• YourKit
• JProfiler
• JIP
• crap4j
• JRockit

I stumbled onto the Intel SS4200, which is intended as a SOHO platform for NAS.  Essentially it’s a small form factor PC, based on 1.6Ghz Celeron, 4 hot swap SATA drives, to be use as a home office NAS.

Turn out lots of other companies OEM this box (Fujitsu Siemens Scaleo is one).

Based on cursory Google search, there is a lot of people hacking this box.  It is very hackable, hw and sw wise.  One can add more memory (alas, only one slot, but you can go from 512KB to 4GB stick), upgrade the CPU (from Celeron to Core 2 Duo), etc.

Some useful links:

• Accessing linux console.
• Upgrade firmware (EMC Lifeline)

VUDU Goes Box-free for Entone
LA Time – VUDU and Entone team up…

Heh, that mean they (both of ‘em) are still alive. That’s because they are doing something to stay above the tide of competition.

I’ve always thought that VUDU can’t survive on their own.  They need to partner with someone else, but it has to be the right partner, otherwise it’s a waste of resources (time, effort, fund…).  They had a couple of chances with some very good possibilities, but they screwed up.  Actually, IMHO, both sides screwed up….

Anyway, this is a step in the right direction, although I wish VUDU has partnered with one of the big players in the video on demand or consumer electronics field — e.g. Amazon, Samsung, LG, Sony, etc.

I think Samsung or Sony would be perfect partners for VUDU.  It’s a win-win for both side.

ODV

Whether via Netflix, Blockbuster (very slow on-demand ) or online via Internet, ODV is here to stay.  It’s a given.  I just want to get that out of the way.

In a way, I think TiVo should be thanked for pioneering the video appliance and the very easy to use UI.  They helped introduced lots of people to watching videos on their own time, at their convenience, as opposed to the TV/cable network’s.

Once people see what TiVo can do for them, other uses pop up and the genie is out of the bottle.   There are other related uses besides recording TV/cable/satellite shows.  Such as automating, digitizing movies (going from manual, post office ship DVDs of Netflix, Blockbuster) to renting, buying videos on line, on demand.  The video on demand usage has been known and attempted for a long time, going back to the early cable days.

Time Warner, back in the early 90’s partnered with SGI to do VOD at several location around the US.  There were lots of technical hurdles that had to be solved before something like this can become a reality.

Recently, companies such as Akimbo, CinemaNow, Movielink, 2Wire (AT&T Uverse), OpenTV, ZillionTV, VUDU, Roku(Netflix, Amazon), AppleTV, etc… etc… all joined, some have failed, some are failing, others are….

As someone who worked at 2Wire and later at VUDU, I have some knowledge about what the companies were trying to do, and the issues they faced.  I also worked at SGI during the Time Warner VOD trials were going (I was working on the XFS and IRIX 64 bit port projects).

Of course, the content owners – movie studios, TV networks, etc. — aren’t going to sit still and watch others make money off their work.  So HULU and various other studios web sites were launched, offering streaming videos from their content library.

The competition in ODV is getting fierce!  Good for consumers (yes, very confusing, but good to have choices!), but bad for these companies.

SSD or Solid State Drives is one of the next hot tech fad… besides multicore CPUs/GPUs, cloud computing, virtualization, Brittney Spears comeback, Mel Gibson hot, new young girlfriend…

Heh, sorry, let my hand type faster than my brain.

My brothers and I were discussing about the merits of adding SSD to servers.  One of the things discussed was whether a new interface (connector, bus, whatnot) is needed to make most efficient use of SSD in servers.  People were looking at adding dedicated bus, slot, whatever to motherboard so you can get the highest throughput from SSD.

My argument is that, that is not really needed, except for the jobs that demand the highest possible speed.  And even then, it should really be decided on a sliding scale.  How much is an additional percent of extra speed worth to you?

I think that for most people, using the existing SATA (I/II/III) interface is “good enough”.  Yes, you do not get the best speed, but the benefits still make it worth using, and the low cost will induce people to use it.

SATA interfaces come for free on all modern motherboards.  Most servers support hotswap SATA drives.  Not all support hot swap PCI/PCI-X/PCI-e slots.  Secondly, with hotswap SATA drives, you can do it without having to open up the case.  If you have more than a handful of servers to upgrade, you will appreciate this.

Don’t forget too that if you go with add-on cards — PCI, PCI-X, PCI-e — you also most likely will have to deal with drivers.  OS is not going to automatically make use of these add-on SSD cards without drivers.

Have you check your credit report lately?  In the US, you can get a free credit report (one from each of the 3 nationwide credit reporting agencies) each year.

According to FTC web site, the official web site to get your free report is AnnualCreditReport.com.