Microsoft 30 years ago and today
The left photo above is now somewhat famous. It’s a picture of the Microsoft team in 1978, taken right before they moved their offices from Alberqueque to Seattle.
Thirty years later, the group has come together for another photo.
Important Update On June Blog Promotion!
June 21st, barely more than a week left to get your name in the drawing for the 22″ monitor I’m giving away.
The winner will be drawn by the random.org random number generator, and announced here. You’ll need to claim your prize within five days or I will select another winner.
There’s no strings, no hidden catches, I’m giving away this fantastic monitor. All you have to do to enter is go to this post and leave a comment. There are also some ways you can get extra entries, and before the contest ends I will add a few more ways to get extra entries.
I wasn’t sure of the best way to keep track of entries. I ended up using a simple spreadsheet in google docs. To give transparency and oversight to the process, I am making this spreadsheet available publically. This is your chance to make sure you have the right number of entries, and maybe make sure someone else doesn’t have too many entries!
Access the spreadsheet for June’s Blog Promotion on Google Docs.
There’s still time to enter to win!! With only 50 entries so far, you have a very good shot at winning. You can also write my giveaway on your blog or website for an additional five entries.
Win a Market Leverage Bag of Stuff
John Chow is giving away a bag of goodies from www.marketleverage.com.
The bag contains:
- Flip Video Camera
- $200 Amex Rewards Card
- Combination Pen / USB flash drive
- iPod Nano
To enter for your chance to win, just head over to his blog, and post a comment on this entry.
You can also write about it on your own blog for an additional FIVE entries. The winner will be drawn on June 21st!
Speed up application load time in Ubuntu Linux Hardy Heron using prelink: HOWTO and benchmarks
I’ve used prelink in the past on Ubuntu in an attempt to speed up application loading, but I’ve never actually done any benchmarks to test the results. I decided today to run some simple benchmarks to gauge the performance increase of using prelink.
For readers too lazy to read through the entire article, I will summarize by saying that using prelink does reduce application load time.
Read about prelink and what it does on Wikipedia. Explaining it is beyond the scope of this article.
Testing methodology:
- Reboot
- Load several large programs using “time $program”, then close the program as quickly as possible. Record the real time. Wash, rinse, reboot, and repeat two times, then average the results.
- Install prelink, and run /etc/cron.daily/prelink
- Reboot, and repeat all tests
Programs that will be used for testing:
- OpenOffice.org 2.4 Writer
- Firefox 3.0
- Azureus BitTorrent Client
- Tremulous
- Evolution Mail Client
- GIMP
Testbed:
- Intel 915GEV motherboard with 3.0ghz Pentium 4 1024k cache
- 3gb dual channel DDR2
- 2x Maxtor 80gb SATA drives in software RAID 0 array, XFS filesystem
First, the results without prelink:
| Test | 1st | 2nd | 3rd | Avg |
| OpenOffice.org | 7.65 | 7.06 | 7.24 | 7.32 |
| Firefox 3 | 6.45 | 5.31 | 5.12 | 5.63 |
| Azureus | 11.67 | 11.14 | 11.31 | 11.37 |
| Tremulous | 3.56 | 3.28 | 3.52 | 3.45 |
| Evolution | 5.42 | 5.36 | 5.47 | 5.42 |
| Gimp | 5.93 | 6.01 | 5.88 | 5.94 |
Now, I will install prelink, take the system down to single user mode, run the intial prelink session, and reboot:
# sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude install prelink
# sudo init 1
# sudo /etc/cron.daily/prelink
# sudo reboot
Now that prelink has run, it’s time to run the benchmarks again and check the results!
| Test | 1st | 2nd | 3rd | Avg |
| OpenOffice.org | 6.62 | 6.61 | 6.83 | 6.69 |
| Firefox 3 | 5.40 | 5.92 | 5.07 | 5.46 |
| Azureus | 11.10 | 11.25 | 11.16 | 11.17 |
| Tremulous | 3.30 | 3.12 | 3.48 | 3.30 |
| Evolution | 5.39 | 5.45 | 5.32 | 5.39 |
| GIMP | 5.72 | 5.93 | 5.68 | 5.78 |
Conclusion
These benchmarks clearly show that prelink generates a measurable performance improvement in application load time. Considering that the time needed to install and configure prelink is minimal, and the gains are obviously very real, it logically follows that using prelink is A Good Idea.
0.63 seconds may not seem like very much time saved, but consider if you launched OpenOffice five times a day. That’s 3.15 seconds a day. Six days a week that comes to 18.9 seconds a week. That’s 982.8 seconds a year. 9828 seconds over ten years. Etc, etc. It adds up.
I’m saving lives here! Somebody pin a medal on me.
Video Post: Star Wars according to a three year old
This has been around awhile, but I’m sure some people haven’t seen it yet. It’s way too cute.
This wildly popular video has prompted many video replies, among them “Star Wars according to a (twenty) three year old.
Another version with clips from the movie inserted:
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