A while ago I wrote about Synergy and showed a picture of my desktop as of July 2007:
That’s two 24″ Dell monitors (one for a Windows computer, the other for a Linux computer). I’ve had that setup for a couple years and I recently decided it was time to upgrade. So I bought a 30″ Dell UltraSharp 3008WFP monitor. Now my desktop looks like this:
The two left monitors are Windows XP, the right monitor is Ubuntu. From left to right, I have seven browsers open showing my blog, the Google webmaster blog, Techmeme, Friendfeed, Twitter, Google News, and the Google homepage. I love how much screen real estate this setup gives me (a little over 8.7 million pixels).
Recently I treated myself to a solid-state drive (SSD). That’s essentially a hard-drive made out of memory chips. I bought the Intel X25-E Extreme, which uses faster single-level cell (SLC) memory chips instead of slower multi-level cell (MLC) memory chips.
I wanted to put the drive through its paces, so I decided to see how fast I could boot Ubuntu and start Firefox. It turns out that Ubuntu 9.04, code-named Jaunty Jackalope, is just a few days away, and one of the features listed is “significantly improved boot performance.” Perfect! I installed Ubuntu 8.10 from a CD and then followed the incredibly easy instructions to upgrade to the beta of 9.04.
So how fast did Ubuntu 9.04 boot with a solid-state drive? Really freaking fast. Like, “I can’t believe it’s already done” fast. Well, here, watch for yourself:
Total boot time from pressing power to Firefox loaded was about 22.5 seconds, with about 5 seconds of BIOS display on a Thinkpad. Subtracting out the Thinkpad BIOS display time, that means that Ubuntu 9.04 booted into Firefox in about 17.5 seconds. I think I’m going to have a lot of fun with this hard drive. Oh, and Ubuntu 9.04 looks really interesting too.
Added: I collected a couple bootcharts by using bootchart. As Ryan said in a comment, I ran sudo apt-get install pybootchartgui bootchart , then rebooted, then collected the image in /var/log/bootchart . If I’m reading the images correctly, it’s claiming 8.67 seconds for one boot-up and 8.69 seconds for the other boot-up.
Added: Okay, I reinstalled Ubuntu 9.04 so I could use ext4 and it shaved almost a second off the boot time! Check out this image which shows a 7.83 second boot time.
Today is April 4th, which means that it’s 4.04 day -- even in Europe where they switch their months and days around. That means it’s a perfect day to learn what a 404 status code is. Essentially, a 404 is a way for web server to return a “Page Not Found” error when a browser requests a web page that the web server doesn’t have.
Happy 404 day! Today is best celebrated by making 404 jokes with friends (”404 error: beer not found”), posting pictures of good 404 errors, and general merriment.
Google Chrome continued its upward marketshare march in March. I was looking at my browser breakdown tonight. Here’s what I’ve got from the last 30 days in Google Analytics:
- StatCounter says that Chrome topped 2% recently. Click through to see fewer people using Internet Explorer and more people using Firefox and Chrome over the weekends. StatCounter provides CSV export, so I made a separate chart for Chrome:
- Clicky says that in the last 60 days, Chrome has gone from 2.099% to 2.479%
Not shabby for a little over six months since Chrome was released. My favorite Chrome links recently are:
- The dev channel switcher to get the latest/greatest features in Chrome. For example, the dev channel uses the F11 key to switch to full-screen mode. You can also delete auto-form-fill suggestions by cursoring down to them and hitting the “Delete” key.
NOTE: THIS WAS PART OF AN APRIL FOOLS JOKE. YOU CAN SAFELY DISREGARD THIS POST.
(Doing the “type up a quick blog post” thing. Let me know if I had any typos.)
Thanks to everyone that contacted me in the last few minutes and hours about changes in our search products and quality; we’re seeing the impact in our metrics as well. I hear your feedback loud and clear--no need to keep emailing or contacting me about this. Google researchers recently activated a new tasked-array learning cluster. The formal name is “Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity” or CADIE for short. Ultimately this technology has a lot of potential for an exponential increase in search quality and other Google properties.
Unfortunately, the launch looks like it hit complications. This new entity has involved herself in Google’s products, and the early evaluation from our live metrics suggests that the first few hours have been decidedly suboptimal. We’re getting a handle on the full extent of the CADIE issue, but assessing the full impact is difficult because CADIE moves and reacts much faster than we expected.
The bottom line is that we hear your feedback about recent changes and senior engineers are looking into these problems. Don’t be alarmed; we hope to have a fix live by the end of the day. I’ll post more details as I get them, but again: don’t panic.
