Against better judgement

I've been playing around with CouchDB for a few nights, inspired by the work of Stuart Langridge and others at Ubuntu, and also J Chris Anderson.

To break myself into the CouchDB world I started poking around at the capabilities, and mostly trying to not think of SQL-isms. Understanding map/reduce and getting your brain out of the SQL world is worth it, if for no other reason than to get a different perspective on data storage.

Unfortunately I decided, rather than write what I really thought would be interesting (a Thunderbird provider for couchdb, so that I can replicate my lightning calendar and contacts to my server, laptop and desktop, without using SyncKolab[1]), that it would be best if I started simple.

I chose to develop a pure CouchDB application, using the rather nice couchapp. I write web apps and this should be a gentle introduction, and fairly quick (which is what I wanted primarily). Really, How hard could it be? So I pulled down couchapp, did a bit of reading and built a VM to run couchdb 0.9, as several newer features are required than the current version in Debian stable. What I'd failed to realise at this point was that the "API" for pure couch applications are a bit in flux. After a few hours, over the course of a few evenings I've become somewhat frustrated, until I noticed a page entitled Formatting with Show and List on the CouchDB wiki tonight. A lot of the available code out there uses the new API, which explained why a hell of a lot made bugger all sense and why I'd almost started pulling down the couchdb 0.9 to have a butchers.

Now this isn't a slur on anyone except me. I was so blinkered after the joy of understanding why non-SQL databases do have a place in the universe that I failed to search the wiki correctly.

To give the whole post a sysadmin-style slant, during this I'd started noticing the CouchDB growing quickly. Now granted I was doing a lot of pushing of attachments, shows and lists, but the growth seemed rather unproportioned. After doing some tests of my own I hit the web and found that Joan Touzet has some interesting thoughts on the subject as well, which you should go and read now. Naturally without putting my tests into the real world don't take it as gospel, but if you're using couchdb you might want to ensure that you're doing things the right way, lest your sysadmin smite you with the +2 damage hammer of server resources.

I'm trying very hard not to paint a bad picture of CouchDB here. Genuinely I think it's a good project, and although it certainly has a lot of competition, it does seem to have a lot of mindshare. There are also good points to, for one, backups are easy.

[1] Not that I have a problem with SyncKolab, it's serving me well, and probably will continue to do so.

Gamers at Top Gear?

I've been mulling over whether or not this is blog worthy. Probably not, but it is geek related.

Whilst watching Top Gear Episode 6 of Series 13 one of my housemates (Phil) noticed a familiar sound. From fifty five seconds to one minute into this episode you can hear the same noise/siren that the viral detectors make in Prototype.

Linux drivers for HyperV guests

If you've never had to run Linux under HyperV you'll know that it runs, although it could be better. You'll also be aware that Microsoft supply drivers via connect, in a binary state with official support for only a few distros.

So you can imagine how I felt when I saw the announcement on the LKML. Drivers for Linux guests, in the kernel. Ok, so it's not in the mainline yet, but it is the start of good and great things.

To all those involved, I salute you!

Not your usual 0-day?

My feed reader just picked up a new article over at ISC about a new 0-day for Linux. You should go and read it now, because it's fairly different from most other exploits and comes from fairly innocuous looking code.

Not being a real programmer (I'll never call myself a real programmer - I hack together code, but it's almost never elegant) things like this always fascinate me.

My 4 hours of netbook fun, and Sysprep under Safe Mode

I use my work Macbook Pro for personal stuff as well, and quite frankly if you don't want kids in the future, it's the laptop to use on your lap. And deity forbid that you want to use a demanding program; you might as well forget about using your legs for a week afterwards. To combat this I've been toying with getting a netbook for over a year now, and since last week was my birthday, I got myself a Compaq 702EA as a present.

Sadly I wasn't impressed with the 702EA. I knew going into it that it would be low powered. That was what I wanted. Sadly I wasn't prepared for just how poor the performance was of the unit. At minimum I expect a laptop of the current generation, to be able to cope with a "standard" flash banner and scrolling the webpage. Sadly this wasn't the case under XP or any flavour of Linux (current versions of fedora, ubuntu and ubuntu netbook remix) or Solaris (nexenta and opensolaris) that I tried. Having used MBPs for the best part of 2 or so years, I fear that I've become somewhat spoilt.

Having decided to return the device I was faced with the prospect of returning it to factory defaults. Fairly simple with a normal laptop, but as this was a netbook, not so much. In the end I ended up cheating, resizing the partition back, using the XP Home safe mode to remove the users and data I'd added and using sysprep on the provided disk to reseal the Windows installation. Interestingly until now I wasn't aware that sysprep needs to run in Safe Mode with Networking in order to function. If you run without networking it states that the version of sysprep doesn't match the version of Windows.

So will I be joining the netbook revolution again? Given the cost of netbooks, no. The only reason I'd gone for the 702EA was because it was available for £200 from ebuyer. All other netbooks are too near the cost of a regular laptop and I can't jusify it, quite frankly.

The crunchpad still looks interesting though.