9th December 2007, 05:27 pm
Compiz is a 3D desktop environment (that used to be called Beryl) that can be a very nice place to work. I’m a sucker for 
eye-candy, true, but even with most of it switched off the result can be a pleasant, and maybe even more productive, place to be. There are literally hundreds of videos on YouTube to give you an idea of what Compiz looks like – see here. One of the most noticeable effects is the ‘wobbly windows’. This give the windows some ‘flexibility’ and also gives the desktop some ‘friction’ The effect is quite stunning, especially as the contents of the windows update while they are being dragged.
OK, that looks nice but it’s not really that useful – one thing that is useful though is the desktop ‘cube’ effect. Your desktop can have up to 16 faces that are rotated in 3D. Now, I must admit that I also have dual monitors, so I have a lot of ‘desktop real estate’ already, but having the ability to have different ‘cube faces’ with work tasks grouped on them is great. I very rarely press Alt-Tab any more (even though the 3D application switcher effect is quite nice also) because my applications don’t stack on top of each other very often – they’re on different cube faces. I’ve also got my mouse setup so that if I rotate the mouse wheel while at the edge of the screen the cube rotates. This makes quickly switching between different applications very fast.
Continue reading ‘Compiz Fusion: Such a sucker for eye candy’ »
5th December 2007, 11:55 am
ZFS is the (relatively) new filesystem from Sun with some fascinating properties. Here are some headline facts just to get your attention – the maximum size of a single file on a zfs filesystem is 16 ExiBytes (that’s 1000 million gigabytes), it’s possible to take a complete filesystem backup (snapshot) in a few seconds and you’ll never have to fsck your filesystem again to make sure it’s not corrupt.
So, sounds pretty impressive, heh? So what makes all this possible?
There are 3 main components to zfs that enable a lot of the cool functionality. If you’ve used a NetApp OnTap based filer before then these will sound familiar (hence, Netapp and Sun’s lawyers getting in a bit of overtime).
The first component is the Copy On Write transactional model (COW). This means that when a block of data on the filesystem changes it is not overwritten, a new block is created and the metadata for the file that has changed is updated.
Continue reading ‘ZFS: The future of filesystems?’ »
1st December 2007, 10:56 pm
I’ve got a total of 3 VPS’s from different providers now and I’ve been trying to decide the best way to back them all up. Plus I’ve got about 7GB of documents, photos and videos on my home PC and if everything could be backed up to the same place then even better.
For the past month I’ve been using Amazon’s S3 along with Duplicity.
There are a few really good points to using this method -
- the later versions of duplicity are built to work with S3, it’s one of the many options
- duplicity only sends files that have changed since the last backup reducing the bandwidth you use
- S3 is pretty cheap and you would hope, being Amazon, that your data is pretty secure
- although not mountable as a filesystem yet you can access S3 through a plugin in firefox
- it is possible to encrypt your data on S3
Continue reading ‘Backing up a VPS with duplicity?’ »
eye-candy, true, but even with most of it switched off the result can be a pleasant, and maybe even more productive, place to be. There are literally hundreds of videos on YouTube to give you an idea of what Compiz looks like – see here. One of the most noticeable effects is the ‘wobbly windows’. This give the windows some ‘flexibility’ and also gives the desktop some ‘friction’ The effect is quite stunning, especially as the contents of the windows update while they are being dragged.